The Rathbones (9 page)

Crow trundled along the net, claws catching on the threads, hopped to the window ledge, and flew off into the darkness.

{in which we meet the first of the Rathbones}

1761

B
EFORE FIRST LIGHT
, the boy began to climb the tower at the edge of the dunes. It was roughly built and full of splinters, but his feet and hands were tough from hauling rope, from clambering over rocks after crabs and chasing game. The freshly felled trunks of pine, lashed together with rawhide strips, had been driven deep through the sandy soil of the dunes to bedrock, far enough from the tide line so that the tower would stand firm. Scrub pine and beach roses grew at the tower’s base. Around the boy’s neck hung a skin of water and a string of smoked perch to hold him until dusk.

The wood creaked under his feet and his hands grew sticky with sap as he climbed. A crow flew past him, scrawking, a fat fish in its claws, banking off toward the pines on the bluff. When the boy reached the top, he stood straight and scanned the beach from end to end. A thin line of light spread along the horizon. To the east, in low hills that rose from the harbor, the roofs of a few houses showed among the trees. To the west the beach curved out to the point, a long pale curl in the dark sea.

The boy looked across the sound to the fishing fleet at rest in the harbor, saw the gleam and sway of shuttered lanterns among the dark hulls. A few men had begun to move about on the docks and in the
boats. In one bumboat near the end of the dock, a man coiled rope into a tub, while his companion sat at a wheel, sharpening lances; the screech of metal on stone cut across the water. Other men loaded their crafts with floats and fluke spades, lantern kegs, piggins, and water to wet the whale line. A sharp March wind roughened the green water to white and sent cold spray over the men as they moved to and fro, hunched into their coats, blowing on their fists to try to keep warm.

Schools of sperm and humpback had been seen out in the sound each spring for as long as anyone had lived there, but only last winter did the fishermen learn from a passing ship that a few dozen barrels of sperm oil were worth more than a long hard season’s haul of cod or flounder. This spring some of the boats—dories and wherries, some larger smacks—had stowed their nets and mounted oars and racks for harpoons and lances, bought from a town farther up the coast that had begun whaling a season earlier.

Several sperm, on their way north to summer in colder waters, had been sighted a few weeks ago. Most of the whales had been too distant to pursue. Only one, an old bull of forty feet, swam slowly enough so that a few boats were able to give chase. Though all were seasoned netmen and could spear a big tunny or halibut cleanly, none of the men had ever been so close to a sperm. All pulled hard, their backs to the whale toward which they moved, glancing over their shoulders nervously, glimpsing the long shining body, scarred and puckered. For half a minute they stroked alongside the whale, their own breath and the creaking oars louder in their ears than the whale as it glided through the water. Before the harpooners could ready their weapons, the whale blew, shooting spray thirty feet into the sky, then rolled and dove down in a smooth curve, its great flukes surging up, then curling into the sea. The men rowed back to the dock in silence. None wanted to admit that he was grateful not to have had the chance to try his arm, to find out if his blade would have been the one to hold fast and make the line spin out. They had all been told, by men in the town up the coast, how the whale thrashed when it was struck, its tail slapping boats, smashing them with a single blow, how it dove deep,
taking the harpoon and its smoking line with it and sometimes the boat too and all its men.

One whale had been taken by the villagers, but not through any prowess. The boy on the tower had been watching a few days earlier when a sperm drifted in on the evening tide. It was twilight, and the fishermen had long since gone home. If they had been on the docks they wouldn’t have noticed the whale that the boy could see clearly on the darkening water. They would have heard the cries of birds, a horde of seabirds: white gulls and terns, black skuas and gray-tipped gannets thronged on the carcass, so thick that they made of the dead whale a living shape. The birds lifted off in a body, hovering for a moment just above the whale so that it seemed to expand, then flying suddenly off and away, the whale first becoming enormous, then dispersing and vanishing. Its body, now a diminished hulk of patched black and rotted gray, drifted to shore and came to rest on the sand.

The next morning the men towed the carcass to the dock and moored it there, head and tail, waiting for one of the larger craft to return from netting in the sound so that the whale could be towed to Mystic. Though its blubber was rotted, the reservoir of oil in its head was intact, and more valuable than the oil from the blubber. Some of the younger men sat on the edge of the dock with lances, ready to stab any sharks that followed the blood in on the tide. A gaggle of children danced along the dock above the whale, reaching down to poke at the body with oars from their fathers’ boats, laughing.

On the bumboat, the older man looked up from coiling his rope, peering across the cove to where the boy stood on the tower.

“Isn’t that Denison’s son?”

The younger man stopped pedaling his wheel and squinted, shading his eyes with one hand. The sun had edged up, dull red behind banked clouds.

“No. No, I don’t think so. Denison’s son is over in Westerly today. Anyway, it’s Ephraim’s watch, he should be up there. That looks like the Rathbone boy.”

The older man stood up to stretch, frowning.

“He has no business up there. Running wild since Amos died.”

The younger man held up a spear against the light and turned it, eyeing the edge and feeling it with his thumb. “He was wild enough before. Out swimming at all hours, for no reason, sometimes out past the breakers.”

“Well, now. Maybe the boy misses sailing the seas in a barrel.” The older man’s face twisted in a grin.

“Right, right, wrapped in a sealskin. Heard it a hundred times.” The younger man turned his head and spit into the sea. “I never believed Amos found him like he said. Always full of stories. Tell you what I think. Old Amos got that boy on some heathen woman and lied about it.”

“Heathen woman. You mean an Indian? Hasn’t been one around here for fifty years and more. All cleared out long ago.” The older man rubbed his chin. “Besides, if Amos had laid with a native woman the boy would have brown eyes and that boy’s got green eyes, greenest eyes I ever saw.” He pushed his cap back off his forehead and sat up straighter, hands on his knees. “Could’ve happened like Amos said. Could’ve been set adrift from some ship that was foundering, stove by a whale. That was … let’s see, four winters back, wasn’t it, the boy showed up? Rough weather that winter, I remember. It wouldn’t have been the only ship wrecked. It might’ve been a ship carrying skins from up north. What was that brig that passed through last fall? The
Nuuka
?
Nuucha
? Carrying all kinds of hides—bear, fox, some seal, I think.” He pulled his cap down tight and returned to coiling his rope. “Like baby Moses floating in a basket. That’s where Amos got the name, you know.”

“But how would he have survived? He was just a little starved-looking thing. Amos said he lived on raw fish. Said the barrel was half full of fish bones. How would a little thing like that have caught fish, and with what? Anyway. Probably that’s what stunted him, starving like that. Though he’s strong enough now. Have you seen him handle one of these?” The younger man held up the spear he had just sharpened.

The older man kept staring across at the tower where the boy stood, a black shape edged in red by the low sun.

“Here’s Ephraim. High time.”

A tall young man stepped out of the thick pines that ran down to the shoreline and stood for a moment on the beach, stretching his arms and yawning. He started, and looked up at the tower, which stood a dozen feet tall. He began to climb, quickly. Near the top he stopped and began to yell, waving his arm at the boy standing there. His angry voice wafted across to the two men in the bumboat, but they couldn’t make out his words. As they watched, Moses leaned over and pushed him, hard. The man’s arms windmilled backward and he fell, landing in a mound of sand.

The older man stood up from his wheel. “What in hell. Hey!”

The younger man stood staring, his mouth open.

Ephraim sat up slowly in the mound of sand, shaking his head, looking up in disbelief at Moses. Moses didn’t look down. He looked straight out to sea and cried out, raised his arm, pointing.

The two men on the boat turned to look. The men on the dock and in the other boats had heard it too. All stood staring at the stretch of open water toward which the boy pointed. The surface of the sea was smooth gray, unbroken. A minute passed as the men stood there, frozen in place, their hands up to shield against the sun that now flooded, golden, across the water. Most had dropped their hands and turned away when, far out in the sound, a dark shape bobbed up, then another, the water soon as thick as chowder with them. The spouts started, bright fountains. Sperm spouts, Moses knew. He knew all the whales by their spouts: the right whale blew two vertical plumes, the sperm whale’s spray angled to the left, the humpback blew one wide arc straight up. Today there were thirty, no, more than forty. Forty-two sperm.

The men on dock ran to their boats. Those already afloat bent their oars and leaned deep, urging one another on.

Moses stood on the tower, watching. He knew more about the whales. He could tell the length of a sperm within a foot or two by
the curve of its back as it sounded; he knew after a minute of watching how fast each whale in a school could swim; he knew the place behind the whale’s flipper where his great heart beat. But he kept such things to himself. He used to tell Amos what he felt and saw, but Amos said he shouldn’t speak about such things to the other men, that they would fear or envy such gifts.

Moses knew the beat of the sea, its quick pulse along the shore and the slow swing of the tides. He felt the deep stream of warm that surged under the cold, hugging the coast, then turning in a long curve out to sea to circle back again. He was never out of sight of the water, even when he hunted in the woods on the bluff. If he walked too far away his breath went short and his limbs stiffened, and the sea pulled him back.

In the water he was more at ease than on land. With a single long draft of air he could dive down and stay under not one or two minutes, like the village men, but ten. He stroked through the light-webbed water near the surface or wriggled along the sea bottom through thickets of anemone and coral. He could see through the water as though it were air and felt everything that moved around him. Schools of small fish sparked and glimmered in his fingertips; passing sharks twitched his skin. When the whales swam near they thrummed along his spine and tolled his body like a bell. He knew the clicking sounds they made and clicked back at them, and in their answering sounds read their shapes. With eyes shut, swimming alongside a sperm, he felt the throb and jostle of its organs. He saw the white lake of oil gleaming in its head, smooth and still under the dark dome of its skull.

Where he came from, all the men knew such things. They had known the whale because their lives depended upon knowing. The village lived all the winter on a single sperm. The heart and brain were boiled in blood, the tongue and flukes and flippers dried into jerky to chew through the long dark months when the bay was frozen solid and the wind shrieked across the white sea. The blubber was eaten raw to cushion the villagers’ lean bodies against the cold. His oil fed their fires and lit their lamps, and his skin clothed them. On
the day each spring when the ice finally broke, when the last of the whale was almost gone, the next whale came, and the men went out in the boat to meet him. Only one whale came each year. All the village knew when it was coming. Each man, woman, and child felt it loom, their bodies attuned to what they could not live without.