Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “Not the last heard, dear Una, for on his way back, Delight had a gam with another captain, who himself had had a gam with Captain Gardiner of the Rachel—”

  “The Rachel is also of Nantucket.”

  “Aye—and he said—”

  “But that is too far removed a hearsay!” I cut her off; I was alarmed.

  She gathered herself together, stopped crying, smoothed her starched apron, and said, “You must listen to what I have to say.”

  I nodded, terribly afraid.

  “Captain Gardiner of the Rachel lost his son. He crossed paths with the Pequod and wanted to charter her for two days to help him find his son, gone, in a whaleboat. Ahab would not.”

  My gladness sank to hear of this heartlessness of my husband to a man whom he knew, a father. It would not be Ahab to so lose his humanity, without his own soul writhing and anguished. But alive! My heart did not dive to the coldest depths.

  “Then someone else has seen Ahab,” I said hopefully.

  “The Pequod herself, shortly after meeting the Rachel, was stove by the whale—”

  I was stunned. Like the Sussex.

  “Stove and sank—by Moby Dick. Listen! One man only surviving. Picked up later by the Rachel herself. Picked up from off a coffin used as a life buoy.”

  “He was?”

  “He was not one of ours. No one’s heard his account firsthand. We do not know his name. They say he sailed for South America.”

  HOW I WALKED back to my buggy, I do not know. Mrs. Maynard was beside me. I put my hand on the dashboard, ready to spring up, then stopped and said to Mrs. Maynard, “I cannot go back without something more definitive. I must go see Captain Peleg.”

  Mrs. Maynard kindly went with me, hurrying to keep up. We were not surprised, when we went in that owner’s parlor, to see huddled there with him—all three in deepest black—Captain Bildad and his sister, Aunt Charity.

  “I could not bring myself to tell thee,” Aunt Charity said. “Forgive my passing you in silence.”

  “Is the Pequod lost then?”

  Captain Bildad slowly rose from his chair, the patriarch of the group. “The Pequod has gone down, Captain Ahab gone, Starbuck gone. Stubb, Flask, every Nantucketeer, every Vineyardman, every man, gone.”

  “Save one?” Mrs. Maynard amended.

  “Save one—a fellow of former marchant experience.”

  “Quohog by name,” said Captain Peleg.

  “Nay, that name was the infidel harpooner.” Bildad shook his head quietly, but produced no further name.

  I stood listening, incredulous. “Are you sure, Captains? Are ye sure of it? I have my son to tell, and Mary Starbuck and her son.” My eyes were burning dry, but every internal organ gushed tears.

  Captain Bildad walked slowly to me, and slowly he put his arms about my shoulders. “Shall I come with ye, to help ye tell it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  I AM SURE that as soon as Mary saw me drive up with the black-clad, somber Bildad at my side she knew.

  He called the boys to him and, with a hand on each of their shoulders, told them their fathers were lost. Then he quickly said a prayer. “Come to me, lads, if ever ye need,” he added, departing. “Perhaps there’s a bit I could do to help ye, if it comes to that, ever. And ye’ll have my prayers. Till the crack of doom.”

  The boys fell into each other’s arms, and over them, Mary and I leaned inward, making a tent.

  MY SADNESS at this final, stunning word was more for the other three than for myself. I but gave up false hope, hope I had harbored for only an hour, above the Union Pacific Bank, talking with my friend. Before that, I had known for some time that Ahab was dead. I had accustomed myself to that knowledge.

  I tried not to imagine the awful final moments of Ahab’s life. I did not care to know the name of the survivor, or to milk the captains for any details of frenzy, or blood, or suffering, they may have heard. I had known none of that, nor needed to know of that violence, when my grieving had begun.

  I think things went the hardest for Starbuck’s Jim. Justice had made an intuitive connection with my own resignation and with the spiritual life that was becoming not only my solace but my definition. But Jim, though a steady, sympathetic lad, had not listened to the intuitive messages that had informed the rest of us. Some Quaker elders came out to talk with Mary and Jim, and their conviction gave the boy a sort of tortured comfort. He felt that his father was in a better place, but he could scarcely bear the loss of him.

  The Unitarian minister and several members of that congregation—a party of three buggies with perhaps twelve people—soon called on us. Two of them were Isaac the gaoler and his wife, Betsy. They did not bring their children, but she was pregnant again. As always, the sight of them was a bright thing for me. We had little to say to one another, but I was glad that they had come and I told them so.

  I invited Mary and Jim to meet our church friends, as she had invited Justice and me to meet hers. Even the members of this group of people who only slightly knew Mary could scarcely keep their eyes from her. I saw then that she was a bit above the average in height and that this lifted her gleaming head more into the light. She and Isaac and Betsy, who was also fair, looked like three angels, Mary in our midst and those two together at the periphery. Mary Starbuck’s hair, I irrelevantly noted, was more silvery and metallic in quality than the softer, golden curls of Betsy. I do not know why these visual matters preoccupied my mind. Somehow beauty was more consoling than conversation.

  CHAPTER 132: The Perseid

  THAT DAY we learned of Ahab’s death, my minister asked on behalf of the Mitchells if they should postpone their coming. The meteor phenomena would have an impressive decrescendo for a full two weeks, but Mary and I decided that the Mitchells should come as scheduled at the peak of the shower. It would help the boys to have company, and there would be much distracting talk of unimaginable numbers.

  The tone of our scientific party was subdued, of course, and we all felt sensitive and careful about our human fragility. Twice, I saw dear Jim run off over a sand dune (we had our watching station on blankets on the beach) for a cry—both times shortly followed by a compassionate Justice, and then by two or three of the cheerful Mitchell boys.

  Having retold the story of Perseus, for whom the meteor shower was named, Mr. Mitchell suddenly mentioned Chartres Cathedral. He said that at the center of the penitents’ labyrinth, inlaid on the floor of the cathedral, was a mosaic of the head of Perseus, who had slain the Minotaur of the labyrinth at Crete. I wondered if Mr. Mitchell had confused Perseus with Theseus, but I said it was odd to have a pagan figure as the endpoint for devout Christians, traveling on their knees. More strange—I did not speak of it—to have an image of Chartres, originally in my mind through Ahab’s words, embellished by Mr. Mitchell.

  “Perhaps those medieval Christians were less narrow than we think,” Mr. Mitchell offered. “Perhaps the cathedral designers knew the old myths also carried light for humans.”

  “I sometimes thought of Ahab as a Prometheus.” Yes, I could speak of him. “Did you know that as a young man, he went to Chartres?”

  “Ahab was a visionary,” Mr. Mitchell said. “He fought metaphysical battles in a physical world.” He added, with feeling, “I thought you were a lovely pair of birds.”

  OUR LITTLE TRIBE spent that night on the beach. We counted—forty, sixty, eighty—meteorites and watched them slash the sky. Mr. Mitchell pointed out that they all emanated from a central station in the dark. He said they were the residue of a burst comet.

  As I tried to sleep, the ceaseless crisscrossing of the waves made a lattice of sound in my mind. I hid beneath that sound. Before sleep took me, I turned on my stomach and wept into the sand for my Theseus, slain by the beast, because he could not find his way out of the labyrinth of revenge. I thought that the name of the needed thread was forgiveness.

  I wished that my beloved could have heeded the words of my father, reciting: “Lo
ve your enemies as yourself, bless those that curse you, and forgive those who trespass against you.”

  Before dawn, I was called from sleep by Justice. Without rising, I held out my arm to him, and he lay beside me with his head on my shoulder. I held him close against my body, and the prince-of-a-dog, Pog, came and lay close to him on the other side. Never have I felt such gratitude to a beast.

  I myself needed to love a beast—never so desperately as that night when the stars skated over a black night. A beast had stolen my beloved.

  CHAPTER 133: The Woolsack

  AFTER THE PERSEID meteor shower of August, we entered into a quiet time of grief and into the routines of our lives. Justice and Jim were much to themselves outdoors. They learned to swim and to manage a small boat. When summer turned to autumn and the winds began, sometimes they rode the horses along the beach and came in rosy-cheeked, but strangely silent. I remember the boys were always tearing their coats, and we reset sleeves, sewed many buttons on, and stitched new bottoms into pockets. If they were fighting, they never did it in our view. Jim was older, but Justice was more compact and quick. Their garments seemed equally ripped. Mary and I had little of chatter as we sat by the hearth through the fall and winter, knitting and piecing quilt tops. Sometimes I wondered if Mary had unspoken blame to lay at my feet, since Ahab had been captain of the ship on which her husband was lost.

  Both the gradual coming on of spring—signaled by the greening and then the pinkening of the rose canes that lay atop Mary’s cottage—and a definite event marked the end of our mourning. At shearing time, Justice and Jim were still small enough to fit inside the woolsack but large enough to have the requisite weight for speedily packing down the wool. When they both asked to be taken to the spring shearing, I remember rising up from my chair and stretching.

  “Then you won’t have to oil my shoes,” Jim said to his mother. Since the news of his father’s death, Jim’s face had had a strained whiteness, a tautness as though some structure under the skin might snap. It seemed so to me now—as though he were starving and asking for bread instead of for a diversion.

  “They say it gets terrible hot inside,” Mary answered with a gentle smile.

  “We can stand it! We can stand it!” Justice insisted. He began to jump up and down on the spot to demonstrate his stamina. Here was practical energy, ready for purposeful harnessing.

  “Well, of course,” I said, taking over the decision. I looked at Mary. “Why not?”

  She stood up, put her knitting in her chair, yawned and stretched. “Why not?” she echoed.

  When we reached the shearing pens, a festival atmosphere made me glad we’d come. From the back of a wagon someone sold baked goods with dips of preserves. I saw Abram Quary with a rack of smoked fish tidbits and, remembering his kindness to Kit, made it a point to buy and to compliment him on the flavor. “Smoked in apple wood?” I asked, and he made one swift nod down. Many families with boys had come, as we had, so that the boys could pack down the wool, and their mothers and sisters had come as well with picnic lunches. Captain and Mrs. Maynard had driven out with a whole load of boys belonging to their neighbors. Boys who owned more than one pair of shoes carried them along in hand as they ran to get in line.

  Already-shorn sheep, pink and bleating, were running around in their pen. They corkscrewed into the air and skipped, light without their winter wool. One gleeful little girl pointed at the fleshy sheep with one hand and covered her mouth with the other. “They’re naked, they’re naked,” she giggled. On the other side of the shearing floor, the unshorn sheep milled about in their pens. Really, with their fat paddings of wool all about their bodies, they scarcely seemed to be the same species as the skinny, bare animals.

  The woolsack, perhaps twelve feet long, was held up within a tall wooden frame, against a high platform. Ladders made it possible to mount the scaffold. With a pulley system at one end, loose wool spread on a canvas square was hoisted up by the four grommeted corners to the platform. A stuffer-man threw the wool into the woolsack. And inside the woolsack—we could see the long white length of it pulsating as we approached—a boy jumped up and down to pack the wool for shipping off-island. As he pounded down the loose curds of wool, the lanolin penetrated and waterproofed the leather of his shoes, which would be put away for winter wearing.

  The boys vied to see who could pack down the greatest weight of wool into the volume of a standard bag, and each bag was weighed and labeled. Anew hoop, perfectly round, hanging on a peg, would reward the boy this year whose legs packed the wool most tightly.

  The long white sack gyrated in its rack, and boys yelled encouragements. “Harder! Faster! Hurry! Let me, let me, if you can’t!” Justice and Jim hurried to get in line. Packing down the wool was hard, hot work. As a boy tamped the wool and new loose wool was thrown down the open mouth of the sack, he rose higher on what he had trod. At the top, he grasped the frame for balance as he danced. Suddenly Justice returned to me.

  “What is it?” I asked my son.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. He looked at the woolsack with a hard, appraising stare. “It resembles Moby Dick,” he said. Then he ran back to Jim and whispered in his ear. Jim seemed stricken. The other boys in the line were practicing their leaping, challenging each other for the highest vertical jump, but Justice resumed his quiet, calculating stance, arms crossed over his chest, hands hidden, and Jim imitated him.

  When Mary and I approached the boys, she asked enthusiastically, “Do you think it will be fun? Don’t you want to practice?”

  “We will win,” Justice said.

  “I will win,” Jim said.

  Justice did not contradict him. “For now, we save our strength,” Justice said.

  Too small for a whole whale, to me the woolsack more resembled the head of a whale, which might be bailed for the case oil. And here was oil again, but innocent. No planking awash with blood. The shearers were experts and the pink skin of the sheep was only occasionally nicked and bloodied. I looked at the tent and picnic tables, sniffed in the festive atmosphere.

  “I think it’s like a whale’s belly,” Justice said, nodding at the long sack. “We’ll be inside.”

  Jim nodded in agreement, his pale face stretched with tension.

  “We must leave them to it,” Mary said to me and took my elbow.

  We walked to the shearers and watched a sheep come through the chute. One man with small shears trimmed the tags from around the eyes and ears. Next, a nearby man, sitting on a short stool, up-ended the sheep between his knees and began to cut loose the cloud of fleece. Beyond him, the woolsack jerked and trembled from the exertions of the lad inside.

  “A boy could make himself sick jumping so hard,” I said to Mary.

  “They’re strong boys,” she said. I wondered she had not seen the strain in Jim’s face. Perhaps she had not noticed Justice’s remarks.

  Wearing the red-checked gingham dress I had made for her some years before, Mrs. Maynard came to chat with us. As I always did when I saw her in this dress, my eye followed the tucks down the bodice to be sure I had sewn them perfectly straight. Of course, it had been easy to keep the lines straight with the checks as a guide; still, I always enjoyed their perfection. “Kit’s mother used to bring baking to the shearing,” she said. “It beat this.” She thrust a curl of cinnamon roll into my mouth. I expected the familiar taste and texture I had learned from Kit, but this bread was heavier and had not been made with enough butter.

  I watched Jim put Justice ahead of him to mount the platform. A load of wool was dumped into the flaccid sack, and Justice dropped out of sight on top of it. Quickly whole snowloads of the creamy, curdy wool were thrown down on top of him. I could tell that he used his hands to brush it off his shoulders and send it to his feet. His knuckles made little bulges against the side of the bag. I was pleased that he had a steady pace to his stamping; there was nothing of frenzy and all of method in his work. Sometimes his knees bulged the sides of the bag. His head was
a long time emerging at the top of the sack. His black curls, wet with sweat, stuck to his forehead; his cheeks were flushed. He grasped the struts of the framework and danced himself higher and higher out of the sack, like a puppet on strings. Best of all, his eyes were merry.

  Soon I knew why: his bag was the heaviest so far.

  As Jim leapt into the bag, for his turn, he drew up his knees and thrust his legs down with the utmost force on the pile waiting in the bottom. Mary’s back was turned, and I began to debate with myself whether I should share my anxiety with her. Not now, I decided. There’s nothing untoward about zeal. But I didn’t want the boys to exhaust themselves. So thorough was Jim’s tamping down of the wool that some of the boys grew impatient and taunted him to speed up. Jim’s head emerged pink and grinning. Excited and determined. His fair hair was dark against his scalp. He stamped on the wool as though it needed to be crushed and killed.

  Jim’s bag topped Justice’s in weight. They stood at the back of the line together, each happy in the accomplishment of the other, picking off stray strands of wool from each other’s sleeves, stooping to touch each other’s lanolin-soaked shoes.

  When I saw my minister, the Reverend Mr. Peal, arrive by buggy with his wife and an older woman, I went over to greet them. Learning the older woman was his mother, I complimented her on her recipe for plum pudding, which I had so enjoyed from the church Christmas baking. She was a bit deaf.

  “I live in Maine now,” she said, “but I grew up here on Nantucket.” Like her son’s, her cheeks formed defined curves at the corners of her mouth, as though all she said were spoken into parentheses. “The recipe has come home when it came back here with my son.” She was obviously proud of him.

  I told her that I and my son lived at ’Sconset, and I pointed Justice out to her.