Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  I felt like a mole constantly belowdecks. Against the November chill, I wore a heap of coats and scarfs, and I never changed my clothes. When I went to the hold, I carried a candle, and sometimes I warmed my fingers on it. I could not question myself as to why I wanted to sequester myself with the cargo. It seemed the place for me. Had Kit really struck my face? I could not bring myself to think of it, to question its meaning or to contemplate the future.

  Often I thought of Uncle Torch and his kindness to me, and of Aunt Agatha and of Cousin Frannie. I pictured myself and my mother at our quilts, the sound of buggy wheels and my father passing the window, leaving the yard. I thought of the night sounds in Kentucky, especially of owls—perhaps because of the dimness of the hold and because the creaking of the Pequod’s timbers reminded me of those soft, persistent sounds.

  And I remembered my father striking my face. One blow as Kit had done. Then twice—a blow for each cheek. Then thrice. The left cheek left swollen and bruised.

  Once, when I made my way to Starbuck’s cabin for supper, I noted that the corridor had been scrubbed. The next day, no new barrels were delivered below, and so I knew that trying out was complete and that cleaning had begun. In two nights, I found pinned to my door a note from Ahab, stating that this was the last night at sea and would I join him and the mates that evening at the captain’s table. My hand went to my hair, which I knew was disheveled. Then I bethought me of my clothes, which were Kit’s trousers I had stitched up for climbing aloft.

  Upon entering Starbuck’s tiny room, I found one of my dresses spread on the bunk, and on it a small round mirror framed in beechnut, and a tortoiseshell comb. On the chair had been set a china bowl and water pitcher for my toilet. I would not have known if this was Ahab’s kindness or Starbuck’s, except for the fact that I saw these items later in Mary Starbuck’s home.

  And so the mole emerged and tried her best to become a human being again. When I entered the room, Ahab rose, as did Starbuck and Stubb and Flask, the second and third mates. All were wearing clean clothes and were fresh-shaven and wetly combed.

  “Pardon my tardiness,” I said demurely.

  “To Mrs. Sparrow,” Ahab replied and raised his cup.

  “It’s but a rum punch,” Starbuck said, as though he questioned the propriety of serving me strong liquor.

  “Thank you,” I said, and then tasted and appreciated the hot libation, composed of rum and molasses; a sliver of lemon cut thin as a window glass floated on top and bore a sprinkling of cinnamon powder.

  The dinner itself was a meager one. The cook had toasted a slab of the usual ship’s biscuit, and each of us had upon it a nice portion of pickled herring with shreds of onion, which was a great treat in terms of flavor, though the ratio of herring to onion could have been vastly increased in favor of the onion.

  “What can you tell me of Nantucket?” I asked the company.

  “A place to raise a turnip,” Mr. Stubb said, and they all laughed.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “ ’Twas William Rawson’s turnip,” he said. “Measured three feet two inches in circumference. And berries! None that size, but in abundance—huckleberry, elderberry, blackberry on the moor, cranberries in the bog.”

  “There are entertainments,” Mr. Flask put in. He being a very short man, his face was close to his plate. Nicknamed Little King Post by the crew, he commanded great respect. A king post was the hub of radiating spokes which buttressed from the inside the sides of whalers plying iceberg-laden waters. “There’s a bowling alley at ’Sconset, at Bunker Hill on the South Side,” Flask continued politely. “And Peleg Macy’s got a bathing establishment on South Wharf.”

  “What is the barrel record?” Ahab asked Starbuck.

  “That of Captain Frederic Arthur stood for a while. He and the Swift brought in over three thousand barrels of sperm. ’Twas in October 1825. Then he topped himself in 1830, on the Sarah with almost thirty-five hundred.”

  “Did it bring a good price?” I asked, for I knew nothing of the money end of whaling.

  “Valued at ninety-eight thousand dollars,” Flask said. He had finished his dinner first and sat clutching his knife in one hand and the fork in the other, as though those wands could conjure up more victuals for their employ.

  “There are many churches,” Starbuck said.

  “HELL!” It was Kit’s voice roaring from behind the wall.

  “The Unitarians,” Ahab answered as though deaf, “have added a tower tall as a mast—one hundred and nine feet.”

  “With a Portugee bell,” Starbuck added.

  “HELL!”

  I took a gulp of air and tried to remove my ears and mind from my circumstance. Though I knew only a little of the Unitarians, I remembered that both my mother and my aunt had spoken well of them. Yes, it interested me that they prospered on Nantucket. “What other sects are on the island?” I asked.

  Starbuck seemed the church authority and named the African Church on West York Street, the Congregationalists, and the Orthodox body of Quakers.

  “There’s more choices than that, Mrs. Sparrow,” Mr. Stubb put in. “All in the process of organizing—the Baptists are on Nantucket, the Episcopal, the Methodists with all their disruptions amongst the members. Somebody brought over an elephant and there’s some that want to build a church for him!” Stubb laughed. “The Elephantists!” The second mate had a rare sense of humor.

  “Nay, it’s the Universalist Society,” Mr. Flask corrected.

  “What is their belief?” I asked.

  “That ye cannot be damned. It makes no difference if ye worship elephant Hindu gods or the crescent moon. There’s no hell, they say, and ye can’t go to it. Salvation is universal.”

  “Hell,” Kit groaned, and I half rose to go to him.

  “Mr. Flask,” Ahab addressed the third mate, “earn your name and give him something to soothe his mind till morning. Keep your seat, Mrs. Sparrow.”

  The steward appeared and cleared away our dishes. I felt most miserable that I had partaken of company, had eaten and drunk and tried my best to make merry, while my husband lay in chains. But in my feeling guilty, an issue became clear to me. Amongst the barrels in the hold, my face burning from the blow, I had pondered what to think of Kit, of our marriage. When my father struck my face, I slammed shut the door to my heart. Let him knock, it would not be opened. But Kit was mad, suffered in his madness, and that fact lent him innocence, inspired my pity.

  “Tonight, Captain Ahab,” I asked, “might I watch over my husband?”

  “Ye’ll need your strength tomorrow,” he said—not unkindly, but firmly. “Wait till we’re ready to quit the ship. We’ll have him up and ready. Then walk him off as if he were a normal man and go seek out your friend.”

  I blushed with shame, for I knew neither Charlotte’s last name nor where on the isle she was to be found. But perhaps Kit’s mind would be clear. I would wait and hope. And if he struck me again—well, I would ponder again.

  “Now,” Ahab announced, reaching into his coat and drawing out a cloth pouch. “We have five pieces of maple hard candy. Let us taste the mainland! I give you Vermont!” And he rolled out the candy onto the table the way one might roll dice. We all reached over for one of the amber lozenges and quietly tucked them in our mouths. At first, mine tasted of the cloth, but when that layer had melted off, pure sweetness filled my mouth, and I thought of maple trees all scarlet and gold in the fall, for we grew this tree in Kentucky, too.

  “I do thank you, Captain Ahab, for your dinner, and for all your hospitality to Kit and me.”

  “I wish ye well. Cover your head and hands and walk up on the deck with me. ’Tis the last night ye’ll ever stroll the Pequod.”

  Not having been in the open air for several days, I found Ahab’s invitation agreeable. On deck, I was surprised by the cleanliness and tidiness of the ship, all pinked by the sunset. The tryworks had been dismantled and the carpenter’s bench taken below, so there was a spacious
ness to the boards. The ship moved along smartly, and while the wind was steady and chill, it had no meanness to it. I listened to the slapping of the water against the hull and found the sound familiar and reassuring.

  “Ye have sailed the Pacific,” Ahab said, “with the Sussex.”

  “Yes,” I said—not at all eager to go into detail.

  “It’s strange to me,” he said, “that though we are this moment completely encircled with water, and it is the same in the Pacific, yet the Pacific always seems to my senses larger, more ultimate. The mind infects the senses, I think, casts an aura over them.”

  “And which sensation do you prefer? The little round or the greater one?”

  “When I am one place, I remember the other and want it.”

  “ ’Tis a character flaw,” I said and smiled.

  “If I develop none worse than that, I will feel that God is pleased with me.”

  His answer surprised me, for it contradicted his claim to having no religion. But I said nothing. The end of the pink light caught the ivory fittings of the Pequod. The belaying pins, which were in fact the teeth of sperm whale, made me somewhat uneasy, as though I stood not on a deck but upon a tongue inside a great flat jaw.

  “When I sat in the hold of the ship, the ribs curving up around me, I thought of Jonah.”

  “Many times I’ve felt the same.”

  For perhaps a quarter of an hour, we simply stood silently at the rail. A few dim stars appeared against the sky that still held some sunlight up in their domain. Out of nowhere, I heard my voice again. It rose naturally to the surface, the way I have seen some fish rise from the depth.

  “I associate you, Captain Ahab, with the color white,” I said.

  “My hair almost gone to white; the bits of ivory about the Pequod.”

  “You seem the opposite of my father, who always wore black, had black hair, carried a black buggy whip whenever he drove out of the yard.”

  “Well, the Pequod always sails under white canvas.”

  “Do you know of any instance in the whalery when that is not true?” I asked.

  “Not in the whalery, but it is an ancient sign. When the Greeks came home in the wooden walls, if the news be bad, they sailed under black. And in medieval times as well.”

  I remembered that Starbuck had said Ahab was a learned man, though Starbuck’s own reading was confined to the Bible.

  “But there is a way that you and my father are much alike.”

  “Aye?”

  “You both have a wild eye, a fiery eye. I saw yours when you set out to hunt the whale.”

  “And what did your father pursue?”

  “God.”

  “I could chase him, too.”

  Ahab’s eye roamed the newly starry sky, regarded the wind in the sails, then he bent his eye to the plowing prow of the ship.

  “But,” Ahab added, “where is he?”

  I was surprised at the pain in his question. “Are you, then, religious after all?” I felt disappointed. He had seemed a fellow skeptic, like Giles, like Kit.

  “Religion and God usually have very little to do with each other,” he said. “What do you think of the wind, Mrs. Sparrow? What Arctic news does it blow to Nantucket for the season?”

  “What does the word mean, ‘Nantucket’?”

  “It’s the Indians’ name: the faraway land, for its distance from the mainland. And Kentucky—its meaning?”

  “Also an Indian word—the dark and bloody land.”

  “Beware the treachery of words, Mrs. Sparrow. They mean one thing to one person and the opposite to another. They are like all conventional, land-born habits. Words seem to be well-woven baskets ready to hold your meaning, but they betray you with rotted corners and splintered stays.”

  “You mistrust all that is of the land.”

  “It pretends to permanence, but even mountains wear away, and the river finds a new bed, deserting the old though it may have served a millennium. So it is with humans.”

  “I think it is possible to be at home,” I said. “I have been there.”

  “The sea promises nothing, and so it is more to be trusted.”

  The night had grown cold, and I decided to terminate my time outside in the wind, but first taking courtesy leave of Captain Ahab, for I knew he would be busy the next day.

  He paid no attention to my heartfelt gratitude. Perhaps I expressed it too conventionally.

  “The sea,” he finished his comparison, “bears all her changeability on her face, and so is more kind.”

  “In her cruelty,” I added as I turned away.

  The glitter of the stars discomforted me.

  OF ALL THE BERTHS I’d had on ships, I preferred Starbuck’s. It had all the comforts of a coffin. The bed itself was wooden, only a bit wider than myself, but clean. There was an aisle to stand in which was the width of the bed. In it, beside the head of the bed, sat the one small chair, a convenient place to put one’s clothes or to set a candle. Beside the door was a tiny writing shelf that could be folded down and suspended on one side by a small-linked chain, for his writing in the ship’s log, and the chair could be pulled up under the shelf. Where to put the clothes, if one turned scribe? Well, there were three pegs along the wall, and a chest slipped under the bed. In the ceiling was set a green-glass bull’s-eye for funneling down the daylight. A sort of net was fastened against the wall alongside the bed. There Starbuck kept his Bible, and in its leaves there were a few dried grasses, some violets, and a pencil sketch of a woman who was certainly Mary.

  A very narrow red rag rug covered the strip of floor so exactly that it surely had been manufactured to its dimension. It was the color of cranberries and likely dyed with them. Probably Starbuck had been comforted hundreds of times by the color, but never with any conscious association to the cranberry bogs of Nantucket. I thought well of Mary for making her husband a red rug. If he could not have a hearth fire to cheer him, at least he could have the color red.

  I thought of my mother’s log-cabin quilt, with the red square in the center, though that was a redder red—a red the color of blood. And I had never associated the color with the idea of the bloody land. Nor could she have intended me to.

  To lie on this bed was like lying in the drawer of a well-made cabinet. Here I was contained. And the container ordered my confusion. Far too small for two people, for the lone person the room fit almost as well as a shell fits a turtle. It seemed protective. And my toes found a hot brick wrapped in flannel.

  I blew out the candle that I had set on my chair, and I listened. Would I ever hear these sounds of wooden ship, of passage through the waves, of night wind in the sails, again? Would I ever make my way alone over the sea again? What had happened was terrible beyond anything I could have imagined, and yet…and yet…I had lived. I would manage. I touched my face, the still-sore cheekbone. I would not be struck again.

  I listened far into the night. Then I rose, dressed, and tiptoed to Ahab’s cabin. Ahab and Starbuck snored peacefully; from Kit there came a low, continuous moan, at the same pitch as the wind in the sails, but with a human timbre. One wrist was manacled to the wall in a low place, and he was lying down. I sat beside his head with my back supported by the wall and lifted his head and shoulders into my lap. I cradled and comforted him and kissed his face.

  I shall take care of you, Kit, my lovely, I promised. I shall pick you berries and plums. You shall have a radish as big as a washtub. I’ll get fishhooks and stand on a smooth rock beside the ocean and fish for you. I’ll dry fish and I’ll pickle them. I’ll sew plain and fancy while I wait for fish to bite. We shall have jams and jellies, quince and elderberry. We will harvest seaweed till we have a great stiff stack of it. I shall get us a sheep and shear her and spin and knit from her. What needs anyone a large house? Ours will be like a double cupboard, built warm and hugely thick. And you shall do just as you please all day long.

  WHEN I AWOKE, both Ahab’s hammock and Starbuck’s pallet were empty. Kit still sl
ept in my lap. Gently I slid from under him. As quickly as I could tidy myself, I ran to the deck.

  Land! A hundred masts in the harbor! Buildings! The high tower of the Unitarian Church, its dome wrapped in gold leaf!

  “ ’Morning, Mrs. Sparrow,” Starbuck called out.

  “ ’Tis no longer the far land,” Ahab called, “but the near land—Nantucket!”

  CHAPTER 71: Ahab Prepares for the Next Voyage

  KIT AND I packed our clothes inside the pillowcase I had borrowed from Sallie and the Albatross. Standing at the prow with Kit, among the sailors, I watched the island festooned with buildings grow larger. Ahead of us sailed another whaler, the Boar, and the airstream behind her bore a horrible odor. It seemed a combination of rotted fish and rancid grease.

  “She’s coming in dirty,” one of the sailors said.

  “Her flag flies lowered,” another said.

  And others spoke disparagingly of the filth, till Starbuck put in an explanation: the captain must have died during the voyage, and the first mate had lacked the authority to make the crew clean up as they should have. He pointed out, too, that she was from Australia, and it made little sense for her to be docking here.

  They seemed scarcely competent to steer the ship, and we closed on her. The deck was in disarray with ropes and spare sails, harpoons; even a dangerous cutting spade lay in the rubble.

  “Look up,” I said to Kit, “at the church spire.”

  He quietly took my hand. Then he meekly asked, “What do you notice, Una?”

  I had only noted the sunlight on the golden dome, but quickly I supplied ideas for Kit to chew. “See, the clock portion is a cube, a square, but the next level, the one all louvered, is hexagonal, and there the square is moving toward curving. And the third level is the round drum of the cupola, and that is topped with the dome, which is almost a hemisphere.”

  “You would have me transform like that building?”