Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Sound

  That night when I lay in bed, I listened to the wind humming in the tower. Did the Giant emit sounds? Along with Stillness one of his great attributes was Silence. Yet when the wind, like a horsehair bow, rubbed him as though he were a long stone string, he sang.

  Or did the breath of God make the Giant into a lone Pan-pipe? I fingered the hard stone wall beside my bed. As the velocity of the high wind increased, the column of air inside the Giant’s long hollow throat was set to mournful vibrating. I wailed back till I woke Frannie, and she left her warm bed to crawl in with me to offer comfort. Don’t be homesick, she whispered. I’m here.

  “I EXPECT the Camel to appear any day,” Uncle said to me at breakfast. “Are your letters ready?”

  “I have one for every month for my mother.”

  “And for your father?”

  “I’ll write him at the end of summer.”

  Uncle only slightly frowned, but he looked away.

  Aunt said quietly, “We understand.”

  ABOVE ALL, Aunt Agatha was a pacifist who was unyielding in her abhorrence for violence. She labeled war not only the greatest of human evils but also the silliest. One summer evening, while we stood on the beach to enjoy the sunset colors, she told us—she seemed blushing, in that light—of women in ancient Greece, who had withheld their bodies from their husbands as long as they pursued war. That, she believed, was probably the only effective way to end strife among men.

  Uncle Torchy put in the statement that sometimes the Greek men loved each other, like sailors at sea without women. Not only his red hair but the skin of his face and bare arms reflected red.

  Auntie said firmly, “Wait till she’s sixteen, Torch.” She took Frannie’s hand and walked back toward the cottage.

  Since there were so few of us on the Island, Aunt Agatha’s views about war were of remote importance to me—our peace, marked off by the inevitable shadow of the Giant, seemed unending—but Aunt’s attitude toward education was an immediate matter—one from which my spirit, if not my mind, benefited greatly. She said that Plato believed children should not learn to read till they were ten, but instead spend their time with music and exercise—so Frannie was exempt from formal instruction. Since I came to the Island at age twelve, my reading (and I did a lot of it) was acceptable. But Frannie, now age five, lived a life as free as the goats’, and more so, for she could come inside, or thrust her nose in the roses, if she liked. Of course, she was curious about her small island world, and whatever questions she asked, at five, at six, at seven, were promptly and kindly answered by both my uncle and aunt, but they volunteered no information whatsoever, as far as I could make out.

  This seemed a bit of a lapse to me, and that second summer with Frannie on the Island, I endeavored to tell Frannie everything I knew so that she would not grow up ignorant. On June 1, I told her that I was a University of One, Una University, and that all day she should listen to me talk. I traced the letter U in the sand and said it had two sounds, when the U was like the vowels in moon, or in Una, and, in that U-sound in university, when the U-sound was like you. Promptly I moved on to what I likened to the contents of an encyclopedia. But when I began to expatiate, it amazed me how little I knew, and that, really, it did not require the day, but only the morning to get through it all. That afternoon, in the shade of the cottage, we pretended to eat from our pantry of mud pies and gossiped about the goats as though they were people.

  More glorious than the gulls, the clouds alone dominated the tower. If it was stolid permanence, they were playful change. They filled my head even as they filled the great dome of sky, and when I thought of sewing my mother the promised quilt, I wanted to fill it full of clouds. “Patched Clouds” my aunt and I called it, and the quilt was such variations of white and blue, and a full year in the fashioning, that Auntie almost cried to say good-bye to it and to fold it in the box to send back to Kentucky. I promised Aunt to make her a quilt representing the waves, which would be easy triangles, tipped with red at sunset. Aunt said that I learned much of geometry in making quilts, and that a proper tessellation took a kind of imagination. I did like to control the colors. My first sewing in Kentucky, which my mother had commenced in the same effortless way as my reading, had been a sampler of the alphabet, with the motto Love One Another.

  As the summer reached its conclusion, Uncle Torchy asked if I had my letters ready for the Camel and if there was one for my father. I surprised myself by saying I would write it that evening.

  Dear Father, you asked if Uncle has explained the workings of the Lighthouse to me, and the answer is that he has not, for I have not asked. Nor have I yet climbed up into the Lighthouse. But I have contemplated it in many different ways. Perhaps it is a Trojan horse—it appears to be a gift from the gods, but really it harbors death and destruction?

  Why, when I tried to write to my father, did my thoughts turn dark? I had never thought that before.

  I have been reading the I liad and the Odyssey this summer, and whenever I come to the name Ulysses, for he is given the Roman variant of his name in this translation, I think of you. But it is I and not you who has gone from home.

  I sighed and looked unhappily at my letter. He had written a kinder letter to me, of pumpkins and yarn balls. Again, I saw his hand diving for my cheek. I thought of how the sea eagle smites the sea and comes away with a fish in its talons.

  Uncle has taken me fishing many times, and I can manage a small boat by myself. Of the fish we catch, scrod is my favorite to eat. I help Uncle keep his log of passing ships, as the government requires. He says my eyes are very keen. We keep a very large garden here so that the packet boat will not have to bring too many groceries when it comes. Probably the boat will come tomorrow, but if it does not I will add to this letter. Please ask Mother to read those of hers to you. In the meantime, I remain, your daughter, Una.

  The Camel did come the next day, but she had a new master, and he had not known to gather our letters from the post office in New Bedford. We were able to send out letters, and our groceries and fire-wood were aboard, but there was no news from Kentucky to savor. My second summer on the Lighthouse closed sadly.

  THAT SECOND WINTER, bereft of the letters from my parents, I became gray with isolation and loneliness for the world. That winter was fiercer than the one before, and when I went around to the backside of the tower in the late afternoon, I found that spray had been blown all the way up the hundred-foot cliff, and it coated the stones with silver rime. We saw only a few ships a week plying the rough ocean.

  That second November I felt especially hemmed in by grayness, for not only the tower but also the sea and sky were paler shades of gray. It occurred to me one evening when I knew it was time for sunset, though the sky had been a uniform colorless hue the whole day, that if I could elevate myself, I might get above the gray ceiling and see some color before sundown. How welcome a flash of crimson would be, a billow of pink. I determined to try to climb up the tower to get a better view.

  Without asking permission, I creaked open the door to the Lighthouse and disappeared. I carried a candle with me, and its weak light shone on a world more dismal than that outside. The barren gloominess of stone and steps presented a silent indifference to my presence. I climbed only to the slot of the western-facing window. The sky held no blush of sunset for me, but I sat down and waited. Perhaps the sky would change.

  When it did change, it was to darken from gray to black, and then all at once there were hosts of stars. I felt afraid, as though a swarm of yellow jackets had appeared in the distance. Behind glass, encased in stone a hundred times thicker than an elephant’s hide, what did I have to fear, even if they had been a host of stinging wasps? But they entered my mind, through my eyes, and buzzed of my loneliness and insignificance. Disconcerted, I sprang up, slapped first one cheek and then the other, as though to swat insect pests, and hurried down the steps.

  As I descended, I heard Uncle opening the door, carrying up his ligh
t for the Argand lamps.

  “I’m late tonight,” he said. “Without the sunset, I was careless.”

  Then he asked me if I wanted to go up with him. I quickly declined, and as I went down carefully, I heard him hurrying up the steps, higher and higher. I wanted to shout up for him to look out for the star swarm, but I knew my November fancy was bleaker than the reality. Stars were only stars, but I shuddered at the thought of them.

  That Christmastime, sweet Frannie, to distract my depression, suggested we make a holiday wreath to encircle the Giant. Then she asked Uncle if we might cut some branches from the cedars—trees and wood being scarce enough on the Island so that no one would ever thoughtlessly mutilate any of the trees. Uncle replied that a full, encircling wreath would require too much greenery, but we might make a small wreath to place on the side, and he would drive a hook, or we might make a garland.

  I chose a garland, and all four of us stood in the afternoon wind, while Uncle hammered two iron nails into crevices at either end of one of the five-foot granite blocks. I winced at the sound of the blows. How could one stand such nails going through the palms of his hands? The ends of the garland tossed freely in the wind, and the swag of the midsection luffed out.

  That night, after Uncle had come down from lighting the high lantern, I suggested that we all come out to see the garland. Aunt suggested that we each carry our own lantern, and we did. As we stood in the cold, my eye traveled from the holiday greenery up the gray tower to the top. “Now it looks like the Star of Bethlehem,” I said, with satisfaction, and Aunt hugged me with her free arm.

  And the year turned round the tower again.

  DURING ALL THAT TIME, my aunt, and my uncle, too, proved as liberal in their attitudes toward religious belief as ever my mother had described. During the third and fourth winters on the Island, we celebrated Christmas royally, with much preparatory baking, and the making of gifts as fall gave way to the blowing cold. We sang Christmas songs, and each did as he or she wished in terms of exact belief.

  Aunt Agatha renamed Billy the goat “Liberal,” for challenging the preeminence of the Giant. She herself challenged not only the narrowness of the prevalent Christianity but also the rigidity of education, the inhumanity of the slave economy, and the position of women.

  For me, Aunt’s liberality in education meant essentially that I, like Frannie, might learn what I liked when I liked. I learned at least one new word every day, and all kinds of random facts springing from the words adjacent in the dictionary. Aunt encouraged me to write in tiny print beside any word I looked up my initials US (for Una Spenser) and the date.

  I have already mentioned that Aunt herself had a collection of the poems of Byron, and she also had Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, which had been published in 1798. Her volume was the twin of one my mother had in Kentucky. Another collection, in a small green binding, was by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, though Uncle always affectionately called him Bobby Burns, as though he knew him. I should like to say sometime what those poems meant to me, line by line. When I read Wordsworth in the hammock, tended by the summer breeze, the poet’s reverence for Nature helped to fill the vacancy left by my father’s toppled God.

  Giles and Kit had yet to materialize out of thin air.

  WHEN I THINK of Kit and Giles, I think of the summer birds that wheeled through the sky all the daylight hours. The Lighthouse seemed to organize us—the house and garden, the larger scallop of the Island. Those of us who lived there—four years for me—had our paths, our predictable rounds, all referenced to the Lighthouse. And these were lovely paths, for Torchy and Agatha had set about to make something of a little paradise of their Island, our Arcadia.

  But the summer gulls! The air was freedom for them, and they might come in close, or weave out of sight over the water. None flew so high as to fly over the Lighthouse, but once I saw a sea eagle stand on the knob above the lantern.

  Giles and Kit soared into our lives one warm day when I was sixteen, as freely as the ever-roving gulls. Though they came by water and not by air, of course, the sail of their tiny boat was like the wing of a gull. The dark boat itself was named the Petrel, because, they said, like Saint Peter, it could walk on water.

  But I would not skip over the time when I was fourteen, and for a week on the mainland I was reunited with both of my parents for the last time.

  Like the gnomon of a sundial, the tower did cast a shadow, as I had observed the day my mother left for Kentucky. We were under its measure of time, and many a day, since that first one when my mother embarked, was marked off as its shadow moved like the slat of a fan over the goats’ hill, and then down the boulder steps on the east, until the shadow-shaft again grew chaotic with the waves.

  CHAPTER 12: New Bedford

  ONCE EVERY SEASON, as I have implied, the packet boat came to us, but the winter boat came at the beginning of winter, and the spring boat came after mid-spring, so it was sometimes five months that we were alone on the Lighthouse with our books, with nature, and with ourselves. During the summer when I was fourteen it was successfully arranged for a June Saturday that my mother and father would come up from Kentucky to meet us.

  When I saw them at the New Bedford wharf from the deck of the Camel, naturally they looked smaller to me. But even when the boat was bumping the wood, to my surprise, they still seemed shorter than I remembered. My mother and I fell into each other’s arms immediately. She was the same, though smaller, with the same serenely parted, glossy-smooth hair. She fingered my curls tumbling over my shoulders in front and down my back and said, “My gypsy girl.”

  My father said, “Una, at fourteen, young women braid their hair.” He did not touch me and he stood like a column of darkness.

  “Does not the scripture somewhere forbid women to braid their hair, brother Ulysses?” my aunt said subversively.

  My father’s eyes flashed black darts, but he spoke mildly. “I’m not such a literalist as that, sister Agatha.”

  Suddenly I wanted my two families to get along, and I leaned forward and shyly kissed my father high on the cheek, on the skin above where his black beard began. Aunt Agatha was right behind me, but she said with a note of merry mocking, “Clearly the scripture says to greet one another with an holy kiss.”

  Uncle loaded our valises onto a hand truck and paid the boy to trundle them to our hotel, while Mother and Father greeted Frannie, whom Father had never seen before. Frannie was unafraid, and she shook my father’s hand as though she were as tall as he was.

  Then my mother put her arm through my father’s elbow and held out her hand to me. As we started toward the hotel, I joined with them. Then I held back my free hand for Frannie. She took it and grabbed her mother, who in turn playfully took Uncle’s hand, so that we made a chain with six links in it as we walked along.

  I think my father had eyes only for the churches of New Bedford, for as we passed them, he stopped to read the sermon topics tacked to the doors. We all stood patiently, still holding hands, while he read. He looked like a dark minister seeking a home for his little flock.

  “We could play crack the whip,” Frannie said, all smiles, for that was a game that all four of us sometimes played on the beach. I shook my head solemnly at her.

  At Seamen’s Bethel Chapel, after Father read the sermon notice tacked on a blue-painted door, he announced, “This will do.” My mother moved beside him in front of the door also to read. Then we moved on, but we did not take up our linking of hands again.

  When I had the chance, I inquired of my mother what was the promised sermon topic. She said that the next day we were to hear a discourse on loving obedience and loyalty. Her eyes looked into mine with such love and loyalty that the protest which rose to my tongue subsided. All evening, I felt fixed in the admonition of her gaze, and I tried to please my father as the six of us ate supper. I asked him about the horse that pulled the buggy and about his fishing in the Ohio, of catfish and bass and bluegill, and I reminded him of when
I had fished with him, and as I spoke of these things, I discovered that I did indeed care about them. But I felt as I imagined an old person might, reminiscing about times long gone and far away.

  Sunday morning found the six of us entering the Seamen’s Bethel, an odd church with a pulpit shaped like the prow of a ship. No sooner had we seated ourselves in a pew about halfway down, on the left, than the minister ascended the pulpit. To do so, he climbed up a rope ladder, then hauled the rope up into the prow. He began by reading from the Book of Ruth. During the night, I had slept off my acquiescence to the tyranny of religion and paternity. I listened to the reading grudgingly, sitting between my parents, instantly in hot rebellion. When, in the sermon, the minister began to generalize on the application of Ruth’s words—Thy people shall be my people and thy God, my God—the words hit my heart as the sea hits the headland rocks—to be turned away with its own force. I thought, Thy people shall not be my people—I choose my own—and thy God shall certainly not be mine, for I have my own allegiances. I seemed to grow taller, as though my shoulders had shot up to the level of my parents’ ears. I felt fiercely gigantic, and I knew that I could begin to roar, if I chose, that neither they, who sat so close, nor the congregation as a whole could keep me from roaring one gigantic No! in the face of the high minister. After that, they might drag me out, true, but really I could say whatever I pleased.

  Yet I knew my words themselves would dash senselessly against the pulpit. That ship would sail right over me. Instead of roaring my dissent, I studied the minister, who was tall, lined, and battered in appearance, as though he himself had often been to sea. While his words seemed foreign and offensive to me, he himself was a pillar of dignity. I could not help but like him. His figure contrasted with that of my father, who was short and powerfully compact. The minister was silver like driftwood, not the certain black of my father.