“You’re the fucking idiot. Where you been all these years, man? Huh? You want to explain that one, hero?”

They didn’t apologize to the spirit of the whale, nor did they sing to it or pray as they said they were going to do. He alone prayed and he did it silently because he thought, really believed, the men would laugh if they heard him. He realized they didn’t even believe in the lives of their ancestors, that it was as if those old ones, the ones whose presence he often felt, were only stories to them. Maybe they’d lost all feeling because they’d had to in order to survive in a place where kids shot guns, killed dogs, and died of alcohol poisoning, but he’d hoped this would be something different than just a killing, that it would mean something, that it would do something for them.

Now Thomas knew only that he’d stay there all night if that’s what was required to do this job right.

In silence, he apologized to the whale. He was sorry they had caused it so much suffering and pain. He wanted to make amends for those who hadn’t prayed or sacrificed, not knowing his son had done both. Not only that, but Thomas thought they’d need a dozer to help them with such a mass of innards and bone.

As Ruth searched for Marco, Thomas continued to cut into the whale. The helpers, the flensers from the north, patiently, even in the wind, taught him to cut, taught him to lay out the meat in eight-pound slabs on a kind of paper, and when they had enough, some drove it away to be frozen in lockers in town. The fat and oil had an odor to it that made him sick.

Ruth went from house to house asking, “Have you seen Marco?” But she already knew. As a mother, she felt it. His absence was everywhere. Wet from the rain, she began to run, her hair in her face. She went to Dwight’s. The Breaker, she called him. She took hold of his shirt as if she could shake him, and she did, with her great fisherwoman’s strength. She hit him in the chest over and over, crying now. “This was all your doing,” she said, her knees starting to buckle until his wife, casting a look of pure disgust at her own man, said to him, “You could at least go out and help the other men.” His wife, Candy, took Ruth into the kitchen and cried with her at the table about the s.o.b., the wife all the time hating Dwight, too, as she would forever after. She had believed in him. They all had. They didn’t know him. Now she saw him and it made him all the more hostile. But still the younger men had all looked up to the man who sat on the brown plaid couch in his Rod and Gun Club jacket and said to Ruth, “Hey, it’s cool. Just chill out. He’ll turn up.”