Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Not just her words but all her sweet face, stunned and puzzled under the cornet of crossed braids, inquired of me. I squeezed her hand. I swear there was nothing callous in me. Only strength, which seemed to increase geometrically. “Very well,” I said quietly.

  CHAPTER 130: The Roar of Guilt

  THAT NIGHT, though I was weary with the day, I took to the roof again. Some constellations were known to me—like lands I had already visited—and these I sailed past. Some stars hung in splendid, isolated brightness, and these, too, I tried to look beyond. Were all the stars the same size? My fingertips rested lightly on the wooden rail. I could not know if stars were equal to each other, but if they were, then the dim ones must be far and farther away, and toward those reaches I hurled my soul.

  A palm of lightning smacked the sky. I felt the rise of the wind. Soon the sea would begin to roar and rain would sweep landward. A harpoon of lightning flung itself from the sky into the sea, and then the crack of it came walking more slowly to my ears.

  The night was rising so black over the ocean that darkness had obliterated half the stars. The sea was roaring like a pride of lions. I thought of Ahab roaring shame into vengeance. I imagined lions caught in the sand-tossing surf, their tawny manes all tangled in froth and foam, their sharp-toothed mouths open and roaring.

  And in their own ravenous mouths, I saw my own, in the whaleboat. I saw my hand holding a grisly present toward my gaping mouth. If thy hand offend thee, my father would have quoted, cut it off!

  I held my hand up between me and the night. My right hand, the one that held the needle and my livelihood. My pleasure in writing as well as in sewing. Could I not sacrifice the other hand, less valued? But it was the right hand that had offended.

  Again I looked at it. At my narrow wrist. There was the place to bring down the hatchet. Could I? Of course I could. Hesitation was no longer a part of my soul. There was only decision and action. Of course I could. Yet time was mine, to contemplate and decide.

  What I saw was a good hand, an articulate wrist, capable of bending and turning. Holy the Body, the stars chirped softly like little chicks running under the shadow of hawk wings.

  No. It was a hand that could yet do much good. I would not mutilate or diminish my power. I pulled my blanket higher on my neck. I let my hands clasp each other over my belly. I felt the sweep of wind over my face and watched the darkness take more stars.

  When I went downstairs to bed, I dreamt turbulent dreams, like the roar of the surf, of wolves swimming in the water alongside lions and sharks and eels and other predators of the deep—squid and octopus, and in their tentacles they held sailors, some of whom had been with Giles and Kit and me in the whaleboat. When I awoke, I was biting my hand, and I sleepily promised myself that I must make it be a good hand, and nevermore would it cause harm to any human being. I would not feed my hand to guilt.

  Then a great hunger came over me, and I got up and went to my cupboard. There I had a beautiful fillet of cod that I had cooked in cornmeal during the day. The tips of my fingers on touching the grainy coating seemed to have tastebuds on them, and I wanted the fish so unmistakably that I lifted it up and ate it. The cooked fish was bliss on my tongue. I went back to bed thinking that humankind philosophizes by need.

  How lovely it is to sleep amidst warm quilts next to a smooth plaster wall with the roar of the surf in one’s ears and a full stomach.

  AT LEAST once a week during the summer, Austin Lord drove out to visit, often accompanied by Mrs. Maynard. Taken by Mary, Judge Lord claimed she had a medieval simplicity about her that painters should adore. “Has anyone ever asked if he could paint you?” the judge inquired.

  Mary laughed. “No, but the woodcarver asked if I would sit and lean forward as the model for a ship’s prow.”

  “A discerning man,” the judge commented. “What’s his name?”

  “Robben Avalon.”

  “Did you sit for him?” I asked. I thought that I would very much like to have been asked.

  “No. It’s too close to idolatry for my Quaker husband. I don’t think Mr. Starbuck would have liked it.”

  “But would you have liked it?”

  She laughed a little while she thought of the answer. “No, I couldn’t have enjoyed doing what might upset Mr. Starbuck.”

  “Would you have accepted the invitation, Una?” the judge asked.

  “Yes,” I said frankly, amused at myself.

  Now Austin Lord laughed. “I thought so.”

  The summer passed without our seeing the woodcarver again.

  I spent many nights, but not every night, on the roof walk. I did not go there to look out to sea, but to look up at the starry sky. I liked it best when there was no moon: Luna was a bittersweet mirror for Una those days. Sometimes when I looked at her I ached with hope that Ahab, too, saw her shining face. But I did not believe that was true. In the dark of the moon, the heavens aglitter with stars, I gradually made my peace, lived through and beyond a slow grieving.

  Throughout the summer my spirit sailed those spaces between stars, much as it had that first night at ’Sconset, and while it did, something like a taproot also went down from me, and I knew myself to be at home. Always this expansiveness and this rootedness grew.

  One night while I sat cross-legged on the planks, my back resting against the chimney, I heard Justice climbing up the steps. He quietly asked if he might sit with me.

  “You’re watching the stars, aren’t you, Mother?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat awhile, silently, beside me, cross-legged, looking up. Finally he said, “Sometimes I think my father is not coming back.”

  I waited and said, “But we remember him, even if he doesn’t. We love him the same. And we’re all right, aren’t we?”

  “The Perseid meteor shower is next week—” he said.

  “Mid-August, already.”

  “—and the Mitchells are coming out to watch with us.”

  “That’s good.” I put my fingers in my son’s curls.

  “They say they can’t see as well in town because of all the lamps and lanterns. But I thought light helped us to see. They say it’s ‘good and dark’ here.”

  Together we watched one spark skate across the sky. “The town lights are like a reflective screen. They bounce our seeing back to us when we would see beyond.”

  “Mother, when summer is over, let’s stay here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to stay, too.”

  CHAPTER 131: The Return of the Delight

  WHEN I AWOKE, the sea ran white and virginal. Not just its lacy foam, but all the expanse of its fabric was white, reflecting a white sky overhead. Where the muted sun glittered through his white veil, the white sea modulated to a satiny silver that glistened and blinded my eyes. On each side of this strip of silver lay spangles and bright flakes of light and white blankness. Occasionally, where the morning breeze disturbed the blank surface, the white sheet lifted toward the palest hue of green—as though the warp were still of white threads but the woof ran pale green.

  My eyes were at feast on it when the line of the horizon was suddenly punctuated by the yet-white, but dully so, silhouette and mass of a ship, a whaler. She was not the Pequod, for this image was not congruent to the one stamped in my heart. (Turn the Pequod to any angle, stern or aft, starboard or larboard, at any intermediate angle, and I know her. All variations of her shape and rigging, if a hundred be not the right number, then a thousand variations, hang in the gallery of my memory. I could not mistake her.) This ship was another, but she hove toward Nantucket and she was a whaler and perhaps the bearer of Pequod letters or sightings.

  I shook Justice and told him I was running to see Mary, and he might come down as he liked. As I ran along the path, my nanny goat frolicked by my side, and I took it as a good omen.

  I knocked softly at the window, knowing that Mary’s head lay just beyond the curtained glass, and called her name. When she drew back the curtain, I saw her sleepy fa
ce and tousled hair. I but pointed to the sea, and she leaned forward, looking, and then sprang up in a swirl of white nightgown and, to my surprise, pink ribbon. Ah, she was no plain Quaker for her husband, I saw. As she stood in the door, her gown showed itself to end in layers of lace from her knees to the ankles, as though she stood in sea-foam.

  “It’s the Delight,” she exclaimed, “though I have not seen her for five years. We are her home port.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s built with shears.” These were broad beams which crossed the quarterdeck at a height of a few feet above a man’s head. Shears were used to lay whaleboats athwart.

  Mary stepped back inside the door and reached up for the brass telescope, where it always hung between large hooks, as a shotgun might hang in a Kentucky cabin. When she held the instrument to her eye, concern passed over her countenance, and she said, “She sails sadly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She handed me the glass, and I looked for myself. All was tidy aboard, but two whaleboats were missing. Usually the ship’s carpenter could refashion what was stove, and rarely had I seen a ship with less than its full component. Observing further, I saw that the number of men on deck was sparse, and those that were there moved slowly. Indeed, they did seem sad, as though they hesitated to bring home sorrowful news.

  “Yes,” I said. “I see.”

  “Do you see the captain?” she asked.

  “He stands very still at the wheel.”

  “Yet a captain may bring news of a captain,” she said.

  “And I see the first mate, too,” I replied. But the sight of the man was not reassuring. He was gaunt and stooped. I handed her the glass.

  “It would only be their own sorrow that weighs them so,” I said.

  “One of us must go to town, and one stay here with the children.”

  “Do you wish to go this time? It’s been a long time since you were in Nantucket.”

  “I would rather stay,” Mary said. “We know that this is not the Pequod. Hereafter, we will take turns.”

  A sleepy-faced Justice had followed me. Now he took my hand. “Mother, do you think the Mitchells would still give us Pog?”

  “I’m going to town. I’ll ask. They can bring him for the Perseid, if they want to.”

  THE ROAD between me and the wharf seemed not to exist, nor the time between the farewells at ’Sconset and the moment I stepped from the harbor dinghy into a loop of rope so as to be hoisted to the deck of the Delight. When I introduced myself to the captain of the Delight, I thought, Ironic name!—for he appeared to be the captain of Sorrow. This hollow-cheeked captain started as though at an apparition when I told him I was Captain Ahab’s wife.

  “You’ve seen the Pequod then?”

  “Aye, and that old, wild man.”

  “What of my husband, sir?”

  “I baptized your husband with death or resurrection. I don’t know which.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When first I beheld the Pequod at a distance, he was aloft, hatless, risen high in a basket, keeping lookout himself, as though he had no trust of the usual lookouts.”

  At this my heart constricted in guilt, for I myself had betrayed such a lookout trust, and my betrayal had been at the sighting of an almost immaterial Moby Dick. Yet Ahab, by means of this mechanical basket contrivance, had flown aloft again! and a spark of happiness for him dashed across the dark field of my apprehension.

  “On the end of the rope,” the captain went on, “he had Starbuck, and just such a mate I’d want on the end of a pulley rope.”

  “What of Ahab?” I insisted.

  “He stood on his vessel and I on mine, but I showed Ahab the salvaged skeleton of our whaleboat, up there”—he pointed back to the shears. “Naught but boat bones. Moby Dick, I told him, and worse than a mere stove boat has been the monster’s work. ‘You sail on the grave of four of my men, gone down alive and dying,’ I told him, as very soon I must tell yon weeping clutch of wharf women. I must tell them after you have your portion.

  “I pointed your husband’s gaze to my deck, where lay a shroud inhabited by the fifth dead man. ‘And all of those lost,’ I said, ‘were Nantucketeers like ourselves.’ Even as Ahab and I stood talking at our taffrails, I with my trumpet, he only with his stentorian voice, my sailors were taking the last stitches in the canvas shroud, sealing shut the sides.

  “Ahab’s anxiety was only that I might have killed the white whale afore him—now, Ahab’s good wife, I see the darkening of thy bright countenance—but I told him no harpoon forged would ever do that.

  “Angrily, he defied me—let me finish the tale for you. Over there, on the wharf, they want different characters in the cast. Ahab snatched his harpoon and brandished it about. ‘Look ye, Nantucketeer; here in this hand I hold his death!’ ”

  Ah, in this captain’s tale, I heard Ahab, I saw Ahab!

  “ ‘Tempered in blood,’ Captain Ahab shouted. ‘Tempered by lightning, to be triply tempered in the hot heart of Moby Dick.’ ”

  Though I trembled in all my being, I shivered out my question. “Was he mad, then?”

  “ ‘Tempered in blood, tempered by lightning, to be triply tempered in the hot heart of Moby Dick where the white whale most feels his accursed life!’—those were the last words I heard him speak—‘accursed life!’ ”

  The captain of the Delight averted his eyes from mine, as though he was ashamed. He added quietly, “But my last words to him were ‘May God keep thee, old man,’ and then, the last stitch having been made and the body placed on the plank, I began the funeral words ‘May the resurrection and the life…’ But Ahab sailed away. Yet we splashed him with the bubbles from the sea-struck corpse.” The captain seemed to fetch a sigh from the very depths of the ocean. “Perhaps ye know, Mrs. Captain, did I baptize him in that splash of bubbles with death or with life?” Still he would not look at me but continued to gaze at the decking of the Delight. “Now I have five more tales to tell, and each of them ends in certain death.”

  “So you do not know what became of my husband?”

  “That is all I know of him—with certainty. Don’t ask for more report.” He turned away from me. Was he so anxious to disburden himself to the women waiting on the wharf that he had no civility for me? He muttered as he turned from me, “What I heard with my own ears and saw with my own eyes. That’s all I’ll tell ye.” Then he stopped, as though he remembered one last sight, and looked at me. “And the last I saw of the Pequod—at the stern, for the life buoy, hung a coffin.”

  “I thank you for your telling.”

  AHAB ALIVE! and still pursuing the white whale! Closing, perhaps, on the whale! Ahab possibly alive! But what was the sequel?

  My dinghy deposited me among the fearful women. I did not need to say that some crew had been lost; their only questions were who. On my walk to the Mitchells’, to ask about the dog, I passed Aunt Charity, and she, too, as the captain had, startled to see me.

  “Am I so infrequent a visitor in town as to startle you?” I asked gaily, but she merely nodded, tucked her head down, and hurried on. Perhaps she already knew that the Delight brought news of death. Captain Bildad probably had gone out with the pilot boat.

  Mr. Mitchell was not home, but I conversed with Maria in their apartment above the bank. Like me, she thought that one could not draw any certain information about Ahab from what the captain of the Delight had told me. I stayed perhaps an hour with Maria—she said they would be happy to deliver Pog to Justice, since they had several other dogs and they had hoped to give him away, he being the largest of their dogs, with the most extensive appetite. I remembered to inquire of my patient scientific friend how her search was going for a telescopic comet, but she had no news. I saw no hint of despair in her face, such as one sees in the faces of wives of sailors who have been too long at sea. Maria would wait trustingly through all eternity, if she could, for a comet to swim into the ken of her telescope.

  �
��Will it not be a relief,” I asked, “to come out to ’Sconset and see dozens of meteorites?”

  She laughed and ducked her head. “Of course it will be a pleasure to see you.”

  I thought she dissembled a bit; she really did not want to leave her lover for even one night. I almost teased her thus, but remembering her maiden state, decided not to embarrass her. All the time I was taking an interest in her work and in Justice’s dog, my heart beat quickly with possibility—Ahab, my lover, my husband, yet Alive!

  Next, I went to call on Mrs. Maynard, whom I found with Captain Maynard, and she was crying. Before she saw me, I heard her snuffle, “And I once thought him an old warthog!”

  “Dangerous as Vesuvius,” her husband replied.

  Then they both saw me. Mrs. Maynard jumped up. “Land sakes, there she is, poor Mrs. Sparrow!”

  The appellation gave me a turn, but I smiled and said, “I have not been so called for a long time.”

  She entreated her husband, “Oh, leave us, leave us.” He seemed quite ready to do so, twirling his right-hand mustache as he went. “Oh, my dear, the captain of the Delight has confided to the captain of the Camel the most dreadfully disturbing news!”

  “I have spoken to him myself,” I answered. “Five crewmen lost.”

  “But Captain Ahab!”

  “Last seen well, but in pursuit of the white whale.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, fiery and eager.”

  “That was not how he was last seen.”

  “But the captain of the Delight took particular pains to say that was the last he saw of the Pequod.”

  “Yes, but not the last heard. Not the indirect news. And what Delight heard later, he has confided to another captain—my captain—and it is most dreadful.” She sank into her chair and sobbed.

  Oh, slow wit that I was, I was yet amused by this latest round of miscommunication. She reached out, took my forearm, and drew me into the chair beside her.