Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “My favorite goat, Apron, a little white nanny, died in birthing. It was twins on her first time.” Was this history true? Or had the nightmare swamp within me spawned ghostly gas, independent of fact? Yes, Apron had died, between the installation of the Fresnel and my trip to New Bedford.

  “Did the kids live?” Regardless of our size or condition.

  “We hand-fed them at first. One lived and one died. We made another nanny claim the brown one that lived.”

  “How did you get them to claim up?”

  “You build a small pen so the nanny can’t get away from the kid. The proximity kindles the nanny’s maternity.”

  “What happened to the carcass of Apron?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, did you have goat stew soon after?”

  “Yes.”

  “But no one spoke of Apron?” This is the last biscuit.

  I thought of the stew, thick with innocent vegetables—onions, potatoes, celery, carrots, spiced very hot with black pepper. “Shall I describe the stew?”

  Kit laughed. More a cackle, because his throat was dry. “I’ll pass,” he said, and mischief burned in his glance. “What else did you eat?”

  “Fish. Tons and tons of fish. Mackerel, cod, small tuna…But you see, we pulled them out of the water around the Island. They didn’t live on the Island.”

  “What about the creatures on the shore—sometimes in the water, sometimes out?”

  “We counted the shoreline as part of the sea.”

  “And so, you ate?”

  “Our little Island was a complete world. It had every kind of shore. The Lighthouse was not at the crest of the headland, but about two-thirds of the way up. The hill behind it continued to rise on one side, almost a little mountain, all meadow, then at the crest, there was a drop of a hundred feet to the sea. The sea battered away at this bulwark, ate off big chunks of it in bad winter storms. That was why the Lighthouse was not built at the top of the crest.”

  “I was there.”

  “What?”

  “Remember, Giles and I came to the Island in the Petrel.”

  Why had I spoken to Kit as though he were a stranger who had never seen my home? I was embarrassed. My face burned in the sun. I shaded my eyes, looking for the tower.

  “You said there were many kinds of shore.” Kit’s voice was soft, almost a murmur. Perhaps he had not asked. Perhaps I was fishing with Uncle Torch.

  “I’m thinking of the eelgrass.”

  “Where?”

  “In the inlet. The leaves are green, like long ribbons. It’s rooted in the mud, and when it’s ripped up in the fall storms, it sinks to the bottom and decays into a rich, brown muck. The top of the grass floats on the surface. It’s always swaying. A strand may be as long as a man.”

  Once I measured Torchy with a strand of eelgrass. He lay on the beach, and I stretched it out beside him. It was the measure of a tall man, six feet tall. Or perhaps it measured him. “What’s measuring is also measured by what it measures,” I said aloud.

  “What did you find in the eelgrass to eat?”

  “Mussels, scallops.” Regardless of our size or condition.

  “Cats that eat scallops drop off their tails and ears.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “Probably a myth perpetrated by cats who talk to people in their sleep. The cats want all the scallops themselves.”

  “Why do you think, Kit, that if you hear a bell when you’re sleeping, you can dream so fast that you make a place for the bell to sound in the story, and then it sounds right in its niche?”

  “In dreams, the arrow of time is reversible.”

  My mouth was dry. If you speak the air comes in, and the mouth dries. My lips were cracking, and the flesh in the cracks was tender. I moved my hip, though it was numb and continued numb against the boards in the bottom. My eyes were closing.

  “Uncle planted dead trees to farm the mussels. Like the French do. These are dead trees, and you make them stand up, and the mussels cling to the branches. They festoon it. Every dead branch is a shelf with mussels clinging above and below.”

  “How does a mussel clamp on?”

  “It doesn’t open up and clamp on. Each mussel spins out binding thread.”

  “Like a spider?”

  “A clam just spins out one thread, but the mussels spin and spin. Their threads are golden, called byssus threads.”

  The sheen of gold seemed before my eyes. Cloth of gold can be woven from byssus threads, but Kit would not have believed that so I didn’t tell him. Aunt treasured such a cloth she herself had woven of threads spun by pen shells. Her cloth was narrow, and at Christmastime she laid it on the table, and it stretched from Uncle at the head of the table to the small, thick-sided window cut through the stone wall. On the runner of gold cloth she placed the Christmas candles, held by a curl of driftwood, and the candles were colored with cranberry and scented with bayberry, which grew, like everything else in the world, on the safe Island.

  “I’ve thought of the true name of the Island,” I said. “Its name is childhood.”

  “Not everybody has such a childhood.”

  This is the last biscuit.

  “Remember, Kit, when you made the yeast rolls in the morning?”

  “You could have gotten along with my mother. Most people couldn’t, but I think you could have.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes you can think like her.”

  But I thought of a madwoman urinating in bread dough. I knew Kit was not thinking of that. I loved to be praised. The comparison to a madwoman was made with approval, affectionately. I opened my eyes and looked at Kit. His nose had a long blister down it, and the skin from his cheeks was peeling. His skin seemed charged with brick dust. The sail hung listless.

  “We’re lucky it’s not storming,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I looked at the heads of the ten others. Each wore some sort of hat fastened under his chin. Discolored, bumpy, their faces looked like gourds blistering in the sun.

  ONCE WHEN I sat at the head of the table, I looked down the shining cloth to the window, and I saw a ship, in full sail, centered in the square. It was the very picture of a ship, framed in stone. Leaning over the table, I pointed and said, Look! Aunt had said, A merchant ship, and Uncle said, It will make Nantucket by Christmas Eve. Aunt had asked if Boston was not the likely port—all laden with goods as she must have been, and Uncle agreed with her.

  Kit and I fell from talk to silent memory.

  THAT EVENING, toward our discomfort and our growing fear in the small boat, the setting sun, dropping into the sea, threw out a cloth of gold from him to us.

  I noted, but disregarded, such glory. Sleep sealed my senses like a black bandage.

  In my dream, a starfish and a mussel. At low tide, the eelgrass lies flattened, combed down by the retreated tide, and piled on the eelgrass are starfish, all sizes and colors, lying limpsy. I am a starfish, and I fasten my five arms to the mussel I want to eat. You shouldn’t be here in the eelgrass; you should be safe in the farmer’s tree, I think to the mussel, though I know my logic is faulty. At first I cannot open the mussel, but I use only two of my arms at a time, and when they weary, I pry with two fresh ones. The mussel, exhausted, opens. Now I must get my stomach to it. My stomach is a thin sack. Turning my stomach wrong side out, I eject it from my body. I send my stomach inside the mussel shell, and it secretes its juices. I digest. When I am nourished, I pull my stomach back inside to the center of my starry body.

  CHAPTER 42: The Beginning of the Debate

  SUCH DREAMS began to fill my days as well as nights.

  My eyes were swollen, but through a slit I checked from time to time to see if it was night or day.

  Once I looked at Chester, unmoving, and wondered if he was dead.

  Captain Fry—his face visible again since it had turned gaunt, blistered, and scabby as any of ours—sat beside his son like a heathen idol. No, he moved! He
took off his hat and laid it over the boy’s face.

  ONCE I saw Giles take a jackknife and score the gunwale.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Each mark is for a day passed since the last food.”

  “All around us in the sea and the sky, there is a black glory we do not share.”

  There were four upright marks. With his knife he crossed them with a diagonal.

  THERE SIMPLY is no more water.

  WAS THAT a voice? It seemed like a flag. No water was the flapping flag under which we sailed.

  Each man sat with a string in his hand. The strings passed over the sides and down into the water. I understood. We were fishing for water.

  THE MURDERING. We shouldn’t. Voices cracked as lips and tongues. We must. Who wanted to wait, to debate at night? Wait. Night was the time to sleep. Not yet. I still knew that. There was the Big Dipper anyway, bringing me water. Soon.

  CHAPTER 43: Father and Son

  WE DECIDED. They said.

  Why, what could we even use as lots?

  “I have paper, Captain.” Giles.

  “Let it be on your head.”

  We decided in the night.

  “Suppose we’re rescued? It could be next hour.”

  “Do you see a ship?”

  “Would you have everybody draw? Even the cabin boys?”

  Regardless of size or condition.

  MY FINGERS are in a hat sorting cracker crumbs thin as paper, but I am glad. How slowly my hand moves to my mouth. Someone impedes me. “Wait,” he says. I try to disobey. “Wait!” Kit commands, and he holds my wrist so that I cannot eat. Unfolds paper.

  “IT’S THE little boy!” The voice is Giles’s, and it is a wild, despairing shriek.

  The captain is standing in the boat, his saber in his hand. “Let no one touch him!”

  Kit asks Chester, “What would you?”

  Chester responds, piping, “It is as good a fate as any.”

  The captain brings the blunt, knobbed hilt of his saber down on Chester’s head. A measured blow. To stun. He holds the saber low, and with its tip he opens his own throat. Opens extravagantly. Without restraint. He tosses the saber the length of the boat to Giles, who catches it and stands. The captain falls among the men. He falls straight, like a cut tree. Like a fountain. Only he is a bone among dogs.

  CHAPTER 44: The Human Animal

  SOMEONE RELEASES my wrist. I get to chew my paper.

  Someone puts a finger in my mouth. I suckle. But I know. I will always know. I am drinking blood.

  CHAPTER 45: The Alba Albatross

  WE DRANK and ate. We slept. We dreamed, and believed reality was dream. I crooned the song of the Lighthouse, as though torture were sung in a long, stone throat. It seemed that as days passed, other people left. And why was that?

  My cheek on the gunwale, I saw so many scratches. The point of a jackknife making another. What does a steel tooth like to eat? Wood. Just some shavings. Another calendar, Frannie?

  Giles pulling my head up by the hair.

  “Do you want my throat?” I asked.

  “Look! Look!”

  Why, I could still read, and yet be a cannibal!

  A ship. The Alba Albatross. Distant. Closer. Closing. A merchant vessel, the Albatross. She swooped down for us, appearing not at all like her namesake with wings spread out and out on both sides fifteen times in length the width of the bird’s own body, but like a white mother hen, feathers all heaped and ruffled, ready to settle over her chicks.

  Six sailors came over the side and down the ropes like six seraphs, though they were weather-brown and whiskered, one in a shirt of broad red and white stripes, looking jolly as Christmas or St. Valentine’s Day, though I did not believe such days existed anymore. Two on each side, they helped Kit and Giles into the slings, but Red-and-White, whose name I later learned was Bob, sat in the sling himself, saying of me, “This one is so slight, I’ll hold him before me, lest he fall.”

  He folded his arms across my stomach and chest, and I did not care that one thick forearm surely felt the shape of my breasts, for he adjusted his arm so that it rode under and not across me. But he said nothing except, lifting his face toward the deck, “Heave away.”

  Our miserable state was so urgent to them that I saw the hands of one sailor tremble as he worked to secure Kit in the sling. He moved away, in fact, too rapidly, and did a poor job. Kit was scarcely three feet above the water before he toppled into the sea. Another sailor dove after him immediately. I watched them both disappear under the waves. I watched with interest, but it was a slow interest. I wondered if they would emerge, what beasts under the water they might encounter if they continued to descend. But I made no cry and felt nothing. I looked away.

  Giles, who was rising beside me, was in a swoon. I looked up at the cloud of sails hovering above us. Surely the Second Coming! Our Savior and his clouds had come, and even as it was written in Revelation, we quick, we dead—whichever one we were—were caught up to meet him in the clouds, halfway to heaven.

  When we lay in the makeshift sick bay, I saw there were three of us, and a woman with a wadded white cloth gently bathed the salt water off Giles’s naked body. So must the women have bathed the body of Christ, taken down from the cross. Behind a black curtain of my mind, it was as though my father read the scriptures to me that I needed in order to interpret my experience. The sailor who had borne me up swabbed my own lips with blessed water. I could not open them, but with a large wet finger he most gently went into my mouth. I could feel him prying past my teeth, but even this was done with no more force than was necessary to accomplish the saving of my life. He did this over and over. It seemed an eternity, and throughout the corridors of timelessness, I heard him say to others, “No, no. I’ll attend.”

  Likewise the woman would not leave her post with Giles. I wanted to turn to see if Kindness Incarnate, a human of one sex or the other, had also come to Kit, but there was no part of me that might turn, or bend, or twist, or fold, or glance, not even so much as to shift my eyes in their socket-beds. But I could hear. And that part of me worked that counted and shuffled numbers. I had seen Kit go under the waves, but Kit was beside me; at some point I had counted us Three upon the cots. Blessed Three, take away Two Known, and the Unknown must be, was most surely, Kit.

  Giles should have lain in the center, for surely he was the Christ upon Golgotha, and Kit and I were but thieves in comparison. But it was I who lay in the center, and blasphemy came with the position, for on my right hand of myself, God the Daughter Almighty, was Kit. What sinister meaning was hidden in having Giles to the left? Whose promised place was on the left?

  Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.

  Da da da-da.

  Three halves divided by zero: Won’t go. Won’t go.

  MY SAILOR painted in blood. My lips are at the veins. Not his, her, your, their veins. Just the veins. Veins removed from the body, miles like thread. Stitch a quilt with veins, pocket full of sixpence.

  Your penance lies in your fingers. The graveyard quilt. That morbid thing stretched from one corner of my mind to all its corners and covered the floor of thinking. All colors are gray or brown or charcoal, burnt wood, blackened fish, glistening coal, octopus ink, the black of the pupil of an eye. All dark fabric, crossed or paisleyed only with like darkness, or darker. We stitch the coffins, the names in black thread on their lids. All the coffins go like boats, but they are out of their element, for this is on land, a graveyard near a church, perhaps. And there is a gray fence. Inside are the already dead. Outside are all whom we know, waiting to die. There’s a crowd of us—too many ships in the offing waiting, crowding, jostling each other for the narrow neck and the spacious harbor within.

  Gray squirrels run over the tombstones, and the stones are white and sparkling marble. The squirrels cavort and one runs up the magnolia, in full white blossom, and there twitches its tail, a flurry of gray air. And Giles’s voice tells me Sanskrit—that squirrel in Sanskr
it means “ass-flasher.”

  It is Uncle Torchy, head flashing like a lighthouse. He takes the needle from my fingers. Ah, the dear needle. I want it. Its sides are smoothest steel, smoother than any silk. Let me prick my fingertip, the very bull’s-eye of the whorl, let blood soak into the graveyard quilt, for everyone weeps blood when making such a quilt. I must make a graveyard quilt for penance. He puts an eagle feather in my hand.

  Surely blunt, but no: it is a quill, his knife has sheared it slanted and sharp for me.

  I SUCK the finger in my mouth. I am Apron’s child, Apron Young Nanny dead in birthing, and the little thing made to suckle on my fingers. Ah, yeah, the flag over me says, red and white unfurled. The squirrel turns the magnolia cone under its paws; the cone turns like a wheel. Handspikes turn the windlass. The squirrel seeks one red seed left neglected in the dark honeycombs. The windlass winds the chains; the anchor lifts from the bottom. Ah, yeah, the angel croons, and my tongue seeks around the fatty pad of his finger and wants.

  Now I would hold his finger tight with my teeth, but he slides past my clamping, and comes again, dripping water. And again. Wait now. But he puts his finger in my fist to hold. The part of me that sends out numbers knows the dripping water came three times, and when it comes again, it will be three times. It will not be less, but the same, the same, I sing it, or more!

  Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.

  Together our mouths tell the news; yours first:

  Thy friends are yet living.

  It was poor Tom who dived for him.

  We sent the anchor down, and Tom found it.