The Rathbones (50 page)

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.

N
AIWAYONK
, C
ONNECTICUT
, S
EPTEMBER
10, 1845

M
Y
T
ALOS—

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
.

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.

S
OURCES

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, gift 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.

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

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