The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  “Miss Rathbone.” He pulled off his hat. The powdered wig was gone. I was surprised at his hair, a dark gold, thick and wavy, tied simply at the back of his neck. His face had lost its gray cast, his cheeks reddened by the wind. “Forgive me for just showing up like this, I only … I wondered if there’s anything I can do for you, any service I can offer?”

  I opened the door a little more and stood blinking at the glare.

  “How did you know?”

  “Captain Avery happened to mention—”

  “Of course.”

  It would be polite to invite him in, I thought, standing there. He took a step back and put his hands behind him.

  “You’re alone here?”

  I nodded. Larboard and Starboard had disappeared the day after Mama died.

  We both stood in silence.

  “Well. If there’s anything, anything at all I can do.”

  I watched him walk away, down to the landing below the rocks. Beached there was a craft that strongly resembled a barge of ancient Egypt, with a gilded hull and long striped oars. Its crew were walking back and forth on the strand hugging themselves, bare-chested men in pleated skirts, shivering in the winter air. The Starks, I saw, continued to plunder the epochs of history for fashion, though Roderick seemed by his plain clothes to now be following some other course. He climbed into the barge, looking back at the house as the oarsmen pulled away.

  He didn’t knock again in the months that followed, but I would often wake to find packages on the stairs outside. I knew they came from the Stark kitchen by the dishes inside, which were patterned with jackal heads and lotus blossoms. They held not useless bric-a-brac but wholesome food for which I was grateful, being an indifferent cook: fruits and vegetables from the Stark gardens, still-warm bread (those oarsmen must have rivaled my ancestors in speed to come such a distance with bread still warm), nourishing soups unembellished with birds’ nests.

  • •

  It was a year later when I next opened the door to Roderick. I watched him arrive from the window of my room, this time not in a royal barge but in a handsome little cutter crewed by men in warm pea coats and watch caps. It was an icy morning, early in the new year. The sound was a pale frigid green, like the sky; an easterly wind beat the sea into whitecaps.

  Roderick was dressed like his crew. He pulled off his watch cap.

  “You look cold, Mr. Stark. Would you like some tea? I’ve just made some.”

  I led him up the stairs, through the round hall, and into one of the parlors. His step slowed as he took in the golden walls, tarnished but still dully gleaming, and the room’s sparse furnishings: Lydia’s settee; the spinet on which Claudia had played. I gestured at the settee. On a small table next to it I had already placed the tea tray.

  “I’ll just get another cup.”

  When I returned from the dining room, Roderick popped up from his seat. I sat at the end of the settee and poured our tea. He lifted his cup tentatively, sniffing at it.

  “My aunts make it. Rose hips, mostly, a little nettle.”

  Roderick took a few polite sips and set his cup down.

  “It must be healthful. You’re looking very well.”

  I looked down doubtfully at my musty gown, the algae-brown one my aunts had made, and put a hand to my hair, which was loosely coiled on my neck.

  “Oh. Well. If I do, I have you to thank, Mr. Stark. If it weren’t for your kind gifts, I’m not sure how I would be surviving this winter.”

  “I’m so glad. I mean, not that you’re barely surviving. It’s just, is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “No, I manage quite well. Thank you.”

  I looked at him sidelong as he fumbled with his teacup.

  “You’re looking well, too, Mr. Stark.”

  I was surprised that it was true. His grim face could now be better described as rugged, browned by sun and smoothed by wind. His lank frame had acquired muscle, his thin hands, sinew. Those dark blue eyes, sad before in his gray face, now sparkled.

  “Please, call me Roderick.” He looked down at himself. “If I look well, it’s my turn to thank you. If you hadn’t started me thinking about what I wanted to do, what I really wanted to achieve—”

  “Me? What do you mean?”

  “When we were looking at the old portraits that day, you spoke of my returning to the family trade, of doing something useful. It struck me that I’d never allowed myself to think of doing something I actually wanted to do. But not being a merchant, buying and selling. I wanted to make something useful, something real.”

  To his family’s chagrin, he had given up his studies in the arts in Boston and now spent his days in the warehouse on the wharf, teaching himself woodcraft with his great-grandfather Calvin’s old saws and adzes and plumb bobs.

  “The old Rathbone ships were built by Starks. Did you know that? The Misistuck was built by my great-grandfather and his brothers in 1772, the Sassacus and the Paquatauoq …”

  We talked of the ships, and how they were rigged, and how it felt to be out there on the sea, and the hours slipped by.

  • •

  “What are you reading, Mama?”

  “It’s only an old journal.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Maybe later.”

  Little Mordecai shrugs and runs down the lawn and off and away to the point. He shimmies up a tree, a young pine springing from among the charred trunks above the tide line, where the sheds burned. He clings to the top of the tree, swaying, fearless, waving to me and shouting; his voice is carried away to sea by the wind. He’s brown from the sun, nimble and hardy, as keen-eyed as me. In him live the Rathbone gifts and the golden beauty of the Starks. It seems the tide has finally swung back; I hope it has. I fold the chart and close his uncle’s journal.

  Mordecai lies in Circe’s cove, in a grove of slim white birches, where the stilts nest each spring. Circe lives on in her cave and keeps Mordecai’s grave free of droppings. Captain Avery helped me bury him there. I considered sending him to sea with Mama but there wasn’t room for more than one on her boat of bones. And Mordecai wouldn’t have wanted to go with her.

  A warm arm comes around my shoulders and squeezes them. Roderick still, sometimes, reminds me of Mordecai. His way of striding stiffly, hands clasped behind his back, when he’s thinking; the light that comes into his eyes when he’s excited about discovering some new, better way of pursuing his craft. I like to imagine that Mordecai, given a different path, might have been as content.

  “Is it that time of year again?” Roderick smiles at me, brushing wood chips from his hair, taking the journal gently from my hands. “Maybe you should put this away for good.”

  “Someday, maybe.”

  We watch as the first of the skiffs and dories arrive down at the dock for the day’s work. Little Mordecai Stark also watches from his tree. And now my name is Stark, too. I’d never carried my father’s name. My mother had christened me Mercy Rathbone, after her forebears, but I’ve decided to strike out on my own path.

  “Two new orders this week!” Roderick shouts down to the men now striding along the dock toward the boat shed.

  The men raise their arms and cheer—local fishermen, who have been learning shipbuilding with Roderick in the off-season. With the new orders, Roderick will be able to take on a few of them full time. A saw begins to whine from the boat shed and the sharp scent of pine wafts up to the house. The first new brig is being built on the Rathbone dock—not the dock of the elder Starks, who still cannot bear to hear my family’s name. Maybe they will relent when they know that soon there will be a new little Stark (a girl, I know) who will likely look much like her brother, and so may remind the elder Starks of their own lost golden girls and warm even their chill hearts. Euphemia and Thankful will come to help, as they did when Little Mordecai was born. There’s a nursery now on the third floor. We moved curtains from the hall of beds—my favorite pair, those woven with twin octopi—to hang from the crib, and my aun
ts have made bedding of fresh-loomed wool and soft rugs of sheepskin. The nursery is next to Mama’s old room, where Roderick and I now sleep. The long black table is back in the library, where the shelves are slowly filling; Captain Avery brings us a box or two of books each time he visits.

  The workmen’s wives head up the lawn, chattering, greeting me as they pass into the house. They come each morning to help me in the kitchen; the men breakfast with us. My cookery improves, though I would still prefer to stand atop a cold crosstree than before a hot stove, and the house fills with pleasant aromas and lively voices. It pleases me to see all our china and silver shining around the table, and a man at each place. All nine of my great-great-aunts come once a month for dinner, rowing over and back in a single whaleboat, three to each bench. I visit them often.

  Crow flies out of the house and lands on Roderick’s shoulder. Crow has taken to Roderick, perching on his head or napping in a corner of the boat shed while he works. Roderick enlists him to carry small tools or blocks of wood, though Crow soon tires of the work and carries off bright nails and hinges to his nest. He visits the attic now, too, where I still keep all of the things that Mordecai so long preserved, those that were not lost on our voyage.

  When the new brig is finished, it will join a merchant fleet in Boston. There have been no orders for whaling ships. Captain Avery, who often stops by, told us that he sees fewer and fewer whalers at sea. He’s heard that men are building towers on the land now, out on the prairies, not to look for whales but to draw up oil from deep in the earth. Black oil that will replace the white spermaceti.

  “You and I will take her out in a month or so.” Roderick gazes down at the brig, smiling. “You can teach Little Mordecai the names of all the sails.” He kisses me and heads down to join the men.

  I watch the men working for a while, then turn toward the point, to where the trying sheds stood. They, too, burned on the night that Mama died; it was their red glare that had shone through the knotholes in Mordecai’s attic. Papa must have set them on fire as he left. The last of the old gold went with them, the gold which had, in Bow-Oar’s time, brimmed, molten, in one of the great cauldrons in which the whales’ oil was rendered.

  When the tryworks were abandoned, the cauldron of gold was left there to cool and stiffen, alongside a cauldron half full of old sperm oil. Plenty of other gold was kept in those days in the house, gold minted into coin; the men had no need for the gold in the cauldron and later forgot it. I had once, when a child, rowed my skiff up to the great doors and peered into the gloom inside. The shed was built over the water, the cauldrons suspended on chains high above the sea. The vast iron vessels, each large enough to hold the oil of a seventy-foot sperm, hung too high for me to see into them, but light entered through the gap between the doors and played on the surface of the cauldrons, and on the water below, bright ripples of gold. When the sheds burned the chains gave way and the cauldrons tumbled into the sea. The stiff gold lies shining on the ocean floor. The spilled oil rejoined the sea it came from.

  There was some gold left in the house, a few hoards of coins that we found in drawers and cabinets, where the crows had hidden them. Just enough to furnish Roderick in the tools and materials of his craft, with a little left over to get by until the boatyard begins to yield a profit, with which I am more than content.

  I touch the three bones at my throat and think of both my brothers. They are the bones of Gideon’s finger, the ones that Mama wore, but I think of them as Gideon’s, and Mordecai’s, and mine.

  I turn back to the open sea. A whale blows there … no, it’s only clouds. But it could be a school of sperm just under the surface, looking up, casting their own clouds into the sky from the deep with great long breaths.

  Crow, who had been away somewhere at sea, flies down to me. In his beak he carries a folded piece of blue paper, the letter Mama always kept tucked in her sleeve, trailing straw from his nest.

  NAIWAYONK, CONNECTICUT, SEPTEMBER 10, 1845

  MY TALOS—

  When you are out on the full blue of the ocean, with no land in view (surely sailors have a word for that), distances must be deceptive. When you see a ship against the sky, on the horizon, how can you tell its true distance or size by eye, when no landmarks guide you and nothing else sails near? The horizon line must, in clear weather, be some absolute distance from you on the open sea—is it twenty miles as the crow flies? The distance a gaze can travel undisturbed by the curve of the earth is only a short line, a tiny segment of her circumference. Can you be sure, though it has the shape of a thousand-ton schooner, that such a ship may not be much smaller, much closer? If you had only one eye and could poorly judge space, and suffered a little from fever, besides: Couldn’t that eye mistake a child’s toy, carved of balsa wood with handkerchiefs for sails, bobbing lightly by, for a grand galleon?

  Though the books tell me that the earth is round, I would rather think of her as flat, as she was for so long, until one of the Greeks came along and made her into a sphere. I would rather think of you, with the heavy body of the ship beneath you, moving straight and true, steady against wind and whale alike, sighting with your sextant as far as you wish, no curve blocking your gaze. You might then, standing on the forecastle, look back in a straight line to me, while ahead your goal stays always in sight. Though but a speck at first, you would only need to squint hard enough to see it.

  When I think of the earth in her cloak of ocean, turning her back to every kind of weather, always spinning, I wonder what would happen if she suddenly stopped to rest, while your ship sailed on, unknowing; and when the sea reached the topmost point of the stalled globe, it would slide on, unable to stop, spilling off the edge into the ether with all its travelers. How barren the earth would be then. If she were still flat you would see your end coming, whatever its distance, however small its signal. Perhaps she’s better round.

  But still, when I look out to sea from shore on a clear day and watch a ship approaching, when I first spy the tips of her masts, I prefer to believe that, rather than rounding the curve of the world, she rises straight upward, from the depths of the sea, like Aphrodite.

  Ever Yours I Am

  —Verity

  —The boy grows stronger, more beautiful each day. The girl, too, is fine.

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My agent, Mollie Glick, believed in this novel early and late; I’m so thankful for her insight, energy, and dauntlessness. I’m deeply grateful to my editor, Alison Callahan, for her masterly hand and warm support throughout. Many thanks to Katie Hamblin at Foundry Literary + Media, and to James Melia, Bette Alexander, and all of the wonderful team at the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

  The graduate creative writing community at NYU provided invaluable support and inspiration. I’m especially grateful to Breyten Breytenbach, Chuck Wachtel, Irini Spanidou, Garth Risk Hallberg, E. A. Durden, Martin Marks, and all my workshop comrades.

  Many thanks to PJ Mark, Drenka Willen, Jill Schoolman, Molly Daniels-Ramanujan, and Lorin Stein for early encouragement.

  For their support and love along the way I thank my father and mother, Kenneth and Maureen Clark; my sisters, Karen Clark and Barbara Clark-Greene; my son, Bryson Clark; Joan Bassin; Gigi Buffington; Steve Evans; Kristin LeMay; Sue Pak; Ann Snowberger; Dino Stoneking; and Michael Tirrell.

  Many thanks to Emily Mahon for the jacket design and to Michael Collica for the book’s interior design.

  I’m forever indebted to Diane Cole for helping me learn the profound value and joy of making art.

  My deepest gratitude to Eric LeMay, without whom I would not have become a writer.

  SOURCES

  Thank you to the New Bedford Whaling Museum for permission to use part of a verse from a scrimshaw whalebone busk in their collection for Claudia’s song: “This bone once in a sperm whale’s jaw did rest / Now ’tis intended for a woman’s breast” (whale panbone busk, NBWM Collection, gif
t of the heirs of Nathan C. Hathaway, 1923.6.35). Mystic Seaport’s online collection of logbooks and journals provided models for Benadam Gale’s journal entries. “Blood Red Roses,” which Mordecai sings on the deck of the Able, is a traditional sea chantey. “A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury,” the caption to an image in the fictitious booklet Diseases of the Seaman from the Rathbone library, is an anonymous saying about the nineteenth-century practice of treating syphilis with mercury. Apologies to the ghost of Matthew Fontaine Maury (American oceanographer and astronomer, nicknamed “Pathfinder of the Seas,” 1806–1873) for appropriating his Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic as Mordecai’s invention; certainly Mordecai, given opportunity, might have created such a wonder.

  A Note About the Author

  Janice Clark is a writer and designer living in Chicago. She grew up in Mystic, Connecticut, land of whaling and pizza.

  FACEBOOK PAGE: www.facebook.com/JaniceClarkAuthor

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