The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  “Perhaps unsuitable …” Mordecai muttered, carefully pushing the booklet back into the dictionary. As he began to flip through the pages—looking, I assumed, for some other entry—a loose page slid out and floated to the deck, unnoticed by Mordecai. I looked down at a crude drawing in black ink of a sailor and his beloved clasped in what I took to be a lovers’ embrace, but before I could make out any significant detail Mordecai snatched up the drawing, restored it to its place, and snapped the dictionary shut. Shaking his head, he continued work on his map.

  I shrugged and looked back at the chart.

  “I wonder what happened to the other wives.” Some of the wives still alive were among the first on Mordecai’s chart. But this meant they were among the eldest. What had become of the younger wives? I stared at the chart and tried to guess from the dates and lists of sons under each name what had happened.

  “Beulah arrived at Rathbone House to find newborn triplets. But she passed no wife on her way.” I checked the names. “The wife before her, Felicity, must have died in childbirth.”

  I ran my finger along the long line of names. No sons were listed under one wife.

  “Silence. I think Silence was discovered to be barren and was made to walk the gangplank.”

  Mordecai looked up, his eye bright. He hesitated, then said, “The grates in the windows, on the bottom floor? Those date from just after Desire’s time. Perhaps she deliberately plunged into the sea.”

  I opened the chart again and looked at the second row, the next generation of Rathbones. The word “Son” appeared several times below each wife’s name. I counted, wondering if some of the wives had overlapped to produce so many. Though there were gaps here and there where no name appeared, the wives had borne more than fifty sons. Next to some “Son”s was an initial or number: H, B, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Seeing my puzzled look, Mordecai leaned over.

  “Harpooner. Boatheader. First-Oar, Second-Oar, and so forth.”

  “What about their names?”

  “Those were their names.”

  In some lists half the sons were crossed out; in a few all were gone. I saw no mention of daughters.

  “For each child born one perished at sea.” Mordecai sat up straight, staring out over the water. His pencil, forgotten, dropped on the half-finished graph. “The sons returned but once in a year, later even less, their voyages stretching to three and four years as the ships ventured farther in search of fresh herds of sperm. Some died quickly during chases, thrown overboard and drowned, or consumed whole by their prey. Others were reduced by degrees, leaving their limbs behind in increments on successive voyages.” He opened one of the logbooks and flipped through the pages. “One boy lost only the tip of an ear to the snap of a colossal jaw. Some were so ruined that their brothers were thankful when they sank in the sea, their entrails spiraling behind them.”

  I flipped back through the pages to the start of the journal and saw entries in a different hand. Not Mordecai’s spidery script but the careful block letters of someone unaccustomed to writing. A boy or man whose voyage was cut short; the entries spanned only a few weeks. I wondered whose son had written these, and if his mother or grandmother was one of those still alive on Mouse Island.

  Mordecai got up and began to stalk back and forth, grasping the lapels of his jacket and gazing out to sea.

  “Moses reigned for three decades, the undisputed monarch of his maritime realm. Many other fishing families from Naiwayonk and neighboring towns sent their own sons to sea. All yearned to direct the flow of whale gold into their own coffers, but none had the preternatural abilities of Moses’s clan. He and his sons knew before anyone else when the whales were coming, long before spouts showed on the horizon. When the whales near the coast thinned, and the ships went in search of herds, Moses and his sons always knew where to find them. They lived on land as they did at sea, their native skills honed by ceaseless practice, working as one organism.

  “Other families couldn’t match such prowess. They sank hope and fortune into ships that were lost at sea, ships that crawled back into port with their holds nearly empty or their meager harvest gone rancid from lingering too long in distant waters, hoping for one more whale that Moses and his sons may have missed. The Rathbone ships returned so laden with sperm oil that they threatened to sink. In the early years, whales were towed home to burn on shore, in the cauldrons of the great shed that hung over the water. Later, tryworks were built on the ships themselves, enabling each ship to harvest many whales before returning. In the great years each Rathbone ship brought back two thousand barrels, the oil of forty whales, from each voyage.”

  Suddenly conscious of how long he had been speaking, Mordecai stopped pacing, folded his legs under him, and went back to his graph, taking up the pen and beginning to ink in his lines.

  I lay on my stomach on the warm deck and spread the pages flat, looking at the long second row crowded with sons. Below that was a third row with only a few names sketched tentatively in pencil, too pale for me to read. The fourth row was blank except for my parents: Verity Rathbone Gale and Benadam Gale. Below my parents was my own name, in the fifth row, if row it could be called, having only my name in it and, to one side and at some distance, Mordecai’s name, floating, unconnected. I wondered briefly why his parents’ names, Abiah and Hosea, didn’t appear above him. Mama’s brother and his wife had died in a storm at sea, Mama told me, when Mordecai was just a baby, on their way to visit Hosea’s family; she came from Gloucester, Mama said, far up the coast. I had always remembered Mama telling me this because she had never mentioned any other outsider woman marrying into the Rathbones. Or any other marriages, for that matter, not in her time. She had no sisters that I knew of, and the uncles who had moved away had never married. From a broad expanse at the top, the chart of the Rathbones dwindled to a trickle.

  I thought of the framed silhouettes that mapped the migration of the family profile down the years and up the stairs at Rathbone House. I pictured Moses’s wax profile, with its blunt features and bountiful hair. I asked Mordecai if he could identify the subjects of the other portraits. He looked up from his inking.

  “The next portrait, the one in the elegant hat, was, I believe, Hepzibah’s son Bow-Oar. That would make Bow-Oar your great-grandfather. Of the later portraits I am unsure.”

  I drew a faint line on the chart from Moses to Hepzibah with a pencil.

  “I wonder what he saw when he looked at Hepzibah? It’s almost as if he could see the cluster of eggs in her stomach. The way you can see through a blenny that’s not yet grown, or a squid.” I looked at the lists of sons under each wife. “Maybe he wished the wives could give birth to a brood of babies in one spurt, like a splitfin. A whole whaleboat crew in one burst.”

  Mordecai stared at me. He tugged at his collar and cleared his throat.

  “I beg your pardon, but neither Moses Rathbone nor any man could view the subcutaneous contents of his wife. Besides which, a warm-blooded mammal’s eggs do not reside in its stomach, they are located …” He lifted a finger to point somewhere on my body, faltered, and seized a ruler. I waited for Mordecai to become engrossed in his map again, then took up the pen and drew small portraits above the names on the chart that I now knew: first Moses, looking like his wax portrait, then Hepzibah and the other aunts as I thought they would have looked as new wives, with small, neat faces and thick dark hair. In the row below, the row of sons, under each crossed-out name, I drew an oar, snapped in half. I closed the book and lay it next to Mordecai.

  I picked up the telescope and wiped the spray-spotted lens on my shawl, admiring my braids in the glass.

  “Mordecai. Do you think I’m like Hepzibah?”

  Mordecai looked at me warily. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, like my great-great-aunts. I look so much like them and not at all like you and Mama. How is it we’re so different?”

  He looked up at the mainsail above us, its long curve taut with wind.

  “You did not just
spring from the forehead of Zeus, you know.” One side of his mouth twisted up briefly.

  Mordecai turned back to his work. I lay on my side and directed my lens back toward Mouse Island.

  “Mordecai.”

  His pen skipped on the page and he swore under his breath.

  “What is it now?”

  “What about the daughters? Surely Moses’s wives had daughters too? And why did Mama stop visiting them?”

  “Why didn’t you ask Euphemia your questions?”

  “I did. She just smiled and said, ‘We have told our story in the cloth.’ ”

  I had since considered the curtains at Rathbone House, and the weavings I had seen on Mouse Island, and tried to order them in my mind. The early curtains showed fishing scenes or teeming sea life; then came patterns in which I could make out sperm and harpoon, until the patterns overtook their subjects so that all I could recall were rigid geometries of square and rectangle. Then the patterns fell away until the last weavings depicted nothing I could name nor any fixed color; they looked like thin layers of the sea.

  “I know my aunts were not telling the truth about the daughters. They couldn’t all have been stillborn or sick … Maybe they were exposed on the rocks, like the Spartans did with female infants, though Moses probably would have chosen something more efficient. Then there were those fires the men made before they sailed. I wonder if those offerings they made were all four-legged or finned?”

  Mordecai had stopped listening. I had been trying to speak lightly, but I shuddered, thinking of Mama’s response when I asked about my brother. He was smaller even than you, so we threw him back. I wondered that I had not been thrown back instead.

  The air grew cooler. My new shawl, adorned by my aunts with iridescent fish scales, tinkled in the freshening breeze.

  “Mordecai, you should wear your new cape.”

  “Yes, yes, certainly. Practical. Seaworthy.” He didn’t look up.

  I sighed. I stood and stretched, feeling the smooth roll of the deck under my feet. Avery’s mate climbed in the rigging above me, adjusting the trim as the wind rose and veered south-southeast. I wrapped my shawl closer and descended a ladder into the afterhold, which was pleasantly dark and still after the bright deck. The space was filled with covered barrels and crates stacked to the ceiling. The walls were lined with shelves and drawers, packed with trade goods: bolts of cloth, casks of aromatic spices and tobacco. On a high shelf was a row of ladies’ hatboxes, some striped or patterned with flowers, and next to them neat stacks of men’s hats of varying styles. I chose several and returned to the deck.

  Mordecai suffered me trying on each hat while he scratched at his papers. A beaver stovepipe, tall and glossy; a round-brimmed coke hat; a cocked bicorne; a sugarloaf with a high crown and stiff brim. None of them were practical at sea. I noticed a crimson brim poking out from Mordecai’s suitcase, a familiar tricorne shape that had recently adorned an ivory head in the attic. First glancing at Mordecai to make sure he was not watching, I pulled the hat slowly out. Though the stiff red felt was creased and flattened, I was able to prod and pull it to something of its proper shape. Its ribbon cockades retained their former glory.

  “Why not wear this one?” I held it up in the air.

  Crow dropped down from the rigging and plucked the hat from my hand—Mordecai lunged for it unsuccessfully—and skimmed away over the water. Crow circled back, dropped the hat in the sea on the windward side of the brig, out of reach but in plain view, and landed on its crown. He settled to eat a sardine that he clutched in one claw. The sardine didn’t look fresh; he must have stolen it from some barrel in the hold. Mordecai and Crow eyed each other. When he had stripped the fish, Crow lifted off, hovered above us, and dropped the skeleton on the foolscap. Mordecai flung the bones over the side. He bent over his paper, blotting water with the tail of his jacket, muttering.

  I moved closer and leaned over to look into his face.

  “Whose hat is that?”

  He silently deployed a protractor, trying to ignore me. Crow returned to his perch on the hat, bobbing beside us on the water, preening his feathers and running his beak along the brim to clean it.

  “I told you. I found it in a drawer.” Mordecai fanned his drawing with the billed cap to dry it.

  In the attic, when I had turned the hat in my hands, it had smelled of fresh sea air, and tobacco, and something more elusive, warm and faintly sweet.

  “Mordecai, I want to know.”

  Waiting for him to respond, I suddenly remembered a storm that had come through a few weeks earlier. The wind had been unusually powerful and had blown for days; for a fortnight afterward each tide washed a few dead creatures onto our beach, creatures I had never seen before: eyeless fish of inky black; transparent, shapeless polyps torn from deep reefs; nameless seabirds tangled in long twists of weed, all long in the water and smelling high.

  Mordecai sprinkled sand on his map and lifted it carefully from the deck, then pursed his lips to blow off the sand.

  “I’m not certain you’re ready to hear the true story.”

  I stood up and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Mordecai. I may not have benefit of your years, of your wisdom, but I’m ready. I’m strong enough.”

  He looked startled. He lay his map aside and removed the new blue spectacles he had acquired from the captain’s stores. He cleaned the lenses on a corner of his coat and returned them to his nose.

  “How old do you believe me to be?”

  I appraised his white hair, his pale skin and faded green eyes.

  “Thirty? Five and thirty?”

  He gave a little laugh, and smiled at me.

  “I am twenty years old.”

  My eyes widened. I looked closely at his face. Mordecai was twenty? That couldn’t be. The aunts’ shiny salve didn’t disguise the dried appearance of his skin. He looked long-salted, his flesh not wrinkled but sucked close to the bone, the water drawn away. Not that I was a keen judge of age, having lived so confined a life myself. I had first guessed my aunts’ ages at perhaps seventy, though they had all passed ninety, and a few one hundred, years.

  “But how could that be?”

  Mordecai rolled his map and tucked it away in his case, then stood up, knees creaking. The beaver stovepipe, last among the hats I had been trying on him, fell from his head; he picked it up, looked at it absently, and put it back on. He leaned to snatch the spyglass from the deck and, holding it behind his back, began to pace, glancing my way now and again.

  “But we were not talking about my age, were we? We were talking about the hat. I found it on the widow’s walk.” He looked directly at me, sharply, the faded eyes now bright. “It belongs to the man in the blue coat. The man with your mama.”

  My face went hot. I looked over the rail at the red hat, on which Crow still bobbed on the waves. I remembered now that the hat had appeared in Mordecai’s attic on the same evening the strange man had appeared on the widow’s walk. I knew that Mordecai knew about the intruder and had heard him looking for me in the halls, but I had no idea he had witnessed what I witnessed.

  I pictured a wide back in a blue coat swelling over Mama. The sound of skin scraping against sand. A strange man holding me up by the hem of my frock, letting me spin like an insect he had caught and wanted to examine before crushing it.

  Mordecai turned away and stood at the rail, looking out over the sea. On the green islands of the archipelago the shapes of buildings began to show through thick trees.

  “Captain Tayles, I once heard her call him. I’ve searched for that name and anything like it in all the logs and journals, and never found anything: Tell, Taylor, Tyler … He must have been on some ship that passed through Naiwayonk. Or perhaps she met him elsewhere, I don’t know. I only know that it has been going on for years.” His mouth twisted and he tossed the glass up and down. “I have my spying places, too, you know. I used to listen to them. I would crouch at the bottom of the rope ladder and listen. The
y heard me, once, coughing. She leaned over the edge and saw me. That’s why she hid me away in the attic. Your mama and that man were afraid I would tell your papa, when he came back. They wanted to make sure I couldn’t.”

  I looked at Mordecai and saw the young man under the pale skin and behind the faded eyes of my tutor. The little boy sent to live in the attic, alone. He felt my eyes on him and stood up straight, clearing his throat. He reached to wipe his brow and felt the stovepipe hat, pulled it off, glared at it, and tossed it to the side of the deck. His hair sprang out of its neat pigtail and blew around his head in the wind.

  “Why do you think your mama always walks up there? She’s not hoping for your papa to return. She’s afraid he will come.”

  I thought of her walking the boards, night after night. Mama, faithful and abiding. I pulled my knees up and lay my head on them. I closed my eyes. I remembered an entry in a whaleman’s logbook that Mordecai had read to me, describing how he and his mates had tapped the sperm’s oil. They plunged a great ladle into the dead whale’s head, into the vast pool of oil in the case, over and over, until it was empty. I felt as hollowed out as that sperm.

  After some time I took up Mordecai’s journal again and opened out the chart. I drew Mama’s face above her name, her hair coiled tight, her collar buttoned high on her neck. I drew Mordecai’s face with its mist of white hair, and my own face, counting out and adding my aunts’ hundred braids.

  My pen hovered above the place where my missing brother’s name should have been. I had Theseus in mind, as he faced the Minotaur; his small, sturdy form and thick hair seemed to me most like the Rathbone men of Moses’s time. But my brother wouldn’t hold still and pose. The face I drew was too narrow, and the hair would make no firm wave but only floated. It ended by looking much like Mordecai’s: not a face to confront the Minotaur. I rubbed the drawing out and started over, this time trying to match Jason’s bold profile as he seized the golden fleece from the tree. I sketched in his face and armed him with the sword of Aegeus; I drew the many-headed Hydra, already slain, lying behind him. Jason’s eye turned to look at me. He had something to say, but his mouth was only a smudge through which he couldn’t speak. Something moved behind him: The children of the Hydra, the skeleton warriors born from its teeth, sprang up from the ground and started toward me with their swords, clanking and clattering.