Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  For a week, scenes from that time with Susan came back to me frequently. And I was pinched by anxiety about her passage south. Then I received another letter from Ahab, delivered in a roundabout way and not directly by the vessel to which he had first transferred it. It was a gloomy letter, full of forebodings, and since Justice was playing down at the wharf when I read it, I deemed it best not to share the missive with him. Apparently, his father had not received Justice’s request for a rousing description of A Chase.

  “Pip has twice leapt from a whaleboat. Pip’s being left alone in the vast ocean, with no ship in all the circle of his seeing, cost the little black boy his senses. So even did Lear have his fool,” Ahab wrote. “Pip is a hundred times more dear to me now, and me to him.”

  I thought how in my extremity, Susan had become so dear to me—a shadow self—so kin she had seemed. But Susan had kept her wits, even when the dogs were barking behind her.

  Ahab wrote, too, that Queequeg (the tattooed harpooner I had just glimpsed in the mist that Christmas Eve) had decided to die and had had his coffin prepared. Eventually Queequeg rose up from his tomb (Ahab queried, “Is his savage, incised face the true face of Christ?”). The Pequod’s life buoy had filled with water and rapidly sunk when it was sent after a sailor who had fallen at sunrise from the fore masthead. Ahab noted that the sailor swallowed by the deep was the first man who mounted the mast to look for the white whale in the whale’s own particular ground. “At last we have reached those grounds of the Sea of Japan,” he wrote, “where I lost my leg, and where I shall find my revenge.”

  What needed my boy to hear such news of fear unto madness, of death and revenge? And soon enough, by spring, we had other troubles come sailing in.

  I sat in the parlor—it was unseasonably hot—sometimes fanning myself, sometimes crocheting on a white, fleecy coverlet—I knew not for whom, it was about the size of a baby’s blanket, the combination of air and yarn cloud-soft—when Justice burst into the room, pulling a sea captain by one wrist. The sleeve of his other arm, I noted at once, hung empty.

  “I do apologize, madam.” He spoke with an English accent. “I be Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby—”

  “Mother, he has seen my father! He has seen the white whale!”

  “Is it true?”

  “Show her!” Justice commanded.

  From within the slack fabric of his coat, he produced an ivory arm, ending in a hideous ivory hammer! I gasped and all but fainted. I was glad I was already seated on the sofa.

  “It’s a startling sight, madam. Not meant at all for ladies. I do apologize.” His words were clipped, British. “But then my life is spent at sea, and there’s need there to occasionally hit something.”

  “I know,” I managed to murmur.

  “Tell her!” Justice commanded, his eyes wild. “Spin her the yarn!”

  “So like his father he is. He said the very words to me, that I must spin him the yarn of how I lost my arm, though I never got the companion tale of how he was missing his leg.”

  “Shall I bring you tea, or a cool lemonade?”

  “Nay. We have but put in, and there’s much I must oversee. But the lad here, Ahab’s son, such insistence! I confess I am surprised to find myself swayed—even by such ardor. But here I am, and so let me spin the yarn, even as I did for Ahab.”

  “Please do.” There was something about Captain Boomer, or perhaps his English speaking, that made me want a polite manner and proper introduction. “I am Una, the boy’s mother, Mrs. Captain, as you have no doubt surmised.”

  Captain Boomer bowed and commenced his tale.

  “After we spoke the Pequod, Ahab came riding up and over the bulwarks of the Sammy E. on our blubber hook, landed on the capstan head. Seeing his appendage, I held out my ivory arm, and he his ivory leg, and it was as good a handshake between comrades as flesh itself ever pressed. We crossed our ivory like fencers unashamed of whatever rapiers we possessed.” Captain Boomer heaved two bushels of air into his lungs. “But it was with Moby Dick we had both already fenced.

  “Ahab seemed full of joy to meet such a brother as I.‘Aye, aye, hearty!’ he says.‘Let us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did’st thou see the white whale?—how long ago?’ I answer, ‘On the Line, last season.’ ’Twas the first time, madam, I’d cruised on the Line, and of the white whale I was ignorant. Amongst a pod of four or five whales, he bounced up as though he owned them, a great whale with milky-white head and hump, all crow’s feet and wrinkles—”

  “Moby Dick,” the boy breathed reverently.

  “ ‘It was he, it was he!’ Ahab exclaims.‘And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin?’ I add.‘Aye, aye—they were mine—my irons,’ cries Ahab, boiling with joy. When I tell Ahab that the white whale runs all afoam into the pod and goes to snapping my fast-line, Ahab says, ‘Aye, I see!—wanted to part it—an old trick—I know him.’ ”

  “My father knows all his tricks, all of them!”

  “The white whale was the noblest and biggest I ever saw in my life.” Captain Boomer jumped to his feet. “And I let the old great-grandfather have it.” He pretended to throw with the arm that ended not in a harpoon but an ivory hammer. “Next instant, in a jiff, blinded I was by foam and the whale’s tail straight up like a marble steeple inclined to fall. Another instant, the boat is splintered, all chips, and I am hooked in the arm by the barb from the second iron, and down the watery ladder to the depths I ride, towed by Moby Dick.” He sat down again on our sofa and spoke quietly. “Yet an arm is but human flesh, and I too puny a fish for such a fisherman as Moby Dick, and the hook tore down the length of my arm and out, and I rose to the surface.

  “I told this tale to Ahab, my ship’s surgeon, Dr. Bunger, standing by and verifying all that I said. But Dr. Bunger is a joker as well as a surgeon, and he made light of my missing limb, much to the annoyance of Ahab, who wanted only more information. Had I seen the whale after my loss? Aye, I told him, twice. I allowed as how there would be great glory in killing Moby Dick, but I says to Ahab, ‘Hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?’

  “Ahab knows I am meaning his ivory leg, but he answers most strangely, reasonably and yet at the same time flinging reason away with both hands. I only have one hand now to throw away reason myself. So when I say Moby Dick is best left alone, Ahab answers, ‘He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.’ He said that the whale was a magnet for him, and he asked, ‘Which way heading?’

  “Before I can reply or fling some one-handed reason back into his face, Dr. Bunger notes Ahab’s agitation and goes to joke about it.‘Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,’ Bunger says, and making like a dog, he snuffs around at Ahab—”

  “Snuffs my father!”

  “And Dr. Bunger says, ‘This man’s blood—bring the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!—his pulse makes these planks beat!’ and Bunger takes his lancet from his pocket and approaches Ahab’s arm as though to relieve him of too much hot blood.‘Avast,’ roars Ahab. And any man would describe his sound that way. It was a roar such as a lion might make.‘Avast,’ roars Ahab.‘Man the boat! Which way heading?’ And then when I ask of the Parsee, ‘Great God, what’s the matter here?’ that ancient pedestal-for-a-turban slides over the bulwarks, brings round the boat, and Ahab commands my men to lower him as he came, astraddle the hook.”

  I sit in silence a moment, and even Justice is quiet.

  “There’s no more to tell,” Captain Boomer said. “And I should return to my ship.”

  “May I visit you, sir, to hear it again?” Justice asked, all politeness.

  “Aye, lad. I’ll tell you again, if you must have it. I’ll introduce you to Dr. Bunger. He’s a jolly one. He’ll make you laugh.”

  CHAPTER 123: The Distress of Justice

  THE AFTERMATH of the story o
f Ahab conveyed to us by the Samuel Enderby, put in for repairs, brought no lightness to Justice. The next day Justice went down to the wharf, which was all abuzz with the latest news of Ahab (a native son and thus of much interest), told probably not so much by Captain Boomer as by the crew (who all witnessed Ahab’s froth for the whale, adding that Ahab’s own crew resembled a pod of yellow Manila tigers, even possessing long cat whiskers) and embroidered by Dr. Bunger, who struck me, even indirectly met, as a foolish fellow to offer Ahab’s arm his lancet.

  On the wharf, Elijah, who despite his prophetic hauteur also listened to the gossip, stepped into Justice’s path. He had never before accosted the boy. Perhaps he had not known his identity, though many remarked his resemblance to Ahab, notwithstanding my dark curls on his forehead.

  This scoundrel Elijah began to degrade Ahab. He called him a vile sinner and the brother of Beelzebub and other such nonsense, and it so upset Justice he burst into tears. Then Aunt Charity came along and quickly saw what the problem was. She heard Elijah say, “Thy father shan’t come home. He lodges at the bottom of the sea with the White Devil Whale. He likes it there.”

  “I’ll have no such jabbering nonsense told the boy,” Aunt Charity said, and she backed Elijah to the edge of the wharf with her wrath.

  “Jezebel, Jezebel,” Elijah began on her. “A consort sure for the wicked Ahab.”

  Charity, her maidenly honor besmirched, shoved Elijah off the edge of the wharf. He sank like a stone. Not so much as a bubble arose. When Charity saw what she had done, she screamed, “Run, Justice, run for help, lest I’ve drowned the devil.”

  Help came speedily. Many sailors were about, but none came speedily enough. Charity had indeed drowned the devil.

  HIS DEATH was not so sad as the aftermath. Though Judge Austin Lord quickly settled the matter as an accident, Charity went about for weeks and months entirely dejected. She had never meant to take a human life. All her days had been devoted to making life more comfortable for her fellow creatures who went to sea. People said she spoke of herself most unforgivingly many times at the Quaker meeting. All who knew and loved her spoke most reassuringly to her. Certainly I did, for it was in her trying to protect Justice that the accident had ensued.

  Out of concern for Charity, some of the lethargy and suffocating numbness, as it had in response to Susan’s letter, left me. But I was even more shaken by my concern for Justice. The old crackpot’s message that Ahab would not return greatly disturbed the boy, for Elijah had commanded among the children a certain mysterious power.

  “But my father shall come home!” Justice declared to me. “I shall make him!” For hours and hours each day, he retreated to the cupola, his eyes fastened on the sea, his brow furrowed in concentration. Here was young Ahab willing a thing to be so. And I thought of Kit willing the sun to stand still.

  One morning I stood in my son’s way, at the foot of the stair.

  “Mother, I will go up,” he said, and brushed past me.

  It was anguish for me to see his state of mind—both defiant and terribly afraid; sometimes his eye flashed at me the way I had seen Ahab’s eye flash at others (but never at me). I could not soothe my son’s terror at night, nor interest him in wholesome activities in the day. I asked many folk for advice—my friend Austin Lord advised me to be patient, that the melancholy was natural and would naturally run its course. But they did not know Ahab a fraction so well as I did, and they did not know how Ahab’s blood, at least partly transmitted to Justice, could seethe with intensity and singleness of purpose, undiluted by time.

  One day the judge sent for Justice to come visit him, by himself, and the boy reluctantly crossed the street. I knew the judge was trying to help, though I could not imagine in what manner he might be able to do so. Yet Justice came home all smiles.

  “He has such chocolate, Mother, as you’ve never eaten before. He has cherries and nuts and raisins, all dipped in chocolate. There’s light chocolate and dark chocolate—that’s the best. The dark is a little bitter. I love the bitterness. Here—it’s pecans inside, and caramel.”

  Not every day, but many days, the judge unpredictably sent for Justice and gave him candy. Eventually the treats expanded to my beloved jams and jellies, and finally we were invited to a dinner with the entire Mitchell family. The younger Mitchell boys, as clear-headed and balanced as their oldest sister, soundly ridiculed any idea that Elijah’s prophecies were anything but humbug. It was an excellent tonic, provided by my friend the judge.

  Nonetheless, that night Justice returned to the cupola, though it was too dark to see the ocean. “I want to think strong thoughts,” he told me. I thought again of Kit’s rhetoric, and a hand seized and squeezed my heart. “I’d like to be alone,” Justice added, but gently.

  A week later the Mitchell boys came to visit us with a large gray dog. Not a pup, but a creature over a year old and beautifully schooled to sit and shake hands. Justice was much taken with his obedience. “He’s not a dog,” Justice said, “he’s a prince.”

  “You could name him Pog,” Billy said. “That’s a combination prince and dog.”

  “His real name is Fog,” Michael said, “but that’s so near to Pog he’d probably come.”

  “Here, Pog,” Justice called, and the dog came, wagging his shaggy gray tail.

  “He’s so big,” I exclaimed admiringly. I had not owned or wanted a dog since my father shot King.

  “Maria says he’s part Irish wolfhound. They’re the tallest dogs. They guard castles.”

  “Maria says you’ll have to walk him a long way every day because he’s so big.”

  “I should walk him?” Justice questioned.

  “He’s a present!” the boys all exclaimed. “We want to give him to you.”

  Justice patted Pog’s head quietly. “That’s nice,” he said. “But I don’t think I could keep him. I need to be in the cupola.”

  The Mitchell boys exchanged disappointed glances.

  “I couldn’t walk him enough,” Justice added.

  “Well,” Billy said slowly, “if you ever do want to walk him, you can. Just come over.”

  AS THE WEEKS passed, Justice seemed gradually to be a bit better. He was quieter, at least seemed less angry. But he spent many, many hours in the cupola, even in the heat of the day. When he came down, his face was unnaturally pink. One day he asked me, “Mother, couldn’t you have asked Father to stay home? Did you ever think about doing that?”

  “Indeed, I did.” I felt myself accused of negligence. “He looks for the white whale with the same persistence that you watch for him.”

  The boy smiled ruefully.

  ’Twas then that the pineapple knocker fell against the brass plate, and we opened the door to Mary Starbuck and Jim her boy, some few years older than Justice. When Justice learned that Jim, too, had a father aboard the Pequod, he took a great interest in him, and they went up to the cupola together.

  No sooner had they left the room than Mary said frankly, “Una, the boy’s not well.”

  “You heard of Elijah’s drowning off the wharf?”

  “Yes, and his poisonous prophecy as well. I’ve come to give you advice.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. I nearly wept in response to her practical sympathy. The braided coronet across her head gleamed in the sunlight.

  “There is a cottage close to us at ’Sconset, for let. I think you should rent it for the summer. The cottage is humble, but I’m sure you’ll like it. And I am sure that Justice will do better away from the town and the cupola. I think you should also rent a pony or horse—the boys can care for it and ride it.”

  I had to laugh. “Mary, your plan is so well thought out, so complete. I will love being your neighbor.”

  “It’s time we were friends.” She smiled in a lovely, wise way.

  The boys came rattling down the steps. What a healthy sound!

  “It’s too hot for me up there,” Jim announced casually. “I don’t see how he stands it.”

 
; “Mother,” Justice asked, “did you know that ’Sconset sees the ships come in long before we do?”

  “And you can go up on the roof walk, if you like,” Jim said. “It’s open and breezy up there.”

  “I’d like us to go to ’Sconset,” Justice said.

  “So we shall!” I replied, thinking: All the better that Justice believes it to be his idea.

  CHAPTER 124: To Siasconset

  GIDDY WITH ADVENTURE, we four clip-clopped out the Milestone Road, straight for ’Sconset. Our good spirits were contagious even to the mare, and she pranced along. It being a distance of, Mary said, something over eight miles—I had thought it shorter—we stopped about halfway to have a picnic. The boys clamored to go to Altar Rock, and so we left the main road to drive north to the foot of the highest hill. As we tethered the horse, I could not help but remember the winter day I had climbed this hill—a snow hill like a whale hump—to pray for Ahab. How cold and restless I had been.

  But now it was good summer. That very boy whom I had carried inside me now walked beside, and we were adventuring genteelly with friends. The air was fragrant with the blooming heathers and heaths. After we had eaten and Mary and I had sipped some ruby port, I let my eye circle the summery land that lay all about us like a favored skirt. Centered in this landscape, the goodness outside and inside seemed almost enough.

  When we arrived at ’Sconset—what a bright booming of water! It burst against the shore with the joy of free running. The horse tossed its head and nickered.