Free The Rathbones by Janice Clark

bright blood. She pried my fingers from her waist and pushed me back to my chair, not roughly but slowly and with a cool eye. She held me there with one hand and turned her attention back to her thumb, which she brought closer to her eye to observe its small spurt for a moment longer before letting go of me to reach for a rag from the table, which she wound tightly around the thumb. I stayed in my chair and forced myself to keep my hands in my lap, though I would rather have hid my face in my hands.
    There had been other times when I had felt afraid as a child. When a pack of horseshoe crabs had clattered over my boots on the beach, I had swallowed a scream. When a thunderstorm had pelted the roofwith hail and drawn down lightning to its many rods so that the whole of the house crackled, I had set my mouth in a line and kept silent. Mama had watched, nodding approvingly.
    I turned toward Mordecai. Crow grumbled and shuffled from my shoulder up to the top of my head.
    “They’ve lived here all these years, just a few miles away, and I’ve never known them,” I whispered. “You knew. Is that why you lied about Mouse Island, about the poison oak, so that I wouldn’t come find them? Why?”
    Mordecai squirmed, trying to pull his nightshift down to cover his legs better.
    “Well, yes, I knew of them. But I did not think their history suitable for a young lady’s ears.” He hesitated. “However, I did not know that some of them were still alive. Or that Mouse Island was where they lived. And it was old Bemus who told me the story about the poisonous oak. I believed it, too.”
    I was surprised to hear Mordecai admit to not having known about Mouse Island. I assumed he knew everything. He took such pride in his carefully hoarded collection of journals and logbooks, in knowing so much about the family. And I wondered why Bemus had lied about the island. Old Bemus had died when I was a baby. I didn’t remember him at all. Mordecai had said he was the last of the old Rathbones, the ones who whaled.
    Mordecai continued to turn the eye. Within its shrunken jelly the dark pupil gleamed. His vision was poor, but he liked to say that he could see more sharply than me when he held the eye, that he borrowed from the squid the great eye’s power.
    “Tell me more,” I whispered. Crow stirred and began to preen his wings.
    Mordecai sighed and hugged his knees to his chest.
    “Those bedrooms on the first floor?”
    I nodded. The chain of rooms. I had always loved the curtains on the beds. Their patterns were all different; one set had a border of twining kelp and mollusks. I realized that the same pattern decoratedthe shawl that Mordecai still wore about his shoulders. He saw me looking at the shawl and nodded.
    “Your great-great-aunts wove all of those curtains, long ago, when Moses’s sons slept in those beds.”
    I thought of other patterns in the hall of beds: starfish and sea urchins capered on a reef; gulls flew in a tight phalanx across the sky; on my favorite set, twin octopi stretched their tentacles toward the selvages.
    “In your great-great-grandfather’s time his sons alone were enough to crew the whalers, captain to cabin boy. When one wife was worn out with … breeding, another assumed her place, already with child. No time was lost, no favorable wind unmet, no bins unreadied for fresh blubber. The worn wives were exiled to an island—this island, which, I must confess, I didn’t know until today. They lived together, welcoming each new castoff.”
    Mordecai carefully wrapped the squid eye in his bandanna and tucked it deep into his ditty bag. He lay back with his arms behind his head, closed his eyes, and was soon asleep.
    Euphemia began to speak quietly from her place at the loom below, taking up Mordecai’s tale, the soft click and clack of the shuttle marking the rhythm of her voice. She told about Moses, my great-great-grandfather, and the beginning of the Rathbones. She told about the wives, and of