Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “He’s probably communing with the spirits of darkness.”

  To my surprise, Giles held out his hand to me. When I took it, very happy, he squeezed my fingers and, at the distance of both our outstretched arms, smiled at me.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll go look for him.”

  AS I PUT ON my nightgown, my fingers tingling, it was as though all the million beach bubbles were inside me, evanescing.

  But I dreamed that as I gazed out my window, Kit’s face, like a disturbing full moon, rose in the darkness. I reached out, first with my right hand and then, strangely, with my left, and the moon became a circular pendulum such as wagged in our mantel clock. Held awkwardly in my hand, the pendulum had a sinister weight, heavy beyond expectation.

  CHAPTER 17: A Rose

  WHEN I AWOKE, my back turned to the window, and my eyes registering the gray stones of the backside of the fireplace and chimney, I thought of the sentence I must say to Giles before he left: I hope that you are an indefatigable letter-writer. Thus he would know that I wanted my mind forever to be in contact with his. Thus he would see that I put no undue claim upon his physical presence—only letters; thus he would know that my own appetite for exchange could not be exhausted.

  When I said my sentence, as Giles and I stood beside the cascade of roses on the roof and side of the cottage, my heart fluttering, he corrected my pronunciation: indeFATigable. But he smiled.

  I blushed, but smiled, too, to think that I was admitted to the brotherhood of honesty that existed between him and Kit. We need not stand on any ceremonies of courtesy.

  Giles went on to say he would write to me, but it would probably be only Kit who would return with the crew for mounting the Fresnel. I did not know why he would not return, and I felt that I could not ask him why—that question would cross some unspoken boundary having on one side the freedom to say anything and on the other the restriction of an extraordinary respect for privacy, an extreme of trust. Giles said that if he could not be with us, he hoped Kit and I would talk often and enjoy each other’s company, for him.

  This last seemed an odd request to me. But I dipped my head in acquiescence—just the way I have seen a thousand terns dip their heads under the water to catch small fish.

  “Shall I pick a rose for you, Una?” He said it as though amused at himself, but wanting to please me.

  “I’d like that.”

  Quickly he touched one or two, discriminating among them, then pronounced, “This one will do. Not too perfect for earthly use.” He snapped the slender green stem and handed it to me. Despite words that seemed determinedly unromantic, his eyes were as innocent and tender as the sky. Later I would put fresh water in a seashell and keep the rose on my windowsill. When the pink browned and fell, I saved the petals in a loose heap in the corner of my drawer, and when I left the Island, I folded them in a piece of paper to take with me.

  The Petrel before us ready to sail, all of us stood on the dock in the sunshine for a last good-bye. Aunt shook hands with Kit and thanked him again for the wonderful rolls, but Giles she hugged. Uncle, his hair blazing in the sunlight, was a tower of goodwill to all. He was taller than anybody. Frannie hid her hands under her apron to squeeze and wring them.

  When they jumped into the boat, Kit turned and said his final adieu: “Farewell, Fran.”

  “Come back soon. Come back soon,” she said, wringing her hands. I could tell that she wanted to jump up and down, as was her usual childish way of saying both hello and good-bye, but she restrained herself, wanting to be taken for more dignified than a mere age eight.

  After they had cast off and sailed nearly to the horizon, I turned to Frannie and asked if she wanted to climb to the top of the Lighthouse and see them again.

  “Yes!” she said, though Frannie had never completely mounted the air before.

  We had to stop so many times in the ascent, for her to catch her breath, that I was afraid they would have sailed beyond even the vantage point of the Lighthouse. “Hurry, hurry,” I urged her, and she tried her best. At the higher of the slit windows, I had her stop and look out, and we did see them, sailing quickly toward the horizon. The sight revitalized Frannie’s feet, and we scampered up the rest of the way like two squirrels spiraling up a tree. Frannie would not go out on the grillwork, but we could see them well from behind the glass.

  I wondered if they knew that we yet watched them. Frannie slowly waved her hand and said aloud, “Farewell, Kit; good-bye, Giles.”

  It looked as though they sailed off the edge of the world.

  Before we left the lantern room, Frannie first took my hand and then said solemnly, “I’d like to be called Fran, now.”

  “But I love you as Frannie,” I protested.

  She smiled her full childish smile at me, for the first time since her illness, and said, ready to please and accommodate, “Then I’m still Frannie.”

  She herself looked pleased and comforted.

  CHAPTER 18: Our Lady of the Rocks

  ON THE TOP FLAT ROCK of the natural boulder steps Frannie and I made a calendar of stones, seven in a line to count the days and weeks till Kit and the workmen returned. I wondered if we should keep two calendars, since, after all, we were separate people, but Frannie wanted the companionship of keeping the same calendar. We agreed that we would take turns selecting the stones. They were mostly dark gray ovals with some sparkle to the surface, and they were about the size of Uncle’s pocket watch.

  From her small chest of books—so like my mother’s—Aunt left a new book on the settle beside the fireplace. As was her wont, she did not suggest I read it, but I understood that I might if I wished. It was a novel titled Robinson Crusoe, and I soon saw why she might think it appropriate for me to read. Poor Robinson was marooned on an island with no one to talk to except his parrot and his man Friday. Yet he was ingenious with provisions for his convenience and safety, and I knew the suggestion was that I, too, should be ingenious in filling my time. We had not been told any definite span of days, though four weeks was the absence mentioned to Fran by Kit. Sometimes I now thought of her as Fran.

  About six weeks into our vigil, Aunt suddenly told me that the next day she wanted to take a walk with me to the far part of the Island. She said we would take a picnic basket and make our lunch there and that Frannie would stay with her father. This seemed unusual to me, and I realized that was just the point. Kind Aunt was trying to introduce some variety into the monotony of my days. She had told me a day ahead of time so that I might have it to look forward to. And it was a definite appointment. After she spoke to me, she commenced baking the dark rye bread I like so well, pumpernickel flavored with molasses. She sent me to the garden with the instruction to pick the two prettiest of any vegetable that I would like to eat raw the next day, and I picked two small cucumbers and two bell peppers. Of course I could not see into the ground before pulling two carrots, but I picked the two with the most luxuriant ferny tops.

  WE STARTED our walk in the morning ceremoniously, with Uncle and Frannie standing together at the door of the cottage, holding hands and waving to us. Aunt carried the picnic basket, and she had made up a bundle of sewing work and knitting for us. Good work during digestion, she said. The bundle was wrapped in a tablecloth, and this pouch was suspended from the end of a stick which I was to carry over my shoulder. In her skirt pocket, Aunt brought along a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for us to read aloud; she said it taught virtues that transcended its theology. My bundle on the stick and her basket, she said merrily, would make us feel the more like pilgrims journeying on the path of life.

  I thought it quaint of her, and she did seem particularly girlish. Perhaps I was passing into the realm of adulthood where Aunt, more than Frannie, would be my natural playmate.

  Our destination was a sort of rocky cave or grotto at the foot of the high cliff. It was a place quite close to home, as the mole burrows, for all one had to do was climb the hill behind the Lighthouse, and then go straight down a hund
red feet! Rather than accomplish this precipitously, we would walk over the gentler hump of the Island and gradually work our way halfway around the Island, closer and closer to the water.

  Our entourage included at first the goats, but we both knew they would tire of us at some point and pursue their own goatish curiosity or appetite. Apron, all grown up, was among their number, and for the first time, she was going to have kids of her own. She had hidden the first year the Camel had brought over a special breeding billy, and the next year she had not “taken” from that goat or from our resident Billy Liberal.

  It was a lovely-feeling day. The warmth of the sun penetrated the cloth of my dress on my back; our forearms were bare and we wore straw hats like fishermen. We exclaimed at what we saw—a ruby-throated hummingbird drinking five times from the compartments of a columbine; a cluster of tiger swallowtail butterflies on a patch of goat manure. Some of the seeds of the grass heads were ripe, and there was the faint odor of baking in the air. My feet crunched on the grass.

  When I was ten, my mother and I had walked through the woods, once, to a mossy boulder to have a picnic. We had had the pumper-nickel bread, too. Probably the sisters had cooked from the same recipe, but because we had several beef cattle, the main fare for Mother and me in Kentucky had been thick slices of roast beef flavored with wild garlic. Aunt and I carried no beef in the bottom of our basket but two bowls of herring and hard-boiled eggs soaked in vinegar and thin slices of onion. In Kentucky there had been much shadow in the sheltering woods, and here, on the exposed Big Meadow, there was much light.

  I wondered if my mother was lonely. Why was it that they had never sent for me to come home? My father had been willing to visit me in New Bedford. Whenever the supply boat came or we went to the mainland, there were letters from Mother, and Father often wrote me a few lines. Sometimes he quoted a bit of scripture. The gulf between my father and me had been partially traversed, during our visit together when I was fourteen, but since then our spirits had not progressed much toward one another. In his brief letters—mine, too, were brief—he always told me to mind my aunt and uncle and be dutiful. He had no idea of what it was to live on the Island. There was scarcely any idea of dutifulness here. Everyone was simply kind. If we had a duty, it was only to make each other happier, to provide our daily needs and, for Uncle, to care for the light.

  I glanced back over my shoulder and saw just the head of the light, for now the terrain was starting to slope downward, and here was the first of the little cedar trees that stood up like green bottle brushes. The aroma of cedar always reminds me of books, for Uncle had fashioned the chest for Aunt’s library out of the wood of one of these trees that had blown over in a storm. He never cut the trees down, saying their roots helped to keep the Island from being washed down into the sea. The wood we burned was driftwood, and, of course, the lumps of coal and cords of wood that were part of the lighthouse keeper’s allotment from the government.

  Now Aunt pointed out another tree that lay on its side, the jagged stump with its red heartwood still rooted among the small rocks.

  “We must tell Torchy,” she said. “Perhaps he will make you a chest, after the wood cures.”

  “But I don’t own a single book.”

  “Some girls keep their embroidered pillowcases and their knitted lace in chests, apart from the family’s goods.”

  “Why?”

  “To take with them when they marry.”

  Marriage—what a strange and thrilling word. Not at all like the pairs of crowned columns in King’s Chapel, Boston. Not now. The color of our picnic modulated. It had been the pure yellow found next to the black in a tiger swallowtail’s wing; it became the red of cedar heartwood, something gashed.

  “How long does it take the wood to cure?” I found myself asking.

  “About a year.” She picked up a red splinter and held it to her nose. “It is sooo aromatic,” she said, and sounded like Frannie taking her delight.

  What would it be like to have a daughter with one’s own delight, or skin, or mind? I remembered Frannie, when she was five, sitting in the wooden tub—also fashioned from staves of cedar—before the hearth. I was unfolding a piece of sheeting to warm at the fire before drying her. She was sturdy then, neither plump nor thin. As I was turning my back to her to spread the sheet to the warmth, she spoke. “I love you, Una,” she chirped, as she often had before. As always, I told her that I loved her, too. “No,” she said, “this is different this time.” I turned and asked, a little amused, “How is it different?” She answered, “I love the way you think.” I swooped down and kissed her damp cheek. It was not Frannie who was naked before me, but I, accepted and naked, before her.

  Could my own child ever surprise and know me so well as Frannie?

  “Aunt,” I asked, “is Frannie quite well now?”

  “Yes,” she answered. She smiled at me with full confidence both in the fact and in her knowledge of it. “I am sure of it. We do not need to fear losing her, Una.”

  I nodded.

  “And your eyes? Do you see perfectly well now?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is the same with Frannie. Feel assured. As you came close to blindness, but escaped, so she came close to death and escaped.”

  Strange to say, I shuddered. Aunt looked curiously at me. I remembered the uncertainty I had felt as my eyesight returned. It seemed to me that perhaps Aunt was wrong in her certainty, though I liked it quite well. Perhaps between sickness nigh-to-death and health lay the region of vulnerability, and perhaps Frannie was in it. Perhaps I, too, was in it. Perhaps Vulnerability was a land that, for some people, could never be entirely traversed.

  “Let’s go on to the plum grove,” she suggested.

  On a terrace of particularly fertile soil (washed down from the slope where the cedars gripped what was left of thin, rocky soil) grew six little plum trees, all weighted with fruit. Ripe early, this year! Aunt exclaimed. My palm hefted the sweet weight of a plum, relished its exotic purple skin. My teeth broached the tight plum skin into the warm, golden meat. Juice and flavor gushed into my mouth. I sealed my lips on the rupture, thought myself a bee, and sucked. I devoured the plum and all its globed delight of Now. Both Aunt and I picked another to carry along, and we ate our way down to the shore and tossed the pits into the sea.

  I listened to the slurping of the surf and the screeching of gulls. Access to the sand was a mere step down at this point, but as we walked along, the bank on the right grew ever higher and steeper. Sometimes it was a reddish clay, sometimes cracked rocks faced the ocean. At the top of the embankment lay a thin line of dark soil from which rose blades of grasses, small against the sky. This was a forbidden area for Frannie and me, for one must know the ways of the tides to walk safely here. The margin of sand upon which we walked could be covered with water, and the bank too high to climb up. For knowledge of the tides, I trusted to Aunt. The bank on my right rose to thirty feet and then fifty and then beyond my easy calculating. The ocean curdled in a low, white froth beside us. Though my legs were strong, it requires different muscles from climbing ones to walk in sand: one could not run fast in sand, even if one needed to. Aunt stopped twice to rest before we reached the cave.

  This was not a dark and dank cave. It was filled with sunlight and was very high and wide. It seemed big enough for a ship to sail into, and I said so to Aunt. She said that could never happen because there were many large and treacherous rocks under the water in front of the cave. Over time, great rocks and tons of soil had fallen out of the cliff face, and the cliff itself was always moving back. In two hundred years, Aunt said, the cliff would be so undercut by the waves that the Lighthouse itself would topple into the sea. But that was not now. Of course, we could not see the Lighthouse, but it delighted me to think that it was someplace not far away, standing tall above us on the cliff.

  Thrusting up from the floor of the cave rose many pitted and sea-carved columns of stone. When the tide was high, it rushed in among t
hese pillars and wore at their sides and tops so that they were polished as well as pitted. A few rocks were more flat and table like. Their surfaces sloped toward the sea, but they were flat enough to sit on. One of these was almost the color of an eggplant, a deep purple with black in the purple, and this was the one we chose for our picnic. A coolness came from the back of the cave, even though it was shallow, but the sun shone full on us when we faced the sea, and the water sparkled and glittered before us.

  I asked Aunt how it was that she knew the cave so well, and she said that she and Torchy, when they were first married and newly moved to the Island, often came here.

  “Before Frannie was born?” I asked.

  “Oh, many years before Frannie.” There was a shyness in her voice. “Like Apron Goat,” she said, “I was beyond the usual time after marriage in conceiving.”

  I wanted to ask her how long, but it did not seem my place to inquire about something so private.

  Unasked, she said, “I was eight years married before Frannie.”

  “Was it lonely for you and Uncle to live on the Island?”

  “Not in the least. We talked from sunup till bedtime, and read to each other, and sang, and worked.”

  I thought bitterly that my father was probably no such companion to my mother. “Do you think that being on the Island helped to make you happy?”

  “Often lighthouse keepers and their families are thought to be strange, because they are so much alone. Do you suppose we are, Una?”

  “No,” I said stoutly. Of this, I was sure. “I feel very normal and natural here.”

  “Normal may not be the same as natural.”

  “You don’t want to leave?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” she said. “But you?”