by Janice Clark
I lay on my bed of sand, braiding two strands of sea palm, staring out the window at the dunes. It may have been only the way the clouds were gliding slowly to the west, but it felt as though the island were drifting eastward. Crow dropped down and stalked about on the bed, plunging his beak at intervals in the sand, prodding for clams. I spread my arms and legs on the sand to make a larger me.
“Mordecai.”
“Yes, Mercy.” Mordecai sat cross-legged on the sand above the spot where the chair was buried, his nose in a tattered book. I pulled a clamshell from the sand next to me and with it drew circles on the surface.
“What will you do when we find Papa?”
“I shall sail with him, naturally. I shall take my place by his side.” He looked up at me keenly, patting the ditty bag around his neck, which held his wind and current chart. “I will be his navigator.”
“And what about me?”
“You shall be lookout, of course.” Mordecai smiled at me.
I looked around the sunken room and out the window at the long strand of sand. Maybe Benadam Gale really had been seen here by the old gardener’s brother. Maybe this really was the island of which the gardener spoke, with thick woods and high bluffs, and it had dried up along with all the fish in the sea around it. He could have stopped here to rest in his pursuit of Mordecai and me. It was not impossible that he had lived here, in those years when I’d pictured him far away on the sea, though what few objects remained in the house had clearly not been used for many years. The roofless house would provide poor shelter against rain and wind, and nothing grew on the island. He would have had only fish to eat. If Papa had been living here, I’d been right about one thing: He had, after all, chosen a desert.
The wind sighed through the empty windows, bringing with it a swirl of sand.
“Mercy.”
“Hmm?” I had been half asleep on my bed of sand. I turned my head to find Mordecai still staring into the book he had found.
“I believe we know someone with the initials ‘B.G.’?”
I sat up straight. Mordecai came and sat next to me, handing me the book.
It was a clothbound logbook of a common type, with leather corners and marbled boards of a dull green, with the initials “B.G.” lettered roughly on its cover, the ink blurred by seawater. I opened it eagerly, holding it so that Mordecai and I could read together.
The logs I had seen in Mordecai’s collection began with a title page of some sort: “Journal of a Voyage to California by Charles Stoddard, 1837” or “Remarks on Board the Bark Houqua.” Some included an invocation for a profitable voyage in verse, such as: “Let Neptune keep from us Unkind Gales, Let our Harpoons spear many Fine Whales.” The logbook of B.G. began with no such formality. On the endpaper inside the front cover was a crude painting in watercolor of a sperm swimming in a green-black sea; from its spout spumed a cloud of blood.
The pages of the journal proper looked much like other whalemen’s journals, with brief entries on date, activity, winds, and heading. Wide margins to the outside of each page carried the stamped images of whales, used to mark those days when a chase had been successful. On one such spread we read:
Remarks on board Feb. 26, 1846. These 24 hours begin with light winds from the west. At 4 p.m. saw sperm. Struck, killed, and took him alongside. At 10 p.m. got through cutting and took in sail. Sixe hands employed in boiling thus ends these 24 hours.
I flipped quickly through the book from front to back, scanning the text for some mention of my brother. But there were no names mentioned at all, only details of sailing, and weather, and whales. I handed the book to Mordecai and lay back on the sand. Mordecai bent eagerly over the book. I closed my eyes, listening to the pages of the logbook turning and the soft swish of sand outside in the dunes, while Mordecai read.
“Cousin.” Mordecai’s cool hand touched my shoulder, and I sat up. He looked stricken. His mouth trembled. He took a deep, shaky breath.
“I am not quite sure how to tell you this, but I have been much mistaken about your papa. You must brace yourself.” He moved closer and put a rigid arm around my shoulders, his fingers cold and damp against my neck. “He does not follow the whales, after all. He has not followed them for some time. He is no more to be found now than he ever was.” He took his arm away. “Our expedition is at an end.”
With a grim nod, he handed me the logbook. I didn’t know whether to feel relief or guilt. I could almost have laughed at Mordecai wanting to protect me from what I had so long known, so long avoided telling him.
I began to page through the journal more carefully. Other records that I had seen usually included only a scattering of whales over the course of a voyage, with many blank days. In B.G.’s journal the early pages were thickly populated with whales, jostling so closely that there was little space left to write. Often, only dates accompanied the crowds of whales; the hours of their deaths went unremarked, their boiling uncelebrated. I thumbed through the book quickly, so that the stamped whales flashed past, seeming to live and swarm on the pages: now stamped in blue ink, now in black, lapping one over the other. Some pages were sprinkled with blood or splotched with oil, so that whales from the pages underneath shone through the translucent paper. About three-quarters of the way through, their numbers diminished rapidly and trailed to nothing. I turned back to the beginning: The log entries began in the year 1842. The final entry, scant as all the latter entries, recording only date and wind bearing, was in 1852. Seven years had passed since ink had marked these pages. After the final entry were a few dozen pages barren of any writing.
I looked up. Mordecai was standing in the doorway, staring out. He turned to me, eyes bleak.
I told him, then, what the old gardener had said, about his brother seeing Benadam Gale not a month ago on this island—Arcady Island.
I wondered if all of the questions that followed for me were in his mind, too: why Papa wasn’t still pursuing the whales; why he hadn’t come home, if he was so near, instead of to this dead place. Mordecai turned his head to me, a faint smile on his lips.
“It need not be his,” Mordecai said. “B.G. It could be the log of a Bartleby Greene. A Barnabas Grimwell. Brendan Goforth …” He turned away again.
I hadn’t realized how much I had relied on his dream, the way a drowning sailor relies on a cracked buoy, knowing he will sink but hoping, hoping. Even if I had long since given up on Papa, I never expected Mordecai to.
The wind sighed through the empty windows, bringing with it a swirl of sand. I suddenly felt like I would smother in that great bed, as though the ceiling were about to collapse, the whole house about to sink deeper into the sand. I left Mordecai to his book and went outside.
The morning mist had burned off, and I looked down the strand to see the Able’s dinghy, drawn safely up, well above the tide line. Captain Avery would be worried about the boat by now, and perhaps about us. My eye fell on the buried smack jutting from the sand, a few houses down the strand. It appeared seaworthy enough. I would leave the captain’s dinghy here and find some messenger to let the captain know its whereabouts so that he could retrieve it; maybe Crow would consent to act as carrier pigeon, a note tied to his foot. It was time to give up our false quest. I turned and leaned into the doorway.
“Mordecai, come help me.”
Mordecai seemed at first not to have heard. Shoulders slumped, eyes dull, he looked now like my tutor of old, not the hale and hearty Mordecai of our halcyon days. He followed me out into the thin light.
We retraced our steps to the buried smack and together we hauled it from its berth and let it drop down. I examined the hull carefully; its sandy sleep had cured rather than rotted the sturdy oak planking, and its oars were equally well preserved.
We pushed the smack down to the sea. Crow stationed himself in the point of the prow, a small figurehead of lacquered black, suited in size to our vessel. I took the first stint at the oars, pulling us through the choppy surf as I looked back at the island. It m
ay have been the angle at which I viewed it, but the village of stone seemed even lower in the sand than before, the sand itself lower in the sea.
“Mordecai, is it possible for an island to sink?”
His voice was toneless. “Islands formed by volcanic activity have been observed to recede beneath the surface, leaving behind only their coral reefs. Also, those located along some perilous divide between tectonic plates of the earth’s crust have been known to …” His voice trailed away, and he stared off vaguely.
I looked to the north, to the point of the compass from which Mordecai had expected the whales to come, and in their wake my father. No matter the time, no matter what else he was doing, Mordecai had, until now, never failed to glance in that direction every few minutes since we had been traveling northward on the Able. To the north was only the same unbroken gray sea, and a light mist hung in the air.
A movement on the island caught my eye. Not a movement so much as a presence, for the shape I saw was that of a man, legs apart and firmly planted, arms held stiffly at his sides, motionless, facing my way.
My body knew before I did. A hot wave spread through me and I jumped up, dropping the oars. My spine thrummed and my skin twitched as though he had just reached out and touched me. Papa.
He seemed to stand on the surface of the ocean itself—our boat must have come far enough for the curve of the earth to hide the island, or the island was sinking as we rowed away.
I knew him now. I hadn’t recognized him that night on the walk, but now I did. I knew now that we were alike, both bound to the sea. I felt its pulse as Moses had felt the whale’s.
But that was all that connected us. No days spent together, no stories read or dinners shared—none of the simple stuff of life that would have bound daughter to father. I would never have abandoned my family as he did, never have chosen to hide on this dried-up island in a house of sand. I would have chosen instead a death like Bow-Oar’s, who climbed to the crosstrees of his ship and fell silently into the sea. I would rather have drowned, with the fish swimming through my bones at the bottom of the ocean.
I didn’t wave, and I didn’t call out. I wanted nothing to do with him. I only wanted my brother. But no smaller silhouette stood next to Papa. I told myself that he only lagged behind, that he would come running to join his father in one more moment. But as I stared, hoping, hoping, Papa, still alone, faded from gray to white in the thickening mist and disappeared.
I glanced at Mordecai. He lay slumped in the hull, staring off, away from the island; he had noticed nothing.
I was unsure what heading to take, and the wind was boxing the compass in weak gusts. I let the smack drift into the current, south by southeast, rowing only to stay far enough from the coast to keep clear of shoals and breakers. I looked back again at the nameless island as we rowed away. You might never know a village had ever stood there, it rode so low in the dunes. Soon, I knew, it would sink altogether.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CIRCE
{in which Mordecai succumbs to a siren song}
OUR FISHING SMACK was weatherly, if not swift, built for patient trawling along the coast. Judging by the map I found in Mordecai’s bag, Naiwayonk was perhaps a three-day sail, though the trip would take longer in our little vessel.
“Well. What do you say, Mordecai? Shall we go home?”
Mordecai was hunched in the stern, trawling a hand in the water.
“We could go to Mouse Island. My great-great-aunts will teach me to weave. You could continue your study of the sheep.”
Mordecai ignored me.
I considered and quickly discarded the Starks. Though I thought Roderick would welcome us, I didn’t think we would find a haven in that house. I fished in one of Mordecai’s bags and found the sailor’s cap he had affected earlier in our travels. I wound my braids tightly around my head and pulled the cap down tight.
“Maybe I’ll join the merchant marine or the navy of some foreign power.”
The cap popped off my head and my braids sprang out. I sighed and put the cap away. Mordecai had not looked up at all.
We made slow progress southward. On our starboard side I kept in view a rocky coast topped with pines, the branches of some lightly dusted with snow, under a lowering bank of cloud. The weather here held true to the season, for we were now deep into autumn. We anchored that night in a cove, dining on a few handfuls of crumbled ship’s biscuit from the bottom of Mordecai’s bag. Neither of us slept well in the chill air, huddled under tarps in the little smack.
On our second day of sailing the coast began to change in character, its rocky forms now softened with verdant green. The wind, too, softened and pulled us always leeward, no matter the trim of our little sail. The placid sea on which we rode, a clear and plangent blue, showed no treacherous shoals or sandbars, and I allowed the smack to sail closer to shore.
The air was ever warmer. The water warm, too, when I dipped a hand over the stern. Though the sun shone strong and low in a soft sky, it didn’t account for the unseasonable November temperatures.
Mordecai, who had been dozing in the stern, wrapped in oilcloth, lifted his head slowly above the rim, squinting over his blue spectacles toward the coast. We were sailing past a little cove of white sand. I leaned over the side and reached to the shallow bottom, taking up a handful of sand and letting it run through my fingers. It was made up of finely crushed shells of every kind I had seen and some I had not. The fragments were all rounded, as though they had turned in this same gentle surf for many years. Above the pale crescent of beach, against a backdrop of slim white birches, rose a terrain of rocky crags pierced by caves, softened by lichens and mosses. From their dusky recesses came the sound of trickling water, not a rhythmic sea-like sound but the sound of fresh water, in intermittent tinklings and drips.
As we sailed past, a loud whooshing sound startled us both. From the dark caves came pale flashes, flutterings of white—wings rising, then as suddenly sinking down again, out of view. Crow left his post as figurehead to fly toward the flashes of white and was soon lost to view in the dark landscape.
Mordecai half stood, shielding his eyes, looking eagerly toward the rocks. In a moment he had scrambled over the side and was hurrying across the cove and into the gloom.
I dropped anchor and followed. My boots crunched on the strand of shell, then stepped soundlessly on the thick moss that coated the rocks that rose all around, obscuring the sky. As I clambered up, a cavern, thirty or forty feet across, opened before me, its roof lost in darkness, its rear wall receding in a deep curve. Light, from some opening farther in, filtered through moist air. Rivulets of water trickled down the cavern walls, echoing. I stood waiting for my eyes to become accustomed to the low light. The whooshing sound started again, and I could now see large white birds, dozens of them, rise perhaps a foot in the air then drop to the moss that covered the floor of the cavern. The floor was covered with birds. Where they didn’t stand or mill the rock was white with their droppings. Among the white was one black form. Crow strutted among the flock, all taller than him, turning his head to nip now left, now right; the birds twitched at his nips and moved aside but didn’t startle or scatter.
Mordecai stood among the birds, an ecstatic look on his face. He leaned and lifted one. The bird suffered him to hold it in his arms and gently stroke its feathers. Though I had not seen such a specimen before in the flesh, I knew it well from Mordecai’s map: the black-necked stilt. Here, then, were the birds that should now have been, according to his calculations, winging northward to Greenland with the whales, closely followed by Papa. But these birds had winged nowhere; their wings were scarcely larger than their heads. No wonder they couldn’t rise beyond the lowest branches of the birches. They had, besides, a complacent air, more of the domestic chicken than a wild, man-wary creature; a dull eye; an unassuming beak. I recalled the stilt’s plumage in the tinted engraving as a rich black and white, its legs as quite long and bright red in color. This bird trailed legs o
f only moderate length, a faded pink in hue. Its plumage didn’t have the stark division between dark and light of its depiction on the map but rather a mottled appearance, a gray and white like the lichens clinging to the rocks among which the stilt’s companions huddled, emitting low and infrequent kip-kip-kips.
Mordecai gravely stroked the bird, which lolled in his arms, gazing vacantly into his face.
“At least I have found my stilts.” He smiled dimly. “Though not where I expected. It seems I have been wrong about everything.”
Something moved in the dark recess behind him, something larger than the birds: a slender shadow, a curve of long pale hair. I wouldn’t have noticed if the figure hadn’t moved slightly, it was so similar to the pale-barked trunks of the birches that sprang here and there from the mossy floor of the cave.
A voice from the dark recess; the figure moved again. This time Mordecai saw and started. A high, soft voice, a woman’s.
“Kip-kip-kip.”
I would have thought the birds had made the sound if I had not seen her mouth move. The stilts all began to shuffle excitedly toward the woman.
“Kip-kip-kip. Kip.”
We moved closer to the figure in the cave. She was, in the dim light, attractive, with a slender figure and a pale smooth complexion that didn’t suggest any nameable age. She looked so like Mordecai that I caught my breath. Her whiteness, though, was of a different variety, not dried but moist in a fungal way. Her pale hair was long and sleek. She was clothed in a soft garment of a mushroom hue.
“Kip-kip-kip.”
I cleared my throat and dropped a curtsey.
