Chapter Two: I discover the ambergris

I reached the gigantic, lumpy mass on the beach with Angus MacCallum still fifty or more paces off, my claim thus trumping his. He was a good fellow about it, cursing his emphysema and arthritis rather than my youth. We had both made a run for it, but I was ten years old at the time and Angus was a few years north of seventy, one gimpy leg making him not so much run as waddle like a crab, an elbow energetically flailing at the air as if he were fighting his way through a crowd. I am now ninety-one years old and don’t doubt that, limp and all, Angus could outrun me today were he still prowling the beach below his lighthouse. But this was more than eighty years ago, a time when my legs were still strong and fresh.    

I must boast that we O’Hallorans have always been fast afoot. My little brother Alex was eventually faster than me—a county champion in the 100-yard dash. However, in 1934 he was just six years old and struggled to keep up with me. “Wait up, Connor,” he’d shout when the wind in my face convinced me to run faster and faster along the beach that bordered our little coastal village. If I refused to slow down, he’d add a word picked up from the men cozied up to the bar at The Last Resort. “Wait up, you prick!”

Alex had a predilection for storytelling, although he was a quiet boy who became a quiet man. His stories were preserved on paper, and indeed, I wish this one had come from his pen. The war in Korea stole that opportunity from us both. I spent years as a reporter, making public the private affairs of others. It’s made me protective of my own privacy, and until now, I’ve preferred a small captive audience when recounting the events of that summer in 1934—a child, grandchild, or great-grandchild listening as I carry on from a porch swing or at the fireside. “You may not like it. It’s a story for boys about secrets and treasure and other things boys think about,” I told my daughter, the first of them to hear this tale of the whale and the ambergris and Tesoro, California. She was eleven years old at the time and my careless remark got her dander up. Of course, she kept her lips buttoned even though I deserved some sass. She was raised in a time when girls were taught to put up with narrow-minded talk from men. Thank goodness she raised her own girls to understand that any opinion worth having is dressed in neither skirt nor trousers. “A story is a story, Grandpa,” her own daughter sniffed when sitting at my knee around twenty-five years later. “If it’s any good, both girls and boys will like it.” She had gumption, that one. Still does. She’s a forthright woman and reminds me of Miss Lizzie Fryberg, one of the strongest, smartest, and most wonderful women I’ve ever known.

Now you may believe I’m about to fill your head with some whoppers, and I confess my story can sometimes sound like the fanciful recollections of an old man. Have a little faith. Everything I’ll tell you is as true as I best remember. Of course, that makes it not entirely true. Just mostly true.

So, there I was, my claim staked, waiting for Angus MacCallum to reach me. He shouted as he ran, managing to sound profane without actually issuing any profanity, spicing the mishmash of Gaelic words he’d brought to our little northern California coastal town from his native Scotland with a few “bloody” this’s and that’s.

“I saw it first and started me run afore ye, laddie,” he croaked upon reaching me. “Some might suppose that makes it mine, but I figgers ye bested me fair and square and I cannae dispute it.”

The lips forming his words were mere suggestions, Angus’s face a mass of wrinkles with folds of flesh drooping morosely from forehead to jowl. I looked into a pair of creases that offered the best chance of being his eyes.

“You can have it, Angus,” I said, the stinking blob of jellylike material of value only because the old lighthouse keeper had been so enthusiastic about reaching it first. Now that it was mine, I found little to recommend the thing with its overpowering odor of fish and feces, its girth that of an elephant, its shape no more defined than a compost pile. It reminded me of a story often told by Miss Lizzie Fryberg, then the Tesoro town midwife and general medical officer, who had once attended a delivery resulting not in a baby but a gelatinous mass much like this one except for its size—the newborn thing no larger than a honeydew melon and studded with hair and teeth and fingernails. It was apparently not a baby at all but some sort of tumor called a teratoma. Nevertheless, the poor new mother insisted on naming the thing Arthur and having it buried in the family plot. Children in Tesoro have since been terrifying their little brothers and sisters with tales of Arthur the Teratoma who purportedly arises on Halloween night to steal the souls of trick-or-treaters.

“I mean it, Angus,” I reiterated, wrinkling my nose against the monstrous stench. “You can have it.”

Angus shook his head.

“Nae, laddie, dinnae let it be said that Angus MacCallum was a poor loser. Ye beat me to it. It’s yers.”

Angus began to pace about the thing, poking at it with the walking stick he always carried, afterward sniffing the tip of his cane and issuing little grunts and hums. His behavior suggested that he knew what he was doing, although I strongly suspected he did not.

“It stinks, Angus,” I said. “You keep it.”

Angus made a great show of being exasperated, a difficult proposition as the mood he prized above all others was exasperation.

“Ye cannae give it away, ye little fool!” he shouted. “Yer mother would ne’er forgive ye.”

The introduction of my mother into the discussion did little to dissuade me. At the time Ma lived about three streets past even-tempered and one short of loony, in part because my father lost interest in our family about the time Miss Lizzie Fryberg pulled my little brother Alex from Ma’s womb and slapped him on his pink bottom. Dad took one look at another mouth to feed and stepped out for a smoke that turned into forever.

“Ma is in one of her moods,” I told Angus. “She won’t care.”

One of the folds in the old man’s face formed a reproachful scowl, but I remained suspicious. Angus didn’t recognize competing claims on beach debris. He was a decent man and had always been good to Ma and Alex and me. But everyone in Tesoro knew that he considered the public strip of sand below the lighthouse to be his private property. Every day he patrolled the narrow stretch, barking off campers or kids he didn’t like, at the same time searching for pieces of driftwood he could carve into small gnomes or mermaids. Such items were inexplicably appealing to rich tourists taking a day from their San Francisco vacations to visit our little seaside village. They routinely squandered up to a dollar for Angus’s homemade doodads and their extravagance made him territorial, shouting off more than one kid from a giant sand dollar and once smacking Milton Garwood the Misanthrope with his walking stick, in part because he figured Milton had it coming, but also to reinforce his claim on a mutant dried starfish with six points. So, you might see why it made sense for me to be wary of the old lighthouse keeper’s uncharacteristic generosity. After all, it was the first day of my summer vacation from school, and I had a good deal of nothing planned for the next three months with no desire to replace even a minute of it cleaning up the enormous blob on the beach just because Angus MacCallum was too old to beat me to it.

“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.”