Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “Tashtego,” Quary began again.

  “Tashtego?” Yes, I knew the name—the Indian harpooner who had hired on with the Pequod.

  Quary’s mind wandered back to the old times when schools of blackfish had beached themselves, and a person could walk for half a mile without foot ever touching sand by stepping from one whale to another. Quary and Tashtego had built a small boat and taken a small whale. They had gorged themselves for days.

  He had brought Kit a basketful of dried strips of the whale meat and a bowl of beach-plum preserves to dress it with. To the keeper, the Indian had also given meat and jam, but that jam had been infused with powerful sleeping herbs. When the drug had done its work, Quary undressed Kit and redressed him in his own clothes. In his simplicity, he seemed to assume that a mere change of clothes constituted an adequate deception and that color of skin or arrangement of hair would go unnoticed. He had led Kit out of his cell and out the front door of the gaol.

  “He will be lost!” I exclaimed. “And cold!”

  But Quary unfolded for me the rest of his planning. Tashtego, waiting with warm clothing, would row Kit first to the Vineyard—Tash’s own home—in the boat and then from the Vineyard to the mainland. Not to a city, no, but through the countryside. Tashtego knew some of the Penobscot of Maine, to whom he would entrust Kit. Those friends would, in turn, guide Kit to Canada. Tribe by tribe, Kit would be guided west until he came to the people who believed that to be mad was the same as to have arrived at home.

  A cold fire raced through my brain. It was a good plan. What better could have been done? In Nantucket, his name was already Lunatic. His life might become a series of incarcerations. But I thought of the weary miles, the cruelty of the weather. Then I saw Kit inside some Indian shelter, a hogan thickly insulated as a beaver’s house. I imagined him eating venison stew, his ravings incomprehensible, but, for the Indians, in a language they did not understand. Don’t foul yourself! Honor their home. I heard myself offering these injunctions. In reality, they were in the small boat, skirting the island. Quary said that when the gaoler awoke after an hour’s sleep, he had quickly discovered Kit’s absence.

  “Gold, gold,” Quary said, inexplicably swirling his forearm around his head. But he made me to understand that the gaoler would soon return.

  Then Quary asked me to take the key from the drawer of the table and release him. I could not refuse, no matter what the consequence. Once liberated, he moved as quickly as the shadow of a bird, across the room and out. Almost as quickly, I laid the key on the table and followed Quary.

  In the street, he had already disappeared. I began my walk home, my body rigid with anxiety. With each step I feared being arrested by a shout or a firm hand grasping my arm. But neither shout nor restraint came. From a tavern burst a group of bundled-up citizens, led by the turnkey. Their voices were excited, but not angry. Quickly they rushed past me, clustering around the gaoler. I reversed my direction and made myself follow after them toward the gaol. I went unnoticed.

  When they disappeared into the log building, no doubt expecting to question Quary, a boldness came upon me. I waited, then watched them emerge, splitting in groups of two or three and going in many directions.

  I approached the gaoler. He wore a good coat and cap, and a scarf wrapped across the lower half of his face, but his nose had a clean cut to it, and his eyes, too, suggested clarity.

  “I came to visit Kit,” I said. “He was gone. The cell was empty, and the key upon the table.”

  “The Indian took him,” the gaoler said. “Old Abram Quary.”

  “He is as addled as Kit,” I said.

  “Abram Quary does not disrespect the town pump.”

  “Kit was to have been released at the New Year. It’s but three days early.”

  “You would have me not to search for him, Mrs. Sparrow?”

  “He has no place to go but home. You could come for him there tomorrow.”

  The gaoler, being a reasonable man, proposed we should talk with the judge, and together we walked without further conversation toward his house.

  Guard him, guide him: my prayer was to Tashtego. Again I felt the tip of his feather slide against my scalp. I had saved the feather, in a drawer in our room, at home.

  THIS WAS A HOUSE—the abode of Judge Austin Lord—as large as three ships. When we stepped into the parlor, its warmth and rich furnishings amazed me. How completely, just beyond a door, beyond a screening wall, may lie an undreamt-of reality in this world!

  When the gaoler took off his cap and scarf, he revealed a cap of golden curls. His beard was composed of wiry, red-gold hairs bent around like rings. The judge had us sit upon a sofa upholstered in dark red velvet, the wooden portions being of polished mahogany. He sent a servant for tea, which came in a pot of blue and white such as captains brought back from China or Japan. Meat sandwiches on small plates were handed us. I was so warm, so sheltered by the beauty of it all, that I found it hard to speak. Nervous, I wanted only to be in that luxurious place.

  Judge Lord himself was a pudgy, balding man; the crown of his head gleamed pink. From just above one ear, a ruff of black hair circled the back of his head to the other ear. A pair of spectacles clamped into the flesh of his nose. His plump hands moved dexterously among his fine things, and he seemed much inclined to listen. Judge Lord addressed Cap-o-curls by name, but at the time I paid no attention. The judge asked the gaoler many questions about Kit’s deportment in jail, what had been the subject of Kit’s conversations, what the frequency of his agitations, and if there were discernible causes. Of me, he asked very little. The turnkey, who relished the comfort and honor of our circumstance, talked very fluently, with few errors in grammar.

  His account of my husband branded new pictures in my mind. Kit had gnawed at the bars. “ ‘You’ll but injure your teeth,’ I told him. Then he pronounced that I was an honest man, but things sometimes had to be tested, that the common wisdom could be false.”

  At length, but not before we had all finished our sandwiches and tea, and a hot dried-peach cobbler had been summoned and eaten, the judge said he saw no real reason to pursue Kit farther. “I hope, Mrs. Sparrow, that you will find him at home and that you will be able to keep him away from the town.”

  “What of Abram Quary?” I asked. I did not want the judge to punish a man who meant so well.

  “When you see Quary, tell him he is to knock at the back door for a chat with me.”

  I turned to the gaoler and said I was sorry people were put to trouble because of Kit. There being nothing else to be said, I stood up and thanked the judge for his hospitality. He graciously responded that he was glad it was in his power to resolve legalities, but he wished that something therapeutic could help Kit.

  “You do help him, Judge Lord, by not pursuing him, by not confining him further.” (I wondered if Kit and Tashtego had reached the stretch of water between the two islands.)

  With that the world of luxury and light closed behind us. Though the kindly gaoler offered to walk with me out to the Try Pots, I declined. While he was pulling his cap over his hair, I remembered Quary’s description of the gaoler as “gold, gold.”

  Across the street, from a dark portal of a dark house, my eye caught two other flashes of gold. I saw the African harpooner, Daggoo, step forward. The light had caught on the hoops of his large golden earrings. He walked toward the wharf.

  CHAPTER 76: On the Moor

  THUS, I commenced to traverse the road alone. After I passed the last lighted house, I listened, for company, to the familiar sound of my feet on the roadbed. Certainly there was a map in my mind of my route, but the usual sense of sight could not serve as a check to that plan. The night was starless and utterly black. The brushing and quiet placement of my shoe soles reassured me, but steady cold invaded my face and chest. I thought of the pressure of an apple press bearing down against the flesh of the apples—so it was the cold bore down and squeezed me of my warmth.

  I searched the sky f
or some star’s gleam, but the blackness was utterly complete. Stars offered little comfort anyway. I felt my lips growing numb. Licking them only gave the frigid night moisture to freeze. My fingertips, too, grew numb, and my toes within my boots.

  The warmth of the judge’s tea had completely left me. His soft home seemed a kind of delusion. So might one imagine heaven. I wondered what lay beyond his parlor and how Judge Austin Lord had come to his station in life.

  I began to hear a creaking, groaning sound. It reminded me of the straining of a ship’s mast in a wind, but I knew myself to be far from the harbor. Still, these timbers sounded massive in their adjusting. Suddenly, the fear came to me that though I was upon a road, it could not be the right road! There was no natural or artificial structure on all the deserted road to yield up this particular creaking, turning sound. A wheeling.

  A wheeling with a pattern to it. I might smash into some gigantic wagon. Perhaps some vehicle had overturned, and its mammoth wheel now turned in the wind, and if I walked into it, my flesh would be abraded away in an instant. Yet it did not sound close by. There might be an abyss before me.

  I was afraid to step forward, and yet I made myself do so. Where I had walked confidently before, I now sent out a foot like a probe. Uncertainty compounded fear till I stopped, considered crawling so that I could feel ahead of myself with my more intelligent hand.

  I would not crawl, but I palmed the air before me.

  My body tilted, which meant the path was turning upward. And the groaning, turning sound seemed nearer. I knew where I was. I had taken the road to the mill hill. Dazzled by the judge’s house, I had been disoriented. I would come to the mill, whose wooden blades must have come unbraked and were now turning in the wind. I thought of Don Quixote. I will not tilt with you, but I will take a moment’s shelter under your arms.

  So I climbed the hill. Though I still could not see in the darkness, I felt my way to the door, but it was locked. I leaned against the structure. The great gears turned and rumbled inside. Trailing my fingertips around the tower, I moved to the lee side, sat down, and rested myself. Though the mill was wooden, the height and cylindrical shape reminded me of the Lighthouse. The mill shuddered in the wind as though it would unscrew itself from its moorings and tumble arms over root down the hill.

  My father had given me a whirligig, carved of wild black cherry wood, one Christmas. The blades were twisted, and he had said that with birds the tips of their feathers could twist in the wind. I was reluctant to leave the mill, whose internal motion gave it a kind of aliveness. I was growing sick from the exposure.

  I imagined Kit stumbling in the wind. With every second the gulf between my life and Kit’s widened. The mill arms churned the night; the grinding gears within whirled and gnashed. I wished Kit shelter and happiness among the wild tribes, who, after all, did not think of themselves as wild. Kit was a wild man at heart.

  Stiffening with cold, I struggled up and set out again in the blackness. The mill was for me a giant compass, for I knew its door faced east. If I went north over the moor, I would come to my road. My feet would tell me it was a road. I would go left, westward, perhaps a mile farther to the Try Pots. I would see the lights. My mind cleared of confusion, I had but to confront my fatigue and the cold.

  These were not easy to face. The low shrubs of the moor caught at my clothes. I stumbled many times. Sometimes the land was strewn with rocks. Once I stepped into a declivity and fell. I could feel my slow tears as cold as snail trails on my cheeks. Still there was naught to do but go forward. I schooled my mind to be alert, not to miss the change underfoot from moor to road. I crossed a few more open places, but these could not be road, for I heard and felt that I trod on ground-hugging heath and brittle moss, desiccated by the cold.

  When my feet did step into the roadbed, I knew it at once for what it was. I consciously made my turn to the left. Now the walking was not so hard. As the physical exertion lessened, the darkness of the night closed closer about my soul. I thought of Charlotte, and I dreaded to tell her that she was not, no more than I, destined to care for Kit. But Charlotte would adjust to that. She had her Mr. Hussey. She would always have him. I was alone, and my heart cried out for some sense that I was cared for.

  Kit would think himself lucky to be rid of me. A she-wolf, he had called me. Yes, in this utter blackness, I could remember the taste of human blood in my mouth.

  But I could not condemn myself again for it. I panted in the cold air. The life I now had was condemnation. Against the gunwale of the whaleboat I saw the burnt face, the parched lips, of a sailor. I gasped, for I knew him! His face recognizable, his name known! No! Willard Wilson! I willed the vision to dissolve. My life! My life! Surely that was enough of condemnation. I panted harder, afraid of my conscience as well as the night. I conjured up a comforting face and name: Charlotte Hussey—had she not acquitted me, called me human, welcomed me to living? Charlotte cared for me. She would forgive me.

  I might be made of grosser stuff than Giles or Kit. Nothing in me bent toward my own death or desired the expiation of madness. Marriage was my expiation. I had assumed the harness. Of those who had died in the open boat, I would not think. And yet, if Kit was gone, then their dark specters would have his place. Thomas Rodgers! Oscar Brian! Livingston! Joseph! Their names echoed in my brain till other words pushed through my cold lips into the blackness: I am sorry. I am sorry. I uttered and repeated this sentence as though the intensity of my speaking could engrave it on air. And I was afraid.

  I prayed to those whalemen. Spare me! Spare me because you were not spared. Logic left me, and I stepped from the road back onto the moor. If I could wander the moor till daybreak and absolution—then I could go home. I fled cross-country, dry gorse pulling at my skirt. Driven by fear of who I was and of what kind of world I lived in, I heard behind me the sound of other footsteps.

  Perhaps it is Kit! Perhaps Kit had decided to come home to me. I paused to listen. The steps continued toward me, quickly. This was not Kit’s gait. I was stalked. Demonic forces walked the moor.

  I moved as fast as I dared in the darkness, the way a fish might plunge through the depths of the ocean. Blackness streamed about me. Still, I heard the approaching footsteps. My eyes strained for glow from the Try Pots Tavern, but there was none.

  Some harmless townsperson, I told myself. No one would wish me harm, surely. Yet the town was full of unknown people, and sailors from ports around the world. The steps were closing on me. Small rocks fired from under the soles of his boots.

  I would not run, I would not run, I told myself, but fear ran through me. The pursuer was at my shoulder. Let him pass by. Oh, let him pass.

  Then a large, flinty-hard hand took my hand. That was all. The man took my hand. There was naught but kindness in it.

  I did not speak. He did not speak. He led us back to the road. Occasionally the side of my arm brushed some part of his clothing. Some human consciousness had seen my aloneness. He had offered comfort. I held that hand gratefully. Flinty and hard in terms of the texture of his callused skin, the pressure from that hand only reassured. I am here too, it said.

  So we walked together. My heart boiled and brimmed. My lips parted as though parched. Some human had shown me compassion—simply because I was a human. Perhaps I would get letters from Mother and Aunt. Perhaps they, too, forgave my cruel desertion.

  At length, in the distance I saw the lights of the Try Pots. We walked on together but a short piece. It was as though my companion wished to make sure that my eyes had registered the evidence of a haven. Without a word, his hand slipped from mine. I walked on. I listened for his footsteps, but he either stood still in the road or had stepped onto the felted moor.

  My hand remained warm from his comfort, and I tucked it under the cloak, up under my armpit, to keep it so.

  THAT NIGHT in my bed, with a warm brick to my feet—Charlotte had been all kindness—I clasped my hands together. I relived my journey on the moor. Again I was comforted b
y the dark stranger.

  My body seemed to whisper that there was something familiar about that hand. Kit? No. But I thought of Kit’s hands and mine when we clasped together in our marriage vow. Both Kit’s hands had been between mine, and my hands covered both above and beneath by palms as hard as stone. That rocklike hand from the night! Why, it was the hand of Captain Ahab.

  CHAPTER 77: A Slow Spring

  AS I HAD suspected that bleak night upon the moor, the exertion and cold made me sick, and I stayed abed till after the arrival of the New Year. Charlotte brought me bowls of chowder—cod or clam—and one evening a plate of steaming root vegetables—carrots, beets, a turnip, a parsnip, a whole cooked onion which fell apart in concentric, translucent shells. She made my bed, causing me to sit wrapped up in a quilt in a chair while she smoothed the sheets; she carried out my slops; she gathered up my nightclothes and undergarments for the wash pot.

  When I told her of Kit’s flight with the help of Quary and Tashtego, I concluded, “So his care falls to neither of us, Charlotte.”

  “Then I shall take care of you, instead,” she said.

  What a system of substitutes she had! If not Kit to meet her passion, then Mr. Hussey. If not Kit to care for, then his wife. It was in her nature to love and to nurture; she would not leave those feelings within herself to fester and sour, but instead she chose someone who would receive her gifts gladly. She did not hold herself to be so special that only one special person could she find satisfactory.

  I was not truly glad to be the object of her concern, but I was grateful. Being sick in bed from exposure gave my mind and spirit as well as my body time to heal. It was good for me to be confined and cared for.