Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “For whom?”

  She gestured toward the tower, and I noted Uncle up on the encircling platform washing the windows of the lantern house.

  “For your father?”

  “No. For him.” She gestured again, as before. “For the Giant. I’m making him a collar of all the prettiest stones.”

  Still I felt confused.

  “I’ll show you. The collar is on the ground around him. Like a path.”

  She scampered up the flat rocks till she reached the base of the tower, and there I saw several patches of stones, some dun, some purplish.

  “The colors show up best when they’re wet.” She picked up a small dun rock. “These turn golden.” She licked the rock and held it toward me, and it was like a smooth lump of gold. “And those purple are red as rubies”—I reached out and took her hand to restrain her—“when they’re wet.”

  “Why do you do this?” I replaced the golden stone among its dull fellows.

  She shrugged. “I like to.” And she ran back down the boulders to our mud kitchen on the edge of the garden.

  I sensed that I would be strangely caught between the adults and the child. But as I spooned my pie into its mold, I knew there was pleasure in the idea. I would be who I liked here. No one wished to constrain or define me. And I liked my kinfolk.

  I walked down to the pier where my aunt and mother were sitting, their laps covered with nets, and asked, “What kind of light is this, here on the Island?”

  Both women looked at me with open mouths. Then Aunt reached out her arm and swooped me on top of her lap onto the net.

  “Why, look! I’ve caught me an Una!” she exclaimed, and she kissed my cheek heartily.

  I wondered where the needle was, and she held it out, as though to answer my question, at arm’s length, and the sunshine caught its tip like a star.

  “This is the light of unbridled Nature,” my mother answered.

  “Of unveiled Nature,” Aunt put in. “But sometimes we’re veiled in mists and fogs that last all day.”

  “You have a splotch of mud on your cheek,” my mother said, and she reached out and, slipping her nail under the edge of the dried mud, flicked it off. “Like a teardrop.” With the ball of her thumb, she rubbed away the last crumbs of the blemish.

  “Go down the shore,” Aunt said, “you and Frannie, and wade.”

  When I conveyed the instruction to Frannie, she was delighted, for she was forbidden to put so much as a toe in the water without an accompanying adult. On the little beach, we slid out of our pantaloons and held up our skirts. Our toes giggled in the cold water, but we were bold and made them go deeper and root in the mushy sand while the water splashed around our ankles and then up our calves. The sheer cleanness of the waves! The cold freshness!

  “Ocean water makes you want to drink it,” Frannie said.

  “It does! It does!” I bent and cupped up the foam.

  “But you mustn’t. It will make you sick.”

  That first day set the pattern for our relationships. Frannie and I shared what we knew—I not to go too deep; Frannie not to drink the salt sea—and followed each other’s desires, and played and chatted, comfortable always, yet always with careful respect. Young as she was, Frannie often pointed to the ships far out to sea and told me their names.

  The last sensation each night, in my bed across the little room from Frannie in her bed, and the first awareness when I awoke was dread that soon my mother would leave. But each day of her presence was licked by light, glowed like mellow gold.

  The last evening, my mother and I sat on the pier alone and watched the western sun slide toward the sea. My mother remarked that in Kentucky we never had so clear a view of the sunset, and then she asked me if I liked it, on the Island.

  “Could you not stay?” I asked stiffly, because the question was too important not to articulate, and yet I knew the answer.

  “Let your aunt represent me.”

  “But she’s not you.”

  “I think it is a mistake, Una, to insist on having only one particular person near you. And we will be close together whenever we think of one another. And we will write.” She leaned toward me. “And your father and I will come to visit.”

  I squirmed in my chair. “Shouldn’t we be helping Aunt in the kitchen?”

  “She shooed me out. Because you and I will not be able to sit together again for many afternoons.”

  So we sat quietly in our chairs and did not help with supper, or sing Uncle aloft, but watched the smooth red slide of the sun toward the restless water. Even before the sun slipped into the slot of the horizon, the beam from the Lighthouse shone out in the dusk, and the cool, westerly breezes caped our shoulders. When the last red arc disappeared, my mother stood and said, “And so we eat again.”

  Our dinner was beautiful fillets of cod, simmered in goat butter, and sprinkled over with toasted bread crumbs. Afterward, Uncle set up a chessboard and invited my mother to play, while Aunt set up a second board and said she would show Frannie and me the moves.

  “O, I love the horses,” Frannie exclaimed. She picked up a brown one and a white one and mated their green-felt bases.

  To sweeten the time with the boards, Aunt served us dried-apple cobbler, with brown sugar, like sand, on top.

  None of us seemed to like the bishops. Aunt showed Frannie and me the diagonal cut across their faces, and said that was a sign as to how they moved—always on the slant. But even more than the bishops, I disliked the pawns with their stupid, hobbled conformity each to each. My mother asked what the pieces were made of, and Uncle said the white were ivory, carved from whalebone, and the dark were walnut, which was a very hard wood for carving. “So they represent the sea and the land,” he added.

  “And the board is the beach where they meet.” I spoke so quickly. Thoughts never fell from my lips like that at home, before the words were in my brain.

  What with watching the other board out of the corner of my eye, I could barely pay attention to the moves Aunt set up for Frannie and me. I terribly wanted my mother to win, and she did. “Bold move,” Uncle said, as he laid down his king in defeat, “to sacrifice your queen.”

  “Bertha always knows what she’s doing,” Aunt Agatha commented.

  I thought that was true, and if my mother wanted to return to Kentucky though I was to live at the Lighthouse, she surely had good reason. Though I had not been safe with my father, she would be. But I knew her only motive could be love of my father and loyalty to him—a priority that was difficult to swallow.

  AFTER OUR WEEK of radiant, expanded domesticity, she did, indeed, depart. The small cargo boat (the Camel) came to fetch her, and I watched her seat herself beside a water keg; she tucked her skirts around her and looked pleased and excited to be going somewhere. Her skirts bunched smoothly from her waist; her hair fell serenely from the part. Her eyes glistened. The two men quickly unfurled the single sail, and she was off. How quickly they skimmed my mother away from us. Without variation, she steadfastly smiled and waved at us till her features became indistinct with the distance, and they all four—mother, men, and boat—were but color upon the water.

  At that moment, I felt a shadow fall across me. I looked up, yet I saw no cloud.

  Frannie took my hand.

  Aunt said, “It’s the shadow of the Lighthouse.”

  “Do you know what a gnomon is?” Uncle asked.

  “It is the stylus of a sundial.”

  And I saw that a long bar of shadow began at the base of the tower and fell like a slat across the face of the Island, across us, upon the close-in water, into the chaos of the waves.

  CHAPTER 10: The Giant

  BY DAY, the Lighthouse stood like a great, gray stalk, and that first summer Frannie and I contracted to worship it together. I had been exiled for my unbelief—but that was for the ready-made mythology I inherited. Left to myself, like an innocent savage or a younger child, I toyed with objects of veneration, sought constancy and comfort in som
e dominant force.

  Who else gazed skyward? The roses, whose exuberance had given me satisfaction with the extremity of nature, had first attracted my admiration with their profuse beauty. The mass of roses lay supine atop the cottage roof. Each rose had at its center a yellow eye, gazing upward. “Do the roses worship His Highness?” I asked Frannie, as I indicated the great, gray tower. “Or do they merely take his measure?”

  Frannie gaped at me and gave no answer.

  “Those yellow eyes are saucy,” I opined. “They use the tower like a highway to take their gaze to heaven.”

  While Frannie and I hoed and tended the early summer garden, she suddenly said, “Una, the roses worship the sun.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Those rose-eyes see the sun as a distant kinsman. He’s yellow, like them, and the roses take from him whatever they need.”

  But the goats led me back to a contemplation of the tower, for I observed how warily they glanced at it. There were six goats, one billy, three nannies, and two kids—one of which was brown and one white. Apron was the white kid. The billy was also white, with strong curved horns the color of slate. Once, in late summer, when Frannie and I were taking a walk on the high land just above the Lighthouse, we saw the billy run across the hill and butt the tower.

  “The color of his horns matches the granite,” Frannie said.

  “He is the minion of the tower,” I replied. “The roses are of the sun’s congregation.”

  At supper, as we enjoyed the squash and sweet red peppers from our garden, Frannie asked her mother, “Why does Billy butt the tower?”

  Agatha laughed and told us that he did it once each year, at the end of summer. “He rebels against Authority.”

  “He tests the tower when he himself is fattest and strongest,” Uncle said.

  “It must give Billy some satisfaction,” Agatha went on ruefully, “to crack his head against rock.”

  “What do you think of God,” I asked, “for testing the loyalty of Job?”

  “I think it is wrong for the strong to test the weak, though it is natural for the weak to test the strong.”

  “Agatha, Agatha,” Uncle said, looking up from the sweet potato gashed richly open on his plate, “how can you lay down such ready maxims?”

  “Billy is much weaker than the Giant,” Frannie said.

  “You call the tower the Giant?” her father asked.

  “I think of it sometimes as Jack’s beanstalk,” Aunt Agatha said.

  “It looks like a chimney,” I said. “It’s snug against the house like a chimney. Like a chimney that grew out of control.”

  But in my heart, I adopted Frannie’s idea—that the tower was a Giant, and I would use all my senses to know him, and then, I would offer him a challenge.

  Sight

  That night, as I lay in my bed, I wondered what it would be like to live under a mountain instead of a lighthouse tower. (Condense the plot, my mother used to instruct me, after I had lived the experience of reading a novel. Can you abstract meaning, she would ask with a smile, after the pleasure of poetry.) I wondered if the Lighthouse were not just a condensed and abstracted mountain. Height was the feature they shared, and stone. But had I leaned a shoulder against a mountainside, it was likely that close at hand there would have been other mountains to look at, for nature rarely throws down just one of a kind.

  Part of the power of the Lighthouse, however, derived from its singularity.

  In Kentucky, I had lived next to a river, and sometimes the Ohio was indeed a running of gray, though more often brown with mud, or, occasionally, reflective blue of the sky, and sometimes all a glitter with sunlit silver spangles. At this time of year, the river water would be floated by autumn leaves, especially the sycamore, which liked to grow near water. Did it matter so much that the river’s gray was horizontal and the stony Other vertical? I thought not. Or that the river if marked off stretched for miles, and the tower, after all, rose only in feet and yards? In its length, the river curved and bent, and while that had a graciousness, some credit had to be given to the Lighthouse for his straightness. Perhaps if there were no gravity, he would stretch up for miles, curving sinuously as smoke, as he climbed the sky. As my consciousness rarefied toward sleep, I decided that when I compared the spectacle of the Lighthouse to the river, it was His Highness’s Stillness that ought to be emphasized and capitalized. And did stillness mean permanence? Eternity?

  THE LETTERS my mother sent from Kentucky arrived that fall in a bundle, brought out to us on the Camel. I half dreaded to open them. I did not like to think about the life I was missing in Kentucky. Her letters, though, were almost boring. They described the animals heard or seen in the woods and the gatherings of neighbors for church or harvesting. I used the corner of one of the envelopes to clean under my nails, as I sat beside the hearth.

  “Don’t do that,” Aunt suddenly said.

  “Why?” I was surprised by her tone.

  “It’s not respectful to your mother.”

  “Get a toothpick,” Uncle said kindly, “if the garden dirt is under your nails.”

  When winter fell, the river would be frozen and closed to steamboats, and there would be no letters. The last letter in the stack was a short note from my father, full of wishes for me: he hoped I enjoyed the food of the Lighthouse, he wished he could send me a pumpkin from their garden patch, he hoped I enjoyed my sewing as my mother did. I suppose that sometimes you and your little cousin enjoy tossing a yarn ball between you. Does your uncle take time to explain the workings of the Lighthouse to you? Will you take time to write to your father who loves you? Both your mother and I miss you.

  Touch

  The winter gales on the Island resulted in our bringing out caps and coats and scarfs and mittens, but sometimes Frannie and I took off our mittens to touch the rounding of the Giant. And what did the sense of touch tell us about the Giant? He too had his temperature, and that was changeable. He had his sunny side. It was recalcitrant during the morning hours, retaining its night coolness, but by afternoon, if you spread your hand on the stone, it gave back warmth greater than your own, and so, noticeable. The stone could really grow quite warm, warmer, say, than the udder of a goat, when you laid your hand against that hairy bag.

  So, we stepped, feeling with our hands as though we had gone blind and the tower were the shaft of our giant cane, around the base.

  Yes, when we rounded the turn to due north, the Giant’s skin became cooler to the touch and finally cold and clammy. He had a pelt of rough lichens there, flat, scaly, and branching like gray fire. After we knew him well, we became sorry for his north side and its perpetual cold. We warmed stones in the sun, carried them to his backside, and nestled them up against him. True, it was like warming no more than a few toes of a person; still it was something. (And, Frannie and I agreed, we very much liked having a warm brick for our toes when we slid into our beds those cold nights.)

  And so we got to know the Lighthouse by touch (both texture and temperature) as well as by sight.

  Smell

  He did have an odor—we noticed it in the thawing of spring—as all rocks do. It is the moisture in them that gives them an aroma, and we believed that if the Giant had no moisture he would crumble into a great pile of dust. We agreed on that, but I said there was really no danger of dilapidation, for he was something like a wick. He was rooted in the Island, so its spring-fed fresh water was available in abundance and could be wicked up from the lower stones to the higher ones, as needed.

  If there were many bright days with no rain, sometimes we splashed a pail of fresh water from the cistern against his lower stones.

  Taste

  Did we taste the Giant? Frannie proposed it. No, I replied, for I was fastidious about my mouth. But, I allowed Frannie to kiss the lichen-crusted stone with her lips, as though he were an holy icon, the mighty thighbone of God, and I stood beside her and sang a hymn, such as they sang in my father’s church, God of Wisdom, God of Power, changing the wor
ds to suit me: Sign of Safety, Sign of Silence, Sing we to Thy Speaking of the Light, and thanked him many times for his palpable being.

  CHAPTER 11: Winters, Summers

  WHEN FRANNIE jumped into her father’s arms and thrust her hands boldly into the burning hair atop his head, the sensation I felt was envy. O, to be so little!

  “You’re like a torch, Papa,” she said, tugging at his topknot.

  He smiled down at me. “What do you say, Una? Am I now your Uncle Torchy?”

  Frannie pulled a tuft of his red hair, as though to test how well it was rooted to his head, but he made no move to stop her. I smiled at them.

  I remembered my father, sitting on a stump, holding me on his lap. “Now, I’ll put on your golden gloves,” he had coaxed; he slid his fingers over each of mine, starting with the thumb and saying with each stroke, a word: “Do-unto-others-as-you”—changing hands—“would-have-them-to-do”—and then he buttoned the fanciful gloves, having run out of fingers—“unto-you.” Then he cautioned me, holding both my hands tightly, “Whenever you do wrong, Una, the gloves come off. You must then say the verse again and put them on with new resolve.” I also remembered his hand, when I was twelve, swooping for my cheek, and the impact that turned my head. And after that picture, another appeared, unwanted, of him framed in the narrow door, his whip in his hand, of my mother rising, standing between us, saying, “No.”

  Uncle Torchy began to hum and to waltz around, holding his little daughter against his chest.