“That’s so much,” the old woman says, leaning toward the man quietly. “Where will she live? What will she do?”

“I’ll figure something out. There’s my mother’s place. I can live there. She needs help anyway.”

“That’s not all,” he says, businesslike now. “We also have to pay all the people who will pass word along the way to him, and those who will beseech him.”

“What will they require?” Ruth is resigned by now.

“What about Witka’s old house? The Rain Priest would like that, I’ll bet. If you took down the fence maybe he’d even stay there.”

“No. Thomas lives there now. He would have to give that up, and I’m the one bargaining here. Besides, he could never do it.” It was his grandfather’s. Ruth knows Thomas better than anyone else does. They understand this. The two of them grew up together almost as one person.

The old man knows it might take even more. But what no one knows is that right now Thomas is sitting in the dark little house on the black rocks considering his own sacrifice. He has broken into his father’s proud glass case, taken his medals out, and put them in a leather bag. He, too, is thinking. Many weeks of drought slid by and the smell of rotting things permeated Witka’s house. At that house with the fence before it, Thomas himself feels responsible for the drought. He knows what is happening, that the ocean is mourning after so much had been taken from it, after Marco and the death of the whale. It is mourning for everything, the death of reefs with the lives he’d watched at night, the dead zones. The water had receded from him and his fence. He doesn’t even hear it at night. Now all he has to listen to are his thoughts.

As the clouds have deserted them, his own fog, too, has lifted, and now he looks into the chambers of himself.

He regrets leaving his daughter, Lin. He still sees her bony knees and skinny legs as she ran toward the helicopter toward him, crying. He had never returned for her. He could have told the truth and taken her, but he hadn’t thought of it. He was thinking of her mother, his wife, Ma. She had chased Lin and been blown up by a mine. And all he could think of was his own grief about leaving. He is still in grief. He could have said, She’s my daughter, and taken her. He thinks about what he had left her to, if she was alive, the life he could have given her.

He remembers flying over the brilliant green of a beautiful land. He looked down, thinking, I am going to help our country, my people, their country, their people. He is still in battle. Now he calls out in Witka’s home, all the names he can remember, the men he’d seen die, the woman he loved. He cries out for Song, the old man of the village, and for Lin, and he calls out for Ruth. Then for Marco. Saying his name over and over. He cries out for all that is no more, and it is so much. He’d spent all these years living in a fog. Now it is moving away. Instead of the fog of self-hatred, he also sees that he had compassion. He had been wrong, and he was not wrong. I killed, he thinks, but I saved. I ended up loving and then hating myself for it. It was a world of doubleness. There are no clear lines between evil and good. He is both. This is the slow dawn of his knowing.