The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  Mordecai finally stirred. The fleet of fish veered off and disappeared. One arm still over his eyes, he moved his free hand over the satchel in front of him until he found the open top and felt the rolls of papers protruding at one end. Before he noticed that I had stopped rowing I had found and tugged on my gloves, taken up the oars again, and returned to my rhythm. I already felt blisters forming on my palms. I glanced up at the sun; perhaps an hour had passed since we started.

  “Thankfully I didn’t drop the one with the charts. Though my fistulae are forever gone, and the Hand of Glory.” Mordecai sighed. He pulled out an old blue bandanna, faded but clean, and tied it over his eyes with the point hanging down over his nose. Spreading his knees, he unrolled a stiff chart that cracked as he opened it across the seat between his legs. He lifted the point of the bandanna to peer down at the chart, leaning close to the faded blue ink. I bent to look at his eyes. They were red and watering; through the squeezed slits his irises were vaporous, his pupils pin dots.

  I wondered if Mordecai would bring up the man in blue, now that we were safely away.

  He lifted the point of his bandanna a little higher to squint at the horizon. “That chain of islands straight out, to the south?”

  I turned and raised my hand to my brow and found a stuttering stretch of green.

  “The Stark Archipelago.”

  A cold gust of wind blew hair into my eyes. Turning my face to the wind, I gulped in the clean air, so pleasant on my hot skin after rowing. I let go of the oars and half stood to look out toward the islands. I couldn’t help but scan the horizon beyond for that telltale spout: sharp, leftward, identifiable at a great distance. I could in fact see the horizon in sharp focus, see the white crest of every distant wave as though it were close, but nowhere did I see any spout or any spray but that of the ocean itself.

  As I began to row again, I noticed a sprinkling of islands far to the west of Naiwayonk, just visible, and wondered if they were among the local islands whose names I had heard Mordecai mention: Whaleback Rock, Birch Island, North Dumpling, Scraggy Island. My eye fell on another island, much closer, a few miles southwest of us. I had often watched this island from my window, a low mounded shape with a wavering, pale line of surf. The island had always been a shifting presence, seemingly changing shape and position. I longed to get closer.

  “Mordecai, what about that island?” I said, pointing.

  Mordecai tilted his head back to sight along his nose. Light glared off a wave and he winced. He dug again in the bag.

  “Ah.” From a leather case he drew a pair of dark-tinted purser’s spectacles and balanced them on his nose.

  “Can’t we row past? It’s not that far out of our way.”

  He saw what I pointed at and shook his head. “Not there. Too dangerous.” He gazed at the island for a moment, then glanced back toward shore.

  I eased up on the oars and drifted for the space of a few strokes to look to the west, toward the low gray island still deep in the fog that had already begun to burn off closer to shore. Among Mordecai’s earliest lessons was one in botany in which he diagrammed the poisonous oak with its three-leaf stem of deep waxy green and told me how Mouse Island was completely covered with such plants. A brood of young ancestors had rowed out to the island one night long ago. One of the boys, on a dare, had swallowed a leaf and choked, his throat swollen closed with the poison, the scrimshaw maiden that was his prize still clutched in his hand.

  “Dangerous? I wouldn’t be so stupid as to swallow it.”

  “Not that. The rocks. The breakers.”

  From so close, the thin line of surf I had seen from my window was a churn of white below the island, sending high flares of spray against the green sea.

  Mordecai clutched the rim of the skiff, looked over one side, blanching, I would have said, if he weren’t already so white, then fixed his eyes on me, watching me pull. My arms had begun to slow, my strokes shorten.

  “Let me take the oars for a while.”

  I thought it was impolite to ask if he had ever rowed before. I was equally doubtful of his navigational abilities, but I was tired enough to accept the offer. I rose carefully, as did Mordecai. There was no room to pass side by side. I ducked instead between his legs and settled on the seat in the stern.

  The bandanna now tied pirate-fashion over his long pale hair, Mordecai began to row, at first most unsteadily, then settling into a kind of rhythm, though one which needed frequent course corrections, veering now to starboard, now to port. With this inefficient tacking we headed south at a lubberly pace, toward the distant archipelago. Mouse Island was about a mile to the west when we passed. I could see that its low mound appeared to be gray stone. I had sometimes wondered why, if covered in poisonous oak, it didn’t look green in spring or summer, instead of just a cool gray.

  I closed my eyes and let my mind drift for a while. It was difficult not to, with the lapping water, the warming light.

  A loud splintering sound made me sit up straight. I turned to see a jagged tear in the side of the boat. Water poured into the bottom of the skiff. With a too-vigorous downstroke of his oar, Mordecai had driven it through the brittle wood.

  My first thought was to bail. I felt around under the bench and pulled a bucket from a tangle of old rope and began to bail the bottom of the skiff. I had just begun when, through the water bubbling into the boat, I heard another sound behind us. I stopped mid-bail and peered out toward the sound. Where the fog had not yet burned off, sunlight suffused it. A thick cloud of light blinded me. I heard a muffled splash and then a pause—it was hard to tell how distant; sound traveled easily on the water. Another splash. Mordecai listened too. We sat motionless.

  “A pair of dolphins,” Mordecai declared.

  I held my tongue and listened.

  “An errant buoy,” Mordecai ventured.

  A splash, and then another. Closer.

  Mordecai plied the oars. A few inches of water now soaked my feet, seeping through the seams of my boots. Crow hopped down and splashed his wings in the water; I spoke to him sharply. He nipped my boot and lifted off, toward the sound, disappearing in the fog. Wind shivered along the face of the water. To the west the island dissolved in spray from the oars and reappeared.

  “The plaster, get the plaster. The jar …”

  I reached into Mordecai’s bag and began to pull things out: a pair of Turkish slippers, a torn signal flag, a dried lungfish that crumbled in my fingers.

  “At the bottom, under the eel skins.”

  I pulled out a jar half full of white powder.

  “Take the oars.”

  I dove between Mordecai’s legs and started to row.

  He pried off the cap.

  “I had hoped to cast the other …” He began to lift a wrapped shape from his bag, then eased it back. He glanced up toward Crow, who hovered above the boat, flapping, staring toward the splashes. “It makes no matter.” He dipped the open top of the jar into the water in the hull, stirred with a long finger, and smeared the white paste along the crack. The plaster soon hardened, and the leak stopped. We switched places, Mordecai again taking the oars.

  The splashing was louder now. Through the thick light I saw the curved hull of a skiff, the line of an oar. A blue back, straining. Mama’s man.

  Mordecai saw him, too, and leaned hard on his starboard oar. The bow swung around and pointed to Mouse Island.

  “But the rocks …”

  He didn’t reply, only bent deeper into his oars. We were not far now; patches of gray rock showed through the fog and the breakers boomed. The light chop of open water shifted to long swells as we neared the island. The skiff rose on a swell and started to dip toward the rocks, toward the roaring surf. A sudden jolt: I held on tight and leaned over the side. We had struck a rock under the surface—more rocks, dark and jagged, loomed in the water under us, all around us now.

  A loud crack, behind us, cut through the noise of the surf. I looked back to see a boat shoot straight up f
rom the water, twist in the air, and smack down with a vast jet of spray, landing hull up. An oar spun out and struck a rock, shattering. A blue shape arced down into the water.

  I shouted at Mordecai, but he didn’t look up, intent on avoiding the rocks, trying to crane around to see our path. I shouted again, but he couldn’t hear me through the breakers. I reached out and grabbed his knee so that he would look up and began pointing, trying to direct him through the rocks.

  Twice I twisted around and thought I saw the man moving toward us, gliding through the churning water, slipping around the rocks. Even if the man had survived his boat smashing on those rocks, surely he wouldn’t have the strength to swim after us. But there it was again: a face lifting to one side, mouth spouting water. A blue arm driving down, lifting, driving down again.

  It seemed to last forever, struggling through. We missed striking one huge rock by a hairsbreadth and glanced off another, its sharp peak jittering along the bottom of the skiff as we passed over. Then the rocks began to thin and I leaned out to try to see how close we were to the island. We were starting to round the point at the near end of the island, we were almost past the rocks, and I glimpsed what looked like calm water on the other side.

  A hand shot up from the spray and seized the blade of Mordecai’s oar. He lurched and grasped the oar with both hands, bracing his feet against the side of the skiff, struggling to hold on. With a single great jerk the hand pulled Mordecai and his oar half over the side.

  “Mercy! Mercy!” Mordecai screamed, doubled over, clinging to the oar, his bottom half now starting to slide over the side as the hand pulled hard.

  I leapt onto Mordecai and wrapped myself tight around his knees, trying to make myself heavy, to pull him back. The man’s head surged up out of the water. His face was gouged all over. His eyes blazed red with salt. He reached for me. The skiff jerked and pitched and Mordecai suddenly let go of the oar and fell back. Wood cracked against bone and I saw blood gush from a black gash on the man’s forehead. He threw back his head and his mouth opened in a huge howl. Blood poured down from the gash and filled his mouth with red, then the sea closed over him.

  I held on to the rim, looking back through torn spray as the skiff jolted through the waves. I thought I saw the man’s head bob up, but then we slapped down into a trough, the rocks now directly in front of us, and I lost sight of him. Through the noise of waves and wind I heard a deep bawl. It sounded like my name. That voice again, like something I had dreamed. Mordecai leaned out with his long arms, pushing, struggling to stave off the rocks, and then one last bump and bounce and we were finally around the point, the sea suddenly smooth and quiet.

  My heart still slammed against my chest. I felt Crow’s claws settle on my shoulder and reached up with a shivering hand to smooth his wet wings.

  “Mordecai?”

  He was draped over the side of the boat, arms and hair trailing in the water, breath in long rasps. “I am quite well.”

  A thin stream of red ran into the sea from his dangling wrist. I crouched beside him and scooped water onto the wound, a long pink tear in his white flesh. I looked at it closely; the wound was shallow, but an alarming amount of blood continued to flow, and he was clearly in pain. I pulled the bandanna off Mordecai’s hair and used it to tightly bind the wound.

  When I had stopped shivering, I twisted the water from my hair. I knew we were not far from where we’d struggled with the man in blue. I turned nervously on my seat to look all around the skiff for the dark gliding form among the whitecaps. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had recovered to track us, breathing as easily beneath the waves as above, so strong and fishlike a creature he seemed.

  We had rounded the point to the south side of Mouse Island, the seaward side. No jagged rocks, no breaking surf, only a long, low slope of gray rock curved before us, some twenty yards across. I stood to see more clearly and felt a surge of cold sea on my legs. The plaster plug was gone, forced out in the rushing water. Mordecai’s boots soon sloshed ankle deep; the water gurgled around my knees. My scalp suddenly smarted. Crow was pulling a hank of my hair straight skyward, screeching. The skiff was sinking.

  Crow let go of my hair and lifted off as something passed over my head and around my waist, a thick loop, not rope but something softer. It tightened and jerked me backward out of the skiff, bent over, legs and arms trawling in front of me through the water. I looked up through my own wake, spluttering and choking, to see another such loop, a lasso, pass over Mordecai’s head and around his waist. He reached for his suitcases before he, too, was pulled from the skiff and towed backward through the waves. I wondered if it was the man in blue, if he had after all reached the island and was hauling us to land. I tried to turn my head and through the spray could just see three figures on the island behind me, see the taut ropes stretching back to them.

  A moment later my underside struck something hard and I found myself sitting, gasping, on a ledge of rock that sloped up from the sea. Then Mordecai was beside me, coughing and unwrapping the sea wrack that had wound about his neck. Offshore the skiff, now only a tilted rim of blue in the water, sank. The bailing bucket popped to the surface and drifted slowly away.

  Small hands lifted my arms, loosened and lifted away the rope, and wrapped warm cloth around my shoulders. Soft hands came under my elbow, urging me up. I was facing the sea and so couldn’t see who helped me, besides which my hair, loosely braided when we left Rathbone House, now fell in wet and heavy hanks before my eyes. I pushed my hair aside. Three aged women, all strikingly similar, each closely wrapped in gull-gray cloth, and small, though not so small as me, peered into my face. Two of the women leaned and gathered up the long green ropes, coiling them in neat loops and hanging them over their shoulders. Holding me close between them, they stood straight and moved steadily through the gusting wind, leading us up the slope toward a house that backed against a sheer rock face, the same gray granite as the rest of the island. The house was clad in thick clapboard, hip-roofed, two stories with small shuttered windows, all its wood surfaces scoured clean by the wind until it was smooth and pale as driftwood. To the east were two smaller islands, shallow mounds of rock a few steps offshore, and on each a smaller house with a single large window. Behind the panes something moved—a small black face and then another. A little crowd of sheep milled in each house; I heard faint bleats. As we neared the house against the rock I looked at the uniform gray of all that surrounded me and realized that the island had not a scrap of vegetation, let alone the poisonous oak; no barnacles, none of the weed that clung to rocks on other shores.

  The three women led us into the first house. As we passed through the door I looked back for Crow and saw him skim by with an egg in his beak, pursued by a tern.

  We entered into warmth and firelight, the soft hands pushing us forward, patting us into chairs, pressing cups of something hot and fragrant, smelling of beach roses, into our hands. I was grateful for its heat and clasped my hands tightly around the small cup; pink-tinged tea shone through the thin white porcelain. I looked up into a face of great age, as smooth as a stone rolled in the surf year on year. The woman, one of the three, had unwrapped her shawl and wore beneath it a simple gown of soft gray wool. Her silver hair was drawn back into a neat swirl.

  Our chairs were set close by the fire; the resinous scent of pine spread through the room. Stacked neatly on the stone hearth, a pile of broken planks, scarlet red, bore parts of large black letters: the stem of an A, a curve of S or O. Remnants of rigging sizzled in the flames, barnacles popping in the heat. I turned to face the fire, spreading my hair to dry, and rubbed my hands as I watched the steam rise from my wet frock. On the rough stone mantel above me stood a green glass bottle full of white shapes; I looked more closely and saw that they were small teeth. Behind the bottle leaned a tall mirror in which nothing reflected, its silver gone black.

  Other than the small seating area around the hearth, the room held no furniture but a loom that filled the space from
edge to edge, built of heavy timbers thickly tarred at all the joints. Around the loom’s perimeter, the backs of their chairs pressed to the walls, sat silvery old women. Our other rescuers were among them, though I couldn’t tell one from the next.

  The first woman rejoined her companions, sitting on a high stool at the far end, and began to work the great lever of the warp. The others, eight altogether, worked in pairs, sitting across from each other. One pushed her spindle to the middle, passing it smoothly to her mate, who took it up and returned it, row by row. The clack of the pedal and the softer sound of the shuttles echoed in the high open space above the dames. From the rafters, across the breadth and width of the roof, hung a woven netting, a ceiling-size hammock in which I thought the women must swing to sleep at night, so that they could look down and see beneath them their weaving, like a soft sea.

  I leaned close to the loom, to touch the cloth. The pattern grew no clearer no matter how close I brought my eyes.

  Mordecai stood, wincing, rubbing at his elbows and shoulders. He turned and bowed to the first woman.

  “Mrs.… Rathbone?”

  I gawked up at Mordecai, amazed.

  Smiling, the first woman stood and curtseyed.