“That puts me in line with everyone else,” I said.
“Good,” Papa said. “Spotted the killers making their way back today.”
Papa was fond of giving those black-finned beasties credit for helping us hunt oil whales on their journey to winter feeding. As a reward, he shared our catch with them. He told me this story every fall, and the older I got, the harder it was to believe. Off in the distance he’d spotted three gloomy top fins sailing on the inlet. They’d jumped and thrashed about like bandogs waiting for their master. Papa said those clicking sounds were from Matong, he knew them that well. You know more about them killers than you do me, I thought bitterly.
“Mighty early for them to return,” he said, puffing smoke into the warming air. “Bodes well for the season.”
Papa seemed so content sitting with his elbows on his knees that I just let my earlier thoughts tiptoe to my mouth.
“Now that they’re back, could you use another—?”
“Got crew enough to fill the boats we have,” he said, standing to relight his pipe.
The boats we have. They hadn’t been full the last season, being two oarsmen short most hunts. All of a sudden, one of the demons in my head broke its leash and raced straight out.
“Aye, you do at that,” I said, glancing down at the railing, “and not one of them female.”
“We’d be in damned napkins if it came to that,” he said, shaking his head.
“Brennan says cook’s helper always leads to the boats. It’s tradition,” I said, jumping off the railing. “I’ve been doing it two seasons now and this one’s looking more like cook than helper.”
“Crazy Brennan, he’s one to yabber,” said Papa, his head bobbing as he leaned on his knees. “Maybe the two of ya should start your own station.”
“He might be off his beam, but he sees when fair is fair,” I said, folding my arms, “and you promised.”
“I promised a little girl we’d fly in a balloon over a volcano, too, but I didn’t expect the near adult would hold me to it.”
“I’m a Dawson, ain’t I?”
“For now, but that’ll change too,” he said, exhaling. “It’s the nature of things.” I was close enough to legal marrying age to know what he meant. Close enough, too, to worry whenever Lon Taggart or the likes of him were skulking about. I had two choices to carry as my burden—become the crew cook or a wife, as if there were a difference between them.
“You looking to square me up for a new boat?” I snapped. “Because if ya are, you’re selling short.”
“Just thought you handled cook pretty well, that’s all,” Papa said, getting up slowly until we faced each other.
“Did what I had to do,” I uttered, understanding the gravity our talk was taking.
I stood eye to eye with Papa these days, but I couldn’t look straight at him and lie. “Not wanting regular service with it,” I croaked out, as if my mouth were full of sand.
Papa took off his cap and slapped it against his thigh. “No crew would serve in a hen boat if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, biting the pipe stem as he turned away from me, “and there’s no one worth the risking of finding out.” He marched off then, leaving me to stand alone on the porch.
The harshness of his voice wilted me. The weight of each word pounded my image of our family into the sand. I realized that I didn’t know anything about my brothers or my mother. The whalers whom I’ve played with—and who taught me everything they knew—never wanted me around. All my dreams about this place were just shadows from my imagination, night fog that disappeared by morning.
I’d never asked Papa for anything before this. Well, once for a bisque doll at a harvest festival and he got me a spyglass instead. Another time I wanted to try perfume, but everything stinks of whale oil anyway so I didn’t utter a word. I’d forgotten about those balloon stories. I used to make Papa tell me about faraway places we’d visit. We were going to anchor the balloon to the widow’s walk and escape whenever we wanted. We’d be mates drifting over the plains of Africa and the Great Wall of China, and be back in time for brekkie.
All we had left now were the dead embers of those memories. How could things go so wrong between us when all I did was grow into who I am? Somehow we ended up on opposite sides of the Capertee Valley, me just a cook’s helper and him barking orders.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way in a million years.
I always thought Papa and I saw the world the same way. That we’d come around to agreeing about most anything that came up. Having your dreams trampled by someone who could help you realize them is worse than not having them at all. Papa trusted those blubber dogs in the bay more than me.
I stayed there until the tide let out, and my hopes of whaling with Papa went with it. Before long, the wind rose off the bay and I stomped back up to my room with lathered demons in tow. I slammed down onto the damp aired sheets and felt I was evaporating into them. If I was old enough to be chasing a bludger of a husband down the streets of Paradise, I could surely handle wallowing in a whaleboat. Not worthy of the risking? Given the chance, I’d out-swim and out-row any boy from here to the old Northern Territory. I cut my hair so it wouldn’t tangle with the irons or get caught in the lines. Yet the crew looked at me like I was some street yobbo.
I heard the killers starting to thrash and play. How Papa could still look at them after what they had done to my brothers was beyond me. If this was my watch, I’d run the lot of those Blackfish out to sea with hot lances. Their flute-like songs mocked the few memories I had of my family. It was as if they were singing that I wasn’t good enough to hunt with the likes of them.
But I knew I was.
“I am! I am!” I shouted, pounding my fists into the mattress.
3.
I stretched out to ponder the barney I’d had with Papa, and my pending visit to Frieda, but my feet kept dangling off my bunk. It’s been that way for a while. I had grown a bit these past months. Papa had had to get the carpenter to saw off the aft end of my bed. He added a section fastened with wood dowels and tar, thinking it wouldn’t change anymore. The next thing he knew, in a few months he’d had to add another piece. Three times he’d had to do that, and three times he’d given me the evil eye, as if I’d been growing just to spite him. Next time, he said, he would haul up a stoved whaleboat from the bay and be done with it. Bunking in that might be the only way I get in one.
The whole blasted place was built that way. A piece of driftwood found here, a cabinet that had washed up on shore there. Best as I can remember, Papa said they slap-dashed Loch Bultarra together from three shipwrecks. The main mast from the Lincolnshire was smack in the middle of my room; her large brass porthole gave me a view of the inlet. The floors came from the Rosa Lee’s afterdeck, and the outside walls were planking pried off the Spanish whaler, Coracini.
We lodged in a most curious hovel where all sorts of odd things suddenly appeared and got nailed, tied, or tarred to walls, floors, or ceilings. Reweighing Papa’s words, I imagined I might end up as another one of those things fixed to a wall. The best way to hedge that bet was to get my visit to Frieda going.
Stepping onto the front porch, the warm breeze caressed my face like a mother’s hand. The bunkhouses were empty and the boats were gone. All that remained from the morning was Papa’s cold pipe lying on the rocker. I wanted to toss it into the bay. Instead, I placed it in the porch rafters where he couldn’t find it. Strolling to the Hobson’s cottage, the emptiness of lost memories returned with darkening clouds.
Frieda poked, pried, and pulled every bristle of sheared hair on my head. I was her plucked chook at a Christmas fair ready for dressing.
“What on earth came over you, Savannah?” she lamented in her heavy Castilian accent.
It wasn’t anything on earth, I thought, as I fiddled in my head for an answer. Frieda asked me again with a chop o
f anger in her voice. “I don’t know. I got inspired.”
“People get inspired to do great deeds, not to take hatchets to their heads,” Frieda added with a hard pull.
“Ow!”
“It would be more than that if you were my daughter,” she said, before uttering something in Spanish that made me glad I never learned the language.
“It’s only my hair,” I offered weakly.
“Your hair was an ocean of honey. It was your door to all the niceties of Paradise,” said Frieda, motioning where my phantom locks once covered my scarred cheek and down to my hips. “It was so long and beautiful that Queen Ena could’ve fashioned it into a wig.”
The back of my hand jerked up to shield my pitted face. I kept it there as Frieda tried to even out all the cowlicks and slanted chops I’d made. She slapped my hand away, saying there’d be no hiding from it now. Frieda tried to even out what was left of my hair and that was that.
“You were the first Dawson girl in three generations,” said Frieda, admiring her repair work. “Every day, your mum and I would brush each side of your hair fifty times while singing to you. You loved the attention.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” I said, none too happy with the way this new style felt pinned to my scalp. “No one ever talks about my mum, including you.”
“Well, time to get back to my poddies,” said Frieda, abruptly stuffing the scissors in her apron and chasing after Benjamin, Etta, and her three other giggling children flying about the room.
I wandered back from the Hobsons’ feeling as if Frieda had pulled a rug out from under me again. She’s always been like a big sister, but she only goes so far. She dropped hints of what it was like in the old days, told me about certain things that had happened, and abandoned me in a room empty of memories.
I veered off from Loch Bultarra and headed toward the clearing in the woods to pay my respects at the family plot. Humphrey, Mr. Nubbles, and Quilp spotted me there and followed me into the woods, their tails curled in the air like question marks. Moss tears and dampness stained the worn stones of the long dead. Most everyone I’d heard about was there. Pop and Nana were in the back row with some of Papa’s uncles and brothers. In the front, where the sunlight broke through the trees, Eli and Asa were close enough to be arm in arm. Mum was next to them with spaces for Papa and me when it came to it.
I looked upon all this grayness and tried to imagine the bone and sinew of those lying beneath. I picked up a long stick in front of Mum’s stone and drew in the dirt where the dry grass shrank below the earth. Whenever I did this, it felt as if I were poking the sleeping dog of the past awake to make him do tricks for me. Ever the bad boy, Quilp pawed at my every movement until I chased him away.
After a minute I pictured what Mum looked like. She appeared a little different every time I sketched. Sometimes, I just formed her eyes or lips. Other days, I showed her reading, looking for me, or smiling at plain nothing. Happiness.
I remembered last year Abe Hobson told me Mum had once been a missionary. It was during the final boiling of the season, when the air hung heavy with black smoke and the smell of rancid, smoldering blubber. I started etching her likeness wearing a uniform with her hair under a proper bonnet, just as Abe described her to me. I added a brooch to her jacket like the one I’d found in the attic. I drew Eli and Asa wearing fishing caps and smiling, their lines waiting to drop. I carved Pop Alex with a stern look that was all beard bursting from his face like the wild surf after a storm.
It was as if that drawing stick were my hand reaching down into the loamy darkness and pulling them back to life.
The sun baked the back of my neck when the voices of the crew bellyached off the groves of red ash and sandalwood in front of me. I ran down to the beach and onto the quay where the boats pulled alongside the float dock.
“Only two boats?” I yelled down, catching their lines. “No whale?”
“Was a good chase we gave, but that’s all we have,” bellowed Papa, tapping his lance on the tub filled with unwound rope.
“Empty barrels and stiff shoulders is our reward this day,” said Abe, before ordering oars up as they glided in. “We were done in by leaky boats and men who couldn’t hold their water.”
Sure enough, our two empty boats were taking on water just as I knew they would. The first sank up to the gunwales. The second leaked from the bow, making neither seaworthy. I turned to Papa, but he gave me a look as though I didn’t belong, so I headed back to the family plot.
The wind was already blowing my etchings to smithereens. Crouching by Mum’s grave, I noticed two sticks on her stone. They were charcoal drawing pencils. I glanced about the clearing but didn’t see anyone. A gentle breeze lifted the tree branches in a heaving sigh. Behind me the men continued to laugh and make light of their blubber-less try pots.
I picked up the pencils and studied them. The point on one was sharp; the other had a flat edge for drawing thick black lines. The hair stood on the back of my neck as I peered into the green gloom in front of me. I wondered who had left them and why those pencils were there.
4.
After I found the pencils, I felt someone was watching me everywhere I went. When the pickers left for the orchard the next day, I fetched some eggs. Carrying them up the front porch steps in my apron, I saw another pencil lying on my dreaming spot. This one was green. I dropped all the eggs on the stairs. I ran from one side of the deck to the other but saw nothing and heard nothing.
You’d think with all those well-trained cats to patrol the place one of them might have made a peep. Instead, I had eight silent scallywags not worth the insides of their cat boxes. I picked up the pencil and slipped it into my dress pocket. I paced back to the front door, keeping my eyes on the tree line and ran up the stairs. I placed the green pencil next to the others on the barrel I used for a nightstand. I yanked the pulley rope to remove the canvas covering the porthole. I stared intently, barely breathing, hoping to catch a look-see of something, anything. It was a long time standing for nothing.
I washed the eggs off the porch so Papa wouldn’t see them and popped out the back door. Whistling “John Kanaka,” I stopped to adjust my garments before marching past the well, coop, and hog pens toward the apple and peach groves. Papa bought all this land when the whale money was good. He owned fifty-something acres filled with lumber, fruit, vegetables, and who knew what else.
The orchard was teeming with activity. Oliver and Noah, the Gretch brothers, drove the second wagon far behind Papa and the first batch of pickers. With one eye on the hard cider, Lon and a couple of dags from the bunkhouses were lifting the heavy wooden crates, filled with apples by the wives and children from the farm village, onto the brother’s wagon bed.
I should’ve come sooner, for there was nothing funnier than watching a whaler try to work a horse and cart as if they were boats on the bay. I told the lads the stern was the part with the tail. The bow was the part with the teeth that bites their sterns if they didn’t treat the animal with respect.
Abe was lost without an oar or an iron in his hands. He stumbled up the ladder, unsteady as a cabin boy making his first crow’s nest climb. At the top of the tree he shouted out a prayer in Hebrew and started plucking apples. The forbidden fruit dropped into barrels faster than gulls into a garbage heap. They corralled me with the children when I should have been up in the trees. I knew Papa liked me on the ground to reach the ’tween areas that fall below the ladders. Each of us had baskets to fill and turn in for wages. I carried ten lug boxes out to where the Red Delicious and Royal Galas were waiting. When I could, I dropped apples into the wee ones’ baskets to keep them in the game.
As the afternoon wore on, the sun tucked under the folds of the Cooa Cooa Mountains draping bands of purple mist across the orchard. Papa let the swaggies who showed up feed before they headed off toward a jumbuck station near Walter’
s Peak. We walked back in a caravan of silence except for Lon. He and the sandgropers broke into the hard cider when Papa wasn’t looking. They sang a sailor ditty that hastened the steps of the proper wives frantically fanning themselves against the heat of the lyrics.
The lavender brush reflected a soft violet sheen on the water. Everything led back to the bay. Lon leaned over the wagon slats.
He yelled out, “You, yeah you, lassie,” until he finally got my attention.
“You’re an unstayed mast, you are,” he giddily quipped, staring at my head, “with no rigging to steer ya right.”
“That means you’re free,” offered little Aiden Parsons, pulling on my sleeve.
Because he walked with a limp, everyone called him Peg except me. I figured he had troubles enough without my adding to them. Besides, I knew a thing or two about being marked.
“I know my sails,” I snapped, under my breath, “and I’m anything but that.”
Lon was a bit of a larrikin. His infatuation with me had more to do with his love for Papa and whaling. He saw himself as the heir apparent to Dawson Station and me as some of the equipment that goes along with it.
He stood in the wagon about to make another grand proclamation. “I…eh,” he said, pointing to the sky as he fell back into a bin of apples. His legs kicked straight up like a boxed boomer in the funnies. I let out a bellow that led to more laughs. Papa turned around from driving the first wagon. He gave me a wink and a nod as he snapped the reins. Did that mean he thought I liked Lon and approved? Did he want me to befriend him?
It was hard to tell.
It was sunset before we finished putting all the picking gear away. Papa said he would get a good price for this lot in Paradise. He placed me in charge of storing the rest. Out on the darkened bay, I heard those Blackfish snorting like a bunkhouse full of sleeping whalers. I hoped they’d just up and leave, but they didn’t seem about to.
The Whaler's Daughter Page 2