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The anthropologist, the postmistress said, was coming to study them.
Who’s them? everyone asked.
Teacher was very good at translating Irish to English, and so was the cartographer. They were the most educated, but they weren’t natives. The university people wanted a native speaker. The postmistress told them she knew just the person. “He’s the son of our postman here.”
“There you are,” she said when she spotted Mac. “Stay here until they come.” And then she walked away to join a group of women.
“You all right there, Macdara?” Cathal asked as he approached, steering clear of the postmistress. She and Cathal were always at odds because he delivered the post as he pleased. His beard was thicker than normal, his face unwashed.
“Are you going up?” Mac asked. Meaning home, meaning to see his wife and his new son. From where they were standing they could see the smoke rising from their own chimney and Mac imagined his mother in there, trying to bake a loaf of bread with the baby in her arms. Cathal’s two weeks were up.
“I am, of course,” Cathal assured his son. “Soon.”
IT WAS A FIN WHALE. Sixty-six feet long. Roughly forty tons. The scholars from the university determined it had been dead for about a week before it washed up, and the old-timers who’d been on the sea since they were children looked smug because that was exactly what they’d said to one another. The professors moved suitcases and equipment into the rooms above the pub. They set up a tarp on the beach. For six days they gathered measurements and cut samples of flesh and bone from the animal’s body with the same kinds of saws a person might use to cut down a hundred-year-old tree. They dug out his organs with regular old spades and then pulled and pried just the same as they would if they were digging a boulder from a field. All that schooling and where had it led but to a life more gruesome than Mac expected. They took photographs of the whale’s fluke, of the shark bites on its flank that had healed and that they somehow knew had not killed it. They dipped vials into the sea, they snipped pieces off seaweed and swept algae into nets. When they sliced into the whale’s middle a bellyful of krill slid out, along with a cloud of stink. Wading through the half-digested krill, they pointed out the healthy, oily blubber stores and the suppleness of the skin around the one giant eye they could see, the other pressed into the sand. Two days in a row they had Mac and Barry row them out past the point where the harbor opened into the wider sea, but they didn’t share what they were looking for.
“Cuan an Mhíl Mhóir,” one of the marine biologists said. “I don’t remember my Irish too well but doesn’t that mean whale harbor?”
The rest of them looked at Mac, surprised, as if he’d been withholding this critical information. But he never thought of the village by its full name. It was only the Cuan.
“It does,” Mac said.
“Is there a history of whales here?”
“You do see them way out,” Mac said. “Groups of them. But I never heard of one coming into the harbor.”
“Why Cuan an Mhíl Mhóir then? If they don’t come into the harbor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you ever see them when you’re swimming?” one professor asked.
“I can’t swim.”
“What if you fall out of your curragh?”
“Why would I fall out?”
ABRUPTLY, AFTER SIX DAYS, THEY packed up their things and left the dissected whale on the beach to rot. They gave Mac less money than he’d been hoping for. He held back enough to buy chocolate bars for his brothers and then turned the rest over to his mother. Cathal had not gone up the day they were gathered on the beach and was staying away longer than usual. Mac could tell his mother was starting to wonder.
“Be quiet about it,” Mac warned his brothers as he distributed the chocolate. Still, Rian must have bragged because he came home later that day with a bloody ear. Only poor Coleman, who’d never been to school and couldn’t believe that a person who was not your brother might punch you in the ear, broke off a big piece of his own bar to give to Rian. Once, Barry asked why Coleman wasn’t in school and their mother told the older boys—Sean, Macdara, and Barry—that Coleman would probably never grow up, not in the way that the rest of them would. Coleman was the quietest of them, but it was acknowledged throughout the village that he had the most beautiful singing voice. Their mother often asked him to sing to her while she did her work. “You could sing for the pope,” she always said to him. “You’re like a choir of angels.”
Everywhere Mac went, furious villagers were discussing the matter of the university men leaving the whale exactly where they found it. He wondered what everyone expected—that they’d pack up eighty thousand pounds and take the whale to Galway? They could have exploded it with dynamite, the villagers said. Maybe they should all pitch in and bury it.
“Bury it!” Cathal said, when Mac encountered him on the road a few days later and reported what people were saying. The baby was sixteen days old. “There’s not enough sand on that beach to bury a cat.” Cathal was carrying a soldering torch, his tools in a satchel slung over his back, and they continued along the road together for a while. The still must have needed a repair.
As they parted, Cathal grasped Mac’s hand and pushed into it a thick fold of money. “Give that to your mother.”
“Aren’t you coming home?”
Ignoring Mac’s question, Cathal said, “Meet me at the old pier on Sunday. Before dawn. Bring Barry. I need help with something on the island. Be careful walking down, the rocks are slimed over, you’ll fall and break your bones if you take a wrong step. We’ll row.”
“Why? We’ll just walk out between the tides like always.”
“The tide will go out too late for us to get started.”
“To get started on what?”
“Stop asking questions, Macdara. Be there Sunday.”
