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Eventually Twyman returns and hires him. They have advertised for two months, he says, and Joseph is the only applicant. “Your lucky day,” he says, and eyes Joseph’s boots warily.

They give him a pair of old coveralls and the apartment above the garage. During his first month the estate bulges with guests: children, babies, young men on the deck shouting into cell phones, a parade of smiling women. They are millionaires from something to do with computers; when they get out of their cars they inspect the doors for scratches; if they find one they lick their thumbs and try to buff it out. Half-finished vodka tonics on the railings, guitar music from loudspeakers dragged onto the porch, the whine of yellow jackets around half-cleaned plates, plump trash bags piling up in the shed: these are their leavings, these are Joseph’s chores. He fixes a burner on the stove, sweeps sand out of the hallways, scrubs salmon off the walls after a food fight. When he isn’t working he sits on the edge of the tub in his apartment and stares at his hands.

In September Twyman comes to him with a list of winter duties: install storm windows, aerate the lawns, clear ice from the roof and walkways, make sure no one comes to rob the house. “Can you handle that?” Twyman asks. He leaves keys to the care-taker’s pickup and a phone number. The next morning everybody is gone. Silence floods the place. The trees swing in the wind as if shaking off a spell. Three white geese crawl out from under the shed and amble across the lawn. Joseph wanders the main house, the living room with its massive stone fireplace, the glass atrium, the huge closets. He lugs a television halfway down the stairs but cannot summon the will to steal it. Where would he take it? What would he do with it?

Each morning the day ranges before him, vast and empty. He walks the beach, fingering up stones and scanning them for uniqueness—an embedded fossil, the imprint of a shell, a glittering vein of mineral. It is rare that he doesn’t pocket the stone; they are all unique, all beautiful. He brings them to his apartment and sets them on the sills—a room lined with rows of peb
bles like small, unfinished battlements, fortifications against tiny invaders.

For two months he speaks to no one, sees no one. There is only the slow, steady tracking of headlights along 101, two miles away, or the contrails of a jet as its hurtles overhead, the sound of it lost somewhere in the space between sky and earth.

Rape, murder, an infant kicked against a wall, a boy with a clutch of dried ears suspended from his neck: in nightmares Joseph replays the worst things men do to each other. He sweats through his blankets and wakes throttling his pillow. His mother, his money, his neat, ordered life: all are gone—not finished, but vanished, as if some madman kidnapped each element of his life and dragged it to the bottom of a dungeon. He wants terribly to do something good with himself; he wants to do something right.

In November five sperm whales strand on the beach a half mile from the estate. The largest—slumped on the sand a few hundred yards north of the others—is over fifty feet long and is half the size of the garage where Joseph lives. Joseph is not the first to discover them: already a dozen Jeeps are parked in the dunes; men run back and forth between the animals, lugging buckets of seawater, brandishing needles.

Several women in neon anoraks have lashed a rope around the flukes of the smallest whale and are trying to tow it off the sand with a motorized skiff. The skiff churns and skates over the breaking waves; the rope tightens, slips and bites into the whale’s fluke; the flesh parts and shows white. Blood wells up. The whale does not budge.

Joseph approaches a circle of onlookers: a man with a fishing pole, three girls with plastic baskets half full of clams. A woman in a blood-smeared lab coat is explaining that there is little hope of rescuing the whales: already they are overheating, hemorrhaging,
organs pulping, vital tubes conceding to the weight. Even if the whales could be towed off the beach, she says, they would probably turn and swim back onto shore. She has seen this happen before. “But,” she adds, “it is a great opportunity to learn. Everything must be handled carefully.”

The whales are written over with scars; their backs are mottled with pocks and craters and plates of barnacles. Joseph presses his palm to the side of one and the skin around the scar trembles beneath his touch. Another whale slaps its flukes against the beach and emits clicks that seem to originate from the center of it. Its brown bloodshot eye rolls forward, then back.

For Joseph it is as if some portal from his nightmares has opened and the horrors crouched there, breathing at the door, have come galloping through. On the half-mile trail back to Ocean Meadows, he falters in his step and has to kneel, his body quaking, the ragged clouds coursing overhead. Tears pour from his eyes. His flight has been futile; everything remains unburied, floating just at the surface, a breeze away from being dredged back up. And why? Save yourself, the neighbors had told him. Save yourself. Joseph wonders if he is beyond saving, if the only kind of man who can be saved is the man who never needed saving in the first place.

He lies in the trail until it is dark. Pain rolls behind his forehead. He watches the stars blazing in their lightless tracts, their twisting and writhing, their relentless burning, and wonders what the woman meant, what he should be learning from this.

By morning four of the five whales have died. From the dunes they look like a flotilla of black submarines run aground. Yellow tape has been strung around them on stakes and the crowds have swelled further: there are new, more civilian spectators—a dozen Girl Scouts, a mail carrier, a man in wing tips posing for a photo.

The bodies of the whales have distended with gas; their sides
sag like the skin of withered balloons. In death the white cross-hatchings of scars on their backs look like ghastly lightning strokes, nets the whales have snared themselves in. Already the first and largest of them—the cow that stranded several hundred yards north of the others—has been beheaded, its jaw turned up at the sky, bits of beach sand stuck to the fist-sized teeth. Using chainsaws and long-handled knives, men in lab coats strip blubber from its flanks. Joseph watches them haul out steaming purple sacs that must be organs. Onlookers mill around; some, he sees, have taken souvenirs, peeling off thin membranes of skin and rolling them up in their fists like gray parchment.

The researchers in lab coats labor between the ribs of the largest whale, finally manage to extract what must be the heart— a massive lump of striated muscle, bunched with valves at one end. It takes four of them to roll it onto the sand. Joseph cannot believe the size of it; maybe this whale had a large heart or maybe all whales have hearts this big, but the heart is the size of a riding mower. The tubes running into it are large enough to stick his head into. One of the researchers jabs it with a needle, draws some tissue and deposits it in a jar. His colleagues are already back in the whale; there is the sound of a saw starting up. The researcher with the needle joins the others. The heart steams lightly in the sand.

Joseph finds a forest service cop eating a sandwich in the dunes.

“Is that the heart?” he asks. “That they’ve left there?”

She nods. “They’re after the lungs, I think. To see if they’re diseased.”

“What will they do with the hearts?”

“Burn them, I’d guess. They’ll burn everything. Because of the smell.”

All day he digs. He chooses a plot on a hill, concealed by the forest, overlooking the western edge of the main house and a slice of
lawn. Through the trunks behind him he can just see the ocean shimmer between the treetops. He digs until well after dusk, setting out a lantern and digging in its white circle of light. The earth is wet and sandy, rife with stones and roots, and the going is rough. His chest feels like it has cracks running through it. When he sets down the shovel, his fingers refuse to straighten. Soon the hole is deeper than Joseph is tall; he throws dirt over the rim.

Hours after midnight he has a tarp, a shovel, a tree saw and an alloy-cased hand winch in the bed of the estate’s truck, the load rattling softly as he eases over the back lawn of the house and down the narrow lane to the beach. Tribes of white birch stand bunched and storm-broken in the headlights like bundles of shattered bones; their branches scrape the sides of the truck.

Twin campfires smolder by the four whales to the south but nobody is near the cow to the north, and he has no trouble driving past the hanks of kelp at tideline to the dark, beheaded hulk lying at the foot of the dunes like the caved-in hull of a wrecked ship.

Viscera and blubber is everywhere. Intestines lie unfurled across the beach like parade streamers. He holds a flashlight in his teeth and, through the giant slats of its ribs, studies the interior of the whale: everything is wet and shadowed and run-together. A few yards away the heart sits in the sand like a boulder. Crabs tear plugs from its sides; gulls squabble in the shadows.

He lays the tarp over the beach, anchors the hand winch to a crossbar at the head of the bed of the truck and hooks the bow-shackle through the grommets on the corners of the tarp. With great difficulty he rolls the heart onto the plastic; then it is merely a matter of winching the entire gory bundle into the bed. He turns the crank, the gears ratcheting loudly; the winch tackle growls; the corners of the tarp come up. The heart inches toward him, plowing through the sand, and soon the truck takes its weight.

The first pale streaks of light show in the sky as he parks the pickup beside the hole he has made above the property. He lowers the tailgate and lays the tarp flat. The heart, stuck all over with
sand, lies in the bed like a slain beast. Joseph wedges his body between it and the cab, and pushes. It rolls out easily enough, sliding heavily over the slick tarp, and bounces into the hole with a wet, heavy thump.

He kicks out the extra pieces of flesh and muscle and gore still in the flatbed and drives slowly, in a daze, down the hill and back onto the beach where the other four whales lie in various stages of decomposition.

Three men stand over the dregs of a campfire, soaked in gore, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. The heads of two of the whales are missing; all the teeth from the remaining heads have been taken away. Sand fleas jump from the carcasses. There is a sixth whale lying in the sand, Joseph sees, a near-term fetus hauled from the body of its mother. He gets out, steps over the yellow tape and walks to them.

“I’ll take the hearts,” he says. “If you’re done with them.”

They stare. He takes the tree saw from the back of the truck bed and goes to the first whale, lifting the flap of skin and stepping inside the great tree of its ribs.

A man seizes Joseph’s arm. “We’re supposed to burn them. Save what we can and burn the rest.”

“I’ll bury the hearts.” He does not look at the man but keeps his eyes away, on the horizon. “It will be less work for you.”

“You can’t . . .” But he has released Joseph, who is already back in the whale, sawing at tissue. With the tree saw as his flensing knife he hacks through three ribs, then a thick, dense tube that could be an artery. Blood spurts onto his hands: congealed and black and slightly warm. The cavern inside the whale smells, already, like rot, and twice Joseph has to step back and breathe deeply, the saw hanging from his fist, his forearms matted with blood, the front of his coveralls soaked from mucus and blubber and seawater.

He had told himself it would be like cleaning a fish, but it is completely different—it’s more like eviscerating a giant. The
plumbing of the whale is on a massive scale; housecats could gallop through its veins. He parts a final layer of blubber and lays a hand on what he decides must be the heart. It is still a bit damp, and warm, and very dark. He thinks: I did not make the hole large enough for five of these.

It takes ten minutes to saw through three remaining veins; when he does the heart comes loose easily enough, sliding toward him and settling muscularly against his ankles and knees. He has to tug his feet free. A man appears, thrusts a syringe into the heart and draws up some matter. “Okay,” the man says. “Take it.”

Joseph tows it into the truck. He does this all morning and all afternoon, hacking out the hearts and depositing them in the hole on the hill. None of the hearts were as big as the first whale’s but they are huge, the size of the range in Twyman’s kitchen or the engine in the truck. Even the fetus’s heart is extraordinary; as big as a man’s torso, and as heavy. He cannot hold it in his arms.

By the time Joseph is pushing the last heart into the hole on the hill, his body has begun to fail him. Purple halos spin at the fringes of his vision; his back and arms are rigid and he has to walk slightly bent over. He fills the hole, and as he leaves it, a mound of earth and muscle, stark amid a thicket of salmonberry with the trunks of spruce falling back all around it, high above the property in the late evening, he feels removed from himself, as though his body were a clumsy tool needed only a little longer. He parks in the yard and falls into bed, gore-soaked and unwashed, the door to the apartment open, the hearts of all six whales wrapped in earth, slowly cooling. He thinks: I have never been so tired. He thinks: at least I have buried something.

During the following days he does not have the energy or will to climb out of bed. He tortures himself with questions: Why doesn’t he feel any better, any more healed? What is revenge?
Redemption? The hearts are still there, sitting just beneath the earth, waiting. What good does burying something really do? In nightmares it always manages to dig itself out. Here was a word from his mother’s dictionary:
Inconsolable: not to be consoled, spiritless, hopeless, brokenhearted.

An ocean between himself and Liberia and still he will not be saved. The wind brings curtains of yellow-black smoke over the trees and past his windows. It smells of oil, like bad meat frying. He buries his face in the pillow to avoid inhaling it.

Winter. Sleet sings through the branches. The ground freezes, thaws, freezes again into something like sludge, immovably thick. Joseph has never seen snow; he turns his face to the sky and lets it fall on his glasses. He watches the flakes melt, their spiked struts and delicate vaulting, the crystals softening to water like a thousand microscopic lights blinking out.