The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  She let go of his hand and turned to stare out the porthole.

  “I don’t understand why you have to go.”

  “Yes, you do. You know you do.”

  He flipped through the little book again.

  “I’ve read all the books, all ten of them. I know all the stories; I’m sick to death of them. There’s no one to talk to, nothing to learn, nothing new to see or hear or know. Nothing but this house and the sea. I’d do anything just to get away from the sound of the sea.”

  He reached for her hand.

  “You could come with me.”

  She turned around with a half smile, then turned her back again.

  “We’ll start in London. Then cross the channel to Paris and head south to Venice, then Florence and Rome. And finally Athens. We’ll stand together on the Acropolis, surrounded by the temples of the gods.” He flipped through his book, tilting it toward Verity so that she could see its small engravings. “We’ll see the Erechtheum. Its roof is held up by giant maidens of white marble, so straight and strong.” Erastus’s eyes shone. “Everything in Greece is like that. Clean and straight and pure.”

  “You know I couldn’t leave the ocean.”

  “This isn’t the only ocean, you know. The Aegean isn’t green like here, it’s blue. It’s bluer than the bluest sky you can imagine … I have to go now, while I still can.”

  Verity, still turned away, began to braid her damp hair.

  “I wish Moses still sailed. I wish …” Verity reached up and pulled down the old harpoon, and turned it in her hands. “You have to stay.”

  “All right, I will.” Erastus took the harpoon from her and ran a cautious finger along its dulled edge. “I’ll become a new lord of the seas. I’ll kill two sperm with every cast to Moses’s one. The whale will dance around me in a great circle before he dies.”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “You won’t be alone.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “This isn’t right. I have to go.”

  The harpoon fell from Verity’s hand. She threw back her head and howled. She twisted around and wrapped her arms and legs around Erastus. He buried his face in her hair.

  After a while Verity let go. They lay side by side, looking up at the light rippling across the ceiling. She reached over the side of the bed and picked up the harpoon, and lay the shaft lightly across their bodies. She moved closer to Erastus and ran a shaking finger over his pale arm, along the thin blue veins.

  “The sea is in you too, you know. You say you hate it, but that’s like saying you hate me.”

  Erastus began to sit up. Verity grasped the harpoon tighter and held it down across her chest and his.

  “Tell me again. What Erastus means.”

  “It means ‘beloved.’ ”

  “And Verity?”

  “Veritas. Truth.”

  “Stay. Stay.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE SEVEN SUITORS

  {in which Erastus’s plan goes awry}

  1841

  ON A SPRING morning soon after Erastus Rathbone returned from the Continent, seven crews of carpenters congregated on the lawn of Rathbone House. They shuffled their boots uncomfortably on the broad expanse of smooth green, checking the edges on their tools and glancing up at the windows of the big house on the hill, waiting for instructions. They had come from as far as Baltimore and Providence, having seen the oversize notices with gilt edges that Erastus’s agents had posted in guild halls and taverns all along the coast, promising fat purses to crews willing to leave within the week, seasoned crews who had built the solid merchants’ houses that lined those cities’ harbors. A few men had abandoned half-built houses, unable to resist the money, substituting second-rate crews or leaving angry merchants high and dry.

  The town of Naiwayonk had no carpenters of its own; there was little business for them. The few fishermen who still lived there had built their own ramshackle houses of rough pine and tar paper, and what little furniture they owned they had knocked together themselves. Though the carpenters were told by the fishermen that other large houses had once stood on the hills above the harbor, only Rathbone House remained, on the highest hill, its original builders long dead. The carpenters wondered what sort of craftsmen those men had been, looking at the low, dark wood lodge that formed the first floor, and at the second story of red brick, not wholly unlike those their fathers had built but oddly unfinished—windows without pediments, gables without dormers—a house seen through fog.

  The men stirred as two figures made their way down the lawn. They were at first confused; they had been told they would meet with the master of the house, a young man of twenty-two, but the figures approaching both appeared to be aged. Erastus walked with a rolling gait unrelated to the rise and fall of ships at sea, his back bent, leaning heavily on two canes. He was accompanied by an old sailor in faded middy and ducks, holding a parasol to shade Erastus from the sun. Though bent, Erastus was still taller by a head than his companion. He wore an embroidered waistcoat over pleated mole trousers, and slender polished shoes. His white hair was trained with pomade into a wave that sprang from his forehead.

  With a brisk smile and a general nod to the men, Erastus unfurled and laid on the lawn a large set of plans. A crow dropped down from a tree onto the plans and stalked across them, claws clicking on the paper, until waved away by the sweep of a long arm. The carpenters squatted around the blue-inked drawings, murmuring and scratching their chins. A few stood and squinted against the sun or looked down toward the dock, where neat stacks of seasoned lumber stood ready.

  The next morning, on the empty pier where Rathbone House once stood on its pilings above the sea, seven cottages began to rise. The structures grew at impressive speed; the first crew to finish would earn a handsome bonus. Enough whaling gold remained from the glory days of the Rathbones to build seven mansions, little having been spent since Lydia’s time and so few Rathbones left to spend it: the surviving sons of the worn wives, Bemus, old Fourth-Oar, and Steersman; Erastus and Verity; Conch and Crab (later known as Larboard and Starboard)—the white children, grandchildren of the golden wives.

  Sturdy oak framing was cut, set, and joined in a few days, drawing the outlines of the cottages against the sky. Clapboarding of white pine was lapped and hung; plaster of crushed oysters and sand was mixed and troweled on. The carpenters eyed their competitors’ progress as they worked, and wielded hammer and saw faster, calling out jokes about whose timbers were stiffest, whose hammers harder. In two weeks’ time the buildings were complete.

  Each cottage stood square to the sun, precisely three fathoms apart. Each had the appearance of a small Greek temple of the Doric style, its peaked roof supported by fluted columns. Each wore the name of a sea god inscribed in large capital letters above its portico. Proteus and Triton stood closest to the house; Poseidon and Oceanus trailed toward the open sea. Though built of clapboard rather than stone, their walls were painted with coat after coat of bone-white brightened with mica to mimic marble from a certain distance. When the sun struck them full on the front at eight bells in the first watch, the most squint-eyed old sailor would have been blinded. Tucked just above the cornice on the back side, one small window broke the smooth perfection of each pediment.

  The cottages were a few feet narrower than the dock, their fronts flush with the edge that faced the open sea; along their backs was space enough for a narrow pathway. Their doorways were accessible only from the sea side. At high tide the water lapped the second step of the stairway that dropped from each door into the water; at low tide each stair ended in empty air. If a whaler out in the sound had sent a wherry to collect its crew, each man would have had only to step off, still yawning, losing no time in making the tide.

  Erastus inspected the buildings, declared his satisfaction, and saw the men off as they headed home. Some had come by sea in dories and skiffs, others by land in horse and wagon. Some of the carpenters returned soon enough to mak
e up for lost time or to salvage jobs gone awry in their absence, so that their employers never knew they had been gone. A few stopped in towns on their way home to buy shawls for their wives and sweets for their children. The Boston crew, having finished first and spent its bonus on rum and whores in Stonington, capsized halfway home in heavy seas off Newport, the bonus of gold gone with them.

  The morning after the carpenters departed, Erastus stepped into his sleek new schooner, the Argo, a two-masted vessel of thirty feet. Built in Mystic to his specifications while he was abroad, the slender fore- and aft-rigged vessel sliced through the waves at twice the speed of the larger Rathbone ships. It was crewed by half a dozen hired men in crisp white middies and billowing trousers. The Argo sailed east, skimming along close to the coast.

  That evening, the fishing fleet of a hamlet some leagues east of Naiwayonk coasted into harbor at dusk. As they approached the dock, the fishermen saw a strange cutter moored at the end. Its snowy sails were neatly lashed, its crew standing at the ready, hands clasped behind their backs. The fishermen stared at the tall, pale young man swaying slowly along the dock in a frock coat, leaning on two ivory canes. They felt his keen eyes on them, watching as they hauled in the last load from their nets and poured streams of gleaming fish into baskets and crates to carry ashore, where their wives waited to clean the catch and ready it for market. When the men had stowed their gear and made ready to go home, Erastus beckoned to them, smiling and gesturing with one of his canes. The men looked at one another, laughing uncomfortably. They dipped their fishy hands in the water and wiped them on their slickers, then climbed up on the dock and shook Erastus’s dry white hand. Erastus looked each man attentively up and down as he made pleasant conversation about the weather and the day’s haul. He drew one man, taller and burlier than the others, aside and stayed talking to him on the dock after his fellows had gone home. The next morning, that man failed to appear on the dock and was seen instead, by an early fisherman, seated in Rathbone’s slim, swift cutter as it sailed away.

  In the days that followed, the cutter was noted by locals at ports farther east and far to the north, all along the curve of the great cape, its benches filling with men. Duffels stowed neatly beneath their seats, the men shifted restlessly as the cutter glided along, legs bouncing up and down, hands twitching for something to do, unaccustomed to being passengers.

  A week after the Naiwayonk cottages were completed, smoke spiraled above seven chimneys. Seven fishermen stood in their doorways at first light, staring out to sea. From where Erastus surveyed them, installed in a chair on the curve of the lawn, under his parasol, the men were as like to one another as the cottages. Most were local men, others itinerant whalemen he had found lingering in coastal towns between trips. All were brine-tough and sun-dark, large and strongly made.

  Erastus stood on the lawn, watching, as the men rubbed their eyes and stretched and stood awkwardly at their doors, gazing out over a morning sea. The sky was a pure, clear blue, the air chill and bracing.

  He turned his gaze from the seven cottages to the west harbor, where the remains of the Rathbone fleet were moored. The Paquatauoq, first of the ships to be abandoned when the whales began to disappear, had sunk years ago in a cove, its rotted hull coming to rest on the sandy bottom. At high tide only the stump of its mainmast was visible, tilting above the water; at low tide its drowned deck rose just above the waves, only to drown again at turn of tide. The Sassacus huddled nearby, masts struck, decks drifted in weed and sand. Only the Misistuck still sailed, manned by no Rathbones, only hired men, and bringing in just a trickle of oil the last time it docked three years ago. Erastus envisioned the ships clearly, raised from their disgraceful state and restored to their first glory, fresh spars and yards soaring, sails of blinding white billowing, breasting the sea once again.

  Surveying the seven men standing in the doorways of their cottages, his eye dwelt longest on the young man in the farthest cottage, who outshone all the others.

  Erastus had found the young man yesterday, on his way back to Naiwayonk. He had signed on two men, bringing the total to six, though he had hoped to reach his goal of seven that day. Anxious to put his plan into action, he would select only men who were clearly superior in form and skill, and had left behind several who didn’t meet his mark; he would, he thought regretfully, have to continue his search.

  But Erastus had found his seventh man after all. Late in the day, as the Argo headed back to Naiwayonk, a sudden squall had whipped the smooth sea into tall waves and sent the cutter off course. As she tacked back against the wind, an island came into view, one that appeared on no Rathbone chart, a long, verdant isle above which hovered a single lush cloud of the same shape. The island, perhaps a mile long and a quarter as wide, at first appeared uninhabited. No dwellings showed, no smoke rose through the branches of the trees that lined its shore. Silvery stands of birch shone through thick trunks of oak and elm that spread their leafy crowns high above the island. Among the trunks Erastus saw a herd of white-tailed deer wandering. In the branches of one oak a sleeping bear lolled. The forest grew, seemingly unbroken, from a high base of granite that fell away sharply to the sea. Erastus at first thought that the rocks, a pale, rosy tone, were tinged by the warm rays of the sun that rode low in the sky, but as the sun continued to drop and the light cooled to blue, the rocks didn’t lose their pink cast.

  As the cutter sailed past, a spit of bare rock came into view at the southern tip of the island, and on it stood a young man. Erastus had no need, as with the other men he had gathered, to assess the boy’s skills at a remove; he witnessed his prowess firsthand. Although Erastus couldn’t tell his true height without something to compare it to, and the bare spit of granite thrust well beyond the trees, he could easily see the boy’s mass and girth. Within that generous chest might have beat the hearts of two men.

  The boy, who looked no more than seventeen, stood on the spit, above surf that broke high on the rocks, sharp against the darkening sky. In his raised hand he held not a harpoon of steel but a wooden spear, a tapered shaft as long as three men. The spear flashed out quicker than Erastus’s eye could follow. There was a flailing far out in the water and white spumes of sea, then the boy dove in. A swordfish leapt up in a long curve, its great dorsal fin split by the spear; on its back was the boy, clutching the fin, the sleek silver-blue body between his thighs. The swordfish thrashed from side to side and spun in circles, trying to shake him off, but he held firm as the fish dove and surged up and plunged again, the arc of its body lower each time. Finally, its energy spent, the swordfish turned on its side, scales heaving, its tail giving now and then a weak thrash. The boy grasped the swordfish by its blade and, swimming one-armed, towed it behind him. He reached the rocks and clambered up the sheer face with his burden. Erastus watched him climb to the top and drop the great fish. Now that it was free of the water, he saw its true size; it must have weighed more than the boy. Its scales gleamed silvery in the cooling light. The boy stood looking down at the swordfish, breathing hard, then knelt on the rock, head bent. He pulled a knife from his belt and sliced swiftly across the fish. Standing straight, he held the bony sword high. He drew it across his own chest. In the faint light Erastus could see dark blood welling along the slash, and the scars of older wounds.

  The Argo drew near the tip of the island, now a long black shape against the darkening sky. A fire leapt and crackled, and the smell of roasting fish drifted over. Erastus had in his travels abroad dined on many a subtle dish and delicate sauce; now his mouth watered at the strong, oily odor.

  He called out to the boy, his voice carrying easily over the water.

  “Ahoy! Ahoy there!”

  The boy looked up from the fire, his face bright with the flames. He grinned and waved.

  “Come join me! Plenty for all!” he boomed, pointing the crew to a safe cove in which to anchor.

  When they reached the fire, the boy stood up, wiping his hands on his legs. Erastus was startled afresh
by his size. Two Erastuses tied together might not have matched the width of his torso.

  The boy reached for his hand and pumped it up and down, still grinning.

  “Benadam Gale.”

  He wore duck trousers tied at the waist with a piece of rope. His feet and chest were bare. In the firelight, Erastus could clearly see the healed welts of other swordfish slashes on his chest and arms, parallel cuts like the gill slits of a fish. His body shone with sweat. His long hair was a tangle, sun-bleached. He brimmed with the life that had leaked from the Rathbones.

  Benadam welcomed all the men, asking them to sit. He cut slabs from the steaming swordfish and handed them around, using elm leaves for plates. After the crew had eaten their fill, Erastus sent them back to the cutter to ready her for sailing on to Naiwayonk. He sat by the fire with Benadam, talking. The boy told him about the village, deep in the trees, where his family and a dozen others lived, all of them fisherfolk. Erastus could see the lights of the houses winking through the trees.

  “I’ve never seen a fight like that.”

  Benadam shrugged. “Always done it that way.” He spoke lightly, but Erastus heard the pride in his voice.

  “Why don’t you just spear them, from farther away?”

  “That wouldn’t be very fair to the fish, would it? He can’t throw his sword at me.” Benadam was smiling, but Erastus could see that he was serious.

  “Of course it would be different with something really big, like a whale.”

  Benadam, stirring the fire, looked up sharply at him.

  “Have you seen them?”

  Erastus shook his head.

  “I used to see them, when I was a boy. The big sperm whales. Twice a year they would pass, north in spring, south in the fall, ten or twenty at a time. Never near enough so I could get to them in time.” He was staring out at the dark water. “I’d try, though. Once my uncle’s little brig was docked when I saw a whale, and we set out, but the wind was blowing wrong that day. Sometimes I tried rowing after the whales in a dory, my friends and me taking turns at the oars and rowing for our lives, but we never came close, the whales were always long gone before we were halfway across the bay.”