The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  Lydia smiled, and hugged her daughter close.

  “Why would you want that, dearest?”

  “I want to talk to the whales.”

  The wives all laughed.

  “And what would you say to them?” asked Priscilla.

  “I would ask if I could swim with them.”

  Priscilla and Miriam smiled at their niece and looked at each other, laughing.

  “Claudia, you don’t want to swim with any smelly old whales.”

  “Papa says I shall marry a fisherman.”

  Lydia smoothed her daughter’s pale hair.

  “No, my darling, you shall marry a prince.”

  • •

  The sun rose higher, light spreading across the water and striking the dock. The fathers raised hands to brows; the golden wives squinted through their fingers. At the edge of the sea a line of spouts rose and shimmered. The boys crouched lower. They raised their arms as one. The harpoons flashed out together and in a single swift arc the blades struck home.

  Three whales, their smooth glide checked, churned the water with their heads, thrashing the sea with their flukes. The whales soared straight up and dove down again, disappearing under the surface.

  The men on the dock roared. The women at the window clapped their hands. Bow-Oar and his brothers didn’t move at all, or take their eyes from the place in the sea where the whales had sounded.

  Such a seemingly small thing: the distance from minor valve to major artery, barely the span of a man’s hand in a body of forty feet from end to end. The difference between a slow trickle of blood and a deluge; a huge heart that pumped on, only nicked, and one that burst and emptied into the sea. The women didn’t know, nor did the younger Rathbone men, the significance of that small difference.

  Bow-Oar, watching his son, tried to find excuses for that hand’s span of error: a freak of wind; a slippery hull. But deep within he knew, if the blades had struck where they should have, just above the root of the left fin, that the whales would have breached in a fount of spray and blood and died within moments. Instead they rose smoothly to the surface, their backs bristling with shafts, their pace unchecked, lines loose and trailing, and surged away.

  • •

  Katurah finished spooning the thin porridge into Moses’s mouth and set the bowl aside. She knelt on the end of the bed and stripped down the sheets and blankets, then turned Moses over to change his soiled bedclothes. He was by then light as hollowed bone. She remade the bed with fresh sheets, tucking them neatly under Moses’s chin, and sat next to him. She smoothed the blankets over his shrunken body, and sat looking down at him.

  It had been five years since she’d come to Rathbone House. She had stayed longer than any of the other barren wives. Those who had not become pregnant within a year of their arrival had been replaced. But Katurah, though she had borne no children, had been allowed to stay on to keep the old man company and, in the last few years, to take care of him as he grew frail. Caring for Moses, she thought, as she wiped a drool of porridge from his chin with a corner of her apron, was little different from tending to an infant. She was glad that she had borne no sons of her own. She had seen enough men die at sea.

  Katurah had grown up in a fishing village to the south. Her brothers and father were lost at sea in a storm when she was a young girl. Five years ago, she had, like Hepzibah, like Euphemia and Beulah and all the sixteen wives before her, seen a whaleboat one morning—the same long slim hull, oars flashing in unison against a bright sky. She had, like her predecessors, reached for a boy’s hand and stepped in and glided away. But unlike so many previous wives, she felt no irresistible urge. She was compelled not by fresh boys in blue middies, bright ties flying, but by necessity. There were few men left in her little town. The plentiful cod and haddock in the sound that had sustained them for generations had thinned in recent years. Some men had joined the merchant marine to feed their families, while others moved inland to work in the new factories there. She and her widowed mother lived off their kitchen garden and shellfish gleaned from the shore. When Katurah saw the Rathbones rowing toward her, she knew who they were. Even the smallest, most isolated villages knew by then about the Rathbone wives. She had already decided to go with them. When she stepped into the boat, she was not, like the wives before, in thrall to bright springing hair, to hypnotic strokes or rippling brown backs. The Rathbone boys’ hair was now more greasy than gleaming, their strokes less than perfectly matched, their broad backs narrower. They had by then lost that unity with the sea that shone in earlier Rathbones, and no bright haze obscured them from Katurah.

  She looked down at the frail old man and thought how much harder her life could have been. Other than watching over Moses, she had only to lay with a few of the men in the barracks now and then, which was easy enough.

  There were no babies in the nursery to care for. The youngest had already been taken to live in the barracks with the men before she arrived. So had the sons of the women who lived upstairs. Now and then, on her way to Moses’s room down the long passage, she looked out a window and caught a glimpse of one of the women, staring out an upstairs window.

  They were pretty, of course, the women upstairs, and Bow-Oar and his brothers must take pleasure in bedding them, but they were of little other use that she could see. They would do better to walk along the shore, she thought, and take the sea air, such pale, jittery things they were, cooped up in the house all day. They must have come from some inland place, where people didn’t understand the sea. And their boys. She had seen them in the barracks and watched them training out in the sound. There was something not right about them, though they were as pretty as their mothers.

  Moses was restless next to her. He had begun to moan and click, and turn his head from side to side.

  From its peg on the wall Katurah took down the necklace that had so long hung there, a whale tooth strung on a length of braided hair. Lifting Moses’s head, she put it around his neck. His breath slowed and steadied. She searched among the sheets for the length of knotted rope that was always close by and lay it in Moses’s hands. His fingers found the knots and stopped twitching. He turned his head away from the window.

  “All gone,” he whispered.

  Katurah looked out. Three whaleboats bobbed in the sound. In each boat a tall golden son stood, staring out to sea.

  “They’re still there, safe and sound,” she said.

  Moses shook his head.

  “The whales, the men. All gone.”

  He closed his eyes. The right whales had rejoined their pod and moved off. Nothing larger than a school of tuna stirred in the sound. The herds of sperm were all distant now, the water far less alive. The trying fires on the ships had not been lit for many years. The whale’s heart was tossed into the sea for the sharks.

  Moses knew that Absalom, Ezekiel, and Jeroboam wouldn’t succeed that day. He knew that the blood of the golden wives had thinned the Rathbone veins, had stiffened their sea legs and bled their dark strength to white. He knew that in their next session the boys’ aim wouldn’t improve, that instead their harpoons would fall shyer of the mark each time. The harder the boys tried—for they would never lack the will or the courage—the more their strength would wane. Their fathers would drive them on from pride, but after three such seasons, would finally tell their sons to give up the sea. The boys would nod their heads, not meeting their fathers’ eyes. They would secretly vow among themselves never to stop. In the summer of their fifteenth year Absalom, Ezekiel, and Jeroboam—and their five younger brothers, who wouldn’t be left behind—would take out a boat forbidden to them one morning. They would swear they saw a sperm, just out of reach over the horizon. They would row away one last time, harpoons in hand, never to return. Whether they would sink in one final struggle with the whale or meet some less glorious end, Moses couldn’t see. But he knew that their fathers would never recover. They would return to sea and become reckless, or forgetful, and find quick mariners’ fates of their
own. Second-Oar would become entangled in a line during a chase and be dragged under. Third-Oar would slip on a slick deck and split his head on the fluke of an anchor. Bow-Oar would climb to the crosstrees to which he had climbed a thousand times before with no misstep and fall silently into the sea.

  Moses turned his head back to the boats. His bones ached. They always ached now, but today a deeper pain pulsed along his arm and down his spine. There was a whale out there, after all. A sperm, far out in the sound, moving smoothly toward him through the dim water. His arm reached up for the harpoon that still lay in its rack above him, then fell back.

  He knew this whale, he realized. He had known it in the time before he came to Naiwayonk, when he was a boy. He had never thought of the whale again, until now. It was not the spring whale on which the village lived all year. He had come upon it by himself one day in the autumn before that last whale, when he was swimming far out where he liked to swim, on the wide circle of the sea with no land in sight.

  He had been stroking steadily along and was out of breath. He had stopped to rest. The water was still warm from the summer, and the sea had that golden cast it always had before the chill air of autumn cooled it to blue. He floated easily on his back with eyes closed, rocking on the smooth surface, weightless. He wasn’t aware of the moment when the whale rose under him; it was just there, under his back, his own body suddenly heavy. He rose and fell with the whale’s long, slow breaths, his hands resting on the smooth gray skin. The whale drifted, half asleep, and Moses drifted with it, for how long he didn’t know. Once, the whale blew, showering Moses with warm drops. When he finally opened his eyes the water was cold around him. He was shivering, and the whale was gone. He swam home and never told his father, or anyone in the village, about the whale.

  Now it was coming, swimming toward him across the sound. Soon, he knew, he would feel again that same sun on his face, that warm blood streaming along the whale’s body under him, beating in its great heart. He felt his own heart swell, throbbing against the walls of his chest until, enormous, it burst.

  Katurah crawled across the high blue bed. She pressed Moses’s eyes closed. She lay his body straight, arms close along his sides, and stroked the blankets smooth around him, tucking them tight and seamanlike. She reached up and grasped his harpoon by the blade. Lifting his head away from the pillow, she turned it to the side and neatly sliced away his pigtail. She coiled the long white braid, tucked it in her pocket, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Katurah passed no one as she walked back down the hall of beds—the house was still empty of men. She looked around the room, the same room in which Hepzibah had first stood more than thirty years ago, the room in which all the worn wives had lived. In the back, the line of infants’ hammocks swayed empty in a breeze from an open window. She lifted the patchwork quilt that covered the bed, the quilt to which each Rathbone wife had added her name, seventeen in all. She ran her hand over her own name, chain-stitched in white thread—Katurah, 1809—on a square of faded calico. She folded the quilt carefully and tucked it under one arm.

  Katurah opened the front door and stood looking out. No one noticed. All eyes were still pinned to the horizon, over the edge of which most of the men expected to see the boats with whales in tow, and where now instead the boats were creeping back, harpoons unblubbered, spermless.

  She walked across the lawn and climbed down the boulders to the little beach where a few small craft always rested. She chose a skiff, ran it down the sand, and pushed off.

  As she rowed out, heading southeast, away from Rathbone House, she looked west along the long crescent of beach to the point. Past the headland, tucked in a deep cove, a hull, dismasted and lifeless, rocked in slack water. Katurah could just make out the name in faded paint on it side: Paquatauoq. Past the ships stood the dark sheds, with their tryworks, the cauldrons unused since Bow-Oar burned the three whales many years ago. The smell of cold old blubber wafted across on a breath of air. She looked back at the docks, emptied now of men, except for the three figures who still stood there, watching three boats head slowly home.

  She rowed on. She passed no fresh wife, as there were no more to come. No outsider would enter Rathbone House for many years nor would any woman journey from there.

  Katurah had, when she set out, meant to head for home, for her village. But as she rowed she thought about what it would be like to return there, what welcome she might receive, after these five years, after her life in Rathbone House. She stopped rowing and stood up. She pulled Moses’s pigtail from her pocket, unmade its braid, and strewed the long white strands on the water. When she was halfway out on the sound, she changed course and headed for Mouse Island.

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HALCYON DAYS

  {in which Mercy and Mordecai sail through golden waters}

  AN ADOLESCENT HUMPBACK!”

  Mordecai leaned out over the waves, pointing to a plume of white on the horizon. He was in no true danger. The mate had, with his permission, lashed Mordecai’s lower half to the topmast with several turns of a stout backstay around his waist so that he could enjoy his perch in safety, as he had done every day since we had left the Stark Archipelago. He still wore my aunts’ salve against the sun on his face and hands, and his blue spectacles.

  I had noticed a few minutes earlier that Mordecai’s humpback was only an oversize sturgeon, its plume of spray just a wave dashing against a distant reef, but kept it to myself. He seemed so happy. The wound on his arm had finally healed, and the dark bruises had faded. Late each afternoon, as the sun began to drop in the west, Mordecai ascended, the mate climbing the rigging behind him, guiding his feet and pushing him through the lubber’s hole at the top. The sky had been full of birds, gliding and wheeling, ever since we set sail, and the sea full of fish. While Mordecai watched his birds, I sat below with the captain and he told me all he knew of the Rathbones and the Starks.

  I glanced up to make sure Mordecai hadn’t noticed what I was doing. I had borrowed his journal and was adding more portraits to the chart as the captain talked. Mordecai was still protective of his long-cherished journal, though its secrets had been revealed. Each afternoon, when Captain Avery returned to his sailing duties, I had read Lydia’s letters. Between her notes and what the captain told me, the story of my family began to come clear.

  On the chart, under Moses and his many wives, I drew Bow-Oar, Second-Oar, and Third-Oar. I dressed them not in the fine clothes they had tried to adopt but in their comfortable sailors’ shirts and caps. Next to each man I drew his wife: Lydia, Priscilla, and Miriam in their golden gowns. By Priscilla I drew the ivory box that Second-Oar had given her, its lid open to show the lump of ambergris within. Under the wives, I drew their eight sons, all crowded into the boat on which they finally sailed away; and next to the sons I lightly sketched the faces of the daughters, little Claudia, Julia, and Sophia.

  Now the captain sat mending a sail, pulling a long curved needle through the canvas.

  “I never really knew the men, mind you. Except for Bemus, a little. Just what I’ve heard over the years, picked up in Stonington and Mystic … and selling to the Starks, of course. The Rathbones didn’t like outsiders, even a pleasant fellow like me.” He smiled at me, rubbing his whiskery chin.

  Mordecai’s excited voice came from above.

  “Oh! No. No. Just a storm petrel …”

  I thought it couldn’t hurt to let him believe for a while longer that Papa still followed the sperm. Papa was, I now knew, much closer than Mordecai thought him to be, or had been only a few weeks earlier, when we fled Rathbone House. I couldn’t help but wonder about the island the old gardener had described. It had sounded so much like the Arcady of Mama’s stories; maybe it really did exist, though without its giants and their beds of gull down.

  The wind veered two points to the north, and a cool current wound through the warm air. We had been sailing f
or five days on our passage northward, running at a smooth, unhurried pace. We were headed for the Davis Strait, off Greenland, some seven hundred miles north-nor’east. Or at least that’s what Mordecai believed. In fact, I had taken Captain Avery aside, before Mordecai could make his request to carry us all the way to Greenland, with a request of my own: to not tell Mordecai our true route. The captain had given me a sharp look, then chuckled and said, “Well, miss, I’m sure you have your reasons,” and nodded his agreement. We were in fact sailing northward, but only as far as New Bedford, where the Able would turn south again on its customary route, stopping to trade at every little port with sufficient draft to anchor. Mordecai was dimly perplexed that the captain would agree to take us so far but spent little time puzzling over it, staying busy with his observations and notes. Before we reached New Bedford, when the moment was right, I would gently tell him the truth about my parents. I had put it off again and again, trying to understand why Papa and Mama had hidden him away in the attic for all those years.

  As I finished sketching little Claudia under her mother, my eye went to the faint gray smudge next to me on the chart, where I had erased my brother. I now tried to draw that bright face I had seen so clearly when the gardener told me about Papa and his boy. When I had finished, I held the page away from me and squinted at the drawing; he looked much like me.

  “If you ask me, they should never have married those girls … no offense to you, of course, miss.” The captain tipped his hat. “Greedy, they were. That’s when things started to go bad for the Rathbones. And for the Starks. They sold all that beauty away and have been trying to buy it back ever since. Cursed, is what I’d call it.”

  “Nonsense.” Mordecai’s voice floated down from above, startling me. I hadn’t realized he was listening. He waved an open book at me. “I’ve been reading more of this Austrian fellow, Mendel, and his pea plants. The Starks look the way they do because of inborn characteristics that emerged, not the workings of fate.” He sniffed and turned back to his book.