CHAPTER 19

1887

The day the whales came there were jellyfish in the trees. The sky was dull following a raging blow, but even without sunlight, the waves glittered like fish scales.

Eliza had woken to find her parents’ bed empty, sheets crumpled and discarded, the shapes of their bodies sunk deep into the cotton mattress.

She went to Thomas’s room.

“We’ll go and look for them,” he said, pulling boots over his nightclothes, grabbing his father’s hat from the stand.

Mrs. Riesly hollered after them as they trudged down the road. “You two all right?” Glancing back, they saw her body hanging half out of the window.

As they neared the beach they could sense something was different. Something in the air seemed out of place.

They crested the highest dune and were staggered by the sight that met them. All along the beach, stuck to the edge of the tide mark, were huge, black, bulbous bodies—skin stiff and distended, fins collapsed onto the sand. There must have been thirty of them, spaced out along the beach that morning. Above them gulls wheeled and dived; in the water, tail swishes signaled sharks gathered to feast.

Between the whales, two figures were flitting, scooping buckets of water in from the shallows. They were swift in their task, returning again and again to the whales. Her mother had hitched up her skirts and tied them in a knot at her hip, pale legs glowing like matchsticks through the grayness. Eliza had never seen her father so focused before and felt a strange sensation at witnessing her parents behave this way. She wanted to draw away, to leave them there, as if interrupting them would be to disturb something shared and private. Thomas disagreed. He turned to Eliza, the hat slipping down across one eyebrow. “We must go and help.”

For hours they labored, with salt-chafed skin, trying to save the whales. Her father explained that if one whale was sick it would beach itself and the others in the family would do the same. They could simply not exist with one of their pod gone.

After a time they were joined by the men from the foreshore camps, who brought larger buckets and lengths of cloth for soaking. If they could keep the whales alive until the tide came back in, the animals could be shifted slowly back into the surf if they all put their might behind it.

Thomas was military in his approach to rescue, ordering the men back and forth, allocating teams of two to attend each stranded creature. The men did what he said swiftly and without question, even though, in physicality at least, he was nothing more than a boy.

In the afternoon the clouds piled into one another. Soon, the tide began to creep back in. They stood in a line and waited, watching to see when the water would come close enough to get the whales afloat. The waves crawled in to taste their toes, then swelled greedily around their ankles, and her father ran the whole length of the beach. On his return they could see his sprint begin to slow, until it was a jog, and then a walk, and then something less than that. When he reached them, his face was heavy. He shook his head.

“None of them?” asked her mother, voice wavering.

“I’m afraid not, my loves.”

Eliza felt a sob lodge itself in her chest. She wanted to keep going, to push them back into the water, to see if they could soak the life back into the whales. Her father came to her and put his arm around her shoulder. “We tried, Eliza. That’s the main thing. We tried to give them a chance. That’s all we could do.”

She had glanced toward Thomas then as the rain began to fall. His fists were clenched, his jaw tight, and on his face a look of sheer fury.