After the thrashing and yelling and blood, after they’d hauled the whale in, Thomas thought Marco had gone in with the other young men to watch the ball game. He had been angry with him. His judgment was too severe; the fierce judgment of those who also judge themselves. Not knowing where Marco had gone, now this came back to him.

Thomas tucked in his shirt as he left. It was going to be the fourth time he would cry. How many things can a man hate himself for?

He, Thomas Just, was the man who killed the whale.

That night the breakers rose up and took the whale away. In the morning, to the dismay of the people, it was gone. In the water only the dozer and the winch remained.

DARK HOUSES

It was the custom, when a person died, to keep the houses dark and when the sun went down, to live in darkness and silence, and so it looked like a ghost town. In the old days, darkness meant not to burn the lamps that used whale fat. Later, kerosene. Now the electricity was kept off to show regard for those who lost their loved ones, and the people fasted for three days. On the fourth they came together to sing songs that were so slow and deep and mournful a passerby would cry just to hear them.

Often there was no body because many died at sea. It was the custom once, if it was a land death, to take the body on a slab of wood to one of the islands out in the ocean, the island of ancestors, and to place it in the trees. Next to the body were the person’s favorite items, a special necklace or drinking cup, sometimes a picture or carving. There was a special clan of people and these were the only ones who could go to that island which looked so green from the mainland. They were called the Moon Woman Clan. The moon was related to the wolf and to the women, so most often it was the old women who took the loved human out there, rowing through whatever the ocean offered that day, setting out with the tide in the early morning, returning with it late.

But this custom ceased during the influenza epidemic when so many died that there was no room on the island for the bodies. Then there was the massacre by the Americans seeking gold in the hills and even the babies and elders were bayoneted and shot. There were too few old women left to row and the Americans had burned the canoes so no one could escape. Still, some had lived, had gone into the forest and pretended to be trees and thus became invisible, so there are people remaining today.

Even if the custom of burial in the trees still existed, Marco would not have gone to the island where the eagles and sacred condors once visited to make their meals. He would have been buried near the cemetery marked by whalebones. As it is today. But with no body, now there was just the rule of darkness and silence, the people wrapped in blankets, together, later singing the slow, deep songs.