Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Down the pew was the blazing head of Torchy. Suddenly I wished that I had climbed to the top of the Lighthouse and stood there, beside Uncle Torch. Soon after I had come to the Lighthouse I had asked Frannie if she ever went up in the Lighthouse, and she had replied that she was not big enough. This had set me to thinking if I was big enough. After a month on the Island, with no one having suggested I might climb the tower, I asked at the supper table if I might and added, lamely, that the view from the top was probably wonderful—as though I needed some reason for ascending.

  “I think your legs turn into steel,” Frannie had said solemnly, “if you climb the steps often. Papa’s have.”

  Laughing, Torchy pushed back his chair and straightened out his leg. (My mind left the sermon.)

  “Feel, Una,” he had said, pointing to his thigh muscle.

  I put my fingers lightly on the corduroy cloth of his trousers. “Press down,” he said. When I obeyed, I felt, indeed, a muscle as hard as a steel plate under the cloth.

  “But this is fifteen years of climbing,” he said. “You won’t turn into steel right away.”

  I had thought it might not be too bad to turn into steel if it made one the happy, self-assured person that my uncle was. But I had never climbed the tower with him. My partial ascent had taken me only to the level of fear.

  All of this came into my mind when I but glanced down the church pew and saw the red hair of my uncle, as though his brain were erupted in flame. It pleased me to think that he was in fact no blood kin, but a stranger who liked me. I regarded my aunt beside him. Then I contemplated my parents together and thought it might be very nice to marry a man with red hair.

  When we left the Seamen’s Bethel Chapel, my father looked straight into my eyes—we were the same height—and said that it had pleased him to sit beside me in church, as we had done when I was a little girl. There was a glitter in his black eyes and a soft nostalgia swept over his face, and I was glad that I had not bellowed No! at the pulpit.

  I resolved that I would not provoke him. The two families stayed more than a week in New Bedford (the government having provided a substitute for us at the Lighthouse), and, as my mother suggested, we visited many different places of work while we were there. How lovely to have my mother beside me, often touching my shoulder or hugging my waist, pointing for me to look at this or that. I saw men making barrels and candles and items of metal. I saw harpoons forged and rope braided by the mile. I saw great pans of hardtack baked and then packed into barrels—all of those items that a whaler, gone to sea for two or three years, would need for the lengthy voyage. My mother said that she would have me to notice what kind of man did what kind of work. I want you to learn, she said, how men differ from each other. Mainly I noticed how my gloomy father differed from Torchy’s cheer, from the silver minister’s serenity.

  During these excursions around New Bedford, the sense of the six of us gradually became a sense of five, as my father drew more and more to the periphery. Once I said to my mother, “He looks like an ember smoldering, over there.”

  “You don’t need to be afraid,” she said quickly.

  I had not really felt afraid, only observant, though in the woods he had seemed dangerous. I remembered the retort of his gun as he stood on the threshold and King’s blood in the dust. Then I thought of the shaft of the great white pine I had climbed. At intervals, the branches shot out from the trunk like the spokes from the hub of a wheel. And the sprays of yellow-green needles were limber and redolent.

  When we went again to church the next Sunday, I studied the faces of the men who were returned from sea or who were likely to go there soon. It seemed to me there was an alertness to them that I seldom saw among the landsmen, and a knowing. And I thought of Uncle, who had been many places in his youth and now seemed so content with his small family on the small Island with the tower, plus one niece, myself, and how he was cheerful for weeks and months and years. And I wondered for the first time where I myself would go next, and, if I went there, if that path might branch as elm trees do and as rivers do and go elsewhere. Would I ever come back to the place where I started? What portion of my lot would be choice and what part accident?

  That night, at a New Bedford tavern named the Hollyhock, I was surprised that during our last dinner together before my parents returned to Kentucky, my father asked me a question along these very lines.

  “Una,” he said directly to me, “do you hold that our lives are determined for us or that we are free to choose?” It was as though the dark case of a coal lump had split open, and I saw the fire within, like a wound.

  I glanced uneasily at my mother and felt afraid that their nice visit might end in contention. I had tried to conform! I had concealed my growing unease! My mother nodded yes at me, ever so slightly.

  “I think we are free,” I said. I helped myself to another portion of beef stew, as though it were a normal question and my answer a casual one. “We don’t eat so much red meat on the Island,” I said, “do we, Aunt?” But she made no reply.

  “Until recently,” my father intoned, “I thought so, too. I thought you, daughter, were free to choose to believe, but now I think that fate, or God, determines it all.”

  I was afraid to speak, because it seemed to me that again fanaticism was contracting and smoldering within him. I studied my napkin and the hastily done embroidery on it—a pink hollyhock, to remind one of the name of the place. I could have said, I believe in neither God nor Fate, and the conflagration would have been upon us.

  Uncle asked in a kindly way, “What caused you to change your mind, Ulysses?”

  My father ignored my uncle and focused on me. “I thought you, daughter, were free to choose and that you freely disobeyed. It was my solemn duty to punish you.” He spoke all on one pitch, an intoning, as though he were mesmerized. “I have changed, by the will of God!” Suddenly his voice blared, and the word God was almost a shout. The other diners at the Hollyhock turned to look at us. My mother put her white hand on my father’s dark shoulder, but she said nothing.

  In a lower voice, he continued, “I was in church. You know there is a great debate in Kentucky, south of us, near Tennessee, between those who believe in free will and those who hold with predestination. I have always believed I was free. Look at this hand,” he said. “It will not rise from the table unless I will that it do so. No, it lies inert.”

  Suddenly his hand shot up in a definitive gesture. He held it aloft over us. “I choose,” he said.

  We stared at him. Aunt Agatha frowned and looked away.

  “Am I as a body so different from my hand?” he went on. “That is what I thought, and my minister with me. If I choose whether my hand should rest or move about, can I not make the same decision concerning the entirety of the body? I went to hear my minister say, far better than I could ever formulate, what my soul clung to—autonomy, self-governance. I seemed to need the idea. Was I not like God, in my own world? Were not things done as I ordered them to be done? How could God be less than I?”

  He rose slowly from his chair. It was as though he were in a trance, as though his high hand held a rope that pulled him from his seat. He was not noisy or dramatic, but he began to circle the table. Once when I was out fishing with Uncle, a shark circled our boat just in that way, its fin held out of the water up in the air and quietly gliding.

  “In his sermon, my minister summarized the arguments of our opponents. As he is an honest man, each argument was given its full weight and its attractiveness. Those predestinating views claimed such as this: that if God were all-powerful, as he must be to be God, then what mattered our puny human will? Could not God have had the power to prevent the crucifixion of his only son? Did not Jesus say, ‘Not my will be done, but the will of my father who is in heaven’?”

  When my father circled round to his empty chair, I pulled it out and said softly, “Father, won’t you sit down again?”

  He rushed back his hand as though to strike me. Though the han
d did not flash, in the gasp that ran round the table, I was sucked back to Kentucky, back to when his palm smote my cheek, and he thundered, Believe! But now he slowly brought the hand before the dark cloth covering his chest, he turned the hand palm up, as though he were testing the air of the room for some interior rain. He looked up questioningly at the low, beamed ceiling. Then he placed his hands together in the attitude of prayer. Slowly he rubbed them against each other, as though to let the one warm the other. The sound was like sheets of fine sandpaper abrading one another.

  “And if Jesus, God’s own son,” he spoke softly, “was determined by a will greater than his own, would it not be blasphemy to think that we mere mortals were not so governed? Our minister presented that thinking and many other arguments against us free-willers as forcefully as if they were his own. And, amazingly, as though through sheer sympathy”—he scrubbed his hands furiously together—“he became convinced of our opponents’ reasoning. And I with him.” He opened his hands and his arms as though to embrace us. In a normal voice, he uttered a single sentence: “In the middle of the sermon, my minister did change his mind.” Then my father whispered, “Never have I seen a man so transfigured.”

  Again, my father’s hand rose above his head, as though suspended by a rope. The hand went before him, leading him, leashed, in the circle around our table. “In that godly man, the light of truth shone brighter and brighter as he spoke. And its reflection in me, and in half of the congregation. Truly, all was determined by the will of God Almighty. We were not like him. He was entirely Other. At the end of the sermon, the minister said, ‘All who believe as I have this day been led to believe, follow me through the western door,’ and almost half of us stood up and walked out of the old church, and there on the grounds at Mulkey, we formed a new church.”

  As my father finished his story, he stopped in his circling of us and lowered his arm. Still, I did not so much see him as that brave minister who had started with one idea and through the paths of his own mind found a new place. Yes! He had done this in public, not giving blind allegiance to the position that all knew him to have, but daring to think and to change before their very eyes.

  “Your pudding grows cold, Ulysses,” my mother said.

  My father sat down and took up his spoon, but then he glanced around at each of us. He seemed lost, disoriented, and my heart swelled in pity for him. I had no idea what to do. I started to reach out, to cover his hand with mine, but when I saw the hairs growing there, like black, frost-bitten grass bent by a breeze, I did not.

  I looked at my own dish and realized I had not seen the serving girl bring dessert. Half-tranced myself, I made myself recognize it as the Indian pudding I loved so well—a cornmeal mush flavored through and through with molasses. I took a spoonful to my mouth and enjoyed the sweet, still slightly warm graininess of the flavored cornmeal. I pressed the mush against the roof of my mouth, as though to extract more warmth from it.

  WHEN I EMBRACED my parents in parting the next day, my mother seemed encased in glass—fragile and brittle. My father’s hug seemed dangerous as a bear’s. My body wanted other sensations. Yet I loved them and was glad to have seen them. I wanted a noble perch, a place to flap my wings.

  Upon our return from New Bedford, I climbed the Lighthouse, at noon, by myself. Boldly, I passed the gloomy western window. Halfway up I became tired. An eastern window pierced the stonework, and I looked down. The height made my stomach toss. I looked out to sea, where the waves moved only as lines of white foam; the water appeared as blue as though a bag of indigo had been dropped in it. There were depths in it. I saw a school of fish move like a dark cloud. My knees were shaking with fatigue, and I felt all jelly like and queasy, but I climbed again.

  As I climbed, I was anxious that the door at the top might be too much for my strength, but it yielded to me. And then! The glory of the sky! Light and air all about me! The earth and the enormous sea at my feet. “Mine!” I shouted, and flung open my arms to embrace it.

  CHAPTER 13: Boston

  FROM THAT MOMENT, my appreciation of the Lighthouse changed from reverence for its imposing presence, as we below moved around it, to affection. It admitted me to its interior. With the work of my own legs, it elevated me. I shared the splendor of its view. Knowing the structure from the inside, I loved it and counted it more friend than father. Thus, the book of my life on the Island fell into two testaments.

  In my sixteenth year and my fourth year on the Island, but before Kit and Giles came to visit, Torch and Agatha and Frannie and I went to Boston instead of to New Bedford, for they wanted me to know something of the variety of the cities and also the variety within Boston. Perhaps Aunt Agatha detected in me a certain restlessness.

  When we approached the city, by sea, I saw a sweep of structures from one side of the horizon to the other, and out of this mass of buildings arose six sharp steeples, and also, on their right and apparently built on a hill, a dome, which I soon learned was the State House. The steeples and the dome seemed to me like fingers and a thumb reaching impiously from humanity to the heavens. I could not but gasp at such a display of human achievement and thought that if there was a God with eyes, he was surely impressed with this.

  Frannie was also impressed with this hive of humanity and sensibly asked, “Where do they grow their food?”

  Torchy promised to show us not where it was grown but where it was marketed, and as soon as our bowsprit crossed Commercial Street, we all cried out at an enormous and harmonious community of buildings fashioned of glittering white granite. Our Lighthouse was granite, but it was gray, single, and devoted to the vertical. Here the horizontal, the sheer amount of land covered by three structures stretching back and back with long streets between, awed us almost to tears. A gleaming central building, adorned with a dome and a portico of four columns, resembled a temple. However, this was a market building, and the two long granite buildings on either side were warehouses for the produce, which we saw being delivered in an endless line of wagons. Even Torchy was impressed, for the Quincy Market, as it was called, had been constructed only in the last few years. He speculated that the three buildings stretched back for at least five hundred feet. Everything was new and fabulous; even the vegetables were carted in shining heaps of all one color. I thought of the word Xanadu.

  When we began to walk the streets of Boston, I saw many rectangular buildings fronted by columns, and Aunt Agatha pointed out that their architecture was similar to that of the Greek Parthenon.

  “Are we in Greece then?” Frannie asked.

  “Everyone has read Lord Byron, who died fighting for Greek independence from Turkey,” she said. “We honor him by reviving the Greek style.”

  I was astonished that a poet who dealt in airy words should have influenced the shape of substantial structures. But when we visited the Bunker Hill Monument, Aunt said it was in the Egyptian mode. I smiled and echoing Frannie said, “Then perhaps we’ve come to Egypt.” But Aunt, explaining they were the residue of Napoleon’s famous Egyptian campaigns of 1798, pointed out a number of obelisks and cemetery gateways of post-and-lintel construction. We also saw something of the Gothic medieval influence.

  After much walking around, Frannie and I both developed a desire to see inside. What I loved most, perhaps because of the way the sun was streaming in the high arched windows above the balcony, was King’s Chapel. Within its vast volume, fluted columns stood in pairs, like a queen and king, and each was crowned equally in an ornate Corinthian capital. The columns stood companionably together, two by two around the sun-filled room, and I thought if ever I should marry so would I like to stand with someone so like myself that we had a certain majesty.

  In a curiosity shop, we saw more of the wonders of the world. The window and counters displayed gods and goddesses—an ivory Buddha with a tummy like a keg and elongated earlobes; hairy faces made of coconut shells with eyes of inlaid mother-of-pearl. Aunt pointed out an Egyptian god, Bastet, in the form of a cat with a tiny si
lver hoop in her ceramic cat ear.

  “Do you know why sailors wear gold in their ears?” Uncle asked me. “It was the law, long ago, that a sailor had to have on his person enough gold to bury him should he wash ashore. So the seaside folk wouldn’t be out of pocket at the funeral expense.”

  I shuddered, and Frannie said she would like to have a cat, like Bastet, someday, as a pet. I was most pleased with a bronze statuette of many-armed Shiva dancing in a circle of fire.

  The streets themselves unfolded like an argument of question and answer. Where were we now and where would we go? they asked. Street ran squarely into street till I felt fatigued with the rectangular geometry of it and was pleased when an avenue swooped or curved in a more natural or streamlike way. We walked through an area called the Crescent where all the dwellings linked onto each other, and in front they shared a common park.

  While we tramped about Boston, at the mariner’s supply, Uncle Torch saw a model of a new sort of lens for the Lighthouse lantern. Our light had produced a steady star, which was, to me, of astonishing brightness, but the new lens, which was called a Fresnel lens for the French physicist who had invented it, promised luminosity of far greater magnitude. Furthermore, the new light would rotate.

  All expenses connected with the Lighthouse had to be approved by the Nation, and so that evening Uncle spent several hours at a desk in our hotel room composing the letter to the Governor asking him to recommend to Congress the new lens. He tried out his sentences on Aunt and me and Frannie. He said that sentences were like blubber and that you must send them to the try works to render out the fat.

  “It must be so clearly written,” he said, “that an eight-year-old will comprehend how the invention works.” He looked at Frannie to enlist her greater attention. “Then there is some hope that the lawmakers will understand the logic and science of it.”