The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  The space between beds formed the narrow gangway down which the watchman continued his watch, passing through a chain of such rooms, one after the other, each bearing four beds, four boys. Through windows on the east and west walls could be heard the sound of waves slapping the pilings far below and the creak of rigging from the ship just outside to the east.

  The watchman’s lantern faded in the distance, disappeared, then grew bright again as he turned for his next pass. Eight bells, he called out as he would have called out on a ship at sea, eight bells. No bell sounded but their bodies knew the time. Heads rose and sank back down into snores. The boy next to Hepzibah loosened his hold on her and turned to his other side. She felt herself lifted by new arms and dropped onto a new bed.

  All the older Rathbone sons slept here, those aged twelve to twenty, all the crews just in from sea that morning, a ship’s worth. Six men crewed each whaleboat, three whaleboats served each ship. While one sailed with Hepzibah, the others slept. She was passed from boy to boy, tossed from bed to bed like a bale, turned on each capstan, hauled and harvested until she brimmed with her own small ocean. By the time she left the hall at three bells in the last watch on seasick legs, whatever fish swam in her might have been spawned as much from the swirling plankton of the sea as from any particular son.

  When Hepzibah next opened her eyes a sleepy child of five or six in a nightshirt and watch cap stood by the side of the bed in which she lay. Over his arm Hepzibah’s gown was neatly draped; someone had cleaned and dried it during her travails, along with her shift and stockings. From the child’s other hand her boots dangled, newly polished, laces tied together in a reef knot. Once she had dressed—she didn’t at first feel steady enough to rise, but the boy waited patiently—he put his soft hand on her arm and led her out of the hall of beds, toward the back of the house. She was grateful for the warmth of her wool gown as they walked through chill air down a narrow passage on one side of the house. Wind gusted along the hall. Hepzibah’s hand found a taut rope railing along the wall with which to steady her steps. The pounding of waves against the pilings below didn’t fade as they moved; even the back of the house was not far from shore. But over the waves Hepzibah now heard weeping. Through a door to one side a candlelit room came into view. She stopped in the doorway and looked in.

  The room was, like the chain of bedrooms, unplastered, raw joists jutting from rough wood planks. A half-dozen canvas cots stood side by side along the walls, in each cot a boy, all neatly tucked up in nightshirts under cotton sheets and woolen blankets. These, too, were Moses’s sons—those not yet old enough to wield a lance or harpoon. A few were younger than her guide, boys of three and four. It was these whom Hepzibah had heard weeping. The little boys seemed to Hepzibah more distressed than ill. As far as she could tell in low light, they were sturdy little creatures with thick dark hair and healthy color in their cheeks. On a stool next to each sat an older brother, dressed in a white guernsey frock and wide-legged trousers. One of the older boys wrung water from a cloth into a basin, folded the cloth neatly, and laid it on his brother’s forehead, patted away his tears, tucked him tighter into his cot. Another plied a curved needle on a piece of heavy canvas, hemming the edge of a sail, humming, his younger brother’s eye listlessly following the flashing needle. The little one’s face turned toward the door where Hepzibah stood and he sat up with a cry, then saw her unfamiliar face more clearly and fell back. His brother pressed him into the pillows, holding out to him a fat dolphin of whittled wood. The little one’s face brightened and he snatched the dolphin with both hands. Hepzibah’s guide pulled her away as the little boy’s brother stood up to close the door. She longed to stop at the sick bay herself and have a cool cloth pressed to her hot head, but the boy who’d come to fetch her pulled her onward.

  They arrived at a dark room at the end of the hallway. The cabin boy tilted the wick of a candle into the flame of his lantern, set the candlestick on a table, and hurried off down the hall. A soft ring of candlelight replaced the lantern’s stronger flame. In its glow a small pitcher of clear water could be seen, and a plate on which something was draped. Hepzibah pulled it toward her. She had eaten nothing since dawn. A smoked cod eyed her. She pushed the plate back and sat on the edge of a narrow bed covered in patchwork. By the bottom of the bed stood a wooden bucket with a cloth folded across its rim. Hepzibah dipped her hand and smelled it: cool seawater. She lifted her shift, squatted over the bucket, and washed herself, wincing at the sting. There was no towel with which to dry, so she used instead her shift. She crawled under the covers, curled up, and started to sob. After a while she reached for the plate and began to eat the fish. She heard something from the back of the room and stopped chewing.

  This room, too, she realized, was full of breathing, high-pitched and light. Besides the breathing, a soft creak-creak came from one corner. She had heard it when she first came in and thought it was the sound of wind in the ship’s rigging from outside. Hepzibah burrowed deeper and clutched the blankets around her but no one came near, only the creak and the soft breathing. She crept from under the blankets, lifted her candle, and moved toward the sound.

  From hooks in the rafters hung a row of small hammocks, pale canvas flaring under her candle. The hammocks were empty but for the two nearest to the corner from which the creaking came. Hepzibah moved closer: a sturdy baby boy, wrapped in soft muslin, breathed gently in one hammock. Next to him was another boy, older, though not by much. Thick hair sprang from their heads. Their skin shone like polished copper. The hammocks swayed, one gently bumping the other. Hepzibah lifted her candle higher.

  In the corner a boy rocked back and forth in a rocking chair, twin infants stacked in his only arm. His other sleeve was empty; Hepzibah wondered if he had lost it to a whale. The infants’ little faces slept one above the other, in each mouth the teat of a bottle on which his lips had gone slack. Their big brother, too, had fallen asleep, though his body continued to rock. All three faces shared the same dark and bright look—the look of Moses, the look of all the faces she had seen since she arrived—like teeth in the same mouth. The boy’s arm dropped lower on his chest. The infants twitched, the bottles slipped, and two thin streams of white wet his shirt. Startled, he gripped the infants tighter and looked up with his green eyes to see Hepzibah standing there. His face lightened. He rocked to his feet and tilted the twins into Hepzibah’s arms, knocking her candle to the floor, and disappeared down the hall. The candle spluttered but stayed upright and soon glowed steadily again.

  The boys, a few weeks old, blinked up at Hepzibah. Their foreheads began to crumple, their mouths gaped wide to wail. She bounced and shushed them and began to pace the floor. She stroked their heads to calm them. They, too, had full heads of dark hair, soft and springy in places, in others short and choppy as though it had been roughly sheared.

  Enough light entered from the night sky for her to see that she was in a corner room and that the ship was docked just outside, its web of ropes and rigging darker against the dark sky. Between the ropes the sea shone, lapping softly on the piers, though it had been rough when she arrived. The tide must be turning. Behind the ship, a dull red flooded the black sky. Through the window on the other side stood stacks of crates; farther away, at the head of the pier, tall pines rustled and swayed. Hepzibah paced until the infants grew heavy with sleep, then lowered them gently into their hammocks, next to their two sleeping brothers. She gave the hammock on the end a gentle push; they bumped each other in a slow wave. On the other end of the row the empty hammocks swung.

  • •

  Hepzibah tucked herself in but couldn’t sleep. She was sore and still leaked between her legs. She let herself remember the moment when she’d first seen the whaleboat from the dock that morning. She had not meant to linger. The women and girls had been warned to stay clear of the docks in recent days, though the men wouldn’t say why. The Rathbone method of wooing women must have already been known along the coast. But Hepzibah needed medici
ne for her sister’s leg, a poultice of steeped seaweed that only the old lobsterman, who lived in a shack on the pier, could make. She had put on her shawl and left the house before first light, to be sure to catch the old man before he went out to check his pots. When she came out of his shack there it was against the dawn sky: a long slim hull full of fresh boys in blue middies, bright ties flying, oars flashing in perfect unison, and she couldn’t take her eyes away. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching for one of the hands held up to her as the boat slid alongside the dock, couldn’t stop herself from stepping down into the moving prow and gliding away.

  Her life had so far been spent in caring for six younger brothers and sisters. Her mother took in washing from a local merchant. In the summer she earned a few dollars on what little could be spared from the kitchen garden after feeding her family. Hepzibah’s father had died in a fishing accident when she was eleven, along with the rest of the crew of his boat, the largest and finest vessel in the small village fleet. Few men remained in the town, tucked in one of the many coves along that winding coast: well north of the open Atlantic, distant enough from the Rathbones, and from the route of the whales, to have taken no part in the whaling that was burgeoning farther south.

  Hepzibah was already weary of the long, hard days of cooking and cleaning. At sixteen, she saw among the men of her village few candidates for a husband, only a few depleted old clammers and indifferent netmen with leaky craft.

  So when she had first glimpsed the crew of young Rathbones at a distance, her mind jumped to the pragmatic: She didn’t want to live out her youth taking care of her brothers and sisters. They were getting older and soon would be able to take her place as helpmeets to her mother. She wanted a life, a husband of her own.

  When the whaleboat drew closer, such matter-of-fact considerations faded. The Rathbone charm took hold of Hepzibah and drew her away. It may be difficult for those not born to the sea to grasp such fishy allure. It was a charm drawn from the whale the Rathbones hunted, as though they had, like the sperm, great reservoirs of shining oil that lent a springing grace to their movements, a brightness to skin and hair, a suppleness of form that spoke of power held in check. Hepzibah had left without a further thought.

  She had first spied the house from the boat, halfway across the sound: a glint of window, then a flash of golden wood that seemed to float above the sea in the fresh light of morning. By the time the whaleboat drew near at dusk, the crew’s smooth strokes never flagging, hour after hour, only the long, low shape of the house showed, a darker violet on an inky sky. The house stood on pilings on a long pier, high above the surf. From its center a pale column of thick smoke surged. Three tall spikes rose from its roof, the masts of a ship docked alongside the house on the other side of the pier, its web of rigging visible between spumes of smoke.

  • •

  Now Hepzibah felt like it had been days since she arrived at Rathbone House. Turning her head into her pillow, she tried again to sleep. She flipped the tear-dampened pillow over and felt raised stitching on the cotton under her face. She sat up and lit the candle. Her finger traced a name embroidered in careful loops of chain stitch on the pillowcase: “Amaziah Rathbone 1772.” It had been stitched with white thread on undyed muslin so that it barely showed. She felt the same kind of stitching on the underside of the patchwork cloth that covered her bed. Turning the edge down, she saw other names on the plain muslin behind each patch: Thankful 1761, Patience 1765, Constance 1773. She turned the edge back and ran her hand over the front of the cloth, over patterned squares of calico and muslin, the cotton stiff and smelling of salt.

  Hepzibah thought of the boat she had passed that morning on the way across the sound, a boat just like her own, rowed by its own crack crew. A woman had sat slumped in the stern, staring back over the sea toward Rathbone House, a woman not much older than herself, judging by her face, though by her tired breasts and slack belly Hepzibah would have said she was past forty. A woman, she now realized, who must have been Hopestill Rathbone, the name stitched on the most recent square on the quilt, dated 1775. The woman had worn a gown of the same sprigged muslin used in the quilt. Hepzibah remembered the soft rose hue, the pattern of buds and stems. She thought of the little boys of three and four, crying in their cots, and of the two infants. The woman had been tossing something from her lap into the wake of the boat—small dark blurs that curved into the water. Hepzibah had seen that they were curls of dark hair. She thought now of the roughly sheared heads of the babies. Each time the woman had tossed a curl a fish had risen, snatching at the surface and carrying it below.

  • •

  Hepzibah heard a sharp cry from outside. She stood at the window that faced the sea, just above the stern of the ship that was docked tight alongside the house. Across from her, almost close enough for her to touch, ropes swayed and snapped in a low wind. Through the ropes she could see the faint line of surf that curved out to the point, on the point a wooden tower, silhouetted against the night sky. A figure at the top waved its arms in the air, then pointed straight out to sea, shouting. Hepzibah leaned out, her eyes following the pointing finger to the horizon: Nothing was visible on the mute black surface of the water. From all around the house voices were answering the cry from the beach. Feet pounded along halls, doors slammed. Below Hepzibah, to her left, loomed the dark hull of the ship. From every window of the house, all along the dock, boys were pouring down ladders, dropping onto the deck. Pulleys creaked, and barrels and crates crossed in front of Hepzibah, swung from the stacks on the pier behind the house. A bundle of piglets squealed by in a net; a crow rode on top, flapping its wings to balance, one bright eye on Hepzibah.

  A roar went up from the bow. Moses swung into the rigging from a window, breeches half laced, chest and feet bare, shouting orders. Boys and men ranged over the ropes, the cheeks of some still striped with shaving soap, coffee cups in hands, losing no time. Their compact bodies moved with economy and grace, swarming nimbly up the masts, forming lines in no time atop the yardarms. In one motion they let go all along the line. The thick white rolls dropped down, the rigging drew tight, and the sails swelled in three great arcs, straining against the anchor toward open sea.

  On the foredeck a circle of boys squatted around a low fire that flared up blue, sparkling each time one of them dropped something into the flames. Hepzibah couldn’t see what it was from her window. They rocked on their heels in unison, chanting low, then stood as one body and stretched their arms up and sent a whoop into the sky. From the thick pine woods along the shore Hepzibah heard an answering whoop, and another, then spotted small fires flashing here and there among the trees. She heard the hoot of an owl and felt the pines exhaling warmth into the cool dark air.

  Fish leapt around the ship. The sky was full of birds. On the horizon, far out at sea, spouts arced, gleaming, in the dark water.

  The anchor streamed up over the stern, trailing long gouts of sea wrack. The ship drew away. Across the open water Hepzibah could now see, halfway down the shore, what the ship had hidden, what made the glow she had mistaken for dawn: a great dark shed hunkered over the water, its mouth gaped open. The dull red glow came from inside. Two new ships were drawing near it in the dark, towing behind them two great black shapes.

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  CHAPTER SIX

  MORDECAI’S LESSON

  {in which Mordecai spills his story}

  THE WORN WIVES all waved goodbye, their faces a line of small moons against the gray rocks. Soon fog had covered them all, hiding Mouse Island, though I still heard the bleating of sheep.

  We sailed this time on a sturdier craft, a merchant brig out of Pawcatuck, a two-master called the Able. Her captain, a bluff, cheerful seaman of middle years named Samuel Avery, traded up and down the coast, he told us, touching at Mouse Island once each season. We were fortunate that he had arrived so soon after we were marooned there.

  Though only Euphemia and Thankful really
talked, the others plying their shuttles mutely, I had been happy just to sit among my aunts with a lamb in my lap while they wove, which they did from first light until dusk every day. Mordecai had slept through much of our time on Mouse Island, exhausted by our escape from the man in blue, and I kept Euphemia’s stories of Moses and Hepzibah to myself. I relished having my own secrets to brood over, as Mordecai always had, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist telling him sooner or later.

  Over the two weeks we spent on Mouse Island, I had carved out a happy little niche for myself. I’d learned to card the heavy, oily wool that stood in baskets at one end of the loom, combing out lodged strands of weed and sea moss. Some days, when my aunts left their loom for a few hours to do necessary chores, I wound the wool for Amaziah as she spun on the wheel that sat by the hearth. Her small, nimble fingers coaxed glossy filaments from the unruly wool, which, like my aunts, had a silvery sheen. Other days, I fed the sheep in their little houses, pouring grain into long wooden bins into which they dipped their dark heads, and lingered to listen to them munch in the warm, close air of the houses. I shared breakfasts of tea and ship’s biscuits, and modest dinners of poached fish, which left my stomach still rumbling. I wondered where my aunts’ energy came from, with so meager a diet, but they rose (or, I should say, descended) every morning with the same steady vigor with which they completed each day’s work, the shuttles passing back and forth as quickly at dawn as at dusk.

  I would have liked to stay longer on Mouse Island. But my cousin didn’t want to linger. Mordecai spent little time in the worn wives’ house, preferring instead to wander the shores of the little island, observing the birds that passed overhead. He developed a brief enthusiasm for the sheep, extracting a measuring tape from one of his bags and taking note of cranial diameters and abdominal girths, noting each measurement in a little book. Mordecai grimaced each time he scribbled; his wounded arm healed slowly and was still painful, the elbow swollen, the joint a purplish-black.