The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  “Excuse me, may we introduce ourselves? This is Mordecai Rathbone, and I am Mercy Rathbone. May we know your name?”

  The woman didn’t look directly at us, though I believe she tried. Her eyes traveled tidally, rolling high in their sockets then sinking down like waves on a beach, never stopping. The birds were thick around her; most squatted down and drowsed, those nearest stretched their beaks up to her. In her lap lay a cluster of garden snails. As we watched she placed one on a large flat rock beside her, cracked it with the small rock in her hand, and dropped the meat into a waiting beak.

  “What lovely birds. Do you take care of them all yourself?” I said, nudging Mordecai.

  “Yes, yes, what fine … robust specimens of Himantopus mexicanus you have here. I congratulate you.”

  The woman only replied in the language of the stilts. I thought at first that she understood us and was trying to respond, but the sounds she made seemed after all directed at her birds, not us.

  As my eyes grew used to the gloom, other, smaller creatures took shape on the rocks around the woman and in the crevices. Each was familiar and yet altered. I recognized several small echinoderms; clumps of agarum and sea palm; the sand dollar and the sea urchin, leached of their color and clinging not to a reef but to a tuft of moss; the brittle star become pliable; the horny sponge moistened. When Mordecai, too, could see them, he bent and lifted them close to his eyes, examining first one then the next, exclaiming softly as he turned them in his hands.

  We ventured farther into the grotto. Smaller caves were here and there worn in the rock, lit by wan shafts of light from openings in the rock above. In one such recess was the woman’s sleeping place: A fine bedstead of the early colonial era stood, somewhat unevenly, on the rocky floor, its crewelwork hangings still bright, protected in the dim cave against fading. I thought I saw, farther back in the cave, the end of another bedstead, though the light was too dim for me to be certain. In another recess stood a carved chest on which were stacked a few porcelain dishes and candlesticks of pewter. Other niches held baskets. I dipped my hand in each and held it up to see: tree nuts, some kind of twisted root, late berries. My stomach rumbled; the berries were tempting. I had not tasted anything land-grown these many weeks. The kip-kip came again; I turned to see the woman gesturing and nodding toward the baskets, smiling. I grasped a handful of dark, prickled berries and ate gratefully.

  Mordecai, meantime, tried to slake his thirst at a thin trickle of water running down one wall, pressing his mouth against the stone with little success. The woman, watching, gestured eagerly toward a small pool just behind her, fed by some underground stream or spring. Mordecai knelt at the pool’s edge and sniffed at the surface, dipped a finger, and tasted. His furrowed brow cleared and he put his lips to the pool and drank thirstily. Crow left off tormenting the stilts to join Mordecai at the pool, plunging a greedy beak and drinking deep. Refreshed, he took up a perch high on the cave wall and used it as a base to dive upon the stilts, snatching snails from their beaks. After several dives, the woman called to him. He first approached her as she beckoned gently, then retreated, sidling nearer by degrees until finally he hopped in her lap and allowed her to stroke his head.

  My skin began to creep in the dark and humid space. I picked my way across the rough cave floor to get outside, to light and fresher air, Mordecai following behind me. When he stooped to pass through the low entrance, he struck his forehead against the roof of the cave with a loud smack and a howl. Wincing, he lowered himself slowly to sit cross-legged on the rock, hand to head. When he pulled his hand away I was relieved to see that he wasn’t bleeding, but the blood had jumped under his skin to start a great dark bruise already. I burrowed in his bag and found his bandanna, knelt beside him, and gently bandaged his head. Mordecai, grimacing, pressed his spectacles closely against his eyes, drew up his knees, and sighed. We both stared out to sea.

  I knew the woman’s eyes were on us. Without turning my head, I leaned close and whispered, “Who is she, Mordecai?”

  Mordecai looked down at his hands. In them he turned a sand dollar, not one of the stiff disks with which I was familiar but a soft and spongy circle.

  “I believe she may be a relation.” He smiled.

  Around us wandered a few stilts, fresh from the cave, blinking in the sun. Mordecai gathered one up as it passed close and cradled it in his arm. He examined, tenderly, its scanty wing.

  “They do not need wings here. How admirably they are suited to their environment. Note the beak variance, fully two inches longer than the species mean and angled to adapt to the land-bound snail. Such a beak could no longer pry the recalcitrant sea mollusk. But these stilts no longer need the sea. It looks to me as though they found plentiful sustenance here, stayed and built their nests, and over time lost the power of flight. They had no need to strive further.” Here he patted his bag. “Though I have it on authority that they did once fill these skies.” He looked off, over the water. “And, beneath them, the great herds of sperm filled the sea.”

  He cracked open his satchel. Though it had looked moderately old when we started out, the bag now told its true age, its brittle leather bleached and cracked. He took my hand in his and with his other hand reached into the bag, then slid the woven bracelet onto my wrist. I had realized it was missing back in the little temple on the Stark Archipelago, that I hadn’t seen it since showing it to Mordecai our first day on the Able. It felt tighter, whether by salting or because my wrist had grown larger, or perhaps both.

  Mordecai leaned back against a rock and closed his eyes against the sun that now seemed so bright after our time in the cave. He appeared to be suffering from the same drowsiness that afflicted Crow. He reached up and pulled my bandage lower on his face so that it shadowed his eyes. His skin, golden in our days on the Able, was starting to burn, and his eyes were as sensitive to the sun as they had ever been. When he straightened his legs he winced, as though the joint pain that had vanished with all our swimming had returned.

  “It is so warm here. I do not like the cold, it does not agree with me. Though I didn’t mind it then …”

  His mind was wandering, I thought.

  “What do you mean, ‘then’?”

  He leaned forward and looked at me groggily.

  “Did you know, Mercy, that the northern whalers used a barrel nailed to the crosstrees for a crow’s nest, to shelter the lookout from the cold? Though it provided little protection in those latitudes.”

  We had not spoken of that northern voyage since the day Mordecai fell overboard. I had been startled by his vivid description of the polar bear, certain that he had seen Ursus not in starry form but in the flesh, rearing against the Arctic sky. So I had suspected then what he told me now, though not all.

  “I rode up there, in the crow’s nest, once or twice. Your papa carried me up himself, wrapped in furs of Ursus. I didn’t care how cold it was then.” He leaned back against a rock, closing his eyes in the sun. “I beheld the aurora borealis. I observed teeming populations of the Aptenodytes penguin filing toward true north.” Mordecai swept his arm across the sky and lost his balance, falling to one side. Righting himself, he slowly smoothed down his wandering hair. “At night great swarms of migrating herring shimmered beneath the ice. If such life thrived so far north in turgid waters, I could scarcely bear to contemplate the glories of maritime life that awaited me to the south.” He paused, drawing his legs up and leaning his chin on his knees. “But it was not to be. I was not to train for whaling, nor to serve in any useful capacity aboard your father’s ship.”

  “But Mordecai. You told me Papa didn’t know about you. That Mama and the man in blue hid you in the attic.”

  “Did I?” His eyes were unfocused behind the blue lenses. I glanced back at the cave. Crow slept soundly in the woman’s lap, while she continued to feed those stilts who were not themselves napping. Most had gathered their legs beneath them and settled to sleep. I was glad that I had not drunk from that pool.


  “Why weren’t you allowed to sail again, a second time?”

  “I was … superseded.” Mordecai turned up a corner of the handkerchief and squinted up at me with a wan smile.

  I felt suddenly very cold.

  “What do you mean … ‘superseded’?”

  Mordecai sighed and waved me away with a limp hand.

  “You need not concern yourself for my feelings, Mercy. I will be comfortable here, as much as anywhere. I shall stay here, and study the stilt and his companion creatures. I shall classify them. A crustacean shall be named after me. Perhaps record my own learnings, produce my own volume. Something worthy to gather dust in the attic.”

  Stay? That wasn’t possible. I searched for something to say.

  “But Mordecai. We have to find Papa.”

  He lay back again on the rock and turned his head away.

  “We both know that will not be.”

  I clutched his arm and shook it.

  “But you can’t stay here. You have to help me find my brother. And make Mama tell me what really happened.” I clutched my braids to stop my hands from shaking.

  Mordecai sat up slowly. He reached deep into his bag and pulled out one more item. I knew before he laid the folded linen napkin in my lap what it was. I couldn’t bear to look.

  “He’s been properly treated. I had wanted to cast him for you in plaster, but there was only enough to repair your skiff …”

  From the cave came, again, the woman’s kip-kip-kip. Those few stilts that had wandered out into the light turned and hurried back toward the cave. Mordecai lurched up and followed them. He trod into the cave like a sleepwalker, knelt beside the woman, and lay his head on her knee. She began to stroke his hair; soon he lay beside her, his head in her lap, next to Crow’s. Mordecai looked as like to her as a twin. He appeared to have fallen asleep but then he opened his mouth and started to sing, his voice slurred and off pitch.

  “Father, Father, sail a ship,

  Sail it straight and strong.

  Mother, Mother, make a bed,

  Make it soft and long …”

  My mouth went dry.

  “Didn’t you hear it? The song?” Mordecai asked.

  I got up from my place in the sun and approached the cave, stopping where bright sunlight abruptly ended and the dark began.

  “Don’t you remember, Mercy? The barrels?”

  “Barrels? Do you mean the crow’s nest?”

  “No, no, the bed your mama made. A bed in a barrel …”

  Mordecai was confused. He couldn’t know what he was saying.

  “He was in the way, you see. Of her … recreations.” Mordecai turned over, stilts shuffling out of his way, so that he faced away from me, his voice muffled. “Your brother. Gideon. She stuffed him in a barrel and left him there …

  “For it was Father sailed the sea,

  For it was Mother murdered me …”

  He fell silent and his head dropped back into the woman’s lap.

  “Mordecai!” I screamed.

  The woman smiled at me, her eyes executing a slow somersault, and petted Mordecai’s head. He didn’t stir again.

  I had to wake him, had to get him to explain. I rushed up to him and pushed and prodded and slapped his face again and again, but nothing would rouse him. Crow lay languid and uncaring among the woman’s soft skirts. One glazed eye opened. I snatched him up and ran out into the light. Slinging Mordecai’s bag over my shoulder, I headed for the boat. I looked back once more, despairing. I didn’t know what else to try. I didn’t want to leave without him but I couldn’t stay. I had to get away from there.

  I ran to the cove and set off across the little lagoon, rowing across its glassy, windless surface, rigging my sail only when I reached open water. I sat on the stern bench, took a deep breath, and started to cry.

  Crow crawled from my pocket, stretched his wings, and hopped to the top of Mordecai’s bag, which lay on the bench beside me. He cocked an eye at the opening, where a peak of white cloth showed, and with his beak tried to pry the opening wider. I gently pushed Crow away and pulled out Mordecai’s journal. I opened it to the chart and stared at the drawing I had made only a few weeks ago. I’d had such a clear, strong picture of my brother in my head as I drew and was so pleased with the likeness. Now I saw only a vague jumble of line and shadow.

  I had, at least, at last, a name. Gideon.

  My brother. After all this time. Mordecai had lied, just like Mama. I tried to grasp that fact, while my mind ran ahead: Stuffed in a barrel? Mordecai was delirious; it must have been the bird woman’s water.

  I slammed the journal shut. I tried to picture my brother the way I always had, until Mordecai and I ran away. I imagined my favorites among the images I had used to assemble him. I chose his head from among the bronzes of the Greeks. I tried Victorious Youth and Ephebe of Marathon, their curls turned verdigris by the sea. I tried my favorite, The Charioteer of Delphi, with his thick bronze lashes, the bright whites of his eyes startling in sea-green flesh. I chose a marble, the Torso of Miletus, for his body, and tried to attach each head to it, but none would stick.

  I wiped my eyes and stood to trim the sail. Cold wind whipped my calves; the hem of my gown now rode above my ankles, no longer soaked by the sea when I stood in the bow.

  Why hadn’t Mordecai ever admitted I had a brother? Why? He had heard the song, too. He had spoken for so long in half-truths that I didn’t know what to believe. I was little better; I had dawdled as long in lies small and large. I had loitered on the Able and delayed going home. If I had known what I would find there, I might have begged the captain to sail on to the Davis Strait after all, and beyond, to that point so far north that the ship would have halted, frozen between two waves. Or I might have returned to the Stark Archipelago and found the jilted grotto of which the gardener had spoken, and become another Circe, attended not by many snowy stilts but by one dark crow.

  A flash of white caught my eye; a single sail, on a familiar craft—there was the Able’s dinghy, not a mile behind me, bearing west toward Circe’s cove, with Captain Avery at the tiller. I was glad that he had already recovered the dinghy, but surprised to see him in these waters, miles south of the Able’s northward course; then beyond the dinghy, a mile or so to the north, I saw the Able herself anchored off a point, saw the glint of a cable curving down into the sea.

  I was not far from the dinghy; I waved, but the captain didn’t notice, intent on his destination. I changed course and tacked back, until I was only a few boat lengths away.

  “Captain Avery!” I shouted.

  He whipped around, his mouth dropping open. I ran the smack neatly up alongside and tossed out a line; he automatically reached for the line and made it fast, but said nothing, only stared at me.

  “Captain, I’m so sorry about the dinghy. We never meant to leave the ship. The wind came up and Crow had chewed through the line and …” I faltered and stopped. I steeled myself to be reprimanded. But instead he reddened and began to chatter.

  “Never you mind. Found her all snug and sound.” He patted the side of the dinghy briskly. “Wasn’t hard to guess which way you went, I knew the wind was north-nor’east, and there’s no other landfall for miles and miles. Never you mind, she’s fit as a fiddle.” While holding my eye, he fumbled behind him for something: a canvas tarp, which he was trying to spread over a group of crates that filled the dinghy. There was also a woven basket full of vegetables and another of apples. Nestled among the apples were a few smaller baskets filled with the same dark, prickly berries I had seen in Circe’s cave.

  “Is she my aunt, then?”

  The captain’s hands froze on the tarp; his mouth opened and closed. He stood up, heaved a deep sigh, and nodded.

  I thought of the second bed I had glimpsed in Circe’s cave.

  “Are there others?”

  The captain slowly pulled the tarp off the crates and folded it.

  “There were. She’s the last of them. Name of Limpet.”
He sat on a crate, lit his pipe, and pulled his collar closer around his throat. A keen little wind had sprung up; the hulls of the boats bumped against each other. He looked sidelong at me.

  “Limpet? How did you know that?” I asked. In my mind I had named her Circe, though the Circe of the Greeks had charmed Odysseus’s men not into stilts but swine.

  “Maybe I did visit Naiwayonk a time or two. And I might have known Bemus, a little.”

  “What about my mother?”

  He shifted on the crate. “Well, now, her I never knew.”

  I realized I was shivering. I pulled my shawl tight and looked toward the island; the white cove was just visible, and behind it the dark rocks.

  “Captain, why didn’t you tell me about my brother? When I asked you, back at the Starks’? I know about him now. Mordecai told me.”

  Captain Avery looked keenly at me, then looked down at the hull and sighed again.

  “Well. I don’t know anything much, miss, really I don’t. I’d heard there were two youngsters up at the house, twins, and that the boy disappeared along with his father. There were a few stories about what happened to him. Just gossip. Nothing that would do you any good to hear.” He glanced up at me. “He’s just gone, has been a long time.”

  I was tired of all the questions, tired of asking them. I gazed across the water, toward Circe’s cove.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on him.” The captain winked gravely at me. “Going back?”

  I nodded. He took up an empty bucket and put in a few apples from one basket, carrots from another. From his breast pocket he took a flask and, unscrewing the top, tipped it into his mouth and took a couple of long drafts. He rinsed it over the side and filled it with fresh water from a cask, then put it in my hand.

  “Best to keep a good two miles or so off Napatree Point on your way back, the shoals there …” He looked up at me, chuckling. “But then you’ll not have any trouble handling a boat, will you?”

  He cast off my line and leaned to push our hulls apart, then stopped and reached out for my hand. When I put my hand in his, he pulled me close and hugged me.