Page 29 of Whale Harbor

“I’m telling you,” Mac said. “You can look it up in a book. A fin whale. Important people came to study it.”

“It’s the truth,” Peter said.

“Is it still there?” Martin asked.

“Might be there forever!” Mac said.

“Nothing will be there forever,” Martin said.

It was still snowing at dawn, but not as heavily. By late morning, it was over. When they levered the doors open and spent a few hours clearing paths and assessing, they discovered what they feared most had come to pass—a third of the cattle were missing. Everything, as far as they could see, was one continuous white blanket of snow. The roads were gone, the trucks, any bush or shrub shorter than a man. Despite the task that lay ahead, it was impossible not to notice how beautiful it was.

They got the horses ready. They packed food for overnight just in case. Setting out, Mac felt a sense of dread, and only a quarter mile from the yard they saw the first few cows lying here and there, under telltale hillocks of snow. They found live ones, too, burrowed into haystacks, but most had so much ice and frost built up on their faces they couldn’t see and were slowly suffocating. Mac pulled ice off the face of one cow whose eyes were wild with fear. “It’s all right,” he told her. “It’s all right now.” Beside him, PJ was frantic and moved from one to another to another, pulling ice from their nostrils and wiping their faces like Mac had seen him wipe the faces of his girls. They worked quickly and silently. Some must have tried to jump the fence to get to a stand of trees in the next field but failed. There were half a dozen hillocks by the fence. Mac counted four that went down on the ice below the bridge, not far from the mill, but the grade was too steep for the horses to go down there. The snow would have to melt before they could get them out.

They slowly drove the survivors back to the yard in a jagged pattern where the snowdrifts would allow, cutting fences wherever they could.

The next morning, they went out again—PJ and Simon in one direction, Mac and Martin in another. Peter and Jenny tended to the ones they’d gathered, and Bill’s arthritis was giving him trouble so he stayed home to rest. There was an abandoned barn about a mile away and Mac suggested they might have made it there. Martin doubted it. The group they were looking for was young. They’d only been weaned a few weeks before the storm and they’d only been driven toward that barn once or twice. But Mac insisted a cow’s memory was an impressive thing and what harm, their horses were strong and they’d searched everywhere else.

When they got close, there were no prints in the snow and nothing looked disturbed. But when they slid down from the horses and stepped out of the glare of the snow-blazed world into the shadow of the barn, there were twenty-six sets of eyes blinking at them.

“I can’t believe it,” Martin said.

“You wise girl, you,” Mac said as he knelt to one. He slung his arm around her and pressed his face in her flank. “You clever, clever girl.”

And then, without the slightest warning, he felt a sob push through his chest. She looked at him calmly, as if she never doubted. When he glanced up, Martin looked shaken too.

“I blame your mother,” Mac said. “She’s the one who encouraged me to this mad place.”

“Imagine the job the rendering truck will have,” Martin said.

MAC WROTE TO RIAN FOR the first time that night, staying up in the family room after everyone went to sleep. He knew he should have written sooner, and even in the privacy of his mind he couldn’t quite figure out why he hadn’t. Home and everything that had happened there seemed so far away from this place. If he didn’t think about them too much, he could almost make himself believe the old world had paused while he got used to this one. He knew he was purposely trying not to think about them, but he didn’t know whether that was right or wrong. He only knew it made it easier to get by day to day.

He told Rian about the blizzard. He told him about the room of bunks and Simon, his American friend. He told him about seeing a coyote, which looked like a dog but a bit wrong, and then seeing a moose up close when it stood in front of PJ’s truck and looked at them for a moment before walking off. He said the size of it was like witnessing their own turf shed at home stand up on legs and walk away. He told Rian that PJ said there was no doubt he’d see a bear before the year was out. He told Rian that American butter was strangely white and eggs bought in a store tasted watery. He told him about the cold and the bigness of everything. He told him that Martin snored worse than Cathal, and then he smiled because he knew Cathal would read it.

“I know you wrote the name of this place in your book because you thought you’d like it, and I believe you would. For now, Rian, do your schoolwork and be good at home and in a few years’ time you can come here too. I’ll help you.”

He didn’t describe to Rian how nice his American Christmas had been, or how much fun he was having learning poker at night, the bottles of beer, the laughing. And it was only winter, still. Everyone said the real fun wasn’t had until summer. He didn’t tell him that PJ’s girls had more toys than Rian could even imagine, so many that they put the ones they were done playing with in the donation bin in town. Rian would have taken one look at that donation bin and pulled the entire thing home behind him. Mac didn’t tell him about the trio of pretty girls in the diner who said “Hey, Irish” to him and Martin one afternoon, and then put their heads together as they giggled, or how he and Martin had spent the entire rest of the day wondering how they knew they were Irish when they hadn’t spoken.

“I’m sure they’ve heard about you,” Jenny said.

“And you both look as Irish as Paddy’s Pig,” PJ added.

He’d stopped dreaming of Noel, Fearghal, and Vincent—their nightly drownings and burnings, their cries for help. He thought of them, yes, and worried, but as time passed it was getting easier to push those thoughts away. When he did think of his brothers, his mind usually went to two images: the first, Fearghal’s shaved head on the wrong side of the school’s iron gate, and the second, the dull blankness that came over Rian’s face when Mac told him he was leaving. Thinking about these two moments did something to him, not only in his mind but in his body. That same crushing breathlessness came on him as it did the day his mother died, and when that happened he couldn’t sleep, food tasted like sawdust, his heart beat so fast he had to cough. So it was best not to think about them at all, if he could manage it, until the day came when he could call up the postmistress at home with real news, that he had money to wire, that it was time they all came over and joined him.

He’d saved a little money, but so far he’d mostly been paid in meals and a comfortable place to sleep. He’d been paid in kindness and fun and it felt like a very good deal. He realized quickly that if Bill Cunningham had hired an American, that American would have demanded fair wages on top of room and board, but Mac wouldn’t, because he couldn’t. It was okay with him so far. It might not be one day, but right now he felt like he was getting the better end of the deal. PJ, in small ways, reminded him that he had to use the situation to learn, get smart. That’s what he’d done, after all.

In the letter, Mac asked Rian about the whale, how it was doing, if anything had changed. And in asking for the whale he hoped to give Rian a way to start a reply. He wrapped the letter around a ten-dollar bill and tucked it neatly inside the envelope. Once he sealed it and wrote the address, he held the envelope up to the lamp to make sure the money couldn’t be seen.

WHEN THE SNOW MELTED, THE earth went mucky and soft for a week, and by the time it dried and hardened there were insects buzzing, green buds were unfurling to reveal bold reds and blues, and they left their coats draped over fences. Two weeks later they were in T-shirts.

Once they were in the thick of summer, an American girl from the neighboring ranch got it in her mind to teach Mac and Martin how to swim. Her name was Debra. She was the younger sister of Jenny’s lifelong best friend, and since PJ had married Jenny, he’d sort of married the best friend, too, and her entire extended family. He made it sound like a uniquely American arrangement, but Mac didn’t think it was so different in Ireland.

Debra babysat PJ and Jenny’s girls sometimes, but once spring had arrived she began riding over most afternoons because she liked crossing the open land of her family’s ranch to Larkspur. The trail began narrowly, she told Mac, without much of a view between thick stands of trees, but then at the crest of a hill it opened to a clear view of the valley, and no matter how many times she made the journey she always paused at that spot.

“She also likes to chat with two handsome Irish boys,” Jenny had added, winking, when Mac and Martin were discussing it one evening.

“Do you think she’s pretty?” Martin asked Mac.

“Anyone with eyes would think so,” Mac said.