Arvin Kraft loves his complicated family, but they talk about him: how slow he is, how they need to share the burden of caring for him, how tired they all are. He hides in the walls of the family’s old house in Boston and listens to their laments. And he also discovers there a lead box of old papers. Slowly he reads them and finds they are the original manuscript of Melville’s Moby-Dick, long thought to have been lost in an 1850s fire at his publisher. The manuscript is valuable enough to save the family’s failing construction business if marketed properly. But Arvin wants more and Professor Thorne is the Melville expert who can help. Arvin and the professor take turns telling this tale with its lyric resonances of Moby-Dick, the specter of the curse of Ahab and strange deaths, and the scramble of greed as the manuscript becomes more valuable by the hour. Michael Strelow has a Ph.D in Literature, and has published poetry, short stories, and non-fiction essays in literary and commercial magazines. He hosts creative writing workshops in universities and writing groups, and his 2005 novel The Greening of Ben Brown was a FINALIST for the Ken Kesey Novel Award. Michael lives in Salem, Oregon, USA. The Moby-Dick Blues By Michael Strelow John Hunt Publishing Ltd. Copyright © 2017 Michael Strelow All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78535-701-5 CHAPTER 1 Arvin I think our house was built in 1873 or 1874. My mother sometimes gives one year and sometimes the other. In the basement, the beams measure twelve inches by twelve inches for the uprights, and the floor joists are two by eight inches. I measured both and wrote the results down in a small notebook that Salome gave me for my tenth birthday. I once tried to pound a nail into a beam because I wanted to hang up my notebook in a safe place where neither Ben or Carl could find it because either one would just take it if he could. Every nail I tried to pound into the support beam bent, and it didn't matter if I pounded small or big nails. They bent right in the middle like I was trying to pound into cement. I asked Carl later why you couldn't nail anything into the beams, and he said it was because the wood was old and dry. I had a right angle used by carpenters and Carl told me he would give me twenty-five cents for every right angle — it had to be exact — I could find in the house. I couldn't find any. Our house has had Kraft family in it every year of its life. My great-grandfather, Arvin Condon Kraft — I was named after him — cut some of the trees they made into the house. He didn't work as a carpenter or tree cutter either since he made lots of money, they said, selling his farmland to be made into new city lots. But he wanted to cut some of the oak and maple and pine trees that were going into his new house, just because. I understand that. It would be fine to point out some of the wood and say, "I cut that" or "I remember that tree when it was standing on the hillside out near Parker's Ferry." The house has six pocket doors and five fireplaces, though all the fireplaces don't work. Three of them were plugged with metal things so we wouldn't try to start a fire, especially Ben and Carl, who like fires. I was not allowed any kind of fires in the house or out after that one time. Ben and Carl could only start fires if someone — meaning mother or Salome — asked them. Our father had been dead as long as I could remember, but Ben said he could remember him and that he smelled like tobacco smoke. No one else ever smoked in our family after he was gone. Once Carl tried to get me to try to smoke a cigarette, but just the smell of it made me sick. No thanks, Carl, I told him. The pocket doors all worked in di?erent ways. On some of them the right one stuck and the left one slid easily. Some the other way around. The doorway upstairs on the third floor, the one that closed o? the highest fireplace room, sometimes the right door wouldn't budge like someone was holding it from inside the wall. Ben told me our house had ghosts and that one of them kept that door from opening when he felt like being bad and that I should never force the door. Just leave it alone when Great Uncle Morgan Kraft was feeling like holding it. Ben always told me stu? to scare me since he was older than Carl and could get away with it. Carl tried it and I'd cry because I knew he was picking on me and had been told over and over by Salome not to. Carl was afraid of Salome. Ben, too, but not as much. Salome told them both not to pick on me because I was slower than they were. Of course I was slower, I remember thinking, I'm three years younger than Carl and five years younger than Ben. I'd always be slower until we all grew up. Then I'd catch up. The pocket doors got me thinking about the inside of the house. I shined a flashlight into the pockets to see if I could catch Great Uncle Morgan holding the door, but all I could see was way back into the wall — the dust, the track for the doo