Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Charlotte put the little fox on a stool before the fire. “Sing, Folly,” she said, and the little fox lifted her nose and yipped two syllables. “Higher,” Charlotte commanded and pointed to the ceiling, and the animal howled at a higher pitch. “And higher.” Was she approximating a tune? Was I hearing the old church tune my father liked, “Holy, Holy, Holy”? I held my breath. Would the uncanny animal be able to continue? Following the jabbing of Charlotte’s finger in the air, the fox stretched her mouth open and yawned a syllable rather like “Lord,” but the entirety of the next phrase, “Lord God Almighty,” was beyond her. Or beyond my imagining. Then Charlotte held open her arms, and the fox leapt into them. With her bare fingers, Charlotte fished right into her bowl and brought out a nice piece of milky cod to reward her pet.

  “Now go outside,” Charlotte commanded. The vixen ran like a streak across the floor, under the table, where we sat, toward the door, at the bottom of which was cut a small hole hung with a flap of leather.

  “When the real cold comes,” Mr. Hussey said, “I’ll have to stopper it up, but she knows how to ask to go out.”

  I nodded appreciation and smiled. I did not tattle on Folly, who as she passed under the table had taken just time to nip my ankle again, but that night as we got into bed, I showed the punctured place to Kit and whispered what had happened.

  “You shouldn’t complain,” he said and looked at me strangely.

  The remark made me shudder, but I was happy to be on land, so beautifully fed and kindly received. And we were about to lie in a real bed together, on land, for the first time.

  “I want to take you from behind,” he said.

  I was uncertain of his meaning, but I quickly said, “No.”

  “You don’t understand. You need to let me.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want that.” And I thought of what I had heard of the practices of some soldiers and sailors long without women.

  “I need you to let me. It’s what Giles did to me.”

  “Giles?”

  “Giles wanted me. It surprises you, doesn’t it? I hadn’t meant to tell. It was why we couldn’t be friends any longer.”

  I would have thought he was delusional, except for the last sentence. The hiatus in their friendship, while we were on the Sussex, had stood an open question. Kit’s explanation did not so much answer the question as engulf it.

  “Giles said for me to pretend I was you.”

  “Stop,” I cried, almost too loudly.

  “Now you must be you for me.”

  My defense, smaller than a child’s sand wall, seemed swept away, and I rolled onto my stomach. I began to cry into my pillow as he lifted my gown.

  “Now you are my friend,” he said.

  My body was not made for this, and it was cruel. Kit gnashed his teeth behind my ear and groaned. Giles? Was that the word I heard? When Kit lay spent upon me, he whispered in my ear, “I love you. Rest now.”

  Who was that “you” to whom he spoke? And of what rest?

  AS WE AWOKE in the morning, he pulled my head to his chest tenderly and held me there. “Thank you, Una,” he breathed. “Sometimes when a husband and wife don’t want to conceive, they love each other like that.”

  I did not believe this notion had motivated Kit in the least, but still I kept my ear against the soft thuds of his heart. My body contracted with the painful shame Kit had inflicted on me in that bed.

  Kit stroked my hair as though I were his pet. Perhaps he would be less tortured now. Perhaps he needed to pass on the pain, to do to me what had been done to him. How was it that he knew I could not refuse if he told me Giles had wronged him? No, not for Giles had I lain with my face in the pillow. Because I knew the depth of Kit’s injury, I could not deny him.

  I heard the Husseys stirring in the next room. Suppose life had sent a Mr. Hussey to me as a spouse? I would have said no to that. But because Kit spoke to me from the land of pain, I could not say no to him. I hoped he would not ask that of me again and wondered if Giles had asked him many times.

  I was glad in our stillness together, but our thoughts were separate. Yet he held me as though I were dear to him. My letters home! Inadequate apologies, pale explanations! But Absalom Boston had posted them.

  I wished it were night and we could now fit together with the passion of husband and wife. Should we have a child, might we name him Giles and thus seal up a wound and a loss that each of us bore? We three might form a healed and healthy unity. But when I sat up in bed and looked into Kit’s eyes in the morning sunlight, I saw on their horizon the sure storm clouds of gathering madness.

  CHAPTER 72: Breakfast

  SUPPOSE there were an assemblage of musicians whom one was used to hearing in the front chamber of such-and-such a house. And suppose you were a thousand miles, no, leagues, a whole ocean width away, and you yet heard those same instruments tuning up. Without going to look, as first a low note and then a squawk and next a toot came to your ears, then, no matter how unlikely it was, you would entertain the hypothesis that these so familiar sounds must be emanating from that same group that you thought yourself to have left in another life.

  So it was that when I heard a great stamping of feet and an entering of certain voices into the Try Pots Tavern, I concluded fifteen bulls must resolve themselves into something like the able-bodied seamen of the Pequod.

  And so also concluded Kit.

  “The devils have followed us,” he said.

  I came close to laughing, but instead I replied, “That’s the hortatory tone of Mr. Flask. Only instead of urging the men to break their backs a-rowing, he’s demanding a swift passage of porridge and codfish gravy.”

  “I think they’re speaking of us. Or they’re going to.”

  “Not unless we have assumed the names of porridge and gravy.”

  “What do names matter? They’re only code.”

  I thought of how Captain Ahab, a man far saner than Kit, had said much the same of words. My ears had detected no evidence that Ahab was with his former crew, and, indeed, I was sure that he did not hobnob with them, for all of his respect for, say, Mr. Starbuck (whose voice was also missing from the company).

  “That’s Mr. Stubb’s pipe I smell. Come, Kit, let’s go down and have breakfast, too.”

  “We won’t be able to stay here if they talk about us.”

  “What’s to say?” I asked defiantly, though I knew an answer: Ye have Kit Sparrow, do ye, Mr. Hussey? Had to be chained to Ahab’s wall. And his wife…

  “They don’t know anything about me.” I was surprised to hear my defense, as though I were afraid.

  “I think you told Captain Ahab. I heard you at his dinner table. You drank blood together, didn’t you?”

  A plume rose from my heart. Red, as from a whale harpooned in a vital organ. “No, Kit,” I stammered.

  “I won’t see them.” His voice was growing louder.

  “Let’s, then, take a walk. They’ll leave and then we’ll breakfast with the Husseys.”

  And holding him by the hand, I coaxed him out of the room and down the stairs. It had seemed warm upstairs, but when we stepped out the back door, the November chill of Nantucket washed over us, and I did not dare suggest we go back for coats. “Let’s run,” I said, and we rushed down a small hill behind the tavern.

  The distant, hushed sucking of the surf charmed my ear, and before long I had led us to a desolate beach and to the sea, which we had but so shortly quitted. We walked beside that heaving, and it was a gray heaving that day, though the waves turned over in whiteness. Close to our feet, it was as though pitchers and pitchers of foaming milk were being poured out on the sand.

  What colossal, relentless waste it all was—this pouring and pouring, this rush to nothing, a few bubbles sinking into the ground. And the heave and fling of it, till I wanted to tell it to hush, to rest. Sometimes I chose a surge and thought to myself, “There, that was the last.” And there would be a deceptive pause, as though my will had worked.<
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  “I’m trying to stop the waves,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t,” Kit said.

  “You tried to stop the sun.”

  “Well, it is gone,” Kit said quietly, “today.”

  I felt his warm hand in mine, and I wondered if I would go mad with him this time.

  “Try to be well,” I said to Kit urgently.

  “I am all right now.”

  I stopped our walking and inspected him. “Shall we have breakfast then?” While I waited for his reply, I watched the sea and its processes. In long gray rolls the water built itself higher, and then at one end, the shape broke over into foam, and the froth came traveling across the top of the roll, and all went to flatness, flowing white fringes. As though they had pushing knuckles of water behind them, the fringy white fingers came scampering up the sand.

  Kit knelt down. With both hands, he formed the sand into a little mound, a cake. “Una?” he said, looking up at me shyly. “Will you squat down with me?”

  I did, wrapping my skirt across the tops of my knees.

  He stuck his finger in the little sand heap and held some grains toward me. “Would you try my cake? Cinnamon and sugar.”

  “No, Kit,” I answered gently, as one might to a child whose fantasy of mud pies had carried him away.

  Kit slowly put his finger in his own mouth.

  “It’s gritty,” he said.

  I stood up and held my hand out to him. “Let’s walk again. I’m cold when we stay still.”

  We stood up and walked. In answer to my need for warmth, he put his arm across my shoulders.

  “Look at all the skate egg cases,” I said. The beach was littered with the small black, leathery rectangles, from each corner of which extended a kind of hook. “My uncle called them mermaid’s purses.”

  “I liked your uncle. He was a merman himself.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “He escaped the ordinary.”

  “So have you, Kit.”

  He did not dispute me, nor speak at all, but kissed my cheek. I felt a bit of pride; at last I had given him something good.

  CHAPTER 73: Shame

  THOSE LATE FALL DAYS, I managed him. He could be guided. He did not get better. Charlotte remained hopeful. “He’s not had time enough,” she said, “only a month or so—it’s not enough time.”

  I took him Christmas Day into the town, thinking perhaps some of the Christmas cheer, the sight of happy faces and families, the aroma of stewing fowl and roasting joint, might conspire to raise his spirits. Charlotte and Mr. Hussey I left to their endless chowder making, though Charlotte was also steaming a pudding. Kit came with me docilely, but he insisted on walking just at my heel. Finally, he said, “Call me Fido, Una, for I am your faithful dog.”

  I stopped at once. “You are my beloved husband, my best friend.”

  “But scratch behind my ears, anyway,” he replied with the light of teasing in his eye.

  “Gladly.”

  But as I scratched in his hair, his expression changed and suddenly he snapped at my fingers.

  “Let’s walk on now,” I said, turning my face so that he would not see my tears. My cheek remembered the terrible slap he had given me on the Pequod. A chill went through me, but surely I was not afraid. And how was my mother spending Christmas? And had Torchy pinned a wreath to the tower?

  The Nantucket weather alone was cause enough to shiver. All is gray in Nantucket in winter: the sea, the sky, even the earth is matted with low-growing, twiggy plants, all gray and stark, and the shingles covering not only the roof but also the sides of the houses have weathered a matching shade of gloom.

  In the town, the gray doors were bedecked with wreaths of bayberry. Several times we saw a red candle burning in a window, though it was still afternoon. I wanted to walk to the bake shop to buy a cranberry-and-nut cake to share with Kit, and while we walked down Vestal Street, I heard piano music tumbling from one of the houses. At the keyboard sat a young woman of about my own age. Younger brothers and sisters were about her, and a gray-haired man, doubtless her father, turned the pages of the music for her.

  “William Mitchell,” Kit suddenly said. “He sets the chronometers for the captains.”

  There was something in Mitchell’s face, wreathed by his family as he was, that very much pleased me. I wished that Kit and I might have been members of that circle—not as husband and wife, but as children, being instructed and provided for. Just then, the family dog rose up from the door stoop to greet us, wagging his tail as though we were cousins. He seemed to smile in the way that bulldogs sometimes have. Kit dropped to one knee and stroked the massive, wrinkled forehead.

  “Here’s an inscription on his collar,” Kit said. He read: “ ‘I am His Highness’ dog at Kew, / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?’ ”

  “It’s a quotation from some eighteenth-century wit,” I quickly said.

  “A philosophical dog,” Kit said.

  “He doesn’t know what his collar says.”

  “Did I say he did? You make mountains out of molehills, Una. It’s something I don’t like about you.”

  I stood quietly for a moment. Yet I felt angry. Was I to be criticized whensoever he liked? Who does not sometimes have a critical judgment of a companion? But we do not have to inflict our thoughts on those who try to be pleasant with us.

  Kit stood up, and the Mitchell dog lost interest in us. He walked to a stump and lifted his leg. “Ha,” Kit sneered. “Natural philosophy, unbridled.” The dog scratched the earth a few times with his hind legs and walked back to his own threshold. As though quoting the dog, Kit muttered, “I piss where I please.” Again the beast’s face seemed to smile, but not particularly at us. All the while, the young woman played the piano. “Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” they sang lustily. Her father turned another page and then smoothed it with his hand.

  “Shall we get our cake now?” I asked.

  “I thirst,” Kit said.

  Were those not some of Jesus’ own words? Did I now hear portent in every utterance of Kit’s? But I followed him as he walked toward the town pump.

  Kit worked the handle and bent to drink. After that he walked three times around the pump, eyeing it all the while. With just such a baleful eye, long ago, he had regarded the Argand lamps and spat on the light, just before I was blinded by lightning. Suddenly Kit unbuttoned his trousers, took himself out into the air, and directed a stream of urine onto the pump. I saw that another woman was approaching the pump, and I hurried to stand between her and Kit, to shield him from view. I spread wide my skirt.

  “You’ll not ruin this,” Kit said.

  Then he doused my skirt on one side where I held it out. In a low voice, I urgently admonished him to stop, but it was too late. At the sight of a man pissing on a woman’s skirt, the unknown woman let out a shriek. I covered my face with my hands and cried bitterly and publicly.

  When next I looked at my husband, two men stood on either side of him. For a moment, he seemed to embrace their waists—all the time with his trousers unloosed and his member bare and nakedly hanging down before him. One of them grasped Kit’s trousers, and the other adroitly tucked in his member.

  Someone tried to put her arms around me, but I ran away a little distance and stood there and watched, sobbing, almost hysterical, all the while. I would not abandon Kit, but I could not bring myself to stand beside him. The odor of his urine rose from my skirt. A number of women did come to surround me loosely, hiding me in their midst. The constable was summoned, and after some short talk with Kit, he came to me and said Kit must spend the night in gaol, for his acts of exposure and defilement of the public pump, till the judge might be consulted. With that I broke from the group and ran, half blinded with tears, back toward the Try Pots, my wetted skirt flapping against my knee. I stank with his urine. As I struggled through the streets toward the road, I thought, I can leave it all behind—run faster—I can leave it behind in the town.

  The Chri
stmas Day sun was beginning to set before me—all gold around the sun itself and mauve and purple to the north. Scarcely noticing the roadbed, I stumbled and cried and rushed myself most miserably westward.

  When I reached home, Charlotte saw my wet skirt and that I was distraught. She followed me up to my room, and, my own hands shaking too much to unfasten my skirt, Charlotte unhooked the waistband.

  “A dog?” she asked. Her nose prompted the question.

  “No. Kit did it.”

  “Kit?” A stillness descended upon her. “Where is Kit?”

  “Gaol. They saw him.”

  She gathered up the garment, and my stockings, and said I was to “never mind.” She would wash my clothes for me. I was to get in bed. But I took a rag first, and water and soap from my washstand, and bathed my leg. My skin felt scalded from the urine. Then I did crawl into bed, biting my thumb to keep from wailing.

  Why had I yoked myself to a madman? Because he had given me a seashell comb for my hair? Experimentally, he had wondered if the Venus comb would fulfill the function promised by its name. Giles had given me a rose in the tradition of high romance and assumed its decay.

  Again I saw the yellow stream directed at my skirt, the rosy head of his penis held in his hand. Once I found a dead tortoise and reached for the shell to make buttons or tortoiseshell hair combs. But when I turned it over, the shell was unbearable with maggots. Just so my hand drew back now, when I imagined reaching out to Kit. My body shivered.

  Before long, Charlotte appeared with a tray, lighted by a red candle. Thus she brought me a serving of plum pudding, covered with white hard sauce. Between her arm and her body, she carried a square of folded cloth. After Charlotte had me sit up and put the tray across my lap, she shook out the fabric.

  “As Providence would have it,” she said, “I made you a new skirt for Christmas.” It was dark, forest green, and I thought of the cedar trees of Kentucky. Charlotte sat on the bed and chatted with me, never mentioning Kit. My mother had remained loyal to my father, but he had not hit her. He had not made water on her.