Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “I am glad to hear it,” I said.

  “And will you wait for him?”

  I considered for several moments. Ahab would not mind while I searched for the truth of my heart. I felt in myself a depth of calm, profundity like the ocean, yet floating on top a sort of nervous, superficial froth. “Friend Ahab, my heart is not hard—Kit is not dead—and yet—though I can envision him making friends, walking westward, though I know what his mind is like when it is clear—I feel neither loyalty nor bereavement—I do not understand myself in this.”

  “Then the message he sends back will not pain you.”

  “What message is that?”

  “ ‘Tell them I am never coming back.’ ”

  I gasped and stopped walking. Like a hammer blow to the forehead of a calf, the words stunned me. Almost I felt I would drop to my knees. And yet had I not wanted a full freedom?

  Ahab stood silently and waited for me to recover myself. Finally he said, “But the words do hurt you.”

  “It is their finality,” I said.

  “That which you greatly feared has come upon you.”

  “I feel bereft, after all. Bereft—like a blow.” I began to walk forward again. “Not bereft of Kit. He lives. Bereft of a companion.”

  “You must have felt that many times before?”

  “Yes. It is the finality of it. That now I have no choice in the matter.”

  I stopped again, swung the bundle from my shoulder, and handed it to Ahab. He took it without a word, and we walked on. I did feel stricken, as though I needed all my strength, all the air in my lungs, simply to go forward. Encasing me was froth of nervousness, like a thin garment, a veil. My knees trembled. I seemed to walk like a blind person through the town to Mrs. Macy’s door. He handed me the bundle.

  “So then, Una, it’s good-bye.”

  “Yes,” I said, dazed, and for no reason added, “I am a married woman with no husband.”

  Though he did not speak, quicker than language, Ahab’s eyes darted defiance. The scar! It seemed to contract, to convey an electric discharge from his brain down his neck to the trunk of his body. All his being was charged, embodied storm and power. He wheeled, like a cyclone or waterspout, and walked away.

  It was no proper good-bye at all. The thought of saying Godspeed had deserted me.

  LIMPLY, I sank upon the settle in Mrs. Macy’s kitchen.

  “Girl, girl,” she said, “you’re pale as bleached linen.”

  “My husband is gone forever,” I said.

  “Now then,” she said, sitting beside me and patting my hand. “So’s mine. And look at me.” Her forearms were covered with small freckles, very close together, yet distinct. What else did she mean for me to see?

  “He’ll never come back,” I said.

  “Nor will mine, till Christ comes in the clouds, the graves open, and the quick and the dead ascend.”

  She spoke of the end of the world with total good cheer.

  “Look at me,” she went on. “I have my own business. More close friends than I can count on fingers and toes. Who knows, for you, even—why, it could happen to me—I’m only of middle age, and strong—God may send another, better husband. Here,” she said, “take off your clothes and get in the washtub. The water’s warm, but far from scalding. Wash off your grief. I hear he was but a sorry lot, anyway.”

  Here I sniffed, preparatory to tears. She ought not criticize my Kit.

  “But no doubt you loved him well enough. You have a loyal heart—anyone can see that. Still, there’s nothing like a spring bath in water someone else has heated. Strip down, girl. I’ll pull the curtain.”

  Indeed, I could not move, but Mrs. Macy pulled the curtain, stuck her finger in the water, then grasped a hot stone with her tongs from the hearth and threw it sizzling in the water. I felt the rock was my heart, gone already ahead of me into the water.

  “The Indians cooked with hot stones in their water,” she said. “Can you imagine the filth of it? Not my rocks, though. They’ve been boiled ten thousand times. Do you use hot rocks for your washing?”

  “No.”

  “Now lift your arms, and off slides the camisole. Oh, you’ve nice breasts, indeed. You’ll yet nurse a babe. And I’ll scald his diapers for you. It’s a promise. And you’ll remember Mrs. Macy who on your day of woe, scrubbed you pink and pretty and sent you to town as fresh and sweet as the first rose of summer. Now the drawers. Yes, you have pretty lace trim, but my! such a hard tie-knot. Now you mustn’t tie the knot so hard, oh, no. No one likes to fumble. No, he doesn’t like that. Yes, you’ve the hips to be a mother. That’s right, just step right in. Doesn’t it feel pleasant? Fold up now. I’d squat, not kneel, if I were you. Yes, then rock back and sit on your buttocks. Here’s a rag to wash the upper story.”

  Indeed the water was so clean, warm, and comforting that when I closed my eyes in the bliss of it, only a few salt tears squeezed out.

  “Now, this,” Mrs. Macy said. “Glycerine and rose water.” She gave the little clear bottle a vigorous shake. I saw the oil droplets inside. She opened it up and poured it all into my bathwater. “It won’t be long till high spring,” she went on, “and after that—oh, you’ve never seen the roses of Nantucket. They are a sight. Like clouds of clabbered sunset, pink sky sweetly curdled and come down to earth. They sit on every fence, they cover the sides and roofs of the houses.”

  I thought of the stone house with its hat of roses, at the Lighthouse.

  “Sniff up,” she said. “Breathe deep.”

  I did, and sure enough, the odor of roses and summer came to me.

  “Splash it up on your breast and neck. That’s right. Face too. Oh, how pretty you look. And your hair is like gypsy curls around your face. Do you want to marry a sailor again? Then you must come sit in the shop and do the business direct with them. The joy of the sailor is he’s often gone—”

  I must have looked shocked.

  “Oh, you can come to love your own life. Alone. Have no doubt of that. The women of Nantucket have their consolations—do you know about that, dear?”

  I had no idea of what she spoke. I merely regarded her apron, immaculately ironed, smooth and pristine as ever soap and flatiron could render cloth.

  “Here,” she said, and she displayed another vial. “Laudanum. Anybody can get to sleep with that. And this—” She went to a drawer and took out a porcelain item that somewhat resembled a pestle for a mortar. “It’s from China, and it’s called ‘He’s at Home.’ ”

  I gasped.

  “But you need not marry a sailor, if you don’t like. There’s that young keeper from the gaol. Isaac Starbuck. Oh, he would walk around the world for you.”

  I felt my face flush.

  “Now are you getting too hot, dear? If you stay too long in a bath, it will make you sick, they say. We want none of that. My rose must be a healthy rose, not one with a dribbling nose. Here’s a towel—just stand up and wrap it around you.”

  What a whirlwind of talk she was. I did feel new and clean as I stepped over the edge of her tub. What would become of me? How should I know? How could I know? I need not know.

  Next, Mrs. Macy insisted that I take bread and cheese, and again I was reminded of the Lighthouse, for the cheese was tangy brown goat cheese.

  “We used to add herbs to our goat cheese,” I offered.

  “Is that so?”

  “Sage, rosemary, parsley, oregano, dill. Each has its own flavor.”

  “Do you not like the flavor of plain cheese?”

  “Indeed, I do. But on the Island, we ate so much cheese that the variety of flavoring was nice.”

  “And would you have a vinegar egg? The hens are only beginning to lay again.”

  I smiled and gladly bit into it. The third omen from the days of the Lighthouse. Yet they had not written to me. Nor my mother. And then I knew why, with a smooth certainty, as surely as Mrs. Macy’s clothes were untroubled by a single crease or wrinkle: they simply had not received my letters. Anyt
hing else was inconceivable. Given who they were, they would have answered. I could go to visit. Tell them I am coming back, I wanted to say. Let my message reverse that of Kit.

  So when I stepped back into the Nantucket street from the home of good Mrs. Macy, I was clean and fragrant with love of myself and my life. I walked toward the harbor, as though I would take ship and go at once, though this was not my plan. Along the way, I stopped at a shop and bought paper and envelopes and borrowed the use of a quill, and I wrote letters first to the Lighthouse and all there—Uncle Torch, Aunt Agatha, Frannie, and the new babe whose name I did not know—and then to Kentucky.

  What did I write? I was tempted to describe my recent perfumed bath and the egg I had just eaten, the furnishings of the shop where I sat—the immediate world defined me and swirled through my brain. Finally only these words: the date, followed by: “I am coming home. I am fine.” I wrote the same note to both my homes. I signed my name Una Spenser, for so I felt myself to be—my own old self again. Then I sealed up the two envelopes, returned the quill, and stepped outside to continue my walk toward the harbor. There, I planned, I would find a boat bound for Falmouth or Hyannis; my letters would be my messenger doves flying before me.

  I saw the Pequod and other outbound whalers lined up along Long Wharf, and I passed on to North Wharf, where the little barks nudged up like shoats to their sow. As though to fling the round arms of myth about me, to make my ending in my beginning, what vessel should I spy in the middle of the line but the Camel. Yes, there was the Camel, loaded and apt, who had first carried me from the Lighthouse to New Bedford. Standing on her deck was the same captain with the marvelous twin mustaches, hanging like twin awls from above the corners of his mouth, almost to his collarbones.

  “Ready to go home, are you?” he hailed me, as though he had been expecting me.

  I was tempted to say yes, but instead I replied, “Not yet. But my letters are. Will you take them? One to the Lighthouse, one to forward overland to Kentucky?”

  “We’ll send it by steamboat,” he answered. “I know captains who know captains all the way to New Orleans. For me they’ll leap ashore at any port.” He added that he no longer served the Island, but he would find a carrier in New Bedford.

  I jumped lightly from the pier to the prow of the Camel and handed him my precious doves.

  “Come with me now,” he said.

  “I have to say good-bye here.”

  “Send letters to them that’s here that you have gone. Postlude instead of prelude. You come with me.”

  His insistence seemed almost rude. He breathed deeply, his mustaches hiking up. “Rose, Rose,” he said. “Let this vessel be your vase. I’d make you a proper husband, Una, if you be not wed. Are you wed?”

  “Captain,” I laughed. “You have not seen me for nearly two years.”

  “I know freshness when I smell it,” he said. “I know sweetness and beauty. I know you. Will you have me? Are you wed?”

  I saw he was earnest. “I am not wed,” I said soberly.

  “And you’ll have me?”

  “You do me honor—” (How could I wed such mustaches? Something in me wanted to giggle. I made myself be solemn.)

  “—but you won’t have me.” His head dropped, and I saw he was truly grieved. The mustaches almost tipped his waist, so low was his head sunk, and when he raised his face the silver trails of tears ran from his eyes down into the hair of his face.

  “Oh, Captain,” I said softly.

  “Well, I’ll take the envelopes then.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll mend, to be sure,” he answered and tried to smile.

  “Do you have clothes that need mending?” An imp gave me an idea.

  He looked at me wonderingly.

  “May I borrow your handkerchief?” I asked.

  He handed me a yellow one, with red spots on it. Quickly I put it in my mouth and tore a rent in it.

  “Now,” I said. “On the sincerity of your question to me, you must take this handkerchief to Milk Street. There you will find a widow named Mrs. Macy, who mends and launders and is equipped to tolerate a husband’s journeying, and you must say to her that I have sent you to her, and she is to mend and wash and iron your handkerchief dry while you wait—”

  “On Milk Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, look, Una Spenser—” He raised his finger and pointed. At first I thought he was pointing to the dome of the Unitarian Church, which was the only bright spot, being high enough to catch the last of the setting sun, but then I saw the dark smoke that drifted between the wharf and the dome. We both sniffed for smoke, and there it was.

  “If there is a fire,” I said. “It’s far from Milk Street, which is at the other end.”

  “Shall I really take only a handkerchief to the mender?”

  “Shall I tear a sail?” I teased.

  He folded the little square of cloth so that the rent was uppermost and put it in his shirt pocket. “You have sharp little teeth,” he mused as we walked the wharf.

  Though it was not an accusation and I did not feel stricken, I sealed my lips over my teeth. Fatigue washed my body. I felt my newness dulled. “I want to see the fire,” I said and parted company with the captain of the Camel.

  As I walked toward the fire, I felt a clear bubble of humor rise in me like a gurgling spring at the proposal of Captain Mustachio. Laughter would renew me again. What had Shakespeare written? Thou purple-hued, mustachioed Malt-Worm? But I would bless and not curse the Camel and her master, who saw and smelled me sweet, and beautiful, and worthy.

  Hurrying down the street, I passed Tashtego and Daggoo, the Pequod’s harpooners, walking together toward the wharf—no doubt to spend their last night in port aboard the ship. But I did not see Captain Ahab. I wished that I would see him now that I was bathed. My father’s scripture came to me: Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. As I passed other crew members of the Pequod, some of them recognized me and tipped their hats or raised their hands in farewell. To each I said, Godspeed, Godspeed, and I felt forlorn to think that I was being left behind. And yet, as Charlotte said of Kit, I knew that I had had enough of oceangoing.

  CHAPTER 80: Fire

  THE FIRE raged in four buildings, their shingles buckling and springing away from the walls. Like bursting buttons, the hot tiles shot out toward the people, who stood well back. A line of men passed buckets of water as quickly as they could. The crowd looked wild-eyed, and some neighbors tried to divert the buckets to douse their own walls or roofs, though they were not yet burning. On all our faces there was soot, and I thought of the night-burning of the tryworks, and this seemed to have the desperation of that butchery, though merely wood and not flesh burned.

  The townfolk wept, distraught over the loss of their property. Then the cry went up that there were yet people in one of the houses that was blazing like a torch.

  “Who? How many?”

  “A child. A boy. He was asleep. An orphan, with no parent to count him.”

  “Who?” they asked again, as though the answer had not sufficed.

  “We don’t know him. A child.”

  “But who is it?”

  “One,” a voice whispered beside me. It was the gaoler. He pulled off his shirt (skin pink, with golden hair in the middle of his chest, like a fleece). He stepped to the bucket line and plunged his shirt down into water, then held the dripping wad against his mouth and nose and ran into the house. Now my own breath went sharp, and apprehension coursed my veins.

  “Who? Who?” they called out again, as though there could never be an answer certain enough. “Who is inside?” Yet some replied, “A man!” for Isaac Starbuck did not return as minutes ticked on, and the Unitarian clock struck six. I looked up and saw how the cruel flames reflected red in the dome. “Who? And who?” voices both mumbled privately and shrilly cried.

  The terror of the scene brought back the sailors in the open w
haleboat, whose names and faces had returned to me when I was lost on the moor. In the flames, I saw and heard them again. Sometimes they had muttered, on and on. Sometimes a shriek more piercing than a bird cry emanated from an anonymous throat. No, that was Oscar who cried and rolled his eyes toward me. A white bird had perched on the mast, and we had longed for it, debated throwing a shoe or weaving a net to cast over it.

  “Who?” I myself cried out, though I meant to ask How long? A velvet voice spoke naturally in my ear. “A man, a boy.” Ahab! I thought, but the voice was that of the judge.

  “No,” I roared. And No, and No, and No, I screamed. Till Isaac, the gaoler, suddenly staggered out, double-headed. Peeping over his shoulder was a little black face. Isaac stumbled and Judge Lord caught the boy from Isaac’s back and laid the child on the ground. The gaoler fell like a charred beam. The boy, I cried, and someone gave me wet cloth, and I scrubbed and scrubbed until I realized that he was not black with soot but that he was a little black boy. He opened his eyes, and the judge lifted him up in his arms.

  A man pushed on the gaoler’s chest to squeeze the smoke from him. He pushed and pushed, and, still on my knees, I heard myself saying “Again” and “Again,” but the attendant stopped, shook his head, and stood up. I flung myself on the prostrate Isaac Starbuck. I drew deep breath into my own lungs and tried to force my breath into his lips and down into him, because he was human, only for that reason, and needed his life. But when I looked up from this fruitless labor, I saw Judge Lord all sooty now standing above me, watching, with the little black boy gathered up in his arms. The judge, smudged black with the soot from the child, seemed to step backward, and without turning away from me, they were absorbed into the night.

  Then there was Mrs. Macy, and other women, helping me up and leading me away from Isaac. They held my hands and washed and dabbed at me. While they did this, I saw someone take a sheet and spread it over the naked chest and body of the gaoler, whose last whisper had been for the worthiness of one life, and so of us all. Then I wept for Isaac Starbuck, and despised my superiority and my hauteur.