Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  We were getting stronger. When the larder got distressingly low, Captain Swain sent out a small fishing boat, and after a day of anxious waiting, she returned to us with an enormous marlin lashed to the side. His sword was as long as a walking stick, and the captain later nailed it to his cabin wall as a decoration. The fish’s flesh was fixed in all the ways imaginable while it was fresh, and the rest put down in vinegar or dried and salted.

  During our rainy promenade, when we came to a puddle on the boards, they swung me over it. “Fragonard!” I exclaimed, for he once painted a happy girl in a swing, her shoe kicked high in the air. I had seen a copy in Boston when Frannie caught the pox.

  “Watteau,” Giles corrected. With what dry self-irony he spoke—as though it were his distasteful duty to make things right.

  The pendulum in me swung back to wanting their company and connection, under Sallie’s borrowed umbrella. Afterward, I wrote letters to the Island and to Kentucky, and a few days later we met with the Thistle, New Bedford–bound, to convey my reassuring letters.

  Far from scorning Kit and Giles, now I loved their company so much that I could scarcely abide sweet Sallie’s, though our time together was always pleasant. She felt that my clothes (borrowed from her) must fit, and so there was much taking in of seams, and then gradually letting out. “Look,” she’d say, holding up a new-pinned seam, “it’s going out an entire half inch!”

  That I climbed the rigging at night I concealed from Sallie. At the foot of the mast, I unhooked my skirt. Giles brought me trousers, and I pulled them up over my long pantalettes. I think there was no more modesty about the body left in me.

  What did we do those nights? We climbed to a low yardarm and stood there, talking, like convivial birds perching on a limb. But, of course, our fingers were laced into the rigging, and we were perpetually adjusting our balance with the plowing of the ship.

  As we gradually climbed higher, our talk became freer, for there was less chance of being overheard. And it became darker.

  What do you remember? was often the question. Usually it was asked by Giles, of Kit. Without fail, he had some new and ghoulish image to relate. Once I asked him to stop, but Giles admonished me to let him talk.

  But I think I may have been right in trying to dam up that black river. As we climbed higher by night, and memory compiled, Giles’s own face became sadder by day.

  One night, when we were truly aloft, perhaps a week’s sail from the Azores, where new groceries would be purchased, Giles said simply, “Perhaps we made the wrong decision to live.”

  “I think not,” I said promptly. I surveyed the quiet night around me—the ship below, serene water encircling us. I was glad to be there.

  “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori,” Giles quoted.

  “Translation?” Kit asked.

  “ ‘It is sweet and decorous to die for one’s country.’ It’s the motto for a Roman soldier.”

  “We were not soldiers,” Kit said.

  “A ship is always the ship of state,” Giles said quietly. The night breeze gently flapped our sleeves and trousers. I gloried in my strength, that I was well enough and still uncowed enough to stand in the mast.

  “There was one sweet and decorous death.” Kit gripped our shoulders.

  We hung there silently, Giles and I, till I asked, “Which?”

  “The captain for his son,” Kit answered.

  “Ah,” Giles uttered.

  “That was the answer to Christianity.”

  I felt a dread in me. I did not like Kit’s speculations on reality or religion. They seemed to me to be a snarl of words. What should be said metaphorically he thought of as truth. I had visited those dislocated realms myself.

  “In Christianity,” Kit went on, “the father sent his son to die. Captain Fry, the father, died to save his son.”

  The idea had some appeal. “It’s why war is a mockery of Christianity,” I said. “The old generals send the young men to die.”

  “No,” Kit said. “War is an enactment of Christianity, not its mockery.”

  “ ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’?” Giles asked.

  “ ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword,’ ” Kit replied.

  “The devil can quote scripture,” I said. It was something my father used to say to me when I used Biblical words to defy him.

  “What do you think,” Giles asked Kit, “of pro patria mori?”

  “I prefer friends to countrymen.”

  “Yes,” Giles answered. “ ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’—even Marc Antony put friends ahead of countrymen.”

  I chuckled.

  “But then,” Giles added, “he was a traitor.”

  “I need to piss,” Kit announced.

  “Go ahead,” I said. I had seen the act often enough.

  “You’d not piss on the heads of our saviors, would you?” Giles asked.

  “No.”

  “I would,” Giles answered. “But I have no need.”

  “Urine in the bread dough—do you remember when you said that to Frannie, and Aunt was shocked?”

  “I shouldn’t have said it,” Kit said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “It upset your aunt, and she’d been hospitable to us. It probably disturbed little Frannie.”

  “You could wait a few years and marry little Frannie,” I said.

  Here I knew I had overstepped. I felt Giles on one side and Kit on the other stiffen. I shuffled my feet on the masthead platform.

  “I intend to marry you,” Kit said. Then he laughed. “Both of you.”

  “Sometimes I feel that way,” I said shakily.

  “In case you want to know,” Kit said across me, the words like the threat of a spear, to Giles, “I forgive you for what you did to me.”

  “You can’t,” Giles replied. An utterance like a pebble dropping forever down a well.

  We waited for Giles to speak again. Finally, his tone all changed, he said, “I think we are all already married.” He sounded happy and ironic. “If that’s possible.”

  “How do you say in Latin,” Kit asked, “that it is sweet and fitting to die for your son?”

  “In King James’s English. ‘Greater love hath no man than this. That he lay down his life for his friend.’ ”

  “Do you think we could have killed each other?” Kit asked. “If you hadn’t thrown away the sword?”

  “No,” Giles answered.

  “Do you think that we would die for each other?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Giles said. “Or live. You might find that harder.”

  After we had climbed down, and I had shucked my trousers and donned my billowing skirt, Giles spoke to me privately.

  “Una, ‘my words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’ ”

  “Claudius,” I said. “Hamlet.”

  “Who was Claudius?” Why did Giles ask? To test me?

  “Hamlet’s uncle, Hamlet’s mother’s husband, the new king of Denmark.”

  “No. Claudius was a murderer. So am I.”

  “We all ate.”

  “But I was the one who decided, wasn’t I? I was the captain.”

  I saw the sword flying above the boat from Captain Fry to Giles. He caught it so solidly. It had been as though nature put the sword in his hand. And the captain already bleeding, quickly falling forward as though to prostrate himself before the new captain. I knew what he was doing there. He was asking for the life of his son.

  “He didn’t want Chester to see, of course,” I said. But Chester had never seen anything again. The blow, meant by his father only to drop his boy into a sleep, sent him into a level of unconsciousness from which he never awoke. Chester’s burial in the sea had been decent.

  “I had made a ladder of reasons,” Giles said. “I thought I was justified, but I was only arrogant. I didn’t want to die.”

  “I will never give up my arrogance,” I said. “I want to live.” I said it to encourage him. Hav
ing suffered so much for our lives, we needed to value them.

  THE NEXT DAY at noon, I watched Giles go up the rigging. He’d offered to check a sail, Captain Swain said. I don’t know for what reason I stopped, looked up from my tatting, and watched him go. He seemed to climb toward the sun the way I had once climbed toward the moon with Kit.

  There was no cry at all. His foot seemed to tangle. He tumbled down the sky and, with hardly a splash, disappeared into the indifferent sea.

  CHAPTER 51: The Test

  HOW DO YOU become a trumpet? Heart and throat open in blaring. Their heads—the heads of the men on deck—unbent innocently from the ordinary, for no one but me had screamed Giles down the sky. While they polished the capstan or trimmed the wick of the binnacle lamp or while a man lowered his eyes to whittle a new belaying pin—that was when the catastrophic superimposed itself on the ordinary: a conundrum that soldiers and sailors knew well. All those tasks and more were abandoned, and a line of men crowded up to the taffrail beside me. We saw only the heaving sea, the small whitecaps where water built and broke. And my pointing, my shrieks, the chattering of my teeth.

  A boat was lowered: Albatross turned into the wind to wait. Though the sailors rowed the small boat all around the spot where I had seen Giles enter the sea, a place I had watched with unbending eye from that moment, Giles never surfaced, nor any article of his clothing. The glassy green water lifted only itself, and fell, and rose again. The small boat rode the rise and fall of the green swells. Sometimes they rowed, and bits of foam, little necklaces, floated and dissipated.

  If only the boat would not return—we could wait for eternity. Let him not be irrevocably gone! My heart beat with the strokes of their oars. I willed my heart to stop, but the boat came closer to the ship. Wood against wood. Returned. Six men with arms and legs and moving life. Not even the husk of Giles, not even a sodden, lifeless, drooping form.

  Sallie stood with me at the rail, guided me to her cabin, sat beside me on her bed, wept for me. I could find no tears. I stared. I felt her braided rug under the sole of my shoe.

  Had his body finished its descent to the floor of the ocean, or would it slowly sink for hours, wafted by the currents? Was a marlin passing, parting the water with his spear? Did the water grow dim and cold as he sank deeper? Did some giant squid with undulating arms wait at the bottom, opening its beak?

  Surely Giles died at the moment of hitting the water, hard as iron. Death quick as the smack of a hand. No harder. He felt nothing harder than that. Had he been afraid as he rushed toward the water? When his foot missed the spar and stepped on air, did he think, It’s just as well?

  I imagined a slight smile.

  Was it falling or letting go? Or some of both?

  I FOUND KIT sleeping in the forecastle, his cheek pressed into the netting. I shook his shoulder. He gazed at me without acknowledging the oddity of my presence, but his hand reached over the edge of his hammock, and he gently put his finger in my curls and then brushed the weave of Sallie’s piqué collar with his fingertips.

  “Giles is dead.”

  “What?”

  “He fell from the topgallant sail into the water.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Giles is dead, Kit.”

  “You and he have made it up to test me.”

  “No.”

  Then I sat down on the floor beside him, to wait. Giles would have wanted my undivided love to go to Kit. Console. That was my pure injunction.

  He lay slung in the hammock, staring up. After many minutes the tears began to seep from the corners of his eyes. I knew he knew, and I began to sob. Even the linings of my mouth wept and filled it with water.

  Then Kit got up from his hammock and sat on the floor beside me. He put his arm across my shoulder and drew my face against his bony chest. “Poor Una.” He, too, had consolation to offer, but I felt numb as stone.

  The ship rocked us, sometimes my weight bearing toward Kit, sometimes his body leaning into mine. Only my skin was alive. I was a rock covered with a tissue of flesh.

  Kit put his hand under my skirt and touched my thigh through the cloth of my drawers. When he said, “May I?” I said “Yes,” and unloosed the drawstring and lifted my skirt so that we might be more together.

  CHAPTER 52: The Funeral

  WHEN I SAW SALLIE, I told her that my menses had commenced again and asked if I might have some rags of her.

  Her face cleared a moment at this “news” of returning health, for my body had been so dried out, so starved and tried by many weeks in the open boat, that the womanly functions had ceased. Sallie spoke sympathetically. “Your friend gone, and this, too. I’ll get you a clean dress.”

  I would have spent the night in Kit’s embrace and in my embrace of him, but he and I both had known that soon other sailors would come to the forecastle, and we must not be found upon the floor. My shoulders remembered the hardness of the boards. There had been gladness and pain, purging pain, and desperate comfort in joining with a man whose heart knew my heart’s sorrow.

  “My mother,” Sallie went on, “often told me that some great shock in life could either start or stop the monthlies.”

  She handed me a navy-blue skirt and waist, and I thought ironically of how bravely and naively I had left my childhood Island in just such a frock. After she poured fresh water in the china bowl, Sallie hugged me again and kindly left me to bathe in private.

  I was scarcely changed—some dried blood on my legs. The loss of the label “Virgin” signified nothing compared to the real loss of Giles. Signified joining—that neither Kit nor I was alone. The world was utterly changed.

  When she returned, she said that her husband would read scripture on deck as a funeral service for the soul of Giles, but we were under sail again, headed for the Azores, and would not stop. The crew, or many of them, would assemble for the brief memorial. As soon as I felt I could come, I was to appear on the quarterdeck.

  Wearing a dress saber, Captain Swain placed a black Bible on the gleaming head of the capstan and proceeded to read from the Twenty third Psalm. Only the phrase “He maketh me to lie down beside the still waters” reached my brain, as I regarded, beside the brim of the captain’s hat, the incessant dancing of the waves.

  After he had finished his reading, without any thought or decision, I said the poem of Wordsworth that begins “I wandered lonely as a cloud…/A host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, beneath the trees…And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.” But my heart was a still lake of sorrow.

  Kit abruptly said, “We went through a lot together. There were some happy times.” Then his face became angry, and he added, “He was a great man, greatly flawed.”

  Here Sallie came to put her hand, restrainingly, on Kit’s shoulder. Great man? There was a lie in Kit’s statement. Were we not boys and a girl? Sallie’s white fingers, curling around Kit’s shoulder, gleamed as innocently as seashells. There was a spark of iridescence on her hand—an opal ring. I thought of Frannie innocently tipping the basket of shells, their inner surfaces, some of them, splashed with iridescence, for Kit to see as they sat before the hearth that night of first acquaintance.

  Kit brushed away Sallie’s hand and squeezed shut his eyes and proclaimed, “He would never have fulfilled the potential of his youth.”

  It was a stunningly inappropriate statement, but I accepted it as quickly as I used to accept Giles’s own quiet outrageousness. Quickly the captain loudly began, “Our Father, who art in Heaven…” and the crew mumbled loudly along, but Kit growled obscenities.

  I would not listen to what Kit was saying. I had given Kit my body. I smoothed the skirt of my dress with my hand. Our Father. I thought of Captain Fry standing hatless in the prow of the boat, his sweat-wet hair adhering to his forehead, and then, as though it were a mere envelope, opening the flesh of his neck, penetrating the jugular with the tip of his sword. Offering himself—my body and blood—in the hope that his son
might live. I would have given mine for Giles’s life.

  CHAPTER 53: The Contest

  HADN’T OUR PACT been to stay alive for each other?

  I would not have died for the man with the pointed shoes or his mates.

  There was no sleep that night. I lay on my back and fought down the memories of the whaleboat. Legs, trousers, swollen hands—not their faces; I would not envisage faces—yellow trousers, a ripped sleeve lay strewn among the seat struts of the whaleboat. Exhausted, recumbent, the crew sprawled. Intact. We had hoped for rescue.

  Their faces were wiped of features, as though I had been blinded by brightness again. Kit, Kit! If only I had Kit to hold me.

  THE NEXT MORNING Sallie brought me a fried piece of marlin, a slice of toast, and an orange that she had been saving for herself. She watched me eat, and I tried to do so with some show of pleasure, for I wished her troubled countenance to brighten at some small enjoyment, directly or vicariously experienced, as was her habit. She collected the orange peels, nesting the fragments one inside the other, and said that they would be ground up to flavor a sauce for another dish. Then I thought of poor Harry and his endless economy.

  “I knew a cook who saved eggshells,” I said. And then it struck me that these were the only words ever said in eulogy of Harry.

  Sallie did not reply to this, though usually she was full of pert and prompting questions. After I had finished, she said that during the night Kit had begun to rave and rage so loudly that no one else could sleep, and that they had taken him up and chained him to the foremast. No! We should have been together.

  In a blink, I rushed to Kit and found the steward pouring water over him. My Kit was chained, by a wrist. His eyes were glazed and unblinking. I saw that his body was brownly smeared.