Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  I described the Pequod to my mother, and she gave me the back of an old envelope to sketch it on. The preciousness of paper was a sign of how backward we still were on the Kentucky frontier.

  “Though Lewis and Clark ran short of nearly all their supplies,” I remarked, “when they wintered beside the Pacific, they always had plenty of paper.”

  “Clark’s brother died at Locust Grove, down the river ten miles or so. I imagine they had plenty of paper, too.” She lifted her eyebrows and smirked. “But this ain’t Locust Grove.”

  Although my drawing was wobbly, my mother used it as a pattern to work a cross-stitch sampler of the Pequod. “You must hang it in your cupola,” she said. “Show it to the baby, and tell him to watch through the spyglass for that ship.” Under it she worked a rhyme, which she said she had heard in her Boston Quaker school. The cross stitched verse was supposed to encourage boys to stay home and be scholars instead of running off to sea:

  A Ship Is a Breath of Romance

  That Carries Us Miles Away.

  And a Book Is a Ship of Fancy

  That Could Sail on Any Day.

  I did not tell her that a whaling ship could be more like a Butcher’s Shop than a Breath of Romance. It sometimes amazed me how well I knew, now, with my mother, what to say and what to omit. I was sure she did the same for me, and always had, though our discourse was unusually free. But we would not give each other pain.

  Always on her face was her love for me. Even if I had only been out in the yard a few moments, when next she saw me, her face shone out in gladness, and always there was a steady radiance. Many times she thanked me for coming home to share the joy of my waiting with her.

  Of Ahab I thought chiefly at night, as I lay in bed waiting for sleep. I missed him and loved him. I thought in his direction, but I did not try to write to him. The fate of letters, as I knew it now, seemed too precarious. Before I left Nantucket, I had sent Ahab a letter to tell him of our coming babe and of my pleasure in our home. Sometimes as I waited for sleep and watched the full moon sail up the window (my mother and I decided to share her bed), I imagined what might be in Ahab’s letters. Certainly he would describe the sea to me and report what whales they took. I hoped that he might write of his love for me, but so much of the bond between us had traveled the path of the eyes that I did not require, with Ahab, a stream of romantic words.

  Often I remembered our wedding night, the gentleness of his hard hands upon my body, the joy of our uniting. Had it been after that last time, that morning when I held out my arms to him, that his seed had impregnated me? I thought so.

  I had told my mother that at the dawn after our wedding night, we had entered the cupola and angels of resplendent hues had flown around us, for I wanted her to know how I loved my husband, his mind, body, and spirit.

  WHILE I THOUGHT of Ahab by night, by day those summer and fall hours were filled with the love between my mother and me. Perhaps it would have been a more ordinary time if we had both not known that at the end of the next spring, our year together would be over, and I would take my babe of five months age or so back with me to Nantucket.

  When the fall vegetables were ready to gather, Mother got out her Keats volume and read his “Ode to Autumn” to me, and I loved the full sadness of the poem as never before. Especially the description of the gnats moved me—that such a small part of nature was yet worthy of a place in his lines about that remote English world of harvest.

  Our root cellar, with its new stock of vegetables which we ourselves had not only grown but also harvested, dried, preserved, and pickled, seemed as rich a treasure house as Keats’s granary. The burlap sacks were lumpy with cobs full of dried corn, and we had large jars of beans and tomatoes on the rough shelves. Against the dirt walls we had baskets of black walnuts we’d gathered in the woods and boxes of dried blackberries. We had a store of turnips and radishes, carrots and potatoes. It was a pleasure to crunch through the fallen leaves down into the ravine, to open the heavy wooden door, and to add to the bounty. When we entered the cellar, we deeply inhaled the aroma of vegetables mixed with earth. “We’ll run out of room,” we told each other, proclaiming the success of our agriculture.

  Perhaps it was because of my own round shape that I particularly loved the apples that fall. Though my belly was not blushed with red, as they were, I seemed gaudy with joy. (Giles once told me the root of the word gaudy, in fact, means joy.) I ran up a lovely loose dress of red-and-gold plaid from the yardage in my trunk, and when I wore that, I felt most applelike, plump and ripening. Reaching up to the low, heavy-laden boughs, I felt one-with-the-apples as my fingers closed around them. Mother would not let me climb the ladder up into the trees, but she herself did the climbing. It made her blithe as a girl to be aloft on the ladder, though when she looked down and smiled at me, I saw many wrinkles of middle age in her skin. I told her how I had loved to climb aloft, dressed as a boy, almost a hundred feet into the air, with the ship plowing the waves far below.

  In late fall, we harnessed our mare to the wagon to carry some of our apples to the press, so we would have cider through the winter. It was a merry gathering of families scattered throughout our area, and there was square dancing that night, but being so big with child, I did not wish to dance. After much encouragement from me (and from a widower who had a farm a half-dozen miles away), my mother did join the dancing. I think she rather liked showing off before her daughter. Her feet moved nimbly and her face grew rosy and steamy. I thought of how that first night at the Lighthouse we had all danced together, and I wished that those members of the family were with us now.

  We spent the cider night, all the women, wall to wall on pallets, with all the men in the barn. And that night there was much joking and singing among the women as we waited for sleep. Strangely, me thought of how people might lie in a graveyard, somewhat cozy with the proximity of other bodies, but here, more cheerfully, we were a prone community of the living, of sisters of all ages, myself a woman accepted among women.

  When Mother and I drove home the next day with our load of cider-filled bottles, I felt a little wary of the mare. She pulled too hard, I thought, and when she sensed that we were near home, she was hard for Mother to hold. It really made me quite angry. We had had her many years, caring well for her. Perhaps she rebelled now because my father had kept her under such a tight rein.

  But there was an element to our speed that I relished. The fall colors, particularly of the maples, dogwoods, and sumac, were beyond compare, and the speed of our passage seemed to make them swirl together in a phantasmagoria. Occasionally a puff of wind would bring down a shower of leaves from a tree that overhung the road. Then we were in the thick of it! Leaves flying like colored froth. I wanted to write to Ahab about it. The speed alternately thrilled and frightened me.

  We had left the barn door open, and though Mother hauled on the reins, the mare ran right in. When we got out, I saw the pallor under Mother’s tan skin, and she was shaking. “That’s the last time I drive Penelope till next spring,” she said. “And then I’ll have a neighbor take her out till she’s calmed down.”

  Usually, once we went to bed, Mother and I did not talk. It was as though she knew I needed some time with my thoughts of my husband. But that October night, after we had pulled the patchwork up to our chins to keep out the chill, she remarked, “Listen, the mockingbird is telling us good-bye. We’ll not hear him again till spring.”

  As I listened, I wanted to describe the bird’s song to Ahab. I thought of Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale” and wished that I had the genius to immortalize our Kentucky mockingbird. Those who have heard both birds swear by ours as the greater vocalist. That night I felt melted by the sound. The notes were smooth-flowing as liquid and seemed individually to have the soft and fluid contours of honey. The melody was embellished with trills and flourishes; there were repeats and explorations, the tunes of other birds, especially cardinals. “Pretty bird, pretty bird.” And “Look right here!”
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  But I dreamt of how I had battled the eagle with my bonnet and the raucous cries of that bird.

  THE NEXT DAY, we began cracking nuts for our fruitcakes and mixing the batters and blending in the jam for Christmas jam cakes and measuring out dried fruits for our plum puddings. I told my mother how Aunt had filled the Lighthouse with much the same odors, in the bleak weeks before Christmas. Yes, there was a nip in the air in Kentucky, but we were by no means windswept as I had been on the Island. We saw Canada geese come down the flyway of the river. I loved it when I got to see the tired leader fall back and a fresh goose take the point of the V. Sometimes I heard the bang of guns not too far from our house.

  One cold day when we knew the bees were sleeping, Mother robbed the hive in our old sycamore tree. We had buckets and buckets of golden honey. “This one was your father’s favorite bee tree,” she said. That afternoon a neighbor brought by a haunch of bear, which we roasted in a pot surrounded by carrots, and we ate the bear meat dribbled with honey. “The strong and the sweet together,” Mother said. “It will be good for the baby.” We finished supper by the fire, eating crisp apples and slices of cheese.

  “I wonder, Una,” she suddenly said, more tentatively than usual, “if you ever think, that if the baby should be a boy, you might name him Ulysses for your father?”

  “I am not sure that it is a lucky name,” I replied, and I could have bitten my too-quick tongue. “But certainly I will think of it.”

  “What name did you take when you shipped in disguise?” Her eyes teased me.

  I admitted the truth: “Ulysses.” How had she guessed?

  As we lay on our bed that night, listening to the falling of the last few leaves of the oaks, I relived that conversation. Almost I chuckled at myself. My mother had penetrated my defense. There would always be a part of my father that I carried forward.

  But the next day over breakfast, she apologized to me, saying it was no one’s business but my own what I named my babe, Ahab being at sea. I must name him the name that came to me with his birthing.

  “Our last name already being Spenser,” she said, “I named you Una from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, because I wanted you to be brave and true like Una. And you are. But the name proved prophetic in terms of oneness, for you are my one and only child.” She brought us each another piece of cornbread from the warming oven.

  “Did my father know the work of Edmund Spenser?”

  “I had often thought of your father as my Red Cross Knight, he so wanted to champion God and the Good.”

  “How alike we think, you and I! I sometimes think of my husband, of Ahab,” I confided, “as the Red Cross Knight. A whale is not unlike a dragon—a great and mighty animal, almost mythical in its power. The whale sends up a plume of water instead of fire.”

  “Leviathan, the scripture calls the whale. Do you think whales to be malicious?”

  “Often they seemed to me as innocent as gigantic calves, slaughtered. But the black one, the one that stove the Sussex…it was darker than granite, malignant…intentional in its assault.”

  “It could not help its color.”

  “Ah, you are a Quaker in judging animals as well as human races. But the Quakers are a bloody lot when it comes to slaughtering whales.” How delicious the bacon was that morning. I split open my cornbread and placed it inside so that the flavor would permeate the bread.

  “What will we do,” she asked, “if North and South part over the slavery question?”

  It was the first time I had ever heard of such an idea.

  “Perhaps the North will join with Canada then,” I said, “and both will fight the British again.”

  “The mills of England run on cotton picked by Southern slaves.” She poured us each another cup of tea.

  I did not like to think of alliances among nations and wars that could be fought. I wanted to bring my baby to a peaceful world.

  “Agatha and I used to speak of fighting against slavery,” she went on.

  “How?”

  “Sometimes we imagined ourselves orators; other times as soldiers, if war came. We would dress in the attic as men and act it all out.”

  “Dress as men!”

  “Yes. As you actually have done.”

  Suddenly I laughed to think of myself dressed as a boy, and I patted the round of my belly, which almost touched the edge of the table.

  A HARD FROST came that night, and the next day we gathered per simmons. I could scarcely bend over to pickup the fallen ones, which lay among the frost-rimmed brown leaves. Our supper was a reckless gorging on persimmon pudding, on more and yet more pudding, spicy with nutmeg and cinnamon, which I had purchased in New Bedford. Despite our giddy gorging, I saw anxiety in my mother’s eyes.

  In another week all the hardwood trees were bare. The cedars yet held up their bushy green plumes, and the sprays of pine needles were green and crisp against the thin blue sky of the approaching winter. At night, because the elms, maples, and even sycamores down by the creek were all bare, we saw the stars caught in the fine twigs and lattices of the trees. Sometimes we bundled up and walked out a quarter of a mile from the cabin expressly to see the night sky.

  “The hairnets of the trees,” my mother said, “have caught the brilliantine of the stars.”

  “Let stars be little shining fish,” I answered as we turned toward our door and warmth. “Constellations are schools of fish caught and pulled together in the nets of celestial fishermen.” Later, I wrote down these pretty ideas in my journal.

  Our feet on the brown fallen leaves seemed married to the earth, the way moles, rabbits, and muskrats go to earthy dens in winter. The leaves we trod were sodden, not crunchy, already losing their structure and uniting with soil. Kentucky is the middle of the middle of something Substantial—the very opposite of water. This was the forest, sprung from Kentucky earth—our house was of it, we ourselves were of it. Even the canopy of stars seemed Kentucky stars.

  CHAPTER 90: A Winter Tale

  IN DECEMBER, the temperature fell and fell. The bare trees around the cabin snapped and popped in the wind. Once a limb cracked off, and when it fell against the frozen earth, it exploded. We salvaged the wood, spreading it out before the hearth to dry it, to use later as starter or kindling. Those days in December we did not allow the fire to die. Often I sat before the fireplace in a rocking chair and dozed, my great belly swelling yet more to fill my lap.

  My mother still sewed, but I had no ambition for it.

  Nor was there need. My mother’s sewing was not for the babe but a spring dress for me. The fabric was a light lawn, besprinkled with tiny flowers, a whimsey, and I thought lazily back on how I had stood in the shop in Nantucket—a world away—and purchased the fabric. Heather’s Moor seemed like something from a dream. What need, really, did I or anyone have for such a house? A cabin with a fire and a rocking chair, a baby kicking his small foot from time to time inside, a beloved mother at my side. I had brought her a silver thimble with an S for Spenser engraved inside the cup. With this little engine, she plied the folds of the cobweb fabric, while I dreamed and rocked by the fire, my belly in my lap. The world seemed indolent, sleepy, replete.

  I fancied Ahab sailing right down the Ohio, saying he wanted to live in the woods. He came in a miniature Pequod. The woods were the place of rest. The ocean was too incessantly active for peace. Let my husband sail down the Ohio, while curious squirrels and deer, Indians and settlers peeked through the river birch to see a seafaring man sail home to his woodsy wife.

  One night as the full moon came up, snow began to fall across her mellow face. I went to sleep remembering how it had snowed on the Pequod and frosted her like a floating cake in the freezing waters. And I had waited for the ice to melt on the ratlines and then climbed aloft for Ahab. How lithe and thin I had been! Perhaps that was the true beginning of our love—when together we kept the ship.

  In the morning, Mother and I awoke to a world around the cabin that had gone soft—lavender in color
—with snow. I saw where deer had toed their way among the old cornstalks in the garden. We had taken down a section of rails for them. The sun did not shine, and the temperature dropped again. We pinned on shawls and walked about a little, but our shoes were not high enough to keep out the snow, and our world seemed unfamiliar. Often I turned around to be sure nothing was creeping up on me.

  “I wish the sun would shine,” Mother said. It seemed unnatural to us both that snow should seem gloomy.

  That night the wind came up, and it snowed again. I could hear the snow dashing against the shutters. Mother took out two extra quilts. The sound of the snow sweeping the roof reminded me of the water swishing against the hull of a ship. We seemed a little ship of sorts, isolated, anchored but bobbing in the elements. I was grateful for our good woodpile.

  For breakfast, Mother cooked sausage on the spider, and the cooking woke me up with its medley of aroma and sizzling. She also made white porridge, sweetened with maple syrup, and in the taste of maple, I remembered the hard little pieces of Ahab’s Vermont candy. All this she brought to me in bed, telling me to get up gradually. She put such logs on the fire that the whole fireplace was filled from top to bottom with flame, and I could not see the tips of the flames, but just an undulating curtain of fire.

  “Now, what would you have me read?” she asked.

  “Keats. ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes.’ ”