Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  S-s-s, the first sound my mother taught me.

  And suppose the universe itself is but some greater globe where it is possible to travel through rather than on its curving surface. Or suppose that—that we are only on the surface of a dark expanding globe—then where is the journey to the place that is limitless? I find it within. Last night I found it within me—independent and single. No, I do not unmarry Ahab. But I marry myself. I take my fate as within. Would that I could give this thought to Ahab. His singleness of purpose is all fastened on the white whale. Yet I do not think that in his most extreme moment he forgets his wife and child. I know that there is a part of him that longs for us, for home, for Nantucket.

  He sees us in the mirror-eye of Starbuck, whose heart is with his wife and child. Yes, Ahab can see all that is human and relenting in Starbuck’s eye. Yet, my imagination tells me he looks in Starbuck’s eye and looks away. His gaze roams the horizon for a slash of foam, for a low and bulbous cloud that resembles the white whale. He fixes his own heart to the tip of a harpoon that is ever seeking the heart of Moby Dick.

  Without his heart, I fear that Ahab my husband is but a standing ash. Such a column is all powdery, and frail. The breeze blows against him, and he is scattered. So I sit at my window, open a bit, in ’Sconset. Does this breeze bring me some small atom of Ahab? Is he scattered in the sea? Do his cells brush boundaries with whatever is left of my ashy father, or rub against an enduring shard of calcium from Giles’s bones?

  How one we surely are with one another. And one with all that fiery burning scattered through the endless night. Such an idea surely brings peace. Is it a form of worship? I feel that I should walk to the beach and randomly select a grain of sand. That grain I should enshrine at home and call my god. In its impenetrable complexity, there is surely enough to fill my mind with wonder.

  My boy is stirring in his bed. I shall put three turtle eggs in a pot of water and boil them for our breakfast and cut two thick slices from the loaf Mary gave us yesterday. I will spread that fragrant bread with a good smear of clear rose-hip jelly that Mary made from the fruit of the sea roses. I will call her pet nanny goat to come stand in the door and let me milk her on the threshold. Yes, Justice is stirring under his quilt, a lasting gift from Mary, a quilt pieced in triangles of sea green, pale blue, and storm-cloud gray, bound and bordered in the tan of sand. He straightens his leg, he turns his face my way, though his eyes are yet closed, so that when he does open them he will see my eyes of love. Fitting for a child, fitting for the father of the child!

  For me, this morning and every morning and may it ever be all my life, my eyes are greeted by the surprising, ceaselessly rumpling sea. And every morning my heart will rise to meet the sea, which is what we know here on earth of infinity and change.

  What is the word for where the sea meets Una? There are my origin and my immortality.

  CHAPTER 129: The Neighbor Beyond the Hedge

  SOMETIMES the past returns as present—at least those moments that never leave us do. All happened as I thought it would: my Justice awoke to his day. But before my son opened his eyes, he smiled and came close to laughing. When his eyes did look into mine, I asked, “Why are you happy?”

  “I dreamt I got it at last,” he said.

  “Got what?”

  “My father’s watch.”

  And I went and fetched it from the mantel. He took the pocket watch in his hand and kissed its face and rubbed the smooth silver back of it against his small palm. The grooved winding knob on the stem he rotated between his chubby thumb and forefinger. Looking up at me, his face was ashine with delight and gratitude.

  While Justice and I breakfasted on turtle eggs, a question formed in my mind about my neighbor’s hedge. Many houses on Nantucket boasted a handsome hedge that divided them from their neighbors or shielded them from the dust of the road. Perhaps some were cultivated to sieve the sea wind, as well—I don’t know. But few hedges, I thought, had carved through them a Gothic opening so that one neighbor might pass freely into the garden of another. I wondered if on the far side as well as on my side the neighbor had cut a door.

  “Have you seen the neighbor’s privet whale?” I asked Justice. “Would you like to go with me into his garden?”

  “Couldn’t we build houses on the beach?”

  Clearly my boy already had plans for his morning. I agreed to play with him, and he agreed to my plan as well. When we reached the sand, he was dismayed that all his building of the day before had been washed away, he having been unfamiliar with the reach of the tide at ’Sconset. His eyes overflowed, and he bit his lip to keep from sobbing.

  “Look,” I said, kneeling down. “It’s soon rebuilt,” and I scooped up sand in my hand.

  Justice made no move to help, though I constructed one little castle and began another. “Help me,” I said encouragingly.

  “No,” he said. “When you’ve built them all back, then I’ll build again. I had fifteen.”

  I stood up and put my hands on my hips. “I’ll not reconstruct the world for you, child. There’s no fairness in asking that of me.”

  “Then I won’t,” he said.

  “And I won’t either,” I replied.

  He kicked the sand and sent a slur of it toward the water. Then he ran to the ocean and stamped on the edge of it that was washing to the depth of an inch deep onto the shore. Far from me to tell him not to splash his clothes! He could wear them sandy. Still, I thought he was a foolish lad. Neither I nor Frannie had ever stamped the water.

  “Water feels not a thing,” I called. The wet sand clung to my fingers, and I brisked them together. I saw I would have to walk to the water to rinse them. This I did, being careful of my shoes and standing a distance from my splashing child. But while I bent over, clutching up my skirt in one hand and washing the other, Justice charged at me like a little bull from the sea. I lost my balance and fell shoulder first, wetting my whole side, into the water.

  Now I was angry. “You imp,” I said, and Justice ran for the wooden steps. I was after him in a flash, and being much-longer-legged and angry to boot, I caught him by the shoulders and hauled him off. Then I dragged him to the water—oh, he struggled all the time—and forced his body down into it—not his head. The water was cold, and he resisted me so thoroughly that I was drawn down into the water in my attempt to dunk him. I began to feel ashamed as we struggled. My clothes became sodden and full of sand; my hair fell down and the length of my braid was dunked into the sandy water as well. Justice had not a dry hair or thread on him. I feared for the leather of our shoes.

  “Let’s stop, let’s stop,” I pleaded.

  “I win,” he shouted.

  “Very well, you win. But let’s stop.”

  And so we waded to shore, I breathless and embarrassed, he still sullen despite his triumph.

  At this moment a large black dog bounded up and barked at Justice, who suddenly grew stiff and still with fright. I walked slowly to my son and took his hand. “It was time to go anyway,” I said and led him toward the stairs. Now the dog barked more furiously. I put Justice ahead of me and told him to keep going. The barking stopped. Halfway up the embankment, I turned to see what had become of the dog. He was sitting below, a large stick of driftwood athwart his mouth, wagging his tail.

  “Look,” I said. “He only wanted to play.”

  Quick as a minnow, Justice darted past me and down to the beach. He took the stick and flung it across the sand, and the dog ran to fetch. So all our fright was turned to fun, and I could see that Justice thought himself honored to be chosen to play by the big dog.

  Sometimes the dog ran so hard to the stick that his braking almost covered the trophy with sand, and then he dug energetically for it, though sometimes he was inaccurate as to the stick’s position and his digging only tossed more sand over it, and then there was a mighty digging. I stood at the foot of the steps and watched all this, and of course I was glad that Justice had found a friend. I resolved that the next d
ay I would go and call on Mary and have some adult companionship of my own, though I did not want to make a pest of myself now that I had moved to ’Sconset.

  Justice came to me and asked what we should name the dog.

  “Alpha,” I said, “for he is the first dog we have seen here.”

  Up trotted a second black dog, smaller, but in both color and shape the sure mate of Alpha. “Omega,” I announced. She dragged a strip of sandy carpeting, and with a snap of her neck, she unfurled it like a huge question mark in the air. Alpha jumped for the end of it and caught it in his teeth, and then the two dogs ran off together, sometimes stopping to play tug-of-war with each other. But the strip was like a banner between them, and while no writing inscribed it, I felt that they proclaimed the joy of having a mate.

  I felt weary, and I called to Justice that now it was my turn to choose our activity, and we must inspect the neighbor’s hedge—thus I hoped to save my boy from the sense that his dog friend had abandoned him for another. He came with alacrity, a gritty, sandy little boy, but pink-cheeked from his play with the dog. I myself felt a mess, and the damp and dirty skirt clung against my knees and chafed them. We passed beyond the wind-dwarfed pines and misshapen apple trees, up the hillside steps, and into our yard; then through the opening in the hedge to the garden of our neighbor.

  Justice was utterly delighted with the privet whale—“You should have told me!”—and immediately he began to dance around it and to look for a pretend harpoon that he might assault it. The yard being scrupulously free of debris, my son was reduced to make-believe, but he cocked his arm and threw airy darts at the vegetable whale and shouted in a kind of whisper-shout. Just so had Chester played in the moonlit whaleboat.

  Meanwhile, I circled around the fantasy to the opposite hedge and walked its length, finding no opening. With this unbroached wall, I found satisfaction. The garden was not open to anyone, but only to those who had the good taste to rent the cottage that Justice and I now occupied. It was as good as a formal invitation. I fantasized a friend.

  I sat upon a little wooden bench whose back was placed against the wall, closed my eyes, and sucked in through my nostrils the odor of honeysuckle, which grew on a shallow trellis on the sides and over the bench. I hated to move, for any shift in my posture brought me in contact with the unpleasant, gritty garments I wore. I hoped that this tussle on the beach with my son was not the harbinger of many tussles to come.

  But was it true that I waited no more for Ahab? Had not something irrevocable happened in my soul on the roof walk atop my cottage? Yet, for Justice’s sake, I appeared the same—serenely, hopefully, anxiously waiting. But had I not given him his father’s watch? Surely that was some sign to him. My honeysuckle reverie was interrupted by Justice’s rush to me and his declaration.

  “Mother, there is a shed here full of wooden women.”

  Bluebeard’s Garden, I thought, but I said, rising, “Show me.”

  Justice led me to a shed with a glass window. When I peeked in, indeed, I did see two dozen or so carved wooden women. Some were completed and beautifully painted; others were carved but bare of paint. Still others had only rough approximations of a human form, and some were still encased in what was no more than an impaled upright and leaning tree trunk, either stripped of bark or brown and rough. It was a workshop for making figureheads for ships.

  Before I could say so, a masculine voice said, “You must be my new neighbor.”

  I spun around, shy to be caught peeking, and sodden as well, and explained that we were the wife and son, Una and Justice, of Captain Ahab of the Pequod.

  The man asked courteously if I would like to see the figures. I replied that I had fallen in the water, and that I needed to go home, but the figures were beautiful and striking.

  “Well, you must see them later,” he said, “when I return from my trip. I keep the workroom padlocked, and you will have to wait till then.”

  Justice glared at the man, though I half wished my son would rudely ask what I dared not: where was our neighbor going, why, and when would be the return? But Justice was uncertain of the woodcarver and said nothing.

  He was a man about the age of Ahab, from looking at his face, which lay in folds. But his hair was jet black, almost preternaturally black. Perhaps he was two decades younger than Ahab, then, for all his care-carved face. The man was not at all strong and muscular, as Ahab was, but thin and tall. His hands were covered with nicks and scabs and small white scars, which I instantly deduced came from slips of the chisel while he carved.

  “I have two of them ready to sell,” he said.

  I do not know why, but I shivered. It was as though he were a slave trader. “Do you keep some of them?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I have some warm water,” he said. “Let me show you.”

  He led us around to the back of the shed. Fastened to the roof was a large black tank, with a funnel and pipe fitted to its bottom. There was a stopcock device at the end of the tube. “Let me rinse you both,” he said. He turned the stopcock, and water showered out. As he put his hand in it, I followed suit, and found it warm. There was no fire to heat the tank; merely the sun had warmed the water in the reservoir. Gladly, I stepped under its spray and called Justice to me. Together, we stood there turning in the warm water and rinsing away the sandy grit and clammy temperature.

  “Now,” the neighbor said, turning off the water. “Run home like rabbits through the hole in the hedge.”

  I took Justice’s hand and we ran home, Justice dropping my hand as we neared the opening and running through first, laughing, ahead of me.

  WHEN WE CAME to our own green, we saw that Mary Starbuck and her son stood at our door. Mary held a cloth-covered basket in her hand, which my nose soon told me contained hot rolls. She laughed out loud to see me, and she teased that no sooner had I moved to ’Sconset than I had gotten into trouble.

  When we were all dry and changed and the boys had gone outside to play, Mary and I sat beside the hearth and chatted. I felt wonderfully fresh and happy. ’Sconset, I told Mary, was far better in its simple isolation than town with its bustle. I had never lived in a town before Nantucket, and, I claimed, if I had more people about me than could compose the crew of a ship (about thirty on a whaler), then I grew restless.

  “No, Una,” she said, “you are a person who can adjust to anything. If you prefer ’Sconset, it is only that you choose it.”

  Always, I have felt uncomfortable with such a remark—it implies I have no true core, no essence—but I knew Mary did not mean to imply that I was lacking. She must have seen the shadow pass over my face, for she reached out and took my hand.

  “I meant only that you are always your own true self. Every time I see you I am but more impressed by that.”

  “I spent the night on the roof walk.”

  “Did you look for try-pots burning at sea? I used to. But now I sleep through the night. I looked this morning,” she added. “Nothing.”

  “I felt that they were not coming—ever.” I hesitated to tell Mary this, but as I wanted her as my true friend, I did not wish to hold back.

  “I have sometimes doubted, too,” she said.

  “I seemed to know that they would not return. It was not doubt I felt.”

  “Still, it was your revelation,” she said. “Not mine.”

  “Have you not felt it?”

  Now her eyes filmed with tears. “Every day I feel it with more certainty. With me, it is not the revelation of a night’s watch. But every day my soul fills with the same knowledge, slowly, as some wells slowly fill with water.”

  “You have concealed it well.”

  “As a mother should,” Mary answered. “But I think such concealment is not becoming to friendship.”

  I felt my nostrils flare, as though I were a cannibal catching the scent of meat. I spoke as gently as ever words have passed up my throat and through my lips. “What else would you tell me, Mary?” But on my tongue I tasted blood.

&nbs
p; She reached for my hand—her fingers were warm from her teacup, now set aside—that familiar gesture that is the prelude to confidence.

  “When I was a girl of twelve”—her eyes searched my face, how vigilant, how knowledgeable, their movement—“a man in Nantucket lured me into the mill. He was very short, scarcely as tall as my shoulder, and I mistook him for a younger boy. He had no beard. He showed me silver coins. He opened his hands so that there was one in each palm like two large silver eyes. He moved them back and forth like demon eyes that seemed located in a face that could grow as broad as a giant’s, or very narrow. It was daylight, but in the mill it was like dusk, yet somehow beams of light fell on the coins so that they glowed. These I could have, he said. ‘If you take off your drawers, lie on your back, spread your legs, and make no sound.’ ”

  Mary repeated the words like a horrible four-part litany. Take off your drawers, Lie on your back, Spread your legs, Make no sound. I felt my own lips moving after them as though what had been the experience of Mary, my sister, was now included in my own history—this outrage, this rape.

  “And so he had his way with me. For money. Any prostitute is my sister.”

  “Believe that I am your sister, too. Not in this particular. In another way. More heinous.” But now was not the time to lay my story atop hers.

  Silence breathed on us, and then she added, shaken, frightened, “I could not have told anyone of my shame if I had felt Mr. Starbuck was yet alive.” Our gaze was a bridge of shared truth. “How will we live without our husbands?” she asked.