Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Maybe a week passed. He begged me to run back north with him, but I explained I had to go back for my mam. I see a new kind of owning, the way he look at me. Man owning woman type of owning. What I didn’t know for a long time was I was carrying his child with me. I said good-bye to Daniel standing in the snow on the riverbank. Hole in the ice still marking the spot where I went under, just a little skin of clear ice over the water. We tried to fork up my basket with my tin honey box you gave me and the patty-pan the Shakers gave me, but we couldn’t get it. Daniel chose a new spot, put down logs in case the ice rotten all along. Then he walked peaceful as could be over the river. Got in my old track where the snow still rumpled. Stars watched with me, Daniel climbing the north bank, gone into the snow and woods. Last sight, him slipping round tree trunks.

  I walked south. Met the Spring and then the Summer. Folks helped me again, and I saw some I couldn’t help but would have if I could. A great drove of Indians walking west. They had dogs to pull their loads, hardly any horses. I saw a family stop, dig a hole, bury a child, knees to chest. I listen to the mourning song. Torn from the side of suffering was what I thought. The line walked around them while they buried by the trail. I was hid under a mountain laurel. Knees pulled up to my chest. Finally the family fell in with the line, walked on west. I cried.

  I planned what to say if I was caught. “Please, oh do please, take me home. I was stole away.” But I wasn’t caught. Everything looked right to me, farther on south I traveled, the kinds of trees, the bushes, the slant to the sunlight. It was all way too pretty, I thought, couldn’t be all bad. One night the lightning bugs came up to meet me. One other night, though, I see this glowing that was too big for lightning bugs, and I wondered Baby Haints. All in a cluster, pale and bleary. They bobbed and swayed a little in a group. Scary, but I had to see what. When I got closer, I see this was a gourd vine over a blackberry bush. Those little gourds had whitish ends, and the ends reflecting moonlight. I decided to stop there, sleep under that glowing—you can find little rooms inside where blackberry canes curve over.

  In the morning, hanging in the vine was a pair of shoes.

  “Who left these shoes here?” I say to the woods.

  “I did.” I see an old black man sitting on the ground, head screwed sideways, cheek on his knees, grinning.

  “Haint?” I ask.

  He shook his head No.

  “Who?” I asked, and I wanted to laugh, like all this a big joke. “Why?”

  “And how?” he said, mocking at me. “And when?” He had a high-pitch cracked voice.

  I wanted to hear him talk, so I just kept my peace.

  “I, the Shoeman.”

  “You got many customers in these woods?”

  “I gib away,” he said. His voice sink down so deep and muddy I could hardly understand him. “Bout here, long this stretch, where shoes gib out. I gib anybody a pair of shoes, if he need them. Them soles is polly-wally wood.”

  I unhooked the sandals from the vine, slipped my foot onto them, nice shaped foot bed, tied the laces threaded through the ends of leather straps. “They fit.”

  “Girl, you think I make something don’t fit?” Voice all high. “I measure your footprint.” Voice sinking low. “But you headed the wrong direction.” Voice at the bottom, thick.

  I told him I was going home. He just shook his head. He didn’t say no more. I look away, I look back. He gone. Nothing but space where he was. But he didn’t take the shoes.

  When I walked the last mile home in the dark, a mockingbird commenced to sing. I knew that was a bad sign. Seemed like he followed me. I wanted holy quiet. But that bird just kept shooting off his mouth. When I looked in the window, I see a candle and a woman sitting at a table, sewing. My mam worked the field, she didn’t sew. I saw she squinted her eyes, and my mam never did, and I saw she was stout, and my mam never was, but it was my mam.

  The window was swung open on the side hinges and I just ducked down and stood in that little wedge space between the glass and the opening. I breathed home air. Saw children sleeping round the room, big quilting frame. Saw her skirt hem resting on the floor. Head bent.

  She didn’t look up, but my mam said, “Is that you?” still sewing. “Susan?”

  Una, it was my mam, and she knew me without looking.

  Oh, I sat on her lap, and she told me get the buttermilk pitcher, get the cornpone off the shelf, and it had her own handprint over the pone top. I knew she watched me stretch up to the bread shelf, and she said, “You come home to born a child into slavery!” Her words just burst out. Mean as sparks.

  I said, “I come for you.”

  “Look here,” she said, and she pulled up her skirt. I standing there with the pitcher in my hand. Where they should have been a foot was only a stump wrapped in rags. “Now you grow me a new foot while you grow that baby. Maybe then, we run.”

  My heart broke. “You want me to kill ’em?” I said. My voice sunk low like a growl I never heard. I heard the mockingbird sing, too, Una. So shrill. Like it want to scream but not got the throat for it.

  She didn’t answer me straight. “I try to run. They catch me. Take my foot.”

  “You want me to kill ’em?”

  I cried myself stupid, on her lap. “Sho. Lets think about killin em.” She rock me, spoke it over and over, like a lullaby song. “Lets think, lets think.” I listen to the children sleep. Some my own kin, some she must of been keeping. “Lets think bout it.” Finally I breathing with the younguns. My mam told me to get in bed, over against the wall. She said she was so stout now couldn’t anybody see over her to see me. I got in, and then she used the ladder-back chair to help hop. Three hops. And her way too heavy to hop at all.

  When morning come, my anger was melted down to sorrow. For her. Night melted me. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. Only a sorrow lump left. Grief was for me, too, cause I couldn’t leave her.

  I did what I had to do, her standing in the door calling “Wait now. Lets talk this over. Lets plan.” I went through the quarters to the overseers house. Knocked on his door. I looked at the ground like I was ashamed. Orange tigerlily blooming by his step. Door opened, I mumble so humble never looking in his face, “I was stole away, sir, but I done found my way home.”

  He knock me down. “Reckon I best brand you,” that’s what he said, “so nobody won’t steal you off again. Get up.” I follow him inside his cabin.

  He sat me on the three-legged stool by the fire, heated up the branding iron till it was white, and sunk it in my cheek. His wife gave me a wet, cool cloth, folded in a square. Walking home, there the mockingbird. Hopping in the dust. He see me, he jump quick into air, two white fans spreading out of his two wings. My cheek with an oak leaf. Burning. Burning bad. For Thousand Oaks. The name of this place where I am. But you mustn’t use it for address, lest I be beat. I find you someday, Una. When freedom come. If you could buy us all, I would pay you back. And I got a baby. When she was born, I say to my mam, “This baby’s name is Liberty.” I named her for yours. I shamed to born her to slavery, but that name helped, so I could smile a little.

  My mam say, “Lets name her Liberty Lee, and we’ll jus’ call her Lee. Time being.”

  She smiled so big, and so did I. So would you. All sneaky. We will have freedom, and we will have it right this time. I have no doubt. My faith is firm. My mam called in the children and holding up my baby girl to the sun in the window she said to all them what I say to you, “This is the day the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice, be glad in it.”

  My girl is growing, and sometimes I whisper other names in her ear, magic names whose meanings I don’t know. “Orpheus Eurydice,” I whisper, for she is the sweetest life I know.

  In love and hope abiding,

  Susan Spenser Oaks

  Susan’s letter had been held for me at the Mitchells’, and I could not help but explode into tears there in their apartment after reading it. As soon as I could speak, I consulted with Mr. Mitchell about how to find Sus
an, for her letter mentioned Thousand Oaks plantation, but not the state. Mr. Mitchell’s reference books supplied me with the names of all the counties in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and Maria and I immediately began to pen letters to the sheriff of every county, saying only that we were trying to locate kin who were staying at a farm called Thousand Oaks. With great urgency, we wrote letters for three days, and then I came back to ’Sconset.

  CHAPTER 157: The Roof Walk

  ONE NOVEMBER NIGHT, I felt so anxious that I knew I must walk the widow’s walk. I left the trapdoor flung open to the pit of light below, and I wore a blanket around me like an Indian to swaddle myself from the breeze. I grieved for Susan. For my own innocent baby, alive three days; and for Frannie’s. For Susan’s Indians, moving west. Susan, be safe.

  What are your houses, dear readers—if ye exist as other than wisps in my mind—but platforms to lift you up? Walk above your house, and the heavens are open to you. Let what might seem like roof for your head become floor for your feet.

  The wind wanted to blow me clean. How I had loved the wind when aloft at sea, and how, with sails, one could fly before such a wind! I clutched the flapping blanket under my chin. Smeared by the wind, my vision bleared the stars. I loved the wildness of it all. Among you, among you, my spirit sang.

  I thought of my boy and of Jim, of my friends Robben and Austin as dear to me as brothers, all of whom were now someplace on the ocean. I did not feel afraid for them, though, ironically, they sailed in a ship named the Liberty. It tormented me to think of Susan waiting for help. Worse was to think she’d run again, was captured, parted from her child. Sold. Killed. And she had appealed to me.

  But gradually my pacing brought me calm. The vastness of the heavens seemed a haven for all of us. Surely Susan was somewhere. Be safe. And I thought of Margaret Fuller’s letters from Europe, of Charlotte and Kit, and of Frannie’s letters, of Aunt Agatha and Uncle Torchy tending their lighthouse. We were not fragments, or if we were fragments we were in-gathered. I stood still and felt them all gathering home. If my mind called their names, they seemed with me. I felt us all in-gathered by the glittering universe.

  Alone on my platform, I knew myself to be in motion, though I stood still. My motion was rooted in the earth and its journey. Not just my house, but the world itself was my ship traveling airy waters which rarefied beyond air into sheer blackness. And beyond and all about me in deep black nothingness were sources of light, they, too, moving. What a rushing, what a rushing we all made, like this Nantucket wind, immediate, crisping my cheeks and ears. And none left behind, nor could they be. We are embraced even before we can embrace.

  I heard footsteps, which I knew well, pass through the house. From the first night in my bed, we had known the depths of each other; my body had whispered to me as his had to him: This is marriage. It needed no courtship.

  I heard his feet on the stairs, and his dark form emerged from the light below. “November in your soul?” I called.

  “Nay,” he answered, “this November’s external, where it should be.”

  When I turned back to the star-bright sky, he came to stand behind me, wound arms around me, knotted me close to him with clasped hands.

  “In a few weeks, we will rejoice in the hearth,” he said.

  “Do you mind we write the same book?” I asked. The Star-Gazer seemed to be my title.

  “Think of the mighty Cathedral of Cologne,” he said, “left with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.” He paused and then went on, for it was ever Ishmael’s way to extend a thought. “Think of the Cathedral of Chartres. Think of its two towers. They do not match at all. Built perhaps a century apart, or more; but without both spires, our Chartres would not be Chartres.”

  The pulse of me beat against his hands knotted over my stomach.

  Unself-consciously he mused on, “Small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the finishing to posterity. My whole book is but a draft—nay, but the draft of a draft.”

  I said I felt the same about my book.

  Ishmael added humorously, “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

  The wind enwrapped us both, with whirling, invisible arms; its fingers plowed our hair. I covered his human fingers with my own, and we were quiet awhile. With our faces uptilted toward the stars, he said, “And what do you think, Una, of these heartless immensities?”

  “That we are a part of them, and they are a part of us.”

  Epilogue

  WE ARE NOT legally married by even so liberal an institution as the gold-domed Unitarians, but united by our natures. Each day and forever we choose to be husband and wife as surely as the spangled sea meets the land before me, as surely as the ink flows from my sharpened feather to meet the sun-washed page on my desk.

  We may sail again, taking Felicity—our daughter—with us, when these books are done. I would gaze at those disparate spires of Chartres, with Ishmael beside me. We would see Margaret’s pagan Pantheon in Rome and the pyramids in Egypt and the Nile, where the spiritual may yet be found in cyclic floods and vegetable forces.

  Last year, in 1850, Margaret died, drowned with her husband and small son, just off New York’s Fire Island. Because I knew from her letters that she was bringing a trunk of manuscripts, I went there, walked the beach, hoping at least to salvage the part of her spirit committed to paper, but I found it not.

  As I wandered the warm sand of Fire Island, the birds circling above, I met a man and a boy of five, who spoke to me, amazing me by his spiraling sentence—“My name is Henry James,” he told me, “and I shall always remember this day when Father and I searched for the trunk of Margaret Fuller, who is known to me only by her writing (perhaps someday my flesh, too, or yours, shall be represented only by marks on a page, or scratched letters like those I saw in Rome on the stone wall of a catacomb, where I also saw a picture of a fish incised in the stone, and I wondered if it were a great fish?)—and I shall remember the essence of Margaret Fuller without volition on my part, the same way I shall remember that hawk who cries overhead and this desolation of flatness.” He was a blessed boy—a prodigy—and I wanted to weep at the marvel of him. The period at the end of his spoken sentence, though invisible, seemed like a speck to me, like a bird flown so high that finally it was only a diminishing dot.

  Survivors of the shipwreck reported that Margaret refused to try to save herself, but I cannot believe that. They say she sat on the deck, her back against a mast, her long hair streaming over her shoulders. My heart shrieks against that! She would try, we would try. Certainly Susan and I would try. But I have not yet heard again from Susan, or of Susan.

  Next door, in Mary Starbuck’s old home, I have a school—have I not wanted to be a teacher since I was a girl—called First School, where I teach young women sent to me by Frannie. My students lived but recently in slavery, and they share their stories with each other, and I teach them how to read and write and sew, even as I began to teach Susan. Their first letter is an S, as my mother taught me. S for snake, for sea, sand, sun—look out the window. And sometimes I tell them, my voice almost choking, that S is also for Susan and for School, which I began to honor her.

  Amidst fundamental learning at First School, strange questions are also welcome. A girl of twelve, her skin the most lovely hue of milky brown I have ever seen, looked up from her stitching and asked me, “Is time an orphan?” Later, when I took her to the night sky, I waved my pale hand at the glory and said, “Time lives here. Far away and near as us, on this platform.”

  Now I see Robben next door, pruning the green whale. We enjoy much interaction and discussion among us, visiting with the Isaac and Mary Starbuck lighthouse tribe and the Mitchell clan, and Phoebe from town, as well as new friends. Justice and Jim study and board in town with William Mitchell.

  Our friendly discourse is not always reassuring. We, like other folk of this midcentury decade, look at the North and South and wonde
r if there will be war. To Ishmael I have trotted out an old idea—if civil war comes might we not sail west, to the farthest reaches, into that territory not a part of the United States, for I would not be party to any national solution to either slavery or states’ rights, or, indeed, to any political problem, writ largely in blood.

  I look north along the coast, and I can just make out the clot of students from First School standing on the Sankaty cliff, with the lighthouse behind. The judge is with them; he became an expert at the potter’s wheel, once he learned to abide the gray slurry on his hands, and he teaches these former slaves that craft. Today they are recreational together. They are all launching kites from the headland before the lighthouse. Maria Mitchell is with them, no doubt discussing air currents. At this distance, I see the kites as bits of color rising up like glad-flung confetti.