Justice came to me and asked what we should name the dog.
“Alpha,” I said, “for he is the first dog we have seen here.”
Up trotted a second black dog, smaller, but in both color and shape the sure mate of Alpha. “Omega,” I announced. She dragged a strip of sandy carpeting, and with a snap of her neck, she unfurled it like a huge question mark in the air. Alpha jumped for the end of it and caught it in his teeth, and then the two dogs ran off together, sometimes stopping to play tug-of-war with each other. But the strip was like a banner between them, and while no writing inscribed it, I felt that they proclaimed the joy of having a mate.
I felt weary, and I called to Justice that now it was my turn to choose our activity, and we must inspect the neighbor’s hedge—thus I hoped to save my boy from the sense that his dog friend had abandoned him for another. He came with alacrity, a gritty, sandy little boy, but pink-cheeked from his play with the dog. I myself felt a mess, and the damp and dirty skirt clung against my knees and chafed them. We passed beyond the wind-dwarfed pines and misshapen apple trees, up the hillside steps, and into our yard; then through the opening in the hedge to the garden of our neighbor.
Justice was utterly delighted with the privet whale—“You should have told me!”—and immediately he began to dance around it and to look for a pretend harpoon that he might assault it. The yard being scrupulously free of debris, my son was reduced to make-believe, but he cocked his arm and threw airy darts at the vegetable whale and shouted in a kind of whisper-shout. Just so had Chester played in the moonlit whaleboat.
Meanwhile, I circled around the fantasy to the opposite hedge and walked its length, finding no opening. With this unbroached wall, I found satisfaction. The garden was not open to anyone, but only to those who had the good taste to rent the cottage that Justice and I now occupied. It was as good as a formal invitation. I fantasized a friend.
I sat upon a little wooden bench whose back was placed against the wall, closed my eyes, and sucked in through my nostrils the odor of honeysuckle, which grew on a shallow trellis on the sides and over the bench. I hated to move, for any shift in my posture brought me in contact with the unpleasant, gritty garments I wore. I hoped that this tussle on the beach with my son was not the harbinger of many tussles to come.
But was it true that I waited no more for Ahab? Had not something irrevocable happened in my soul on the roof walk atop my cottage? Yet, for Justice’s sake, I appeared the same—serenely, hopefully, anxiously waiting. But had I not given him his father’s watch? Surely that was some sign to him. My honeysuckle reverie was interrupted by Justice’s rush to me and his declaration.
“Mother, there is a shed here full of wooden women.”
Bluebeard’s Garden, I thought, but I said, rising, “Show me.”
Justice led me to a shed with a glass window. When I peeked in, indeed, I did see two dozen or so carved wooden women. Some were completed and beautifully painted; others were carved but bare of paint. Still others had only rough approximations of a human form, and some were still encased in what was no more than an impaled upright and leaning tree trunk, either stripped of bark or brown and rough. It was a workshop for making figureheads for ships.
Before I could say so, a masculine voice said, “You must be my new neighbor.”
I spun around, shy to be caught peeking, and sodden as well, and explained that we were the wife and son, Una and Justice, of Captain Ahab of the Pequod.
The man asked courteously if I would like to see the figures. I replied that I had fallen in the water, and that I needed to go home, but the figures were beautiful and striking.
“Well, you must see them later,” he said, “when I return from my trip. I keep the workroom padlocked, and you will have to wait till then.”
Justice glared at the man, though I half wished my son would rudely ask what I dared not: where was our neighbor going, why, and when would be the return? But Justice was uncertain of the woodcarver and said nothing.
He was a man about the age of Ahab, from looking at his face, which lay in folds. But his hair was jet black, almost preternaturally black. Perhaps he was two decades younger than Ahab, then, for all his care-carved face. The man was not at all strong and muscular, as Ahab was, but thin and tall. His hands were covered with nicks and scabs and small white scars, which I instantly deduced came from slips of the chisel while he carved.
“I have two of them ready to sell,” he said.
I do not know why, but I shivered. It was as though he were a slave trader. “Do you keep some of them?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I have some warm water,” he said. “Let me show you.”
He led us around to the back of the shed. Fastened to the roof was a large black tank, with a funnel and pipe fitted to its bottom. There was a stopcock device at the end of the tube. “Let me rinse you both,” he said. He turned the stopcock, and water showered out. As he put his hand in it, I followed suit, and found it warm. There was no fire to heat the tank; merely the sun had warmed the water in the reservoir. Gladly, I stepped under its spray and called Justice to me. Together, we stood there turning in the warm water and rinsing away the sandy grit and clammy temperature.
“Now,” the neighbor said, turning off the water. “Run home like rabbits through the hole in the hedge.”
I took Justice’s hand and we ran home, Justice dropping my hand as we neared the opening and running through first, laughing, ahead of me.
WHEN WE CAME to our own green, we saw that Mary Starbuck and her son stood at our door. Mary held a cloth-covered basket in her hand, which my nose soon told me contained hot rolls. She laughed out loud to see me, and she teased that no sooner had I moved to ’Sconset than I had gotten into trouble.
When we were all dry and changed and the boys had gone outside to play, Mary and I sat beside the hearth and chatted. I felt wonderfully fresh and happy. ’Sconset, I told Mary, was far better in its simple isolation than town with its bustle. I had never lived in a town before Nantucket, and, I claimed, if I had more people about me than could compose the crew of a ship (about thirty on a whaler), then I grew restless.
“No, Una,” she said, “you are a person who can adjust to anything. If you prefer ’Sconset, it is only that you choose it.”
Always, I have felt uncomfortable with such a remark—it implies I have no true core, no essence—but I knew Mary did not mean to imply that I was lacking. She must have seen the shadow pass over my face, for she reached out and took my hand.
“I meant only that you are always your own true self. Every time I see you I am but more impressed by that.”
“I spent the night on the roof walk.”
“Did you look for try-pots burning at sea? I used to. But now I sleep through the night. I looked this morning,” she added. “Nothing.”
“I felt that they were not coming—ever.” I hesitated to tell Mary this, but as I wanted her as my true friend, I did not wish to hold back.
“I have sometimes doubted, too,” she said.
“I seemed to know that they would not return. It was not doubt I felt.”
“Still, it was your revelation,” she said. “Not mine.”
“Have you not felt it?”
Now her eyes filmed with tears. “Every day I feel it with more certainty. With me, it is not the revelation of a night’s watch. But every day my soul fills with the same knowledge, slowly, as some wells slowly fill with water.”
“You have concealed it well.”
“As a mother should,” Mary answered. “But I think such concealment is not becoming to friendship.”
I felt my nostrils flare, as though I were a cannibal catching the scent of meat. I spoke as gently as ever words have passed up my throat and through my lips. “What else would you tell me, Mary?” But on my tongue I tasted blood.
She reached for my hand—her fingers were warm from her teacup, now set aside—that familiar gesture that is the prelude to confidence.
; “When I was a girl of twelve”—her eyes searched my face, how vigilant, how knowledgeable, their movement—“a man in Nantucket lured me into the mill. He was very short, scarcely as tall as my shoulder, and I mistook him for a younger boy. He had no beard. He showed me silver coins. He opened his hands so that there was one in each palm like two large silver eyes. He moved them back and forth like demon eyes that seemed located in a face that could grow as broad as a giant’s, or very narrow. It was daylight, but in the mill it was like dusk, yet somehow beams of light fell on the coins so that they glowed. These I could have, he said. ‘If you take off your drawers, lie on your back, spread your legs, and make no sound.’ ”
Mary repeated the words like a horrible four-part litany. Take off your drawers, Lie on your back, Spread your legs, Make no sound. I felt my own lips moving after them as though what had been the experience of Mary, my sister, was now included in my own history—this outrage, this rape.
“And so he had his way with me. For money. Any prostitute is my sister.”
“Believe that I am your sister, too. Not in this particular. In another way. More heinous.” But now was not the time to lay my story atop hers.
Silence breathed on us, and then she added, shaken, frightened, “I could not have told anyone of my shame if I had felt Mr. Starbuck was yet alive.” Our gaze was a bridge of shared truth. “How will we live without our husbands?” she asked.
Not just her words but all her sweet face, stunned and puzzled under the cornet of crossed braids, inquired of me. I squeezed her hand. I swear there was nothing callous in me. Only strength, which seemed to increase geometrically. “Very well,” I said quietly.
CHAPTER 130: The Roar of Guilt
THAT NIGHT, though I was weary with the day, I took to the roof again. Some constellations were known to me—like lands I had already visited—and these I sailed past. Some stars hung in splendid, isolated brightness, and these, too, I tried to look beyond. Were all the stars the same size? My fingertips rested lightly on the wooden rail. I could not know if stars were equal to each other, but if they were, then the dim ones must be far and farther away, and toward those reaches I hurled my soul.
A palm of lightning smacked the sky. I felt the rise of the wind. Soon the sea would begin to roar and rain would sweep landward. A harpoon of lightning flung itself from the sky into the sea, and then the crack of it came walking more slowly to my ears.
The night was rising so black over the ocean that darkness had obliterated half the stars. The sea was roaring like a pride of lions. I thought of Ahab roaring shame into vengeance. I imagined lions caught in the sand-tossing surf, their tawny manes all tangled in froth and foam, their sharp-toothed mouths open and roaring.
And in their own ravenous mouths, I saw my own, in the whaleboat. I saw my hand holding a grisly present toward my gaping mouth. If thy hand offend thee, my father would have quoted, cut it off!
I held my hand up between me and the night. My right hand, the one that held the needle and my livelihood. My pleasure in writing as well as in sewing. Could I not sacrifice the other hand, less valued? But it was the right hand that had offended.
Again I looked at it. At my narrow wrist. There was the place to bring down the hatchet. Could I? Of course I could. Hesitation was no longer a part of my soul. There was only decision and action. Of course I could. Yet time was mine, to contemplate and decide.
What I saw was a good hand, an articulate wrist, capable of bending and turning. Holy the Body, the stars chirped softly like little chicks running under the shadow of hawk wings.
No. It was a hand that could yet do much good. I would not mutilate or diminish my power. I pulled my blanket higher on my neck. I let my hands clasp each other over my belly. I felt the sweep of wind over my face and watched the darkness take more stars.
When I went downstairs to bed, I dreamt turbulent dreams, like the roar of the surf, of wolves swimming in the water alongside lions and sharks and eels and other predators of the deep—squid and octopus, and in their tentacles they held sailors, some of whom had been with Giles and Kit and me in the whaleboat. When I awoke, I was biting my hand, and I sleepily promised myself that I must make it be a good hand, and nevermore would it cause harm to any human being. I would not feed my hand to guilt.
Then a great hunger came over me, and I got up and went to my cupboard. There I had a beautiful fillet of cod that I had cooked in cornmeal during the day. The tips of my fingers on touching the grainy coating seemed to have tastebuds on them, and I wanted the fish so unmistakably that I lifted it up and ate it. The cooked fish was bliss on my tongue. I went back to bed thinking that humankind philosophizes by need.
How lovely it is to sleep amidst warm quilts next to a smooth plaster wall with the roar of the surf in one’s ears and a full stomach.
AT LEAST once a week during the summer, Austin Lord drove out to visit, often accompanied by Mrs. Maynard. Taken by Mary, Judge Lord claimed she had a medieval simplicity about her that painters should adore. “Has anyone ever asked if he could paint you?” the judge inquired.
Mary laughed. “No, but the woodcarver asked if I would sit and lean forward as the model for a ship’s prow.”
“A discerning man,” the judge commented. “What’s his name?”
“Robben Avalon.”
“Did you sit for him?” I asked. I thought that I would very much like to have been asked.
“No. It’s too close to idolatry for my Quaker husband. I don’t think Mr. Starbuck would have liked it.”
“But would you have liked it?”
She laughed a little while she thought of the answer. “No, I couldn’t have enjoyed doing what might upset Mr. Starbuck.”
“Would you have accepted the invitation, Una?” the judge asked.
“Yes,” I said frankly, amused at myself.
Now Austin Lord laughed. “I thought so.”
The summer passed without our seeing the woodcarver again.
I spent many nights, but not every night, on the roof walk. I did not go there to look out to sea, but to look up at the starry sky. I liked it best when there was no moon: Luna was a bittersweet mirror for Una those days. Sometimes when I looked at her I ached with hope that Ahab, too, saw her shining face. But I did not believe that was true. In the dark of the moon, the heavens aglitter with stars, I gradually made my peace, lived through and beyond a slow grieving.
Throughout the summer my spirit sailed those spaces between stars, much as it had that first night at ’Sconset, and while it did, something like a taproot also went down from me, and I knew myself to be at home. Always this expansiveness and this rootedness grew.
One night while I sat cross-legged on the planks, my back resting against the chimney, I heard Justice climbing up the steps. He quietly asked if he might sit with me.
“You’re watching the stars, aren’t you, Mother?”
“Yes.”
He sat awhile, silently, beside me, cross-legged, looking up. Finally he said, “Sometimes I think my father is not coming back.”
I waited and said, “But we remember him, even if he doesn’t. We love him the same. And we’re all right, aren’t we?”
“The Perseid meteor shower is next week—” he said.
“Mid-August, already.”
“—and the Mitchells are coming out to watch with us.”
“That’s good.” I put my fingers in my son’s curls.
“They say they can’t see as well in town because of all the lamps and lanterns. But I thought light helped us to see. They say it’s ‘good and dark’ here.”
Together we watched one spark skate across the sky. “The town lights are like a reflective screen. They bounce our seeing back to us when we would see beyond.”
“Mother, when summer is over, let’s stay here.”
“Yes,” I said. “I want to stay, too.”
CHAPTER 131: The Return of the Delight
WHEN I AWOKE, the sea ran white and virginal. Not
just its lacy foam, but all the expanse of its fabric was white, reflecting a white sky overhead. Where the muted sun glittered through his white veil, the white sea modulated to a satiny silver that glistened and blinded my eyes. On each side of this strip of silver lay spangles and bright flakes of light and white blankness. Occasionally, where the morning breeze disturbed the blank surface, the white sheet lifted toward the palest hue of green—as though the warp were still of white threads but the woof ran pale green.
My eyes were at feast on it when the line of the horizon was suddenly punctuated by the yet-white, but dully so, silhouette and mass of a ship, a whaler. She was not the Pequod, for this image was not congruent to the one stamped in my heart. (Turn the Pequod to any angle, stern or aft, starboard or larboard, at any intermediate angle, and I know her. All variations of her shape and rigging, if a hundred be not the right number, then a thousand variations, hang in the gallery of my memory. I could not mistake her.) This ship was another, but she hove toward Nantucket and she was a whaler and perhaps the bearer of Pequod letters or sightings.
I shook Justice and told him I was running to see Mary, and he might come down as he liked. As I ran along the path, my nanny goat frolicked by my side, and I took it as a good omen.
I knocked softly at the window, knowing that Mary’s head lay just beyond the curtained glass, and called her name. When she drew back the curtain, I saw her sleepy face and tousled hair. I but pointed to the sea, and she leaned forward, looking, and then sprang up in a swirl of white nightgown and, to my surprise, pink ribbon. Ah, she was no plain Quaker for her husband, I saw. As she stood in the door, her gown showed itself to end in layers of lace from her knees to the ankles, as though she stood in sea-foam.
“It’s the Delight,” she exclaimed, “though I have not seen her for five years. We are her home port.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s built with shears.” These were broad beams which crossed the quarterdeck at a height of a few feet above a man’s head. Shears were used to lay whaleboats athwart.
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