Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “No. But I would like to.”

  “Why?” Kit asked. His short question sounded cramped, clenched.

  “To read Faust, in the original.”

  “I don’t know about Faust,” I admitted bravely. Where there should have been darkness against my eyes, my mind was filled with the blinding brightness.

  “Goethe’s Faust.”

  When Kit asked Giles why he had an interest in that story, Giles explained that there had been a medieval version of the same foldable, and many other versions as well. “It cautions against intellectual pride.”

  We continued our descent in silence, till I asked Giles why he had gone up in the tower.

  “To find you two,” he answered.

  Then I felt happy, and I wondered if it would be possible to leave the Island with them. I could go in disguise. When my bare foot felt the first of the sixteen stone steps, I was sorry. I wanted us to go on together forever, even if I could not see.

  CHAPTER 16: The Brightness of Brightness

  UNENDING BRIGHTNESS! Surely at the point when I passed from the tower into the familiar chamber, colors would return—at least, the customary dimness in the corners of the room? the small glowing lump in the middle of the hearth? At least, when I passed through that room, guided by Giles and Kit, into my bedroom, then I would cross a border into the ordinary? Here, in my bedroom, would reside a familiar darkness? But it was not so. My mind swam in brightness.

  Kit asked me if I should like my aunt to be awakened. I felt my bed bump against my legs and groped my way under the covers. No, I told him; I would wait for morning. Perhaps by morning there would be nothing to confess. I did not want my aunt to know that I and our guests had walked about together in the night. How quickly her critical glance had shot out at Kit when he told Frannie of his mother’s defilement of the bread dough.

  “Good night,” they told me.

  I pulled the quilt up under my chin and fervently hoped for morning and for the world to reappear to my eyes even as it was already reappearing for Kit. But his eyes had been closed, his back turned away from the lightning bolt, and I had looked at it straight. I listened for Frannie’s gentle breathing, and there it was. I pictured her curled away from me, her face to the rock of the chimney. I thought of Aunt and Uncle up in their attic above the big room. Such a private room they had—I had been in it only a few times during my four years on the Island. Did the odor of the roses on the shingles above Aunt and Uncle visit them as they lay in bed? In the summer, were their dreams rose-scented? The rain droned on, and I thought of it tearing off petals from the flowers. But all in my mind was veiled in brightness.

  What is the brightness of brightness? A sizzle of the nerves? At first it had seemed a scalding of the sense of sight, but now there was no more sense of seeing anything. It was as though the imprint of brightness was directly in my brain. I did not see it. I dwelt in brightness.

  When I was a small child, I had asked my father to describe heaven, and he had said it was eternal light. There, there was no more pain and no more death; he had lifted his eyes as though they were focused on an invisible realm. With my brightness, there was no pain. Was this brightness but a forerunner of the eternal light of heaven? Was not bliss an implied component of that brightness? My world—not bliss—was very much with me; still, I could die into brightness. For Father’s heaven, there was the counterbalance of eternal darkness, of hell. This brightness was absolute.

  The contours of my universe were altered. It was as though I lived in a star. Or a star had come to fill me.

  How could I, Una, become blind? What trajectory intended for me, determined by me, could include the subtracting of sight from the sense of me? It was as though I were climbing the tower but instead of the reliable next step, I stepped into nothingness.

  All the underbelly of my soul seemed falling, plunging down an abyss whose limit I had not yet found. I shrieked as I fell. The noise of the storm outside seemed distant and muffled. Would something in me scream all my life if I was forever cursed with this blinding brightness?

  I heard a step in the room. And Kit’s voice saying quietly, “Una?”

  “Kit?” I whispered.

  “You’re not asleep?” he asked.

  I felt him sit on the edge of the bed, and I reached my hand toward him. His clothing was wet.

  “I went outside,” he explained. “I wanted to make some clay.”

  I had no understanding of what he wanted, but I was glad he was with me. Clay? He began to speak again—gently, coaxingly, but with some strange and steely imperative.

  “When Jesus made the blind to see, he spat on the ground. He reached down and took up the clay and mixed it with his spittle into a paste.” He paused, then said, “Feel what I have,” and he took my fingers and put them in the cup of his hand. Kit had brought in mud.

  “The paste he used to anoint the eyes of the afflicted.”

  The scream within me turned to ice. As calmly as I could, I said, “I do not believe in miracles. Nor in Jesus.” I felt afraid for Kit. Did he hope to work a miracle?

  “Probably some of the miracles happened,” he said with unusual intensity. “Or some form of them. Would people make things up out of absolutely nothing? Maybe there was a healing element within the clay. Maybe it could be widespread as dirt itself, and we but have to reach down to the earth and take what she offers us.”

  “Kit?” Frannie’s little voice spoke. “Kit, is it you?”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid,” she answered. “Are you awake, too, Una?”

  “The lightning hurt her eyes. She can’t see.”

  “Una?” Her voice swooped up in alarm. “Una, you can’t see?”

  “My sight will come back,” I said.

  She rushed to me and flung herself on me, her arms around me, softly calling my name.

  “I think it will be all right,” Kit said. He told her how his own vision had returned. “I was going to put some mud on her eyes, to speed their healing.”

  “Your clothes are wet,” she said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said evenly.

  “I want to wait, Kit,” I said.

  Kit stood up and walked to the door. “Good night,” he said. His voice was stiff.

  “Can I get in with you?” Frannie asked me, as soon as Kit left.

  She slid in beside me, and, cuddled together, we both fell asleep.

  IN THE MORNING, I woke to a visibly returning world. First there was a rim of movement around a central blankness. When color became discernible in patches around the rim, I felt a bit reassured.

  I said no more to Aunt and Uncle than that the lightning had blinded me. Uncle said that he had heard the bolt come down the tower to the ground. They were both full of tender concern for me. Uncle said he had known a sailor who had been temporarily blinded in a lightning storm off the coast of New Zealand.

  Of climbing the tower, of seeking the company of one of our visitors, I said nothing. Even deeper in my heart, I buried the idea that Kit had gone out into the rainstorm, found some muddy place, and gathered the mud into the palm of his hand, with the intent of healing me. Had spoken of Jesus and miracles. I asked Aunt if she thought any sort of poultice would help my eyes.

  She suggested that we protect them with a thin cloth, that we let the light back in only gradually. So that day, I lay much of the time with a double thickness of cheesecloth over my face. Giles visited me briefly and explained that he and Kit would be taking measurements of the space in the lantern house, and of the stairwell, and of the tower itself, to see what lengths of ropes and beams and pulleys they would need if the new lens was hoisted up rather than carried up. He said he would come and read to me, if he had time, and we agreed on Wordsworth. But the day passed without his return.

  Kit also visited, and he spoke cheerfully for a time, but then he said, “We have not brought you luck, Una.”

  “I think I am lucky to know you bo
th,” I said.

  “Your life was more peaceful before we came.”

  “I could die of peacefulness.”

  “I used to wonder what it would be like to grow up with very few other people, no society. One of the things I admire about all of you is your contentment.”

  “What do you like about content?”

  “I have so little of it.”

  “Giles, too?”

  “We’re very different.”

  As I lay under the cheesecloth, I asked myself if this was true. I could not tell. They both seemed wondrous to me, and that wonder was like the brightness. Within it, there were no distinctions. On my bedsheet, my fingertips felt a crust of dried mud, and I picked at it and flaked it, and brushed it away. Then I asked Frannie to bring me a damp cloth so that I might clean my fingers.

  By dusk, I could see in a broader circle around a bull’s-eye of blindness. It seemed like an unwanted sun masking the humans who were dear to me. When I tried to look into a face, there was only abstract brightness, but if they raised their arms and hands to gesture, I could see that my bright spot had human appendages.

  Kit said that the phenomenon had been the same for him, but more short-lived. “I wanted it to last longer,” he said, and I asked him why. “People are always composed of a combination of the real and the abstract,” he said. “We make each other up.”

  I WAS NOT SICK, but there was a weakness about me, and a timidity. I moved as though I were recovering from an illness. Uncertainty seemed to me a kind of illness, and I felt as though I wanted special food to strengthen me. Aunt was wonderfully sensitive to this and asked me what I would enjoy eating, and I asked for rose-hip jelly on toast. My mother had made jelly from calves’ hooves, which I did not like, but Aunt’s jelly seemed to bring to me all the clear goodness of the sun and the rooftop roses.

  For supper, I particularly enjoyed a mess of herring fish. Every person at the table picked out the tiny bones of a herring for me, since my sight would not permit such fine work, and I enjoyed the flavor and meat of the fish without any of the tedious labor. Then Giles brought out a sack of pecans that someone in Alabama had sent, and the adults separated the meat of the nut from the pith for Frannie as well as for me, Aunt saying that the pith was so bitter it would turn your mouth inside out. Though I could not see it, she placed the nut-meat in my hand to feel and told me that some people thought that pecans nourished the brain, because half a pecan resembled the human brain.

  “And some people believe,” Kit put in, “that if you eat cucumbers, your nose will grow long. Or other parts.”

  “What parts?” Frannie asked.

  “Your feet,” Aunt said. Then she asked Giles when the measurements and plans would be complete.

  Giles said they would stay but one more day and leave the next morning, if the weather held.

  “Then I’ll certainly bake the famous rolls in the morning,” Kit said. “If I may.”

  “I want to help,” Frannie said.

  “And I’ll help, too,” Aunt said.

  But I had no fondness for cooking and merely looked forward to the eating.

  After the lanterns were lit in the Lighthouse, Giles read from Wordsworth, “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” and the image of the narrator standing above the great city of London came before us. How the speaker looked down on all the buildings and all the life that they contained and felt a kind of love and awe for our lives and our multitudinousness.

  My own response included the thought that should my eyesight not have returned, never would I have seen for myself such an expanse of city. Yet, again, I thought how the mind’s eye sees, and if it was as Kit said that halfway we make up what we see, then already, through the words of Wordsworth, I was seeing.

  Then Giles read the poem about the daffodils that begins “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and how, suddenly, the poet came upon “a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils,” which were “tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” The sight became a mental treasure for Wordsworth, to which he could return in memory, and when he did, then his heart once again, Giles read, “dances with the daffodils.” I thought how the two poems fit together—one of the city with compassion for humanity and our composite creation, and the other about the beauty of nature and one’s individual joy of it.

  Giles read in such a manner as to increase my understanding of the poems. It was as though with his own mind, his tempo, and where he made the emphasis fall he presented the lines with more clarity than they might have had in themselves. The cadence of his voice curved the thought of the poem, and we were enriched by Giles’s interpretation as well as by the words composed by Wordsworth. Then he read “Tintern Abbey.”

  I had always felt kin to Dorothy, Wordsworth’s sister, who often accompanied him on his rambles through the English countryside, who relished the wildness of nature, its “dizzy rapture.” But there was a phrase in the poem that I had overlooked before. The line put me in mind of Kit’s theory—Wordsworth said that nature was half created, half perceived. I glanced at Kit, but his body made no movement of recognition. It was as though, for Kit, the idea had only his own particular twist to it, and if the twist was not there, he did not recognize it as a kindred thought. Or so I read his stillness. I could not yet see his face.

  Were many people in the world cut from the same cloth as Kit and Giles? I wondered. Were there many men like Giles with such a gentleness and wide learning about them and who were yet sailors? Or those like Kit, with such a strange originality to their minds that they left mine reeling? There was a kind of dizzy rapture for me in talking with Kit. With Giles, his thought was not so much original as deep and complete; I did not think many people could know so much about such different things—certainly not I. But I thought I knew how Giles felt.

  I AWOKE in the morning to the odor of yeast rolls and baking pecans, and for breakfast we indulged ourselves in such tender bread, such tasty buttered nuts lodged between the turns of the spiral, such a caramelized sweetness crowning the rolls, that no one could thank Kit enough.

  The bright blank spot in my vision had shrunk to the size of a nose. People had their ears again and their cheeks and the outer corners of their eyes, and only in the center of their faces a candle seemed to burn. The colors of the world delighted my looking as much as the sweet rolls delighted my eating. The simple colors I knew with their names and incarnations—the pink of the roses; the yellow crown at their center; the white, wiry hair of the goats; the cerulean, azure, and periwinkle blue of the sky; and the green and white of the ocean rolling in and breaking on our shore—delighted me. The hues that have no name even more charmed my eyes. I saw tones of gray, when a cheek was in shadow, or tones of yellow, or pink at the flanges of the nose; I noted the way the violet of my aunt’s blouse reflected under her chin. The many colors in our food spoke to me with joyful voices. It was as though there were landscape and vista enough to have pleased a Wordsworth in a spoonful of vegetable soup or in the stretched tent of shiny, whitish skin over a bent knuckle.

  I did not want to miss any conversation I might have with our visitors, yet I wanted even more to reclaim my Island, my world, to my sight. Not from the lofty height of the tower, but close to things. Antlike, I wanted to travel our paths, to look long and hard at the design of Queen Anne’s lace, the long spurs of columbine. Even the yellow cap of a dandelion delighted me, and how there was something greeny in its yellow. The beach was littered with mussels, and I loved the bruised blue and the ridges of their shells. When I heard a sound, I wanted to look directly at whatever thing it was that caused that sound and know its color. The light poured over the world like honey, and I wanted to see the breeze as well as feel it. I watched the tiny hairs on my forearm ripple like the sea grass. Whenever a wave withdrew, the million bubbles left behind, sinking rapidly into sand, tickled the corners of my eyes with iridescence.

  I would store it all up; I would reclaim it if I ever was blind. As I looked, I planned that i
n my bed, that very night, I would remember these colors and shapes, the distinctiveness of every part of nature. Then I would rejoice again, like Wordsworth, with “that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude.” I was full of love for all that I saw.

  THEIR LAST NIGHT with us, Giles read many parts of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I had more taste for it than Frannie, who said, after a while, that she felt too sleepy to stay up. All day she had followed Kit at every step, even up to the first window in the tower, where she stopped and waited for someone to come back down. Even though she truncated her journey up, being afraid of the height, her legs and lungs were not used to climbing the tower. “Feel how hard my heart is beating”—she had come to me down on the beach after one of her descents and placed my hand on her delicate chest.

  Uncle and Aunt retired as Frannie did, and Kit decided to go out and look at the stars, so only Giles and I were left before the fire. Some of Coleridge’s lines, though solemn in their intention, seemed funny to me in their rhyming: “Water, water, everywhere,/And all the boards did shrink,/Water, water, everywhere,/Nor any drop to drink.”

  When I giggled, Giles asked me solemnly if I thought I could endure the guilt of the Mariner.

  “His crime seems so symbolic,” I answered. “Shooting a bird with a crossbow.”

  “Yes, it is a crossbow.” Giles’s lovely blue eyes gazed at mine. He had speaking eyes, as my aunt said, yet I could not discern the meaning of his emphasis. “He could have decided to die for the crime.”

  When I responded, I tried to match Giles’s tone, for I felt that the issue was important to him. “His telling about it, the way he tells, seems like expiation to me.”

  “I suppose.” Giles did not quite agree.

  He continued to read, tucking in the overly obvious rimes so that they were less humorous. At length, Giles said, “I think that’s enough, Una, even for us.”

  “But Kit hasn’t come back.” I looked at the mantel clock. How relentlessly the pendulum disk swept back and forth!