by Janice Clark
I sat up and ran my hands over Mama’s collar, lying across my lap, smoothing the linen to lie flat along my thighs and across my calves. It had fit tight about her throat, like a baby’s bib, then flared far beyond her shoulders, curved in a wide white crescent, narrowing to fine strands of rope that hung down her back, the ends weighted with ivory. I tied the ropes to my bedposts, the collar stretching between them to form a small hammock, a cabin boy’s size, at the foot of my bed. I hung it as high as I could so that he would be able to see the harbor, and pressed my hand down in its center, to see what weight it would bear: Enough, I thought. I kneeled and gathered the bones. I stacked them in my arms, kindling for a cold fire, and lay them in the hammock, side by side, skull facing the sea.
Crow climbed into the hammock and it swung gently to and fro, as though under sail on a soft sea. I sat on the end of my bed, one hand to the hammock to rock it, and began to sing a lullaby. When the bones were set in motion they started to tell their story.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE BONES TELL THEIR STORY
{in which Gideon sails three times}
FIRST VOYAGE March 15, 1849–August 7, 1849
The first time we were gone for nearly half a year. Mama didn’t want me to go but Papa took me anyway. I was four. I remember you watching us leave from the dock, and Mama looking after us from way up high. I remember you getting smaller, and the dock, and the town just prickles of light, and then there was only the dark sea.
I didn’t sleep at all the first night. Papa strung a hammock for me next to his, in his cabin. I liked how it swayed, the creaking sound the ropes made, and Papa’s deep breaths. I crawled out of the hammock and climbed up onto the long seat under the windows that stretched across the stern. The wake behind the ship was like a big white fan under the starlight. The ship lifted and tilted under me. I clutched the harpoon Papa had carved for me. In every wave I saw the shape of a fin or the curve of a fluke.
I woke the next morning to bright sun and salt spray on my face, the crew hurrying and shouting around me. Papa had hoisted me on his back, wrapping my arms tight about his neck, so thick my hands could only just clasp together. He kept one hand there to hold me safe and then we were running up the shrouds of the mizzenmast. He climbed with only one arm but so fast and smooth that I hardly bounced as we went up. I looked down at the water, farther and farther away and at the same time bigger until all I could see were green water and white waves. I caught glimpses of the deck far below, through the stays and sails that surrounded me. When we reached the crosstrees he slung me over to the topman and slid down the ratlines, back to the deck, then straightaway he went into the whaleboat that was being lowered over the side, the crew already clambering in. I leaned from the safety of the topman’s grip to watch the boat splash down, the long oars slicing into the water. Half a league off the starboard bow I saw a fountain of spray and under it a great long shine of gray.
Papa was standing in the bow, one foot braced on the rail, both arms raised. He held a long slender wooden spear in each hand. He looked like a statue made of metal, so still and bright under the sun. The whaleboat moved fast across the water, the oars flashing out and cutting through the long swells. Already the boat was almost within striking distance of the whale. It was a sperm, the first one I had seen. Papa said they used to swim thick in our own bay, years before. This sperm was nearly as long end to end as that row of rooms downstairs, the one with all the beds: seventy feet from blowhole to flukes. He lay in the water, holding his great blunt head up high, not swimming away but lying there waiting, breathing and blowing. The boat was only a cable’s length away from him. The oars all lifted together and hung over the water. The whale lay there a moment longer, its head turned toward Papa, waiting for him. Papa stood like before, both arms raised, motionless except for the rise and fall of the sea. Then the whale slowly turned in the water and began to swim away.
The water between the whaleboat and the Verity was so bright in the sun but still I could see everything sharp and clear: the long wet curve of the whale’s back as it swam just ahead of the boat, Papa’s arms lifting higher; the first spear flashing out, then the other at almost the same moment. The flukes burst from the water, twisting, slapping down into the sea, spinning one man out of the boat—his foot caught in a coil of rope and he was gone under. Then the whale was sounding in a surge and swimming away, the jet of white spray now a bloody mist, the rope streaming after it, the men leaning hard on the oars. Through it all Papa stood solid in the prow, urging them on, faster. Suddenly it was over. The boat slowed, the great gray body bubbled up and slowly turned over. The crew hooked on and they towed the whale back to the ship.
The Verity was manned with a full crew, all from Arcady. There were three whaleboats with six men in each boat. But Papa would allow only one boat in the sea with the whale, and no one but him held the spears. The men all clamored to be chosen each time a whale was sighted, all wanted to be with Papa. My favorites were Jim and Peter, who crewed in the first boat that day. They said they wanted to take me to Arcady when we got back and we would go nest-hunting up in the cliffs.
Each time Papa chose a fresh crew, driving them hard, urging each man to row faster and stronger than the last. The chase sometimes lasted for two glasses, or longer with a fast whale, though once in range Papa never missed his mark. The men were so tired they slept all the next day after a chase, but if a whale was sighted the next morning Papa was out again with a new crew. And the boats tired, too; one or another was always under the carpenter’s hands, stove-in planks being repaired or bent davits straightened. Papa needed three boats to be sure one was always at the ready. The men didn’t mind; they all knew they would have their turn soon enough, and they were kept busy cutting up the whales and melting them down.
No sooner had one whale been harvested than another would appear. Some days we saw pods of thirty or forty, all swimming together alongside. I would lay along the yard and look down at them running close to the surface, so that the light dappled on them and the water ran gleaming off their backs. The calves would travel in the middle of the pods, their bodies sometimes covered by the little fish that rode on them. They blew their plumes of spray up at me and clicked and called to me. Some days I saw right whales, their double spouts making rainbows. Or humpbacks blowing rings of bubbles, trapping big columns of fish in the rings to feed on. But we were after only the sperm.
Each day I took my place in the crosstrees. On quiet days when no whales were in view, I pointed out other things I could see from my perch. A distant flock of gulls glutting on an endless stream of haddock. Once, a storm that made a waterspout go spinning along the surface. But I stopped pointing when I understood that no one else on the ship could see such things. The men would roll their eyes and chuckle when I claimed to see such distant sights. I had always been able to see far, but on the Verity I realized that I was different. It was not only distant things that I could see clearly. I could see well under the surface of the sea, deeper than our draft. I knew what the soundings would be before the mate made them. I felt reefs and shoals coming up and tugged at Papa’s coat to warn him. You know what I mean, sister. We both have Moses’s gift.
We sailed through the warmer waters in which the whales traveled on their way south, going for weeks without sighting land, only sea from rim to rim. The men all said they had never known such clear sailing: a steady wind always on our beam, the Verity’s best point of sailing, no matter the compass point, as though, the men said, the wind shifted just for us.
I swam each day with Papa when the weather was fair, which was most all the time on that first voyage. Each day, before beginning his watch, Papa put me on his back and dove deep off the stern. We swam alongside the ship in the warm water. Swarms of fish parted around us, passing so close that I felt their smooth scales.
The weather held fair all through the summer, and no week passed without its count of sperm. The men called me their lucky charm. It had alway
s before taken at least a twelvemonth, sometimes twice that, to fill the barrels. By the time we turned for home, early in July—a month from Naiwayonk—the oil of sixty-two whales ballasted the ship. The Verity, heavy with the oil, rode through the sea as steadily as Papa stood in his whaleboat. With no more empty barrels, no more need to hunt, Papa passed the weeks of homegoing pacing the quarterdeck, front to rear and back again, wearing a path in the wood. He called out never-ending orders to the men, making them change the trim of the sails without rest, to be sure each breath of wind would help speed us home.
All through the last leg of the voyage Papa manned the wheel himself, a full night and a day. I stayed aloft all that time, too, higher than him, first carrying up a blanket and filling my pockets with biscuits. I looked down at him, walking back and forth. Each time he reached the foremast and turned to walk back again, he took a compass from the breast pocket of his jacket and opened its case to look at the braid of hair he kept there, pale woven with dark. He forgot I was up there, or he wouldn’t have let me stay so long. I saw Naiwayonk come into view long before Papa, though he’d kept watch all those hours. I know I saw Mama long before him. She stood on top of the house, her shape black against the sky where the sun was setting, glinting off a curve of green glass; a dome was being built there, behind her, supported by a scaffolding of posts and planks. She was holding on to the scaffolding, looking toward the Verity as it sailed toward Rathbone House.
SECOND VOYAGE October 7, 1849–February 21, 1850
The whales were boiled at night. Some nights I watched. Down below in the dark Papa would stand on the edge of the pit. The trying fires flared on his face and lit up his teeth. He swung the big hook over to where the whale hung along the side winched in a great sling and stripped down the first fat coil of blubber. His boots squelched in oil when he turned, swaying the long spiral down to the mate in the pit. From the coil the mate chopped a wide chunk and held it in one hand, skin-side down, slashing along it with his blade so the thick pieces splayed open like a book. He said the oil came faster that way. The mate called them Bible leaves. He dropped them into the big pots where the boys stood and stirred, thigh-deep in blubber, flame-bright.
I hung up high on the mainmast, slung from the yard in a ditty bag, an extra one; the sailor it belonged to had gone to the whale. Papa thought I was asleep in his cabin but some nights the cook brought me up there when I asked him to. He knew Papa wouldn’t like it, but he also knew that I would find him the biggest fish in the morning and plenty of crabs to sweeten his stew.
It was our first whale in two months. The men whispered and wondered what they would live on that winter. We had been out for four months and our hold held the oil of only three whales. Some of the men were saying that the whales had all been fished out, others that the whales had grown wise and had found different waters in which to swim. They began to grumble about hunting with only one boat. They wanted to go farther out, they wanted to use easier ways to kill the whale, like other whalers, pikes and spears made from sharp steel. But Papa wouldn’t allow it. He said that the whale, having himself no metal, must be met by only one man and only with wood or there was no honor in it.
One night, after the men had taken a fifty-footer, I watched them take off the head. The wind was shifting, swinging me away from the yard, and when I swung I saw the men crawling along a line between head and body and together they began to slice. Farther out and far beneath the dark surface of the sea silver points began to grow, the first sharks started to rise.
The wind shifted again. Behind the ship the water burned green—the sailors say it’s called phosphorescence. In the bright wake I watched the sailors’ white trousers wave, bleaching in the brine, nipped at by fish. I wanted to dip my hand down into the wake to see if the green fire hurt.
Onto the deck the men lowered the whale’s head (the sphinx, they called it), laying it to rest along the cut edge. Soon the men would stand on the head and break into the case, dip into it with their long ladles for the oil.
I swung in my hammock and saw below me the mate and the men bent over the Bible leaves with Papa, murmuring. The sailors skimmed the whale’s own skin from the pots and fed it into the fire to make the flames soar high. The whale cooked best that way.
Above the deck I swung between mast and mast and turned my face up to the sky, to the stars beginning to spill from a great gash of light in the black. Papa would have been able to see me if he looked up. He said that I was too young to do what he did. Next year, he said, next year.
Over the rail the sailors stopped beating away the sharks. The ship tilted to starboard as the sharks bit into the stripped carcass, slopping water over the rail and into the pit to make the fires hiss.
On deck in the dark the whale’s head waited, looking up to the sky like me.
THIRD VOYAGE February 23, 1850–April 12, 1852
I wasn’t meant to go the last time. Mama had made Papa promise to leave me at home after the second voyage. I had turned five at sea.
We came in one evening from the second voyage, having been more than four months at sea, just before dark. Before we rounded the last point, before Rathbone House came into view, we anchored offshore.
We only came back, Papa said, so that we could swap crews and let the men go home to Arcady. They wanted to stay with him, they said, but they had to feed their families. They would go to the cities to look for work. Papa sent the whaleboats off to Arcady to take the men home, asking them to spread the word on their way.
I asked Papa why he had anchored so far from the house. He said he couldn’t let me go inside. He said if I went in Mama would never let me go again. He needed me with him, his lucky charm, he said. We had to go farther this time, we had to find the whales. But he went to the house himself that night, rowing away in the dark, rowing back the next morning just after dawn.
By midmorning enough men to man the Verity and more had sailed or rowed from villages nearby, and Papa signed the best of them. Most had crewed on some other whaleship; a few were only fishermen that Papa had liked the look of and taken on, saying they’d be easy enough to train. Though all the men had heard that the Verity’s last voyage had not been successful, they had heard, too, that he was offering not a lay but a set sum, and a large one, no matter how many whales they harpooned.
With the turn of the tide, late that morning, the Verity weighed anchor and started to sail away. I was busy in the tops with the rigging and didn’t look back at Rathbone House until the ship had begun the turn around the western point. Mama was not on top of the house as she had been when I sailed away twice before. She was in the sea, far from shore, swimming after the ship, her gown streaming behind her, a dark streak on the gray sea. She was still there, her white face turned up in the water, when we rounded the point and left Naiwayonk behind. I don’t know if Papa looked back.
We sailed farther than on the earlier voyages, which had taken us only a few hundred miles from home, usually running north and south, within easy hail of the coast. This time we headed east by southeast until we lost all sight of land. Papa said we were going to the big whaling grounds in the middle of the ocean. But whatever luck I had brought before had gone away. I once glimpsed the V-shaped blow of a bowhead many leagues off, and once heard the song of a pair of blue whales running deep below, but nothing nearer, and no sperm at all. The weather was queer besides. Papa said the southerlies should have been pelting us with rain in those latitudes, driving us on so that we made two hundred miles from noon to noon. Instead there were only weak gusts of wind from no particular point of the compass and no rain at all. Within a month our fresh water ran low and we had to drink the tarry water we had gathered in sails and funneled into barrels during earlier rains for just such a drought, and we washed our clothes in seawater so that our skin went rough and raw. Not only were there no whales but the fish had thinned out or changed their routes. I felt almost nothing beneath the ship, only a few scattered dogfish and bloodmouths. The sky was e
mpty of birds. There was little for them to feed on.
Papa paced the deck for hours, wearing a path in the wood until it gleamed. Other times he took the wheel himself, though it didn’t take much to keep the ship on course, the winds were so weak. He stood as tall and broad as ever, but it was like he was empty, like all his oil had poured out. The men kept to their duties, which were light without any whales to flense and boil: mending line, polishing fittings that already gleamed. Sometimes, as the air grew warmer, they just dozed under the whaleboats.
I was posted lookout now officially, though I had long served as such. I stood two watches, sometimes three. Papa didn’t object, though I think it shamed him to see me stay awake so long. He knew I was his best hope.
The day I finally saw the whale, we had just crossed the thirtieth parallel. The sea, for days a low, choppy gray, now showed patches of bright green, smooth and still. A cool wind came from the northwest, billowing our sails enough to make the water sing along our sides and put the men in a happier mood. I leaned out from the mainmast top and looked down into the sea. I knew from the mate’s charts that at this parallel a cold stream from the north was turning in a great loop beneath us to return home. The cold was surging up to the surface and bringing with it creatures from the deep, pale, formless things without names. But I felt something larger among them, caught in the churn. I saw a huge dimness rising slowly from far below and I called down to Papa.
