Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  The Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf and waited in the harbor. Aunt Charity was coming off in a whaleboat. Soon she stood with me on the wharf and watched as her brother Captain Bildad and then Captain Peleg appeared on the ship’s deck. Peleg’s words to the first mate carried over the water: “Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure all is right? Muster all hands, aft here—blast ’em! Captain Ahab is ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh?”

  Charity whispered in my ear, “I took Stubb a nightcap—he’s my brother-in-law, ye know. And an extra Bible for the steward. I’ve ransacked my mind for what else might be needed, but truly I’m content. They’re well supplied.” She clasped her white hands over her black cloak and leaned back into her heels with satisfaction.

  Bildad took his position as harbor pilot, and Peleg swaggered and swore about the deck as if he were commander: “Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!” and the crew sprang to the windlass, fitted the handspikes, and began to weigh anchor. I saw Queequeg was among those at the handspikes, and also the sailor, his face concealed by the slouch of his hat, who had companioned the Polynesian. Unfortunately, that slouch-hat sailor paused in his work, and Captain Peleg’s foot delivered a swift poke to his rear.

  “Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” Peleg roared. He pronounced the word marchant the better to express his contempt. “Spring, spring and break thy backbone! I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog!”—I had heard the Polynesian’s name to be Queequeg. “Spring thy Scotchman, spring Green Pants, spring your eyes out, Quohog!”

  To those he kicked, I thought ruefully, “Merry Christmas.”

  Pip was running about the deck, peeking over the rails, for Ahab had kept his promise, despite his black and narrow mood, to take Pip as a cabin boy. After Ahab had learned to walk on his ivory leg, he had interviewed Pip, to see if it was still his inclination to go a-whaling. Pip had been steadfast, but after he left that interview with Ahab, his whole little body had shivered like a struck tambourine. He whispered to me, “Cap’in Ahab done been saved from fire, like Pip. Cap’in Ahab done been tied to the stake. Who cut him down? Pip don’t know.”

  This primitive appraisal of Ahab had smote my heart: I had had so little balm to offer.

  My bruised heart felt wrapped in chains and anchors, lay strangled in the deep.

  Followed by the small sailboat—to bring back Bildad and Peleg—the Pequod seemed to shrink as she left me. A carol chant silently recited itself:

  I saw three ships come sailing in,

  come sailing in, come sailing in;

  I saw three ships come sailing in,

  on Christmas Day in the morning.

  But it was a worthless charm. My eyes beheld, that Christmas Day, but one ship, sailing out.

  CHAPTER 118: The Jeroboam Returns

  THAT VERY DAY, even though it was Christmas, Justice spent an hour in the cupola, watching for his father’s return. I could not dissuade him. I told him clearly it would be next Christmas and beyond before his father would come back, and there was no hope in watching for him. But the boy had something of his father’s—and his mother’s—stubbornness about him.

  I thought that I would let him exhaust himself with the vigil, and during the days that followed, he often went aloft. I myself did not return to the cupola for a fortnight. When I did, I found the boy in the room so forlorn in his watch that I told him he might bring up his rocking horse and whatever other toys he liked, and that I myself would use the room to sew in. With light coming in the windows from every direction, it was an excellent place to sew, though too small for laying out cloth and cutting. Throughout the spring, Justice and I were good companions in the cupola. After a few months, I preferred that small, light place to any other room in the house.

  Sometimes I would raise a window, lean out, and think, No matter how far away Ahab is, I am now two feet closer. And to get closer still, I would hurry down from the cupola to walk the wharf again, my eyes leaping to the horizon, seeking with a shrewd, focused gaze the shape of Ahab’s ship. Those days, I scarcely wanted our boy to grow, but to keep him unchanged at each darling moment till Ahab would return. I thought cheerful words to myself: He has survived a thousand lowerings.

  My skeptical self countered: But this time he goes with only one leg.

  The hopeful, loving wife and mother, watching our young son playing with his ivory toys, added: Ahab knows well the limits of the ivory leg. On the Pequod he fits it in a pivot hole when he would steer. And in the whaleboat, there’s a notched place in the prow for him to wedge against, and the hull of his whaleboat is double-sheathed to withstand the pressure of the timbertoe.

  But I wished he would not go into the whaleboat.

  I felt it my duty to be calm and assured for the sake of our son. Ahab was beyond my help, and though I had spoken of praying for him, no prayer burst spontaneously from my lips. My constantly serene behavior did, after a time, soothe my inner self. I remembered the strange evenness I had seen in Maria Mitchell, at our first meeting, and attributed to her Quaker upbringing. So during Ahab’s third voyage, I made something of a Quaker woman of myself, in placid manner and even temperament. My greatest joy, after mothering, was my sewing, and while I stitched, my mind lay smooth and quiet.

  Thus not only spring passed (with Justice’s fifth birthday), and summer with its little outings, but fall and winter and spring again. As each season turned, I wrote a letter to Ahab, and sent it by whatever ship was at hand.

  My son continued his watch at the window for his father through all these seasons. In the warm weather, we spent our hour in the cupola in the morning, with the sashes up. In cooler seasons, we climbed aloft in the late afternoon when the room had had time to collect and multiply whatever warmth of the sun came there, and we left open the trapdoor so that heat from the house rose up. Thus we kept tolerably warm, or cool, as the season required.

  The cupola was like a miniature or a sampler of the house, offering a roof over our heads, windows, and a doorway of its own though the door was in the floor. Now it was as imaginatively stocked as if Aunt Charity had provided: holding my sewing basket, a little standing bookcase, an ivory stool (the duplicate of one Ahab had taken on the Pequod), a lap writing desk (equipped under its lid with extra paper, quills, ink, sand, and blotting paper), pillows, a small rug, a quilt or two, a basket of snacks, a corner full of toys. Once I wrote to David Poland, at his sister’s, that my cupola and my house provided material for a meditation on little and big, with the small really holding the heartbeat of the large, though its space was only a fraction of the volume bound by the whole house.

  THE SPRING of my son’s sixth birthday, I glanced out to see something of a commotion on the wharf. The whaler the Jeroboam of Nantucket had returned. Justice did not remark it, but I told him, our hour being almost over, that I had bethought myself of a pressing errand and needed to go down, and he should go across to the judge’s when he finished his sea-watch.

  Shouting through a horn from the deck of the anchored Jeroboam was a man who styled himself Gabriel, after the archangel, and his news was of the Second Coming of the Shakers’ God. Except for Gabriel, the crew of the Jeroboam were not to be seen. What made the hair on my arms rise up was that Gabriel proclaimed the Shaker God to have embodied himself as a great white whale—Moby Dick! Gabriel was alone on the deck, having ordered the hands below, once the ship was in the harbor.

  Quickly I worked my way through the crowd to the edge of the wharf to hear whatever he might say of Moby Dick. Gabriel was a short man enveloped in a long-skirted coat, the skirts of which he occasionally grasped and flapped up and down. The effect was not one of heavenly wings but of a deranged man vainly trying to fly. His yellow hair and the complete sprinkling of his face with freckles made him resemble the third Mrs. Hussey, but I did not imagine such a lunatic could be kin to that sane and forthright genius of the chowder pots. The archangel professed himself to be the possessor of certain vial
s and seals, within which lay an epidemic that could be unleashed on the town, as it had been on that very Jeroboam. At this I saw Isaac Starbuck, who stood a distance from me, shaking his head in disapproval.

  “Bow down, ye sinners of Nantucket”—Gabriel raved—“for the Second Coming is at hand and perdition for all who—”

  His words were drowned out by the thumping down of knees upon the wharf. “Thou,” he said, pointing a finger at me, for I was among a few conspicuous for not having bent the knee, “blasphemer! Beware the blasphemer’s end!” His pointing finger moved from me to the water, as though to show me my death by drowning.

  “For shame! Thou jabbering humbug!” It was Captain Peleg from the back of the crowd.

  “This woman’s husband pursues Moby Dick. Dost deny it?” he asked me, all the while pointing at me. “At the bottom of the sea! With one beat of his flukes, Moby Dick hath sent him under.”

  Ahab lost! A storm of white passed before my eyes, and my knees buckled, even as I strove to stand upright.

  With my collapse, he trumpeted, “Behold, Mrs. Macey, wife of the drowned blasphemer, how she sinks to her knees!”

  Mrs. Macey? No. Not I. My husband pursued Moby Dick, but he was not Macey. I struggled to regain my feet and felt the helping hand of the gaoler under my elbow.

  “This be not Mrs. Macey!” the gaoler shouted.

  Had I not been faint with relief, I would have giggled.

  Another woman, who had dropped with the congregation to the injunction of their priest, slowly rose. “I be Mrs. Harry Macey,” she quavered. I knew her; she was married to the brother of Mrs. Maynard’s second husband. He spelt their name with an e.

  “Dead. Harry Macey. Dead and in the fiery pit!” Gabriel pointed to the deep, and presumably beyond.

  “Flukes and flames!” shouted Peleg. “Where is thy captain? What hast thou done, mutineer, with Captain Mayhew?”

  While this conversation was occurring, the gaoler unloosed my arm, quietly untied a dinghy from the wharf, and began to row out to the Jeroboam. Like any Nantucketeer, Isaac handled a boat expertly, and soon, while Gabriel raved about vials, seals, and epidemics, Isaac climbed a rope, hooked his knee over the rail, and approached the archangel from his rear; the summer sun glinted on Isaac’s golden curls.

  “Who art thou?” Gabriel blurted in surprise, and then, know-it-all that he was, he answered his own question. “The Archangel Michael comes to assist me! Together we bind this town with seals given by the Shaker God himself, the White Blot!”

  “I am not the Archangel Michael,” Isaac responded loudly, “but the town gaoler, come to take you to gaol!” And with that, in a single, practiced gesture, he clapped the archangel in the wrist irons which could always be seen and heard jangling from the gaoler’s belt.

  Another dinghy, manned by Captain Peleg with a crew of four, was on its way to the ship, and soon the hatches were opened and the sailors and captain of the Jeroboam released. Straightway, the gaoler and Gabriel, accompanied by Peleg, returned from the ship. The folk on the wharf appeared not at all shamefaced at how easily they had been bamboozled. As spontaneously as they had succumbed to prophecy did they recover from it. But not all were left unmarked by the return of the Jeroboam.

  Mrs. Harry Macey, with two women friends to comfort her, stood sobbing and anxiously waiting for Captain Mayhew to come ashore. Regrettably, Captain Mayhew affirmed that Macey, burning with reckless energy, had given chase, and had succeeded in landing one iron (insufficient!) in the white whale. With his lance poised, Harry Macey had been dashed from the boat and to his death by one fast, fanning motion from Moby Dick.

  As Gabriel was escorted past me, he said, “I do know thee. Thou art the wife of Captain Ahab!”

  “I am.” But I was not then afraid. One right guess out of two tries was not a winning percentage, I thought, for prophecy.

  “Now thy husband is a postman,” he jabbered. “I gave him a letter to deliver to Mr. Macey. A moldy missile addressed by yon weeping woman—yon right-well-weeping woman—and there shall be gnashing of teeth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The letter bag. Her letter to him was in the Pequod’s letter bag, should Pequod cross with Jeroboam. Thy husband tried to foist it off on Mayhew, but I sent it back, on a boat knife, to Ahab.’Twon’t be long till Postman Ahab will go the way of Harry Macey.”

  Here Peleg gave the Archangel Gabriel a forward shove. “An all-fired outrage,” he said. Then he applied his foot to Gabriel’s backside, though Isaac did not wish his prisoner so treated. “Flukes and flames!” swore Bildad. “I’d keel-haul thee, angel, if thou wert mine!”

  A bit shaken, I watched them go. Standing beside me, I realized, was our own local madman Elijah, who regularly haunted the wharf. Elijah spoke to me quietly, and all the more sinisterly for that quietness. His face was a blazing red. “Thou knowest, Mrs. Captain Ahab, perhaps of the old prophecy of the squaw Tistig? Not mine, but I have foreseen it, too. Tistig said that Ahab’s name would prove prophetic. The wicked King Ahab of the holy Book of Kings, she had that referent in mind. That dogs, too, would lick Ahab’s blood. Who are the dogs of the sea, Mrs. Captain, but sharks?”

  I walked away, but I was afraid for Ahab, forked by prophecy. And afraid for myself and for Justice.

  CHAPTER 119: The First Part of Ahab’s Third Voyage After His Marriage

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON Captain Mayhew, a most reasonable and responsible-seeming Quaker, came to call on me at Heather’s Moor. Though Harry Macey’s letter, impaled on Gabriel’s boat knife, had been returned to the Pequod, Starbuck had tossed aboard the Jeroboam a bag of several letters, which Captain Mayhew laid out on my parlor table: three for sailors’ wives, one from Mr. Stubb to his wife, one for Mary Starbuck, and one skinny envelope for me.

  “How fared my husband?” I pressed his letter to my throat as though to give it voice.

  Captain Mayhew answered, “He pursues the white whale. That much of the mutinous madman’s tale was true.”

  “In what style does my husband pursue Moby Dick?”

  “Moby Dick can be pursued in only two possible styles.” Captain Mayhew had a quiet, sensible bearing. A short white scar sat atop one cheekbone.

  “They being?”

  “Either ignorantly, foolishly—That were the way of poor Harry Macey. Thy husband is no fool, but full of cunning.”

  “Or? The other way?”

  “Madly.”

  Standing in the double doorway of the parlor, with arms folded across his chest, was my lad of six. “Madly? What do ye mean by madly, of my father?”

  Captain Mayhew glanced at me, but answered, “I think thy father is a brave and skillful captain. Perhaps he pursues Moby Dick too hotly.”

  “I thank thee for thy answer. But, please, tell me, what ye mean by hotly.” Justice’s speech was that argot of Quaker and sailor usage that he had heard from his father, but that he never spoke to me.

  “With too much singleness of purpose. Too much ardor. Let me pass, lad.” And with that Captain Mayhew walked by Justice and out the front door.

  Justice crossed the room to me.

  “What is ardor?” he asked me. He squeezed my hand.

  “It is passionate feeling, great love.”

  “My father pursues the whale because he loves him? That’s not true, Mother. He hates the whale.” I was startled by my son’s logic; it seemed far beyond his years. He spoke like a man of the law—ah, he was borrowing logic from the judge. “How is it, then, that Captain Mayhew said my father pursues Moby Dick with too great love?”

  I retreated to the sofa of the parlor and patted the seat. I tried to put my arm around my son, but he would have none of it.

  “Thy father—your father—loves not the whale, but he loves the idea of revenge. That is the part of himself that he most loves now, that part that would punish the whale for taking his leg.”

  “Moby Dick is a thief.”

  “Aye, and he has stolen away more
than thy father’s leg from us.”

  “Could he not forgive the whale?”

  “He burns in his heart for revenge.‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ ”

  “But Moby Dick has no leg.”

  “Thy father requires his life.” I saw Justice’s brow knit—so like his father when he was gathering thunderclouds—beneath the dark curls on his forehead. For the first time, he made me think of Chester, the little cabin boy, and his father, the good captain, who hoped to die to save his son. The waters of grief rose up in the well of me.

  “Moby Dick’s whole life?”

  “Your father feels the whale has ruined his life.”

  “Ruined!” At that the boy’s face contorted with pain, he gasped one mighty, shuddering sob and threw himself into my arms. I could have bitten off my tongue.

  “It is a temporary feeling your father has. Once he has killed the whale, your father will feel whole again.” I rubbed the boy’s back and felt it grow more still and then more stiff under my strokes. Was I hardening my son by passing on to him his father’s passion for revenge? “Of course, your father’s life is not at all ruined,” I went on. “How could any person be ruined when he is loved the way you love your father and the way I love him? Do you think it’s possible to have a ruined life when you are so beloved?” I waited for his reply.

  “I don’t know.” His words were muffled against me. He hesitated, then added, “Moby Dick has such a big life.”

  I smiled, relieved to hear him speak childishly. But I thought of the tons of blood in that great body, and how it would incarnadine the sea all around if he was slain. I had hoped that Ahab would have a change of heart, that he would forgive the whale, or forget his hatred. Ahab’s life was as intact as he wished to perceive it. “Yes,” I answered my son absently, “whales are enormous.” But I wondered, if Ahab did prove victorious, then who would Ahab be?