Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Then he began to climb, with little Chester climbing, too, in front of him, but with the captain’s body providing a kind of movable cradle in that Chester climbed within the captain’s hands and body and feet. They climbed very slowly, and I could see by his glances and conjecture from his moving mouth that the captain was gently encouraging his boy.

  I began to be cold, exposed as I was to the September air, as I waited for them. No doubt little Chester had insisted that he, too, as superior cabin boy, must go aloft. I was sorry I had not bought a regular pea jacket, for I felt I would freeze in a wintry sea. Yet I trusted my ingenuity to provide when need arrived. I would quilt a lining from sailors’ scraps.

  At length, first Chester, who reached up for my hand, and then the captain threaded into the loop. Some whalers do not have this safety device, but just a tiny open platform to stand on. It was typical of good Captain Fry that he provided safety insofar as it was mortally possible to do so. Ah! the limits of mortality. But that comes later. If only writing were like music with many strands in many layers progressing at once! Da Vinci was said to be able to write different messages simultaneously with each hand! But can anyone read that way? Da Vinci himself, I suppose.

  Standing all three together, Fry said to me, “Now, boy, let me look at your eyes.”

  Obligingly, I looked straight into his, and we commenced to read each other shamelessly.

  “So these are eyes that can see under water?” he asked.

  “There was a shadow. A moving shadow. Moving at the speed of small whales.”

  “Looking into your eyes, I do not know what I am seeing,” he mused. “But I know that I have never seen it before.”

  “Nor I, sir,” I answered somewhat shakily. For the first time, I felt a little afraid. Here was an impertinence, as is any utterance from the heart.

  “Can you teach me to see so keen?” Chester asked.

  I looked at the father to see his wish.

  “Yes,” I said. “Partly, at least. I’ll teach you from the deck.”

  But we three stood some time longer in the masthead, and both the captain and I pointed out boats and currents and clouds to Chester.

  After a few moments the captain said kindly, “You’re cold, Ulysses. Your cheek is flushed. We should go down.”

  I went first, and they followed after. We all moved slowly, like crippled ants. As children try to tell their pet cats, climbing down is harder than climbing up. But I vowed to practice.

  I was assured my berth on the Sussex. There was no need to talk further of that. I felt most unusual, most lucky.

  That night in my hammock, slung next to Chester’s in the stateroom which opened into the captain’s cabin, I thought of the three of us aloft in the crow’s nest, with volumes of air about us. The present chamber spoke confidingly of close wooden walls, white-painted, a low wooden ceiling. My breath seemed enclosed. I was hung all netted up like a leg of mutton in a string sack. I felt feverish from too much wind. Beyond his closed door, I could hear the captain snoring. A homey sound. The wind had all but blown through me when I was aloft. Did I inhabit the wind, or the wind inhabit me?

  I thought of my searching in Captain Fry’s blue eyes—steady, penetrant. Kind. What had I thought I saw? All reflective in my hammock, I knew at once. I had seen the eyes of a true father.

  CHAPTER 26: The Companion

  WHY HAD I never thought of Uncle Torch that way? He had stood in for four years as dear as any parent. And Aunt, too. My hammock swayed with the natural rising and falling of the ship on its bed of waves, but I could not sleep. Had my mother reached home again? Perhaps the Kentucky cabin door was even now swinging open on its hinges. What an emptiness for her! My father gone. The emptiness inside her body. Perhaps a neighbor woman stood beside her, both of them with web shawls across their shoulders.

  My conscience smote me for the lies I had sent to the Island and to Kentucky. But those lies would give them peace of mind—each home believing I was at the other. Was it not clever and kind of me to lie?

  The Kentucky cabin—so far away. Here, in Captain Fry’s day room, the enclosing space was smaller, the boards planed and painted; there we had huge logs, brown almost to black, with chinking betwixt. I wished for my mother’s hand on my hot forehead. I had lied to my mother. Or Aunt, who would check on me unobtrusively but whose will I would feel, impelling me to health, strength, even to sensible thoughts! I had lied to my aunt.

  That night I dreamt of that peculiar pressure of the ratlines under my foot and of how I pushed up and off with each step.

  In the morning, Chester and I took our breakfast at his father’s table. What a bounty it was! Mrs. Swain’s board could not have been much better. Captain Fry explained breakfast was celebratory, as we sailed right after. He told us to listen and we would hear the handspikes turning the windlass to haul up the anchor, even as we cut our ham.

  There was fresh cow’s milk and butter for our toast. Chester had a cut-crystal pot of a mixture of white sugar and cinnamon which he was allowed to spoon liberally over his toast. He enjoined me to try it, and I did, finding it to be a heavenly condiment. The captain urged us both to eat more and more, reminding us that we were growing boys and needed to eat heartily. In the center of the table sat a golden brick of cheddar cheese. We had large bowls of oatmeal—molasses on that—and we each had a hard-boiled egg sprinkled with black pepper. Chester informed me that when the chickens aboard stopped laying eggs, we ate the chickens.

  Last voyage the chickens had stopped doing their duty on the morning after the Sussex crossed the equator. The captain and mates had had fried chicken, baked chicken, poached chicken, and finally chicken stew—four mainland meals in the middle of the South Atlantic.

  I inquired how many chickens we had among us this time. Thirteen in the crate under the carpenter’s bench. “Last time there were twelve,” Chester said cheerfully. “So one chicken is a veteran, like me.” (The last voyage had been his first.)

  “What do you mean?”

  “She never stopped laying eggs. So we didn’t eat her. She gets to sail again.”

  I could think of a better reward for that productive bird, like a berth in a land-rooted coop at home. I glanced at the captain to see if he entertained any such thought, but I noted a placid justice on his brow—not mercy. However, as I immediately learned, I could not always read my captain accurately.

  “Perhaps we’ll just keep her as a pet in any case,” he said, with that extreme of mercy, pardon, in his voice. He smiled at his boy. “A companion.”

  Little did they guess that Chester’s human companion was also female. Involuntarily I cleared my throat.

  Chester looked at me impishly. “Are you my human hen?”

  “Chester,” his father said, “leash your tongue. He means no harm, Ulysses.”

  “Ulysses!” Chester said. “That’s a clumsy name.”

  “A classical name. Ulysses survived the Trojan War,” his father said. “He was a sailor, a voyager of many years before he returned to his wife. His son, Telemachus, grew up while he was away.”

  “I shall call you Billy.”

  The memory of our old goat charging the Lighthouse tower came to mind, and I laughed.

  “Billy has a pleasant temper,” the captain said. “It’s a good thing for you, Chester.”

  At that moment, the ship gave a lurch. It came up through my feet on the floor and into my bottom on the chair; my shoulders, neck, and head swayed with it. My body knew! We were moving! I, a girl, was going to sea.

  I’m sure my happiness was made visible to the captain. I could not help but beam at my new family at the breakfast table.

  Retrospectively, I flagellate myself. How could I have so callously left my old family? Sixteen thinks the joy of adventure is her natural right. Sixteen thinks that because all is well—temporarily—with her, those who love her must mystically be assured.

  “How does it feel, Billy?” Captain Fry asked me. What a surprising qu
estion! It was as though he were my mother but invested with power. And what a quietness those two qualities made in combining. Power and sympathy equal quietness. What an equation!

  “Your mind moves in flashes,” Captain Fry said. “Thoughts shimmer like sheet lightning on your countenance.”

  “What do you mean?” Chester demanded.

  I dodged my head and was silent. No one had ever made me dodge before! Certainly not my own father. Chin up! That was the necessary attitude for defiance. But now my head drooped.

  “I feel happy and excited,” I mumbled.

  “And don’t you look it?” The captain laughed. “Chester, go up and stand by the pilot.”

  “Is he the same as last time?” Chester made a gesture with both hands as though to smooth a gigantic mustache parallel to the floor. Then his hands made abrupt, right-angle turns toward the floor.

  “I’ve seen that man,” I said. “He owns the sloop Camel.”

  “He was so hairy,” Chester pronounced.

  “No,” his father answered. “One of the new crew, Giles, is a licensed harbor pilot. He’s taking us out. We save the pilot fee.”

  “But how will he get back?” Chester asked.

  “He’s with us for the voyage. Go and talk with him. Learn what you can of piloting. Billy will be cabin boy and straighten for you this time.”

  Chester licked his finger and stuck it straight in the cinnamon sugar pot.

  “Come along,” his father said to Chester.

  I liked it right well when they both quit our chambers. I left the dining table to enter the stateroom, to peer through the portholes. Yes, we were moving. And it was Giles who guided us. This last gave me a special thrill of pleasure. Giles had no knowledge that his ship was pregnant with me. I was a kind of Jonah in the whale’s belly. While he guided above, I was picking up cups and plates. I was making a neat stack and wondering if it was my duty to wash them, as cabin boy, or was that work assigned to cook or to the steward? And perhaps still I would wash them, as cook’s help? Doubtless I was to straighten the captain’s bed. I walked toward the door of his cabin, along the starboard side. My feet moved in the direction we sailed. It seemed a true walking away from New Bedford.

  I smiled. Perhaps I could stay hidden from Giles and Kit till we crossed the equator. Surely that line was the boundary of another realm? How smoothly we moved. Giles was at the helm! I dropped into the captain’s chair at the head of the table, his stateroom door behind me. The stack of dishes sat on my left, and I could see the ring of toast crumbs left around the spot where Chester’s plate had been.

  Not curly-headed Chester but big-nosed Giles was the natural heir to a sailing ship—let it be merchant or whaler. But not a battleship. There was too much Quaker in me to imagine that. Harvard would not have Giles for all his perfect answers to their questions. And better than perfect, too, I would warrant. Telling things they themselves did not know. Yes, though they learned from him, they would not have him. “That which the builders rejected hath become the cornerstone of the building.” Was that my father’s voice intoning scripture? For Giles might, indeed, be the president of Harvard College. His mind and character were fit for it.

  They were not worthy of him! What had they shown of true integrity? But Captain Fry would see Giles’s promise. I smiled to think that the man who had recognized me with such alacrity would surely see the same and more in Giles. The captain had already passed the first test—for he had hired Giles and Kit.

  But it would have been Kit who talked at their interview. Something in me knew that Giles would have arranged it thus. He would himself have stood silently, a little taller, behind Kit. Giles would have folded his arms across his chest with his hands in his armpits. It was Kit who would think of what would persuade another. Giles’s thought was tethered by what signified to himself.

  How could Uncle Torch have given up the sea? I listened. I heard the rush of water passing my wooden wall.

  Ulysses I was, and no Billy!

  I got up to tidy the master’s room. The captain’s stateroom, where Chester and I slept, fitted all across the stern. Three round windows looked out at the wake of the ship. Across the water, I could still see the harbor of New Bedford. I took down the two hammocks and folded them so that the captain might use his sofa and table if he liked, then I returned to his bedroom, adjoining. The bed was suspended in the center of the room, on gimbals, as the captain’s had been in Mrs. Swain’s story. “I became the captain’s whore,” she had said. But my captain was not of that sort—so the good daughter in me said. But the woman part of me asked, “What do you know of men?”

  Suppose Giles and I were to marry? (I forgot I was angry with him.) Then would I be sent back home like a bad girl? But if I were a passenger and we paid my way with his salary? How quickly I laid hold on my spouse’s purse! Well, I could sew and earn my passage.

  What is a gimbaled bed? Imagine a bed such as you ordinarily see in a well-appointed house: a wooden frame strung across with rope, a mattress, a headboard—Queen Anne with two arabesques of waves crashing toward a central spindle—but do not imagine legs on the bed. Instead it is suspended. From the tops of its posters, lines lead to a central gimbal, which device digests the rolling and the pitching of the ship so that the passage of the bed is more smooth than that of the vessel transporting it.

  In short, a gimbaled bed was one that could be made up like any other bed, and I set to doing it. The captain’s linens were the finest I had ever seen or touched.

  The captain had left none of his clothing lying about, but against one wall was a high cherry chest of drawers topped with the same spindle-and-waves design of the headboard. The spindle was the abstraction of a lighthouse, I mused. On either side of the cabin door hung a decoration. On the right was the skin of a zebra—I recognized the jagged bars of black and white, and the tail hung down with a black hairy tassel at the end. It hung on the short wall that separated the bedroom from the head, or toilet, jammed in the corner formed by the perpendicular of the bedroom and the stateroom. On the other side of the bedroom door hung a cutlass in a silver scabbard which was worked all over with a scrolling line. Like the zebra skin, the cutlass sported a tassel, but this one, hanging from the hilt, was made of an aquamarine blue silk. I did not know why, but I shuddered when I saw this weapon displayed as something pretty.

  I returned to the stateroom to have a last glimpse of land. Now New Bedford was small out the stern portholes; the mighty masts of harbored ships became the size of scratches on window glass. Did I view reality or merely random marks across my lens?

  One book lay on the desk, a thickish one. There were no other books about. None at all. This surprised me, for the captain had read, I knew, the Greeks, at least. I hoped the book would not prove to be a Bible. It was bound in dark green cloth boards, frayed at the edges. I read the single word stamped in gold on the cover: SHAKESPEARE. I hefted the tome and opened the book to the flyleaf. Here was written, in a firm hand, the sentence Shakespeare is my Harvard and my Yale. And then the captain had signed his name, Clifford Fry, and a date some twenty years before.

  The pages were soft to the turning. The Tempest, a play I myself knew well, seemed the most read and annotated. Yes, it suited the temperament of Clifford Fry. A world kept safe by a benign despot. I felt like Miranda: “O brave new world, that has such people in it!”

  He had also much read King Lear, but I did not like it so well. The scenes with the cruel daughters bit at me. I had not been so rejecting of my paternity as Goneril and Regan had been. But neither had I proved a Cordelia.

  I was interrupted by the abrupt opening of the door. A very redfaced man informed me that the captain wanted me on deck, that he himself was the cook, and that after the captain was done with me, I was to report to him in the galley. Now my heart was fearful. Would I walk straight into Giles and we scarcely beyond land? There was no possibility that he would look at me and not know me. How had those heroines of Shakespeare appeared
so convincingly as boys to those who knew them already as girls? It was a ludicrous convention of drama. But Deborah Sampson, a woman in history, had fought in the War for Independence dressed as a man. Could I signal with a wink that Giles was not to betray me? If he understood, would he obey? I made my feet climb up the companionway to the deck. Even through my worry, I was pleased at once at the sunshine and brilliance of the open deck and by its size. After the cramped rooms below, there seemed a platform presenting a whole world, clear, bright, and trembling with uncertainty. If only I did not have to hide from two men instead of one.

  I walked gingerly along, trying to keep my head down. I had put on the red cap with the long bill I had found in the street to the wharf, and I hoped that that would mask my features from a downward glance were Kit or Giles aloft. My shorn curls stuck out from the cap, and I was sure that I did not look like myself, from above. I found the captain at the wheel, with Chester at his elbow, and no sign of Giles. Could a month? a week? be made up of such lucky non-encounters?

  It was the captain’s desire that each morning after breakfast Chester and I should walk the deck round about for a distance that I judged equal to a mile. During this time we were to converse. “Tell him what you know,” the captain said to me.

  “I think it is not much,” I said, for I remembered when I had undertaken to educate Frannie.

  Again I congratulated myself that at neither of my homes had anyone been left worrying about me and my whereabouts, though both letters had been shameful lies. I asked Chester how soon he thought our course would cross that of a homebound ship. I would tell them the truth now. Now I couldn’t be reclaimed. Now I could say that my disguise had worked with the captain, and I was perfectly safe. I had begun to see my own life as a story and myself as the author of it.

  As Chester and I talked, my eyes sometimes shifted to the sea and sky and sometimes dwelt upon the gear and fittings and architecture of the ship. I wanted Chester to name every single part to me. My eye sorted out rails and ropes, masts and booms and barrels and brooms, where there were doors and windows, how the small boats were suspended and what was stored in them. I noted the smell of tar, the slide of water against wood. In the distance I heard the sea’s natural sounds, the shifting of unspeakable tons of heaving water—sounds which the world would make whether any boat sailed or not.