Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  CHAPTER 80: Fire

  THE FIRE raged in four buildings, their shingles buckling and springing away from the walls. Like bursting buttons, the hot tiles shot out toward the people, who stood well back. A line of men passed buckets of water as quickly as they could. The crowd looked wild-eyed, and some neighbors tried to divert the buckets to douse their own walls or roofs, though they were not yet burning. On all our faces there was soot, and I thought of the night-burning of the tryworks, and this seemed to have the desperation of that butchery, though merely wood and not flesh burned.

  The townfolk wept, distraught over the loss of their property. Then the cry went up that there were yet people in one of the houses that was blazing like a torch.

  “Who? How many?”

  “A child. A boy. He was asleep. An orphan, with no parent to count him.”

  “Who?” they asked again, as though the answer had not sufficed.

  “We don’t know him. A child.”

  “But who is it?”

  “One,” a voice whispered beside me. It was the gaoler. He pulled off his shirt (skin pink, with golden hair in the middle of his chest, like a fleece). He stepped to the bucket line and plunged his shirt down into water, then held the dripping wad against his mouth and nose and ran into the house. Now my own breath went sharp, and apprehension coursed my veins.

  “Who? Who?” they called out again, as though there could never be an answer certain enough. “Who is inside?” Yet some replied, “A man!” for Isaac Starbuck did not return as minutes ticked on, and the Unitarian clock struck six. I looked up and saw how the cruel flames reflected red in the dome. “Who? And who?” voices both mumbled privately and shrilly cried.

  The terror of the scene brought back the sailors in the open whaleboat, whose names and faces had returned to me when I was lost on the moor. In the flames, I saw and heard them again. Sometimes they had muttered, on and on. Sometimes a shriek more piercing than a bird cry emanated from an anonymous throat. No, that was Oscar who cried and rolled his eyes toward me. A white bird had perched on the mast, and we had longed for it, debated throwing a shoe or weaving a net to cast over it.

  “Who?” I myself cried out, though I meant to ask How long? A velvet voice spoke naturally in my ear. “A man, a boy.” Ahab! I thought, but the voice was that of the judge.

  “No,” I roared. And No, and No, and No, I screamed. Till Isaac, the gaoler, suddenly staggered out, double-headed. Peeping over his shoulder was a little black face. Isaac stumbled and Judge Lord caught the boy from Isaac’s back and laid the child on the ground. The gaoler fell like a charred beam. The boy, I cried, and someone gave me wet cloth, and I scrubbed and scrubbed until I realized that he was not black with soot but that he was a little black boy. He opened his eyes, and the judge lifted him up in his arms.

  A man pushed on the gaoler’s chest to squeeze the smoke from him. He pushed and pushed, and, still on my knees, I heard myself saying “Again” and “Again,” but the attendant stopped, shook his head, and stood up. I flung myself on the prostrate Isaac Starbuck. I drew deep breath into my own lungs and tried to force my breath into his lips and down into him, because he was human, only for that reason, and needed his life. But when I looked up from this fruitless labor, I saw Judge Lord all sooty now standing above me, watching, with the little black boy gathered up in his arms. The judge, smudged black with the soot from the child, seemed to step backward, and without turning away from me, they were absorbed into the night.

  Then there was Mrs. Macy, and other women, helping me up and leading me away from Isaac. They held my hands and washed and dabbed at me. While they did this, I saw someone take a sheet and spread it over the naked chest and body of the gaoler, whose last whisper had been for the worthiness of one life, and so of us all. Then I wept for Isaac Starbuck, and despised my superiority and my hauteur.

  “ ’Twas he you were learning to love then,” Mrs. Macy said.

  “No,” I sobbed. “Not nearly enough.” But I did not mean as a beau.

  I spent myself crying, leaned against Mrs. Macy’s shoulder, so watering her apron shoulder strap that it loosed the starch in the fabric, and I tasted the sourness of the starch. I thought of all Isaac Starbuck’s aliveness—his quick nod of recognition in the church; his compassionate discourse with the judge the night of Kit’s liberation; his pleasure in the little sandwiches and tea we were served; the way the palm of his hand unconsciously brushed and enjoyed the nap of the velvet couch; the way he swung my bundle of mending onto a clean table at the Try Pots and smiled. Who else in Nantucket would remember his friendly ways? I had not had enough interest in Isaac to find out whom he knew.

  Finally, I wiped my nose with the back of my hand as though I were again a sailor myself. My grief for Isaac was excessive. It was beyond my connection to the man. Yet those tears had washed out something of the old grief. I asked Mrs. Macy if Captain Mustachio had visited her, and she replied that she must have missed him. I let the frivolous-seeming matter drop.

  Again my ear registered the roaring of the fire, and my eye fell on the unmistakable shrouded human shape lying on the ground. They were bringing up a hand wagon because the horses would not come close to the flames. Two men approached with a broad board.

  “I’ll go now,” I said, not wanting to see the gaoler taken away. I thought, I’ve missed him. Not as a beau. I had missed his goodness, his humanity—I had failed to acknowledge those. Some were saying that Isaac was a hero, but I thought only that he was dead.

  The fire continued to crackle and spread. Sparks flew so high that their red flicks mingled with the yellow stars. In the streets, the pandemonium multiplied. I turned away from it.

  I walked the dark streets as though they were a labyrinth. I met no one. Eventually the human misery and the elemental fury of the flames beckoned me back. I would find a vantage point from which to view the fire. When I mounted the stairs to the South Tower, as the Unitarian structure was sometimes called, my body confided encouragement. Oh, I was a climber of stairs! The muscles had not forgotten. So easy was the ascent, I only lightly skimmed the tops of the stairs. But now I was not a girl, and I climbed to see neither clear sky and bountiful clouds from the Lighthouse nor the vast and wrinkled sea pleating itself in blue or green below the masthead. No. My mind’s eye saw the inert, shrouded body, the low earth-resting sheet over Isaac. The drapery of the covering sheet.

  As I climbed inside the church tower, I passed the gears and mechanisms of the timepiece and noted a circle of red around the edges of the fire-facing clock, where the fit was imperfect. The rippling and flickering of the flames could be seen even in the thin line around the clock rim.

  A door led from the interior of the tower onto a railed balcony, which was situated on the square portion of the building, just above the four-faced clock. I thought fantastically that I had climbed beyond time. But my body yet made the ordinary gestures. I opened the door cautiously, in case other viewers might be standing in such a way as to be hit by the opening door, but others, it seemed, had not thought of such a vantage point.

  No, not others, but one other. One. To that one my heart flew out. Never does a heart leap so but toward a beloved, when his face is turned, your presence unrealized. You must become real to him. Though you stand quietly, your heart has already leapt forward. Where the railing made a corner, a hand on each of the perpendicular rails, facing the fire, stood Ahab, speaking.

  CHAPTER 81: Ahab Addresses the Flames

  NATURE, ye term yourself. Fire, earth, air, and water. Essence of nature, ye pretend to be. But what is natural, Fire, about eating men half my age and sparing me? But I have seen the little one snatched from your glowing jaws, your deadly black breath. (I imagine him so black and small, his rescuer would not have found him except for his whimpering. A puppy? I have visited the heart of the inferno, that rescuer would think, for the sake of a puppy. The judge can put him to school here, and when I come back, I’ll take him—Pip—with me as my cabin
boy. How he clung to the judge’s neck—tighter than barnacles to the pier, tight as his own curls to his scalp.)

  No, I’ll not call ye Natural, even if ye be set by lightning spark. Ye can burn naturally in the forest, or gallop naturally over the prairie like bison with collars of flame and crackling hoofs. But here ye feed on timbers torn from the forest, planed and tamed, and shaped and nailed by men. Ye take their toys one by one—so they seem from this height—toys—and my own ship Pequod safe beyond at anchor, another kind of toy among these stationary ones. These little houses are the hopes of men. Habitats for us naked creatures who having less of fur and feather need more of shingle and brick.

  How come ye here, Fire, ravaging the homes of humans? Ye are will-less. I know it well. Leibniz claimed this was the best of all possible worlds, and so he would say, Lick away, little flames, toast all those who live on this street—it’s for the best. Indeed, the next street would be worse for all. A stupid faith, this best-of-all-possible notion. Let Leibniz stick to calculus. Let him invent one that calculates human misery and holds God accountable.

  This town pays for Prometheus’ insolence. Yet contained in the hearth, Fire, thou art the most comforting of friends. I’ll have one yet! Hearth, that is. Friend, too. Friend of my bosom. My eye seeks for her, but I cannot find her in that labyrinth. I saw her wiping the face of the black boy, and then she moved and the roof of the building shielded her from view. (The man who bore the boy from the flames—him I love, too. For he alone risked himself for the cinder boy.)

  “Una,” I’ll shout for her. Una! Let me bay it like a solitary, shaggy wolf. Roar, Fire, you will not quench my howling till she look up, and like a visitor to the Vatican, she will look up and see not God, but Ahab in the clouds, reaching down to her, quickening her even as the Creator touched Adam.

  “Ahab Addresses the Flames”

  Fire, I see thou art my brother, for with such heat Ahab rages. The fires of hell, the fires of creation—they are all one—and they burn all knotted in Ahab’s bosom’s heart. Burn, my heart! Burn, my town! Burn! For thy Flames are like a refiner’s fire, and thou shalt purify them—

  Why come these sobs?

  Thou shalt purify me!—

  Let not sobs come and quench the flame within till it has done its work and I am fit for hearth and home—

  Let this church and its tower be my stake. Here let the demonic in me writhe into nothingness. Una!—Obsession! I fear ye more than flames!

  [Here he sank to his knees, still clutching the railings, as though the church’s altar had come external, bent itself into a corner where he might kneel so as to better relinquish his pride and sin.]

  CHAPTER 82: Ahab’s Wife

  NEITHER ALARMED nor embarrassed—for what adult has not witnessed the struggling of her soul?—I walked to him, placed my hand on his shoulder, and said, “Look ye behind, Ahab.”

  First his hand covered mine, his hard-as-stone hand roofed mine. Slowly he lifted his head but did still gaze upon the burning town. Then, still on his knees, he turned his head and looked up, all disbelief and wonder.

  He said in a broken voice, “Art thou angel or devil?”

  “Some of both. Even as you are.”

  “Even as I.” He rose to his feet. “Ye have spoken truly. Thou art as I am, though we be female and male.”

  Then he encircled me with his arm, and together we stood, all calm inside, and contemplated the flames below.

  “I would not have the old town burned to the ground,” he said quietly, “if I were God instead of grateful mortal.”

  “Nor shall it.”

  “Una, be humble. The gods might take us down from our height.”

  I laughed. “Look,” I said, and I pointed up toward the rain clouds blowing toward us.

  “Ye have a weather eye indeed.”

  “All my life, I have watched the clouds.”

  “I remember ye stood aloft for me on the Pequod.”

  I remembered but did not confess that I had let pass unheralded one cloudy mass slipping whalelike just under the frigid water. And this was the first secret and the last that I kept from my husband.

  “Avast!” Ahab shouted to the fire brigade below and pointed upward. Gradually, the people in the streets all stopped and looked up, lifted their faces to the heavens. When the first splatters of rain came down on them, they tucked down their heads, resumed the handing of buckets, augmenting the force of nature that had come to their aid.

  “I would have us go back to the Pequod, the spot where ye were first wed.”

  I nodded, for I knew what was in his mind.

  When we were down in Orange Street, he stopped and pointed back to our balcony. “I should have known that the same impulse that sent me up there would send ye there, too.”

  “As it was earlier,” I said. “When we met at the halfway on the road.”

  It rained hard upon us before we reached the Pequod, but it was, for me, like a natural washing, the complement of Mrs. Macy’s kind human ministrations to my flesh. And though this water was cold, the glow within warmed me like that very hearth of which Ahab had spoken.

  We found our spot on the rain-swept deck—it was as though the Pequod, too, were getting her bath, and all her ivory fittings gleamed anew. I knew the red and black harpooners, Tashtego and Daggoo, slept below our feet in the forecastle, perhaps others as well, if they had not stopped at some dockside inn. There was no sound but the pelting of the rain on the boards and into the furled sails.

  “Here,” said Ahab, and the lightning flashed in his eye, though his voice remained calm. I hoped it would remain so. I did not want him to rage again. I wanted to bring him peace. He took both my hands in his flinty ones. If ever there was trust in my life, it was in him and in that moment. The Pequod swayed under my feet.

  “Here,” Ahab said, “what I did join together, I now put asunder.” What he said was beautiful and true, to me. His voice was quiet and humble as rain. “And here I wed Una and take her for my bride.”

  “Even as I take you,” I said. The course being figured and set, our kiss was the sweet, uncanny, effortless drifting toward harbor and blissful home.

  “I would not spend this night on the Pequod,” I said. Though I flouted the marriage laws and conventions without a qualm, the shadow of my union with Kit aboard the Pequod made me shudder.

  “Nor would I have us stay here,” Ahab reassured. “Wait.”

  He went below and came back with an oilcloth satchel full, I presumed, of dry clothes, and he brought a broad umbrella as well, though I did not realize that he owned such an item. He slid a nuptial bracelet carved from ivory over my hand. A circle of whales swam round my wrist. Ahab no more needed the validation of priest or paper than I.

  I was beginning to feel cold, and we hastened ashore. With my hand through the crook of his arm, we hurried away from the wharf over the cobblestones of lower Main Street. Soon Ahab guided us to turn, and we passed the gaol on Vestal Street. We walked down Vine and on. We climbed a hill. Across the street from the judge’s home, we stopped before a dark house and then stepped onto its dark portico, where I had seen Daggoo lounging against a column. Ahab thrust a key into the lock of the uninhabited dwelling. Turning to me, he explained that he had bought himself a house, and that now, thank God, he had a place worthy of his wife.

  This I could hardly believe. A grand house! We stepped from the wet street through the portal. And I was to live here!

  “One day I was driven to it,” Ahab said, “to buy myself a hearth.”

  The rooms were huge and empty—no furnishings. Wood was laid in the fireplace, though, and there were candles and matches on the mantel.

  “Do ye like it?” Ahab asked. The strange ordinariness of my groom’s question almost made me laugh, and I did laugh, but mostly with the joy of the place and the unlikeliness of all that was culminating here. The candlelight reflected against the bare walls and flickered so unsteadily that the tall walls of the place bent and dance
d in light and shadow.

  “All of it is for us?”

  “I’ll show ye.”

  And I followed my husband from room to room, my soul ever expanding. Our footsteps echoed through the empty first floor, where there were shelves in one room for a library, beautiful fireplaces located at both ends of the house, and along the front and back, large dark windows, unhung with curtains, reflected our candles and us when we passed. I felt a flicker of fear. The walls of the room Ahab said was the dining room were wrapped in wainscoting, and above that a mural of a whaling scene encircled the room. How strange it was to stand in a bare room as though the floor were the deck of a ship, but the painted scene was much busier with ships and whales and whaleboats than any I had seen at sea. I liked best the broad flukes of a plunging humpback whale.

  As we ascended to the second floor, my fingertips trailed a curved banister of fine wood. Then again, he showed me too many rooms to count, all bare. “Ye shall furnish them as ye please,” he said. And again I gasped.

  At the door of one bedroom, he took out a key, and here in the bedroom there was a large, plump bed, hooked rugs, and curtains at the window. This room was as full and complete as the others were empty. He knelt to light the fire and then several lamps, till the room was bright and cheerful with the clear flame from sperm oil.

  Just at the moment I felt acutely shy of asking questions—does one question the genie?—and shy before the worldly wealth implied in being married to a successful whaling captain. Ahab explained somewhat more fully that he only this morning had ordered this room to be furnished. Daggoo and Tashtego had trundled in the furniture. Then Ahab had walked out the Madaket Road to find me. I wanted to ask if he had known we would marry, but again I felt in awe and shy of the power that my husband commanded. His absolute power at sea I was well used to, but, except for the judge across the street, I had never spoken to a man of property on land. I did not question the legitimacy of our marriage, our power to define our lives. Again, in a kind, quiet tone, with none of his sea-gruffness, he told me he had been by no means sure that we would come together, but he had hoped. “My hope was like a slain whale that sinks before any harvesting—it will sometimes, ye know—but then miraculously buoys and rises again.” He smiled at me. “And the prize the sailor thought was lost to him forever becomes rightfully his.”