The Rathbones: A novel - Softcover

Clark, Janice

 
9780345803610: The Rathbones: A novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345803612 ISBN 13: 9780345803610
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Mercy, fifteen years old, is the last of the Rathbone whaling clan. Her father has been lost at sea for nearly ten years—ever since the last sperm whale was seen off the coast of Connecticut. As Mercy’s memories of her father grow dimmer with each passing day, she spends more of her time in the attic hideaway of her reclusive cousin Mordecai. But when a strange and threatening visitor turns up one night, Mercy and Mordecai are forced to flee and set sail on a journey that will bring them deep into the haunted history of the Rathbone family.

From the depths of the sea to the lonely heights of the widow’s walk; from the wisdom of the worn Rathbone wives to the mysterious origins of a sinking island, Mercy and Mordecai’s enchanting journey will bring them to places they never imagined possible.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janice Clark is a writer and designer living in Chicago. She grew up in Mystic, Connecticut (land of whaling and pizza) and has lived in Montreal, Kansas City, San Francisco, and New York, where she earned an MFA in writing at NYU. Her short fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz and The Nebraska Review, and her design work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art. The Rathbones, which she also illustrated, is her first novel.

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Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition


PROLOGUE

Moses knows what will happen. Not just how the trials will go today, or what the fathers will do when their golden sons fail and how the boys’ mothers will bear it. The green of his eyes has long since been burned away by the sun on the sea, and there is no window in the little room. But he sees it all anyway, from his high blue bed. He sees the whole sweep of it.

The great herds of sperm whales that once streamed along the coast have already thinned and will soon disappear. Fleets of ships are being built with holds deep enough to provision the long voyages required to find fresh pods, to the Pacific, to the Azores and the Indian Ocean. Boys no longer climb the watchtowers that line the shore to look for whales; instead they climb to crow’s nests at the tops of masts. The towers on shore will soon be torn down, their timbers used to frame the houses of captains and merchants, which will rise in the hills above the harbors as the whale gold continues to flow. Captains’ wives will conduct their own searches of the sea from the widow’s walks at the tops of the houses. Other towers will rise. Moses closes his eyes and sees them, the derricks, first of wood, then of steel, sprouting up across the sea of prairie. He feels the rumble as dark fountains surge up and spray across the sky; he sees black oil replace the white spermaceti. In a few years the captains will stop sailing. Some will move away and take up other occupations; some will linger, taking their wives’ places on the widow’s walks, staring out to sea. The houses will fall into disrepair. They will pass to city people who will use the walks for sun parlors or to store old clothes.

Moses does not choose to see such things. He longs to look back instead, to the first morning that the Misistuck sailed. He wishes it were that day. He strains to lift his silver head and there it all is again: the watchtower at the end of the point that curls into the sea; his son high on the tower, pointing, crying out, his voice carrying clear and strong across the bay to his brothers, already swarming up the masts and over the rigging. Moses sees the white sails billow as the ship moves toward the bright water where the whales are sounding.




C H A P T E R  O N E
Widow's Walk
{in which we meet the last of the Rathbones}

Naiwayonk, Connecticut, 1859


If I had not heard the singing voice that night, none of the rest might have happened.

Mama might yet be carving her bones; Mordecai lingering in his attic, leading me through the same old lessons on the sperm; both of my crows would still accompany me everywhere. I could have drifted through my life, forgetful of the time passing, and stayed always undersized. Maybe Papa would have finally come home.

But it’s not for me to say. Though I have the keen eyes that were once the gift of all the Rathbones—standing now on shore, looking out to the horizon, I see what I know you would not if you were standing beside me: a flock of terns, a league away, diving as one upon a school of bream that darkens the clear blue sea to cobalt— I cannot see into the future, as my forebears sometimes could.

I do know that if we hadn’t fl ed the house that night I would never have met the worn wives, or visited my grim in- laws on the Stark Archipelago, or seen the sinking island where Papa was born. The fate of my lost brother would have remained a mystery, as would what truly happened between Mama and Papa.

But I did hear the voice that night, and what I found when I followed it compelled me to flee the house with cousin Mordecai and to shed the fog in which we had both so long lived. Though we were seeking Papa, we found our own history as we went, and that of all the Rathbones. It was a sometimes patchy tale, woven from such thread as I found: oral histories passed down and with each step altered, un-finished ship logs, journals washed and bloated by the sea until little could be read. Cousin Mordecai gathered much of it, while he could. Later I took it up from him. What wasn’t provided, I had to surmise. You may think it would be difficult to assemble a story in such a way. I was used to such piecework, growing up as I did in a house populated only by remnants. It was as easy for me to see the golden wives arrive at Rathbone House four generations ago as it was for Moses to see a school of sperm streaming through the deep.

The night I heard the singing voice began like any other that summer. I had gone to my mother’s room, as usual, to help her undress. Mama’s room, at the front of the house, had the best view of the sea. Its line of tall windows were kept always open, the white curtains swaying in every weather.

Each day Mama wore a dress of deep-dyed indigo with a wide collar of white linen, boiled and bleached, starched and pressed, that lifted off her shoulders and unmoored her face when the wind rose. Her underclothes were sewn from soft muslin and smelled of the cedar chest in which she kept them. Her corset was of whalebone, fine strands borrowed from a fin that had once turned in the lightless deep.

When she lifted her gown and leaned to let me unlace her, I saw again how she was double- ribbed, bone on bone. When I lifted the corset off, her body kept the corset’s form, as though she always held her breath, but when I pressed my face against her for a moment, I felt the shallow rise and fall of her ribs. She placed the corset on the chair by the window. It stood sentinel there, a spare torso. For each year that Papa was at sea, she’d slid a slender bone from its channel and made me lace it tighter. The end of the ninth year was approaching. Soon Mama would be reduced. The next morning she would go down to the shore to fi nd new sand for the hourglass she kept by her window. Her eyes turned to it whenever she walked by.

Suitors had begun showing up at the house in recent months—a retired captain, two lieutenants on leave— drawn by Mama’s beauty and by the stories of Rathbone wealth. After ten years, cousin Mordecai had told me, Papa would be considered by the law to be dead. But Mama never appeared for visitors. Each suitor was ushered into a golden parlor on the second floor by Uncle Larboard and Uncle Starboard, served a plate of dry ship’s biscuit and a pot of tea brewed from nettles and saw grass, and then ushered out again, hat in hand.

Mama uncoiled her braids and let them down and waited for me to unwind them. In truth, she had only to shake her head and the braids unfurled, but she knew I loved to feel the tight plaits go soft and free in my hands. When she wasn’t too tired, she let me sit next to her on her bed and practice my seaman’s knots on her hair: sheet bend and monkey fist, timber hitch and lineman’s loop. Her hair hung in a long pale wave that she sometimes allowed me to brush. I counted the strokes slowly to make them last, her hair popping and crackling as the dark bristles moved through it. When I finished, she let me step
inside the curtain of hair, into her warm breath that smelled of cloves, close to the shine of her green eyes. They focused for a moment on me, and she smiled a little, then returned to her watch for Papa, her eyes trained on the sea. Long after sunset they held the horizon in each iris, split dark and pale.

I knew the tide was in when Mama smiled. I waited, hoping this would be a night for Arcady. She leaned back against her pillow, gazing out the window until the last light faded, then turned her face to me. I lay back with my head on her breast and closed my eyes as she began. It was the only story she ever told, and one I had heard since I was very young. I was, it’s true, too...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345803612
ISBN 13 
9780345803610
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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