Ruth thought of the history of their breaking, her tribe, even the tsunami of 1967 and its huge wave of water that hit the town, just missing her mother’s house, falling short only a few feet. It was still remembered and talked about with an awe of nature’s amazing destruction. That day the Japanese and Indian women were at work cleaning and cutting fish in the fish factory, a large dark brown building, a roof of rusty corrugated steel, when the water hit. Two women had survived and remembered it and told of the crash of the wave that hit the building like a train, water entering, the tables floating. One reached for her glasses and that reach almost cost her life. “Still,” the woman said, “I could see them there, swirling just before me before I escaped.” Miraculously she floated out on a wave of water that came suddenly and from nowhere. “I saw the other women. Their clothes were like wings. Their legs and arms like angels flying. Then they were gone.”

After a time, the tide changed. But Ruth knew already what tomorrow would bring, the breakers bouncing back against the storm waves from far out at sea. For every action there is a reaction. It’s true especially in the ocean. And so tomorrow, from what she knew of the ocean, there would be large, rough breakers. The word meant waves, but the thinker in her knew it also meant people, those who unmake other people’s lives. Dwight was a breaker. He’d broken her son. He’d broken the lives of women. He’d broken Thomas in some way even Thomas didn’t know.

But the breaking went back further, to the Spanish, the Russians, the British, the teachers and American missionaries, the epidemics in 1910 that killed more than three fourths of the tribe, the enormous whaling boats that nearly brought the whales to extinction. A breaker was not just a wall of crashing water, even though people had spoken of the tsunami and collapsing earth walls.

She even thought of the breaking when she had looked so often at the photographs of Witka and her grandfather and Dimitri Smith in ill-fitting suits, sitting in front of the white church. Yes, they had easily changed from Catholics to Shakers because the Shakers’ beliefs were more like their own, and there was healing and a belief in the significance of dreams, although none of them believed in celibacy.

Finally, in the rich smell of the sea, she reached the shore of white houses. Now she saw that the houses were still there. They had been blackened and were nearly invisible against the hillside. They were the color of the rocks behind them, rubbed with black charcoal to reveal their grief. Ruth, soaked to the skin, walked up the beach and two old women greeted her. They’d been watching her out there. “We were worried. We saw you go up and down and then out too far.”

“I’ist ka a,” she said to the women. It meant many things: hello, how are things, are you well, I greet your heart. In this case, I greet your broken heart.