Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  When this idea of the great distance to the South American coast did not convince them to prefer Tahiti as destination, Giles said he knew that Tahiti had been purged of cannibals by the Christian missionaries. All the men had developed, through Harry’s open admiration, an idea of Giles’s great store of knowledge and of his intellectual abilities in general, and his statement gave them pause.

  But one of the men in the fartherest boat called, “What was the name of the missionary?”

  Giles replied that the names of missionaries were not something that interested him. And with this admission of ignorance all his credibility evaporated.

  “Hammersmith,” I shouted out. “His name is Hammersmith.” I did not know why I made up that name on the spot, but it was to no avail. I was only a pair of eyes, a redundant cabin boy, small of stature.

  “Christopher Jones,” Kit called out. “Solomon Brown.”

  The men in the far whaleboat took up their oars, and their boat began to turn away. They were lightly manned compared to us.

  The captain ordered them to remain with us, but they did not obey. The boat between us and them, carrying only four men, also took up oars and moved to join the rebels, pulling for the east.

  From his belt, the captain drew out his pistol. He stood, and again he ordered the two boats to turn.

  “Fire!” Giles yelled.

  Captain Fry did fire, but he aimed into the air.

  The shot was ignored.

  Quietly Giles asked, “Will you reload?”

  “I cannot fire on my own men,” the captain said.

  Aboard our overcrowded boat, a man with pointed shoes stood on one of the seats and said, “We’ll not sail to Tahiti either.” He stood with his hands on his hips, leaning belligerently toward the captain. Kit tensed as though he might spring on the man, but his companions rose beside him. The boat rocked dangerously. Captain Fry looked sadly at the men and slowly lowered the pistol.

  I looked to Giles, but he said nothing.

  With a sweep of his arm, Captain Fry flung the pistol into the sea. “As you will,” he said and sat down.

  And our boat, too, began the long journey, in the face of the prevailing wind, toward Chile.

  Captain Fry draped his arm around his son and bowed his head. Chester fastened his eyes on Giles.

  All day we rowed in dejection toward the east. Only a few words were spoken. Giles moved beside me and said the course was well aimed, though ill-chosen. I was heartened by this, for it had seemed to me that we were merely following the other boats.

  During the first night, we lost sight of the other boats. Perhaps they slipped away on purpose. We had lit candles from the lantern keg to signal our whereabouts, but they had not.

  In the morning, when I awoke, I saw that we faced the rising sun and that our boat was alone. The captain still slept in the prow, his arm still about his son. I counted twelve of us, clustered around the three rowing benches and at the prow and stern. During the night, when the wind changed, someone had hoisted the single sail. The barrels of our provisions circled the mast; we rode low in the water, slowly tacking. A sixteen-foot open whaleboat is a small country for a population of twelve, but already the territory was subdivided into districts, fore and aft of the provisions. The man with the pointed shoes was the center of the group next to ours. We were at the stern, with Giles’s hand on the big steering oar.

  Giles bent to whisper in my ear that during the night he had tried to persuade the men to turn west toward Tahiti, still only two days’ sailing behind us, but so great was their fear of cannibals—I myself was still afraid, though I did not admit it—that they would not be persuaded. Giles had pointed out the rations, ample for three days, even for the overnumbered crew, but inadequate for a longer voyage. He had stocked the boat with Tahiti in mind.

  I did not and do not know what to think of Captain Fry and his capitulation of power. But from that moment when I saw him asleep, he seemed to me a part of the wood of the boat. He seemed inert. What is the opposite of one of those pretty female figureheads at the prow of proud ships? It is a captain, turned around, curled in the prow with his back to destiny. I could not bear to look at him.

  His face seemed blotted out, as when I had been blinded by lightning. And Chester? I could focus on his face, alert and frightened, nestled in the crook of his too benign father’s arm.

  CHAPTER 39: The Distance of the Stars

  DAYS PASSED, and nights.

  “How far away, then,” Giles mused, “are the stars?”

  I shifted myself in the boat and put my cheek on his thigh.

  “Kit is asleep,” he said.

  “And the others, too.”

  Our boat rocked from side to side at the same speed, it seemed, with which we progressed. There was a harmony in our movement then, though the pace of it—for our survival—served us ill. One man’s cheek lay against the hard rib of the boat, yet he slept as though pillowed on his mother’s breast.

  I remember the next morning that the man’s face still bore the wide red welt across his cheek as though he’d been struck by the flat of a sword. But I do not want to remember any of their faces too vividly. I have forgotten their names, though certes, I once knew the names of all thirty with whom I sailed on the Sussex. I remember the slight man who fanned his fingers low on the broomstick when each sunset he swept the deck of the Sussex; he was with us. The man who wore shoes of dark suede with an unusual tapering and point in the toe—he was with us. It was he who had stood to defy the captain. The image of his feet, standing on the rowing seat, seared into my memory. For a long time I could not recall who else was with us in the light boat, neither names nor faces.

  Giles steered us into the wind, and I thought of our zagging on the water as a kind of decorative stitch. And I knew that such a stitch takes a fourth again as much thread, and time, as a straight stitch, and if the angle of the back-and-forths is too acute, it may take twice the labor to reach the other side. And if the angle is acute and the stitch is long, and lengthening, then one sews, I think, with infinity.

  Moonless, the sky was an utter darkness (as was the sea, which met it seamlessly), strewn with stars, as was the sea occasionally, when the swell of some wave before me would bulge up to reflect briefly the light of some star behind me, before rolling it under the water. Can the sea thus swallow even the stars? Do seas toss on any other world? In that other place, does some girl from a desperate boat see the reflection of a distant planet twinkle an oar’s length away from her? Does she watch that spark roll down into the black? Would she, perforce, imagine me, the moment I imagine her? Am I not her? and, thus, far removed from here?

  How far away are the stars, Giles asked, but I replied, “How far away is Chile?”

  “A thousand miles. Or more.”

  Much more, I thought, but did not say. “And that would be as the crow flies,” I said.

  “This is a night for black birds.”

  “Think of one the size of our boat,” I said. “A black bird hovers over us, with a circle of gold for an eye. Its wings are shaggy at the end. When he sees us, he spreads them individually, like black fingers, to brake his passing.”

  “He would not brake.”

  “Why is that, Giles?”

  “Crows love only shiny objects, and we are a dull crew.”

  It is true: our boat is more dull than black. Black, after all, is a color and can have its glory and sheen. All around us in the sea and the sky, there is a black glory we do not share. We are a blemish on it, a spot of rust. When obsidian is hit with a rock, it may split off into sharp and useful flakes, but hit athwart, it blemishes—a crazed spot, a wound. Athwart was our world smacked.

  “My mother loved shiny things. She hung them among the trees, to light up the darkness of the forest,” I said.

  “She must have loved the stars.”

  “In Kentucky, we were so ringed with trees that you saw the stars only by peeps through branches or in small clearings for hou
ses.” I thought a moment, listened to the waves against the wood, and remembered the small dock my father had extended like a timid finger into the Ohio.

  “Perhaps over the Ohio, you could have seen a highway of stars. I was never there at night.”

  It was a fishing dock, and once he had taken me there during the day, when I was a small child, and fixed me a pole and let me fish like any boy. After a while, I had laid down the pole and had lain down beside it. I remember yet that azure, cloudless sky, that lulling sound of the river’s water against wood. It was not so different a sound from that which now sang lullaby to all the crew but Giles and me. The river swept the dock away in spring flood, and my father said that he could fish as well from the bank, if he needed to fish, and would not rebuild.

  “We would have been in Tahiti,” I said, “if we had sailed west.” I thought that Giles should have made up the name of some missionary. What point of honor in him had dammed up his throat? A thousand names could have come twinkling out of my mouth, as numerous as stars. But mine was not to question Giles. I believed and do believe that there was a nobleness in him.

  “Who but Una,” Giles said, “would imagine a crow over the dark Pacific?”

  “A giant crow,” I put in, with a glint of pride. But had Kit been awake he would have thought of outlandishness beyond any of my imagining, and it would have been deeper. Crows flew out of him as from the depth of a coal mine shaft. From the bowels came his thoughts. “Kit scares me sometimes.” My voice was all tenderness—their pact as friends was older than mine with either of them.

  “Kit loves you.”

  How simply we were speaking. All unguarded and soft. Giles traced his fingertips across my forehead. He spoke again: “Kit loves you, and he would never hurt you.”

  Suddenly, I was all discomfort. It passed through me that Giles was looking into blackness and seeing the future. “We should have sailed for Tahiti,” I said again.

  “They should have feared the cannibal within.” His voice was tight with impatience and judging.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not without math, Una. Count the biscuits. Count the miles. Count the days.”

  “I don’t know how many biscuits are in the barrel.” I looked at it—the upright cask, the metal bands like two equators. The altar of our salvation. “Maybe it should lie on its side?”

  “You know the size of a biscuit. How tall is the barrel? Estimate its average diameter. Figure the volume.” He snorted through his superior nose.

  Disdain is becoming to no one. We would be found—some crossing ship would see us. Perhaps the hulk of the Sussex had ascended, floated derelict, and someone would look for us. Which way? those people would wonder. East or west? Perhaps there would be two ships, and one would go toward Tahiti and one toward Chile. Yet, it was possible that time after time a ship would choose to search toward Tahiti. What was to prevent that choice being always made?

  “Giles, if you were to flip a coin, and ten times it came down heads, the eleventh time, would there be good chance, excellent chance, improved chance, that now you would get tails?”

  “No.” I could feel the sigh and tenseness run out of his body. His leg stirred under my cheek. “Think of it yourself. Each time you flip the coin, there is an equal chance that the coin may land either way.”

  “But if you try over and over?”

  “I think the law of the coin is the same.”

  “But that is not the world we live in.”

  “Can you really say”—he stroked my forehead—“what world we live in?”

  I thought of my fantasy of the woman rowing in a region far away among the distant stars. But he could not have known I’d thought that. It was not so much a thought as a picture.

  “Here,” he said. “I saved my biscuit today. Let’s eat it.”

  His disdain had been but the irritation of hunger.

  He took it from within his shirt, quickly broke it in half, and handed me my portion, which was still warm in a tepid way from being against his flesh. “Eat quickly,” he said. “The odor might wake them up.”

  “Why did you save your share, Giles?”

  “I wanted to see what it was like to miss a day.”

  I could hear him faintly as he quickly, almost delicately, ground the biscuit with his molars. He was making a kind of soup of it in his mouth, to make it go further, to crack every crumb and sub-crumb, to liberate all the potential of its nourishment.

  I said stoutly, “I don’t think they smell in their sleep.”

  “Really? Haven’t you heard a bell ring in your sleep, and immediately fashioned a dream around it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And the odd thing is that the drama manages to precede the sound, to lead up to it so that there is a notch for the sound in the narrative.”

  “I’ve noticed that, too.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I think that in the dream the sound is but a memory of the original sound.”

  “But you don’t hear the bell twice.”

  “The trick would be to time the real sound and the sound within the dream.”

  “But you cannot place a clock in the unreal world of dreaming.”

  Now my biscuit was but a memory. Suddenly Giles leaned over the side and vomited. He did not let the upheaval fall into the water, but caught it, as best he could, in his hand.

  “Are you very sick?”

  He shook his head, but could not speak again for a moment. Still he held the vomitus in his hand, and I could smell the bile from his stomach.

  “Wash off your hand,” I said.

  He held it toward me. “Would you like to eat it?”

  “Eat it yourself!”

  “I cannot. I’d only vomit again.”

  “So would I!”

  “I drank a little seawater today, and that’s why I’m sick. Not the biscuit.”

  “It’s already part digested!”

  “Wolves regurgitate for their young. Birds, too.” Still, he continued to offer me his hand like a cup, as though the mess were broth. He sat like a Chinese idol, straight-backed, dignified.

  “No.”

  He rinsed his hand. “The day may come, Una, when you will long for anything you can offer your stomach. You may imagine my hand as a Christian pictures the chalice holding the blood of his salvation.”

  “Wine,” I said.

  “Choose your salvation—Catholic or Protestant?” And now he was teasing me.

  “Give me goat milk, and let Nature be my god,” I said. Six goats clambered over a magic island, in the shadow of something large and armlike.

  “An impersonal god, Nature,” Giles said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. Perhaps I had a secret, could think a thought, image my own universe that was beyond Giles himself.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  I would have answered, but I had no words for the idea, nor any image either. Yet I could not retract. “I don’t know.”

  Again we were quiet. I watched the brief lives of the star reflections in the sea. Some bulged out on a swell, gushing refraction as they went down. Some in the concavities grew harder and smaller, sharply focused before they disappeared inside themselves. Or so I imagined. Perhaps they were really only spots of light. My head seemed swaying and unstable.

  “Shall we calculate the number of biscuits in the barrel?” I asked.

  “No,” Giles answered. “Look up. How far away do you think the stars are?”

  CHAPTER 40: The Sentence

  AT FIRST the men stood often and pissed over the gunwale. I waited till night when the watch was ours. Then Giles and Kit held my arms as I sat on the side and lowered myself till my bare bottom was just above the water. They always turned their faces and waited till I came up, pulled on my trousers, and said, “All right.” As the crew ate and drank less and less there was less necessity for anyone to relieve himself.

  Our days were spent in glitter, d
azzle. Sometimes the cups of light were small as thimbles, sometimes big as bowls. They rocked, they danced, they could not stand still. No. Not when I thought as loudly as I could Be still! did they cease their clapping of hands, their kicking up of heels.

  Ceaselessly moving, endlessly spreading water.

  Colors: green, blue, slate, gold. Pink at sunset.

  Us: groaning. Feeble. Angry with a smoldering more malignant than the try-pots.

  One afternoon Captain Fry said, “This is the last biscuit. I divide it equally among us, regardless of our size or condition.” I could not look at his shining face, that abstract goodness that refused to fire on the disobedient, that flashed our human doom.

  My crumb was the size of my little fingernail.

  CHAPTER 41: What Do You Fetch for Your Mouth?

  ON THE ISLAND, Una, what did you eat?”

  The question came from Kit, with mischief in his eye. In New Bedford, in front of the Seamen’s Chapel—not on the Sabbath—I saw a boy toss a stick over and over for his wolfish dog to fetch. So the question seemed to me: a stick tossed for me to fetch back, for no reason but the distraction of it.

  “We never killed our animals. We had goats, and we milked them and made cheese, and we had chickens.” This is the last biscuit.

  “Did you eat the eggs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And isn’t an egg some form of a chick?”

  “Still, we didn’t kill the chickens or the goats.” I divide it equally among us.

  “And what if a goat died? Did they ever die?”

  While the memory was not pleasant, I liked being pressed against it. Here, in memory, was some other reality than sparkling blue water, sick, weak, slumbering men, a dark fin cutting round and round the boat. I thought of the shark that had circled Uncle and me, but that was not the memory I wanted—that moment was one both too near to the present scene and too totally different in degree of desperation.