The Rathbones (26 page)

The whaler boys began to come instead silently at night, leaving gifts for Absalom outside the door: slices of sea pie, bowls of spotted dick or lobscouse; a baleen whistle; a little cage of whalebone.

Lydia watched Absalom playing at the window with his ark.

“Come, darling, time for your breakfast.”

Absalom turned around and smiled at his mother, then set the ark on the floor. He ran to the table for his porridge and milk, and spent the day making block castles with his cousins.

The next morning Lydia woke to find the window open and Absalom gone. A grappling hook hung from the sill; a knotted rope swung in the breeze. When Bow-Oar came to her room that night, Lydia pleaded with him to bring Absalom up from below, to send him back up into the light, but Bow-Oar shook his head.

“You have had your chance. Now he is ours.”

{in which the Rathbones’ sea legs stiffen}

1814

T
HE THREE BOYS
slowed down as they neared the last room. Though it wasn’t yet dawn, the hall of beds was empty; all of the men were already at the docks, readying the boats for the trials. The door to the little room at the end was always closed, and no one but Bemus ever went in there. Now he was behind them, herding the boys down the dark hall toward the room at the end, whispering in their ears.

“He won’t see you, but he’ll know you’re there all the same. Just go in and wait for him to speak.”

“But why do we have to go? No one else ever has to go,” whispered Ezekiel.

“He’s never asked for anyone else,” said Bemus. “You should feel honored.”

The boys stood in a bunch outside the door, shifting from foot to foot in the cold air, each clutching his harpoon. They had all heard the men tell stories of Moses, but the boys had never seen him. They’d only passed the little room on their way in and out.

“He breathes through gills.” Absalom elbowed his cousins.

“I heard he sleeps in a great big tub of water,” said Ezekiel.

“No, he sleeps on the rocks with the seals,” said Jeroboam, stifling a laugh.

Bemus slapped the top of Jeroboam’s head and pushed him toward the door. Jeroboam hesitated, then knocked softly. All three boys edged slowly into the room.

Once inside, they went quiet. It was so dark they couldn’t see Moses at first, only heard him breathing above them: long rattling breaths, each with a click at the end. Moses, propped against pillows at the head of the high blue bed, leaned forward, far enough so that the boys saw a glint of white eyes, a tangle of silver hair. A hand reached out and beckoned. Absalom rolled his eyes at his cousins, then climbed up and knelt at the end of the bed.

Moses ran his shriveled hands over the boy’s hair and face, over his shoulders and down his body, prodded his belly and groin. Absalom stiffened as Moses poked and grunted, then felt his body relax under the old man’s searching hands. When Moses had finished he pushed Absalom away, then inspected Ezekiel and Jeroboam in the same way.

Moses fell back against the pillow. He lifted a hand to wave the boys away and they ran from the room, laughing only when they were out the door and on the dock, in the lightening day.

•  •

The three boys stood in the prows of their whaleboats, far out in the sound. At first darker silhouettes against a dark sky, then limned by the sun as it began to mount, they faced south, their backs to the shore. The boats rocked on a chuff sea. Clouds scudded high and swift above them.

From the end of the dock their fathers watched, staring out to where the boats and their crews hovered along the horizon. Bow-Oar, Second-Oar, and Third-Oar stood unconsciously in the same posture as their sons, legs braced, arms stiff, harpoon hand tensed to clutch, each ready to reach for the blade that stood not by him but by his son. Each approved of the angle of his son’s arm. Each knew that
the boat in which his boy balanced had been readied to perfection: ropes coiled, blades honed, fittings polished, hulls and oars sanded and varnished. Each crew was trained to the keenest pitch. The boys shone among their dull cousins at the oars who, had they been standing, would have stood only chin-high to the golden three.

Besides the boys’ fathers, four older Rathbone men were on the dock that day. Maimed by the sperm years ago, they had long since been set ashore, reduced to pulling hemp in the rope walk or to household tasks. There was room for them and more on the wide dock where the house had stood in Moses’s time. The wood had weathered in the fourteen years since the house had been moved up the hill so that the place where it stood, at first dark and grimed from decades of smoky fires and scuffing boots, was now nearly as silvery and worn as the pilings beneath the dock. Though the April air was mild, a few of the older men had built a fire where the hearth had been, the place now only a patch of scorched brick. The men crouched or stood nearby, though no one lay any offering on the flames.

Bow-Oar glanced at the vacant moorings along the dock. The two Rathbone ships that still sailed were away. The
Misistuck
had been gone for two years, the
Sassacus
nearly three. On those now distant days when they had set sail, he had not felt confidence in their captains. Not that the two mates he had raised to captain were not good men, but they were well into their middle years, among the only Rathbones to have survived so long with no loss of limb or faculty. But those faculties were slower now and the men less resolute. Bow-Oar had hesitated before sending them back out to sea, but what choice did he have? He and Second-Oar and Third-Oar were needed at home to oversee the proper training of their sons, for without their sons the Rathbones had no future. Four young Rathbones—sons of Humility and Trial (the most recent worn wife, Silence, had produced nothing)—trained along with the golden sons, but Bow-Oar placed little hope in them. Their older brothers, already at sea on the
Misistuck
, had proven fainthearted.

Though in the last generation Moses’s wives had continued to
produce infant whalemen at a steady rate, fewer had survived to adulthood in the years since the golden wives arrived. The younger Rathbone men no longer felt the deep sympathy with the sperm that was so natural to their ancestors.

If you had asked any of the older Rathbone men when the tide had turned, they would have told you, in low voices, behind their hands: on the day Bow-Oar and his brothers brought home the golden girls. Some would have said the true turn began when Bow-Oar fooled his father, giving him not a portion of the whale’s heart but an indifferent gob of dolphin; when he tilted the chum into the sea—that he might have done as well to tilt Rathbone House itself and tip all the men into the sea, so much did Bow-Oar, in ending the old ways, choose to fall from grace.

Mama would have said who knows when any tide turns? It’s as impossible to tell as where one wave ends and the next begins.

But ever since Bow-Oar had killed the three whales on a fall day fourteen years ago, more men were flung overboard or mauled beyond repair. They lanced the whale too soon, not waiting for, or no longer knowing, the precise moment when the whale had tired just enough, and the whale, instead of sinking, turned and smashed the boat to pieces. Some men suffered no bodily harm but, after encounters with whales that didn’t easily yield, whales that towed a hundred fathoms of line from the boat and still swam on, whales that Moses would have met with his blood singing, they showed fear in their eyes, and their crewmates saw it. Once marked, such men were not wanted in any boat.

The two remaining ships were only thinly manned by Rathbones, their crews filled out by hired men. Including the captains, just twelve of Moses’s sons still whaled, split between the
Sassacus
and the
Misistuck
. The Rathbones stood thigh-deep in blubber after the hunt, hooking slabs up into the hold, and filled the benches on the whaleboats as second oar and third oar and fourth oar, but they no longer served as harpooners. That role was filled by sailors from distant ports: Gayheads from Massachusetts, Portogos and Fiji Islanders, men who
knew little of the family and cared less, as long as the disks of gold were promptly counted out into their hands. These were men who struck the whale with spear and harpoon unafraid, men whose lives were still wholly connected to the sea and all that swam in it, though they couldn’t, like earlier Rathbones, kill in one strike. The second harpoon, or the third, might hold well enough; the whale might tire after a long chase and finally succumb to a dozen lances. Just as often no harpoon held or the line snapped and the whale swam away.

Though it had seemed, in that brief period after Lydia and her sisters came, that the family, so long secluded, would become connected to the wider world, they’d retreated yet further after the failed soirée. Bow-Oar and his brothers turned their full attention back to the sea. The scarlet stripes on their boats were allowed to bleach in sea and sun to a dull rose. Shining chronometers and bright sextants tarnished to black in their cases. Bow-Oar continued to rig the ships in the full suits of thirty-seven sails that lent the craft such great speed, but when the sails wore thin his own men stitched new ones, using the frayed sails as patterns. It wasn’t that the Rathbones couldn’t afford ready-made sails—they could rig a dozen ships and provision each for a voyage around the world—but Bow-Oar hoped that, in bringing back the old ways, he would bring back the whales.

Local seamen had kept clear of these waters, having heard tales of passing mariners being pressed into service by the Rathbones to crew their whaleships.

The whales had long since learned to skirt Rathbone territory.

So the sighting of a pod of fledgling right whales at first light that morning, far out in the sound, had been greeted with joy. Though inferior to the sperm in speed and oil quality, they were considered adequate to serve in the trials, which had been delayed for weeks in hope of just such an event. If the right whales had not appeared, a gam of narwhals or a shiver of nurse sharks would have had to suffice, but wouldn’t have served to fully test the mettle of the novice whalers. The right whale, though slow, was known to breach frequently, its tail-slaps powerful enough to cleave a careless whaleboat. The crews
were hurriedly assembled: the four sons of Humility and Trial, ranging from nine to fourteen in age, were enlisted to man oars, with local fishermen’s sons, hired for the day, filling out the crews, six boys to a boat.

The golden sons all knew that the trials would determine their positions on the whaleboats: Harpooner; Boatheader; First-Oar, Second-Oar, Third-Oar, Fourth-Oar. Everyone knew that Absalom would earn Harpooner, and his cousins Jeroboam and Ezekiel would, too. In the weeks before the trials they had cleanly killed every sun-fish and marlin they had practiced on. Today, the first boys to cleanly kill their whales with one thrust of the harpoon would earn places on the
Misistuck
and the
Sassacus
. When the ships returned to Naiwayonk the outsiders hired to fill the crew would be replaced with true Rathbones. Absalom and his cousins couldn’t wait. When they were nine years old, they had all been to sea on the
Sassacus
, on a six-month voyage to the north. They had served as topmen, their days spent climbing high above the ship in the rigging, trimming the sails at each change in the wind. But they had been at home ever since, training with their fathers while the ships were away, whaling. Each longed to be out on the open sea again, to take his first sperm.

Bow-Oar had not speared a whale himself, nor been close to one, since the day the three young whales had been killed. He had been the first to lose his bond with the sperm, when he wielded the harpoon that day. He would not have admitted it. He would have made other excuses for never joining a whaleboat crew anymore: He was the best navigator and needed to stay at the helm of the
Misistuck
, or he was needed at home to train the boys, reasons which were true enough. But he felt the absence of what he had lost. He knew that if he had ever raised his blade again, it would never have flown true or sunk deep. He could call up pictures of every whale he had killed before that day; its length and shape, how many barrels of oil it had given, how much bone and blubber. But how each had given over its life, in a last leap from the water, arcing up to crash down again or sinking silently, he had forgotten. He couldn’t remember the feel of
the living flesh under his hand or the beat of the whale’s blood in his ears, though the sound had once echoed the beat of his own heart.