Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  What would I do with my mad husband? Here all was in suspension. But when we came to port in Nantucket? Then life would be real. It would be no transition from one state to another. Nantucket would be my lot. It would be my penance. Had not Giles commanded Kit and me to love one another?

  I turned and looked at Kit, trussed up in his hammock. He had a bonny face, though now it looked hurt even though there was no mark upon his skin. Gazing at his lowered lids, I knew that a strange universe lay behind a veil I could not lift. I wished there were a sound I could make, a bell to ring, that would make time rewind behind his veiny eyelids.

  We would go back to New Bedford. I would lean out Mrs. Swain’s third-story window and yell at them. Giles was there! We would not go to sea at all, but westward, wanderers walking to the heart of the land.

  I began to pace the cabin, and finding it confining, I took up the candle and slipped up the companion way to the deck.

  As I walked to the prow of the ship, the candle guttered and went out in the breeze. Before us, in the west, hung the crescent moon. When I was a little child, my father had said, “There, you see, God has been paring his fingernails.”

  But then, why wasn’t the sky full of crescent moons—ten of them? Did God have only one finger? Yes. It was the one he used to smite us with.

  I listened to the wind smacking and flapping the sails. Someone was aloft, two men, taking in canvas. Not Giles and Kit. I did not look.

  The moon was enough to see. She was like a shuttle. I smiled to think of my tatting. I had left the yards and yards of lace under Sallie’s pillow. By this time, her fingertips had found the strange mass of threads, had pulled out the lacy wad, had exclaimed to her husband. Perhaps, missing me, she had cried, and he had comforted her. And in her grief, perhaps, she unleashed passion warm and free.

  Certainly for me, grief had flung open the doors of passion.

  I had been a welcome companion to Sallie, though I had felt myself apart from her in spirit because she knew nothing of the human capacity for savagery, the inevitable animal within.

  Now there was no one who could ever tell that I had lived on human flesh. All of the others were perished; Giles dead; Kit mad. Nobody knew. Though I could think of a smug safeness, I could not enter it. What was safety? A room, but I was without that room; I could stand in the open door and look in at its boxy comfort. Or I could look in at windows and see those cozy rooms where others lived, but I was forever unhoused. And yet I was intact.

  “Mrs. Sparrow,” a voice whispered in my ear.

  It was Kit. Kit’s eyes—wounded—but knowing me, calling me by my name, his arms open. I entered their haven, was guided downstairs to our pallet.

  SO, IN SOME MEASURE, I had my Kit. For a fortnight, aboard the Pequod, his mind was with him, and my body was wife to his body. Then he seemed like the Kit of the Lighthouse. The kindness he had shown to Frannie he showed to me. The passion he had had for me, then much suppressed, he expressed freely. I had not had a woman’s sensitive response till Kit loved me.

  The nights gave us to each other. We often left the candle burning, and in its glow his skin and eyes and hair were radiant for me, and all of me, he said, for him. That candle glowing on the floor beside our pallet seemed to have a double, for I swear there was a glowing within my body. Glory—flesh of thigh, of breast, of buttocks, and humbler flesh of palm and ear and cheek and tongue—all existed to rhapsodize! Their song had only two words: Kit Sparrow, Kit Sparrow, Kit Sparrow.

  If Giles had to die, then let him have died to give us this joy. I think he would have smiled to see us.

  When Kit and I were not together, even when I walked about on the deck, I felt him physically within me. This was a new fulfilling, a new secret about my body. The shape of him had a ghost, and it haunted my flesh. He seemed yet palpably with me when I leaned my elbows on the taffrail, hands clasped, skirt billowing. And there, under my skirt, the shape of Kit yet, within my womanness.

  The crew seldom spoke to us—I saw Ahab occasionally at the bony tiller, but he, too, was unobtrusive. They seemed to let Kit and me live in a giant bubble. We might walk as we would, sleep and eat as we wished. Food was left at the door twice a day—coarse, hard fare, but the hard biscuit had beside it a bit of pickled herring, or mackerel in mustard, or a pot of honey, so we had our flavors. I did not imagine our captain ate any better; he had thrived on hardship.

  During that honeymoon fortnight, Kit seemed to give his mind to me to steer, and when the wild sentence came—“Now we eat our fingernails. Now the spiny stars”—I turned abruptly, shook my head, and said, “No, Kit.” He would fall silent for a time. Then I would ask some innocent, simple question. “Do you see that school of cod, starboard?” With his careful reply, we’d be on course again.

  But one night, he boxed the compass with his mind. No statement or question of mine could stop the whirling. He could not stop his mind or feet, and as we walked round and round the deck, he touched the railings and pins and cables we passed. Many times we passed Ahab, and he stood like a statue, his hair white in the full moonlight. The sailors we skirted in our rounds were as phantoms who offered no interference, but each paused in his task, suspended by the wonder of our journeying.

  Finally, Kit stopped beside a hinged chest and opened it. Within, piled to the top, were coils of thick rope.

  “You,” he said. “I don’t want you. I’m going to bed. You stay here.”

  Placing his hands atop my shoulders, he forced me to sit on the coil of ropes.

  “You are a she-eagle. Sleep in your nest.” He gashed my heart.

  “No, Kit. I am a woman and your wife,” I said quietly.

  “It takes a beak to strip flesh from bone. As you did.” My soul gushed from my heart.

  “Hush.” He risked me with the sailors.

  My heart ran out of me, up the mizzenmast. From that height, it looked down at my shame. I wanted to throw out the ropes, to hide in the chest and pull the lid down after me. I wilted on the hard nest of ropes, and he left me. I felt frozen there. Certainly I could not follow him. And what he had implied was true. Had they heard?

  I had no strength to move. Though Kit had gone below, I was now haunted as though by his whole physical being, standing beside me with an accusing finger. I felt as though I could not remember when last I ate, so little strength came to my limbs.

  What could I do but wait for dawn? The disk of the moon went high and small. Our fortnight of honeymoon had waned as the real moon waxed. Without a word, a sailor placed a prickly blanket around my shoulders, and with that act of kindness the looming sense of Kit left me. Still I sat immobilized. When daylight came, someone brought me a plate of food and placed it in a shallow box at my feet. Through much of that day the ghost of the full moon was visible in the blue.

  I saw nothing of Kit, and the sailors moved about me as though I did not exist. To them, I was free to sit or walk or go. I sat on the coils of rope in the chest. I sat in a misery of rejection, of utmost anxiety and loneliness.

  At noon, Ahab came and squatted down beside me. He looked only once in my face and then said, “I’ve put a padlock on your husband’s door. He flings himself about in the room.”

  “Your maps?” I said dully.

  “We took them out. There’s no great damage done. He ate some strips of paper.”

  Then I turned to look at him. No great damage? I thought, but did not speak.

  He read my gaze, and he looked down. “Ye cause me to look away,” he muttered. “Is it possible that ye, a mere girl, have seen as deep as Ahab?”

  “What is the stuff a mind is made of?” I asked.

  Ahab rose and walked away. His tread was steady, but slow, as though he felt his age.

  CHAPTER 56: The Hurricane House

  WHAT IS THE WEIGHT of a cat’s meow?” Kit asked.

  Looking as cheerful as a man on a Sunday stroll, happily smoking his pipe, Mr. Stubb, the second mate, led Kit past me on a chain.

  �
��Those are cats meowing in your trees,” he said, glancing up in the yardarms.

  Behind Kit, a sailor carried the blankets and covers that had been our bed, and a hammer in his hand.

  “Here, kitty, kitty. Here, Topgallant. Here, Royals. Here, Sky Catcher.” Kit called the names of the uppermost sails.

  The men entered the hurricane house. Hammering within. Kit moored inside. Then the sailor nailed a blanket on the inside, over the window. But he did not nail fast the bottom, for Kit lifted it and looked steadily out at me, as though he had lifted the curtain at the window of a passing coach. I could not meet the detachment of his gaze.

  When I looked down, I saw the feet of Ahab.

  “It’s been three days he’s been below,” Ahab said. “Time enough for the soul to go to hell and back again.”

  I heard the yardarms meowing against the masts. “A cat will come down if you leave out a bowl of milk,” I said.

  “Mrs. Sparrow,” he said. “Listen to me.” He touched my shoulder to get my attention. I looked at his fiery eye and the long hair, here snowy, there gray as old snow. With an act of will, he seemed to dampen the blaze of his eyes like closing the door to the tryworks oven.

  “Chained belowdecks would make a sane man mad, a mad man madder.”

  I said nothing.

  “Ye should go down now, Mrs. Sparrow. Take the hammock. Ye’ve been as chained up here as he down there. Go sleep and rest. Ye’ll be sick yourself, if ye don’t.”

  “May I not keep my husband company in the hurricane house?”

  Ahab muttered, “ ’Tis aptly named, for his mind is a hurricane.”

  “I know him.”

  “When did the madness come?”

  “We were at sea in an open boat. Many weeks.”

  “Aye, that may do it.” But he looked at me as though I might tell him more, if I chose.

  “The Sussex.” My mouth went dry.

  “A whaler! And rammed by a whale.”

  “Yes. A whale large and dark as a promontory or a new island pushing up from the sea. Black as lava.”

  “Ye were not married then? To someone else?”

  “No.”

  Ahab paused in his interrogation. Indeed, he abandoned the factual path altogether. When he spoke again, it was in a gentler tone, one something akin to fatherly compassion. “Ye have a curiosity about the sea, then?”

  “I have a curiosity about all of life,” I said.

  He laughed. “But ye are nothing of chatterbox. Where are the questions?”

  I saw Kit let the curtain fall. What was he looking at now? The board walls inside of an empty box. The hurricane house had been unfurnished for the coming winter weather. Perhaps Kit liked it so. Perhaps he invented furnishings fit for a king in his mind. It was kind of them to leave the blanket curtain unnailed; and it would add warmth to the little room.

  “He asked to be taken up here, then?”

  “Aye.”

  “You have been good to us, Captain Ahab.”

  “What is your first name, Mrs. Sparrow?”

  “Una.”

  “Then, Una,” he said, and his tone was like a cove, tranquil and protective, “obey your captain and go below to rest.”

  CHAPTER 57: Ahab’s Jottings

  WHY, WHEN I SPEAK to this poor girl, flesh of the flesh of a madman, is my soul all peace? Is it the latent father-part of me? Even God wanted himself called Father. There might have been children of mine scattered in the isles of paradise. And is she one of them, grown-up?

  There’s something of me in her.

  CHAPTER 58: Kit’s Ruminations

  WHEN THE CURTAIN’S DRAWN, then, that’s the time to whisper confession. On your knees. What’s in a knee? Cartilage and gristle. A knee’s a kind of bone knot. And my throat’s another knot. Untie that lacing in my neck. The neck is tied off, wrapped round and round with inner cords I cannot loose, though I would speak, whisper, confess.

  She forbids it. Let us confess to each other, she says. As though she were the world. No. I should put my mouth into the sea, press my lips against its great watery belly. Blubber my secrets there to Mother.

  Perhaps Giles would hear me. We did it for love of one another, he would say again. I see his lips moving underwater. What soldier has done less? he would say. Don’t soldiers kill to preserve those they love? Don’t they kill for the sake of the men who stand beside them? And if all of their comrades have fallen, they kill for their own sweet sake. It’s natural.

  She would say I’m glad to be alive. Glad. She did not see herself with rubies on her mouth. What would it benefit the world, she asked, if we were also dead?

  He used his knee to crack their long bones, and out of the splinters, his finger lifted the fat marrow and took it to her lips, and all in a smack and a swallow, it was gone. But she closed her eyes, and Giles fed her the horror, and spared her.

  He didn’t spare me.

  “Kit Sparrow,” he said to me, the last thing he said to me. “Kit Sparrow, change your name to Kit Sorrow.” As though a new name could give me a new life.

  Cursing him would be as good as confessing.

  Yet, there he is all bright at the bottom of the sea. A phosphorescent skeleton-angel. Something wondrously strange that though I see I cannot see, for he’s a bleary light. He wants me to use him like a lantern, to find my way through the midnight depths, my movements wavy, slow, cold. Uncertain and unreal.

  CHAPTER 59: Starbuck Introduces Himself

  IN A MANNER particularly upright, with a careful humanity, Starbuck said, “Ye ought not sit in the wind, Mrs. Sparrow. Move to the lee. I’d not let my Mary take so much wind.”

  “Have you and Mary children, Mr. Starbuck?” I asked.

  He patted his shirt, and I heard the crinkle of paper.

  “I durst not take it out lest the thieving wind make off with it,” he said. He smoothed his chest with the palm of his hand.

  “She writes you of your children, then?”

  “My boy.”

  “When did you see them last?”

  “Two years ago I waved good-bye to Mary. Him, I see him only through her words, first and last.”

  I was shocked to think of the young mother so long without her husband. “Have many letters found you?”

  “This is the second, in as many years.”

  No wonder he treasured it next to his skin!

  “All at once, I have a son, and he is one year, four months of age.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Here he laughed. “She does not tell his name but calls him ‘Baby,’ and ‘Beloved Child,’ and ‘Puck,’ but she would not name him Puck—there’s nothing of Quaker in that, or Christian even.”

  “There’s Shakespeare in it, or it is in Shakespeare.”

  “Sometimes she writes ‘our son.’ He recited: ‘I bought our son a little boat, and yesterday we sailed it on a puddle before the door, the puddle-water was all crimson with the setting sun, and I sent the boat, about the size of my flat iron, across to him and he to me till the sun was down and a star shone in our puddle.’ ”

  “Not for naught, then, is your name Starbuck.”

  “Eh? But she doesn’t say that.”

  All of Mistress Mary’s words in the letter had been memorized by her husband. Sacred writ to him, and he would not have added one jot or tittle.

  “It’s strange,” I said, “that she doesn’t give the child’s name.”

  “Sometimes my Mary will tease a bit. But I’d rather have the babe himself with no name than a name and no dear babe.”

  I wondered what kind of woman Mary was who could tease so upright a man as Mr. Starbuck. He seemed to have no fun in him, but was filled to the brim with a sweet seriousness.

  “In what part of Nantucket do you live, Mr. Starbuck, if I may ask?”

  “Ah, Mary will not have any place but ’Sconset.”

  “And what is particular to ’Sconset?”

  “It’s against the open water. It’s as c
lose to coming to sea with me as she can get. Our house is almost of the beach. It’s a hard, lonely, eastern end of the island, where the waves from the open sea pound the land.”

  “Kit’s mother—she was a baker—used to send buns to ’Sconset, by the coach.”

  “You must come out to see us when you get Mr. Sparrow settled.”

  Mr. Starbuck’s eyes gazed into mine, and I saw there sadness for us, and pity, that our landfall would be far less joyous than his.

  “Where do you suppose Mr. Sparrow and I might best live on the island?” I asked.

  His blue gaze held mine steadily, but he shifted his feet though the ship had not rolled under us. He hesitated and then spoke calmly. “I expect Mr. Sparrow will have to stay in the madhouse.”

  CHAPTER 60: Ahab Overheard

  I HAD JUST come to the top of the companion way when I noted Ahab standing on deck, gazing north. One hand rested on a dead eye in the standing rigging. He was alone, his back to me, but speaking.

  “So, Old Winter, where art thou? Ten times, nearing home in November, we’ve shaken hands over these gray waters. What news of the polar bear? and the Lapman herding his reindeer? And hast thou tucked in the nation of Canada?”

  Ahab paused as though he were waiting for the North to answer.

  “What! would make Ahab wait? Well, Thou art older, ’tis thy privilege.” He fetched a sigh. “Older even than Ahab. Will Time hump my back as well as whiten my hair?” He grasped into the rigging, seeming to flex his back. Then he spoke too loudly. I hoped no one else would hear. “Where is thy rude blast, Winter?”

  He clasped both hands behind his head, stretched his back again, lifted his chest, and spoke lightly and rapidly. “Thou hast donned thy spectacles? Panes of ice, I’m sure. But they sharpen thy eyesight, for all of that, and mine as well. For now I see why thou waitest. There’s Spring aboard the Pequod. There’s no place for Winter, where Spring is, and her name is Una.”