Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  In brighter spirits, I set out into the bright morning. Yet I felt gay with purpose, and the sparkling of the snow invigorated me. The children of the town filled the streets with their snow forts and snowballing of each other. Once I had passed the town, the road was hard to discern, for no one had walked out.

  As I walked on, my merry mood was replaced by a more solemn one. Occasionally I passed a house and saw other human beings, but much of the island was draped in snow, and I felt my smallness in the unbroken fields of white. At length, I saw the rise of hill atop which I knew to be Altar Rock. Except for the cliffs at Sankaty, north of ’Sconset, it was the highest point of the island. I do not know why, but in an instant I decided to change my destination to Altar Rock. Perhaps I knew I was growing tired, and I had scarcely traversed half the distance to Mary’s house. So I began my climb.

  The slope was gradual, like the back of some giant beast. I thought of David’s pursuit of Susan in Ohio up the snow hump of a hill. As I climbed the snow hill, I found myself praying for Susan, praying that she lived in freedom and that life had brought her many good things. Not Susan but Mrs. Maynard would attend this next birthing, and no doubt the judge would produce the doctor at the very moment if he should be needed. I thought of Susan emerging from beneath my mattress and smiled.

  How bleak the climbing of that last, futile snow mound must have been for Susan. That was alone. And yet she used her wits, and the money had been enough. When I gave it to her, I had wondered why I was giving her so much. I had not thought it necessary for her journey, but it had been a way not to pay her—for that could never be done—but to honor her. And where was David now? For him, too, I prayed, as I struggled to climb the hill.

  When I paused to pant, I saw two field mice running hard over the top of the snow, and then the shadow-wings of a hawk. But I think I was too imposing an upright for the raptor to stoop, and I waved both arms at him. Yet I knew that the hawk, too, had his rights.

  Bigger than any whale, the slope rose skyward. Suppose my babe should die again? But he would not. He would not. My legs churned in the snow, and I thought of the froth that billows up around a whale swimming on the surface, and the flakes of foam that fly back continuously from the prow of a ship. I plowed and struggled upward, my feet and legs cold to the shins. I would attain the rock; I would attain it. Was it in homage to Susan and her struggle that I first decided to climb the hill?

  Whence comes this pilgrimage? I mused. Surely a futile act. I might as well scrub the stone floor of Chartres Cathedral with my knees. I should not have let my restlessness drive me to punish my body this way. Yet I could not turn back.

  When I reached the top, I dropped to my knees; I placed my elbows on the rock and looked out over the vast white sea of snow. Only the distant hawk violated the silence with his scream. I knew why I had come. My pilgrimage was not for Susan or for David or even for my unborn babe. I sank to my knees in the snow to pray for Ahab.

  God of strange and extended whiteness, God of heights, who lurks around the crow’s nests of ships, who circles the tops of lighthouses, who inhabits the high crags of Norway, God of frost and nothingness, love thou my Ahab!

  When I turned the knob on the door of my own home, I was very tired, and my restlessness was gone.

  CHAPTER 112: Mothering

  IN MY SNOWY BED, I dreamt Giles Bonebright falling, and from his shoulders sprouted long hawk wings, mottled brown and tipped with white, the feathers deconstructing and scattering for their own soft fall. Mother and I stood at the rail and watched the feathers rocking like little cradles on the water. In each small, curved feather—they must have been breast feathers—yowled a tiny, inch-long babe. A hundred of them afloat, crying in unison. “Another baby,” said the voice of Rebekkah Swain from a rumble deep in the earth. Foam, white as milk, lapped into the cradles, nourishing the babies, then swamping their little boats. “Susan!” I cried out, and awoke.

  IT WAS IN April, standing on the seashore, admiring the foam white as milk, when my fluid broke. I let my waters fall on wet sand, stepped back to see the sea come in. I fancied our water—the babe’s and mine—uniting with the big sea where Ahab yet rode the Pequod. And then I walked calmly homeward.

  Mrs. Maynard attended the birthing, which was in my own bed, and not in the birthing room, since there were no other children present to be disturbed; the labor lasted but six hours. My second child was born about seven o’clock in the evening.

  His skin was softer than rose petals, his eyes the blue of forget-me-nots. His breath! I put my nostrils in the way of his exhalation so that I might inhale his discarded sweetness. The living weight of him in my arms! He was a miracle, as all babies are. But he was the miracle of Una and Ahab, of a blessed marriage. His black hair was but a fuzz over his head. His arms and legs seemed to have the beautiful, strong form of Ahab’s arms and legs, but the eyes! They seemed to be my own eyes looking back at me.

  Maria Mitchell kissed my forehead in a manner that suggested a seal of approval. She presented a little white silk dress, embroidered with a comet.

  “Read the motto,” she said, “embroidered on the hem.” She stood by my bed, her hands on her hips.

  It read in cursive: We are kin to stars.—M. M.

  I smiled but questioned her. “How can we living beings be kin to what is lifeless?” Maria never objected to any question.

  “Only in an elemental way,” she answered. “Most basically.” There was a hint of irony in her voice. “That’s all.” She paused and stroked the golden threads of the star she had embroidered on my baby’s shirt. “Or metaphorically, if you prefer. Stars have their births, agings, and deaths. Their journeys.”

  And then she inquired about my comfort. Since she had attended her mother after the births of the seven younger siblings, she knew much about my state of both mind and body. That data told her I hungered to hear the baby admired and myself encouraged. While tending both those needs, she picked up the small silver disk sent up while I was still occupied in labor by the affluent Absalom Boston, the black man whom I had not seen since I first set foot on Nantucket.

  “His boardinghouse prospers,” she observed, “even if his venture as a whaling captain was an economic disaster.”

  “He was a captain?” I had never imagined a black man in that position. I was surprised at my own surprise. Certainly Margaret Fuller’s idea that women might be sea captains was no more startling.

  “ ‘Justice,’ ” Maria read. “Did you know the medallion is engraved with the word Justice?”

  “Mrs. Maynard,” I asked softly, “you do think my babe will live?”

  “I have never seen a more alert or robust child. Unless illness or accident befall him, his own dear body is as sturdy a vessel as soul could hope to sail in.” How much alike in shining expression were the faces of Mrs. Maynard and Maria.

  “Then I shall name him Justice, for he comes to balance the loss of my frail Kentucky baby.”

  “What was that baby named?” Maria asked.

  When my lips tried to form the word, a lump stoppered my throat and I could not speak.

  Mrs. Maynard answered Maria’s question for me; she named the dead babe and rushed on to speak of the living one: “Oh, this Justice is a prince, a king!” she declared. “Just look! He listens to us. And look at the little boat the Indian brought him.” She held up a tiny birch-bark canoe.

  We heard the flap of the brass pineapple knocker, and Maria crossed the room to look down at the stoop. “It’s the Husseys,” she said.

  Mrs. Maynard joined her at the window. “Oh, a pot of white flowers! I must go down and bandage up the knocker. Don’t stay long,” she added, instructively, to Maria.

  But I made her stay long enough to listen to my thanks, again, for the baby’s embroidered dress, for I knew Maria hated to sew. Indeed, she viewed the needle to be no less than a ball and chain for women.(We disagreed on this, I having found independence through my needle.)

  I slept with
my babe by my side. There he was, contained by his own soft skin, breathing, his heart beating beneath my fingertips. Thus assured, I fell asleep, and in my dream I drank milky chowder from crocus cups, presented on a silver circle reminiscent of the moon.

  I NEVER TIRED of teaching my babe or tending him. Every moment I felt that if his father should appear, my happiness would overflow. Time was defined by the skills my child acquired. His first word was big, and he used it as a synonym for beautiful. My new dress with large flowers on it was greeted with cries of “Big, oh big!” His feet were ones that loved to dance, and if I put him on any new surface, he knew it by dancing on it. He loved all exotic foods, which he ate without hesitation, particularly my imported jellies made of guava, mango, and pomegranate; his little hand approached an open jar as slowly as a starfish and disappeared into the rim with an inevitable calm.

  Before he was two, he applied physics to our various chairs; that is, by grasping a leg close to the floor he found any chair could be levered up and over. When Mrs. Maynard saw him pitchpoling the chairs, she said, “Una, you must yell at him when he does that,” but I could not bring myself ever to raise my voice at him. I did explain about the fragility of chairs, and he ignored me till he had dominated them all.

  Once, he was perhaps two and a half, I entered the chamber painted a sunny yellow, while the real sun poured through the window, to see him smile, open his eyes to the happiest of worlds, and ask, “Mother, what is death?” The truth was that I had already wondered and dreaded when he would become acquainted with the idea, but still I was unprepared for it to enter so abstractly. I pointed out the difference between what moved and what did not, and said that people and all that lived—plants and animals—might change and become still and that to become a mere thing was to die. “Some people believe,” I added fairly, “that there is an invisible part of us that goes on to live without a body, but we cannot know about that.”

  Each time he returned from Boston, the judge brought Justice a gift, but he seemed rather ill at ease with my child, as some old bachelors are, while others are the most comfortable of substitute fathers.

  “Children are not quite civilized,” I remember his saying, as though he feared for his china.

  “Of course not,” I replied. “If truth be known, neither am I.”

  Sometimes the judge suggested we go to a lecture or some festivity and leave Justice behind; Mrs. Maynard’s report was that he usually slept through our absence. But as he grew older, I noted that Justice did not count it just that he should be left behind, and so in the spring when Justice turned three, we took him with us to the sheep-shearing festival.

  Outdoors, Judge Lord was, indeed, less tense, and Justice was full of delight at the animals and loved plunging his hands down into their oily wool. He loved, too, the rough texture of their horns, and I told him about my old friend Liberal who liked to challenge the Lighthouse.

  In great curly curds, the wool fell from the sheep, who emerged from the shearing pen naked and shivering. All of this fascinated Justice, as I knew it would. “Cottage cheese, cottage cheese,” Justice chanted at the billows of wool. But his best delight was the boy in the woolsack, who pranced on the wool and packed it down.

  Later a stranger from the Vineyard suddenly appeared with Justice by the hand. “He was in with the animals, petting and playing.”

  I snatched him to my bosom, but Justice held out his arms to the judge, who took my boy clumsily to his chest.

  CHAPTER 113: Chowder Swirls

  SUCH WAS the full and shining face of joy. And on the backside—sorrow. Not the loss of my babe. Not that. But darkness and loss all the same. No ship brought a warning word of the mishap in the Sea of Japan. That first moment!—I was ravaged by the sight of my husband, in terrible pain, raving, on the stretcher. I had not seen him for more than four years, but letters had reached me. I had waited patiently, happy in the mothering of my child.

  Spinning a tale is sometimes like stirring a chowder. Steam and mist will rise up, different particles are whiffed from the broth. When Ahab came home still bleeding, his soul raging, it was the Husseys’ chowder, fortified with sweet butter, for which he had the best tolerance. The hard time, Ahab’s homecoming while Justice was still a little boy, swirls up from memory.

  DURING THE NIGHTS I was tortured as well as Ahab. I thought of the long white shape that, as a girl dressed like a boy in the rigging, I had seen sliding like ice under the frigid northern waters and how I had not cried out. Had that lookout’s betrayal led to this bloody stump, the face contorted in pain, the fever that left only to come again?

  “Fedallah,” he said in his delirium. “Bring me Fedallah,” and he scribbled on a piece of paper where I might find an old and hair-turbaned Parsee.

  “My husband asks you visit him at night,” I said.

  “My master summons,” he replied mysteriously. “My old master calls his servant at last.”

  But this Bombay man seemed far older than Ahab. I found Fedallah in our bedroom one night. I never knew how he got in; he had emerged like an evil vapor through a crack in the flooring.

  As I entered, Fedallah brushed past me. “Let him find his way out,” Ahab said. As I watched the fire-worshiping fiend leave, walking on two feet, I would have cut his leg away from him, if my husband could have used his parts—withered, yellow, and old though Fedallah was. And it seemed I had seen a future Ahab projected in Fedallah’s haunted, plotting eyes.

  When Starbuck tried to visit, Ahab said, “Tell him I’ll see him aboard the Pequod, the day after we sail.” The Parsee had fanned the flame of vengeance in Ahab. He was tortured with obsession as well as pain. Ahab asked, during those first weeks, to be moved to the birthing room so that little Justice would not hear his groans. While still at sea he had been fitted with various ivory legs, but the wound was not sufficiently mended, and the appendage had chafed and torn the flesh again. The small room was kept dark, at Ahab’s insistence, though I tried to convince him that air and light would better promote healing.

  “You’d best send for the minister,” Mrs. Maynard said, nodding toward the room.

  “He’s getting better. He’s not dying. Don’t say that.”

  “Something’s dying in that room. Something like a human soul.”

  How the fear cramped me! Was Ahab to go the mad way of Kit?

  As though my friend had read my thought, she said, “It’s not his mind, my dear. Best send for the minister.”

  But the next day, when I glanced toward the birthing room, I saw Ahab standing in the doorway. He leaned against the doorframe; one leg extended a certain distance, wrapped in linen, and ending in emptiness, but he stood. Justice saw him, too, and retreated up the steps. It was the first time he had ever seen his father upright.

  “Disheveled Ahab,” I said merrily, as though I had been expecting him. Then I went to my husband and kissed him, and he returned the kiss. His cheek was gaunt, and pain had left its print on his brow, but there was affection in his eyes.

  “Papa,” Justice said, peeking around the corner. He was then four years old.

  “Come to me.” Ahab jumped one-legged to the nearest chair, sat, and patted his knee. “Come, sit. I have but the one knee to offer thee.”

  Justice came promptly to his father.

  “Be careful not to bump his hurt,” I cautioned.

  “Aye, son. Ye might start it to bleeding, for it bleeds sometimes even if the sheet rubs it.”

  “Where is thy other leg?” Justice asked, immediately using the Quaker speech in addressing his father.

  “Like Jonah, it is in the belly of the whale. And what do ye think it’s doing there?”

  “Resting and getting well.”

  “Nay. All day and night, between which there is really no distinction in that dark belly, the leg kicks the whale—else, in thunder, it be not Ahab’s leg.”

  “To punish the whale.”

  “Aye, lad. And the rest of me shall, next voyage out, pursu
e the monster with our ship and our harpoon. Dost know Tashtego, the Indian? And Daggoo, the black tower? We shall all pursue Moby Dick.”

  Suddenly Ahab threw back his head. He gazed beyond, it seemed, at the offing, and had forgotten the little lad on his knee and his wife who stood by. With his lifted, outlooking gaze, Ahab had the mien of a weathered god. What sight did he envision? His arm quivered involuntarily, and I thought, He is striking the whale with his lance. Finally he muttered, “Now back to thy nap.”

  Justice jumped down and ran up the stairs. After I helped Ahab back to the birthing closet, I found Justice waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

  “Take me higher, so I can see the Pequod.”

  Many afternoons, in the cupola, his nose against the glass, Justice worshiped his father’s ship.

  CHAPTER 114: The Birthing Room

  I STOOD OUTSIDE Ahab’s door to listen to him breathe. Rapidly, pantingly, like a man at hard labor, he gasped the air and spat it out. So savage his breathing was, I thought his teeth grasped air and gnashed it into his lungs. I heard myself whimper, as though I were nicked. No leak of light escaped from under the door; darkness sealed the seam. Not Kit, not Kit again. My knees weakened, and I feared I would buckle in prayer before his closed door.

  He must have heard my whimper, for he said, “There is a kind of divinity in madness. You have it in you. The password’s ‘Madness.’ ”