The Rathbones (45 page)

Crow climbed into the hammock and it swung gently to and fro, as though under sail on a soft sea. I sat on the end of my bed, one hand to the hammock to rock it, and began to sing a lullaby. When the bones were set in motion they started to tell their story.

{in which Gideon sails three times}

FIRST VOYAGE
March 15, 1849–August 7, 1849

The first time we were gone for nearly half a year. Mama didn’t want me to go but Papa took me anyway. I was four. I remember you watching us leave from the dock, and Mama looking after us from way up high. I remember you getting smaller, and the dock, and the town just prickles of light, and then there was only the dark sea.

I didn’t sleep at all the first night. Papa strung a hammock for me next to his, in his cabin. I liked how it swayed, the creaking sound the ropes made, and Papa’s deep breaths. I crawled out of the hammock and climbed up onto the long seat under the windows that stretched across the stern. The wake behind the ship was like a big white fan under the starlight. The ship lifted and tilted under me. I clutched the harpoon Papa had carved for me. In every wave I saw the shape of a fin or the curve of a fluke.

I woke the next morning to bright sun and salt spray on my face, the crew hurrying and shouting around me. Papa had hoisted me on his back, wrapping my arms tight about his neck, so thick my hands could only just clasp together. He kept one hand there to hold me safe and then we were running up the shrouds of the mizzenmast. He climbed with only one arm but so fast and smooth that I hardly bounced as we went up. I looked down at the water, farther
and farther away and at the same time bigger until all I could see were green water and white waves. I caught glimpses of the deck far below, through the stays and sails that surrounded me. When we reached the crosstrees he slung me over to the topman and slid down the ratlines, back to the deck, then straightaway he went into the whaleboat that was being lowered over the side, the crew already clambering in. I leaned from the safety of the topman’s grip to watch the boat splash down, the long oars slicing into the water. Half a league off the starboard bow I saw a fountain of spray and under it a great long shine of gray.

Papa was standing in the bow, one foot braced on the rail, both arms raised. He held a long slender wooden spear in each hand. He looked like a statue made of metal, so still and bright under the sun. The whaleboat moved fast across the water, the oars flashing out and cutting through the long swells. Already the boat was almost within striking distance of the whale. It was a sperm, the first one I had seen. Papa said they used to swim thick in our own bay, years before. This sperm was nearly as long end to end as that row of rooms downstairs, the one with all the beds: seventy feet from blowhole to flukes. He lay in the water, holding his great blunt head up high, not swimming away but lying there waiting, breathing and blowing. The boat was only a cable’s length away from him. The oars all lifted together and hung over the water. The whale lay there a moment longer, its head turned toward Papa, waiting for him. Papa stood like before, both arms raised, motionless except for the rise and fall of the sea. Then the whale slowly turned in the water and began to swim away.

The water between the whaleboat and the
Verity
was so bright in the sun but still I could see everything sharp and clear: the long wet curve of the whale’s back as it swam just ahead of the boat, Papa’s arms lifting higher; the first spear flashing out, then the other at almost the same moment. The flukes burst from the water, twisting, slapping down into the sea, spinning one man out of the boat—his foot caught in a coil of rope and he was gone under. Then the whale
was sounding in a surge and swimming away, the jet of white spray now a bloody mist, the rope streaming after it, the men leaning hard on the oars. Through it all Papa stood solid in the prow, urging them on, faster. Suddenly it was over. The boat slowed, the great gray body bubbled up and slowly turned over. The crew hooked on and they towed the whale back to the ship.

The
Verity
was manned with a full crew, all from Arcady. There were three whaleboats with six men in each boat. But Papa would allow only one boat in the sea with the whale, and no one but him held the spears. The men all clamored to be chosen each time a whale was sighted, all wanted to be with Papa. My favorites were Jim and Peter, who crewed in the first boat that day. They said they wanted to take me to Arcady when we got back and we would go nest-hunting up in the cliffs.

Each time Papa chose a fresh crew, driving them hard, urging each man to row faster and stronger than the last. The chase sometimes lasted for two glasses, or longer with a fast whale, though once in range Papa never missed his mark. The men were so tired they slept all the next day after a chase, but if a whale was sighted the next morning Papa was out again with a new crew. And the boats tired, too; one or another was always under the carpenter’s hands, stove-in planks being repaired or bent davits straightened. Papa needed three boats to be sure one was always at the ready. The men didn’t mind; they all knew they would have their turn soon enough, and they were kept busy cutting up the whales and melting them down.

No sooner had one whale been harvested than another would appear. Some days we saw pods of thirty or forty, all swimming together alongside. I would lay along the yard and look down at them running close to the surface, so that the light dappled on them and the water ran gleaming off their backs. The calves would travel in the middle of the pods, their bodies sometimes covered by the little fish that rode on them. They blew their plumes of spray up at me and clicked and called to me. Some days I saw right whales, their double
spouts making rainbows. Or humpbacks blowing rings of bubbles, trapping big columns of fish in the rings to feed on. But we were after only the sperm.

Each day I took my place in the crosstrees. On quiet days when no whales were in view, I pointed out other things I could see from my perch. A distant flock of gulls glutting on an endless stream of haddock. Once, a storm that made a waterspout go spinning along the surface. But I stopped pointing when I understood that no one else on the ship could see such things. The men would roll their eyes and chuckle when I claimed to see such distant sights. I had always been able to see far, but on the
Verity
I realized that I was different. It was not only distant things that I could see clearly. I could see well under the surface of the sea, deeper than our draft. I knew what the soundings would be before the mate made them. I felt reefs and shoals coming up and tugged at Papa’s coat to warn him. You know what I mean, sister. We both have Moses’s gift.

We sailed through the warmer waters in which the whales traveled on their way south, going for weeks without sighting land, only sea from rim to rim. The men all said they had never known such clear sailing: a steady wind always on our beam, the
Verity
’s best point of sailing, no matter the compass point, as though, the men said, the wind shifted just for us.

I swam each day with Papa when the weather was fair, which was most all the time on that first voyage. Each day, before beginning his watch, Papa put me on his back and dove deep off the stern. We swam alongside the ship in the warm water. Swarms of fish parted around us, passing so close that I felt their smooth scales.

The weather held fair all through the summer, and no week passed without its count of sperm. The men called me their lucky charm. It had always before taken at least a twelvemonth, sometimes twice that, to fill the barrels. By the time we turned for home, early in July—a month from Naiwayonk—the oil of sixty-two whales ballasted the ship. The
Verity
, heavy with the oil, rode through the sea as steadily as Papa stood in his whaleboat. With no more empty barrels, no more
need to hunt, Papa passed the weeks of homegoing pacing the quarterdeck, front to rear and back again, wearing a path in the wood. He called out never-ending orders to the men, making them change the trim of the sails without rest, to be sure each breath of wind would help speed us home.

All through the last leg of the voyage Papa manned the wheel himself, a full night and a day. I stayed aloft all that time, too, higher than him, first carrying up a blanket and filling my pockets with biscuits. I looked down at him, walking back and forth. Each time he reached the foremast and turned to walk back again, he took a compass from the breast pocket of his jacket and opened its case to look at the braid of hair he kept there, pale woven with dark. He forgot I was up there, or he wouldn’t have let me stay so long. I saw Naiwayonk come into view long before Papa, though he’d kept watch all those hours. I know I saw Mama long before him. She stood on top of the house, her shape black against the sky where the sun was setting, glinting off a curve of green glass; a dome was being built there, behind her, supported by a scaffolding of posts and planks. She was holding on to the scaffolding, looking toward the
Verity
as it sailed toward Rathbone House.

SECOND VOYAGE
October 7, 1849–February 21, 1850

The whales were boiled at night. Some nights I watched. Down below in the dark Papa would stand on the edge of the pit. The trying fires flared on his face and lit up his teeth. He swung the big hook over to where the whale hung along the side winched in a great sling and stripped down the first fat coil of blubber. His boots squelched in oil when he turned, swaying the long spiral down to the mate in the pit. From the coil the mate chopped a wide chunk and held it in one hand, skin-side down, slashing along it with his blade so the thick pieces splayed open like a book. He said the oil came faster that way. The mate called them Bible leaves. He dropped them into the big pots where the boys stood and stirred, thigh-deep in blubber, flame-bright.

I hung up high on the mainmast, slung from the yard in a ditty bag, an extra one; the sailor it belonged to had gone to the whale. Papa thought I was asleep in his cabin but some nights the cook brought me up there when I asked him to. He knew Papa wouldn’t like it, but he also knew that I would find him the biggest fish in the morning and plenty of crabs to sweeten his stew.

It was our first whale in two months. The men whispered and wondered what they would live on that winter. We had been out for four months and our hold held the oil of only three whales. Some of the men were saying that the whales had all been fished out, others that the whales had grown wise and had found different waters in which to swim. They began to grumble about hunting with only one boat. They wanted to go farther out, they wanted to use easier ways to kill the whale, like other whalers, pikes and spears made from sharp steel. But Papa wouldn’t allow it. He said that the whale, having himself no metal, must be met by only one man and only with wood or there was no honor in it.

One night, after the men had taken a fifty-footer, I watched them take off the head. The wind was shifting, swinging me away from the yard, and when I swung I saw the men crawling along a line between head and body and together they began to slice. Farther out and far beneath the dark surface of the sea silver points began to grow, the first sharks started to rise.

The wind shifted again. Behind the ship the water burned green—the sailors say it’s called phosphorescence. In the bright wake I watched the sailors’ white trousers wave, bleaching in the brine, nipped at by fish. I wanted to dip my hand down into the wake to see if the green fire hurt.

Onto the deck the men lowered the whale’s head (the sphinx, they called it), laying it to rest along the cut edge. Soon the men would stand on the head and break into the case, dip into it with their long ladles for the oil.

I swung in my hammock and saw below me the mate and the men bent over the Bible leaves with Papa, murmuring. The sailors
skimmed the whale’s own skin from the pots and fed it into the fire to make the flames soar high. The whale cooked best that way.