He is in the home with the little fireplace and hearth, the light of the ocean, two trees outside permanently bent by ocean winds, leaning. He sits beneath the roof he’d built himself, years before, for his grandfather Witka. Wooden steps climb up and down the rock and a railing he’d also built when his grandfather had become frail.

Then there is the path to the sea and tide pools he once loved with their rich, changing contents, orange starfish, anemones waiting to return, and out there are the stumps of an ancient forest beneath water which had been revealed only once. They were covered again with sand and water, but he would never forget the two-thousand-year old trees that appeared for a short time, never again to be visible in this ocean, not in his lifetime, he thinks. Yet, they were not as old as his people who have been in Dark River since the beginning, in one form or another.

He recalls the whale. It was beautiful in its way, gray barnacles on it, sea lice, as if it supported an entire planet. He remembers how it breathed and he didn’t pray except for under his breath, and Marco, too, both of them so secret in their prayers. The others had been drinking and it made Thomas despise them, his own people. Then, how the spume of blood came high up to the sky, a fountain of death covering them. The killers didn’t love that whale or sing or care for it the way it was supposed to have been done. He wishes he had not been a part of it.

Like Witka, Marco had felt the presence of the whale. Except for his tidy, pulled-back hair, Marco had been like old Witka, down to the thin mustache he couldn’t have known about. The whale came right to them, to look at Marco, who said, No not this whale. There was an argument and a struggle, but no one noticed. The action was so sudden. Only Milton sat and watched it, his mouth open through the yelling and noise.

Marco’s decision should have held, Thomas knew that. He remembers Marco’s look of surprise and something else on his young face when he looked at his father who had fired. He had stared at him. Seeing him. Without respect but with something like understanding and love, nevertheless.

Thomas fired. Once again in my life, I fired, he thought, against my will. It was not by design but by habit, fear, adrenaline. Maybe even memory.

He only barely knows how Ruth must feel, losing the son she’d watched from his beginnings. He feels only a fraction of her pain.

The wretched man no longer wants to see the face of water looking at him. And so he decides to build a fence, the wood already purchased, the fence already planned.

He builds it taller than himself so he can’t see the eyes of the ocean watching him. He doesn’t want to look at the creator of life, the first element. He doesn’t want to think of countries on the other side of the Pacific, the great swaying body of water named for peace.