The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  Mama set her tools aside and walked to the hearth. She drew a soft piece of blue paper from her sleeve and held it up to the firelight to read. Light shone through the cracked seams where it had been folded and folded again. She finished reading and refolded the paper, tucking it into the sleeve of her gown. A moment later she took it out and again began to read, her eyes moving along the same lines.

  I was sure the blue paper was a letter from Papa. I had often looked for other pieces of that blue paper around the house. Once, when Mama was on the widow’s walk, I had searched every inch of her room, every pocket and seam of her clothing, but found nothing. I wondered if there was only one letter, the one she kept tucked into her sleeve.

  “Good night, Mama.”

  She looked up at me, and her eyes seemed to connect with mine for a moment, then slid away. She returned to her work, her rasp scraping along the edge of the boat’s keel, stopping, scraping again.

  Uncle Larboard and Uncle Starboard shuffled slowly around the room, dusting the furniture. I did not then know their given names; I called them Larboard and Starboard because wherever Mama went, so they went, one to either side of her. Their bedrooms were to either side of Mama’s, too. They were about her age, as tall as her, and neat in all their ways. One looked much like the other. They might have been twins. Their hair hung in tidy white queues down their backs. They wore sailor smocks washed until they were as thin as tissue, so that through the faded blue linen their old bones showed. Each had one eye slightly higher than the other, in heads that were overlarge, wobbling a little when they walked. They were mutes and never spoke, but I could usually tell what they wanted to say. Now they gently patted my head and led me to the door, pressing me away with long dry fingers. I headed for my room.

  My bedroom, down the hall from Mama’s, was one of the small white rooms that ran around the perimeter of the third floor. Mama’s room had been made from three or four such bedrooms as mine strung together. Some of the little rooms had unfinished walls, partially plastered or ribbed with raw joists. Others were missing their outer walls altogether, except for the tall white columns between which the blue sky burned. In winter the snow would fly in and drift on the floors. Larboard and Starboard swept it away each day.

  When I reached my room I stretched, yawning, and leaned to pour water into a basin from the pitcher on the floor next to my bed. After washing, I undressed and took a clean shift from a hook on the wall and pulled it on. My room had no space for any furniture except the bed, whose posts were four fluted white columns, smaller versions of the tall columns that stood in each corner. My coverlet was loomed of plain wool with a border of crabs linked claw to claw, woven in a watery green. The walls were bare plaster, the floor scoured pale. The lintel was low, the window small; if anyone but me entered, he would need to bend to see the harbor through glass panes that rippled, remembering their former life as sand on the bottom of the sea.

  The room matched my size. I was small, a guppy at birth, said Mama, and at fifteen still no longer than a codling. I stood as high as Mama’s breast, well-formed but of a scale like the funerary figures from a Chinese tomb.

  I settled into bed, waiting for the footsteps to begin above me. Mama walked the widow’s walk each night, watching for Papa’s ship. The wide pine boards creaked beneath her, salt-ground and silvery. There was always the soft shuffle of sand underfoot, even up there, blown in from the shore, sloughing the wood away. Mama liked to walk above the trees, where she could look down through the leaves to see the harbor. Some nights I heard the tap of her boots above my head until dawn. She had taken to lacing them with a strand of line from an old harpoon. One day I watched her uncoil a rope, bleached white where it lay on the dock, and uncurl a strand from the center, still soft and saltless, fine enough to pass through the eyelets. Some nights she stayed up there until the fishing boats headed out from the docks and she saw them cast their nets against the first light. The boats moved to and fro, but no larger vessel appeared, many-masted and deep with sail; no fore-topmast staysail, no moonraker or mizzenmast fly. I watched from my window. I had no walk.

  I had almost dozed off when my crows flew in. They often brought me treasures, gathered on their nightly patrol of the house: spoons from the dining hall, old bits of metal, any gleaming thing that caught their eye. This night one crow dropped a brass button on my bed, the other something that didn’t shine, something that seemed so familiar, though I had no clear memory of it. A bracelet, woven from mariner’s cord of white cotton.

  I slipped the bracelet onto my wrist and turned it slowly. Its pattern alternated between simple square knots and Turk’s heads. I put my nose to it: It smelled musty, not like the sea. I wondered if it was my brother’s.

  “Where is my brother?” I would ask Mama when I was younger, unable to shake the image of a boy, roughly my size, sturdy and dark-haired, always near the sea.

  “He was smaller even than you, so we threw him back,” she once replied, with a frozen smile.

  Most often Mama would simply not answer my question. When I asked where my brother was, she would slowly shake her head and walk away, or stare at me silently until, uneasy, I changed the subject. Our conversations were few in any case, and brief. She would ask how my lessons were progressing and, however short my answer—“Today we began the Platonic solids” or “Mordecai is relating the woes of the queens of Iceland”—Mama’s eyes and attention had already drifted back to her carving before I had finished.

  I had from time to time asked Mordecai about my missing brother, when Mama refused to answer. He, too, had always insisted that no such brother existed. He always said I must be remembering a boy from the village, some fisherman’s son I had seen on the dock.

  Eventually I learned not to ask. But I knew better.

  I didn’t remember very much, only a few flashes. A familiar form kneeling in the surf, his fat hands filled with shells, wet hair shadowing his face. A small boy diving off the end of the dock in a cold wind, bare-chested, whooping as he hit the water. But those memories always wavered and broke apart, and then I would wonder if I had imagined him, or if he was only part of some story Mama used to tell and which I had forgotten.

  Not that I remembered much about Papa, either. He was always away when I was a child, Mama said, always whaling. When he did come home, it was never for long, only to load provisions and a fresh crew and sail away again.

  One memory shone strong and clear, the only one that included Papa.

  A ship rocks alongside the dock on a bright morning, ropes creaking, sea slapping against the hull. My legs dangle over the edge of the dock, swing back and forth over the water; a second pair of legs dangles next to mine, brown and bare, skin warm against my thigh.

  “Push the monkey through the hole, into the cave, thrice around, pull tight.”

  A scratchy rope moves through my fingers. A hand guides mine, a hand the size of mine.

  “No, three times, tighter!”

  The loose loops of rope in my hands suddenly snap into a tight sphere.

  “That’s right. That’s a monkey fist. Now for a timber hitch.” The boy leans over the rope, intent, his dark hair thick and damp, smelling of salt.

  Men move along the dock behind us, carrying provisions to the ship. I glance up to see baskets pass, full of fresh greens. Chickens’ heads bob up and down from open crates. A pair of goats taps by, crying with the voices of babies. Farther down the dock someone is playing a pipe and I hear the rhythmic thud of feet on wood, men singing, and chants from the rigging of the ship. Gulls wheel and cry overhead. Through the other sounds the clanging of a bell cuts sharply. The boy—my brother—jumps up and runs down the dock. As he runs the gulls scatter and swoop; between their beating wings I catch glimpses of a man high up on the deck of the ship, leaning out over the side, raising his arm to the boy who hurries to reach him. The anchor rises from the ship’s stern, streaming weed and water. A sail swells huge above me; the ship begins to glide away. I don’t
know how long I sit there, but it’s for some time, until the ship has disappeared and the gulls have gone and there’s just an empty dock, and the sea, and the bright sky. I look up toward the house. Something moves on the roof. Mama stands up there on the top of the house, a dark, slender shape against the sky. Her gown ripples and snaps in the wind. She stands with one hand clutching a lightning rod, the other raised to her brow, staring out to sea.

  That must have been the day Papa sailed away for the last time, nearly ten years before, when I was five years old. That day was the start of Mama spending her nights on the walk, drifting away from me, as though when Papa’s ship cast off and sailed away, he’d taken her with him, in mind if not body. And he’d taken my brother with him, too.

  How I wished my brother were home. Then there would be no more lessons in the attic with Mordecai. My brother and I would wake up with the fishermen at dawn and catch our dinner off the wharf, and on warm evenings row together in the sound. We would sail up and down the coast in our little blue skiff, stopping at each town, and visit the islands I could see from my window. If my brother were home, Mama wouldn’t walk the walk or carve her bones. Papa would be home, too.

  But I knew Papa would leave again, and with him my brother. Sometimes I let myself imagine that I sailed with them. Papa would not let me go; I would have to stow away. I would curl myself tight inside a great coil of rope or crouch quietly behind an anchor, or hide in a barrel deep in the hold, showing myself only when we had gone too far to turn back. I would sail away from Rathbone House, away from Mama, to the other side of the world, my brother beside me.

  I lay in bed, turning the rope bracelet round and round my wrist, staring into the dark night. Gulls called over the water, and the curtains breathed softly in and out. I reached around to touch my back; among the scattered freckles floated a birthmark shaped like a ship. As I stared up at the black dome of the sky, Mama’s boat of bone sailed slowly across. Its sails billowed in great sighing curves. My brother, standing in the prow, turned to look at me. His hair was thick and dark, moving like the sails; his eyes as green as mine. Against a lead sky he held up Mama’s carved lantern. The flame inside beat red against the white bone like a heart.

  I buried my face in my pillow, my heart pounding. He was alive. I knew he was.

  Some nights I heard the sound of a boy’s voice singing. It sounded in my own body, as though it was I who had sung. The song made me feel like it had always been there, waiting for me to learn how to hear it. It was the high, sweet voice of a boy before it breaks to manhood. The melody was clear, the rhythm strong, but only shreds of words came through, like a voice torn by the wind at sea.

  As I lay there that night, halfway between sleep and waking, I heard it again. At the first faint note the crows left their perches on my bedposts and pulled the coverlet down. I drew a frock on over my shift and rose to walk through the dark house, the crows on my shoulders. They nipped at each other, restlessly cleaning their feathers and whistling snippets of the song.

  Our house was built like a seaworthy ship. No space was wasted, each odd angle fitted with drawers, shelves, small spaces locked against light and vermin. A lingering fear of running out of stores far from land showed in its design. Each nook and cranny held stubs of ropes or ends of candles, small hoards of the hardtack that will keep a man alive at sea when the last salted beef and moldering oranges have gone.

  I moved along the hall on the third floor, flanked by cupboards containing outmoded forms of illumination: candlesticks of every size and sort, tin lamps half full of old oils of vegetable origin. I was allowed to use only whale oil in my lamp, and that sparingly. The widow’s walk, though, glowed at the top of the house like a great lantern, drenched in spermaceti. Mama burned as much oil as she liked. The light sprayed between the boards above us as I walked, the crows jittering and flapping on my shoulders.

  The voice led us on, toward the back of the house. We passed the main stair, along which the portraits of my ancestors hung. The profiles were modeled in shallow relief of white wax and set within austere frames of ebony. The earliest, toward the bottom of the stair, were all small like me, but the profiles stretched as they mounted higher up the stair. Foreheads expanded, hairlines rose, clumped features drew apart. I sometimes sat on the staircase, staring at my forebears, wondering what they were like. I would from time to time ask Mama about them, but, as with all questions about our family, I received a reply that taught me nothing.

  “A question unasked is an answer unregretted,” she said.

  Along the bottom edge of each image was a paler patch and two small holes, evidence of a nameplate removed. Besides the pronounced stretching from generation to generation, I observed other details such as could be seen in white wax: The hair of the lowermost was bountiful and wild, his forehead low, his features brutish. The second wore an elegant top hat distinctly at odds with features much like those of his predecessor. The third was just a boy, with a profile of balanced proportions and great beauty. The last, slender and attenuated, a little like Mordecai in profile, wore a high collar and a pomaded wave of hair leapt from his forehead. Though the nameplates were gone, the artist had incised in the wood of each frame the date: 1779, 1802, 1811, 1841. No Rathbone had been enshrined in wax for nearly twenty years. I thought the earliest portrait, the brutish one, might be my great-great-grandfather Moses; Mordecai had told me he was the first of the Rathbones.

  Most of the Rathbones had long since died, though a few still lived who had moved away from the sea; a tall uncle or two sometimes visited from far inland, with a gift of maple syrup drawn from trees in the Great North Woods or a corn-husk doll from the Great Plains. My uncles tended to forget that, though small, I was now grown. The few Rathbones besides me who remained in the house—Mama, Mordecai, Larboard, and Starboard—were all tall. They teetered around me mast-like, tilting on the stair treads, craning their necks at the sea. I was, I thought, a throwback. Small and dark.

  As I passed the stair I glanced down to the first floor. A chain of seven bedrooms stretched along a narrow hallway from the front of the house to the back. Each bedroom had a door that opened onto the hallway, and doors that opened directly into the adjacent rooms. From the center of any bedroom you could look through the doorways, one behind the next, and see all along the chain: to the north, the shadowy back of the house; to the south, the bright sea. Though spare of furnishings, each room was fitted with built-in beds, one in every corner, curtained to keep the cold away. The family had once been large, Mordecai said. But no one slept behind the curtains anymore.

  Now the voice seemed to be coming from the front of the house. I sent the crows ahead to scout each room, certain that if I came close enough the faint strains would strengthen and separate, that words would emerge and grow clear. The crows flew low and silent down the rooms, stopping now and then to perch above a door, to turn a head to catch some scrap of sound: the wind at a crack in a window, the creak of a floor long untrodden. The song stayed always just ahead as we made our way seaward. It was stronger that night than it had ever been, and I found my breath coming quick. Now that it seemed possible, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find the source of the song. I nearly turned back.

  Mama’s room was by itself, on the left, near the end of the hall. Another door, directly at the end of the hall, led to the widow’s walk. Coarser than the doors of other rooms, their panels planed smooth and painted in warm dark hues, this door was hinged in heavy brass, the planks broad and bare, never leveled. I was forbidden to pass through.

  But the song was strong now and coming from behind the door. The crows glided back from their scouting and touched down on my shoulders, muttering to each other, leaning out to peck softly at the door. There was nothing to quiet my step in that passage. Mama kept the floor clear of carpets there. She told me it was to save them from the harsh light near the top of the house. But I suspected she wanted the floor clear so that she would hear my steps if I approached the walk. I had neve
r been up to the walk in all my fifteen years. I had sometimes wondered what Mama was hiding, but before that day, when the singing voice had come so clear and strong, had never dared to try to find out. As it was, I hesitated at the doorway.

  The crows clutched my shoulders and hunched their heads low. We entered a narrow well, cool and dank, and almost dark. At its center a rope ladder dangled. I stood just inside the door and leaned to peer up. The well brightened as it rose. Near the top was an opening, a doorway at one side.

  I reached for the lowest rung but it was too high for me. I beckoned to the crows. They twined my hair around their beaks and lifted off, wings beating black in the gloom, until I could reach the bottom rung and pull myself up. The crows dropped to my shoulders, gasping. The gaps between the rungs were wide, but I was nimble and my frock was light. Mama must have had to hike up her heavy skirts and hold them in her teeth to keep from tripping. The corset bones must have bitten into her thighs as she lifted them.

  I reached the top and stepped off the ladder, through the opening into the widow’s walk. There was no banister or railing, just the narrow opening, a hole in the floor to one side of the walk. I pulled my arm across my eyes to block the glare. Though I had seen the walk often, looking up from the lawn, the space was larger than I’d imagined. The walls were leaded panes of glass tinged green, like sea spread thin, rough and bubbled. The panes rose and merged in a curved dome, thinning at the top until nearly clear, a bell glass.

  The crows launched off my shoulders and circled high, knocking against the glass, startled by their reflections. A lantern hung from a hook in the seam of the dome. Its flame lurched and shuddered as the crows circled, their shadows careening around the glass walls and across the floor. I looked around me: Near the ladder, a ship’s wheel leaned against the glass, its spokes dark and glossy where gripped by many mates. Across the walk from the ladder stood a sea chest, strapped in leather and brass-nailed, its sides mottled green, its bottom thick with barnacles.