Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices Read online

  Any highway, I think. They all take you to the same place, don’t they?

  Sam stands across from my mother’s open window. His eyes have paled clear and blue, which gives the illusion that he has spaces in his head through which the sky shows. It is an eerie thing to see, but it holds my mother.

  My father starts the car and adjusts his headrest. “We’re in for a long ride,” he says. He is as casual as I’ve ever heard him be. He is trying but it is too late. As he eases the car forward, dust foams at the wheels. My mother and Sam are still staring at each other. “I think we’re going to be just fine,” he says. He reaches behind his seat to pat my foot.

  As my father pulls down the driveway my mother’s head turns to watch Sam’s eyes.

  “You two have really been on some trip,” my father says. “You had me all over the place.” He keeps up his monologue but I lose track of the words. My mother, who has turned halfway around in her seat, closes her eyes.

  I am reminded of a time that I watched Hadley bud grafting. He took a bud from a flowering apple tree and grafted it to the branch of an old tree that hadn’t been bearing fruit. With a sharp knife, he made a T-shaped cut in the bark of the old tree. He said it was very important to cut only the bark, not the wood of the tree. Then like a whittler, he pried away the folds of bark. He had the branch from the younger tree in a plastic baggie. He sliced off a middle-section bud, taking a little piece of the meat of the branch. To my surprise there was a leaf inside-I never really gave much thought to where the leaves were before they actually came out. Hadley cut off the leaf and gave it to me and then pushed the bud under the bark flaps of the old tree. He wrapped it tight with a greenish tape the way you might wrap a sprained ankle.

  I asked him when this would start to grow, and he told me in about two weeks they’d know if the bud had taken. If it did, the stub of the leaf stem would be green. If it didn’t, both the bud and the leaf would have dried up. Even if the graft took, the bud wouldn’t branch until next spring. He told me that the great thing about grafting like this was that an old tree, a dead tree, could be made into something new. Whatever strain of apple was grafted would grow on that particular branch. So in theory you could have four or five different apple varieties coming off of one tree, all different from the original fruit the tree used to bear.

  I pull away a blanket from the floor of the back seat. Underneath someone-Sam?-has put bushels of apples: Cortlands and Jonathans and Bellflowers and Macouns and Bottle Greenings. I am amazed that I can pick all these out by sight. Intuition tells me there are more in the trunk, and cider. All of these things to take with us to California.

  I reach for a Cortland and take a large, loud bite. I interrupt my father, who is still talking. “Oh,” he says, “you took some with you, did you?” He has been saying something about the air quality in Massachusetts versus in L.A. He continues to talk, but neither my mother nor I listen. She is hungrily watching me with this apple.

  I stretch out the other half to her. She smiles. She takes a bite even bigger than mine. Juice runs down the side of her mouth but she makes no effort to wipe it away. She finishes the apple down to its core. Then she unrolls the window and tosses it onto the road. She leans her head out the window. Her hair blows into her face, hiding parts of it and illuminating others.

  A motorcycle swerves on the other side of the road. It comes close enough to alarm my father and to break my concentration. The Doppler effect, I think, listening to the engine scream lower and lower as it disappears. But it doesn’t really disappear. It just leaves my field of vision, temporarily.

  My mother catches my eye: Be strong for me. Be strong for me. This silent chant fills the car. There is something to be said for the fact that my father cannot hear a thing. My mother’s thoughts come in waves, pulling me towards her like a tide: I love you. I love you.

  7 SAM

  You are not going to believe this, but when I was a kid my father had this old radio upstairs in the barn that didn’t work, and I always figured if we ever got it going we’d hear all those old radio things: Amos and Andy, Pepsodent commercials, fireside chats. I imagined the voices would crackle like lousy phone connections, swallowing their own syllables. I used to bug my father daily to twist a green wire around a yellow one, or to poke at the huge pitted speaker, but he’d tell me to do whatever else I was supposed to be doing and that was the end of that.

  My dad was almost fifty when I was born, and this radio was a thing from his heyday, I don’t know, but he wouldn’t let me touch it. It looked just like you are picturing it: large, wooden carved, slick shiny mahogany inlaid with brass, a speaker bigger than my face, a dial that was cracked by a fall. My father, knotted, patient, would follow me up to the hayloft to the ledge where the radio sat, impressive as a contemporary jukebox. I begged him to tinker with it, to make it run as he had the tractor and the hand-pump (he was like that), I begged because I wanted to hear his story.

  My father had told me time and time again he had no patience for electric things, as he called them. He told me to put my time to better use. But this radio, it had mystery. What it was doing in a hayloft, I don’t know.

  When I was fourteen I took a book on electronics out of the library and began to fidget with all the black and red snaked wires I could find in my house. I became fascinated with tangles. I took apart my alarm clock and put it back together. I took apart the telephone and put it back together. I even dismantled the conveyor belt we used to sort the apples for market. I began to wonder about the insides of other things. I did all this without attracting the attention of my father. Then I removed the back panel of the radio one Sunday and, scared of going further, left it right next to the radio for the next day.

  But that was the night that the apples began to rot. It was the strangest thing. We had a hundred acres, and this disease, it was a plague, really, spread from east to west, slowly, hitting about twenty acres overnight, our best trees. We spent the next day spraying and pruning and trying all the other tricks in the book. The second night, the Macouns began to fall from the trees. My father took up smoking, which he’d quit. He checked the balance in the savings account. In the middle of the night I sneaked up to the hayloft. I lay in the piles of dry grass and timothy, imagining the Big Band swing sounds, the sweet Andrews Sisters, filling the arched roof and settling over the pickled beams. Then I screwed the back plate onto the radio.

  Don’t expect miracles, we lost half our crop that year. It had nothing to do with the damn radio; it was a parasite whose scientific name I have forgotten. At fourteen, what did I know? Little white things, like potato bugs, only more deadly. When my parents moved to Florida six years ago I had the radio fixed. I was twenty, I still expected to hear Herb Alpert, and I got Madonna. I laughed when I heard her, garbled, like an old gramophone.

  It had nothing to do with the apples, did I say that already?

  8 OLIVER

  (From an article Oliver sits down to write for the Journal of Mammology:)

  I hope they never come back.

  Detailed analysis of humpback whale songs from the low- to midlatitude waters of the eastern North Pacific (Payne et al., 1983) and the western North Atlantic have shown that the songs change rapidly and progressively over time, obeying unwritten laws of change.

  Previously, humpback whales were thought to sing only during the winter months, when they occupy low-latitude wintering grounds, and during migration to and from these grounds (Thompson et al., 1979 , and others). Our observations between June and August in the high-latitude feeding area of Stellwagen Bank seemed to confirm these reports. In approximately 14h of recording during the mid-season, we heard only unpatterned sounds and no songs.

  She must be coming back, or she wouldn’t have taken Rebecca. But you won’t find Oliver Jones apologizing. She’s the one at fault here. She’s the one who is to blame. I still have her mark on my face.

  Until recently the only complete humpback whale songs recorded on high-latitude
feeding grounds in any season were those reported by McSweeney et al. (1983) from two recordings made in southeast Alaskan waters in late August and early September. These recordings, which were the result of listening for 155 days during five summers, showed abbreviated versions of the wintering ground song of humpback whales from the eastern North Pacific, and contained the same material sung in the same order as the Hawaiian songs from the surrounding winter seasons.

  I don’t know what has gotten into her lately. She isn’t acting like she usually does. Lately she has been there when I least expect her, demanding, anticipating things I cannot give. She should know what this all means to a scientist-the hunt, the track, the thrill of it. And now. She struck me-hard.

  The strange thing: her face, after she hit me. She was in greater pain than I. You could see it in her eyes-like she had been violated in some way that broke her own image.

  We report here the first recordings of complete humpback whale songs on the high-latitude feeding grounds in the North Atlantic, along with evidence to suggest that a) whales apparently start singing before migration and b) singing on the high-latitude feeding grounds is common in autumn. Our observations and recordings were made near Stellwagen Bank, Massachusetts, an elongate region of shallows lying north of Cape Cod in the southern Gulf of Maine. Each year this area is occupied by a seasonally returning population of humpback whales (Mayo, 1982, 3) that feeds in the region (Hain et al., 1981).

  The last time it was autumn. It was late September when she left and took the child. After the crash, when I saw her at the hospital, she looked broken, that’s the turn of phrase, like tempered glass that has been splintered. Who would have believed it: happening again. But this husband kept his promise. Oliver Jones did not hit her. She gave herself reason to leave. What was it-run it back through your mind like a cassette, get to the point where the outbreak occurred: the sting, my laughter. Then come the words, the affirmation of the past she tries to run from: like father like daughter like father like daughter.

  We described song structure using established terminology: briefly, humpback whale songs are composed of a sequence of discrete themes that are repeated in a predicable order; each sequence of themes is considered a song; and all songs sung by a single whale without a break longer than one minute make up a song session (Jones, 1970).

  I know her past and it has remained largely unspoken, but the truth is the truth. Like father, like daughter-I surprise myself-it sounds malicious. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. She strikes me, I strike her. Is it possible one can physically move a person with one’s words?

  Preliminary analysis of the recordings from the three days in autumn of 1988 shows that all three contain complete humpback whale songs. Comparisons with songs from March, the end of the winter season, show that the November songs closely resemble the song from the end of the winter season before, which agrees with the hypothesis (Jones, 1983) that songs change primarily when they are being sung and not during the quiet summer.

  Picture this: Oliver Jones, sitting on the steps in his sumptuous-San Diego home, trying to write an article for a professional journal and being distracted by headlights that pass by. Oliver Jones, deserted by his family for reasons he cannot comprehend. Oliver Jones, defending himself from a crazed wife with the power of language. With a single sentence fragment. Oliver Jones. Scientist. Researcher. Betrayer. What a life she has had. Is there any one thing Jane could say to me that could compel me to leave?

  Because we have considerable data about many of the seasonally-resident individuals in the Gulf of Maine study area and a collectionof humpback whale songs from the western North Atlantic wintering grounds dating back to 1952, these studies should help illuminate the function of the high-latitude feeding ground songs and their relationship to those on the wintering grounds. With further study we hope to determine how much singing occurs on the feeding grounds, who the singers are, and in what context they sing.

  This time she must come home. She must so that I can tell her that I know why she left. That it is possible I was the one at fault. And if she does not come home I will go and find her. Tracking is what this scientist built his name upon.

  9 JANE

  Instead of fighting when we were growing up, Joley and I went through a ritual of saving each other. I was the one who lied for him when he first ran away from home and surfaced again in Alaska, working for an oil rigger. I was the one who bailed him out of jail in Santa Fe, when he had assaulted a traffic cop. When research in college convinced him the Holy Grail was buried in Mexico, I drove him to Guadalajara. I talked him out of swimming the English Channel; I answered all his calls, his letters. During all the time Joley tried to find a corner of this world in which he felt comfortable, I was the one who kept track of him.

  And in return, he has been my biggest fan. He believed in me with such faith that at times I began to believe in myself too.

  Rebecca is inside the 7-Eleven, getting something to eat. I told her to be sparing, because the bottom line is, we don’t have a lot of cash, and there’s only so far we can go on Oliver’s credit cards before he cancels them. The operator makes a collect call to Stow, Massachusetts, which is accepted by someone named Hadley. The man who has answered has a voice as smooth as syrup. “Jane,” he says. “Joley’s mentioned you before.”

  “Oh,” I say, unsure how to respond. “Good.”

  He goes out to find Joley, who is in the field. I hold the receiver away from my ear and count the holes in the mouthpiece.

  “Jane!” This welcome, this big hello. I pull the receiver close.

  “Hi, Joley,” I say, and there is absolute silence. I panic, and press the buttons-numbers one and nine and six-wondering if I have been disconnected.

  “Tell me what’s the matter,” my brother says, and if it had been anyone else but Joley I would have asked him how he knew.

  “It’s Oliver,” I begin, and then I shake my head. “No, it’s me. I left Oliver. I took Rebecca and I left and I’m in a 7-Eleven in La Jolla and I haven’t the first idea what to do or where to go.”

  Three thousand miles away, Joley sighs. “Why did you leave?”

  I try to think of a joke, or a witty way to say it. It’s already a punch line, I think, and in spite of myself I smile. “Joley, I hit him. I hit Oliver.”

  “You hit Oliver-”

  “Yes!” I whisper, trying to quiet him, as if the entire nation between us can hear.

  Joley laughs. “He probably deserved it.”

  “That’s not the point.” I see Rebecca come up to the counter inside the 7-Eleven, carrying Yodels.

  “So who are you running from?”

  My hands start to shake, so I tuck the phone into the crook of my neck. I don’t say anything, and I hope that he will fill in the answer for me.

  “I need to see you,” Joley says, serious. “I need to see you to help you. Can you get to Massachusetts?”

  “I don’t think so.” I mean it. Joley has traveled the whole world, its caverns, rolling oceans, and its boundaries, but I have never been far from suburbia on the East or the West Coast. I have lived in two pockets disconnected from a whole. I have no idea where Wyoming is, or Iowa, or if it takes days or weeks to travel across the country. I haven’t the slightest sense of direction when it comes to things like this.

  “Listen to me. Take Highway Eight east to Gila Bend, Arizona. Rebecca can help you, she’s a quick kid. In the morning, go to the post office in town and ask for a letter in your name. I’ll write and tell you where to go next, and I won’t give you more than one step at a time, and Jane?”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you were listening. It’s all right,” he says, and his voice caresses. “I’m here, and I’m going to write you cross-country.”

  Rebecca comes outside to the phone booth and offers me a Yodel. “I don’t know, Joley. I don’t have faith in the U.S. Postal Service.”

  “Have I ever let you do
wn?”

  No, and because he hasn’t, I start to cry. “Talk to me,” I say.

  So my brother begins to talk, endless and lovely and interconnected. “Rebecca will love it here. It’s an orchard, a hundred acres. And Sam won’t mind that you’re coming-he owns the place- awfully young for a controlling farmer but his parents have retired to Florida. I’ve learned a lot from Sam.” I motion to Rebecca to come closer, and when she does I hold the phone between us so that she can hear. “We grow Prairie Spys, Cortlands, Imperials, Lobos, McIntosh, Regents, Delicious, Empire, Northern Spy, Prima, Priscillas, Yellow Delicious, Winesaps. At night when you go to bed, you hear the bleating of sheep. In the morning when you lean out your window, you smell cider and sweet grass.”

  Rebecca closes her eyes and leans against the gum-studded phone booth. “It sounds terrific,” I say, and to my surprise, my voice is no longer quivering. “I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Take your time. I’m not going to chart your course by the fastest highways. I’m going to send you to places I think you need to go.”

  “What if-”

  “Oliver won’t find you. Trust me.”

  I listen to Joley’s breathing on the other end of the line. The atmosphere changes in La Jolla. The salt in the air turns molecular; the wind reverses its course. Two boys in the back seat of a Jeep sniff at the night sky like bloodhounds.

  “I know you’re scared,” Joley says. He understands. And with that admission, I feel myself slip, limp, into the careful hands of my brother.

  “So when we get to Gila Bend,” Rebecca says, “Uncle Joley is going to meet us?” She is trying to work out the particulars; she is that kind of girl. Every fifty miles or so, when she can’t get anything but static on the AM radio, she asks me another logistical question.