Free The Rathbones by Janice Clark Page B

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