Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Perhaps it was because of my own round shape that I particularly loved the apples that fall. Though my belly was not blushed with red, as they were, I seemed gaudy with joy. (Giles once told me the root of the word gaudy, in fact, means joy.) I ran up a lovely loose dress of red-and-gold plaid from the yardage in my trunk, and when I wore that, I felt most applelike, plump and ripening. Reaching up to the low, heavy-laden boughs, I felt one-with-the-apples as my fingers closed around them. Mother would not let me climb the ladder up into the trees, but she herself did the climbing. It made her blithe as a girl to be aloft on the ladder, though when she looked down and smiled at me, I saw many wrinkles of middle age in her skin. I told her how I had loved to climb aloft, dressed as a boy, almost a hundred feet into the air, with the ship plowing the waves far below.

  In late fall, we harnessed our mare to the wagon to carry some of our apples to the press, so we would have cider through the winter. It was a merry gathering of families scattered throughout our area, and there was square dancing that night, but being so big with child, I did not wish to dance. After much encouragement from me (and from a widower who had a farm a half-dozen miles away), my mother did join the dancing. I think she rather liked showing off before her daughter. Her feet moved nimbly and her face grew rosy and steamy. I thought of how that first night at the Lighthouse we had all danced together, and I wished that those members of the family were with us now.

  We spent the cider night, all the women, wall to wall on pallets, with all the men in the barn. And that night there was much joking and singing among the women as we waited for sleep. Strangely, me thought of how people might lie in a graveyard, somewhat cozy with the proximity of other bodies, but here, more cheerfully, we were a prone community of the living, of sisters of all ages, myself a woman accepted among women.

  When Mother and I drove home the next day with our load of cider-filled bottles, I felt a little wary of the mare. She pulled too hard, I thought, and when she sensed that we were near home, she was hard for Mother to hold. It really made me quite angry. We had had her many years, caring well for her. Perhaps she rebelled now because my father had kept her under such a tight rein.

  But there was an element to our speed that I relished. The fall colors, particularly of the maples, dogwoods, and sumac, were beyond compare, and the speed of our passage seemed to make them swirl together in a phantasmagoria. Occasionally a puff of wind would bring down a shower of leaves from a tree that overhung the road. Then we were in the thick of it! Leaves flying like colored froth. I wanted to write to Ahab about it. The speed alternately thrilled and frightened me.

  We had left the barn door open, and though Mother hauled on the reins, the mare ran right in. When we got out, I saw the pallor under Mother’s tan skin, and she was shaking. “That’s the last time I drive Penelope till next spring,” she said. “And then I’ll have a neighbor take her out till she’s calmed down.”

  Usually, once we went to bed, Mother and I did not talk. It was as though she knew I needed some time with my thoughts of my husband. But that October night, after we had pulled the patchwork up to our chins to keep out the chill, she remarked, “Listen, the mockingbird is telling us good-bye. We’ll not hear him again till spring.”

  As I listened, I wanted to describe the bird’s song to Ahab. I thought of Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale” and wished that I had the genius to immortalize our Kentucky mockingbird. Those who have heard both birds swear by ours as the greater vocalist. That night I felt melted by the sound. The notes were smooth-flowing as liquid and seemed individually to have the soft and fluid contours of honey. The melody was embellished with trills and flourishes; there were repeats and explorations, the tunes of other birds, especially cardinals. “Pretty bird, pretty bird.” And “Look right here!”

  But I dreamt of how I had battled the eagle with my bonnet and the raucous cries of that bird.

  THE NEXT DAY, we began cracking nuts for our fruitcakes and mixing the batters and blending in the jam for Christmas jam cakes and measuring out dried fruits for our plum puddings. I told my mother how Aunt had filled the Lighthouse with much the same odors, in the bleak weeks before Christmas. Yes, there was a nip in the air in Kentucky, but we were by no means windswept as I had been on the Island. We saw Canada geese come down the flyway of the river. I loved it when I got to see the tired leader fall back and a fresh goose take the point of the V. Sometimes I heard the bang of guns not too far from our house.

  One cold day when we knew the bees were sleeping, Mother robbed the hive in our old sycamore tree. We had buckets and buckets of golden honey. “This one was your father’s favorite bee tree,” she said. That afternoon a neighbor brought by a haunch of bear, which we roasted in a pot surrounded by carrots, and we ate the bear meat dribbled with honey. “The strong and the sweet together,” Mother said. “It will be good for the baby.” We finished supper by the fire, eating crisp apples and slices of cheese.

  “I wonder, Una,” she suddenly said, more tentatively than usual, “if you ever think, that if the baby should be a boy, you might name him Ulysses for your father?”

  “I am not sure that it is a lucky name,” I replied, and I could have bitten my too-quick tongue. “But certainly I will think of it.”

  “What name did you take when you shipped in disguise?” Her eyes teased me.

  I admitted the truth: “Ulysses.” How had she guessed?

  As we lay on our bed that night, listening to the falling of the last few leaves of the oaks, I relived that conversation. Almost I chuckled at myself. My mother had penetrated my defense. There would always be a part of my father that I carried forward.

  But the next day over breakfast, she apologized to me, saying it was no one’s business but my own what I named my babe, Ahab being at sea. I must name him the name that came to me with his birthing.

  “Our last name already being Spenser,” she said, “I named you Una from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, because I wanted you to be brave and true like Una. And you are. But the name proved prophetic in terms of oneness, for you are my one and only child.” She brought us each another piece of cornbread from the warming oven.

  “Did my father know the work of Edmund Spenser?”

  “I had often thought of your father as my Red Cross Knight, he so wanted to champion God and the Good.”

  “How alike we think, you and I! I sometimes think of my husband, of Ahab,” I confided, “as the Red Cross Knight. A whale is not unlike a dragon—a great and mighty animal, almost mythical in its power. The whale sends up a plume of water instead of fire.”

  “Leviathan, the scripture calls the whale. Do you think whales to be malicious?”

  “Often they seemed to me as innocent as gigantic calves, slaughtered. But the black one, the one that stove the Sussex…it was darker than granite, malignant…intentional in its assault.”

  “It could not help its color.”

  “Ah, you are a Quaker in judging animals as well as human races. But the Quakers are a bloody lot when it comes to slaughtering whales.” How delicious the bacon was that morning. I split open my cornbread and placed it inside so that the flavor would permeate the bread.

  “What will we do,” she asked, “if North and South part over the slavery question?”

  It was the first time I had ever heard of such an idea.

  “Perhaps the North will join with Canada then,” I said, “and both will fight the British again.”

  “The mills of England run on cotton picked by Southern slaves.” She poured us each another cup of tea.

  I did not like to think of alliances among nations and wars that could be fought. I wanted to bring my baby to a peaceful world.

  “Agatha and I used to speak of fighting against slavery,” she went on.

  “How?”

  “Sometimes we imagined ourselves orators; other times as soldiers, if war came. We would dress in the attic as men and act it all out.”

  “Dress as men!”
<
br />   “Yes. As you actually have done.”

  Suddenly I laughed to think of myself dressed as a boy, and I patted the round of my belly, which almost touched the edge of the table.

  A HARD FROST came that night, and the next day we gathered per simmons. I could scarcely bend over to pickup the fallen ones, which lay among the frost-rimmed brown leaves. Our supper was a reckless gorging on persimmon pudding, on more and yet more pudding, spicy with nutmeg and cinnamon, which I had purchased in New Bedford. Despite our giddy gorging, I saw anxiety in my mother’s eyes.

  In another week all the hardwood trees were bare. The cedars yet held up their bushy green plumes, and the sprays of pine needles were green and crisp against the thin blue sky of the approaching winter. At night, because the elms, maples, and even sycamores down by the creek were all bare, we saw the stars caught in the fine twigs and lattices of the trees. Sometimes we bundled up and walked out a quarter of a mile from the cabin expressly to see the night sky.

  “The hairnets of the trees,” my mother said, “have caught the brilliantine of the stars.”

  “Let stars be little shining fish,” I answered as we turned toward our door and warmth. “Constellations are schools of fish caught and pulled together in the nets of celestial fishermen.” Later, I wrote down these pretty ideas in my journal.

  Our feet on the brown fallen leaves seemed married to the earth, the way moles, rabbits, and muskrats go to earthy dens in winter. The leaves we trod were sodden, not crunchy, already losing their structure and uniting with soil. Kentucky is the middle of the middle of something Substantial—the very opposite of water. This was the forest, sprung from Kentucky earth—our house was of it, we ourselves were of it. Even the canopy of stars seemed Kentucky stars.

  CHAPTER 90: A Winter Tale

  IN DECEMBER, the temperature fell and fell. The bare trees around the cabin snapped and popped in the wind. Once a limb cracked off, and when it fell against the frozen earth, it exploded. We salvaged the wood, spreading it out before the hearth to dry it, to use later as starter or kindling. Those days in December we did not allow the fire to die. Often I sat before the fireplace in a rocking chair and dozed, my great belly swelling yet more to fill my lap.

  My mother still sewed, but I had no ambition for it.

  Nor was there need. My mother’s sewing was not for the babe but a spring dress for me. The fabric was a light lawn, besprinkled with tiny flowers, a whimsey, and I thought lazily back on how I had stood in the shop in Nantucket—a world away—and purchased the fabric. Heather’s Moor seemed like something from a dream. What need, really, did I or anyone have for such a house? A cabin with a fire and a rocking chair, a baby kicking his small foot from time to time inside, a beloved mother at my side. I had brought her a silver thimble with an S for Spenser engraved inside the cup. With this little engine, she plied the folds of the cobweb fabric, while I dreamed and rocked by the fire, my belly in my lap. The world seemed indolent, sleepy, replete.

  I fancied Ahab sailing right down the Ohio, saying he wanted to live in the woods. He came in a miniature Pequod. The woods were the place of rest. The ocean was too incessantly active for peace. Let my husband sail down the Ohio, while curious squirrels and deer, Indians and settlers peeked through the river birch to see a seafaring man sail home to his woodsy wife.

  One night as the full moon came up, snow began to fall across her mellow face. I went to sleep remembering how it had snowed on the Pequod and frosted her like a floating cake in the freezing waters. And I had waited for the ice to melt on the ratlines and then climbed aloft for Ahab. How lithe and thin I had been! Perhaps that was the true beginning of our love—when together we kept the ship.

  In the morning, Mother and I awoke to a world around the cabin that had gone soft—lavender in color—with snow. I saw where deer had toed their way among the old cornstalks in the garden. We had taken down a section of rails for them. The sun did not shine, and the temperature dropped again. We pinned on shawls and walked about a little, but our shoes were not high enough to keep out the snow, and our world seemed unfamiliar. Often I turned around to be sure nothing was creeping up on me.

  “I wish the sun would shine,” Mother said. It seemed unnatural to us both that snow should seem gloomy.

  That night the wind came up, and it snowed again. I could hear the snow dashing against the shutters. Mother took out two extra quilts. The sound of the snow sweeping the roof reminded me of the water swishing against the hull of a ship. We seemed a little ship of sorts, isolated, anchored but bobbing in the elements. I was grateful for our good woodpile.

  For breakfast, Mother cooked sausage on the spider, and the cooking woke me up with its medley of aroma and sizzling. She also made white porridge, sweetened with maple syrup, and in the taste of maple, I remembered the hard little pieces of Ahab’s Vermont candy. All this she brought to me in bed, telling me to get up gradually. She put such logs on the fire that the whole fireplace was filled from top to bottom with flame, and I could not see the tips of the flames, but just an undulating curtain of fire.

  “Now, what would you have me read?” she asked.

  “Keats. ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes.’ ”

  “But it’s morning, Una.”

  “I want to eat the language,” I replied, “and feel it with my fingers.” Such a richness we seemed to have together, in our cabin. I wanted rich words, and none are richer than Keats’s.

  “I think he must have studied Spenser,” my mother said. “Do you happen to know?”

  I knew only the poems themselves, but I loved this insight my mother offered, her sense of connection and influence among separate literary figures. I would ask Margaret Fuller if Keats had read the Elizabethan.

  “If you were to piece a quilt,” I asked, “that looked like Keats, what colors would you use?”

  “I think he is beyond real colors.”

  What an idea! “Heard sounds are sweet; unheard, sweeter,” I quoted freely from “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

  We ate such a hearty breakfast that we had only bread for lunch. In the late afternoon, the storm moved out, leaving the deep snow behind. We both sensed that again it would grow colder. In the late afternoon, the sun came out, but only long enough to set itself amidst long streaks of red. And then when the sun sank down, the temperature dropped again.

  “Perhaps the river will freeze,” she said, as the darkness and cold tightened around the cabin. “It has a few times. Once your father and I went sliding on it.”

  Now I was so big with child that it was hard to get comfortable, and night after night, I rolled about in bed. So as to disturb my mother less, I made up the bunkbed that was nailed in one corner of the cabin. After one December night of tossing and turning, I could not wait till morning, but rose before dawn and woke my mother.

  “Crawl in,” she said, lifting the cover.

  “Feel my belly. Do you think my time is near?”

  She got up, lit candles, put wood on the fire, and then felt me under the cover.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I think you have a ways to go.”

  THE NEXT DAY, the sky was clear, and the sunlight dazzled the snow so much our eyes could not stand the glitter. In the middle of the afternoon, my labor pains began, though my water had not broken.

  We were happy at first. At last my time had come. The pains interested me. I still had some appetite, and my mother gave me the savory broth from the bear roast. She installed me again in the bed and even got in beside me so that we both had our broth propped up side by side, with our legs under the covers. Later, she cut an apple in half, and with the tip of a table knife, she scraped the apple. I opened my mouth, and she poked in the juicy pulp. “Not that you’re sick,” she said, “but let me feed you.” During the night, she slept some. I could not. I tried not to squirm, for I knew she wanted me in the big bed with her, but my pain was getting worse. I willed myself to lie still while it racked me.

  How many weary times was I to ask he
r to check my progress? How many times did she answer, “Not yet,” each time her mouth more tight and grim? “It’s always hard the first time, Una.”

  “Was I hard, for you?” Why had I not asked before?

  “You were a happy little fish that came swimming out.”

  At length, after a day of labor, I found that I was moaning. A far-off sound, as though it came from wind-abraded rocks on a distant shore. I circled without progress on a sea of pain, and the moaning seemed leagues away.

  “Is it time?”

  “Not yet. The water needs to break.”

  “I feel I can’t open my eyes.”

  “Just reach out your hand. Here’s the cup. Wait, I’ll guide you.”

  What was that smell? Food, again? My mother’s supper. I didn’t want any.

  “Why is it taking so long?”

  “I wish it were me instead of you.”

  She put the whiskey jug we kept as medicine beside the bed and from time to time had me take a spoonful. Its effect was mainly to daze my mind.

  And I held her hand, felt the bones within. Saw candlelight. Registered night. Her strong hand, thin. Her face, pain for my pain, though she tried to hide it. All our happy months, let my eye catch her eye, and there was love—remember the radiance—hold that. Always…. Afternoon, and already? Back from the woodpile? How cold out? Your hand’s cold. Put it on my forehead. No, let me hold. Knuckles knobby, one, two, three, four in a row.

  “Una, I’m going for the doctor. I’ll hitch the mare. Una, be brave.”

  CHAPTER 91: The Burden

  WHAT HAS BEEN the hardest in my life, I have told first in my narrative. I have already told that I lost my mother, that the buggy turned over on the snowy road, and she froze. I have already told that I lost my baby. I needed to tell those terrible things first, to pass through Scylla and Charybdis early in my voyage of telling; otherwise, I feared I would turn back, be unable to complete my story, if those terrors loomed ahead.