The Rathbones (44 page)

In those moments, in her embrace, I made for myself acceptable answers to my questions. Papa hadn’t stayed away by choice: He had been conscripted by some distant army and was allowed only short leaves; he had learned to breathe water and could live only in the air a little at a time. Mordecai had not been abandoned, only mislaid. And I was not, after all, unloved. For Gideon’s end, I had no answer; I skipped it over.

Mama’s skin smelled of coal and hay. Her hair was dank, her breath foul, but I didn’t care. I don’t remember just what she said to me. She asked me where I’d been, told me how she had missed me, exclaimed at my size. She stroked my hair and held me close. I wanted only to lay my head against her, to listen to her murmur into my hair.

The rope ladder creaked.

Her head turned. Her eyes opened wide. Her arms, so warm around me, went slack.

For a moment it was that last night on the walk, when Papa’s hand had held me spinning in the air and my crow lay crushed in the trunk, when Mama had looked up, but not at me, called out, but not to me. She had reached only for him. And now, again, she set me aside, to reach for whoever was next on Starboard’s list, whoever’s head was now rising above the rim of the well.

The cowboy stepped up into the walk. He pulled off his hat and
stood there, blinking in the glare of the lanterns, clutching the rim of his hat in both hands. The silver spurs on his boots jingled faintly. He looked from me to Mama and back again. His mouth dropped open and he began to back away.

If I had stopped to think only a little, I might have a different story to tell. I might have realized that Mama wanted no cowboy, no farmer, no landsman at all. She only ever wanted to lie under the wide blue back of the sea. She only ever wanted Papa. But I didn’t stop. And though the route might have been different, the end would have been the same.

I felt suddenly calm. I didn’t think or decide what to do next, I only did it.

I walked to the cowboy, took the hat out of his hands, and tossed it onto the floor. I started to unbutton the long row of buttons on the front of my dress, from the top down.

Now Mama wanted to hold me. She pulled me away from the cowboy, who had backed to the edge of the well, as close as he could get without falling in, and was frozen there. He looked down at the rope ladder up which he had just come, then doubtfully toward his hat, which was out of reach.

Mama clutched at me and tried to wrap my arms back around her. She struggled with me, but I was her match. Everything I wanted to say came flooding back, all my questions rushed out. I poured them in her ear as we struggled. Crow shrieked and flapped his wings in her eyes, darting his beak between us, jabbing at her face. He flew to the trunk and, hovering, took the clasp in his beak and flung the lid up. Something leapt and clattered inside. The cowboy’s head, hatless, retreated down the well. Then Mama’s sodden gown was twisting all around my legs, and I was falling. I must have struck my head on the edge of the trunk. Mama was still there, above me, moving slowly, her mouth making the shape of words I couldn’t hear.

I wasn’t unconscious. Though I can’t say that I saw all of what followed, I saw, and heard, enough. It was best, I later thought, that a
fog came between me and what I witnessed; it was easier to bear. But I have sometimes since wondered if the reality may have been easier to bear than what I remember seeing.

A scuffling sound came from below. Chairs scraped and clattered; footsteps retreated rapidly away, down the staircase. Another voice sounded through the house, a voice that belonged to none of the departing suitors. It boomed up the well. The rope ladder went taut; in a moment he was up. The man in blue was back.

I had never seen him so clearly before. A face smeared with blood as I dangled from the end of his arm; a pair of arms pushing through the sea, swimming after my skiff; a shadow standing on the sinking island staring after me who, even from that distance, had looked larger than any other man. Now, as I lay on the floor, looking up at him sideways, his body blocking the glare of lamp and lantern, he seemed a giant, he was so tall and broad.

“Verity.”

He didn’t see me, lying there next to the trunk, bright though it was. He saw only Mama. His face was split dark below and pale above, where his hat sat at sea. Veins beat high and blue on his neck. On his forehead and cheeks were fresh scars, beak-shaped.

From below, outside the house, came the last sounds of the suitors, their footsteps hurrying, fading along the path.

Papa stood there next to the well. His body was so wide and full of heat. His breath came fast. He held himself still, his arms stiff; his hands were shaking.

He stood that way for a few more moments, then his body slumped and his breath blew out. He unbuttoned his coat and yanked it off. He unlaced the front of his breeches. In one stride he reached her and lifted her. She pulled the skirt of her gown up and over her head. She was naked from the waist down. He put his hands around her ribs and lifted her high, then ran her down hard, and up and down and up again. She rose and fell, her boots tapping against his thighs, her head lolling, her pale hair falling over them both. After a while he lifted her off and lay her on the floor and on they went.

Something scraped inside the trunk, behind me; I jumped, jerking myself up from the floor. Kneeling, I lifted the lid of the trunk and felt for Crow. My fingers closed on him and I eased him out—with him came a spew of bones, clattering to the floor.

I reached slowly down and picked one up: not a whalebone but an ulna, slender, s-curved. Its twin was there, too, and a pair of femurs. Crow, perched on the edge of the trunk, leaned down and tugged at something, struggled with the weight, dropped it back into the trunk with a soft thud. I moved closer and looked down at a rounded bundle, wrapped in muslin, nested in a bed of kelp. With shaking hands I unwrapped a skull, its jaw and teeth intact. Between the rows of teeth poked a fan of finger bones, a second smile. When I dropped the skull, it fell softly into the kelp but the fingers popped out, chattering.

I slammed the lid down and scrabbled away backward, taking great gulps of air, until my back hit the wall of the walk. I held Crow close against my breast and pulled my knees up tight, dizzy, the walk spinning around me.

Mother, Mother, make a bed, make it soft and long …

She had made a bed for my brother in the barrel, but it was not his final resting place. Those were my brother’s bones in the trunk, on top of which I had curled, hiding, as I spied on Mama and Papa. My brother had been there all along.

The glare of light on the walk, at first blinding, started to dip. In the minutes that followed the lanterns and lamps began, one by one, to gutter then go out.

Mama and Papa looked just as they had the first night I’d watched from inside the trunk, his blue back swelling over her, her body rocking; the scraping sound as her skin ground against sand. But there were new sounds now—not the sounds of pleasure but of something creaking, something grating and harsh. Where before I couldn’t see Mama’s face, only her skirts and her lifted thighs, her boots moving back and forth, now I could see her face, and she was looking at me. Her mouth was open, her eyes huge, staring. Her skin drained to white.

I’m not sure when I knew what was happening to her. I used to think that if I had realized sooner, if my wits had been keener, my head clearer, I could have stopped it somehow. But I have come to believe that whatever I did wouldn’t have mattered.

Her hand went to her throat, to the wide white collar, crushed and wet with sweat. She pulled out the chain, the little trio of bones. She looked like she was trying to speak. Her eyes were still on me. The creaking sound went on, a ship in heavy seas, timbers grinding one on the other.

I hadn’t noticed the difference in Mama, between that other night and this. That from the waist up she was fully clothed. That her breasts didn’t roll on each rise, her corset was not cracked open but laced tight, tighter than before by one bone. The whalebones bent with her own as she arched under the man in blue, but they wouldn’t break. She couldn’t breathe. Still he plunged on. Mama didn’t push him away. She made no gesture to let him know that she couldn’t breathe.

I don’t know how long he rocked Mama before he realized that she was dead. He didn’t seem surprised to discover it. He pulled away from her and kneeled over her. He pulled her skirt down over her body and smoothed it, tenderly. He turned to look at me. It was then I realized that he had known all along that I was there. I thought he was going to speak, but a moment later he had dropped down the ladder and was gone.

I looked at Mama from across the walk for a while, then went and sat by her. Her head was turned toward the sea. Her eyes were open, the horizon there in each iris as always before. I closed them. I lay my head against her. Now I could leave it there for as long as I liked.

The last of the lanterns went out. The sky was thick with cloud, the moon hidden. The clean hot smell of oil hung in the air.

When I finally looked up, a white shape was drifting up the dark well. Just before I lost consciousness I saw that it wasn’t my dead brother. It was Mordecai.

{in which Mercy meets Gideon}

C
ROW FLEW THEM
down to me one by one. I sat on my bed and lay each bone among the sheets, then looked up to watch Crow again turn the corner at the end of the hall and fly toward me. He began with the larger bones, his path wavering and dipping with the weight, flying low to place each bone before me, then circled around the room to head back to the walk. Panting, he dropped the pelvis into my lap; next the spine, disk by disk, then femur and humerus, working his way toward the extremities. He grasped a clavicle in each claw; the kneecaps required two trips. He beaked the smaller bones in batches, faltering for a moment as he passed the window under which his nest hung. The slender metatarsals seemed suitable to lend extra strength to a bird’s bed against winter gales or to fill the space where his companion no longer slept, differing little from the thin twigs and dry straw that lined the nest.

As he neared the end, Crow’s wings dropped lower. The final bones, unbalanced, scraped the floor, chalking thin lines along the planks. The last phalanges fell into my hands, and Crow dropped to my knee, breathing hard, to rest for a moment before lifting off for his final trip. I dropped my head and drifted for a while, then heard a dull clattering and looked up to see him flying toward me, bumping
a bundle wrapped in white cloth along the floor, slung from his beak. He dropped the skull into my lap. Mama’s white collar drifted down onto my gown, boiled and bleached, starched and pressed.

I gathered the bones and started to build my brother, allowing a small space between them—no cartilage remained to soften the shock of joint on joint—so that they spread out, a constellation of bones in the dark. I knew how to map him. Mordecai had used the skeleton of a spider monkey to teach me how the bones fit together. The parts were much the same. I first lined up his spine, placing the pelvis at the base. It formed a shallow bowl that held what light there was from the sky and reflected it back into my face. I arranged his ribs in parallel lines, docked at his sternum. I made his legs as straight as I could, though with no cushioning flesh the long femurs keeled over, curving outward, so that his legs bowed. In the end they were all there except those of the ring finger on his left hand. I lay myself along the bones and stretched my arms and legs along the same lines. Had I found his bones before I fled the house that night months ago, they would have matched mine in size. Now my limbs stretched farther.

I sat up and ran my hands over Mama’s collar, lying across my lap, smoothing the linen to lie flat along my thighs and across my calves. It had fit tight about her throat, like a baby’s bib, then flared far beyond her shoulders, curved in a wide white crescent, narrowing to fine strands of rope that hung down her back, the ends weighted with ivory. I tied the ropes to my bedposts, the collar stretching between them to form a small hammock, a cabin boy’s size, at the foot of my bed. I hung it as high as I could so that he would be able to see the harbor, and pressed my hand down in its center, to see what weight it would bear: Enough, I thought. I kneeled and gathered the bones. I stacked them in my arms, kindling for a cold fire, and lay them in the hammock, side by side, skull facing the sea.