The Rathbones (46 page)

Above the deck I swung between mast and mast and turned my face up to the sky, to the stars beginning to spill from a great gash of light in the black. Papa would have been able to see me if he looked up. He said that I was too young to do what he did. Next year, he said, next year.

Over the rail the sailors stopped beating away the sharks. The ship tilted to starboard as the sharks bit into the stripped carcass, slopping water over the rail and into the pit to make the fires hiss.

On deck in the dark the whale’s head waited, looking up to the sky like me.

THIRD VOYAGE
February 23, 1850–April 12, 1852

I wasn’t meant to go the last time. Mama had made Papa promise to leave me at home after the second voyage. I had turned five at sea.

We came in one evening from the second voyage, having been more than four months at sea, just before dark. Before we rounded the last point, before Rathbone House came into view, we anchored offshore.

We only came back, Papa said, so that we could swap crews and let the men go home to Arcady. They wanted to stay with him, they said, but they had to feed their families. They would go to the cities to look for work. Papa sent the whaleboats off to Arcady to take the men home, asking them to spread the word on their way.

I asked Papa why he had anchored so far from the house. He said he couldn’t let me go inside. He said if I went in Mama would never let me go again. He needed me with him, his lucky charm, he said. We had to go farther this time, we had to find the whales. But he went to the house himself that night, rowing away in the dark, rowing back the next morning just after dawn.

By midmorning enough men to man the
Verity
and more had sailed or rowed from villages nearby, and Papa signed the best of them. Most had crewed on some other whaleship; a few were only
fishermen that Papa had liked the look of and taken on, saying they’d be easy enough to train. Though all the men had heard that the
Verity
’s last voyage had not been successful, they had heard, too, that he was offering not a lay but a set sum, and a large one, no matter how many whales they harpooned.

With the turn of the tide, late that morning, the
Verity
weighed anchor and started to sail away. I was busy in the tops with the rigging and didn’t look back at Rathbone House until the ship had begun the turn around the western point. Mama was not on top of the house as she had been when I sailed away twice before. She was in the sea, far from shore, swimming after the ship, her gown streaming behind her, a dark streak on the gray sea. She was still there, her white face turned up in the water, when we rounded the point and left Naiwayonk behind. I don’t know if Papa looked back.

We sailed farther than on the earlier voyages, which had taken us only a few hundred miles from home, usually running north and south, within easy hail of the coast. This time we headed east by southeast until we lost all sight of land. Papa said we were going to the big whaling grounds in the middle of the ocean. But whatever luck I had brought before had gone away. I once glimpsed the V-shaped blow of a bowhead many leagues off, and once heard the song of a pair of blue whales running deep below, but nothing nearer, and no sperm at all. The weather was queer besides. Papa said the southerlies should have been pelting us with rain in those latitudes, driving us on so that we made two hundred miles from noon to noon. Instead there were only weak gusts of wind from no particular point of the compass and no rain at all. Within a month our fresh water ran low and we had to drink the tarry water we had gathered in sails and funneled into barrels during earlier rains for just such a drought, and we washed our clothes in seawater so that our skin went rough and raw. Not only were there no whales but the fish had thinned out or changed their routes. I felt almost nothing beneath the ship, only a few scattered dogfish and bloodmouths. The sky was empty of birds. There was little for them to feed on.

Papa paced the deck for hours, wearing a path in the wood until it gleamed. Other times he took the wheel himself, though it didn’t take much to keep the ship on course, the winds were so weak. He stood as tall and broad as ever, but it was like he was empty, like all his oil had poured out. The men kept to their duties, which were light without any whales to flense and boil: mending line, polishing fittings that already gleamed. Sometimes, as the air grew warmer, they just dozed under the whaleboats.

I was posted lookout now officially, though I had long served as such. I stood two watches, sometimes three. Papa didn’t object, though I think it shamed him to see me stay awake so long. He knew I was his best hope.

The day I finally saw the whale, we had just crossed the thirtieth parallel. The sea, for days a low, choppy gray, now showed patches of bright green, smooth and still. A cool wind came from the northwest, billowing our sails enough to make the water sing along our sides and put the men in a happier mood. I leaned out from the mainmast top and looked down into the sea. I knew from the mate’s charts that at this parallel a cold stream from the north was turning in a great loop beneath us to return home. The cold was surging up to the surface and bringing with it creatures from the deep, pale, formless things without names. But I felt something larger among them, caught in the churn. I saw a huge dimness rising slowly from far below and I called down to Papa.

I knew he wouldn’t let me go with him. I knew he had promised Mama that he wouldn’t let me go into a whaleboat until I was twelve. I think Mama hoped all the whales would be gone by then. I think she knew I would never have the chance to do what Papa had done.

By then the whale had surfaced, a few ship lengths ahead. He didn’t breach, only rose and lay there, just breaking the surface with his huge head. I could hear his long slow breaths from my perch. Papa looked up at me once, his face shining, then he was over the side, into the boat. I waited until it had splashed down and pulled well away, then slipped over the side, from the stern, where no one was watching.
All the men were pressed against the rail on the port side, all eyes on the whale. I swam just behind the whaleboat, in its wake. I knew none of the men in the boat would see me. They, too, were bent on the whale, only the whale. I kept my head low and stayed close. It was hard to breathe in the churn of the wake, but if I swam in smooth water the men would see me and tell Papa. I swam well, keeping up easily.

The whale didn’t at first seem to know the boat was coming close, it didn’t change its pace. I felt its body pull me closer. I turned away from the boat’s wake and let the smooth surge of water pull me along beside the whale, close to its flank. I reached out and clutched the edge of a great fin and rode along. It was an old whale. I could see in the clear water the places where its skin was scarred in circles by the suckers of giant squid and scored by shark teeth and jagged reefs. I could feel the surge of its heart under my hands. I didn’t know why Papa, why anyone, would want to kill such a thing as that whale. I would have been happy to swim with it forever. I felt the long smooth curve of the whale’s motion as it turned; I knew it was turning to face the men. The whale opened its long, long jaw and drew in a deep draft of sea. I saw, just before I was swept with startled fish down between the rows of teeth and into the dark, its little eye turn in its socket to look at me.

Papa must have seen me, or one of the men saw and told him. By the time the whale was speared and dragged and Papa had pried open its jaws and come in to find me, I was already dead. The whale had not chewed me, I had simply drowned. Papa pulled me out in one piece.

The men were silent as they rowed back to the ship, the whale in tow. Papa sat in the bow with me in his arms. When the boat had been winched up and the men were out, he lay me on the deck and smoothed the hair away from my face. He called the mate over and spoke to him. The mate leaned over the stern where the men were securing the whale with tackle and line. Cast it off, he said. Let it go. The men hesitated, then untied their knots and hauled in their lines,
and the whale began to drift away, north by northwest, its head turning into the wind. They all stood at the taffrail to watch it go, so they didn’t hear the splash on the lee side when Papa dove in. They didn’t see him swim away, eastward. After they realized he was missing and had searched the ship, they thought he had drowned, and headed for home. But they must have had bad luck somewhere on the way, for the
Verity
never returned to Naiwayonk again.

Do you understand yet, sister? Mama didn’t put me in the barrel. She was only welcoming me home. She had made Papa promise never to lose her son at sea. So he told the mate to salt me, lest I spoil on the long journey, and sent me home. You have misjudged her, as I misjudged the whale who swallowed me whole.

{in which Mercy teaches Mordecai all he needs to know}

I
WOKE TO THE
sound of a boy’s voice singing. At first I thought I was dreaming, or that I was reliving that night months ago when I had first heard the voice. That I would look up to see both my crows on the bedposts and go downstairs to find Mama carving in her room. But Crow slept on one bedpost and the other was empty. I wondered if I had only dreamed of Mordecai, too, rising in the well of the walk like a ghost.

Then the voice came, the song, not strong but clear and true, and I knew I was awake.

Crow woke. He was stiff from his labors of the night before. He dropped from the post onto the bed, trundled across the spread, grasped its edge in his beak, and dragged the cover down.

Neither of us wanted to follow the song. I would rather have crawled back under the blankets. But I got up, and we started along the hall. The house was dark, with no hint of light at any window; it was still deep night. I stopped along the way to take the stub of a candle from one of the cupboards, the lanterns having all served to light the walk the night before. The song was not coming, as before, from the walk, or from Gideon’s bones. It came from the back of the house and higher up. I started for Mordecai’s attic.

I made my way along the hallway that led to the final stair, the narrow switchback that led to the attic. I walked fully around the perimeter at the base of the square tower where the stair was, Crow muttering on my shoulder. I wondered if I had made one turn too many and retraced my steps, but the door didn’t appear. I thought I must be confused by the previous night’s events, and my stub of candle provided such a scant light. Finally I heard the voice once more, thin but close at hand, and turned a corner I was sure I had turned at least twice before to find the stair. The door stood open, and a faint light washed down. I tiptoed up. Though Crow had always refused to enter the attic before, he now stayed with me, hopping from my shoulder to the top of my head.

I couldn’t at first see Mordecai, it was so dark. A few thin beams of starlight angled from the knotholes in the hull above, wavering on the bare wood. A wind was picking up outside, making the hull shudder, and the sea sounded against the rocks below.

He was seated at his worktable, his journal spread open before him. He must have found it in my room. He worked by candlelight, with his books and papers in slovenly stacks on the table around him. I wondered how he got back to the house, then realized that Captain Avery must have brought him.

As my eyes adjusted to the low light I noticed closed crates standing
about the attic. Mordecai’s cherished relics, normally in positions of prominence on tables and shelves, were no longer there: his collection of cast fingers, the prelate’s heart. Only a few nameless crumbling specimens were strewn among his papers on the table. I looked up. Even the rafters were bare of their busts but for one. Crow flew up and perched on the bust of the woman. Without her red hat she had a chastened look.