Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Charlotte’s kindness, as always, soothed and healed me. Before long, she was telling me a light story that she had heard in the inn. She wanted us to be friends. The plum pudding was in itself so sweet, so rich, so savory and plump with figs and currants, that it seemed we were indeed having a bit of Christmas. I ate slowly. The dark, strangely rewarding flavor, the rectangle of my bed, my new skirt, never worn and darkly green, fanned over the counterpane; Charlotte and I together on the bed, her gentle, entertaining talk—taken all together these composed a little world of our own making. Here safety and order, a rich sweetness, reigned.

  CHAPTER 74: B’twixt

  LATE IN THE YEAR, between Christmas Day and the beginning of the New Year, late in the afternoon, I sat in my room, so generously provided by Charlotte Hussey above the Try Pots, and stared out the window at the pale gray sky and the darker, slate gray of the sea. Even the form of the sea resembled slate, striated with small, rigid-appearing ripples. A flock of gray shorebirds flew by in the distance—a gray blur. “ ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,’ ” I thought, quoting Shakespeare, of my existence. Kit would be released in a few days.

  I was having my period—at least I was not pregnant—but the monthly condition contributed to my mood of woe and dejection. No letter had come either from the Island or from Kentucky, and I felt completely alone in the world while Kit lay in gaol. The prospect of his release did nothing to brighten the seascape.

  Staring out at the drably rolling ocean, I heard a soft plunk. I turned around to see Charlotte’s vixen, Folly, making a nest for herself in the middle of my bed. The fox covered her black, pointed nose with a single wrap of her bushy tail, and then peeked out over the ruff with her glittering eyes. It made me mad.

  “Shoo,” I cried at her and clapped my hands together. “Get off! Go!” I commanded.

  But the vixen contemptuously closed her eyes as though to sleep.

  I put my knee on the bed and clapped loudly right at her ear. She did not move. I was afraid to lift her. Well did I remember the sharp nips she had given my ankle. I lifted up an edge of the counterpane to roll her off. Her eyes opened, and she seemed indignant that at a remove, I with my human wit could yet dislodge her.

  “With this soft and bending plane,” I told the fox, grasping the counterpane on one side, “I lever you out of my spot.”

  I stood high on the bed, lifted up on the coverlet, and thus contrived to roll Folly to the edge. She, being not without her own intelligence, foresaw her fate, jumped down, and quickly ran under the bed. There she hunched. She lifted her lip to show her teeth. Then I wrenched off my shoe and threw it at her. As my aim proved poor, I quickly pulled off the other. She yelped when it hit her and adjusted her position, but she did not leave. The little beast should have selected someone else to harass.

  I looked around for something to throw and found a rusty flatiron used to prop the door in summer. I checked under the bedskirt to see which side Folly was closer to, and then I circled. She was not dumb, and as I circled the bed, she again moved. I took the flatiron and beat on the floor with it and yelled.

  At this racket, Charlotte soon appeared in the door.

  “She was in my bed!” I exclaimed.

  “Was she?” Charlotte asked. She snapped her fingers, and to my amazement the fox immediately came out from under the bed and jumped onto it.

  “Just like that,” I said.

  Then, in the air, Charlotte drew a number of circles, loops like an airy lariat, and then stuck a pointing finger through the invisible figure, toward the door. The fox leapt off the bed and went briskly out the door.

  My lip trembling, I turned to the window so that Charlotte would not see my distress. It was her control, her mastery over her world, even the animals in it, that shamed me to tears. “Thank you,” I said.

  I heard her walking around the bed to join me. She put her hand on my shoulder.

  “You did not see Kit yesterday?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Nor the day before.”

  “There is no use to see him. He lies in his filth. He curses me.”

  “But he is mad.”

  “And will be so again. And then? He’ll be gaoled again. When he raves his worst, he asks me to marry him. When his dementia clears, he tells me he has changed his mind.”

  “Was it not a proper wedding, Una?”

  “It was at sea.”

  “Perhaps then a sea wedding does not bind on land?” she went on. Was her point a legal one, or sarcasm?

  “We have shared a bed,” I said. “That binds.”

  She took her hand from my shoulder. Suddenly she made strange clicking sounds with her tongue, and instantly the fox ran in and nipped my ankle!

  “You caused your Folly to bite me!” I exclaimed. “And to claim my bed.”

  “Yes.” Her face was serene and composed. “Would you like to hear her sing again to the glory of God?”

  “Charlotte,” I said, “I marvel at you.”

  “Your mind is like a bright light, Una. Unable to shine on itself.”

  Her serenity and her beauty kept me from labeling her a witch with a fox for a familiar. Perhaps she had worked a witch cure: perhaps I needed to be nipped out of my self-pity and isolation. I put my hand on Charlotte’s shoulder, and in touching the point of her collarbone, I knew she was as thoroughly mortal as myself, a woman coping with what life brought her. “Would you explain yourself?” I asked my friend, for she had befriended me.

  “Yes,” she said. “But let it be with tea and scones and not in your room.” She turned her gaze and her body from the window, avoided my eyes, and led me out of the room. “Sometimes I like the public space,” she said. “It’s where the most private things can be said, confidentially.”

  There were, in fact, customers in the tavern, three large men whom I took to be from the South Pacific basin, for they had the kind of blue tattoos on their cheeks that I had seen on wooden artifacts from that region. They themselves, in the color of their skin, had a kind of mellow, wooden appearance, like sandalwood. Charlotte smiled at her husband and told him she would not be getting up to help with the service. She handed me two brown mugs to carry; she plucked two large scones from the warming oven, wrapped them in a cloth, and set them on a woven tray beside a large brown teapot. She led us to a booth where the backs of the facing seats were so high that we had something of a private alcove, though to my left the business of the tavern continued and to my right, through a small, diamond-mullioned window, lay a patch of the gray world. My eye noted the carvings on the table before me, for one of them was a sailor’s name and the word “Sussex” with the date of her last sailing. I sat in the place where a man now dead, one I had surely known, as it was the year of my own passage, had sat.

  “Did you know him?” I asked, putting my finger on the incised name.

  “Yes. He was from Nantucket. He sailed three times from New Bedford with the Sussex. But the last time, of course, he did not return.”

  “I suppose then,” I said, thinking that my husband had grown up also on Nantucket though he shipped out of New Bedford, “that Kit knew him.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Did you?”

  “Yes, but not well.” I felt sad and weak.

  “Then you met him in New Bedford before the ship sailed?”

  Immediately I saw that she had trapped me, that I had made an error, for Kit had said that he and I had met by chance on the Albatross. Charlotte eyed me closely.

  “You’re not going to make Folly nip me, are you?” I said.

  “Do you deserve it?”

  “Who are you to judge?” I tried to defend myself.

  Our questions were not aggressive, but they were on the edge of it. She unwrapped the warm scone and handed it to me, along with a small crock of butter and a spreading knife.

  I tasted the fragrant bread—it was baked with plump, soft raisins in it—and told her sincerely what a wonderful cook she was.

&nbs
p; “Mr. Hussey would not have married me otherwise,” she answered. “The first Mrs. Hussey was well known as a cook, and he did not want someone who would bring him down in the world.”

  “You bring Mr. Hussey down?” I glanced at him: spry, amiable, certainly, but wrinkled—much older—bowlegged. Above all, he seemed ordinary. Another part of me smiled to think that I had adopted one of Kit’s measures for a human.

  “Youth doesn’t last,” Charlotte said, with a bit of edge in her voice. “I could not through any act of will make my youth last. Cooking recommended me with more assurance.”

  “I look to sewing,” I said. “It’s how I’d earn our keep.”

  “Sewing has no aroma,” Charlotte said, smiling.

  “But it lasts longer than a scone,” I answered. I took another appreciative bite of mine, following it with a slosh of tea. “Cinnamon,” I said.

  “Yes, with a grate of dried orange peel.”

  “I doubt that anyone in the world is a better cook than you, Charlotte.”

  “I thought that Kit would marry me,” she said.

  “How can you not hate me?”

  “Look at Kit.”

  “Still he is Kit.”

  “And, you’re thinking, so is Mr. Hussey yet Mr. Hussey.” Her face turned crimson all of a sudden. It was a tide of blushing swept over her, and I knew she would reveal something remarkable. “Mr. Hussey loves me in such a way, in our bed where it is dark, that I can imagine him to be whomsoever I choose. For he is all men in one. Every night, there is nothing but newness in his touch. His imagination is beyond bounds. He speaks to me, and he never says the same words twice. He touches me in ways that I beg him to remember and do again, but the next night, again, all is new. Mr. Hussey is kind and loving even to my toes. I did not know, could not have known, that yonder nimble, deep-creased man could be such—both servant and king. And most odd is that he says he did not know it himself, that never in his life has it been so before, but he says it is me alone who makes him full of glory, and that it will always be so, as long as I can cook.”

  Someplace in the midst of this astonishing speech, she had reached out her hand and held mine. How urgently, how vivaciously, she wanted me to know the quality of her marriage. Could it be so? Involuntarily, I glanced at Mr. Hussey, who was carrying a large tray of chowder bowls up on his shoulder, and at that moment he looked at his wife, and his tongue licked just the corner of his mouth and his grooved face was washed with—yes, I may as well name it—glory. I saw that it was true. They were inflamed with each other.

  “Kit is a good cook,” burst from me.

  “Yes. He was. He courted me with buns.”

  “And me as well.”

  “I thought that Kit was dead. Gone down with the Sussex. Una, how he startled me, materializing beyond the steam from the chowder.”

  Now it was my turn to reveal the truth. “I was on the Sussex, disguised as a cabin boy.”

  “You went to sea!”

  “Yes.”

  “How could you?”

  I laughed. “Since I was a cabin boy, no great strength was expected of me.”

  “You ran away to sea?”

  I thought she had never been so astounded in her life. It pleased me. I nodded.

  “Just like a boy?”

  I nodded.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  I sipped my tea. “So why do you have Folly-fox bite me?”

  “You deserve it, for your disloyalty to Kit.”

  “Disloyal?”

  Her face, which had blushed with thoughts of her marriage bed, now drained of color to a milky white. As she spoke it seemed to me her teeth grew more pointed and foxlike.

  “You let yourself grow discouraged. You neglect to visit him. This is the time between Christmas and the New Year, a bland, waiting time that you could fill with possibility. Kit is your husband. Kit Sparrow, Kit Sparrow! I would have died for Kit Sparrow.”

  “I have tried to be a good wife. No, it was not trying. It was my heart’s desire.”

  “If you leave him, leave him to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Hussey will equip him a room here, with barred windows, and I will tend him. It would be a less lonely cell than the one he lies in.”

  “Would Mr. Hussey let you keep Kit?”

  Now she looked at me with fury. “Do you doubt my loyalty to Mr. Hussey? He would not. He knows me too well. I know myself too well. I’ve promised him. There is nothing in heaven or earth that could come between Mr. Hussey and myself. The world is not closed off, Una, because a man and his wife make a small, inviolate circle at the center of it.”

  “Certainly,” I replied, “you have let me, let Kit and me, hang on to the edge of your world.”

  “No, I have made you welcome, and Kit as well, though Kit betrayed me.”

  “You were not engaged, I think.”

  “I thought him dead and vowed to myself I would give to any husband all the passion that could not be given to Kit. But Kit had no reason to think me dead. And yet he married you. Before he ever came back to Nantucket.”

  “His life had changed.”

  “As you know well, he was yet Kit; I was yet myself.”

  “When the Sussex went down, a few of us survived, for a time, in a whaleboat. Giles was there, too.”

  “Giles had a volcano in him. I never knew what it was.”

  “I don’t know if Giles fell by accident or if he killed himself.”

  Some of the natural color returned to Charlotte’s face. She considered the idea, and, finding no explanation in her own thinking, asked me why Giles might have decided to end his life.

  “At the end, in the whaleboat, it was only we three who survived.” But then I stopped. I feared that if I continued the story, she would never look at me again with the same trust in my humanity. We had broken a tabu for which there could be no forgiveness. I regarded the innocence of her face, her plump, chinalike cheeks, her vibrant black eyes and glossy curls.

  “You can say,” she said.

  “We lived off their flesh and blood—the others.”

  “Did you?” She drew back, her eyes round.

  I would not say it again.

  “Him too?” She put her finger nervously on the name cut in the table.

  “I don’t know. My mind refuses to remember who. Sometimes I see a pair of pointed shoes. Somebody’s watch cap.”

  With both hands, she reached across and took mine, my fingers still curled around the scone, though I had ceased to eat.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “Whatever it took to bring you here and alive. I’m glad, Una Sparrow. And I will never tell.”

  I felt the tears fall down my cheeks.

  “Stop now,” she said. “Or Folly will bite you.”

  But I could not stop. I put my head down on my folded arms and commenced to sob.

  She sat there, across from me in the booth, for a while, patted my head. And then she slipped away. Dimly, I heard her go about the business of the tavern. She did not send the fox to nip me. After a while, a great stillness came over me. It was as though the sea had ceased her heaving, and she lay a motionless plane of gray.

  From my mind’s eye, I turned to the actual window, across which flew a flock of blackbirds. They flew as a group, but the size of their shape constantly contracted and expanded. What held their flying together, what allowed its varying? They were gone, and I did not know. Yet here came another flock even larger, and after that a third, moving swiftly but enlarging and contracting like breathing lungs.

  Some light was left in the afternoon, and gradually the idea formed in my mind that I should go again to the gaol to visit Kit. I went up to my room to fetch a shawl, for I knew night would come on, and it would be cold on the walk home.

  Charlotte seemed to know my mind and where I was off to. Before I went out the door, she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. I was surprised to find that all the time I had clutched the scone, even
to taking it outside with me.

  CHAPTER 75: Enter: The Gaoler and the Judge

  THE COLE AIR invigorated me, and I walked hard and fast, hoping to gain the streets of Nantucket before nightfall. With the clearing of my head, I ate the raisin-studded bread as I walked.

  The wind was penetran, and I wished I had cloaked myself in two shawls. I walked fast to heat my blood. I had told Charlotte. I had told. Whatever had been in her recoil initially, she had accepted me on the rebounding. She had said she was glad I was alive. She had wanted to take care of Kit. My mind whirled between these points, but most important—she had not labeled me a monster. Not a brute. Not an animal.

  I wanted to tell Kit—we were acceptable. At least to Charlotte. Charlotte, who had never left Nantucket but yet had a generosity, a largeness of heart, that encircled us. Kit might not be fit to hear the news. I would have to wait. I felt health pouring into me as I walked. I felt my own strength. Charlotte, Charlotte the healer. Perhaps Kit should have married her. Perhaps she had health and passion far beyond my own to offer. And her loyalty. She had shamed me there. Yet, Kit had chosen me—had married his guilt? When I thought of Kit, hope died quickly.

  THERE WERE STREAKS of pink in the gray sky when I reached Nantucket town, and an inky blackness was gathering in the northeast over the rooftops. Inside the homes, a few candles and lamps already burned. People on the streets seemed homeward bound, scurrying to escape nightfall and the intensifying cold. I opened the wooden door to the gaol without knocking and stepped into the room. To my surprise, the keeper was not in attendance. To my greater surprise, instead of seeing Kit, I found his cell occupied by the old Indian Abram Quary, dressed in Kit’s clothes.

  Upon recognizing me, Quary said, “He help me—I help him.”

  I was speechless, but my mind filled with dread and anxiety. Unsupervised, Kit would surely fall into a terrible state. He wouldn’t think to eat or to find shelter. Quary meant well, no doubt, but his “help” was nothing but endangering.