by Janice Clark
He could not wait any longer to claim his golden prize. He had first spied Lydia and her sisters nearly two years ago, on a trawling expedition for fresh wives. He had glimpsed them walking on the grounds of the Stark house—from a league away with his keen eyes—and had thought of little else since. He would go back for them the moment the Misistuck returned from this voyage.
But the ship met with no sperm on the way north. Though Bow-Oar knew that the whales were always scarce in the North Atlantic at that time of year, he thought they would have luck enough; the sea had always answered him. When they were two or three days from Naiwayonk and still had found no sperm, he began to worry. No Rathbone ship was allowed to return without every barrel filled; none ever had. Finally, a day away from home, the Misistuck’s lookout spied a small pod of sperm: three young whales. Bow-Oar stared out at the spouts, considering.
Moses had taught his sons to always leave two whales alive in any pod, however small, and to take only mature sperm, leaving the young ones so they could make more whales. But these three sleek young whales, coursing smoothly along not a league away, were easy picking; they should yield just enough oil to fill the last of the barrels.
What would it really matter? If he stayed at sea, looking for a larger pod, for older whales, it could take weeks. And Moses wouldn’t know. If he still came on board when the ship docked, as he used to do, and checked the barrels, Moses would have sniffed out the difference, smelled the clean light oil of the young whales threading through the heavier oil and known what Bow-Oar had done. But not anymore. Moses never left his bed.
Bow-Oar could not wait. He would drain a herd of too-young sperm if it meant reaching the golden girls a minute sooner.
He went out with his crew to kill the three whales, himself harpooning the first. Instead of lingering one more night at sea, the men towed the dead whales to burn in the great shed, unused since whaling ships had begun to carry their own tryworks twenty years ago. By the time the Misistuck docked, her brick hearths had long been cold and swept clean. The men, busy with the whales, had lit no beacon of arrival. No whale’s heart had been set aside and shared out. The ship had docked, and Bow-Oar had hurried away to the Stark Archipelago.
Now, standing in front of his father, Bow-Oar could have chosen to confess. But he was ashamed of killing the three young whales, ashamed of lighting no beacon and bringing no offering.
If he had confessed, Moses would have chastised him, probably punished him, how would be hard to say—no Rathbone son had dared disobey his father before. But, after his anger abated, Moses might have given his son a chance to redeem himself; he loved Bow-Oar enough to forgive much. Bow-Oar might have felt relieved and grateful, and returned, chastened, to the old ways.
But Bow-Oar did not confess. When Moses asked for his offering, his son said, “I have it, Father. I will get it for you.”
Bow-Oar walked out into the hall, carrying his burden carefully. Lydia hung from his shoulders as though dead. She had, in the end, given in to seasickness, barely stirring when Bow-Oar hoisted her and slung her from his neck as they docked. The whaleboat in which they had arrived only a few minutes ago was already all a-tanto, hung from davits on the deck of the Misistuck, swabbed, and flogged dry. A fresh crew was moving about the deck silently and efficiently, stowing the hold, splicing and knotting rigging. A pair of men hung over the starboard side on a platform, painting onto the sober gray hull of the ship a bright band of scarlet, which Bow-Oar eyed approvingly. He admired, too, the rack of new harpoons along the rail, their iron shafts gleaming dully. Moses had never permitted iron harpoons on his ships when he sailed. Each son was required to make his own weapon from what he found in the sea: a sharpened shell, a shaft carved from driftwood. But Moses would not see the new harpoons. And the new harpoons would strike deeper and harder. Even those few men who had not always killed with their first strike would kill now.
Bow-Oar raised a window and called down to the crew.
“Send me up the chum bucket.”
A heavy wooden bucket rose on a pulley in the rigging outside the window. Bow-Oar leaned well out, reached inside, and felt around among the odds and ends of fish, used by the crew on calm days to fish over the side for the mess table. He lifted out a dripping piece of dolphin. Returning to Moses’s room, he found his father dozing in the high blue bed.
Bow-Oar gently took the old man’s grasping hand and closed it on the piece of dolphin. Moses woke and sniffed at the lump. There was no smell of smoke. And no hum of the whale at all, only a weaker beat.
“It doesn’t smell right. It’s not right.”
Bow-Oar settled the old man back in bed.
“It’s all right, Father. It’s sperm. We had rough water coming in, and the fire was doused.”
Moses held the lump in his hands and tried to sit up straight in bed. He turned his face toward the sea and held up his hands, murmuring. He bit into the lump, chewed a few times, then his jaw slackened and he fell back, soon asleep.
Bow-Oar turned, carrying the bucket in one hand, Lydia still draped across his shoulders, and moved back along the hallway. He stopped at the first window he came to, lifted the bucket to the sill, and tilted the chum into the sea.
• •
Lydia struggled up from sleep, her head pounding. At first she wondered if she were still in the whaleboat or instead on some larger vessel; the house seemed to shudder under her and she still heard the sea and smelled it. Her stomach heaved, though it was by now empty. She didn’t remember the end of her trip across the sound or being carried into the house. She realized that the pounding was not in her body but at a door, and that she lay on a bed in a dark room. She shook her head to try to clear it. The door cracked open and in a shaft of light she recognized Bow-Oar’s silhouette, his leaping hair. He started to enter, then turned to someone outside, blocking the doorway with his sturdy body. She heard him speak in a low tone, heard answering voices.
“But what about us, brother?”
Their voices were pleasant, laughing. When Bow-Oar didn’t move from the door the voices turned hard. The door lurched inward and Bow-Oar leaned against it to keep it shut. He stood there for a minute or so, listening; then the voices, grumbling, moved off.
A flint was struck, a lantern lit. In its flame Lydia saw that the bed on which she lay stood in the middle of an otherwise empty room that stretched away on either side into darkness. The wall behind Bow-Oar wavered in the lamplight, in places a pale gleaming blue, in others only raw joists and bare boards. She smelled the sharp scent of freshly cut wood. Though it was deep night she thought she heard the sound of saws somewhere under her, and again the house seemed to tremble. Cool air poured in at the window frames; no glass hung there.
Bow-Oar stood at the foot of the bed, holding the lantern high, looking at her. He bent and set the lantern down on the floor and began to shed his stiff blue suit.
Lydia couldn’t know that Bow-Oar had seen her and her sisters out walking months before he brought them back to Rathbone House. That once he had seen the long and golden Lydia he had lost his appetite for fishermen’s daughters. She didn’t know that he’d singled her out from among her sisters, the tallest and brightest of the three Stark daughters. She only knew that he leaned over her now, his body taut and gleaming in the lantern flame, smelling of clean sweat and salt, his green eyes steady on hers.
Lydia no longer felt confused, or queasy, or ashamed. She thought of the young men who had courted her, none of whom had ever done more than kiss her hand, of their soft white skin, faintly scented with sweet talc. They seemed now a weak wash in comparison to the man above her, though he looked little more than half her length. She laid herself out on the big bed, wet from the rain. He hauled her up and peeled away her crackling gown to find the sweet pink meat beneath. He probed her secret parts, searching for the pearl, and when he found it, plucked it until she gasped. He turned her over, mounted her long body, and rode her like a fin, his dark hair tangling with her
gold. Rain slanted in, rain and salt spray soaking their bodies, the raw-wood walls, salt from their skin and the ocean soaking the bed so that they might have been making love in the sea itself. They rocked in long slow waves until Lydia dropped, exhausted, into sleep.
Toward dawn the door opened and a woman came quietly in, a toddler balanced on one hip. She was Trial Rathbone, fourteenth of Moses’s wives, mother of three fine sons. She swaddled the little boy closely, laid him on the floor at the end of the bed, and began to crawl on hands and knees toward the top. Bow-Oar, without turning, pushed her off the bed with a foot. Trial stood up, brushed wood shavings from her muslin shift, picked up the baby, and left the room.
The black squares of windows began to gray. Lydia woke to faint light, cold, and damp. She pulled a cover over her legs and looked around. The room was larger than it had seemed in the dark. It stretched from east to west, the windows at either end showing scudding cloud in a pale sky. A thin rain drifted through the open frames. She saw that the only furniture in the room was the bed. The raw-wood smell came from the unfinished planks of the floor and the unplastered joists of the walls. The bed was large and finer than those in her father’s house, with gracefully curved headboard and footboard and four tall turned spindles of dark polished wood. She recognized the spindles, she had seen them in the bottom of the whaleboat, their finials protruding from a sheath of oilcloth. One long wall had been plastered and papered in blue silk moiré; it was this that had gleamed pale blue in the light the night before. She wondered if the paper, too, had been in the bottom of the boat, hung by unseen hands sometime during the night. In the wet air the blue strips were peeling from the top, sinking slowly down. A few had just begun to slip; some were slowly curling down the wall with a wet sucking sound, some lay heaped on the floor. The smell of wallpaper paste mingled with those of spilled seed and salt spray. The golden gown, spread beneath her and Bow-Oar, seemed a faint blue in the sodden air.
Lydia turned to look at Bow-Oar, who was still sleeping. His bright bronze skin had dulled down to cold metal. She had been afraid to look at him when she first woke, afraid that she would begin to feel again the fear she had felt on the boat. Instead, when she looked at him she felt the same strong surf she had felt the night before.
She heard a faint voice; it sounded like someone was calling her name outside. The sawing noise of the night before vibrated through the house. She crept quietly from the bed, wrapped herself in her limp gown, and leaned out the window. The light drizzle was dispersing, blown away by a wind off the sound. The voice again; there was Priscilla, leaning from a distant window along the side of the house, toward the water. Behind her, Miriam’s head appeared at another window, then both were snapped back inside and she heard sobbing. Near Lydia’s window, the sawing and pounding sounds were loud; around and above her, boys were clambering over the house, mallets tucked into their belts, levels balanced on their shoulders. She had not, being half conscious, noticed much about the house on her arrival. She now took in its stance on the long pier, on pilings high above the surf. She felt dizzy, looking down at the dark water below. The room in which she stood was part of a second story that was perched, half built, atop the long low bulk of the house. Closer to land, more rooms like the one she stood in were framed in timbers against the sky, their walls not yet in place. Far below, in the half-light, men were bent over great stripped logs in long rows, chanting together, heaving to shove the logs under the house, which stood on blocks above the long dock. At the end of the dock the Misistuck floated, silent and dark, all its sails furled tight to their masts, rigging taut and creaking.
Against the western sky, Lydia saw a great black building at water’s edge. Its tree-high door was rimmed in red, smoke seething into the sky from its edges. In the dark water a fleet of darker shapes floated slowly leeward, the three young whales that the Misistuck had towed. Atop one a boy stood, driving a long blade into it. On the others seabirds clung, gorging. Along the shore thin stands of pine barred the paling sky.
Lydia felt a deep creaking and the floor under her groaned and jolted. The house began to move beneath her. The stripped logs under it screeching and rumbling, the house headed up the hill, breaking branches off trees with loud snaps. She unwrapped the golden gown from around her, shivering, leaned out, and dropped it to the water below. She watched it twist on the surface in the lightening green sea, then sink.
CHAPTER TEN
THE GOLDEN WIVES
{in which the Rathbones overreach their grasp}
1801
BOW-OAR PACED THE dock, smiling in satisfaction at the neatly furled sails and fine new flemished rigging. He had commissioned new suits of sails for all the Rathbone ships from a Boston sailmaker, to replace the dozen home-sewn sails that had long served each whaler: full sets of thirty-seven sails, of finest No. 10 canvas, every studding sail, every staysail, skysail, and spanker. He’d trained the men, who had always navigated by observing the stars or by dead reckoning, to observe the sun at noon with a sextant to find their latitude, precisely timed with a chronometer. He watched the men move around the deck and up and down from the hold; they were due to sail the next morning on a cruise to the South Seas and the men were making ready. As he walked along the dock, Bow-Oar put out a hand to caress the hull of the Misistuck, now painted in broad stripes of scarlet and gold, and admired her new stern chasers of gleaming brass. The Sassacus and the Paquatauoq had been fully refitted, too, and were both away, whaling.
Bow-Oar was anxious to sail, to watch the fresh white sails climb into the sky like clouds. And he missed the whales. His arm ached to hold the lance, to feel its weight and balance, its smooth iron. But he ached more for his long and golden wife. He wasn’t ready to leave her to go to sea. He turned at the end of the dock and, glancing at the position of the sun, quickened his step and headed for the house.
Rathbone House now stood well away from the sound, on the highest point of land. The pines that once thickly clothed the ground down to the sea had been clear-cut when the house was moved, so that it stood exposed on all sides to sun and wind. Below the house, deep ruts—made by the great logs on which the house had been rolled from dock to hill—could still be seen, though covered in thick green grass. Each spring the ruts were filled with new earth and planted with grass seed; each summer the earth sank again and filled with salt water. The first floor of the house was unchanged from its original form, the wharf-long lodge of rough pine built by Moses two generations ago. It squatted, smoke-black and pine-pitched, beneath the second floor built by Bow-Oar and his brothers when they brought back their golden brides.
If Lemuel Stark had seen Rathbone House from a league’s distance, if he had stolen away and sailed to Naiwayonk a year after he sold his daughters, regretting his bargain (and who can say he didn’t?), he might have been startled at the resemblance of the second floor to his own house: the same mellowed red brick, the same pediment windows shuttered in deep gray. As the distance decreased he may have become uneasy about the details: six panes where there should have been twelve, moldings with neither egg nor dart, details foggy and uncertain, as though he were moment by moment more distant rather than closer. Bow-Oar had modeled the new second floor on the appearance of Lemuel Stark’s house from afar, to provide his bride and her sisters with familiar comforts. Though none had eyes keener, Bow-Oar’s had been focused, when he and his crew rowed past the Stark islands, not on the house but on the girls for whom it served only as a dim backdrop against which they glowed.
Bow-Oar hurried up the granite steps that climbed from the beach and through the front door. He could hear Lydia’s light step somewhere above, and the voices of her sisters. At the top of the stairs was a bolted door. Next to it a grizzled sailor sat on a stool, smoking a pipe.
“Good day, Bemus.”
“And to you, Bow-Oar.”
Bemus got up from his stool and pulled a key chain from his pocket. He unlocked the door, lifted out the heavy slab of wood, and opened
the door, nodding to his captain.
Bow-Oar ran up to the second floor, calling out as he headed toward the bedrooms.
“Wife, are you ready yet?”
The rooms into which the golden wives had settled were, like the exterior, a foggy copy of those in which they had been brought up, each room radiating off the circular central hall that Bow-Oar now passed through. The floor’s crude parquet pattern mimicked the floors in the Stark house, but without their gloss; Rathbone floors were swabbed and flogged dry each day by a crew of sailors, always clean but dulled by water.
Intended to make the wives feel at ease, the rooms had instead confused them. The parlor and hall were similar in scale to those in the Stark house but with different proportions: a ceiling too high, a chair rail too low. In their first days in the house, the wives wandered among the rooms as though half asleep. Priscilla walked the perimeter of the central hall and found herself stooping to look out at the sea. Though twelve tall windows pierced the wall as at home, all were smaller and set lower. Miriam woke in the morning and swung her legs over the side of her bed to step into her slippers and instead tumbled to the floor; the beds, like that of Moses, were twice as high as those of the Starks. Though covered in fine cloth and with rich hangings, the beds were made less with the wives in mind than their husbands, who preferred high berths that afforded them the longest view over the ocean. Each night, after coupling with their wives, Bow-Oar, Second-Oar, and Third-Oar returned to the bottom floor to sleep in their narrow cots.
Bow-Oar opened the door to Lydia’s bedroom and leaned in, squinting against the morning light that streamed in and bounced from every surface. The blue silk paper, unsuccessfully hung on the walls when Lydia and her sisters were first brought back, had been replaced with sheets of thin beaten gold so that the wives’ glow, in these rooms, never dimmed.
