The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  May 7

  The whales came today. They never surfaced, they were far below me, far from shore, swimming north, three of them. I felt them coming. I knew they were sperm from the old stories, their great blunt heads, pushing slowly through the water, one after the other. The last turned on his side as he passed under me, opening his long jaw to take in a stream of little fish, then sank down until he was swallowed by black. My stomach twisted when he opened his jaw and I felt like I was sinking, too. Benadam ran down to the point as soon as I told him. It was full dark already, I knew he would see nothing, but he’s still down there.

  May 8

  He said the whales used to pass by the island twice a year, close in to shore. He’s still down at the point, standing there with his lance, scanning the water, as though he could reach them. There are at least twenty, strung out for miles. They’re still passing but they’ll be gone soon. None of them has breached since first light, they’re all well down. Too far for him to reach, with no ship.

  I asked him why he didn’t just keep E.’s cutter. He sent it back, right after the wedding. He said he wouldn’t sail any ship of my brother’s. And that the Argo was too small, anyway, not suited for whaling.

  I wonder if I should have told him about the whales.

  If he hadn’t seen me and brought me here, he would be out on the Misistuck by now. He would be in a whaleboat now with his lance, not standing down there on the rocks, staring.

  I know what he’s thinking. He can’t forget what E. described, what E. never saw or felt himself—the boats, the chase. He wants to face something stronger than him. He wants to know what it feels like to be afraid.

  It’s what I’ve always wanted, too. For it to be the way it used to be. I knew it the moment I saw him, that he could meet the whale the way Moses did. And now he has me instead, and the whales swim on and away.

  July 2

  One of the women, Hannah, is teaching me how to clean the fish and to cook a little. At first I was impatient with the work. I only did it to pass the time until Benadam comes home each night. But more and more I like spending time with the other wives and the children. We talk of common things: the weather, the children’s health, and such things … but I like it. I never would have guessed how nice it is just to sit among other women, peeling apples or mending a smock or braiding a girl’s hair, light voices and laughter all around me.

  The men all fish, from the little boys to old Nate, who turned eighty-three last week. There are a dozen houses, each with a family. Nine children, the youngest Hannah’s baby, a fat little girl with red ringlets, Sarah. Hannah lets me hold her.

  Little Sarah is not much older than Mordecai. She’s so plump, and laughs all the time. I told Hannah about Mordecai. I told her about E. and me. She hugged me, and said I couldn’t have known any better.

  I glanced up at Mordecai. He stared at me, then turned away to face the wall.

  September 6

  Benadam says M. can come live with us. But it’s so bright here, I could never make our little house dark enough. He always cried whenever the sun shone on his cradle. Outside, no matter how well bundled, how cloudy or bright, the sun found his skin and burned it. I thought heavy curtains would work, in the darker rooms, but he always made his way to a window and tried to crawl out, or stole out a door. After I found him down on the docks that day, chasing crabs, his skin blistered black, that was the last time he went outside. He can’t come here. It wouldn’t work.

  October 28

  The sea is cold now, I’ll have to stop swimming soon. The fish are moving into deeper water, too deep for me. I swim now with only kelp for company. I hope Bemus has remembered to bring up the quilts to the attic for Mordecai. I hope E. does not think of me too much. Conch and Crab will keep busy, taking care of him. They will have forgotten me. I’m sure the girls will have everything they need, Bemus never forgets.

  March 9

  I should have known. I should have felt it. Bemus’s writing was so shaky, I wasn’t sure I was reading it right at first. E. tried to hide it from me, how bad it had gotten, but I knew, he could barely walk when I left. He would have been twenty-five next week.

  April 10

  I should have stayed. I should never have left him.

  April 16

  It’s mine, now. The empty house, the rotting ship. The gold.

  He wants to go back. He wants to rebuild the Misistuck and go whaling. He says we can do what E. tried to do and failed. Renew the family. Regain the sea.

  If he had kept E.’s bargain and married Scallop, he would be whaling right now, he said. I told him what Bemus wrote to me, that the Misistuck never came back. I told him about the six wives and the six babies.

  He didn’t listen. He said he’d buy a new ship.

  I told him what I’ve realized, living here. We already have the sea. We have our house and our garden and our life here, and the other families. Our children can grow up to be fishermen like their father. Not like the Rathbones. Once you kill your first whale you will never want to stop, the more you kill the more you will want to kill, until there isn’t a whale left in all the seas.

  Now that I have you, I said, I don’t want you to go after the whales. I only want you to stay here with me.

  May 2

  I haven’t told him yet. There will be two, I know.

  October 8

  They came just after dawn yesterday. A boy and a girl. The women were all there, helping me. Heather gave me a cuttlebone to bite on for the pain. They’re perfect. Fine fat babies with thick heads of hair and pink skin. Their eyes are bright and steady, their limbs strong and well knit. Benadam looked so happy. But tonight he is back out on the point, looking for the whales.

  December 11

  If we went back in the spring, I would see Mordecai. And Conch and Crab, and I could go visit Periwinkle and Cowrie and all the girls at Birch Rock. Benadam would be busy with fitting out the ship for months. And he would have to find men up the coast who know how to whale, to train the islanders, that would take time. He would be with me at least through next winter.

  February 23

  It’s still so cold …

  I said I’d go back.

  I made him promise never to take Gideon to sea.

  I closed the little book and looked at Mordecai. He lay quietly among his pillows, staring up into the hull. No starlight shone; instead, a dull red glowed in the sky behind the knotholes, though it was, I remember vaguely thinking, too soon for dawn.

  “She didn’t know that what she and Erastus did was wrong, Mordecai. Who was there to teach her?”

  Mordecai turned his head away.

  “Maybe Erastus did know, maybe that’s why he went away. But he came back. He couldn’t help himself.”

  I picked up Mordecai’s journal and unfolded the chart. I looked at the fourth row of faces: Verity and Erastus, the twins, the seven shell girls. Under them, in the last row, Gideon and me. And floating off to the side, Mordecai. I picked up a pen and drew a line between Verity and Erastus, and connected it to Mordecai. I drew a line from Mordecai to me and from me to Gideon.

  “You were the real reason she finally agreed to go back to the house.”

  Mordecai shot me a look filled with bitterness, and turned away again.

  “I would be lying if I said that she was not also relieved to have you … aside. But she did care. Before Papa was gone all the time, before she stopped seeing what happened around her. Before she began carving.”

  Mordecai turned from the wall. His voice was low and hoarse.

  “She could have been kinder to you, too, Mercy.” His eyes softened. “Sister.”

  My hand strayed to an open crate that stood next to my chair and fumbled with the excelsior that spilled from it.

  “I was so like Gideon. She didn’t like to be reminded of him, of Gideon alive. She preferred to tend to his bones. They stayed still, in one place.”

  I looked up at the marble bust of the woman. Crow,
clutching her hair, spread a wing out to preen, a fan of feathers that shadowed her eyes.

  “Remember when I asked you about the red hat? When you told me how you used to eavesdrop on Mama and the stranger up on the walk?”

  He nodded.

  “That wasn’t a stranger. That was Papa.”

  I told him how I had realized it was Papa who came and went, and how I hadn’t wanted to tell him back at Circe’s cove, when he was already so disappointed about not finding the sperm.

  “But she called him another name, not Benadam. Tayles. Captain Tayles.”

  I flipped through the diary.

  “I know. She uses that name sometimes in here. Only it wasn’t spelled Tayles, it was Talos. Don’t you remember?”

  On the worktable, under Mordecai’s strewn papers, were a few of the red-leather books. In the volume stamped with the silver face of Jason, I found what I was looking for: a giant made of bronze, straddling a harbor between two points of land. I turned the book so Mordecai could see.

  “He was one of the Titans, remember? He had a single vein, from neck to foot, closed at his heel with a bronze nail. Medea deceived him into believing that he would become immortal if he removed the nail. Or some versions say she hypnotized him so that he tripped and fell, driving the nail from his heel, and the hot oil poured out into the sand.” I looked at the sea that Talos straddled, which the artist had etched in stylized waves that rose and fell in a perfect rhythm. “He wanted to prove that he was stronger than the whales, than the sea. But Mama kept pulling him back.” I smoothed the page with my hand; the sea, printed with gold ink, shimmered as the paper moved. “And I think it was guilt that always drove him away again. Guilt over losing Gideon.”

  Mordecai stared down at the engraving.

  “You know now, don’t you, why Mama and Papa put you here, in the attic?”

  Mordecai looked puzzled, then his face cleared, and he nodded slowly.

  “They had to keep you up here, out of the light, so it couldn’t hurt you and … they didn’t want you to know the truth about your father.”

  Mordecai was so quiet. Crow hopped from my shoulder to Mordecai’s and settled there. He had never done that before.

  I pulled Mama’s little book from my pocket and flipped through the pages to the back. I hadn’t told Mordecai everything. There were other, later entries in the diary, other things he didn’t need to hear, about Gideon and me.

  She wrote that we were as alike as two otters, as strong and as quick. We both could swim before we could walk. Papa would take us, one in each hand, and skim us through the surf, then toss us on his back and dive in and out of the waves and Mama would laugh. She wrote of an old seaman bouncing us, one on each knee, on the dock on a fine summer day, spoiling us with rock candy and boiled sweets from a little paper bag. Rowing together in the blue skiff, with small oars to fit our hands—gliding along close to shore at dusk, the sky going dark, the sea quiet under us, Mama calling to us, saying it was time to come inside. A warm and cloudless day when Gideon’s baby frock was changed for knee breeches and he ran laughing down the pier, the water sparkling on either side as he ran.

  I had strained to remember what Mama remembered, but it had been too long ago.

  Each of her memories—only pictures to me—stayed separate, like tide pools too high on the shore, never joined by a sweep of sea into something deeper and broader. Gideon had been away more than he had been home.

  I sat up and looked down at Mordecai’s face. The purple-black blotch had spread farther, down his cheek and along his neck, dark seaweed on a white beach.

  I saw too, now, Gideon’s face before me, not salt-white but bright brown and full of life, smiling, his green eyes so like mine. Gideon was like Papa. Gone or longing to be gone when he was right beside me. I had found Gideon, as much as I would ever have been able, in finding my sympathy with the sea. I had found something I wouldn’t lose.

  Though Gideon was my twin, though his face rose before me, it was Mordecai I was thinking of. It was Mordecai who was my true brother. I had looked into the distance so long that I hadn’t seen what was near at hand. If we don’t cherish those who stay near, what do we have? Only longing. Longing which we grow to love because it’s all that we have.

  Mordecai’s pale-green eyes had drained to nearly clear. His breath rattled faintly. He might have had something left to say, but he couldn’t speak it.

  I pulled down the blanket that covered Mordecai. I looked at his thin mottled body and felt for a moment that I had no choice. I felt the same tidal pull that my forebears had, that Mama had. I forgave her, a little. I wanted to sail with Mordecai one last time.

  Instead I drew the blanket back up, and waited with him until he was gone, and kissed him goodbye.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MAMA SETS SAIL

  {in which Mama shines bright}

  SHE WOULD HAVE liked her funeral. The boat of bones, her bier; the sail I sewed from her gowns, its deep blue billowing against a like sky; Gideon by her side. I dressed her in her corset, and in the muslin gown in which she was married and whose cloth had cushioned Gideon’s bones in the trunk.

  The trunk went, too, stowed in the stern. In it I neatly rearranged, on a fresh bed of kelp, the objects that Mama had provided to keep Gideon company: a flute carved of bone; a soft kid glove of her own; a little round tin with a ship on its lid, filled with sweets, a snack for the afterlife. To these I added my dead crow and the woven bracelet.

  I considered carving a headstone of whalebone for her, and consigning her to the worn wives for burial in the graveyard behind their house, where all the Rathbone women who lived on Mouse Island are buried. The island being of solid granite, the graves were made in packed earth brought from the mainland long ago, which the sea is slowly reclaiming; at high tide the stones are partially sunken, and the water will take them all in the end. But I knew Mama would rather be in the sea, where Papa always was.

  After I set the boat aflame and pushed it off from shore, before the flames took hold, Crow flew down and plucked a few hairs from her head for his nest. She burned clear and bright for as long as I could see her. With her boat sailed a flotilla of crates, unopened crates, all labeled “For Mordecai.” I found them in the attic after he died. For all his hunger for the bones and specimens sent to me, Mordecai hadn’t wanted to open any gift from Papa to him. He never received the only gift he ever wanted: a place on Papa’s ship. A space in his life.

  As I watched her go I knew why Mama had invited the suitors on that last night. She wasn’t searching for a substitute for Papa, or trying to forget him with a landsman who found no siren call in the sea. She meant to make him jealous, to lure him home with the threat of finally giving him up. And I think, too, that she knew how it would end.

  She had been so lonely. If she lay with every sailor who knocked at our door, she was little different from those old Rathbones who bedded the worn wives so generously, but for her sex. Maybe it was less a choice she made than a map written in her blood. Fish, after all, thoughtlessly scatter their spawn in the sea; they must be profligate to make sure something sticks in their watery world to make more of them. There’s a kind of comfort in knowing that it’s not all up to us, that we must swing to and fro with the tides. We are all still subject to the ocean’s coming and going.

  Watching her go, I hoped I was made more from the stuff of my great-great-aunts than that of Mama. Like those early Rathbone men, the wives, too, borrowed of the whale, not in any showy gleam but in their mute fortitude. My great-great-aunts passed each day from dawn to dusk at their loom; Mama, too, spent her time in making, but where my aunts brought together, she scraped away, trying with her blade to plumb the mysteries of the sperm. I think it made her feel closer to Papa, in keeping close to what he had loved more than her, or me. Close not to that vast creature that swam the oceans, huge heart pumping, breath spouting, strength unreckonable, but to that which remained when all else had been hacked and burned
away, reduced to irreducible bone, quiet and still. Then she moved into it, under the surface, looking for what was lost.

  Watching Mama sail away, I didn’t notice when he arrived; when I looked out Papa was just there, standing in the bow of a whaleboat, balancing easily, rising and falling with the waves, a ship’s length away. He wore the blue jacket, salt-crusted, buttons missing. He wasn’t the giant in the attic dangling me from one hand, or the colossal shadow on the sinking island, or Talos, bestriding the harbor of Crete. He was just a man in an old blue coat.

  He raised his arm to me.

  I could see the longing in his face. Gideon must have looked so much like me.

  I knew the longing was for my brother, not for me. But I raised my arm, too.

  When Mama’s boat had slipped over the horizon, I looked out again to find Papa gone. I reached around and touched the place on my back where the birthmark shaped like a ship had so long floated to find that it had sailed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  GOLDEN CHILD

  {in which the tide swings back}

  IT WAS ONLY after the knocking had gone on for some time that I made my way down the stairs. Even then I hesitated before opening the door. The sound was so loud in the empty house, and I had not spoken a word in a month; I liked the silence. I opened the door a crack and peered around its edge. Roderick Stark startled me, standing at the door, dark against the glare of the sky behind him. In shape and bearing he looked, as he had when I first saw him, much like Mordecai. Crow, too, was startled; his claws sank into my shoulder and with a loud croak he flew off and up the stairs. When Roderick stepped closer I saw that he had shed his Oriental garb for a sober coat of dark wool and a soft felt hat, though his face was no easier to look at.