Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “And Jim’s mother?”

  “I will speak to Mary. I can tell you already, she will be exactly of my mind. But I don’t know about the expense—” Here I felt awkward, for if I had had my old resources, there would have been no question of Jim’s expenses. “Mary and Isaac would not have so much, I think.”

  “There was another reason for Mayhew’s visit to me,” the judge said. “He had a good report. His investments in the new earth oil have done well. I looked into yours, Una, the investment of yours that was meant to bolster his. My dear, you are, if not rich again, at least prospering.”

  “Kerosene is the name of the new god,” Robben said.

  They stayed a bit longer, and we all chatted happily about their prospective voyage, but when they left, I could already feel the emptiness on both sides of me. The furniture seemed like Shakespeare’s bare branches, “where late the sweet birds sang.” In my mind’s eye, the two houses beside mine hulked like ghost ships, drifting and derelict. I put my head down next to the pretty pear confection. The savory, fruity heat from the pastry warmed my forehead.

  To my surprise, I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into the gentle eyes of Robben.

  “You feel we’re all deserting you,” he said.

  I sat up and wiped away the tears. “No, Robben. I want you to go. If I came, it would be no adventure for Justice.”

  “You have your writing, Una.”

  “And I can visit in town, occasionally.”

  “And Ishmael will be here.”

  “Ishmael?”

  “I forgot to mention. I’ve sublet my house to him. He’s a bit of a wild one. You won’t feel uncomfortable having him next door?”

  “Next door?” It was as though the Frost Wind—strange, fresh, inevitable—had come down from the sails to blow around my body.

  “Phoebe got to him first and told him he should sublet Mary’s house, but when he heard mine was falling vacant, too, he said he preferred to share the hedge with you.”

  “The hedge?”

  “Well, it’s some kind of dividing line. A sort of bundling board between yards.” Robben’s eyes were merry. I put my hand in his gray curls and tugged.

  CHAPTER 155: Recitation by Beach Fire

  ONE MILD, moonshine night on the ’Sconset beach, after we had laid down our picnic basket and our quilts and gathered driftwood for a future fire, I watched Pog cavorting in the sand. The dog picked up sticks with his teeth, pulling up the half-embedded ones and bringing them back to our collection. Again, as I had done many times, I admired the shaggy creature. I thought of my old friend David, who had come to me in wolf skin.

  Pog wrestled another sand-encrusted stick up from the beach. A zaggy stick. He carried it delicately, his lips curled away from the sand, his ivory teeth gleaming. We—Ishmael and I—sat on our quilt and watched silently. Angular and heavy, the zaggy stick tilted out of balance. The dog persisted, dragged the stick to me with one of its ends trailing in the sand. When I took it from him, I saw it was not wood at all, but glass. It was the mark lightning can make when it strikes the beach and fuses the sand particles into its imprint. I thought of Ahab—the zaggy mark on his face.

  The moonlight touched the tips of the waves with silver, and, as I had done many times alone, I walked to the shore, took off my clothing down to my camisole and drawers, and entered the water.

  “Can you swim? Can you swim?” Ishmael called after me, as though I had taken leave of my senses. He followed me to the hem of the water, then shed all his garments and threw them inland so that he could overtake me, for I swam out without hesitation.

  I glanced over my swimming shoulder to see his long naked legs and body, the head cloaked with hair and beard, as he stood on the sand.

  When I heard his shout, I looked back again and saw his long arms snaking over the water. He was smiling. I let myself swim too fast, trying to show off my prowess, but I knew when it was time to turn around and how to monitor my endurance. But he had not caught me before I turned. He chose to tread till I reached him, and then we swam back together in the face of the retreating tide. On the return, I fancied my companion to be Poseidon, so easily did he breast the waves.

  “Who taught you such swimming?” he asked me. “You’re at home in the water.”

  “Sweet Robben, whose house you inhabit.” (But I had little extra breath for talking.)

  “I’m a hermit crab then.” The hair of his mustache and beard, studded with droplets, parted in a smile. He swam a few strokes side-wise, like a crab.

  “No.”

  But I could not say what I meant. I tasted the salt water on my lips. My body felt cold, but I kicked on, sure that the necessary warmth would well up within me.

  As we swam, Ishmael said for me to look, and his finger came dripping up out of the water to point. Porpoises were leaping, their bodies an arc of phosphorescence.

  They came close to us and surrounded us with their big bodies, but never touched us. The thudding of their bodies, returning to the water, shook the air, and the vibrations through the water vibrated us. Our bodies were as slick and unfettered as the dolphins, but only they were phosphorescent, fiery green, crimson, silver, in their leaping, traveling circle. Amidst those cold fires we swam to shore.

  We quickly dried and dressed ourselves, and he struck a sulfur match to light the driftwood. I shall always remember the spurt of the match, like a small star exploding, white-hot in the center. The flare of the tinder, nestled in the tent of driftwood. We lounged, propped up, looking into the flames, with quilts under us and the soft sand for mattress under that. How comfortably, how companionably, we lounged at ease—just so had I rested by a campfire in Kentucky with the first David. Was that Milk the donkey chomping the spring grass? Here, too, at ’Sconset, was campfire ease. Ishmael spoke as softly as the flamy tongues tasting air, as the liquid tongues lapping against the shore:

  “When I was floating atop the coffin—Queequeg’s coffin-become-life-buoy—sometimes as the waves rocked us—I say us, for I was wedded cheek to wood, and I and the coffin were one as surely as death and life are one, as surely as we are one”—he glanced at me, did not touch, spoke on—“I heard within that hollow a lightly sliding noise, a movement as though something shifted, sledded within, over the planks. I listened for diversion. And that long night, also to divert by touch, my fingers explored the minutiae of my buoy-world.

  “This finger”—he held it up—“following the tarry seal between lid and side, discovered eight inches of fresher slickness, a place where the line of oakum and tar had been broken and resealed. There the tips of my fingers glided all night along that dark, short track where the hardened tar became softer, less baked. Long days of hanging in the air, from that time the ship carpenter caulked and converted the closed coffin into buoy, had stiffened the rest of the seam into something impenetrable. The buoy had hung in the stern like the heel of a shoe.

  “A coffin for a heel! The Pequod’s heel it had been, the last of us shown to the Samuel Enderby, and finally to the Rachel.” He mused silently, then continued speaking into the flames.

  “Along eight inches, perhaps six, my fingers traveled, wondering, along the seam of softer tar.” He rubbed his fingers back and forth over the stitches of the quilt, as though to relive that time.

  “Till I concluded they had broken the coffin seal to slide something flat and slight inside, and it moved there now. Slip-slip, I heard the cargo when I laid my ear to the wood. Some wafer, I thought, some sustenance.

  “Before morning came, I, like a ship’s rat working the corner of a cracker crate, gnawed the coffin corner nearest my mouth. I had hardly to move my position for my teeth to find purchase on an angle of the boards.

  “I gnawed on, splinters between my teeth, splinters working like needles into my gums. The taste of tar was like black blood in my throat—why should I alone survive!—the sharks swam round, their mouths padlocked, it seemed—till there was a chewed place big enough for ha
nd and wrist to enter. So I groped within, like a midwife blindly searching out her prize.

  “When ocean tilted just so, a paper slid against my fingertips. So thin a sustenance! But what else but paper could have entered that coffin’s vacancy by so narrow a passageway?

  “Whose words writ on that strangely hinged paper? I thought how I must coax an eye to open to a slit, for my eyes had sealed themselves. My pupils acknowledged daylight, sometimes pinkish, sometimes yellow, as through a veil. Floating stomach-down on the swaying coffin, in one hand I clutched the paper, with the other I took a finger and massaged an eyelid till moisture came and unglued the crusty eyelashes.

  “I rolled on my back—which took some care, for I did not know if I should roll accidentally off my sanctuary whether the sharks might not count me prey, or whether, indeed, I would have the strength to pull myself aboard again onto the coffin—I read, and then slept like Beowulf on his bier but with this thin crisp of paper pressed against the salt-stiffened cloth covering my chest.

  “I dreamt seabirds were ripping away cloth and then my flesh. They swooped down on me again, as I lay upon the box. I dreamt I was a string of bones in human form, clutching a message not its own. The harpies would ride me at times, their claws encircling the curve of a rib.

  “But it’s not Ishmael’s dream you would hear. Whose handwriting? No doubt you wonder, dear Una, if Ahab might yet speak to you from beneath the waves through those words I pried my lids apart to read? Or if good Starbuck had mailed a final missive penned during those last days? For your nimble mind thinks, who but Ahab or Starbuck would dare to broach the sealed, life-buoy coffin? Insouciant Stubb? He had the nonchalance but not the imagination for it. So, was it Starbuck’s or Ahab’s hand had slid words into the postbox life buoy?

  “Both. For there had been two pages posted there, separately. And those sheets had found each other. In extracting one, I extracted both, Ahab’s and Starbuck’s pages melded along the side as inextricably as their fate. My fate, you know. ’Twas to be picked up by the Rachel.”

  “Can you read the letters to me?”

  “Nay, Una, but I can recite.”

  “I START WITH STARBUCK’S, but his words are mostly of Ahab. They give the portrait from the outside:

  “Mary, I looked in at him among his charts. Yet not among them, for his head was down, exhausted, and he slept. The charts but offered thin pillow for whatever raged within his skull, his old hair all splayed in disarray.

  “I thought of murder. I had thought it before. I had thought it all my life, so long concealed but mutinous now—to murder authority, to strike and topple, though I willed my knee to bend, though I commanded my hand to serve. To serve God had been my devotion! Would I strike God? Had all my piety, my devout and earnest desire to ever obey the laws of God and those who spoke with just Authority, come to this? Was not this the fated heresy in our Quaker faith, we who sat on our benches without minister but equal to each other?

  “Am I so utterly lost? An assassin! of him who has the right to command not only me but also all the Pequod ’s precious human cargo to follow him to the depths.

  “And when I go there—for we shall know the cold depths—what will save me then? I would go home, home, not there. But God will be there waiting—let Ahab make no mistake about that—and He will read the treachery of my heart. Go there—I will—before I lift my sword to Ahab’s heart or gun to his head. Yes, Starbuck follows Ahab, not murders Ahab. And sunk to that cold place, though hand be unsullied with violence, must I, Mary, show a murderous heart to God?

  “This prayer perhaps I’ll make before the Throne: That Thou knowest murder was in my heart, even the hottest desire for murder, yet knowing, ye forgive! I did not strike. Mary would forgive! Mary!

  “Writ to Mary! To be known, all in all, by Mary.”

  “Where are those pages?”

  “The beak of a nightmare seabird swooped the white pages from my hand as though they were flat slices of Lebanon bread.”

  “But spared your flesh.”

  Before he began the second recitation, he worried his lip, glanced anxiously at me. Then began Ahab’s words:

  “Una, the monster flies before me—a hump like a snow-hill he will appear! A hill I must climb. We will beach the whaleboat on his back. What if the act be futile! It is my will, my will, most futile folly or fated victory, or I am not Ahab. I know the loss of thee, Una—I know and yet I pursue—for I’ve seen my wife and child reflected in the eye of Starbuck, that mirror of humanity. And yet I am compelled forward! I will give chase as long as time requires till I see that miracle-swimming white hill-hump caked with snowy age, and him I will mount!

  “But I see thy figure, Una, already ascended to the crest. How now? Thou art dark as a cinder! A candle with a black flame! Burnt like a widowed Hindee? Black? Thy feet in snow? Even thou art rendered all paradoxical! Is even my Una finally undecipherable? That thought is greatest torture, worse than the hot harpoon of revenge that embedded itself here! Here where I smack my palm, and again, as though to awaken a human—a husband’s—heartbeat.

  “Nothing walks in my chest, no steady, human, home-turned, determined plod.”

  Unhesitating recitation! That profundity I had glimpsed in the merchant sailor’s eye. A reservoir of words. Ishmael continued speaking for Ahab.

  “So, quietly I will fold this page and slip it into the tarry slot. Starbuck has shown me the way. Would that he could show me the way back to Nantucket, to thee. But he lacks the language for it.

  “And I! I have the picture that draws me on. A hump like a snow-hill! Moby Dick! I shall add my stature to his height! Ahab, not Una, let me picture there. Though legs fail, my hands, like mitts of flintstone, will pull me to the summit! Leviathan! My hands are harder than thy flesh! Leviathan! I shall make thee bleed, even as my own manly blood poured from my leg as from a funnel-spout! Moby Dick! When I top thee, THEN, let my punishment begin, for I embody the great Lie: Hate, revenge, my wounds—they are greater than Love. Together let us, like a mountain—higher with Ahab’s added height than you ever reared before—be brought low.

  “Brought low, we’ll storm the shadow valley, we’ll harrow the depths…these depths…whose mere surface lies before me now and all about me. What depths lie below—layer after watery layer of increasing cold. And the floor reached, into what valley do water…whale…Ahab…fall then? And who will exalt the crevasse that on the ocean floor opens itself to step yet again toward unthinkable depths? And who will exalt that valley?

  “But I will lift up my eyes, for now.

  “See how all womanly the ship glides through the waves, her skirts lifted? So might my Una run toward me through the shallow waves.

  “See the towering sails filled with the breath of night. ’Tis speed, I think, that thrills the body into spirit. ’Tis beauty.”

  CHAPTER 156: Letter from Susan, Forwarded

  Dear Una,

  I am home. And have been home for many a day, week, month, two years, I think. Again, I hope and long for freedom. But I am home. Did you get my first letter? Are you well?

  I still have Nature, the book I borrowed. It been my grammar and my speller. I’ve taken the sentences all apart so that they are just a string of words. I’ve learned them all. Now I can put them back together to make my own meanings instead of those of Mr. Emerson, the author. I want to write my story for you, Una, up to this point, because you taught me my first letters. If I could, I would write to Mr. Emerson who has given me so many words. Thoughts, too. Now I take a back-stitch and go back a little before where I left off last time.

  As I retraced my journey to the north side of the Ohio River, I prayed it might be froze again, for I doubted my ability to transcend were it not. More than froze, it was completely still and filled over with snow. At both banks, the snow curved up in drifts, so that the river seemed more like a trough of snow. A long swale. Nothing there but me and all that white snow glittering in moonlight, just a sickle moon, and starl
ight.

  When I stepped off the bank, I sunk up to my chin, but my feet landed firm. I held up my basket, had my tin honeycomb box and the patty-pan in it, and commenced to plow across. Moses parting the snow. Going back to Egypt, though. That snow lying on the river ice was light as white feathers. I stopped in the middle and looked back at the furrow I made. Whole world was quiet, quiet. Got to the other bank and the ice rotten. I felt my foot going through, tried to hold on but might as well try to grab a cloud. When my shoulder hit, that thin ice just crack open. I knew I was swallowed up. All alone, nobody to help me. Whole land shout, “One basket-toting, home-sick, Mam-sick, blackgirl—she nothing.” Shout, and echo, too.

  I don’t know how Nature did it, but she speeded time for me. When I look up through the cold water, I see the full moon. Must have been Moon didn’t want Earth to swallow me up. Moon pulled me out. I brought my face up out of that ice water. I felt the freezing against my scalp soon as I came up. My feet on slippery mud underneath, but I slip and I claw, I break back ice like a loose tooth till I get to firm. Run! That’s what my bones told me.

  I knew I must run all the way to your cabin. I have to tell myself Lift knees, Push feet! Over and over. My clothes freezing. I made myself run. I drive myself like no whip in hand driver ever drove nobody. Faster, faster. Feet like cold flatirons. Lift knees, lift. Dress froze stiff on my thighs. And there it was. Smoke in the chimney. I burst in. Half dead.

  Well, there wasn’t any Una there, but there was Daniel, running north. He build up the fire, wrap me in warm blankets. We get acquainted, and I make a long story short. He never forced me, but one evening when he was sitting in the rocking chair, I just climbed up in his lap because I wanted to. Wasn’t too many nights till we sharing the bed.