Mack left the farm to his father’s lawyer, David Pringle, and his father’s sidekick Wendell, and the farmhands who worked there. He picked up his high school diploma, caught a bus east and took it as far as it would go, a romantic idea, one his mother would have liked. When the bus stopped in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Mack thought he would find a small apartment and a job, but then he caught his first glimpse of the ocean and he learned there was a boat that would take him even farther east, to an island. Nantucket Island.
Mack found his job at the Beach Club by accident. When the ferry pulled in to Steamship Wharf, Bill Elliott stood waiting on the dock, and when Mack stepped off the boat, Bill tapped his shoulder.
“Are you here for the job at the Beach Club?” Bill asked.
Mack didn’t even think about it. “Yes, sir, I am.”
He followed Bill to an olive-colored Jeep. Bill hoisted Mack’s duffel into the back and they drove off the wharf and down North Beach Road without another word. When they pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, Mack saw the view of the water-he was still not used to so much water-and then he heard a hum. Hum. Hum.
“What’s that noise?” Mack asked.
“The seagulls?” Bill said. “They can be pretty loud. Where did you come from?”
“Iowa,” Mack said.
Bill’s forehead wrinkled. “I thought you were coming from New Jersey.”
It confirmed Mack’s fear: there was some kid from New Jersey standing on the wharf, waiting for Bill to pick him up.
“No, sir, I came from Swisher, Iowa.” He heard the noise again. Hum. Hum. Home-it sounded like a voice saying “Home.” “You don’t hear that?” Mack asked.
Bill smiled. “I guess you didn’t have too many gulls out in Iowa. I guess this is all brand-new.”
“Yes, sir,” Mack said. A voice was saying “Home, home.” Mack could hear it as plain as day. He extended his hand. “I’m Mack Petersen.”
Bill frowned. “Mack Petersen wasn’t who I was picking up.”
“I know,” Mack said. “But you asked if I was here for a job, and I am.”
“Do you know anything about hotels?” Bill asked.
“I will soon, I guess,” Mack said. And he heard it again; it was the funniest thing. Home.
Mack didn’t believe in spiritual guides, past lives, fortune-tellers, tarot cards, or crystal balls. He believed in God and in a heaven, despite what his mother told him. But what Mack heard wasn’t the voice of God. The voice wasn’t coming from the sky, it was coming from the land beneath his feet.
Mack had heard the voice at other times over the past twelve years, too many now to count. He read about phenomena like this-the Taos Hum, the Whisper of Carmel-but never on Nantucket. Mack once found the courage to ask Maribel, “Do you ever hear things on this island? From this island? Do you ever hear a voice?” Maribel blinked her blue eyes, and said, “I do think the island has a voice. It’s the waves, the birds, the whisper of the dune grass.”
Mack never mentioned the voice to anyone again.
Mack listened for the voice now as he lingered on the dune. Just four days earlier, he’d received a phone call from David Pringle, the lawyer who’d supervised the farm in Iowa for all the years since Mack left. David called every now and then urging Mack to rent out the farmhouse, or to apprise him of profits and loss, taxes, weather. But he had never sounded as serious as he did four days ago.
“Wendell gave his notice,” David said. “He’s retiring after harvest.”
“Yeah?” Mack said. Wendell, Mack’s father’s right-hand man, had been in charge since Mack left.
“I told you this was in the future, Mack. I told you to do some thinking.”
“You did,” Mack said. “You surely did.”
“But you haven’t done the thinking.”
“No,” Mack said. “Not really.” When had Mack last talked to David? Last November after harvest? A Christmas card? Mack couldn’t remember. He only vaguely recalled a conversation about Wendell getting ready to leave.
“We need someone to run things,” David said.
“Hire one of the other hands to do it,” Mack said. “I trust your judgment, David.”
David sighed into the phone. He was a good person, and less like a lawyer than anybody Mack had met on the East Coast, where even men who weren’t lawyers acted like lawyers. “Since the Oral B plant opened, we’ve lost a lot of help,” David said. “We haven’t had a hand here longer than six months. You want me to put a transient like that in charge of your father’s farm?”
“Are they all transients? Aren’t there a couple of hardworking kids, looking for a chance?”
“Wendell and I don’t think so,” David said. “We’ve talked about it. If your little love affair with that island isn’t over, Mack, I mean, if you’re going to stick it out in the East, then Wendell and I agree it’s time to put the farm up.”
“For sale, you mean?”
David hummed into the phone. “Mmmm-hmm.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” Mack said.
“You have the summer to think it over,” David said. “If you’re not going to sell it, then you ought to come home and do the job yourself. You’ve been out there a long time.”
“Twelve years,” Mack said.
“Twelve years,” Mack could practically see David shaking his head in disbelief. “Your decision, but this is what your father left you. I’d rather see you sell it than let it fall to pieces.”
“Okay,” Mack said. “So I’ll talk to you in a couple of months, then?”
“I’ll be in touch,” David said.
Mack couldn’t imagine selling his family’s farm but neither could he imagine leaving Nantucket. The farm was the last place he’d kissed his mother’s cheek, he was born and raised there, and worked side by side with his father. Sell the farm? Leave Nantucket? An impossible decision. Twelve years later, Mack didn’t know where his home was. And so, as he stood on top of the dune, he listened; he wanted the voice to tell him what to do.
May first was Bill Elliott’s least favorite day of the year; it was one of the few mornings that he didn’t make love to his wife, Therese. May first was Therese’s day to sleep in undisturbed while Bill tried not to panic. The doctor told him panic was bad for his heart; stress of any kind could take months off his life. (Bill noted the use of that word, “months,” and it terrified him. His life had been pared down to increments of thirty days.)
At dawn, he left his house for a walk along Hulbert Avenue. The summer homes on Hulbert were boarded up, Bill was relieved to see; it looked as if the houses were sleeping. So there was still plenty of time to whip the hotel into shape. The reservation book filled up by the Ides of March, but taking reservations was the easy part. The hard part was now, this morning, thinking about all the work that had to be done. The enormous, rounded dunes of the beach. Twenty rooms with furniture piled on top of the beds, draped with white sheets. Dusty, disorganized.
Bill reached home, wheezing. He was sixty years old and because of his weak heart, already an old man. This past winter in Aspen, he hadn’t been able to ski the black diamonds, nor the blues; he had been embarrassingly limited to the gentle green slopes of Buttermilk Mountain. His hair was the color of nickels and dimes, his knees ached in the evenings, and he needed good light for reading. Last week on the flight back from Aspen, he used the lavatory four times. But the kicker was this: Just after the New Year, he and Therese were out at Guido’s with another couple, a doctor (though not Bill’s doctor) and his wife, eating cheese fondue when Bill felt pressure in his chest, a squeezing, as though his heart were a balloon ready to pop. The doctor at the table took charge of calling an ambulance. There was talk of choppering Bill to Denver, but thankfully, that wasn’t necessary, and in the end, Bill was okay. It hadn’t been a heart attack, just angina, heart muscle pain, a warning. The doctor recommended retirement. A few years ago, last year even, this would have been unthinkable, but now it sounded tempting. Bill’s daughter, Cecily, would be graduating from high school in a couple of weeks and she’d already passed her eighteenth birthday. So it was only a matter of time before he could leave the running of the hotel to Cecily.