Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Some unintended correspondence had dashed up in his mind. I tried to ride the wave. “I only mean we all change by degrees,” I said. “Neither in good architecture nor in nature is there any abruptness, but gradual modulation, requiring planning and patience.”

  “Would you lecture me, Una?”

  The land approached, ever nearer, and nearer. When I looked at the water day after day from the masthead, the ocean had seemed to go on forever. Yet any journey across the widest sea led to land, and the limitlessness of the sea was illusion.

  Now I half regretted the ending of my journey. Again I savored the rise and fall of the boat beneath me. As I have often done, I watched a black-backed gull riding the waves, up and down, exactly fitted to the sea. I watched how the small whitecaps folded over, just as the fingers of a raised hand may fold down over the palm. Little foam good-byes, they waved to me.

  Suddenly two men, one black and one red, leapt from the stern of the Boar. Huge men, their arms were stretched over their heads, their bodies taut as harpoons. They entered the water without a splash, and then they breached and hallooed at us.

  “Throw lines,” came Ahab’s command. There was relish in his voice.

  He was obeyed at once, and soon the two giants had pulled themselves like twins over the railing, where they stood half naked and dripping before Ahab.

  “So, Pisces,” Ahab addressed them. “We have fished you up from the ocean, and you are ours.”

  “Daggoo,” said the black man, the water glistening in his tight black curls.

  “Tashtego,” said the Indian, with a voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a muddy river. His muscles lay long and flat in his upper arms. “We harpoon whale for you.” The Indian spoke in a sullen manner, suggesting it was his right.

  With excited vitality, the black man repeated the sentence exactly: “We harpoon whale for you.”

  “Who am I?” The captain of the Pequod spoke as though he were God before whom appeared two souls petitioning admission to heaven.

  “Ahab sails Pequod,” the Indian said.

  “You be the Ahab?” the black man said, squinting and lifting his chin.

  “Cut round the Boar!” Ahab commanded. “Starbuck, bring the book. We’ll sign them on.” Ahab was all erect pride, vainglorious in his power. Indeed, he was lord of the Pequod.

  The crew stood back, in some awe of the red giant and the black giant. Daggoo’s nostrils flared as we passed the Boar.

  “Him stink,” he said, jerking his head to indicate his former ship.

  Mr. Flask was passing out chits to a few of the sailors—apparently extra pay for having seen whales or other accomplishments. “What’s this?” he asked, reading a name. “Mr. Sparrow?”

  Ahab took the chit from Flask’s hand and stuffed it into Kit’s pocket.

  “Your pay,” Ahab said.

  “Did I work here?” Kit asked. I saw the confusion in his face.

  “Aye,” Ahab answered. “I say ye did. Put in at Captain Peleg’s office to redeem your wage.”

  I was dumbstruck.

  “What did I do?” Kit asked.

  “Ye swept the winter wind out of the hurricane house.”

  “I sold you a pound of my flesh for your dinner table, didn’t I, brother?”

  “Sir,” Starbuck said, “there’s not a jot in the log of his work.”

  “I say there is,” Ahab thundered. “Give me my book.”

  He took the pen and the book from Starbuck, and before us all, wrote several lines in it.

  “Now, Tashtego, now, Daggoo,” Ahab said more calmly, “ye are entered here, too. We sail again in the early spring.”

  “You sail close to Africa,” the black man said, “Daggoo swim home.”

  “When we sail next,” Ahab said, all mildness, “ ’twill be for the Sea of Japan.”

  “Tashtego home now,” the Indian said.

  He turned and raised both arms ceremoniously, as though to embrace the island.

  “Are ye?” asked Ahab. “I took ye for a Gay Header.”

  “Yes,” Tashtego said. “Vineyard is home.”

  Then he turned again and walked across the deck, as though he owned it, to us. Placing his fingers on Kit’s brow and hair, he stooped his tall head and looked wonderingly into Kit’s eyes. Kit held his gaze.

  “Mad,” Tashtego said reverently. “Indians to the west, very far west, great Rockies. Duwamish. Their word. Mad—‘I am going home.’ Tashtego also mad.”

  Tashtego reached behind his own head and unfastened an ornament from his hair. With a movement so swift and sure that I never saw it, he placed something in my right hand and turned away. When I looked down, I saw that he had given me an eagle feather.

  I felt that something lost had been restored to me. I opened the drawstring I had sewn into the mouth of the pillowcase and dropped in the feather. Tashtego’s feather was naturally rounded on the tip, but a few slashes of a knife would quickly fashion a point for my new pen.

  I TOOK KIT by the hand and together we walked the gangplank that bridged the sea with the land. How strange to walk upon the earth herself again! After the fluid sea, land seemed stiff and unyielding. My muscles strove to adjust to this new rigidity, and I whispered to Kit, “Walking seems so odd,” but he walked straight ahead without speaking. I was glad that he moved with authority and purpose.

  In five minutes, walking down the wharf and onto the streets of Nantucket, I saw more people than I had seen in over a year’s time upon the sea. As in New Bedford, here were people of the most varied sort—every race and every shade of color, some with mahogany and purple tints to their skin. Their horse conveyances, too, people’s shoes and clothes, even their languages, existed in bewildering multiplicity. I felt overcome by this multitudinousness—what did my single self matter in a world so crowded and varied? I looked for a place to mail my letters to my loved ones. I was safe. I was back.

  “Look at that man,” Kit said, and I followed his nod to a well-dressed black man. “That is Absalom Boston. A success.”

  “Kit Sparrow,” Mr. Boston called. “You’ve come home.”

  “Aye,” Kit answered in a way that seemed wonderfully normal, “with my wife.”

  “You need a place to stay,” he said, “come over to my side. I have a rooming-inn.”

  “Thank you,” Kit said. He put his hand under my elbow for us to journey on, but I lingered.

  “Sir,” I said, “will you help me?”

  Mr. Boston answered slowly and carefully, “In any way I can, madam.”

  “I need to mail my letters,” I said urgently.

  “If Madam would honor me with her trust, Absalom Boston will see to it.”

  I gave him the letters. Good, I thought. Our first test, and we have passed for normal.

  We walked on a bit farther and saw an old Indian holding a bunch of fishing poles. His gray hair was parted over the crown of his head and softly braided beside his cheekbones. He stepped into the path in front of us and asked if his son had landed.

  I said we had but one Indian aboard, and he was from the Vineyard.

  In the old days, he told us, his cloudy eyes fixed on the sky as though it held another time, the whales came to men. Men did not go to the whales. The blackfish, he said, washed ashore to die and be butchered.

  “What is your name?” Kit asked.

  “I knew you when you were a boy. You never noticed me. Abram Quary.”

  “That is not possible,” Kit said.

  “Maybe I forget,” the man answered, immediately humble. He looked down as though ashamed.

  “Take this to Sailor’s Pay,” Kit said, reaching for the chit in his pocket. “The Pequod paymaster. Tell him you are my representative.”

  I remonstrated, for it was all the money we had.

  “Was it pay for my work, or for yours?” Kit asked me.

  I felt uncertain of his meaning and could not answer.

  Taking pity on me, he added mysteriously, “It was my
pay for sweeping.” And to the Indian, he added, “Maybe we forget.”

  Again Kit put his arm to my elbow, and we continued down the street of Nantucket and on beyond to the outskirts.

  The third person who hailed us was walking toward town along the Madaket Road. This was a man who smelled most wonderfully of fish and who commenced to rub his eyes with the backs of his hands when he saw us.

  “Are you real?” he asked. “My eyes says, ‘Why, that’s Kit Sparrow!’ and my mind says, ‘But he went down with the Sussex.’ ”

  “Mr. Hussey, smelling of the Try Pots Tavern,” Kit said, whereupon Kit was wonderfully embraced by his old friend, who had a face as deeply grooved as a steamed prune. I was duly introduced, and the man swept off his hat, out of which flew a few fishbones.

  “We’ll go back, we’ll go back,” Mr. Hussey exclaimed, “and Mrs. Hussey will feed you chowder till it flows from your ears. Why should I go to town when Kit Sparrow has rose from the dead with a mermaid for a wife? All lost, the Hemlock said. Nothing but flotsam. A floating chest. But here you are!” He continued to marvel over us, repeating several times, “But here you are!”

  “And how is your cow?” I asked Mr. Hussey, in an effort to divert him.

  “My cow, alas, the fish have gotten the better of her.” His face changed from genuine joy to mock tragedy. “She coughed up the whole skeleton of a sole, and perhaps it was her soul, for she fell on her side and expired after that.” He poked Kit with his elbow. “But why does she ask after my cow?”

  “I told her once,” Kit said, in perfect equilibrium, “that your cow was shod with the heads of codfish.”

  “But who would shoe a cow?” Hussey asked. “Especially one that is part dog?”

  Then I noted that trotting down the road to meet us, just as a dog would follow her master, was a brindled cow. She came right up to Hussey and with her giant head gently butted against him and nuzzled his chest, all the while turning her head on one side and being most considerate of not hooking him with her horn.

  “So you, too, are rose from the dead, Bessy,” he said softly. “Maybe she has as many souls as she does stomachs, and there’s a sole swimming in each of them.” The man narrowed his eyes, pretended to peer into the mysteries of philosophy.

  “What makes your cow so affectionate?” I asked.

  “Why, Mrs. Sparrow, don’t you know the laws of nature yet, and you being a wife? She is affectionate to me because I am affectionate to her. And why shouldn’t I be? It’s her milk that makes the chowder famous. Oh, never mind the fish. They are quite secondary, in my opinion, though Mrs. Hussey would say otherwise.”

  On the right side of the road, I could now see the Try Pots Tavern, built with actual try-pots steaming in the front yard. A woman stirred the chowder. Smoke and fragrance rose off the pots in the November air, and the aroma was just as wonderful as that of Mr. Hussey, for when I said that he smelt wonderfully of fish, I meant no irony. Here was the mother of his fragrance. I cannot say how cheerful I felt. Perhaps we were home.

  But no sooner did my body relax in that aroma as though it were a warm bath than I felt Kit convulsively grab my hand.

  “That is not Mrs. Hussey,” he said. “That is Charlotte!”

  “Yes,” Mr. Hussey said. “The first Mrs. Hussey did strangle on a fishbone. I missed her terrible. But later, when the Hemlock reported the Sussex gone down, Charlotte cried her eyes out, and then she married me.”

  “Charlotte!” Kit called and ran toward her.

  She brought her hands, spoon and all, to her face, which registered first disbelief and fright and then pure pleasure. She had a round, kind face with pretty pink cheeks and dark hair like mine, but her curls were short and well controlled.

  “Kit, you’ve come home! You’ve come home!” she cried in a lovely, high, sweet voice. “And I am married to Mr. Hussey.” This last statement seemed to her no grief but a source of merriment.

  “And I am married to Una,” Kit said, indicating me.

  And then they both laughed, and Mr. Hussey joined in, as though the very best of cosmic jokes had been played upon them.

  I managed to smile, since they all took our circumstance with such good humor. Perhaps it was because of the odor of heavenly chowder that constituted our most immediate atmosphere, for the wind had shifted so that we all stood in the midst of airborne chowder particles.

  Charlotte held out her hand to me and said happily, “You are Una of the Lighthouse then. Kit spoke so fondly of you.”

  Her hand was sure and kind as she pulled me closer to their circle. I don’t know whether it was her mention of the Lighthouse or the generosity of her greeting that made me think of Frannie and how she had welcomed me when I was twelve. But this was a woman’s greeting, not a child’s, and it included a mature measure of content that I could not but wish were mine. Yet it was I who was married to Kit, whom doubtless she had loved, and not she.

  “Lad, you must have some ale,” Mr. Hussey put in.

  “We all must,” Charlotte said cordially, “and I have bread ready to take from the oven.”

  “Shall I stir here for you?” I asked.

  “Nay,” she said, laying the spoon on the brickwork next to the bubbling pot. “If it needs stirring, Bess will come and do it for me.” She laughed and pulled me toward the tavern. As we passed through the door, I could not help but imagine the affectionate cow taking up a post before the pots. I envisioned her holding the spoon in her soft lips and commencing to stir away as she switched her tasseled tail.

  It was, indeed, the very moment for taking out the bread, and Charlotte pulled it out on her long-handled bread spade exhibiting a bread-crust as brown as any could be without a speck of black or bit of burn on it. With her knuckles she knocked on the crust, and the good hollow sound came back.

  “Bread and butter?” she said, indicating a golden pat as big as my fist on the long tavern table.

  “I’ve told the world about Mrs. Hussey’s chowder,” Kit said.

  “She makes it just as good as the last one did,” Mr. Hussey said appreciatively.

  “Sit you down, sit you down,” Charlotte urged, and thick-sided, heat-holding bowls of thick, creamy chowder appeared before us.

  And so we ate our first shore meal, in every way enjoying every crumb and swallow of the food, and with my feeling, too, for the first time, that Kit and I were a proper husband and wife.

  In every exchange, Kit was as cordial and convivial as ever he had been at the Lighthouse. I thought myself that perhaps he was, more than most, a person defined by his society, and when good cheer and hospitality surrounded him, the inner weather became for him a reflection of that outer glow. Perhaps that tendency accounted some for his absorbing the horror of what had happened in the open whaleboat.

  “I saw a shadow pass your face just now, Mrs. Sparrow,” Charlotte said.

  “Let it begone.” But in my mind, even in my body, I felt a ceaseless rocking, the motion of a small, frail boat floating on a vast sea. It seemed that nothing but a whim kept us afloat. Then under the table fur brushed my ankle, and then a short sharp nip!

  “Ouch!” I jumped.

  In a flash, Charlotte was under the table. She came up with a vixen cradled in her arms, its long bushy tail hanging down before her apron.

  “She’s more mine than yours now,” she said to Kit.

  The fox lifted her lip and showed me her needlelike teeth, but she did not growl.

  “She won’t have forgotten me,” Kit said. “I nursed her when she was a kitten.” He held out his arms to take her, and, in fact, the vixen went right to him. In a quick motion that scared me, lest she bite, the fox stretched her head up and licked Kit’s chin. Then she turned and settled into his arm, just as she had with Charlotte. She looked quickly at me, and again, she showed her teeth.

  “We’ll have none of that,” Charlotte said, and she reached over to hold the sharp little muzzle and jaw together. “She’s jealous of you,” Charlotte said.<
br />
  “She’s very pretty,” I said. “What’s her name?”

  “Giles named her Folly,” Charlotte said.

  “Did you know Giles, then?” A dart tipped with pleasure and feathered with pain passed through me.

  “And Giles gave Charlotte the nickname of Miss Jolly,” Kit went on. “It’s easy to see why, isn’t it?”

  I thought that our hostess would then surely ask about Giles, but she did not. Instead, she contemplated the scene before her as though it were complete and perfect and there were neither past nor future.

  “You must stay with us,” Charlotte said.

  “We’ve an extra room,” Mr. Hussey added, “if you’d like to stay, Kit.”

  I thought that perhaps Kit and Charlotte had truly been nothing but friends, since her invitation was so without misgivings. I didn’t find her exactly jolly, but she was certainly lively and of good cheer.

  “Will you tell us, Kit, how you survived the Sussex?” Mr. Hussey inquired. “What caused her to be lost?”

  “Only if you’ll let me make a short story of it,” Kit answered.

  “Perhaps he’d rather not tell,” Charlotte said.

  “Hush now,” Mr. Hussey said. “I want to hear.”

  “The Sussex was rammed by a whale. I floated in a boat for ten days, with five others—where they are now I couldn’t say. Then we were picked up by the Albatross.”

  “When did you marry?” Charlotte asked me.

  “We are but newly wed.”

  “She was a passenger on the Albatross,” Kit said, “and the captain married us.”

  I let Kit lie without contradiction. Perhaps he was ashamed I’d dressed as a boy, sailed with the Sussex.

  “But you are Una of the Lighthouse, aren’t you?” Charlotte asked.

  “Well, it was a coincidence,” Kit said. “As so much of life is. As you have always said, Charlotte. Were others found?”

  “There was a whaleboat of the Sussex,” Mr. Hussey said, “adrift near the Galapagos. A boat of bones and human rot. They starved.”

  A silence fell for a moment, but Kit was far too sociable to let it settle in a heavy way. “Have you taught Folly any tricks?”