The Eye of the Whale

Arthur Young had seen it first. Bounding down to the cove ahead of his father and his crew of two other cocklers he came upon it. The sight of the mass of shadowy flesh on the beach stopped him straight. Silenced him. The next sound he heard was his father’s voice a minute later.

‘Bloody hell, son. That’s a big fella.’

After a few minutes of staring at it, they retreated to the village and roused Councillor Swift from his bed.

‘What brings you to my door at this hour, William Young?’

‘There’s beached sperm in the cove. A bloody massive one. Fifty foot, I’m reckoning.’

‘I’ll get my scarf and boots on.’

The four of them returned to the whale with Councillor Swift. Not certain it was dead, they walked around it at a distance. Rolled on its side, the huge head sprawled outwards into the sand, white swirls of aged scars riddled across its long back. Its thin pole of a jaw lolled down, revealing the teeth, a row of yellow spikes. The creature tapered down to its splayed, tail lobes. They circled it a dozen times, walking at equal lengths apart, the sharp spring morning air steaming from their breath. Observing every inch, they checked for the slightest twitch or slump. Nothing. The beast was dead, and it was in their cove.

‘We’ll have to tell folk. Not like you’d miss it if you came down here.’

‘Aye, Councillor. Tell the village but tell them how you’ll be getting rid and all.’

‘That’s the question, William. How do we get rid of this twenty-ton beggar?’

They went door to door, the thirty-three houses, informing the sixty-five people who made up the village population. There’d be a meeting at ten in the Councillor’s Hall. The message was ‘Be at the Councillor’s for ten. There’s a sperm beached in our cove.’ The only conversation which took longer was Arthur’s with his mother.

‘Mum, there’s a beached sperm whale. Me and dad found it this morning.’

‘Is he alright, Arthur? Are you alright?’

‘Yes, mum. It’s dead. There’s a meeting at the councillors at ten to talk about it. We’re going round the houses telling the village.’

‘I’ll come with you now and help with telling people. Let’s catch up with your dad too.’

At the meeting most wanted to know if they could go to look. From a distance they could look but not touch it. Questions about its size and shape were met with a quick reminder they’d been told they could go and see it. When the subject of removal came up everyone had ideas. No vehicle they had would pull it. Nor the combined strength of the sixty-five of them. Local authorities wouldn’t care to bother coming out either. Chopping it up was too gruelling and laboursome. It’d decompose eventually, but that’d take months, the weather not yet warm enough to make speedy work of it. Pushing it back needed more strength than pulling it out. In the end, hoping that the tide would roll it back for them was then the solution settled on.

The coming week everyone in the village went at least once. Kids were forced to stay away when they went close to it. Some of them lobbed stones at it, legging back a few feet as they did, afraid there was still life in it. The older folk went the once, kept a way back, and didn’t bother to come and look again. Others spent hours there, huddled in warm clothes, sitting on boulders, or pebble-free sandy patches, gazing at its form as though it were a sunset that didn’t go down, stayed black, lumpen, in front of the sealine, rather than at its horizon. A view so opposite to a sunset that it had the same entrancing effect.

In the following mornings, Arthur and his parents went down to look at it. A daily surveyance of its condition, each time showing a perceptible sag in some parts, slight signs of bloating in others, its colouration altering pitch just a shade. Whilst its deadness stayed the same, for there are no levels of how dead a thing is, its slight deterioration made a gloomier sight from one day to the next.

‘Will the tide take it back in, dad?’

‘No, son. We’ve had the high April tides since it came in. It was a spring tide that brought it in.’

‘Will we be able to go cockling again soon?’

‘Don’t you worry, love. You and your dad will be cockling again soon enough.’

William drew his wife and son into him, their heads resting on his shoulders.

‘Your mum’s right, Arthur. There’ll be more cockles than there’s ever been once this fella has gone. Something needs to be done soon though. The animal will be smelling.’

It arrived on the seventh morning since its discovery. There’d been no hint of it the day before, but the smell spread so vast that a nose itself wouldn’t be able to detect the source. Only the knowledge, the sight of the whale they’d all had, told them what it was. It hadn’t been there the night before, yet those waking to it couldn’t escape it. There was not a room in any house it hadn’t seeped into. On the beach, within feet of the whale, or in the home furthest from it, the same monotone reek blanketed every inch of the village. A smell of old castor oil baked in the sun, insect-riddled, a petrol smell that watered eyes and dried throats. It was a level, solid, rubbery odour, an ancient seeming stench that assaulted nasal passages on awakening to it and hung on without rest. The need for disposal had become urgent and immediate.

The meeting at the Councillor’s had folks with handkerchiefs, tea towels, and any right size of fabric tied around their noses and mouths. It did little to relieve the heavy hum. People spoke quickly, loud, with imperative.

‘Something has to be done fast.’

‘There’s nothing fast that can be done.’

‘Chop it up and get it out of here.’

‘That’s a week of work for all of us and then some.’

‘Get the city authorities here then.’

‘Paperwork alone would take a month.’

The ruckus grew. Shouts piled on one another. Not a single full sentence could be heard above someone else’s. Barked coughs drowned out words. Insults and ideas got lost in each other. Yelled pleas to be quieter were ignored. Hawked phlegm and dry retching punctuated the tangle of voices. Amidst the commotion, only the smell stayed singular, unmoving. The Councillor slammed his fist on his table several times, removed the rag from his face, and bellowed above the commotion.

‘We’ll have to blow it up! We’ll have to blow the bastard up!’

The Councillor explained he had some explosives left, some dynamite. No one was sure what it was left from, and no one asked. That’d be enough to break it apart, then, with the whole village clubbing in, with enough axes, knifes, wheelbarrows, a couple of carts, with sixty-five pairs of hands, and the truck, they could have it out of their way, the stink gone within the day. Volunteers were needed for setting the dynamite. William’s hand was the first up, followed by Arthur’s, then his mother’s.

‘No one knows the cove better than me, Helen, and Arthur. Best that we pack the dynamite.’

No objections came. Most vacated the hall, in silence. As they went out William squeezed Helen’s and Arthur’s hands in his. The family and the Councillor spent the next hour agreeing on the plan. It’d need the four of them to pack the sticks as far under it as they could get, with a hooked pole they could get some pushed down its throat into the belly. They’d wire it back fifty feet and set the fuse. There were plenty of large rocks to crouch behind when they did it.

The Youngs went home to change into overalls, wellingtons, and old hats. William took his four-metre landing pole, unscrewed the net from the end, took his larger octopus hook and wrapped orange twine around its shank to the end of the pole. The Councillor retrieved the explosives kit from his shed, checking inside the wooden, latched box that the red sticks, fuse wire, and blast box were all there. He collected a fresh matchbox from his kitchen windowsill and set off to the cove. The Young family were already there.

After initial agreement about the order in which to pack the explosives, they worked without a word to each other. William and Helen went around the whale, burrowing sticks in the sand, just below the side and belly at six-foot intervals, making a total of fifteen stuck around it. Arthur loosely hung sticks on the pole, knelt into the sand, looking into the throat, and wove in the hook, gently turning the pole to drop the stick, with its trailing fuse wire, as deep inside the whale as it would go. He repeated this at lesser stretches to total three internal explosives. The Councillor busied himself laying a web of fuse wires, forming a huge bulb-shaped pattern surrounding the whale, coming back in strings further back into the cove to where the detonator was waiting.

Whilst this went on, the rest of the villagers arrived with the small truck, four wheelbarrows, a dozen shovels, buckets, garden forks, saws and cleavers, plastic sink basins, and arrays of utensils from around their homes. In the two hours this took, the smell didn’t waver, reduce, increase, or change. Whether up next to the whale, or at a distance, it encased everything.

The whole village assembled a hundred feet back from the whale, perched behind rocks, standing sideways to tree trunks, others round the back of the truck. They were ready to go, push down the plunger, explode the whale. The Councillor spoke to William and Helen and agreed with them that Arthur should take the honour of plunging the detonator. He’d been the first to see it, had helped pack the dynamite, worked on the beach with his father. For him to take the final step brought a symmetry the task seemed to require. The box was out of view of the whale behind a larger boulder. William, the Councillor, and Arthur were all able to crouch behind it, safe from flying debris. They were twice closer to the whale than the rest of the villagers. Arthur placed his hands on the t-shaped handle. His father nodded to him. He pushed the lever down.

The thunder of the blast made everyone startle as a single shock wave wafted around their hiding spots. A vertical curtain of whale skin flew high into the air in a violent, crackling gust. A deep thumping, sucking sound, like enormous doors being slammed followed, with the final sound of a colossal fleshy collapse. After long seconds of silence, the villagers crept from behind their refuge to observe the scene.

The whale was still the whale. Raw flesh shone on its surface where the shreds of skin had been blown away and scattered all around it. Its shape had spread and flattened, divided into pieces, but not separated. The fanned tail remained intact. The jaw had come away, broken in two equal lengths. The rest of the head slumped more into the sand. It’s only unhidden eye hung from the socket. The stink hadn’t budged. It kept its same level of attack on them. They could now start to remove it. The Councillor addressed the crowd.

‘Those with buckets and basins pick up the skin. Rinse it into the sea. It’ll wash out, and get eaten. Those with wheelbarrows, bring them to the body. Pick up what you can and load it onto the truck. Those with cleavers, axes, and saws, come to the bigger bits. They’ll need hacking down for taking. Me and the Youngs will see to the head. We’ll be done by day’s end.’

The crowd went about their duty. Strips of grey, leathered skin were gathered in containers, hefted onto shoulders. Their collectors then waded in up to their waists dropping the contents in the sea. Pairs of workers rolled bigger parts onto their forearms to lift into wheelbarrows which were then ridden up a plank and deposited into the back of the truck. When full, the truck was driven out of the village and unloaded with shovels into a distant enough pit. Folk with heavier tools were at the centre of the whale, diving blades of varying shapes and sharpness into the flesh and bone, riving out sections to be moved to the wheelbarrows. Other than mumbled words to agree process, the only other sound were grunts of labour and the squelches, cracks, plops, and rips of the beast being taken apart.

As the truck took percentages of the whale away from the village, the stench began to retract. Each removed load gave a fraction of relief once it left the outskirts. Coats, hats and jumpers were removed. The heat of the work evaporated the remaining late-morning chill. The smell was receding, but the filth of the labour was worse. The blood, the oil, shreds of skin, gritted bone, the jellied blubber, the stale sea water, the mammal’s final meals, all of it clung to the villagers. Arms that hacked and carried were congealed up to the shoulders. Carriers to the truck wore disintegrated parts down their backs, their hair matted hard as wood with sweat and the liquid remains of the whale. Those collecting the animal’s fragments in buckets had bits ridged under their nails, their palms lined with tracks of brown scratches. The duties continued, the truck repeated its journeys, and the folks of the village became quieter. The horror of the work on their bodies kept their eyes off one another, pairs and groups began to labour alone, eyes down only on their individual jobs. The mass of the whale lay upon them.

Working at the head, the Councillor and William Young had already taken the lower jaw. The tongue they’d sliced into four wide pieces, to be carried two-handed in large pails. The skull took the most work, requiring a tree-felling axe, long shards of bone, five-foot ivory spikes that they walked directly to the truck. Under the skull, the brain revealed itself, humanlike, but that of a giant, fillinga barrow of its own.

Arthur and his mother took the eye, the size of a watermelon, funnel-shaped, with the nerves hanging under the gloss of its ball. They carried it, facing one another, their forearms joined to make a basket and moved in short, careful steps to the waiting truck. Three paces away, struggling to keep it balanced, sliding on their cradling arms, the eye slipped to the floor and rolled in the wet sand.

William came to their aid. The Young family stood round before its lifeless gaze. The whale’s shining black plate of a pupil facing them, and the landscape of its own dissembled body beyond. The wide lens is capable of covering the whole scene of people unpiecing itself apart, carrying its parts away from itself. They collected the dead eye, their six arms interlocking into a bowl to keep it steady and restarted their wary walk. The eyeballs upright, staring at the Youngs as they moved.

This eye that Arthur had first seen a week ago, looking back at him, being not sure if was still a living, seeing eye on that day. Its possible last vision in life is the standing boy on the beach, not moving, observing its last moments. The eye had remained in the head until Arthur pushed down the plunger, that sent the message down the wires, to bring the animal apart, to shake the eye from its head. The eye of the whale in his family’s arms. The eye is to be transported in the back of the truck. To be taken to a ditch, be covered in soil, to never see again.

***

Helen placed the three servings of peas and potatoes with some of Sunday’s leftover gravy on the kitchen table. She told her husband and son their dinner was ready. William came in, picked up his plate between finger and thumb and collected a knife and fork in his other hand.

‘I’ll have mine outside. Warmest day we’ve had this summer, so having it in the fresh air. I’ll need to be quick anyhow. I’ve a meeting with the new councillor to discuss laying off my crew.’

She called Arthur again to come and get his. She’d speak to William after he came back from his meeting if it wasn’t another long one in the pub. She needed to know which suitcases they could afford for their move. Arthur came in from the sitting room.

‘Can I eat mine in my room?’

‘Yes, son. If you want, that’s fine.’

Arthur carried his plate chest height, his utensils held in place by the mash, looking down at his food as he left the kitchen and went upstairs to where he ate all his meals. Helen sat down and looked out of the window above the sink. The back of her husband’s head moved in rhythm to his eating and the clear sky above him was her sole view. She scooped some peas onto her fork, inhaling the faint mint, and began her meal.