Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  These smoky evenings were as pleasant as anything could be. My strength was not entirely with me, though, and I continued to ride on Milk. David took it on himself to rehabilitate me, and once in the morning and once in the afternoon he would ask me to walk a bit.

  “Do you think Milk is tired?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I be. I’ll just ride a bit myself.”

  During such times, I led. Once we passed a foot peddler with David up on Milk. As we passed, the peddler muttered, “My, what a beard on a child!”

  I began to giggle, and when I looked up at David, he was smiling broadly, too, all his nice white teeth showing between his mustache and beard. I recalled noticing his teeth—he had smiled slightly and continuously as he spoke—when he told the racing stories to the Pack children.

  There was something about David’s being small and yet a full-grown and strong man that I came to like very much. I could rely upon him, but he never assumed the stance of dominance so common in men speaking to women. Yet he was not shy, nor even particularly gentle. Once I saw him hit Milk sharply on the nose, when the donkey had insisted on cropping a particularly juicy-looking bunch of grass by the wayside. David’s fist was as authoritative with his world as any man’s, but he being small, his hand and fist were also smaller. He was normal in every way, a friend.

  To my senses, the spring sang both lullaby and reverie. I was both soothed and alerted by what my eyes saw and my ears heard and my skin felt. Merely breathing the fresh air wafted on us by the surrounding sweet gum and maple, the creekside sycamores, was a pleasure. My hands felt fresh in the moist spring air. Sometimes Milk’s feet crushed mint or chamomile, and my nostrils feasted on that natural perfume. My menses had not reestablished themselves yet, and I traveled like a young girl free of sexuality. I absorbed every beautiful detail of the Kentucky forest. Here I was in harmony. And the steady clip-clop of Milk’s hoofs and David’s high, reedy whistle were all a part of the enchantment.

  I thought of the storm at the Lighthouse that had blinded me and how beautiful was the world when I could see again. In childbirth, my own life had hung in the balance, and now I had it back again. I lifted my chin and sucked in life, heavily, with both nostrils. When crows cawed, I would caw back at them, and when cardinals rolled an ornamental note, the tip of my tongue trilled reply.

  I hoped that David was as happy as I was. I knew that I was neither kith nor kin to him—indeed, I paid him to guide me—but still I hoped the forest magic spoke to him. For my part, I could not imagine a more perfect companion. The first time I mocked a raucous crow, David merely turned his large head, glanced back over his small shoulder, and grinned.

  The last night we camped, he unpacked the wolf skin and laid it out for himself to sit on. How benign that flat head looked now, as it lay on the ground. The vacant eyes were mere wobbly holes, the shiny nose an innocent. I sat across the little fire from him with the sapling lean-to, like a scoop, to catch the heat at my back.

  “The river’s clear of debris,” he said. “You could take a steamer now, if you like.”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned around the flames to hand me something. It was the silver thimble.

  “If ever you see Susan again, give it back to her for me.”

  “And her gold?” I said mischievously. I stuck the thimble on the tip of my middle finger.

  “Well, I must have that.”

  I leaned over and tapped him in the middle of the forehead with the thimble.

  “Shall I pay you now?”

  He nodded, and I counted out the agreed-on sum, which he promptly pocketed. Then he stretched himself on the wolf skin, straightening out his short legs quite the same way a man with long legs straightens his.

  “You watch me all the time,” he said, “to see if I am different.”

  I only nodded, for it was true.

  “I’ve told you a lie or two.”

  “How so?”

  “The woman with the children. She’s not my wife. She’s my sister.”

  “But you make your home together?” I did not want to think of David’s not having a home. I cared little that he had lied. He nodded affirmation. Sensing that he had a story to tell, I asked him how it was that he and his sister had come together in their living arrangement, and were the children his sister’s or his own?

  “I would never marry nor risk the chance of children. I would not bring another dwarf child into the world to face what I done faced. But she did. She’s a bit taller, like I said. And a full-sized man was the father of George and Martha. He liked my sister’s littleness well enough. He could pick her up with one hand if he wanted to. Shake her till her ears bled.”

  He looked at the campfire rather than at me as he spoke, and the shadows of the flames rippled across his face like insubstantial whips.

  “I found a wolf cub and gentled it, in secret. But it was to do my will. I trained it like a hunting dog. When my wolf was full-grown, I sicced it one night on Norman—that was his name—when he was near to home. My sister found him in the morning on the path, his throat tore out.”

  My earliest image of David, when I was in my labor, came back to me, how he had scuttled about my cabin trying to sniff out Susan, how on all fours he looked under the bed, how when he stood up he had seemed a magic beast, as much wolf as man. I said nothing, but sat quietly on my side of the fire, looking at him. Throats? I could tell him something of that. Captain Fry rose up, stood in the whaleboat next to the clumsy cleat, his sword in his hand. The hilt came down on Chester’s curls, the tip lost not a moment lodging under the captain’s own ear. I looked at this small man beyond the campfire, lying on his side with his head propped by spread hand, forearm, bent elbow, and said nothing. After a moment, he raised his eyes to look into mine as he spoke again.

  “I told her and the kids that I would kill the wolf that killed their father. So I took my rifle, went into the woods. I called my wolf, and when he come to me, I killed him. This is his pelt between me and the ground.”

  That he had killed the innocent wolf, obedient to his training and his nature, shocked me more than his human murder. The smoke from my father’s rifle as he stood in the doorway had drifted back into the cabin when he shot King.

  “My ways might not be as powerful or bold as a normal man’s, but I swear the man deserved to die. Once I asked him not to mistreat Nora, and he just sneered at me. ‘You gonna stop me?’

  “I did stop him. There is ways to compensate. The weak of the world should remember that. Your Susan, she compensated for her weakness with gold. Once money and death was invented, the weak only need to use their wits.

  “When I dragged the bloody wolf to the door, Nora and her kids took me as a hero. I was a hero, for I killed Goliath, but not the hero they thought.”

  Again I said nothing, but I felt for this small man, and I hoped that the gaze between us conveyed some sympathy, for I didn’t know what to say. I have not spilled blood, but I have drunk it. I could have said that. After a moment, he averted his eyes, stared again at the flame, and spoke even more softly.

  “So perhaps it’s not so hard for me, after all, to be gone from home. She’s only my sister. Perhaps it’s harder for your Ahab.”

  “He’s sailed a long time by himself. Many years.”

  “There’s no man leaves his wife, I’m sure, but what jealousy gnaws him. Is she faithful? It eats him every night.”

  I offered the counterpart anxiety for any sailor’s wife: “Ahab sails the South Seas. He has gone there before. He has lived there before, with the women, yes, long ago, and he came ashore and hunted with the savage warriors.” I did not say, Why do you suppose my husband speaks of himself, in the midst of domesticity, as ‘cannibal old me’? “But Ahab would not take an island wife now. I trust that.”

  David said nothing. He poked small wood into the flames.

  “Was it true—you told me that you wanted to go home and buy normal-sized furniture for the children?”
I prodded.

  “Yes. There’s no reason they should be cramped sitting on a little box that fits me.”

  “No Procrustean beds?”

  “You’ll have to explain that.”

  I did, and our conversation grew lighter, but all the time I told the myth of Procrustes, I was picturing a short-legged table and little chair where David sat when he was home. Diminutive furniture for the murderer. Well, he’d said boxes. No doubt he had had a diminutive rifle to point at his faithful wolf. Did he think he might dispatch the wolf within, his own rage, by pulling the trigger in the actual world? And on a brute, who was his friend. I knew better: that I was then, beside the campfire, the Una who had been cannibal in the whaleboat; and ever would I be the same. There is no exorcism or expiation, I could have said. But I would not tell him my own story—how strangely it had come about that fate had provided a fine home for a cannibal.

  “Let’s eat the last of the jam cake,” I said.

  When I handed him the larger portion, he said, “But I’m the smaller person. I don’t need as much.”

  “ ‘Reason not the need,’ ” I quoted Lear’s statement to his unfeeling daughters. “Besides, I know how to make another jam cake, when I’m home in Nantucket. And you don’t.”

  “You’re a person,” he said, “who makes me think about things. From being around you. I don’t mean the poetry. It’s you yourself. Always taking things in. Always thinking. I like the way you think.”

  His sentence made me gasp. So had another little person, just his size, but young and girlish—Frannie—so had she once said this to me. Suddenly I missed her terribly. I wished that her words could call her back, that she could sit here by the fire, in the freshness of the Kentucky spring, listen with David and me to Milk cropping off the grass. Speak whatever was on her own innocent and inexperienced mind into this flickering circle.

  But I did not speak what was in my own heart. I had told Charlotte my horror, but she was another woman.

  “Because I’m around you, I think new thoughts,” David said.

  “What were you thinking?” I asked.

  “About the big and the small. It’s occupied my mind much of my life. Walking along today, I thought how there was ways of being big and small that had nothing to do with size.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. But it surprised me that the idea was only now occurring to him. Such a simple idea, like the nugget of truth in a homily from some backwoods preacher.

  “Take you,” he went on. “It’s your nature to be tolerant. I am a murderer. But you swallowed that right down. It wasn’t hard for you in the least. But for me, it’s hard to be tolerant. I can’t tolerate the idea that somebody stupid or somebody with a black skin is as smart as I am.”

  “Yet I’d say Susan knew how to buy you.”

  He threw wood at the fire, and the sparks shot up like a fountain. “That sticks in my craw,” he said. “And your toleration makes me feel small. I feel the size of an ant alongside you.”

  I felt ashamed of my own reticence. “Perhaps I am tolerant of murder because I know what I myself am capable of.”

  “No, I think tolerance is in your bones. You might be able to do certain things other people can’t do because of it. Things most folk would call outrageous. Like travel with me. Few women would do that. But you say to yourself, ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m willing to take a chance with him. I want to go home.’ And so you’re off. You don’t even care what your husband might say about it. You might not even tell him.”

  “Sometimes I don’t tell things. Then later I feel I was a coward.” I wanted to tell my history, but I felt cut off from it. The loss of my child, the loss of my mother—those were worse and more immediate horrors.

  “There aren’t many rules for you. That’s the thing. You decide.”

  “I think there might really be some rules.”

  “Think there might be! Most preachers would rise up out of their graves to hear you say that. You don’t go to any church at all, do you?”

  “Well, I’ve tried the Universalists. And the Unitarians.”

  “Universalists?”

  “They say you’re saved no matter what you do. God loves his creation universally, and he won’t destroy it.”

  “So their God loves me?” I nodded. He continued, “You believe in the eternal life?”

  “I don’t know. I hope.”

  “God damn it, Una. You’re as slippery as an eel.”

  I laughed and asked him if he’d ever eaten eel.

  “River eel.”

  “In the ocean, there are eels like giant sea serpents. Sometimes boats go out to the Pacific from Nantucket to hunt them, like whaling boats.”

  “Which do you like better, the river or the ocean?” he asked but didn’t wait for an answer. “The ocean is just there. It don’t go no place. It just comes to shore and goes back. Just bounces up and down. People have told me. But a river—now that has some direction, some purpose. It gets someplace. You can ride its back better than riding an elephant.”

  “I’ll bet the people you talked to had only seen the ocean from the shore,” I said. “There are currents in the ocean. And winds.”

  “Somebody told me the Amazon River holds its own in the ocean. A hundred miles from its mouth, you can let down a bucket in the ocean and get fresh water. I love that idea. See”—he got another wind—“that’s a big idea. Ideas are just like people. They can be big and they can be small. That’s a big one.”

  “Why is it big?”

  “It makes a shiver go down my back. That’s not all.” He sat up and crossed his ankles in front of him. “It’s an unnatural idea, unexpected. You wouldn’t think it was possible. Impossible ideas—those are the big ones.” Then he fell silent for a time.

  His enthusiasm was like that of a child suddenly allowed to speak his piece. He seemed naive. Was I arrogant enough to be amused by him? Yes, a little. But so must it have been for Margaret Fuller when I told her my naive ideas about the nature of art. But Margaret had received my ideas and responded to them with substance, not with these effortless Socratic questions of why? and what? I could not give to him as Margaret had given to me. But did he want me to? No, I thought. He wants me to listen.

  “I’ll tell you something else, Una.” Now he spoke with a note of defiance in his voice, though more quietly than ever. “When I go home, my sister and I will sleep in the same bed. Oh, we’ll put up the bundling board while the children are still awake. They have sweet snores, like little piglets, and when their little grunts get going, then we take up the board, and lie closer. Sometimes it’s her head on my shoulder, sometimes it’s mine on hers. What’s the harm in it? It’s not like husband and wife. But once, months after I done for Norman, she took the palm of my hand and laid it on her breast. She don’t mind a little touching. Nor do I.” As though to hide his face from me, he pressed his body and face against the earth, his forehead on his forearm. After a bit, his voice muffled, he continued, “But we know the limit. Then sometimes it’s best if I leave home for a while. Travel about.” He paused. “Someday I’ll come home, and she’ll be married again. I know it’s bound to happen.”

  I dared not move. So fully had he revealed himself, so trustingly, that even to twitch would have been sacrilege. When I made no reply, he stretched himself out again on the wolf skin. He looked into the flames for a while, and then just once, but long and intently, at me. Again, I made no response. He rolled to his back and closed his eyes. At length, I heard him snore, himself somewhat like a shoat.

  I retreated farther back into the lean-to and wrapped myself in my cloak. By day I had no need of it now, but it was good to have at night. David had a supreme sanity. Nothing was twisted or dodged. Murder—yes, justified, in the circumstance. Incest—no, the necessity for it was not so great that it could not be denied. What would David say of the lesser crimes—bigamy, adultery?

  Along the trail, David had stopped to carve his name on the smooth gray flan
k of a huge beech tree. Other travelers had left their names or initials there. I said the tree reminded me of an elephant in its girth and color. After he carved David Poland, he had walked around till he had arrived at a respectful distance, placed the tip of his knife against the bark, and asked if I would have my name engraved there.

  “Yes,” I had answered. “Una Spenser.” I was surprised, for that was no longer my name. But I let what I had said hang in the air, uncorrected, till it was cut into the tree. “And put up Milk’s name, too,” I added. “Milk Donkey.” He laughed and did so.

  Our names were not very high up, since he was small, and all the other names seemed to float in a spray above us, as though those people were our thoughts.

  “Would you put my baby’s name, too?”

  Without having to be reminded of the word, he merely nodded, and close to my name, he began the L of Liberty. The tail of the y he drew down long so that it touched the U of Una.

  AT BREAKFAST, David was quiet, and so was I. Sadly I mounted the sidesaddle—perhaps my last ride on Milk’s small back. We knew we were very close to the ferry crossing for the Ohio. “Perhaps it’s beyond that crest of cedars,” he said. “I’m not sure.” Maybe neither river nor ferry exists, I thought, but we plodded on. We were drawn toward our goal, and yet we dreaded it. At last we came to the top of the bluff, and through the donkey’s long ears I saw below us not only the landing, but a steamboat with red paddle wheel ready to depart port. Even as we watched, the whistle blew and a puff of steam drifted up.

  “Hurry!”

  “Hold on tight,” he called back, and we started down the red-clay gully. Milks at back on her haunches, and we half slid, half fell down the incline. The dwarf leapt from side to side in our gully, sticking a bit against a side, and then with his small legs rebounding. Like a spring, he compressed and bounced from side to side, pulling Milk’s reins and encouraging her to sit and slide in the central trough. I did hold on, as tightly as I could, and we raised a great cloud of red dust as we descended. Even as we slid, even in the rush and dust of all that, I thought, I have not been as honest with you as you were with me.