by Sarah Busching
The whales took my siblings with them. For three years in a row, I watched each one transform and go into the sea forever.
When it was my turn, I asked them to take me, too. During whale season, whether the sky was clear or darkened with a coming storm, I waded out into the ocean every day and waited, willing my body to recognize its own kind. The sea-black humps passed by our village, leaving me.
The disappointment on my mother’s face hurt worse than my body’s failure. I couldn’t join my two sisters and my brother. My body wouldn’t change. And my mother was running out of time.
“Just get pregnant,” she begged me one day. “Half the girls in this town are already with child when they get married. You’ll get a husband that way, and then you’ll be safe.”
She wasn’t being cruel. She knew I had little interest in men and that if she had to wait for me to fall in love, she’d wait until she died.
But I couldn’t give up on my body yet. I kept pleading on the beach until my mother could no longer force herself to wait. Her own body was being pushed to its limits.
The phantom giants never answered me.
My mother found a matchmaker, which took time she didn’t have as they weren’t very common in our region. She skipped the usual parental negotiations, accepting via the matchmaker an offer she thought reasonable. After handing me off to the matchmaker, she dove into the waves within moments of my back turning on her.
I was to marry a harpooneer, one that made a good enough living aboard a whaler that he didn’t have to winter-over on the ship and instead spent two months ashore every year. Enough time to have a wife, but not enough time to find one on his own.
It may seem contradictory for my mother to have chosen a whale-killer, but it was a practical decision. He’d never be on land long enough to bother me.
The journey to my groom’s town took two days along the squalling coast. The first I saw of it were the wind-beaten walls. The gate was a whale skeleton suspended upside-down, the jawbone forming an exposed arch wide enough for four people to pass through together. I entered my new home through its gaping mouth.
Much like the village I’d just left, the streets smelled of fish and of a general cold, salty wetness. The roads were more shadowed, though, enclosed by taller buildings. When the matchmaker and I arrived at my groom’s home, I found the man already dead and buried. The matchmaker, who was already tense after having watched my mother fling herself into the ocean, began to wring her hands.
We were saved when the dead man’s brother, who now occupied the house, took a look at me and decided I would do for him as well. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other, as the only difference in the second engagement was the man’s first name.
The matchmaker fled back to her own town before I was wed, but I was secure within hours. The blacksmith oversaw our handfasting.
My new husband was a handsome man with a full red beard and red hair. I suppose I’d expected a man who smelled like parmaceti, in a home covered in offal. He seemed like a man I would get along with, even if I didn’t like to think about his livelihood. I could have grown to love him, but no whaler’s wife truly had the time to know her spouse. Unlike his brother, he was still wintering-over aboard ship, although he assured me now that he had his brother’s house, he wouldn’t have to in the future.
We scarcely had a fortnight together before he went away to the whaling grounds. Days are not enough time to learn a person’s character, although he was very polite.
As soon as the ship departed, the wives descended on our home.
“It’s a hard lot to set up a home by yourself,” they said. They helped me arrange my home the way they said I wanted it. I had little in the way of preferences, but it at least no longer looked like the home of a bachelor. They said they’d teach me recipes, and I offered to share some from my home.
“It’s a lonely life unless you’re a captain’s wife what can go aboard,” one woman told me, “but here we make our own crew. Our own pod.”
“It’s lonely aboard ship, too, and you don’t always come back,” someone else murmured. “It’s better here.”
“None of us will ever go on a hen frigate.”
A third of them were widows. The families were all part of the same fishery, although there were several vessels in the fleet.
“I’ve been married five years and have spent five months with my husband,” another announced, and everyone nodded. “You hardly know each other your entire lives.”
This did not trouble me.
“They don’t even know if they’re coming back to a child or not.”
“Are you going to have a child by the time your husband comes back?”
They all looked to me.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
“Well, if you do, we’ll deliver it.”
One woman ran an inn, one taught at the school, and another took in laundry. But my husband had left me with money, so my occupation was at home.
I planted carrots and corn, fed the hens and collected eggs. I fattened up the old rooster with table scraps, churned butter, gutted fish, and chopped wood. I started sewing a quilt with the other wives.
My house was darker than the others, because without my husband there, I wasn’t forced to burn lamps filled with whale oil. Somehow, using my whalebone comb and sewing needles by the light of the sun and moon seemed more passive.
I dreamed of the sea, but I was too busy to visit often. I had plenty of time, however, to think of my mother. When I stirred cornmeal, when I sank into a cold bed at night, when I stomped to the privy in the morning’s chill, I remembered my mother in a black dress, holding both my hands as I wobbled along the dunes beside her. I was too young at the time to form memories, but I remembered. She taught my siblings and me how to catch cod, to chop up octopi and boil their limbs, to crack open the shells of oysters and suck out their innards.
All along, I was conscious that this whale season was my final chance—I didn’t have a baby to leave behind yet. But that was only a matter of the wedding having been timed too closely to my husband’s ship leaving port.
When I did get to the beach, I walked through the tidepools, where the water was so still and clear you hardly knew it was there. There were black rocks weeping algae, red starfish breathing slowly, and once, a yellow pearl on a white tongue. I sold it so I could buy tea and coffee.
None of the wives swam, so I didn’t either. I mixed up the rules of this town often enough that I didn’t dare ask why.
I looked out at the white caps and whispered, “You must take me with you.” But the whales still wouldn’t take me.
My mother physically could not have stayed any longer than she did. My siblings were all accepted by the pod. I couldn’t begrudge any of them the abandonment.
But as the days in my new home grew more numerous, maybe I did stop believing at times. As I stood on the sand, wishing until the sun sank into the trees behind me, perhaps I suspected that my mother had simply found a riptide and let it take her, and that her story was meant only as a comfort for me.
***
Nearly a year passed, and one morning, the sky hung with silver clouds, and the woman who lived next door told me that the whales had been spotted. Our husbands’ ships would not be far behind.
It would be impossible for me to try during the day, but I had to find the pod that night. Luckily, my neighbors had grown used to my dark house, and I would not have to attempt to keep any candles or lamps burning when I left.
After sunset, I passed only two or three people in the street, none of whom I recognized or greeted, but I cursed myself for not having snuck through gardens and over fences. Once on the shore, I hid most of my clothing in the dune grasses, tucking my gown, stomacher, cap, petticoat, and cape under my shoes. My whalebone stays and my belt were at home to make undressing easier.
With the moon and the stars hidden by clouds, the only light came from the lighthouse behind me and the sentinels’ torches along the town walls. Neither provided any useful illumination down on the beach, not that I wanted to be seen, but it was the only way to orient myself back to shore if I lost my bearings.
I’d never looked for the pod after dark. I knew that at night they slept more, like humans, but were closer to the surface to breathe.
I trudged into the surf, hiking up my shift. Spray smacked the top of my head, my nose, my cheeks. Not spray. Drops came faster, and I realized the sky had let loose a sudden storm. Rain wouldn’t affect the whales’ ability to hear me, but it did make my mission more dangerous. Swimming was as natural to me as walking, but the waves had already begun to pound in the wind, knives of night-green water slicing at my face.
The storm broke into thunder and lightning.
“Of course,” I muttered.
I continued swimming, my feet already unable to touch the bottom. Treading, it was easier to let the waves bounce me up and down as I centered myself and threw my mind out to find the whales. I spotted a few ridges in the waves.
And then—a miracle happened. I discovered another organ, an eareyemouth that lived in my throat. Even through the rain and thunder, I located them in the course of a few minutes. Their hums were like wagon wheels thumping along a road, their squeaks like a fiddler tuning his instrument. Their deepness, their unseenness, their wholeness.
From the powerful well inside me, I mimicked them.
As with every season before this one, they did not respond. And my body did not change.
Again and again and again.
Why do you ignore me? I wanted to scream, but I smacked the surface instead, letting go of my whale-sense.
The current had carried me far up the beach, depositing me directly in front of the lighthouse. Its face swung around, and I ducked, although it was unlikely anyone could see me. The light revealed, instead of dorsal fins, a ship’s mast. My husband’s ship. If I hadn’t already been numb, my blood would have run cold. I’d known he would return soon, but this meant tonight was truly my only opportunity.
Stop, I thought desperately at the ship. An alarm bell would already be ringing in town, a crowd forming at the dock. I would be expected, especially if the people I’d passed in the street tonight had recognized me.
I could see, or sense, that the ship was towing a carcass, which meant the whale had been caught recently enough that they hadn’t gone ashore elsewhere.
The rain stopped. A final bolt of lightning struck the ship’s mast. The ship caught fire, and then it was over sooner than I could have ever expected.
I didn’t see much of the fire or the sinking. I was already swimming as hard as I could to the beach and then running, stumbling, my hair and shift freezing and clinging, up the sand to the dunes. Even though I’d seen the whale it pulled, the ship was still too far out for there to be much hope of any of the men aboard making it ashore.
I ran along the beach, away from the lighthouse. Once I reached my clothes, I struggled to dress myself, as the rain had soaked them. I’d just made myself decent and started down the dunes to the road when I heard footsteps behind me.
Two glowing yellow eyes appeared in the dark. It’s her, I thought, and stepped closer towards the ocean. The eyes became flames and then torches, and suddenly there were many more. I realized I should have fled with my clothes in my arms. I was directly beneath the town walls, and I had been seen. Before they shouted my name and the charge against me, I knew I was under arrest.
I ran, moaning under my breath.
They gallied me the same as a crew would a whale, chasing and raising noise when they sighted me.
My scream felt detached from my body as they caught me by the skirt, arms, hair. “Let me go! I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch I’m not a witchnotawitch!” It was the most words any of these men had ever heard from me.
I didn’t stop screaming until I was hoarse, and even then I whispered the same words in the gaol cell. My hands were forced behind me, chained to an iron bar. Alone in the dark, I recalled the events of the night vividly. Of course I was a witch, but I wasn’t responsible for the wreck.
Someone was finally going to eat my old, fattened-up rooster, I thought at some point, and it wasn’t going to be me. It was hardly fair.
***
There wasn’t a trial, only a quick inquiry in the morning before the hanging in the afternoon.
How did you call up the storm? Show us and you might live.
I had no answer. I’d called the whales. I hadn’t spoken to the rain. But saying that wouldn’t help.
You killed not one, but two husbands. You made the first sick and stood in the water to kill the second. You wanted to live unnaturally.
When they led me up the stairs to the high platform—I tried to push the word “gallows” from my brain, even as I stood upon it—the stoic expression I’d carved onto my face began to melt. My hands shook so badly that new cuts opened underneath the rope that bound my wrists, raw from the iron the night before.
Having refused beer since my capture, I didn’t humiliate myself by urinating in front of the crowd. I was grateful for that foresight, but I couldn’t stop myself from crying. The entire town would witness legs kicking, my thrashing flukes in my flurry.
I looked at the sky, but I still heard the crowd’s taunting. I had to step onto the stool without help and stumbled.
Mother.
Step up again.
Mother.
I sensed the whales roaming closer.
Take them, I said with my whale-sense.
At the moment the executioner lurched forward and I opened my mouth to scream, someone else screamed for me.
Seawater rushed into the square, rising up over the spectators so quickly it knocked them over. Within seconds, the town’s walls broke.
Even though the town had gathered to watch me die, the opposite was still unbearable. They had put me up on the gallows, where I stood with shaking legs, but I still knew the women and their sons and daughters below me. Some of them ran down the main street or up other alleys. Maybe they made it. But I watched hands flail as most of the mob slipped under the waves, their fingertips the last to go. Humans became bodies. Children became dolls.
The ocean came for me, too. The flood lifted my body off the stool, pulling me so the noose choked me like a tied dog. But the bonds around my wrists fell away, cut by something unseen. I clawed at the rope on my neck, feet kicking wildly against the current until I could throw off the noose.
The water was over my head, but I didn’t feel any weight in my lungs. Instead of a shriek, loud whistling and clicking sounds were released from somewhere at the top of my head. The rapidly building pressure stopped my ears, but I could hear my own whale-sounds—and others.
The strong current lulled, and sunlight broke through overhead, illuminating the calmed ocean all around me. The buildings that hadn’t washed away became cavern walls. I tried to swim to the surface, but it was already far above me, and I struggled in my skirts.
And then, there she was. And then, there were the whales. I had never seen an entire whale alive, all at once. Their size was almost obscene.
“My sweet daughter,” my mother said in the whale-language, gliding closer.
“Mother.” I had dreamed of seeing her again for a year. I was disappointed that she merely hung there in the water, watching me.
Her skin had blued and barnacled into the same texture of that of the whales. Her hair was mostly gone, and her flesh had swelled into a sensible, sturdy bulk.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I ruined the only future you could give me.”
“I was wrong. You had the ability all along.”
“I don’t understand why they’re taking me now.”
“I told you many times before. It’s not the pod’s decision. It’s yours. And you chose last night in the waves.”
I glanced up at the whales, the looming leviathans. I thought I saw three smaller figures in varying stages of becoming, and my heart clenched at the thought of siblings still living while the children I’d met over the past year were all gone.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The whaling ship.”
“That was me?”
“You know it was. You saw that its tow-irons held one of your own.”
My husband had been a nice enough sort of man, but he’d been a whaler. Perhaps I’d known all along what I’d done.
She reached over and helped me pull my dress off and over my shoulders, as if I were a child again.
I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my stockings. The chill on my legs was fading. I was warm enough that I could have been standing on the beach in the sun.
The current returned, but this time I resisted it easily. The sea was taking itself back. Above our heads, bodies began to rush past, a river of limbs. The whales bellowed as loud as a thunderstorm, as loud as a forge.
“It’s time to go home,” my mother said.
“I can’t,” I said.
“You are my daughter. You will come.”
I thought of my husband and my desperation in a stormy sea. I thought of the flood the whales had brought. “We are not the same.”
“As you say.”
A flickering shadow fell over us. The whale skeleton that had served as the town’s gate floated overhead, somehow still intact. When it had hung upside down from the walls, rope held its frame together, but the bones shouldn’t have stayed so complete in the swells, articulating as if it were alive, slowly swimming out into the dark open. The flood began to recede.
“This is the time to join,” my mother said, and she swam away with the pod, a procession following the debris of the town.
I watched for a moment, then swam to the surface. It was becoming more difficult to resist the tide.
As the whales disappeared, I glanced down to my treading fingers. They were turning blue.
Before I knew what I was doing, I saw the townspeople breaking like dolls in front of me, the whaling wives, their children too, and I took a deep breath and pushed the change away. I lifted my hands from the water: normal. No sign they had been blue.
A trick of the light, perhaps. That was what I wanted to tell myself.
I looked back to watch the shore. The ocean tore down the town’s walls and most of the structures they contained.
Then I turned. Spray blew up from the whales’ spiracles. The waves around me emptied of the last of the bodies and debris, sent forth in the wake of the whales. The sun disappeared, and the cold water became the same color as the sky.
Sarah Busching writes about things that go bump in the night, happily ever afters, and everything in between. She lives in Richmond, VA with her husband and two children, where they spend their time exploring the banks of the James River. Her work can be viewed at sarahbusching.com.