by Janice Clark
Now Mordecai and I sat high atop the forecastle, in the point of the bow, which afforded us a full view of the waters through which we sailed. A keen wind sprang up and blew the fog away, leaving a washed blue sky. Mouse Island was a few miles astern. Straight ahead, some ten miles south, lay our destination: the chain of islands that formed the Stark Archipelago. Mordecai had taken the captain aside before the Able unmoored and asked him to alter his route slightly. The Able would normally have stopped at Fisher’s Island first, he said, but this small change was no inconvenience at all. Mordecai had yet to explain why we were heading for the archipelago, but I was happy to be sailing farther from Naiwayonk each moment. Behind us, due north, at the deepest point of the curved shoreline, I could just make out the shape of Rathbone House and the docks and masts of the harbor.
The air had a wintry edge, though it was still early autumn. Sharp gusts of wind blew Crow from perch to perch. He first hunched on the aft rail, then clung to the fore shrouds or the mizzenmast, making short sorties at my head to worry my hair. He didn’t care for my coiffure. My great-great-aunts had plaited my hair into a hundred braids, stiffened with sea salt, each end caught up in a shell. They had woven me gowns the green of sea bladder and sponge weed, one of algae-brown, one the blood-dark red of a sea urchin, and a pearly gray close to that of their own gowns. Considering that my normal dress had been a pin-tucked frock of no particular shape and a mouselike hue, I was more than pleased with gowns whose bodices were fitted to my own form and whose skirts spread wide. They’d also given me new boots of sheepskin with soft black tongues. Before we said goodbye, my great-great-aunts had taken me to a tide pool and shown me my reflection in the still water, my face strewn with starfish, my braids speckled with the small mollusks that clung to the rocks at the bottom of the pool. I felt myself color when Euphemia and Thankful spoke teasingly of suitors for me. My aunts’ smiling faces formed a ring around mine. Now, when I raised my arm to wave once more, I saw that the sky was the same shale blue as my sleeve; a storm was brewing in the north.
“Just last month the Sabine broke up here,” said our captain. “But do you see aught of it on those rocks?” On the eastern tip of Mouse Island the sharp rocks on which we had nearly smashed in the skiff disrupted the smooth curves of the island. My eye searched not for the flotsam and jetsam of a wreck but for a broken body in a blue coat. Nothing moved among the rocks except a few gulls poking between stones for stray smelt.
Captain Avery traded supplies for the wives’ fine wool (much in demand, he said, among the ladies of Boston), such necessities as their austere ways required that the sea didn’t amply meet: fodder for the sheep, a few tools, fresh water. Their only extravagance was the satisfying of a craving for little seed cakes like those they’d eaten in girlhood. Someone in Avery’s village still remembered how to bake them. Apparently Rathbone House had once supplied the worn wives with what they needed. Euphemia told me that Mama used to bring treats for the wives—eggs, fruit from the mainland, and other small comforts—and sit with them, before I was born. I wondered at the idea of Mama visiting the wives. The picture it suggested was so unlike the Mama I knew. I imagined her pressing her gifts into my aunts’ little hands, chatting about the weather or the spring lambing. The gifts Mama had given me could be numbered on one hand: barrettes for my braid; a set of knucklebones; and a ring scribed with a simple pattern of waves, the last a gift on my twelfth birthday.
I had, not long after I turned twelve, begun my monthly courses. Mama had not told me what to expect. I had woken one night, the bed wet beneath me, and when I had seen that I was bleeding I ran to Mama’s room. I had long since learned not to bother her when I needed anything, but I was frightened enough that night to forget. I stood in front of her bed, twisting my nightgown around to show her the dark stain.
“Take it off.”
She took my nightgown in her hands and, sitting up straight in her bed, tore the gown into long strips from hem to neck and handed the rags back to me.
“Put those between your legs,” she said, and returned to sleep.
“Shake a leg, there. Bear off, bear off.”
I realized Captain Avery was speaking. He was giving orders to the mate, a small round man in faded ducks and a striped jersey, who hurried aloft. The captain peered toward the rocky point receding behind us, shaking his head.
“No, not a stick left of the Sabine. Your aunties have salvaged every scrap. They pick each ship’s carcass clean as crabs.”
I thought of the scarlet boards burning in the fireplace, warming my frock and my feet when we first arrived on Mouse Island. I remembered the partial letters on the painted wood: an A and part of an S, letters that must have once stood in the name Sabine.
“Have you … has anyone been recovered more recently from these waters?” I asked. I glanced toward Mordecai, but he sat with his head bent over some book, paying me no mind.
The captain considered his answer, running a hand over his whiskery face. Though the Able was as neat as it could well be, the captain was not particular about his own appearance. He shook his head.
“No, but ships have broken their backs on these rocks once or twice each year for as long as I can remember. The entire crew of the Sabine showed up in the village next day, down at Lord’s Point. Said they lost their bearings in the fog. That they were pulled out of the water by a passing sloop from Gloucester—what business, I ask, has a sloop from Gloucester this far south?—and set down again on their own dock. Don’t know how they all survived. None dead—not even cut up on those rocks. And not a mark on them. I asked them myself, not two days later, down at the alehouse. They only went red and shook their heads, the lot of them.”
I know better, I wanted to say, but held my tongue. During our stay on Mouse Island I’d watched the wives practice their tosses on the ewes, to keep their eyes true and their limbs from stiffening. I never saw them miss. I suppose no man with any salt would admit to such a rescue.
“I don’t know how any man who calls himself a pilot could make such a mistake, even one who doesn’t know this coast. Channels are clearly marked enough. Some claimed they heard singing. Others mentioned a strong light, swore it was the lighthouse at Stonington. Foolish. Everyone knows the point lies a good three miles farther west.”
Captain Avery turned back to his wheel, though he continued to speak of other ships wrecked over the years. I tired of his prattle. Through it I began to hear a soft melody. I closed my eyes and listened. It sounded a little like my brother’s song, and I felt myself go cold. I moved closer to Mordecai. The melody shifted and I breathed easier, realizing it was only some old chantey, which Mordecai sang in a low, keening voice.
“My clothes are all in pawn,
Go down you blood-red roses, go down,
And it’s mighty drafty around Cape Horn,
Go down you blood-red roses, go down,
It’s ’round Cape Horn we’ve got to go,
Chasing whales through ice and snow,
Oh my old mother she wrote to me,
My darling son come home from sea.”
Mordecai sat cross-legged, pulling books and tools from his case and arranging them on the deck. The aunts had fashioned new clothes for him, too—trousers and waistcoats and smallclothes in dark hues—though he found them too soft. He wore only a short, tight jacket of a virile terrapin green that was not from the aunts’ loom. It looked like a sailor’s monkey jacket, with two rows of brass buttons down the front and heavy gold braid along the seams—salvage from some ship. And he still wore his old nankeen breeches, buff-colored, stained from our dissections.
A couple of weeks with the worn wives, soothed by their teas and coddling, had done Mordecai good. He looked almost healthful and much glossier than usual. The aunts had smeared a salve extracted from bivalves over his skin to guard it against the sun, and he had reapplied it liberally. His skin was otherwise white with a faint green tinge like the roe of a young lobster; only a few minutes in t
he sun caused any unprotected patch to become crisped. My own skin fared just fine in the sunlight. I’d inherited my forebears’ coppery sheen.
Mordecai’s hair hung in a single thick pigtail, which I plaited myself. At first he wouldn’t let me touch his hair, though it blew in his eyes. Even in a dead calm it tended to unaccountably float before his face to form a private fog. But I persuaded him to let me braid the white mass into a neat queue. He didn’t know that I had woven a strand of ribbon kelp into its center; my aunts had said it would bring him luck. That day he wore a billed and braided sailor’s cap over his pigtail, which shaded his still-sensitive eyes, his spectacles having sunk with the skiff. I didn’t like the cap on him. It suggested skills unearned by its wearer. Captain Avery must have let Mordecai into the afterhold, where he also found the ink and quill that lay among the books and tools he was now busily arranging on the deck.
When his song ended, Mordecai hummed on as he unrolled a clean sheet of paper that he had brought in one of his bags and spread it out, weighting its edges with a length of chain. He sharpened a pencil on a whetstone, holding the point up close to his eyes, frowning, then grinding it again.
Among Mordecai’s instruments on the deck was a short spyglass I’d played with before in the attic. I held it up to scan the horizon. The view was fractured by a spiderweb crack in the lens, which split a dozen islands into a hundred. I took the glass away from my eye and looked again at the islands. I could see them more clearly with my naked eye. Earlier a single stretch of vivid green, the islands now began to separate and take shape. Reflected light from the lens flashed into Mordecai’s eyes, but he took no notice. His head and shoulders were damp from occasional bursts of spray off the bow. He had ruled a grid on his foolscap and was now plotting points, referring repeatedly to the little journal he had brought from the attic—re-creating, I realized, the map of the sperm’s route from his blackboard. I held up the glass again and turned it slowly, all around the rim of the sea; still no sign of sperm.
Among the books Mordecai had lined up was one in which I had seen him writing in more than once back at the house: a tall, narrow logbook with marbled covers and a leather spine. I missed my own ledger. I had thought of it as we ran from the house, but there wasn’t time to run back for it. I wished I had it now. I longed to draw my brother.
I had often drawn him in the attic during lessons, tilting the cover of my ledger over my hand so that Mordecai wouldn’t notice. It was an old volume bound in blue linen that held no histories, only columns of figures in a faint graphite hand, without any legend. I wondered what the numbers recorded: barrels of oil or profit gained; distances traveled.
I assembled my brother from parts of my favorite images, especially those in a set of books about the ancient Greeks, the finest books in our meager library. Each volume was bound in red morocco and stamped in silver with the head of an Olympian. Colored plates, clustered in the center of each volume, depicted the heroes of old: Achilles leaping from a parapet of Troy, Odysseus strapped to the mast of his ship while the Sirens sang. Prometheus was there, his liver being devoured by an eagle, only to grow back again. I loved to sit on the floor and turn the glossy pages, the plates vivid in the faded room: landscapes of glowing green or ochre, scarlet and crimson cloaks, breastplates and helmets stroked with sparkling silver. The volumes had suffered from the sea—the plates had melded together, and someone had tried to separate the sodden pages and torn them, so that the heroes were marred or the color stripped entirely away to rough white paper.
The day before, I had copied a figure in the aquatint nailed to the figurehead in the attic, a sturdy youth poised in the prow of a whaleboat. His head, though, was unsatisfactory, too narrow and with a weak chin; I replaced it with a profile of the young Alexander. The angle wasn’t quite right; he appeared to be gazing out across some as yet unconquered country, rather than at the whale that in my drawing loomed just in front of him, but his profile was bold, his jaw firm with resolve. An earlier drawing of my brother boasted the crested plume of Patroclus, although his garment, copied from a painting of saints that hung on the hull, was impractical for whaling, draping as it did around his ankles. Every drawing of my brother included a whale, either about to be impaled or already overcome and floating lifeless in the sea.
Sighing over my missing ledger, I quietly slid Mordecai’s logbook from the stack and, turning my back to him, opened the book on my lap and began to flip through it. The book sprang open at the center, at two doubled pages; I unfolded them so that together they spread as wide as my outstretched arms.
The long stretch of paper held a chart, entitled “The Rathbones” in Mordecai’s narrow hand. At the top left was Moses, then came a row of names, among them three of the great-great-aunts we had just left: Euphemia was there, and Beulah, and Amaziah. I recognized most of them from the quilt Euphemia had shown me—the quilt Hepzibah had found on her bed at Rathbone House. Moses’s last wife, Katurah, who had died only a year before Mordecai and I arrived at Mouse Island, had brought the quilt to the island fifty years ago. By now the patchworked patterns had all faded to pale tones, but the stitched names, yellowed with age, remained tight and true.
I had memorized all of the wives’ names, dead and living. I took up a pen from among Mordecai’s tools and, first dipping it in a bottle of ink, began to add to the chart, squeezing names between those already there, so that they spread from edge to edge: Thankful, Patience, Charity, Amaziah, Constance, Hopestill, Hepzibah, Euphemia, Eunice, Felicity, Beulah, Experience, Desire, Trial, Humility, Silence, and Katurah. Seventeen wives in all.
I was adding the dates from the quilt below each name when Mordecai finally looked up from his work. Preoccupied with his grid, he only slowly realized what I was holding and reached to snatch the logbook.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he spluttered.
“I’m adding the others. I know all of their names now.”
He stared at me, the chart dangling from his hand and fluttering in the wind.
I took the logbook back from him, folded up the chart, and made him sit down again. I told him Euphemia’s stories, of Moses’s first whale and of Hepzibah’s arrival at Rathbone House. Crow settled on my shoulder, hunched in the chill air. By the time I had finished, the bright afternoon light had begun to fade, and the wind had dropped.
Mordecai sat for a while, quiet. He looked down at his grid, frowning, and erased a smudge.
“Some of your great-great-aunts were mentioned in their sons’ journals. Though not often by name. And mostly as memories. The wives were always gone by the time their sons went to sea. I knew I didn’t have all of them listed, but this …” He ran his finger across the long row of names, not touching the page. He hesitated. “I did wonder whether the sons of Moses were all really his.”
“Four bells,” the mate of the Able called. The bell clanged from the foremast. I closed my eyes and there was Hepzibah, being passed from one bed to the next by a son of Moses. In my mind she never left the hall of beds, was never led away by the cabin boy to rest, but was passed, at each turn of the glass and strike of the bell, from the first bed to the last and back up the hall again, in an endless circle.
I rubbed my eyes and stared down at the chart.
“Mordecai.”
“What is it now?” He didn’t look up, engrossed once again in his map.
“Is it true that the male uses his palp during the reproductive act?”
He froze with pencil poised and his eyes lifted slowly up to mine.
“I beg your pardon?”
Among Mordecai’s stacks I had noticed a volume that I had often studied in the attic. I slid out a mottled brown book entitled Episodes of Insect Life and opened it, turning the book so Mordecai could see. On a tipped-in engraving a pair of spiders were interlocked. Their black-and-white bodies, at the point where they joined, glowed a brilliant yellow.
Mordecai visibly relaxed and leaned over the book, peering closely at the ima
ge.
“Indeed, yes, yes. The male jumping spider boasts light-reflective scales that attract his mate. He then transfers his … reproductive fluid onto small webs and hence to tubelike structures on the tips of his front appendages, or palps. Vibrating his palps, he moves stealthily toward the female.” He demonstrated, his hands trembling vigorously as they approached the book. “The male then … his palp is … torn off by his mate and remains attached to her epigyny for several hours. The female may store fluid from different males inside her body and then choose which male will fertilize her eggs. Now, the Brazilian wandering spider—”
“Do men lose their palps too?”
The stream of words stopped.
“Do men …” His voice trailed off.
He stared at me, raising a hand to clutch at his cloud of hair, squeezing his fist tight. He looked blankly all around, then ran his eyes along the spines of his books and gingerly selected a small, thick dictionary. When he lay it on the deck the book fell open at the letter V. I moved closer. Tucked between the entries for “veneration” and “venereal” was a thin booklet. Its cover was a deep blue; emblazoned on it in gold were a pair of mermaids holding a scroll proclaiming Diseases of the Seaman. Mordecai glanced at me and began flipping through the pages of the booklet. I caught glimpses of nude male figures, but their bodies were largely hidden by captions. He lingered at one page, whose caption read “A Night in the Arms of Venus Leads to a Lifetime on Mercury” and accompanied an image of a man lying in a closed box under which a fire burned. Only his head, covered with blisters, emerged from the box, along with spumes of smoke, presumably vapors of mercury.
