Presently I reminded Justice, “Captain Mayhew delivered a letter from your father.”
“Let’s go up to the cupola to read it,” he said, sitting up.
I hesitated, for I did not know what grown-up news it might hold, but I agreed. “I shall meet you there, but first a trip to the privy for me.”
I hastened down the path, and could not help but notice how nicely the berries, which Ahab loved so much for their juicy freshness and purity, progressed. Enough daylight came into the privy for me to be able to read, but, never lacking for oil, we kept a lamp there, and sulfur matches in a tin canister. Ah, the luxuries of the rich. In that clear glow, I seated myself and read, nay, devoured:
Dearest Wife, my One,
Sunset, and beside the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. There was a time when even as the sunrise spurred me, the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely sunset light—it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, thine most of all, though most beloved, since I cannot enjoy it. My high perception responds to the ethereal beauty the eye brings the mind, but I lack the low, enjoying power. Damned in the midst of the soft blush of Paradise! Good night—good night, my wife!
But not good night, for I would share with thee what can be shared in language. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! Though she wearies with her endless hill.
Moby Dick, a hump like a snow-hill. There my soul needs to climb. There I shall find ascendancy. Sovereignty! Remember, I whispered that word to thee in the birthing room. My human sovereignty! the same in the face of animals, angels, absent gods. The idea was born and grows into a giant—but that’s enough. This letter—the first one home—let me comfort thee and reassure thee.
There was a prophecy—I told thee not—that I should be dismembered. Aye—I lost this leg. But I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now the prophet and the fulfiller of the prophecy shall be one. That’s more than the great gods ever were! Forgive me. Rage breaks out like a fire that dies only to leap up again.
My pipe, Una. One evening, I lit my pipe at the binnacle lamp, as was usual for me, and called for my ivory stool. “How now,” I finally asked myself after a time, “this smoking no longer soothes.” My pipe having been so long my companion, I spoke to it. “Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone!” and I threw it lit and hissing into the sea. It was a thing meant for sereneness. And that is beyond Ahab’s grasp.
Una bade me look to the moon for sereneness, but I know there’ll be no moon tonight. The phase is wrong. Let me think of Justice.
Tell our son that some bright days Ahab feels like a farmer who has spent his days among inland wheat fields. “What, wheat fields in the ocean?” our son will ask. “Yes. Let me tell thee where.” (Now, dear wife, assume my voice while reading to our son.) In this first part of this third voyage that I have taken since thy mother and I were married—aboard the Pequod we were married, whilst she stood at anchor in Old Nantucket harbor! didst thou know that, son?—but leagues thence, on this voyage, from the Crozets, northeastward, the sight of wheat fields was to be seen.
All around the Pequod, as though the ship were an innocent farmer’s house, glowed meadows, an expanse of ripe and golden wheat.
And if we were the farmer’s house, then where were the machines to harvest this great bounty? Oh, they were there. Such prodigious mowers, too! The mowers were the Right Whales.
Whales! my son exclaims. Did ye sing out? Nay, for though they are the Right Whales for many to hunt, they are the Wrong Whales for us. Now there’s a riddle. But easily solved. For the Pequod mainly pursues the Sperm whale, whose oil is of the finest and most profitable sort, not the Right Whale, who is the right whale for some because he is easier to catch. (Though I admit I have sometimes topped off an almost brimming ship of sperm with kegs of lesser oil.)
What appear to be meadows of ripe wheat surrounding the Pequod are in fact meadows of brit, the tiny animals that the gigantic Right Whale must have to live. Do you know the kinds of whales, my son? The sperm whale is a toothed monster, but the baleen whale has a kind of mustache inside his mouth—sailors speak of it as a wondrous Venetian blind. So the Right Whale, like a threshing machine, opens his great mouth and with the fringy fibers of his mustache filters the water (which flows back to the sea), leaving bushels of brit to nourish the whale. The sound of this harvesting operation is a grassy, cutting sound, and where a whale has made a swath through the gold, ye can see the blue of the ocean.
It has been now some weeks since I contemplated that pastoral scene. Dear Wife and Son, do not think that though Moby Dick draws me on, I do not feel thy gentle tugs pulling me back.
Dear boy, if up till now ye have had but a vague idea of the varieties of whales, ask thy mother to be thy encyclopedia. She has herself hunted whales, and they her. Look now at the ivory bracelet carved with whales that she wears as my wedding token. Put thy finger on their midget backs, and ask her to tell thee of their true size, habits, dispositions, and uses. Let her read thee the whales as though they were the runes of old.
Ahab
Captain, The Pequod.
In the cupola, I read of the Pequod’ s encounter with the meadows of brit to Justice. He thought it pretty—I asked him so—but he said he would prefer his father describe a chase to him. “Then you must write to him yourself and tell him so,” I said.
“Yes, I should learn to write,” he answered. “It’s time to learn to read, too.” He looked serious, but pleased and brighter. He glanced about and suddenly knit his brow. “We will have my lessons up here.”
That dark imperialism! I saw the stamp of my own father in his grandson’s brow. And Ahab’s stamp, as well.
CHAPTER 120: Moon Watch
THAT NIGHT I could not sleep for anxiety about my husband.
Was there not a moon tonight?
I left the bedroom and climbed to the cupola. There she was, with the cross of the mullions quartering her face. I sat in my rocking chair, then rose to open two windows a crack, so the cooling night air could visit me. Soon I adjusted a shawl around my shoulders. I rocked and watched the moon. I tried to make my mind as blank of worry as her blank face. Eventually, the moon rose above the roof of my little cupola, and I could no longer see her. Yet I rocked and rocked, incessantly as the sea herself.
When I awoke it was morning, with the sunlight streaming in and heating up the cupola.
To my surprise, Justice was not in his bed. I had just dressed and was about to look for him when Justice with Captain Mayhew appeared at the door.
“I couldn’t find you,” the boy said, half sobbing. “I went to the wharf. I thought you might have gone to sea and left me.”
“I tried to tell the boy his mother was no sailor,” Captain Mayhew explained.
“He doesn’t know, does he, Mother?”
“Well, here I am,” I said. “I went up to the cupola to watch the moon and fell asleep.”
“He is a fine, bright lad,” Mayhew said. “I’ve stuffed his ears with tales of whales and ships.”
“I shall go with Captain Mayhew as cabin boy,” Justice said with horrible cheerfulness, “if my father doesn’t come back.”
Turning to go, Mayhew said, “Mind your mother, boy. I won’t have a cabin boy who doesn’t mind his mother.”
“And what has happened to Gabriel?” I inquired.
“The judge says he’s too mad to hang, and the gaoler has taken him out to Quaise with the other poor, mad folk.”
“My father is not poor,” Justice said. “He’s very rich.”
“Hush, Justice. It does not do to brag.”
Captain Mayhew looked up. “It’s as fine a house as any in Nantucket. And beautiful inside.” He sighed. “I invest in oil,” he said.
“What whaling captain does not?”
“Not that sort of lubricant. A new kind of oil, oozed from the ground, lying about in pools over the bogs in Pennsylvania.”
“Pardon me, Captain Mayhew, but it is unusual for a sea captain to turn landward for his profit.”
“Yes, Mrs. Captain, but someday the whales will all be dead, hunted to extinction by the likes of Captain Ahab and myself.”
Justice made a darting motion with his arm. “Let Moby Dick die first!”
AFTERWARD, I crossed the street to visit the judge.
“What is this new oil that Captain Mayhew speaks of?” I asked.
The judge shook his head. “A sad business,” he said. “No one wants the stuff. When you burn it, it billows noxious black smoke.”
“I fear Captain Mayhew’s taken a loss, then.”
“Did Captain Mayhew discuss his business with you?” Austin Lord wished to tease me.
“Why not?” I said, with something of my old sauce.
“Well,” the judge began, scratching the side of his nose thoughtfully, “you scarcely know Captain Mayhew. One does not discuss business with casual acquaintances.”
“Do you think Captain Mayhew will stand a heavy loss?”
“He has already stood a heavy loss, my confidential friend. Now he insists on throwing his money down a sinkhole.”
“Confidential, of course. Why is that?”
“The project is undercapitalized. He got into earth oil too soon. There’s no technique for transforming it into something that can be used in lamps. There will be, no doubt, someday. But Mayhew is already living at Absalom Boston’s boardinghouse.”
“I should like to invest some of my excess in Mayhew’s earth oil company.”
“Too risky. I advise against. Strongly.”
But despite my friend’s objections, I made the investment, and substantially. Perhaps I could tide over Mayhew’s enterprise; he tided over my son’s need for a father, for a few days.
THOSE WERE RESTLESS days and nights for me. My son was taking beginning steps into the broader world. Not only did he go every day to visit the wharf—he soon made friends with many of the mates and crew, and occasionally a captain, for Ahab’s sake, would chat with him—but, as he had proposed, he quickly learned to read and write. His first laboriously written sentence was a simple demand to his father: Tell me about A Chase ye have made this voyage. I was glad for all of Justice’s progress, yet it made me uneasy.
Many a night I kept a moon watch. I saw her through all her phases. My physical tides became tied to her, and when she was dark, and her gravitation pull was added to that of the sun behind her, then my menses were pulled from me. When she circled around to the other side of the earth and her face was fully lit, there was a ripeness and readiness to my body. Sometimes I thought of Mrs. Maynard’s porcelain devices, but such things repelled me. I did not merely want my sex to soar; I wanted the entirety of Ahab, body, spirit, and mind. During the full moon, I thought of farmers throughout the great plains of the West, of Indiana and Illinois, and how they planted corn and wheat when the moon was full.
AS THE DAYS, weeks, months, years passed since our parting Christmas Day, and as we received no further word from Ahab after that delivered by Captain Mayhew of the Jeroboam, nor came any ship to port that had seen him, a kind of cocoon spun its slow self around me. Oh, I could still chat amiably, about nothing, with the judge; and the Mitchells would occasionally tell me some interesting fact, but those facts were no more than pinpricks to a determined sleeper. My letters to Margaret were dull, and she wrote back to me more briefly than she had at first. Her observations about her “Summer on the Lakes” seemed intense, but oddly impersonal, and in fact it turned out that she soon published a book of that title, and some of the very phrases and sentences of her private correspondence to me could be read there. I do not know exactly why that disappointed me. Perhaps I should have been thrilled. Only in church did I find some enlivening of my spirit. My minister never failed to say words that seemed to reach down in me and quicken something vital that might lie dormant otherwise.
I thought of the fog and mist that Christmas Eve when I had told my husband farewell on the cobblestones of Nantucket. There had been strange movement of feet; there had been Fedallah, whom Ahab had reached out and grabbed into our ken. What had been shrouded by that immaterial whiteness? It seemed inside me. It had stopped my throat like cotton and kept me from crying out warnings to my husband and from making enough entreaties to right his mind before he sailed.
He had used my shoulder like a crutch that evening. He would board the ship under cover of darkness so that none of the crew would see him come a-limping down the street. Stay, husband, stay, my heart pleaded, even then, with the ship emerging before us in the mist, and something like cotton muffling my spirit.
Now there was a numbness to my life. My son grew. He prospered, for he was eager to learn everything that might fit him for a life at sea. My friends were kind and patient with me during this period, but it was as though they stood on the other side of a many-layered veil.
Once Maria and I were sitting on the same side of the table in the dining room when she said, “Turn your telescope upon the moon. You could map her face. Galileo was almost burned at the stake for saying the face of the moon was blemished with craters.”
“Really?” The bit of history interested me. I wished something would burn away my dull anxiety. “Where was the heresy in such science?” I asked.
“The moon, being a heavenly body, was supposed to be perfect, reflecting the perfection of God’s creation. The church would not brook Galileo’s observation of irregularity on its surface. The observation of sunspots was also a threat to their system of belief.”
“Surely only a few crackpots would dispute so irrationally?” I poured out tea for us both and told her this was not China tea, but Darjeeling, from India.
“You assume a time as reasonable as our own. Galileo was invited by the Pope, the very head of the church, to recant.”
“Truly?” I was incredulous that a person could rise to such power as a Pope and yet be so foolish, even in a distant time.
“When Galileo refused to recant, the Pope said, ‘Show him the instruments of torture.’ ”
“And?”
“Galileo recanted. Now you can use the telescope safely to map the craters of the moon.”
I smiled at my loving friend. “I doubt that I shall ever travel there.”
She returned my smile, yet persisted. “There are mares, seas, on the moon, albeit dry ones, as well as craters.” Her eyes glowed over the rim of the teacup. “And one of the seas is called Tranquillity.”
I gazed into Maria’s face and saw nothing resembling tranquillity but a face where passion had been transformed into scientific curiosity.
“Do you still search for your comet?” I asked, putting my arm around her.
“Oh, yes.”
She waited for a lover she had never seen.
CHAPTER 121: Letter from Susan
Dear Una. I pretty sur you be real surprised to see how good I write. And to get this letter. How do I aim to mail this letter. Well, I am at your house again. Been north for quite a while. When I got back here, I seed your note saying Welcome Traveler and also how Any business can be conducted by your neighbor, so I just now put your name and then care of him on this envelope. Figure next traveler will take it to him. As I doesnt dare. It dead of winter here now. Just like it wuz when we both here. Good fire going in the hearth. But I be thinking Whoa, Susan. Back up and tell Una where you ben and how it wuz and why you here again.
Where I ben. Maybe four or five days after I lef you and we shout Freedom, I look behind, see I be followed. I knew who. Wolf-man bounty-hunter you told me about. Had to be. I could see the wolf snout point up over his head, and his beard, and him so small. I saw he wuz gaining, but I move fast as I could. Snow everywhere. I says to myself Just get on top of that little snow hill in the middle of the cornfield. But time I got up on the noll, he caught me. I wuz so scared that I split off and part of me just hung up in the air and watched. But I wuz able to think what to do, anyway. I b
ought myself free with your money.
You might wonder how I got the time to tell all this. Trapped in the snow again, here at your house. Me and my friend who was resting here. My friend, he say it must be zero outside. I get to my friend later. Snow near bout to the knee outside, but we warm in here.
Once the wolfman wuz out of sight, I call out to my part left hanging, just a air shiver-self like ice crystals. Self she come on through sunset air to be with me, and I start on.
Come deep dusk and the night wind, I know I got to find a place to stay. No house in sight. I start down a little rise and I stumble. I roll down the hill till I a white snowman. Then I have to bust out of all that snow. I done rolled off a little creek bank. Well, I start digging me a cave under the little overhang. I make me an ice cave. Once I get inside, I block up almost all the front opening with snow and ice.
I go to sleep for a while. Dream I home, warm on the porch, got a sugar cane joint in my hand. Purple case all peeled back, me chewing and sucking on the good part till it limp. It flop over on my hand like a little white mop head. I wake up.
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