Hilcias and the Whale

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beautiful things

Hilcias walked beside his abuelo down rows and rows of tomato plants and peach trees, shielded from the sun by his trusty cap with a whale stitched on the front of it.

“A blue whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle,” he  clicked and whistled, for he hadn’t spoken one word in all of his ten years.

He spoke only in clicks and whistles, much to the dumbfoundedness of the people around him.

“A beluga whale is called the canary of the sea because it sings so much.”

“A fin whale can make a sound on one side of the ocean and be heard by another fin whale on the other side of the ocean 2,000 miles away.”

“Boy,” his abuelo smiled, “You must be talking about whales. You’re a whale genius.”

Now, before sunrise, as he sat beside the Atlantic Ocean at Beachwalker State Park on Kiawah Island in Charleston, South Carolina, as he did each morning of his migrant working life, something astonishing happened.

A gigantic tooth washed up with the waves onto the shore.

The tooth was a sperm whale's tooth, of this he was sure.

The sperm whale was his favorite whale.

The first picture he’d ever drawn of a whale, before he visited the Charleston public library and checked out every book he could find about whales, was a picture of a sperm whale.

This was before he learned that the brightness of a light bulb is measured by a lumen, which is simply the light one cup of spermaceti oil from a sperm whale’s head gives off.

This was before he memorized every fact about sperm whales in his field guide to cetaceans of the world, the only book he owned.

He picked up the tooth with both of his hands.

It was a foot long.

It was shaped like a cone.

It was ivory.

"This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "because they don't have teeth in their upper jaws, only slots that the teeth from the lower jaws fit into.”

“If I sliced the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale like the rings of a trunk show the age of the tree,” he thought to himself.

He gently laid the tooth beside him on the sand.

Then a conch shell washed up onto the shore with the waves, too.

"What an amazing shell.”

“Look at its shape and color.”

The shape was a common shape in nature, formed by graphing the numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on, the Fibonacci numbers, a special shape that appears many times in geometry, architecture, art, music and literature.

“Some people call the shape ‘God’s blueprint,’” he thought, “Because it seems to be the plan from which God created the whole, wide world.”

Its color was a common color in nature.

There were three shades of yellow.

Its spine was the brilliant yellow of the sun that would rise out of the ocean that very morning.

Its siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the corn he and his abuelo shucked in early August.

Its aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.

He picked up the shell with both of his hands.

He raised it to his tiny ear.

Someone once told him that if you hold a conch shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean inside of it.

"I wonder if it's true," he thought.

"If it is, I can take it home to our bus and bring the ocean and the great whales with me.”

He expected to hear only the ocean.

Boy, was he surprised.

The sound he heard inside the shell wasn’t only of breaking waves and rolling tides.

There was also a song.

It was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard in his life.

He closed his eyes and saw the notes dancing before him.

“I...understand.”

“I understand!”

A whale sang to him in his own language, with his own clicks and whistles!

They were the notes that made up his life, the notes he clicked and whistled to the world but that the world couldn’t (or wouldn’t) understand.

A tear rolled down his cheek and dropped onto the sand.

He wept and all the tears inside him poured into the surf and washed away into the vast reaches of the deep sea.

“I hear you!”

I understand you!” he whistled into the shell.

“I hear you!” he heard to his great surprise.

“I understand you, too!”

“There’s a story we hear along our migratory routes,” sang the sperm whale, “About a boy on land, a boy who can sing our language, a boy who can understand our songs.”

“You are that boy, Hilcias.”

“You are that boy.”