The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  Bemus slapped the top of Jeroboam’s head and pushed him toward the door. Jeroboam hesitated, then knocked softly. All three boys edged slowly into the room.

  Once inside, they went quiet. It was so dark they couldn’t see Moses at first, only heard him breathing above them: long rattling breaths, each with a click at the end. Moses, propped against pillows at the head of the high blue bed, leaned forward, far enough so that the boys saw a glint of white eyes, a tangle of silver hair. A hand reached out and beckoned. Absalom rolled his eyes at his cousins, then climbed up and knelt at the end of the bed.

  Moses ran his shriveled hands over the boy’s hair and face, over his shoulders and down his body, prodded his belly and groin. Absalom stiffened as Moses poked and grunted, then felt his body relax under the old man’s searching hands. When Moses had finished he pushed Absalom away, then inspected Ezekiel and Jeroboam in the same way.

  Moses fell back against the pillow. He lifted a hand to wave the boys away and they ran from the room, laughing only when they were out the door and on the dock, in the lightening day.

  • •

  The three boys stood in the prows of their whaleboats, far out in the sound. At first darker silhouettes against a dark sky, then limned by the sun as it began to mount, they faced south, their backs to the shore. The boats rocked on a chuff sea. Clouds scudded high and swift above them.

  From the end of the dock their fathers watched, staring out to where the boats and their crews hovered along the horizon. Bow-Oar, Second-Oar, and Third-Oar stood unconsciously in the same posture as their sons, legs braced, arms stiff, harpoon hand tensed to clutch, each ready to reach for the blade that stood not by him but by his son. Each approved of the angle of his son’s arm. Each knew that the boat in which his boy balanced had been readied to perfection: ropes coiled, blades honed, fittings polished, hulls and oars sanded and varnished. Each crew was trained to the keenest pitch. The boys shone among their dull cousins at the oars who, had they been standing, would have stood only chin-high to the golden three.

  Besides the boys’ fathers, four older Rathbone men were on the dock that day. Maimed by the sperm years ago, they had long since been set ashore, reduced to pulling hemp in the rope walk or to household tasks. There was room for them and more on the wide dock where the house had stood in Moses’s time. The wood had weathered in the fourteen years since the house had been moved up the hill so that the place where it stood, at first dark and grimed from decades of smoky fires and scuffing boots, was now nearly as silvery and worn as the pilings beneath the dock. Though the April air was mild, a few of the older men had built a fire where the hearth had been, the place now only a patch of scorched brick. The men crouched or stood nearby, though no one lay any offering on the flames.

  Bow-Oar glanced at the vacant moorings along the dock. The two Rathbone ships that still sailed were away. The Misistuck had been gone for two years, the Sassacus nearly three. On those now distant days when they had set sail, he had not felt confidence in their captains. Not that the two mates he had raised to captain were not good men, but they were well into their middle years, among the only Rathbones to have survived so long with no loss of limb or faculty. But those faculties were slower now and the men less resolute. Bow-Oar had hesitated before sending them back out to sea, but what choice did he have? He and Second-Oar and Third-Oar were needed at home to oversee the proper training of their sons, for without their sons the Rathbones had no future. Four young Rathbones—sons of Humility and Trial (the most recent worn wife, Silence, had produced nothing)—trained along with the golden sons, but Bow-Oar placed little hope in them. Their older brothers, already at sea on the Misistuck, had proven fainthearted.

  Though in the last generation Moses’s wives had continued to produce infant whalemen at a steady rate, fewer had survived to adulthood in the years since the golden wives arrived. The younger Rathbone men no longer felt the deep sympathy with the sperm that was so natural to their ancestors.

  If you had asked any of the older Rathbone men when the tide had turned, they would have told you, in low voices, behind their hands: on the day Bow-Oar and his brothers brought home the golden girls. Some would have said the true turn began when Bow-Oar fooled his father, giving him not a portion of the whale’s heart but an indifferent gob of dolphin; when he tilted the chum into the sea—that he might have done as well to tilt Rathbone House itself and tip all the men into the sea, so much did Bow-Oar, in ending the old ways, choose to fall from grace.

  Mama would have said who knows when any tide turns? It’s as impossible to tell as where one wave ends and the next begins.

  But ever since Bow-Oar had killed the three whales on a fall day fourteen years ago, more men were flung overboard or mauled beyond repair. They lanced the whale too soon, not waiting for, or no longer knowing, the precise moment when the whale had tired just enough, and the whale, instead of sinking, turned and smashed the boat to pieces. Some men suffered no bodily harm but, after encounters with whales that didn’t easily yield, whales that towed a hundred fathoms of line from the boat and still swam on, whales that Moses would have met with his blood singing, they showed fear in their eyes, and their crewmates saw it. Once marked, such men were not wanted in any boat.

  The two remaining ships were only thinly manned by Rathbones, their crews filled out by hired men. Including the captains, just twelve of Moses’s sons still whaled, split between the Sassacus and the Misistuck. The Rathbones stood thigh-deep in blubber after the hunt, hooking slabs up into the hold, and filled the benches on the whaleboats as second oar and third oar and fourth oar, but they no longer served as harpooners. That role was filled by sailors from distant ports: Gayheads from Massachusetts, Portogos and Fiji Islanders, men who knew little of the family and cared less, as long as the disks of gold were promptly counted out into their hands. These were men who struck the whale with spear and harpoon unafraid, men whose lives were still wholly connected to the sea and all that swam in it, though they couldn’t, like earlier Rathbones, kill in one strike. The second harpoon, or the third, might hold well enough; the whale might tire after a long chase and finally succumb to a dozen lances. Just as often no harpoon held or the line snapped and the whale swam away.

  Though it had seemed, in that brief period after Lydia and her sisters came, that the family, so long secluded, would become connected to the wider world, they’d retreated yet further after the failed soirée. Bow-Oar and his brothers turned their full attention back to the sea. The scarlet stripes on their boats were allowed to bleach in sea and sun to a dull rose. Shining chronometers and bright sextants tarnished to black in their cases. Bow-Oar continued to rig the ships in the full suits of thirty-seven sails that lent the craft such great speed, but when the sails wore thin his own men stitched new ones, using the frayed sails as patterns. It wasn’t that the Rathbones couldn’t afford ready-made sails—they could rig a dozen ships and provision each for a voyage around the world—but Bow-Oar hoped that, in bringing back the old ways, he would bring back the whales.

  Local seamen had kept clear of these waters, having heard tales of passing mariners being pressed into service by the Rathbones to crew their whaleships.

  The whales had long since learned to skirt Rathbone territory.

  So the sighting of a pod of fledgling right whales at first light that morning, far out in the sound, had been greeted with joy. Though inferior to the sperm in speed and oil quality, they were considered adequate to serve in the trials, which had been delayed for weeks in hope of just such an event. If the right whales had not appeared, a gam of narwhals or a shiver of nurse sharks would have had to suffice, but wouldn’t have served to fully test the mettle of the novice whalers. The right whale, though slow, was known to breach frequently, its tail-slaps powerful enough to cleave a careless whaleboat. The crews were hurriedly assembled: the four sons of Humility and Trial, ranging from nine to fourteen in age, were enlisted to man oars, with local fishermen’s sons, hired for the d
ay, filling out the crews, six boys to a boat.

  The golden sons all knew that the trials would determine their positions on the whaleboats: Harpooner; Boatheader; First-Oar, Second-Oar, Third-Oar, Fourth-Oar. Everyone knew that Absalom would earn Harpooner, and his cousins Jeroboam and Ezekiel would, too. In the weeks before the trials they had cleanly killed every sun-fish and marlin they had practiced on. Today, the first boys to cleanly kill their whales with one thrust of the harpoon would earn places on the Misistuck and the Sassacus. When the ships returned to Naiwayonk the outsiders hired to fill the crew would be replaced with true Rathbones. Absalom and his cousins couldn’t wait. When they were nine years old, they had all been to sea on the Sassacus, on a six-month voyage to the north. They had served as topmen, their days spent climbing high above the ship in the rigging, trimming the sails at each change in the wind. But they had been at home ever since, training with their fathers while the ships were away, whaling. Each longed to be out on the open sea again, to take his first sperm.

  Bow-Oar had not speared a whale himself, nor been close to one, since the day the three young whales had been killed. He had been the first to lose his bond with the sperm, when he wielded the harpoon that day. He would not have admitted it. He would have made other excuses for never joining a whaleboat crew anymore: He was the best navigator and needed to stay at the helm of the Misistuck, or he was needed at home to train the boys, reasons which were true enough. But he felt the absence of what he had lost. He knew that if he had ever raised his blade again, it would never have flown true or sunk deep. He could call up pictures of every whale he had killed before that day; its length and shape, how many barrels of oil it had given, how much bone and blubber. But how each had given over its life, in a last leap from the water, arcing up to crash down again or sinking silently, he had forgotten. He couldn’t remember the feel of the living flesh under his hand or the beat of the whale’s blood in his ears, though the sound had once echoed the beat of his own heart.

  Bow-Oar sometimes wished he could go back to the time before the golden wives. He wished that, when his men had rowed past the Stark Archipelago on that long-ago day, he had asked the men to tie him to the mast, to blindfold him and stop his ears with wax so that he wouldn’t see the long and golden bodies of the Stark girls. Though he was busy with the training and wanted only to fall into a cot in the barracks at night, he was still drawn to Lydia like sea to sand, still rocked her each night until he sank exhausted into sleep.

  But she had given him such beautiful sons that he couldn’t truly regret having married her. Sons as long and golden as their mother and as strong as their father. Besides the three boys on trial, Lydia and her sisters had given their husbands five more boys in as many years: Lydia bore Parmenas and Philo one after the other, then came Miriam’s twins, Lanman and Layman, within a month of Priscilla’s little Silas.

  Bow-Oar couldn’t keep his heart from leaping at the thought of the next voyage of the Misistuck. Whereas the whaleboat ranks would be determined by the trials, Rathbone ship captains were chosen by vote, and Absalom had already been voted in as next captain of the Misistuck. The ship had made do without a captain since Bow-Oar had come ashore to supervise the training. Absalom, who led his two cousins in the trials that day, would soon turn thirteen. He would be joined the next year by his younger brother, and in the years to come by his youngest brother and cousins, all in training. The crews would be replenished in the coming years and the Rathbones’ primacy restored.

  • •

  The three boys blazed with beauty. The early sun that struck gold on the sea suffused their skin and hair. The light seemed to spill off them into the water. The boys drew back their arms. They held their arms high, angles exact, sinews taut. Gulls gathered and wheeled above, among them a black bird, a crow that dropped and lit on the mast of Absalom’s boat. Though the whales were not yet visible, their voices began to sound over the water.

  • •

  “There’s Jeroboam,” said Miriam.

  Priscilla leaned out farther.

  “No, that’s my Ezekiel. Do you think I don’t know my own son?”

  Lydia squeezed between them and held her hand over her eyes.

  “There’s Absalom, at the front. He still holds his head that same way.”

  The golden wives stood at an open window, watching the trials. Their whaleboned gowns bumped and scraped as they maneuvered for space at the open sash on the seaward side. Their shawls snapped like signal pennants in the stiff breeze. They were still slender and just as lovely when seen from a certain distance. They wore gowns of silvered bronze and dull pewter and mercury, in styles long out of fashion.

  “Are you sure that’s him? A year. It seems even longer since we’ve seen them. Look how tall they’ve grown!” Priscilla leaned out, squinting at the glare of sun on water. It was difficult to focus on such a distant point, her eyes being used to the near at hand: to the point of a needle, to spinet keys, to the dimmer rooms at the rear of the house where the wives passed their days.

  “One year and nine days,” said Miriam.

  Priscilla blinked and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t understand why we can’t see them more often.”

  Lydia smiled and squeezed her sister’s hand. “They’d grow soft. Don’t you listen to your husband?”

  “Just for a few minutes, now and then. On their birthdays …” Priscilla returned to staring out the window.

  If they could have seen the boys more clearly, the sisters could still not have easily told which son was whose. Though the boys had been living at home all this time, they never came upstairs, and the wives were not allowed to visit them. Only when ships departed or returned, or during the spring trials, did the men and boys gather on the dock, only then did they stand still long enough so that the sisters could catch more than brief glimpses: bright heads hurrying down the hill to the docks; hurrying back again when the dinner bell was struck below; rowing far out in the sound with their cousins. The sons in the boats that day, the eldest sons, looked much alike in any case, all born a few months apart, thirteen years ago. Still, the golden wives squinted at the horizon, trying to match their scant memories with what broad gestures were visible from so far.

  The golden wives would no more have thought of descending to the lower floor than they would think to wield a harpoon. Lydia had tried a few times, long ago, in the first months after Absalom had gone down to live with the men, had pleaded with Bemus, but he only shook his head. Bemus still held his post at the top of the stairs, sleeping each night in his hammock strung across the door.

  Lydia still remembered those nights, before Absalom was born, when she woke to the sound of voices outside the door, like the voices she had heard outside the bedroom on her first night in Rathbone House. Bemus had spoken in a low voice, and the men had moved away. Once, when the voices raised in anger, she heard the thud and crash of a body tumbling down the stairs. But no man had tried to climb for many years.

  Occasionally the wives did descend the staircase halfway to the landing. A door on that level led outside to the gardens at the back of the house. They walked outdoors on fine days, though no trees shaded them and no roses scented the air. A few of the older seamen continued to prune and weed the few hardy bushes and the tough little beach roses that persisted; the flowers and fruit trees planted for the golden wives’ arrival had died long ago from too much salt air and water. The house stood on the highest ground of Naiwayonk, but the sea found its way up through the earth like a spring. The empty furrows of the garden’s formal geometry had become a watery maze along which fish swam.

  The wives passed much of their long days with needlework, stitching delicately petit-pointed signal flags and braiding satin lanyards for their husbands. They sewed clothes copied from catalogues from abroad that found their way to Naiwayonk, already years outmoded, from such fabric as made its way there too. Bow-Oar and his brothers wore waistcoats and frock coats and breeches of thin Indian paisley in which t
hey shivered, or thick felted wool from some northern climate that, once wetted by whale’s blood, never dried. The wives walked the golden rooms not in the fresh Regency on display in city salons north and south but in tired Empire silhouettes.

  Lydia stared out at her son, standing strong and sure in the whaleboat. She thought she saw the bright head turn, caught a glimpse of his pale face. She reached her arm out the open window and waved. If her son returned the gesture, she couldn’t see it.

  She no longer felt the great pain in her heart she had suffered when Absalom had first gone to live below. For her two younger sons, who had descended to live with the men at six months old, she felt a similarly diluted love. It may have been the distance at which she always viewed him or the long intervals between sightings. Whatever the cause, she was grateful to feel that day only a thin wash of pain. She looked down at the girl who stood beside her and hugged her.

  “Besides, I have you, dearest, don’t I?”

  After the boys had all descended to their lives below, after the wives had begun to sigh at the empty cribs and quiet rooms, each began to swell one more time. Three more golden Rathbones were born, and this time they were daughters, the first girls to grow up in Rathbone House. Lydia and her sisters, whatever they knew or did not know of the fate of girls in earlier generations, would not have suffered their daughters to be spirited away. Bow-Oar and his brothers did not object. After their sons were taken from them, the wives were less unhappy with their daughters for company, less troublesome to their husbands. The girls, now all in their ninth year, stood by their mothers at the window, looking out at their brothers. Their hair, in infancy the same shade of gold as that of their mothers, had paled to a shade nearer white. Their names were Claudia, Julia, and Sophia.

  Claudia looked up at her mother. Her eyes, Lydia’s soft blue when born, had lately shifted hue and brightened to a vivid aqua.

  “Mama, I want to go with Absalom next time.”