Treasure of the Blue Whale Read online

  “I don’t want it, Angus,” I repeated.

  “Gimme a minute, laddie,” the old man muttered. “I’ll show ye wha’ I mean.”

  He picked up a large shell fragment and began to scrape away the crust. The mass was large—as broad as the base of a giant redwood tree and nearly as tall as me. It smelled of manure and barnacles and was certainly the most disgusting object I had ever encountered. He continued to use the shell to claw off the outer coating. Slowly, the black gelatinous layer gave way to one that was brown and waxy. When more scraping revealed a hard, whitish core, Angus tossed the shell aside and used his pocketknife to shave off a few slivers, balancing them on the blade. He held the knife to his nose and sniffed, then extended the blade toward me.

  “Smell it,” he commanded and I did. Unlike the disgusting crust, the core of the thing had a unique scent, at once both animal and marine, yet oddly sweet with just a hint of rubbing alcohol. Angus pulled back the blade and again sniffed, then carefully returned the slivers to the white core, pushing against them with his thumb until they stuck.

  “What is it, Angus?” I asked.

  The old lighthouse keeper pointed his face at me, a pair of folds widening to reveal eyes bright with wonder and anticipation.

  “Ah, laddie,” he said, upturned lips separating themselves from his wrinkles. He took me by the shoulders, grinning. “Cannae ye understand? It’s treasure, a bloody treasure. It’s ambergris, laddie…Ambergris. It’s a ton of bloody ambergris.”

  Chapter Three:

  We become rich

  It was eight o’clock in the morning when Angus and I discovered the ambergris. By 8:45 the news had made a couple of passes through our small town and a sizeable group was gathered on the beach to offer advice, roiling the air with intentions, good and bad. No one, including me, knew what the stuff was worth, merely that the word “treasure,” and hence unimaginable wealth, had been attached to it by Angus MacCallum, a fellow who had been around the world as a merchant seaman a couple of times and likely knew a treasure when he saw one. A good many of those in the crowd had never lived anywhere but Tesoro and thought I ought to sell my claim, buy a fancy car, and then load up Ma and Alex, putting our little village in the rearview mirror. Others felt the treasure was under the jurisdiction of maritime law and belonged to the government—the government comprised of the people, and the people, coincidentally, comprised of them.

  “Where does it come from?” someone asked.

  “Whale’s blowhole,” another answered.

  “It dinnae come froom no blowhole,” Angus growled. “Whales chunder it up and it floats aboot the ocean fer years ‘til it turn into ambergris.”

  More questions followed, all directed at Miss Lizzie Fryberg, who was rightfully seen as the town know-it-all because she more often than not seemed to actually know everything.

  “Perfumers prize ambergris as a fixative…something to help a fragrance last longer,” Miss Lizzie told the group on the beach. “They’re willing to pay top dollar for it…although who knows if any of them are prepared to buy a quantity of this size. No one disputed her as Miss Lizzie was almost six feet tall and fifty-one years old, her physical stature joined to a comfortable age when a woman can be smarter than a man while not giving a damn if he knows it.

  “It will probably have to be broken up and sold to multiple vendors,” she added.

  “How much is it worth?” someone asked.

  “Millions,” Angus MacCallum offered, evoking a chorus of gasps that rivaled the slapping sound of morning waves against the sandy beach.

  “Maybe,” Miss Lizzie said. “I’ve heard pure ambergris can go for almost eighteen hundred dollars per ounce. A specimen this large…perhaps a ton…Miss Lizzie hesitated, her lips moving silently until a figure came into her head that lifted her perfectly highlighted eyebrows. “My goodness,” she exclaimed, “Angus is right. This could be worth millions…maybe fifty million dollars or more.”

  She gripped my arm.

  “We need to tell your mother, Connor,” she said.

  We left Angus to guard the ambergris and headed for the little cottage where I’d been born, amassing a parade of folks along the way. Now, my Tesoro neighbors in 1934 were reasonably industrious people. However, it had been a blustery spring with cooler temperatures than usual, and on perhaps the first pleasant morning of summer in early June, it didn’t take much encouragement to make them to put aside what they should be doing in favor of just about anything else. Thus, the trailing crowd grew as we made our way off the beach and then hiked up the main road to the village. Before long we were enveloped in a festive buzz that was equal parts carnival and proclamation. Doors opened, heads popped out. “What’s going on?” people asked. “Connor O’Halloran’s discovered himself a treasure,” was the answer. By the time we reached the cottage I shared with Ma and Alex, it seemed that at least one member of every household in town, other than Cyrus Dinkle’s, had turned out. Of course, Dinkle was not part of it. He was the richest fellow in our seaside village and didn’t mingle with us, spending most of his time inside the walls of his estate on the Pacific Ocean. At the time, I didn’t give much thought to his absence, figuring our treasure was unlikely to tempt him since he had plenty of treasure already, most of it reputedly acquired by nefarious means. I was wrong, as you will learn, with money proving most alluring, as it usually does, to those who need it least.

  The little home where I was born and raised was a tidy, shingle-sided affair with a cheerful red tin roof. Only the flowerboxes hanging from windows on either side of the door disputed the house’s storybook affect, one of them filled with brightly colored blossoms, while the other contained dead ones. Miss Lizzie and I went inside, while the rest of the crowd milled about outside, crowding into the shade of the single tree in our front yard where they gossiped and speculated about the ambergris on the beach. Eventually, of course, the heat of the day shifted the talk into the usual topics: How kids didn’t appreciate things like their parents did when they were growing up, and which of the crooks back in Washington D Almighty C deserved to get strung up first for plunging the nation into the Great Depression.

  Inside the cottage, Miss Lizzie and I found my little brother at the kitchen table, examining a picture of baseballer Lou Gehrig on the front of a box of Wheaties. His eyes brightened slightly at the sight of Miss Lizzie, but he didn’t speak. This was his way. Four years younger than me, Alex had an impressively wide, serious streak for a six-year-old boy, and on those rare occasions when he shared his thoughts, it came after he’d observed a thing long enough to figure out how it was put together. Once he did speak, his remarks could be uncomfortably insightful and blunt. Such unfiltered honesty is rare and more than a few folks around town found it unnerving. They avoided crossing paths with Alex, averting their eyes when he approached as if doing so would keep hidden whatever dark secrets or inhospitable feelings they didn’t want their friends and neighbors to know about.

  “Where’s Ma?” I asked.

  “Out back,” Alex said.

  I was glad to hear that Ma was out of bed. She had still been there when I left the cottage around dawn to deliver the Chronicle—indeed, had been abed for several days, recognizable only as a mound of bedcovers as she battled through one of her low spots. We found her in the back yard—a tiny space with more sand than grass—having a conversation with a loud mockingbird perched on the edge of the roof. I believed Ma could be the prettiest of all the mothers when she chose to fix herself up. But that morning she was a bit of a mess—her hair tangled, an attempt to apply lipstick having gone so awry it appeared as if one corner of her lower lip had made a detour south before wending its way back to where it belonged. She was chatty, as was always the case after emerging from whatever shadow had held her.

  Doctors now have a name for the mood swings that gripped my mother, Mary Rose MacKenna O’Halloran. Folks in Tesoro pre
ferred the simplicity of a metaphor, describing her as “a trifle cuckoo.” Trifle was a kindness. Ma looped back and forth between swirling giddiness and profound melancholy with occasional, brief stops at normal. In that way she was like the flowerboxes beneath our windows—bright colors on one extreme, dry and brown ones on the other. It wasn’t her fault. She had a gentle heart and did her best to be a good person. I loved her.

  “Connor, you’re back,” Ma giggled. “And Miss Lizzie. How delightful. Welcome. Let’s go inside. I just put on a pot for tea. Would you like a cup? I don’t have scones, but scones would be nice. Connor, run to the mercantile and get scones. Use your paper route money. I’ll pay you back this time. I promise. Every cent. And get peaches. Scones and peaches…Perfect.”

  She went on like this for a while, the pitch of her voice scaling up and down like a cat on a piano, hands fluttering in the air, words racing to escape her mouth.

  “Mary Rose, stop talking and listen. We’ve something to tell you,” Miss Lizzie said. Ma immediately fell silent, as our town medical officer had a way of tethering my mother close enough to reality to carry on a conversation; indeed, Miss Lizzie tethered most people to reality whether or not they liked it. Don’t get me wrong. Miss Lizzie was not overbearing. She had simply stopped bottling up what she thought. She was more intelligent and better educated than everyone in Tesoro and we all knew it, making any effort to keep it under wraps something she considered both disingenuous and inefficient. There can be a thin line separating that sort of indisputable reason from unwelcome judgment, and some around town mistook her no-nonsense demeanor for severity. I knew better. Miss Lizzie had a huge heart, a stiff backbone, and a wicked sense of humor. She was as well-read as an Oxford don; honest as her hero, Abe Lincoln; able to debate anyone, man or woman, into submission; as unafraid of opinions as the scandalous Isadora Duncan; and as fashionable as Coco Chanel.

  Miss Lizzie apprised Ma of my discovery on the beach and its potential value. Ma listened without really listening, fingers tapping impatiently on one cheek, her eyes flitting about the room as if unable to find a place to alight. This sort of fidgetiness was typical of her up times, occasions where she mostly searched for chinks in one’s conversational armor, hoping to jam in five or six sentences before an opposing talker could get so much as a prepositional phrase shoved in. This made actual understanding of what was being said an inconvenience and Ma failed to grasp much of what Miss Lizzie told her about the ambergris on the beach.

  “Isn’t that nice?” she hummed when told I might well be a millionaire. “I once found a button on that part of the beach. I am quite certain it was left there by Fannie Brice. Of course, no one believes me, but the button had the letters FB on it so who else could have lost it? There are no FBs in Tesoro and Miss Brice had recently performed in San Francisco. I still have it. I keep it in a cigar box next to my bed. Connor, be a good boy and get my box.”

  I did as she asked, and upon my return, Miss Lizzie seemed to have made some headway, as Ma now understood that we were about to become rich.

  “My goodness, Connor, what will we do with all that money?” Ma fretted, wringing her hands. “What can anyone do with so much money?”

  I didn’t answer, although I had a pretty good idea of what one might do with a lot of money, most of it involving a big house, a diamond necklace and mink stole for Ma, a pair of sneakers for Alex that weren’t handed down from me, and a real radio inside a polished wood cabinet to replace the crystal set on which I listened to faint, static-laced episodes of Jack Armstong, the All-American Boy and The Lone Ranger. I suspect such unabashed materialism may seem selfish, but in my defense, I’d had damned few temptations in life and was understandably susceptible to a treasure some whale with an upset stomach had dangled in front of me. Moreover, my little family relied on a small inheritance from Ma’s late parents, my paper route money, and the benevolence of our neighbors. It was a fragile subsistence at best, and I’d thought myself the man of our house long enough to feel man-of-the-house pressures, particularly in the midst of the Great Depression; a time when fellows back in New York City with far fatter bank accounts than ours were jumping out the windows of skyscrapers—well-heeled tycoons one day and flat broke corpses the next.

  “Dinkle’s rich,” Alex said. He had quietly come outside and now stood behind us. We turned to his voice. “Hasn’t done him much good,” he went on. “Everyone hates him.”

  I studied my little brother. His eyes were leveled on me, dark brown caramels that seemed capable of reading my mind.

  “We should share it,” Alex added.

  I scowled at my brother, partly because it was my treasure and not his. I didn’t appreciate it being offered up without discussion. However, my ill-temper was mostly because I knew that he was right, and I would do well to take his advice, given that riches hadn’t prevented Cyrus Dinkle from turning into a sour old bastard with no family who would have him and no friends who weren’t contractually obligated in some way. What I’d seen of Dinkle suggested that he didn’t mind being despised, but I was not so sanguine. Even at ten years old I wanted to be well-thought of, if thought of at all, and the burden of prosperity that confronted me when Miss Lizzie put a figure on our ambergris suddenly seemed less a yacht than a sinking ship. Besides, I knew it was only fair. Alex and I were fatherless children with a mother on an emotional seesaw. We’d reached the ages of six and ten with the help and kindness of our friends and neighbors in Tesoro, and our little family owed a lot to the town. Now, with my discovery of the ambergris on the beach, good luck had come our way and I had to agree with my brother. It was reasonable that those same friends and neighbors would get a piece of it as well.

  “Don’t worry,” I told Ma as if the idea had been mine. “We’ll share the treasure. Everyone in town will be rich. Not just us.”

  Ma was puzzled, eyes darting back and forth between me and the mockingbird on the roof, while Miss Lizzie offered her approval with the whisper of a smile. Alex remained impassive even though my startling display of generosity belonged more to him than me.

  “Do you understand, Ma? We’ll share it,” I reiterated. “All the money. We’ll divvy it up…share it equally.”

  The mockingbird suddenly flew off, and with no rival for her consideration, I was able to help Ma understand what I’d proposed. She was genuinely delighted, giving me a big hug and then aiming a sloppy kiss at my cheek that I managed to mostly dodge. Afterward, we walked back through the cottage and went out front to meet with the crowd still waiting there. No one had left; indeed, the congregation appeared to have recruited a few new members, a low hum of anticipation greeting us that quickly gave way to a good many questions and a few jokes: What you gonna do with all that money, Connor? You richer than Dinkle now? You gonna build yourself a mansion? You staying in Tesoro? Hey, Rockefeller, how about a loan? Miss Lizzie deflected the questions with a raised hand and the comedians with a pinch-nosed expression. Once the commotion had been replaced by the sound of the morning breeze, she made the announcement that would tangle the town’s mainsail lines for the next several months.

  “It’s worth millions and Connor O’Halloran wants to share it equally with you all,” she revealed.

  A wide array of behaviors followed Miss Lizzie’s proclamation: gasps of disbelief, laughing, crying, silly dances, expressions of gratitude to God, and at least one fake swoon capably performed by Coach Wally Buford’s wife, Judy. Coach Wally, a walking bag of bombast, was torn between his wife’s swoon and a self-anointed mandate to boss people around. It briefly paralyzed him, but after Judy sat up on her own he leapt into action, blowing on the omnipresent whistle that dangled from a shoestring around his neck, at the same time inexplicably attempting to organize people into rows. Miss Lizzie had made a career of thwarting Coach Wally’s efforts to be important. She put a stop to it.

  “We need to move Connor’s ambergris off the beach and weigh it,
then have a town meeting,” she said.

  This idea was well-received by all and Fiona Littleleaf—who operated both the mercantile and the Kittiwake Inn along with her aunts, Rosie and Roxy—drove her flatbed truck onto the beach where the mass was eased onto a tarp and then hoisted onto the flatbed. She then transported it to the port scale where half our fortune evaporated when the thing turned out to weigh not a ton, as Angus had estimated, but just over 1000 pounds. A few groans abused the morning air when the needle on the scale settled on the half-ton mark, but the general disappointment was short-lived. In 1934 a half-ton of ambergris had an estimated value of $28,616,000 or about $146,000 for each of the 196 households in Tesoro, the 197th—home to Cyrus Dinkle—to receive nothing as a lesson from me to him for being miserly, cantankerous, and allegedly felonious. One hundred forty-six thousand dollars may not seem like much, but consider this: If I went to a grocery store today, a quart of milk would cost a dollar and thirty-nine cents. In 1934 that same quart of milk cost eleven cents. Thus, to match the $146,000 I offered to the citizens of Tesoro as a ten-year-old, I would need over 1.8 million dollars per household today.

  I’ll bet you’re paying attention now.

  Chapter Four:

  The first town meeting

  The city charter required four days’ notice before a town meeting, but the prerequisite was waived because everyone other than Cyrus Dinkle knew about my ambergris by mid-morning. C. Herbert Judson the Lawyer was dispatched to inform Dinkle even though the old scoundrel routinely kept himself distant from community affairs. “If we notify him, he’ll ignore us. If we don’t, he’ll sue,” Mr. Judson explained to Miss Lizzie and Roger Johns the Banker. The remaining citizens of Tesoro headed for the town hall, a wood-frame building that also served as a church for both the Methodists and the Catholics, the only denominations with a foothold in our little village.