The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  “Yes, Mrs. Euphemia Rathbone.”

  Around the loom the others rose and curtseyed. “How do you do?” each said in succession.

  The first left her place at the loom and came close to me, touching a finger to my cheek. She was, I saw then, soundly built beneath the soft gown, plumb-weighted.

  “You have come from Rathbone House, dear.”

  I nodded and curtseyed, smoothing down my damp hair. How had she known? There was something in her that drew me. She seemed familiar, though she couldn’t have been more unlike the tall and spectral Rathbones with which my world had been until then thinly populated. When she turned her head to pour more tea, I caught my breath at how closely she mirrored the profiles hanging toward the bottom of the stair in Rathbone House.

  “And your boatman?” She turned to Mordecai.

  “My cousin Mordecai.”

  Mordecai bowed again. The woman nodded and gestured for him to sit down. She stood by Mordecai, one small hand petting his head through its woolen covering, smiling into his face. Seated, his face was at the same level as hers. She conferred for a few moments with her nearest companions, all of whom nodded, then turned back to me.

  “We knew your great”—she raised her eyes to the ceiling, counting back along the generations, and turned to the other women, one of whom prompted her—“yes, your great-great-grandmother Hepzibah. I’m sorry, my dear, we aren’t used to visitors, or we would have welcomed you with more than our poor tea. We’ve seen no one from the house for many years.” She took my hand and stroked it, smiling. “When you were a baby you came here often. With your mother.”

  “But I never came here.”

  The women looked at one another, smiling. They chuckled.

  I turned to Mordecai for help, but his head was bent over his tea, his hand clutching a shawl under his chin that covered his head and shoulders. The pattern of the wool seemed familiar, a winding border of kelp and mollusks intertwined. Mama had taken me on visits to Mouse Island? Mama, who, like Mordecai, I had never known to leave the house?

  The first woman returned to her spot at the head of the loom and placed one hand on the great lever, like a steersman at the oar of his boat. She began to speak, her voice strong and rhythmic, the others standing silently at their places around her.

  “I am Euphemia Rathbone. I was Mrs. Rathbone for four years, the Thousand-Barrel Years. I bore six sons. All went to the whale.” Her loom mates all bowed their heads. Euphemia moved slowly around the loom, laying a hand on each woman’s shoulder and looking into her eyes as she spoke. “And Mrs. Beulah Rathbone bore three. Mrs. Patience Rathbone, five. Mrs. Eunice Rathbone, three. Mrs. Amaziah Rathbone, four. Mrs.…” I lost track of names, trying to add up the numbers, wondering why she mentioned only sons.

  Mordecai coughed. I looked up to see him glaring at me from under his shawl with an anxious expression; my puzzlement must have shown on my face. He looked back toward the women.

  “Moses Rathbone was your husband?” asked Mordecai.

  “Yes,” they replied in unison.

  I opened my mouth and found my chair suddenly pulled tight against Mordecai’s, his hand pressing down on mine.

  But my question was already in the air. “You had no daughters?”

  This time they didn’t reply in unison, nor so loudly.

  “Stillborn.”

  “Sent to the country.”

  “Influenza.”

  Mordecai’s hand was hurting mine. I kept quiet.

  Euphemia returned to the hearth, sat next to me, and ran a hand over my hair, over the fabric of my damp frock.

  “My dear, what a beauty you are. Eunice, doesn’t she bring Hepzibah to mind?”

  Me, a beauty? I met Euphemia’s frank and open gaze, blushing. Her size and bearing were so like mine; I saw myself some sixty years on, if I should live as long as my great-great-aunts had.

  The other women left their chairs and gathered around me. They plucked at my skirts, lifted my hair to examine my collar. I tried to brush the soft hands away, embarrassed, but back they came. Since that time Mama had sliced the gown, I hadn’t thought of how I dressed. Now, as my great-great-aunts fussed over me, I felt a flush of pleasure.

  The women spoke quietly among themselves, then a pair moved to the baskets that lined one wall and together they sorted through hanks of spun wool stacked within them. They pulled out a skein of pearly gray, trying it against my face, draping it across my breast. Mordecai turned modestly away while they peeled off my damp clothes, patted me dry, and slid my arms into a soft nightshift, then started to push me up the stair that clung to one wall.

  I hesitated, then stopped and looked back at my great-great-aunts; a question had been nagging me since our rescue. “Excuse me, aunts, but did you … pull anyone else from the water? Did you see a man out there?”

  My aunts looked at one another, shaking their heads slowly. One stepped close to Euphemia and whispered into her ear. Euphemia smiled and said, “No, but Amaziah says she saw a great blue swordfish plowing up the waves.” My aunts, tittering softly, returned to their work.

  At the top of the stair I stepped off, onto the swaying net that stretched across the space, picking my way carefully on the knots to keep my feet from falling through. I curled up on one of the soft pallets around the edges on which my aunts slept, the net creaking and swaying beneath me, and looked down, to where the women had returned to their work at the loom.

  I watched the gleam of the thread as it passed across and through, again and again, but however long I watched the weft grew no wider. The color of the cloth shifted through shades like the changing sea. As I drifted off, I imagined that a darker shape appeared among the threads and spread and spread, a blob slowly sprouting limbs, a head of waving hair: There was my brother, his arms reaching up, his mouth a great blue O. Then the pattern shifted, his mouth drifted away, his limbs split off, and he was gone.

  When I woke, Mordecai was lying nearby on his back, looking up at something that he turned in his fingers: the squid eye, which looked intact, though less spherical than it had once been. Beneath us the shuttle still whispered across and back, across and back. The slight swaying of the net felt pleasant. Crow dozed on my shoulder. Outside it was nearly dusk and under those rafters close to dark; Mordecai seemed to find the dimness comforting. His eyes were circled in white from the tinted spectacles, his face otherwise the tender pink of a conch from the sun. His arm was now swathed in soft cloth. His wound had not stopped bleeding until my aunts, murmuring over the long tear, had rubbed in a green ointment that smelled of algae.

  Mama, skilled though she was, had once cut herself while carving, a more serious wound than Mordecai had been dealt by the man in blue. The point of a blade she had been using to work the surface of a bone had slipped and driven deep into her thumb. I had been sitting across from her, practicing my script, when I heard her sharp hiss and looked up to see a fount of blood flow over her hand. I had jumped up and rushed to her, clutching her about the waist and burying my face in her skirt. I was frightened of the bright blood. She pried my fingers from her waist and pushed me back to my chair, not roughly but slowly and with a cool eye. She held me there with one hand and turned her attention back to her thumb, which she brought closer to her eye to observe its small spurt for a moment longer before letting go of me to reach for a rag from the table, which she wound tightly around the thumb. I stayed in my chair and forced myself to keep my hands in my lap, though I would rather have hid my face in my hands.

  There had been other times when I had felt afraid as a child. When a pack of horseshoe crabs had clattered over my boots on the beach, I had swallowed a scream. When a thunderstorm had pelted the roof with hail and drawn down lightning to its many rods so that the whole of the house crackled, I had set my mouth in a line and kept silent. Mama had watched, nodding approvingly.

  I turned toward Mordecai. Crow grumbled and shuffled from my shoulder up to the top of my head.

  “The
y’ve lived here all these years, just a few miles away, and I’ve never known them,” I whispered. “You knew. Is that why you lied about Mouse Island, about the poison oak, so that I wouldn’t come find them? Why?”

  Mordecai squirmed, trying to pull his nightshift down to cover his legs better.

  “Well, yes, I knew of them. But I did not think their history suitable for a young lady’s ears.” He hesitated. “However, I did not know that some of them were still alive. Or that Mouse Island was where they lived. And it was old Bemus who told me the story about the poisonous oak. I believed it, too.”

  I was surprised to hear Mordecai admit to not having known about Mouse Island. I assumed he knew everything. He took such pride in his carefully hoarded collection of journals and logbooks, in knowing so much about the family. And I wondered why Bemus had lied about the island. Old Bemus had died when I was a baby. I didn’t remember him at all. Mordecai had said he was the last of the old Rathbones, the ones who whaled.

  Mordecai continued to turn the eye. Within its shrunken jelly the dark pupil gleamed. His vision was poor, but he liked to say that he could see more sharply than me when he held the eye, that he borrowed from the squid the great eye’s power.

  “Tell me more,” I whispered. Crow stirred and began to preen his wings.

  Mordecai sighed and hugged his knees to his chest.

  “Those bedrooms on the first floor?”

  I nodded. The chain of rooms. I had always loved the curtains on the beds. Their patterns were all different; one set had a border of twining kelp and mollusks. I realized that the same pattern decorated the shawl that Mordecai still wore about his shoulders. He saw me looking at the shawl and nodded.

  “Your great-great-aunts wove all of those curtains, long ago, when Moses’s sons slept in those beds.”

  I thought of other patterns in the hall of beds: starfish and sea urchins capered on a reef; gulls flew in a tight phalanx across the sky; on my favorite set, twin octopi stretched their tentacles toward the selvages.

  “In your great-great-grandfather’s time his sons alone were enough to crew the whalers, captain to cabin boy. When one wife was worn out with … breeding, another assumed her place, already with child. No time was lost, no favorable wind unmet, no bins unreadied for fresh blubber. The worn wives were exiled to an island—this island, which, I must confess, I didn’t know until today. They lived together, welcoming each new castoff.”

  Mordecai carefully wrapped the squid eye in his bandanna and tucked it deep into his ditty bag. He lay back with his arms behind his head, closed his eyes, and was soon asleep.

  Euphemia began to speak quietly from her place at the loom below, taking up Mordecai’s tale, the soft click and clack of the shuttle marking the rhythm of her voice. She told about Moses, my great-great-grandfather, and the beginning of the Rathbones. She told about the wives, and of the day when my great-great-grandmother Hepzibah came to Rathbone House. It was a story that would be taken up by others before my journey with Mordecai was done.

  As Euphemia spoke, the worn wives were weaving something on the loom, new threads wound above the old on the same spindles, pearly gray. They were weaving a gown for me. Now when the thread gleamed I saw a new shape take form, my own.

  Crow trundled along the net, claws catching on the threads, hopped to the window ledge, and flew off into the darkness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MOSES RATHBONE

  {in which we meet the first of the Rathbones}

  1761

  BEFORE FIRST LIGHT, the boy began to climb the tower at the edge of the dunes. It was roughly built and full of splinters, but his feet and hands were tough from hauling rope, from clambering over rocks after crabs and chasing game. The freshly felled trunks of pine, lashed together with rawhide strips, had been driven deep through the sandy soil of the dunes to bedrock, far enough from the tide line so that the tower would stand firm. Scrub pine and beach roses grew at the tower’s base. Around the boy’s neck hung a skin of water and a string of smoked perch to hold him until dusk.

  The wood creaked under his feet and his hands grew sticky with sap as he climbed. A crow flew past him, scrawking, a fat fish in its claws, banking off toward the pines on the bluff. When the boy reached the top, he stood straight and scanned the beach from end to end. A thin line of light spread along the horizon. To the east, in low hills that rose from the harbor, the roofs of a few houses showed among the trees. To the west the beach curved out to the point, a long pale curl in the dark sea.

  The boy looked across the sound to the fishing fleet at rest in the harbor, saw the gleam and sway of shuttered lanterns among the dark hulls. A few men had begun to move about on the docks and in the boats. In one bumboat near the end of the dock, a man coiled rope into a tub, while his companion sat at a wheel, sharpening lances; the screech of metal on stone cut across the water. Other men loaded their crafts with floats and fluke spades, lantern kegs, piggins, and water to wet the whale line. A sharp March wind roughened the green water to white and sent cold spray over the men as they moved to and fro, hunched into their coats, blowing on their fists to try to keep warm.

  Schools of sperm and humpback had been seen out in the sound each spring for as long as anyone had lived there, but only last winter did the fishermen learn from a passing ship that a few dozen barrels of sperm oil were worth more than a long hard season’s haul of cod or flounder. This spring some of the boats—dories and wherries, some larger smacks—had stowed their nets and mounted oars and racks for harpoons and lances, bought from a town farther up the coast that had begun whaling a season earlier.

  Several sperm, on their way north to summer in colder waters, had been sighted a few weeks ago. Most of the whales had been too distant to pursue. Only one, an old bull of forty feet, swam slowly enough so that a few boats were able to give chase. Though all were seasoned netmen and could spear a big tunny or halibut cleanly, none of the men had ever been so close to a sperm. All pulled hard, their backs to the whale toward which they moved, glancing over their shoulders nervously, glimpsing the long shining body, scarred and puckered. For half a minute they stroked alongside the whale, their own breath and the creaking oars louder in their ears than the whale as it glided through the water. Before the harpooners could ready their weapons, the whale blew, shooting spray thirty feet into the sky, then rolled and dove down in a smooth curve, its great flukes surging up, then curling into the sea. The men rowed back to the dock in silence. None wanted to admit that he was grateful not to have had the chance to try his arm, to find out if his blade would have been the one to hold fast and make the line spin out. They had all been told, by men in the town up the coast, how the whale thrashed when it was struck, its tail slapping boats, smashing them with a single blow, how it dove deep, taking the harpoon and its smoking line with it and sometimes the boat too and all its men.

  One whale had been taken by the villagers, but not through any prowess. The boy on the tower had been watching a few days earlier when a sperm drifted in on the evening tide. It was twilight, and the fishermen had long since gone home. If they had been on the docks they wouldn’t have noticed the whale that the boy could see clearly on the darkening water. They would have heard the cries of birds, a horde of seabirds: white gulls and terns, black skuas and gray-tipped gannets thronged on the carcass, so thick that they made of the dead whale a living shape. The birds lifted off in a body, hovering for a moment just above the whale so that it seemed to expand, then flying suddenly off and away, the whale first becoming enormous, then dispersing and vanishing. Its body, now a diminished hulk of patched black and rotted gray, drifted to shore and came to rest on the sand.

  The next morning the men towed the carcass to the dock and moored it there, head and tail, waiting for one of the larger craft to return from netting in the sound so that the whale could be towed to Mystic. Though its blubber was rotted, the reservoir of oil in its head was intact, and more valuable than the oil from the blubber. Some of the
younger men sat on the edge of the dock with lances, ready to stab any sharks that followed the blood in on the tide. A gaggle of children danced along the dock above the whale, reaching down to poke at the body with oars from their fathers’ boats, laughing.

  On the bumboat, the older man looked up from coiling his rope, peering across the cove to where the boy stood on the tower.

  “Isn’t that Denison’s son?”

  The younger man stopped pedaling his wheel and squinted, shading his eyes with one hand. The sun had edged up, dull red behind banked clouds.

  “No. No, I don’t think so. Denison’s son is over in Westerly today. Anyway, it’s Ephraim’s watch, he should be up there. That looks like the Rathbone boy.”

  The older man stood up to stretch, frowning.

  “He has no business up there. Running wild since Amos died.”

  The younger man held up a spear against the light and turned it, eyeing the edge and feeling it with his thumb. “He was wild enough before. Out swimming at all hours, for no reason, sometimes out past the breakers.”

  “Well, now. Maybe the boy misses sailing the seas in a barrel.” The older man’s face twisted in a grin.

  “Right, right, wrapped in a sealskin. Heard it a hundred times.” The younger man turned his head and spit into the sea. “I never believed Amos found him like he said. Always full of stories. Tell you what I think. Old Amos got that boy on some heathen woman and lied about it.”

  “Heathen woman. You mean an Indian? Hasn’t been one around here for fifty years and more. All cleared out long ago.” The older man rubbed his chin. “Besides, if Amos had laid with a native woman the boy would have brown eyes and that boy’s got green eyes, greenest eyes I ever saw.” He pushed his cap back off his forehead and sat up straighter, hands on his knees. “Could’ve happened like Amos said. Could’ve been set adrift from some ship that was foundering, stove by a whale. That was … let’s see, four winters back, wasn’t it, the boy showed up? Rough weather that winter, I remember. It wouldn’t have been the only ship wrecked. It might’ve been a ship carrying skins from up north. What was that brig that passed through last fall? The Nuuka? Nuucha? Carrying all kinds of hides—bear, fox, some seal, I think.” He pulled his cap down tight and returned to coiling his rope. “Like baby Moses floating in a basket. That’s where Amos got the name, you know.”