Saltwater Heart by Kendall Kulper

Author:Kendall Kulper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction / Love & Romance, Juvenile Fiction / Historical / United States / 19th Century, Juvenile Fiction / Fantasy & Magic
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2015-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Weeks after leaving the island, I still wasn’t used to the telltale. It smoldered against my wrist, keeping me up at night. When I woke up, the air in the fo’c’sle hung thick and sweaty. I felt feverish all the time. My skin prickled with heat.

“Lose yourself in your work,” my mates told me. But a whaling trip was just time. Time spent up the mast. Time sitting on the deck. Time in the fo’c’sle. We did not expect to see any whales for months. The crew filled their days with books and letters. They drew hunting scenes. They made tiny, beautiful things with clever hands.

I thought about Alice. When I’d left the Roe cottage, I followed my telltale like a compass. It led me to my ship. It pulled me to the sea. Every morning I touched the fire on my wrist, worried. Had it cooled? Were we going in the wrong direction? But it only grew warmer.

Three months after we left port, I woke up to a throbbing wrist and a bloody sky. On the deck, my mates stared quietly at the clouds, their faces drawn. Tall Bill, one of our oarsmen, stood next to me.

“Red sky,” he said.

“Right.”

“Storm coming.”

“Yes.”

“Better get on with it, then.”

There was no time to worry. We’d spent three months doing nothing, and now we had to move quickly or the storm would take us and we would die. We battened the hatches—the grates that brought air and light belowdecks in fair weather and flooded a ship in the bat of an eye in foul. Four thirty-foot-long whaleboats hung from the sides of the ship. They had to be covered with canvas and lashed tight to the hull. Some of the crew went into the hold to secure our barrels of food and water. When the ship rocked, those barrels had to stay put or they would crack and burst or, worse, slide to one side and throw off the balance of the boat. Three months’ worth of deck litter—spare rigging, spare parts, unclaimed tools, dented mugs, hooks, harnesses, and harpoons—had to be tucked away or tossed to sea. In wind they became weapons. In rain they became plugs, mucking up the scuppers that allowed water to flow off the deck and into the sea. One good wave over a blocked deck turned a ship from a boat to a bathtub, and bathtubs sank.

It was too much to do, and then it was done. Then we waited. The boat was ready. We were ready. But the wind had died down. All the blood had drained from the clouds, now streaky gray. They hung overhead and looked hardly thick enough to hold more than a few teaspoons of rain.

Captain Crawley inspected our work, and we all smartly lined up on the main deck. When he had finished, he pulled out two dozen rope necklaces, each fitted with an iron disk.

“I have corpus charms for every one of you,” he said, passing out the charms, but no one looked eager to put one around his neck.

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