The Rathbones (23 page)

But one ship had not been enough for his sons. The wives produced a steady stream of boys, enough so that, though some didn’t return from sea, many were left to vie for places on the whaleboats. All were reluctant to be left behind on the ship or, worse still, left at home, waiting out the months until it was their turn to sail. The sons clamored for more ships, and more ships Moses had given them; there was gold in plenty to buy more. On and off, staggered between voyages, Naiwayonk harbor held a pair of brigs—the
Sassacus
and the
Misistuck
—and a square-rigged bark, the
Paquatauoq
, all deep-drafted vessels capable of ever-longer voyages, to the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. In the Thousand-Barrel Years some thirty sons slept in Rathbone House.

But the whale was always honored, as Moses had planned. Once the oil was rendered and the barrels filled, the body stripped of all that the men could use, the carcass went to the sharks. At the end
of the hunt, Rathbone ships always lingered one last night at sea, to give thanks for the hunt. A great iron try-pot filled with the whale’s blood and organs boiled on the deck, the fire lighting up the ship as if it were burning—red and gold, the sails white flames above. By the whale’s light the men sat in a circle and, first setting aside Moses’s portion, cut up and shared the whale’s raw heart, big as a man. They raised their voices to the sky and to the dark waters around their ship, and gave thanks for a successful hunt, the flames a beacon of their arrival.

Moses had been expecting the arrival of the
Misistuck
, aware of its approach long before it was finally seen, hull up on the horizon, the night before. There was no fire, no beacon; the decks were cold and dark. The ship had docked early that morning after a voyage of eighteen months, its stern trailing a mile of weed from weeks becalmed in the southern latitudes, its hold two layers deep in sperm oil, every barrel filled. Moses was impatient for news of the voyage. He longed to see Bow-Oar, the
Misistuck
’s captain, and to find out why no fire had been lit. But no sooner had the ship docked than Bow-Oar left again. While other brothers streamed into the house, laughing and jostling each other up the ladders and through the door, eager for fresh food and dry beds, Bow-Oar was setting off in one of the ship’s whaleboats with his boat crew, none of the six having set foot on dry land, though all had been a year and a half at sea.

Bow-Oar had been less attentive to his father in recent years, in those few weeks when he had been home between trips, but Moses knew that his son was busy with his many duties. He had always been Moses’s favorite and closest to him in skill. Like his father, Bow-Oar could kill a sperm with one strike of the spear. Other sons could occasionally kill with one thrust, but not every time as Bow-Oar did. As the surviving eldest, many older brothers having gone to the whale, he was responsible, too, for overseeing the training of green whalers. Moses knew that he had not come ashore with the rest of the returning crew and had been absent all day. He was pleased to finally hear Bow-Oar’s step, more so because none of his other sons had paid
their respects since returning nor had they brought any offering of the whale.

Heavy steps approached along the hall. When Moses turned his head, Bow-Oar was standing at the foot of his bed, something long and golden draped over his shoulders.

Maybe here, at last, was his offering. Bow-Oar stepped close to the high blue bed; Moses craned over the edge and reached to touch Lydia’s dangling arm.

The girl didn’t feel right. She was not like the other wives. She had no mineral tang, no whiff of sulfur, and no salt at all. Her eggs were not fat and thickly bobbling but lay in slender yellow threads.

He beckoned his son close, so that his voice, a hoarse whisper, could be heard.

“This pale thing? This is what you have brought me?”

Bow-Oar stepped back, clutching Lydia tighter at wrist and ankle.

“No, Father, this one is for me.”

Moses drew his arm away and sank back in his bed.

“Where is my offering, my proper portion?”

Bow-Oar hesitated. It wasn’t too late then. He could have chosen to explain it all to his father.

He had driven his men hard all the way home. The whaling grounds of the South Atlantic were thick with sperm, but before the
Misistuck
’s two thousand barrels were all filled with oil, Bow-Oar had decided to start north. He planned to fill the remaining empty barrels—a hundred or so, a few whales’ worth—on the voyage home. They had been at sea for sixteen months, and Bow-Oar longed to get back.

He could not wait any longer to claim his golden prize. He had first spied Lydia and her sisters nearly two years ago, on a trawling expedition for fresh wives. He had glimpsed them walking on the grounds of the Stark house—from a league away with his keen eyes—and had thought of little else since. He would go back for them the moment the
Misistuck
returned from this voyage.

But the ship met with no sperm on the way north. Though Bow-Oar
knew that the whales were always scarce in the North Atlantic at that time of year, he thought they would have luck enough; the sea had always answered him. When they were two or three days from Naiwayonk and still had found no sperm, he began to worry. No Rathbone ship was allowed to return without every barrel filled; none ever had. Finally, a day away from home, the
Misistuck
’s lookout spied a small pod of sperm: three young whales. Bow-Oar stared out at the spouts, considering.

Moses had taught his sons to always leave two whales alive in any pod, however small, and to take only mature sperm, leaving the young ones so they could make more whales. But these three sleek young whales, coursing smoothly along not a league away, were easy picking; they should yield just enough oil to fill the last of the barrels.

What would it really matter? If he stayed at sea, looking for a larger pod, for older whales, it could take weeks. And Moses wouldn’t know. If he still came on board when the ship docked, as he used to do, and checked the barrels, Moses would have sniffed out the difference, smelled the clean light oil of the young whales threading through the heavier oil and known what Bow-Oar had done. But not anymore. Moses never left his bed.

Bow-Oar could not wait. He would drain a herd of too-young sperm if it meant reaching the golden girls a minute sooner.

He went out with his crew to kill the three whales, himself harpooning the first. Instead of lingering one more night at sea, the men towed the dead whales to burn in the great shed, unused since whaling ships had begun to carry their own tryworks twenty years ago. By the time the
Misistuck
docked, her brick hearths had long been cold and swept clean. The men, busy with the whales, had lit no beacon of arrival. No whale’s heart had been set aside and shared out. The ship had docked, and Bow-Oar had hurried away to the Stark Archipelago.

Now, standing in front of his father, Bow-Oar could have chosen to confess. But he was ashamed of killing the three young whales, ashamed of lighting no beacon and bringing no offering.

If he had confessed, Moses would have chastised him, probably punished him, how would be hard to say—no Rathbone son had dared disobey his father before. But, after his anger abated, Moses might have given his son a chance to redeem himself; he loved Bow-Oar enough to forgive much. Bow-Oar might have felt relieved and grateful, and returned, chastened, to the old ways.

But Bow-Oar did not confess. When Moses asked for his offering, his son said, “I have it, Father. I will get it for you.”

Bow-Oar walked out into the hall, carrying his burden carefully. Lydia hung from his shoulders as though dead. She had, in the end, given in to seasickness, barely stirring when Bow-Oar hoisted her and slung her from his neck as they docked. The whaleboat in which they had arrived only a few minutes ago was already all a-tanto, hung from davits on the deck of the
Misistuck
, swabbed, and flogged dry. A fresh crew was moving about the deck silently and efficiently, stowing the hold, splicing and knotting rigging. A pair of men hung over the starboard side on a platform, painting onto the sober gray hull of the ship a bright band of scarlet, which Bow-Oar eyed approvingly. He admired, too, the rack of new harpoons along the rail, their iron shafts gleaming dully. Moses had never permitted iron harpoons on his ships when he sailed. Each son was required to make his own weapon from what he found in the sea: a sharpened shell, a shaft carved from driftwood. But Moses would not see the new harpoons. And the new harpoons would strike deeper and harder. Even those few men who had not always killed with their first strike would kill now.

Bow-Oar raised a window and called down to the crew.

“Send me up the chum bucket.”

A heavy wooden bucket rose on a pulley in the rigging outside the window. Bow-Oar leaned well out, reached inside, and felt around among the odds and ends of fish, used by the crew on calm days to fish over the side for the mess table. He lifted out a dripping piece of dolphin. Returning to Moses’s room, he found his father dozing in the high blue bed.

Bow-Oar gently took the old man’s grasping hand and closed it on the piece of dolphin. Moses woke and sniffed at the lump. There was no smell of smoke. And no hum of the whale at all, only a weaker beat.

“It doesn’t smell right. It’s not right.”

Bow-Oar settled the old man back in bed.

“It’s all right, Father. It’s sperm. We had rough water coming in, and the fire was doused.”

Moses held the lump in his hands and tried to sit up straight in bed. He turned his face toward the sea and held up his hands, murmuring. He bit into the lump, chewed a few times, then his jaw slackened and he fell back, soon asleep.

Bow-Oar turned, carrying the bucket in one hand, Lydia still draped across his shoulders, and moved back along the hallway. He stopped at the first window he came to, lifted the bucket to the sill, and tilted the chum into the sea.

•  •

Lydia struggled up from sleep, her head pounding. At first she wondered if she were still in the whaleboat or instead on some larger vessel; the house seemed to shudder under her and she still heard the sea and smelled it. Her stomach heaved, though it was by now empty. She didn’t remember the end of her trip across the sound or being carried into the house. She realized that the pounding was not in her body but at a door, and that she lay on a bed in a dark room. She shook her head to try to clear it. The door cracked open and in a shaft of light she recognized Bow-Oar’s silhouette, his leaping hair. He started to enter, then turned to someone outside, blocking the doorway with his sturdy body. She heard him speak in a low tone, heard answering voices.

“But what about us, brother?”

Their voices were pleasant, laughing. When Bow-Oar didn’t move
from the door the voices turned hard. The door lurched inward and Bow-Oar leaned against it to keep it shut. He stood there for a minute or so, listening; then the voices, grumbling, moved off.

A flint was struck, a lantern lit. In its flame Lydia saw that the bed on which she lay stood in the middle of an otherwise empty room that stretched away on either side into darkness. The wall behind Bow-Oar wavered in the lamplight, in places a pale gleaming blue, in others only raw joists and bare boards. She smelled the sharp scent of freshly cut wood. Though it was deep night she thought she heard the sound of saws somewhere under her, and again the house seemed to tremble. Cool air poured in at the window frames; no glass hung there.

Bow-Oar stood at the foot of the bed, holding the lantern high, looking at her. He bent and set the lantern down on the floor and began to shed his stiff blue suit.

Lydia couldn’t know that Bow-Oar had seen her and her sisters out walking months before he brought them back to Rathbone House. That once he had seen the long and golden Lydia he had lost his appetite for fishermen’s daughters. She didn’t know that he’d singled her out from among her sisters, the tallest and brightest of the three Stark daughters. She only knew that he leaned over her now, his body taut and gleaming in the lantern flame, smelling of clean sweat and salt, his green eyes steady on hers.

Lydia no longer felt confused, or queasy, or ashamed. She thought of the young men who had courted her, none of whom had ever done more than kiss her hand, of their soft white skin, faintly scented with sweet talc. They seemed now a weak wash in comparison to the man above her, though he looked little more than half her length. She laid herself out on the big bed, wet from the rain. He hauled her up and peeled away her crackling gown to find the sweet pink meat beneath. He probed her secret parts, searching for the pearl, and when he found it, plucked it until she gasped. He turned her over, mounted her long body, and rode her like a fin, his dark hair tangling with her
gold. Rain slanted in, rain and salt spray soaking their bodies, the raw-wood walls, salt from their skin and the ocean soaking the bed so that they might have been making love in the sea itself. They rocked in long slow waves until Lydia dropped, exhausted, into sleep.

Toward dawn the door opened and a woman came quietly in, a toddler balanced on one hip. She was Trial Rathbone, fourteenth of Moses’s wives, mother of three fine sons. She swaddled the little boy closely, laid him on the floor at the end of the bed, and began to crawl on hands and knees toward the top. Bow-Oar, without turning, pushed her off the bed with a foot. Trial stood up, brushed wood shavings from her muslin shift, picked up the baby, and left the room.

The black squares of windows began to gray. Lydia woke to faint light, cold, and damp. She pulled a cover over her legs and looked around. The room was larger than it had seemed in the dark. It stretched from east to west, the windows at either end showing scudding cloud in a pale sky. A thin rain drifted through the open frames. She saw that the only furniture in the room was the bed. The raw-wood smell came from the unfinished planks of the floor and the unplastered joists of the walls. The bed was large and finer than those in her father’s house, with gracefully curved headboard and footboard and four tall turned spindles of dark polished wood. She recognized the spindles, she had seen them in the bottom of the whaleboat, their finials protruding from a sheath of oilcloth. One long wall had been plastered and papered in blue silk moiré; it was this that had gleamed pale blue in the light the night before. She wondered if the paper, too, had been in the bottom of the boat, hung by unseen hands sometime during the night. In the wet air the blue strips were peeling from the top, sinking slowly down. A few had just begun to slip; some were slowly curling down the wall with a wet sucking sound, some lay heaped on the floor. The smell of wallpaper paste mingled with those of spilled seed and salt spray. The golden gown, spread beneath her and Bow-Oar, seemed a faint blue in the sodden air.