Thomas was silent, thinking of Marco.

“I saw Ruth with your father,” Dwight had told him when Thomas didn’t want to go out with them to visit the other women. In the other country. Over there. When the mail plane arrived near the jungle, the men he saw from home had teased him cruelly. “Your brother or your son?”

“Ruth wouldn’t do that.”

“What do you know? How many men do you know are still married, man? Look around. Dear John…

But after he returned he went to the tribal records and looked at Marco’s birth certificate and he knew without a doubt that he was the father. He could have gone to them then, Ruth and Marco, but he didn’t. He had guilt now, another reason to hate himself. And he had already ignored them—now what would he say or do? It wasn’t pride so much as passivity. And what difference would it make now?

For a moment in the canoe, it did make a difference. For a moment, they talked. Marco, his son. My son, he said to himself. He thought in another wave of guilt that it was his fault Marco was gone and that even the men he’d killed in the war had to kill, were in that other world, the one Marco now entered, and they were all carried in that same wave of his fault. It was a tsunami of memories that could not be held back, faces, ghosts, loves. Night after night he lay sleepless in his father’s house and they all came to him as if they were truly there, in flesh.

On the boat that day of his death Marco had asked him, “Are you afraid?”

“No,” Thomas lied, because he was always afraid and he didn’t even know of what. Fear was his constant, his daily habit formed years ago. By noise, bombs, the smell of chemicals in the air.

Then, in the boat, Marco said to his father, “Do you hear it? Do you feel it?” He meant the whale. Thomas realized that the boy was a true whaler. Marco felt its presence first, heard the deep rumbling sound of the whale. Thomas said, “No, son. I wish I did,” because he’d lost all his capacity to feel. Did he even feel the soul of water?

But Marco said, “I do,” and breathed and was silent as he looked around at the light on the waters, the firmament, which was the very word for it, the presence around them. “It’s young. It’s not the right one to hunt. It is friendly. It just wants to see us. We are its relatives.” He said it out loud. The others heard. He’d said it to turn the men away from this whale. And then Marco had to watch without judging the men and what they were doing. Marco, who had been a true man, a strong Indian, alive. Yes, he’d also thought he could impress his father and that his father might begin to care about him. They’d all thought they could prove themselves as they set out in the two canoes.