by Janice Clark
I knew he wouldn’t let me go with him. I knew he had promised Mama that he wouldn’t let me go into a whaleboat until I was twelve. I think Mama hoped all the whales would be gone by then. I think she knew I would never have the chance to do what Papa had done.
By then the whale had surfaced, a few ship lengths ahead. He didn’t breach, only rose and lay there, just breaking the surface with his huge head. I could hear his long slow breaths from my perch. Papa looked up at me once, his face shining, then he was over the side, into the boat. I waited until it had splashed down and pulled well away, then slipped over the side, from the stern, where no one was watching. All the men were pressed against the rail on the port side, all eyes on the whale. I swam just behind the whaleboat, in its wake. I knew none of the men in the boat would see me. They, too, were bent on the whale, only the whale. I kept my head low and stayed close. It was hard to breathe in the churn of the wake, but if I swam in smooth water the men would see me and tell Papa. I swam well, keeping up easily.
The whale didn’t at first seem to know the boat was coming close, it didn’t change its pace. I felt its body pull me closer. I turned away from the boat’s wake and let the smooth surge of water pull me along beside the whale, close to its flank. I reached out and clutched the edge of a great fin and rode along. It was an old whale. I could see in the clear water the places where its skin was scarred in circles by the suckers of giant squid and scored by shark teeth and jagged reefs. I could feel the surge of its heart under my hands. I didn’t know why Papa, why anyone, would want to kill such a thing as that whale. I would have been happy to swim with it forever. I felt the long smooth curve of the whale’s motion as it turned; I knew it was turning to face the men. The whale opened its long, long jaw and drew in a deep draft of sea. I saw, just before I was swept with startled fish down between the rows of teeth and into the dark, its little eye turn in its socket to look at me.
Papa must have seen me, or one of the men saw and told him. By the time the whale was speared and dragged and Papa had pried open its jaws and come in to find me, I was already dead. The whale had not chewed me, I had simply drowned. Papa pulled me out in one piece.
The men were silent as they rowed back to the ship, the whale in tow. Papa sat in the bow with me in his arms. When the boat had been winched up and the men were out, he lay me on the deck and smoothed the hair away from my face. He called the mate over and spoke to him. The mate leaned over the stern where the men were securing the whale with tackle and line. Cast it off, he said. Let it go. The men hesitated, then untied their knots and hauled in their lines, and the whale began to drift away, north by northwest, its head turning into the wind. They all stood at the taffrail to watch it go, so they didn’t hear the splash on the lee side when Papa dove in. They didn’t see him swim away, eastward. After they realized he was missing and had searched the ship, they thought he had drowned, and headed for home. But they must have had bad luck somewhere on the way, for the Verity never returned to Naiwayonk again.
Do you understand yet, sister? Mama didn’t put me in the barrel. She was only welcoming me home. She had made Papa promise never to lose her son at sea. So he told the mate to salt me, lest I spoil on the long journey, and sent me home. You have misjudged her, as I misjudged the whale who swallowed me whole.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MORDECAI’S LAST LESSON
{in which Mercy teaches Mordecai all he needs to know}
I WOKE TO THE sound of a boy’s voice singing. At first I thought I was dreaming, or that I was reliving that night months ago when I had first heard the voice. That I would look up to see both my crows on the bedposts and go downstairs to find Mama carving in her room. But Crow slept on one bedpost and the other was empty. I wondered if I had only dreamed of Mordecai, too, rising in the well of the walk like a ghost.
Then the voice came, the song, not strong but clear and true, and I knew I was awake.
“Father, Father, sail a ship,
Sail it straight and strong.
Mother, Mother, make a bed,
Make it soft and long.
Sister, Sister, listen close,
Listen to my song,
For it was Father sailed the sea,
For it was Mother murdered me,
Sister, Sister, come and see,
Come see and sing with me.”
Crow woke. He was stiff from his labors of the night before. He dropped from the post onto the bed, trundled across the spread, grasped its edge in his beak, and dragged the cover down.
Neither of us wanted to follow the song. I would rather have crawled back under the blankets. But I got up, and we started along the hall. The house was dark, with no hint of light at any window; it was still deep night. I stopped along the way to take the stub of a candle from one of the cupboards, the lanterns having all served to light the walk the night before. The song was not coming, as before, from the walk, or from Gideon’s bones. It came from the back of the house and higher up. I started for Mordecai’s attic.
I made my way along the hallway that led to the final stair, the narrow switchback that led to the attic. I walked fully around the perimeter at the base of the square tower where the stair was, Crow muttering on my shoulder. I wondered if I had made one turn too many and retraced my steps, but the door didn’t appear. I thought I must be confused by the previous night’s events, and my stub of candle provided such a scant light. Finally I heard the voice once more, thin but close at hand, and turned a corner I was sure I had turned at least twice before to find the stair. The door stood open, and a faint light washed down. I tiptoed up. Though Crow had always refused to enter the attic before, he now stayed with me, hopping from my shoulder to the top of my head.
I couldn’t at first see Mordecai, it was so dark. A few thin beams of starlight angled from the knotholes in the hull above, wavering on the bare wood. A wind was picking up outside, making the hull shudder, and the sea sounded against the rocks below.
He was seated at his worktable, his journal spread open before him. He must have found it in my room. He worked by candlelight, with his books and papers in slovenly stacks on the table around him. I wondered how he got back to the house, then realized that Captain Avery must have brought him.
As my eyes adjusted to the low light I noticed closed crates standing about the attic. Mordecai’s cherished relics, normally in positions of prominence on tables and shelves, were no longer there: his collection of cast fingers, the prelate’s heart. Only a few nameless crumbling specimens were strewn among his papers on the table. I looked up. Even the rafters were bare of their busts but for one. Crow flew up and perched on the bust of the woman. Without her red hat she had a chastened look.
I dipped my flickering candle into the flame on Mordecai’s table. He was looking up at me; I tried to allow no expression to cross my face. His forehead, where he had struck it on the ceiling of the cave, was swollen as though he had just struck it—it had been two days since I had seen him, though it seemed longer. The dark bruise had spread across his forehead and down one cheek, blotched black and purple; I couldn’t help but think of Erastus’s mottled sisters. He was otherwise as pale as he’d ever been before our journey. He had been so alive during our time on the Able, when we swam together, as though the sea itself had cured him of all his ills. Now his irises had washed nearly to white. His cloud of hair had flattened to a few thin white strands. He leaned heavily on his arms as he wrote, his pen rasping against the paper.
He looked up at me briefly, with a slight smile, and continued writing.
“I was not sure you would find your way here,” he said.
“The song.”
His pen stopped. He sat up straight, then slumped back in his chair, his eyes turned up.
“Oh yes. The song. How does it go again? ‘Father, Father, sail a ship …’ ”
Mordecai sang an octave higher than his speaking voice, in the high thin tone that I had taken for a boy’s, for Gideon’s. He sang the song, staring up at
the hull over us, from start to finish. It had been Mordecai all along. I reached for a chair and sat heavily down. I waited to speak until I could keep my voice from breaking.
“Why? Why did you pretend to be him?”
He continued to stare up for a few moments more, then sat straight, picking up his pen, leaning again over his journal.
“Oh, that I could never do, Mercy.” He smoothed open the chart in the center of his journal, unfolding it so that it draped over the edge of the table and hung to the floor. “I did try, though. I was not permitted on the dock or on board to learn the necessary skills, but I studied them as best I could, in my books.” He picked up a seaman’s manual from the pile nearest him and flipped through its pages. Dozens of pictures of ships flashed by. “I knew the name of every part of the ship, each piece of rigging. I knew more of navigation than Gideon, as much as your papa, though I was never given the chance to employ it. I was not granted the advantage of invigorating exercise in fresh air, as was your brother, but I could have become as hale and strong had I been given opportunity.” He drew himself up and gave me a defiant look. “Captain Avery permitted me to handle the Able’s dinghy on the way here. Certainly it is no three-master, but nevertheless I am not entirely without skills.” I wondered how the captain had managed to let Mordecai think he had handled the boat.
He really believed that he could have thrived, given the chance. If he hadn’t, he couldn’t have flourished so in our time on the Able, however short. And I had half believed it myself. I’d believed he’d sailed with Papa to the Arctic and back.
“But when we were with Captain Avery, and you spoke of the icebergs, of the polar bear … I was sure you had been there yourself.”
He smiled, shaking his head, then grunted and put a hand gingerly to his forehead. “I begged and begged your mama to be allowed to go to sea, on those rare occasions when she came to the attic. She always denied me.” He cleaned his pen on a napkin and lay it down. “And Uncle Benadam clearly did not consider me seaworthy.”
Mordecai’s journal slid to the floor. He stared down at it, leaned stiffly and picked it up, and slowly closed the cover.
“I sometimes believed that I had been on every voyage, so clearly did I imagine them. I experienced each mile more than did Gideon, though he was the one who sailed, he the one who took each trip for granted, who knew nothing of waiting and wanting.” Mordecai pushed away his books and pens and lay his head on the table, his face turned away.
I sat next to him and took his hand. It felt fleshless, dry and hot.
“Mama didn’t mean to hurt you, Mordecai.” I let go of his hand and looked away. “Or my brother.”
Mordecai turned his face slowly back. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember what you told me, back in Circe’s cave?”
He looked at me blankly.
“Back at the cave. You told me my brother was in Mama’s way. That she had made a bed for him in a barrel. She had stuffed him in a barrel, you said.”
“Oh, Mercy.” Mordecai’s face sagged first, then his body followed. He slumped, defeated, over the table. “I should never have drunk from that stream.” He hesitated, then reached for my hand and awkwardly stroked it; his own hand was trembling. “I didn’t want you to ever have to find out. I tried my best to keep it from you, I thought I had. I thought I got you away before you saw.”
I stared back at him. Mordecai crossed his arms over his chest and squeezed them tightly, as though he were cold, and closed his eyes.
“I saw her. I see it all the time, your mama, standing in front of that barrel. Your brother’s face, staring up out of the brine. She put him there. She killed him.”
“No. No. She was taking him out.”
Mordecai’s eyes sprang open and he stared at me.
I reached into the pocket of my gown and held up the last thing Crow had flown down to me from the walk the night before. A packet of oilcloth, which I unwrapped to reveal a small thick book, sheathed in whale ivory.
“This house still hides a few mementos you haven’t discovered. I found this one under the bones, at the bottom of the trunk.”
Mordecai gazed at the little book covetously. Its covers were made from thin sections of a sperm tooth, tapering to a point. The pages had been trimmed to the same shape. It was hinged with soft, knobby gray leather—the whale’s skin—and on its smooth face nothing was graven. Mordecai reached out for the book; I snatched it back and put it in my pocket.
I told him how Gideon had been salted and sent home. Not on Papa’s ship; the Verity didn’t return then, and never had since. The barrel had been passed to a merchantman at sea and delivered to Naiwayonk by a few of its crew, in a jolly boat.
I told him how, after Mordecai had taken me away, Mama had pulled Gideon out of the barrel. I didn’t know how she had gotten him up to the walk; perhaps Larboard and Starboard helped, though she was always so strong, she might have carried him herself. She did not describe every detail, but I could picture it all easily enough: Mama hauling my brother, grunting, from the barrel. The brine sloshing; a thud and a wet slap. Mama sitting on the floor in a pool of brine, my brother lying across her legs, wrapped in a length of cloth. Her hands are busy and she speaks to herself. She is sewing, stitching the cloth in a long neat seam up the front of my brother, with an awl and a length of line. At his feet, two round lumps under the cloth—two cannon shot Mama has put there to weigh him down, as men are weighted for burial at sea, so that their bodies will sink. The two shot must have remained at the bottom of the trunk on the walk, too heavy for Crow to carry down to me along with Gideon’s bones.
Mordecai sat back, sighing. He sat quietly for a while, fingering the rope on a crate that stood nearby, avoiding my eyes.
“Perhaps … perhaps I wanted to think your mama had killed Gideon. And wanted you to believe it, too.” He pushed a drift of hair from his eyes and looked at me. “She didn’t murder Gideon, but she murdered me.”
Crow squawked from his perch on the bust’s head, one yellow eye fixed on Mordecai. Mordecai felt among his papers, found a dried plover egg, and tossed it up to Crow, who deftly beaked it and swallowed it whole.
“I was happy when he drowned, happy to see that barrel, to know that he would spend his days whitening in a box as I have all these years.”
He had begun to shiver. I pulled off my shawl and draped it over his shoulders. He lay his head back down.
“Mama did care for you, Mordecai. I know she did.”
“Oh yes. She held me in such high regard that she never troubled me with her company.”
I pulled a shriveled starfish from beneath a book and twirled it between my fingers. “Don’t you remember walking along the beach and playing in the surf when you were small?”
He raised his head a little from the table and squinted at me.
“Certainly I remember. One of the old ones used to take me. Bemus, I think.”
“It wasn’t Bemus. It was Mama. She walked you along the beach every day, when you were very young. She would have worn pale blue in those days, and she held a black parasol over you against the sun.”
A different light came into Mordecai’s eyes. I could see him reluctantly casting back, trying to remember. He wanted to hear something good about Mama, and yet he didn’t.
Mordecai turned his head and stared up at the hull. His expression had lost its wary look, his eyes had softened. The skin around the sockets was drawn and dark. He looked as old as I had once believed he was.
“I have a lesson for you, Mordecai.”
Without lifting his head, he looked up at me with a wan smile.
“The sperm’s favored diet?”
I smiled back, no more brightly than him.
“Squid and skate are preferred … No. A different sort of lesson. Are you sure you want to hear?”
His eyes flashed a little. He remembered, too, when he had asked me that question, when he had first told me about the man in blue and Mama.
“It would be better if I read to you.”
I led him to his berth and helped him lie down, tucking him tight under the blankets. I set a beaker to boil for tea. Then I pulled a chair close and settled myself, smoothing the skirt of my gown and pressing the little book open so that it would lie flat in my lap. The pages were closely covered in indigo ink, in Mama’s long, impatient hand, the words slanting off and away, sometimes leaping off the page altogether.
I called Crow down from the bust to my shoulder, where he folded his wings and tucked his beak. I flipped through the diary and chose a few entries, and began to read.
April 12
When I lean out the window the sea is right under me, far down. It’s nearly twilight. He’ll be back soon. I can smell the pines, they grow right up to the house. The cliffs are pink in this light, with the sun setting. There are birds nesting in holes all along the cliffs, swallows. They lift and drop on the wind, looping and diving, so close I can almost touch them. He’s been gone since first light. He said he couldn’t miss a day of fishing, not even for me. I knew he would come for me. He didn’t tell me his name until last night. Benadam. It was all I could do to wait until E. went to bed—was it only two nights ago? When Benadam walked in the front door I was waiting at the top of the stairs with my cloak on, my trunk packed. There are the boats now. He’s coming.
April 16
He lies on top of me so that I can’t move, barely breathe. I love how heavy he is on me. How straight and strong. His blood runs right under his skin, it streams along those thick blue veins. I can hear his heart in every part of his body, wherever I lay my ear.
April 18
He fills my every gap. He swells my every sea. He splits me apart. I don’t care. He stitches me together again.
April 22
The sea is warmer here, and the fish—the water is thick with them just past the surf. So many more than back home. Yellow-tail and flounder, great crowds of cod, spiny dogfish and rosefish. Sometimes a school carries me with them out and away, deeper down. I almost forget that he’s not with me, when I’m out swimming. When the boats return and he comes home, he strokes my hair and pulls strands of weed from it, and shards of coral from the reef. He laughs and says he wonders it doesn’t turn green to match my eyes, with all the time I spend in the sea.
