Ahab's Wife (2 page)
Authors: Sena Jeter Naslund
Let them be sea-captainsâif they will!
âMARGARET FULLER,
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
It was now early spring, and the river was swollen and turbulent; great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and from in the turbid waterâ¦. The huge green fragment of ice on which [Eliza] alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it, but she stayed there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake:âstumblingâleapingâslippingâspringing upwards again!
“Yer a brave gal, now, whoever year!”
âHARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851)
“My God! Mr. Chase, what is the matter?!”
I answered, “We have been stove by a whale.”
âOWEN CHASE,
Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket (1821)
"Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whalesâ¦. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moodyâdesperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad oneâ¦.
Besides, my boy, he has a wifeânot three voyages weddedâa sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man had a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless
harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
âCAPTAIN PELEG TO ISHMAEL,
“The Ship,” Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick (1851)
[Starbuck, First Mate of the Pequod:] “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish!â¦âthis instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
[Ahab:] “They have, they have. I have seen themâsome summer days in the morning. About this timeâyes, it is his noon nap nowâthe boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
[Starbuck:] “â¦my Maryâ¦promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's sail!â¦Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!”
But Ahab's glance was avertedâ¦. “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it: what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the timeâ¦? By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspikeâ¦. But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.”
âSTARBUCK AND AHAB,
“The Symphony,”
Moby-Dick
I have fed upon dry salted fareâfit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!âwhen the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crustsâaway, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife
I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillowâwife? wife?ârather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his preyâmore a demon than a man!âaye, aye!â¦Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes!â¦I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!âcrack my heart!âstave my brain!âmockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairsâ¦Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.
âAHAB,
“The Symphony,”
Molly-Dick
“There she blows!âthere she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
âAHAB,
“The ChaseâFirst Day,”
Moby-Dick
C
APTAIN
A
HAB WAS
neither my first husband nor my last. Yet, looking upâinto the cloudsâI conjure him there: his gray-white hair; his gathered brow; and the zaggy mark (I saw it when lying with him by candlelight and, also, taking our bliss on the sunny moor among curly-cup gumweed and lamb's ear). And I see a zaggy shadow now in the rifting clouds. That mark started like lightning at Ahab's temple and ran not all the way to his heel (as some thought) but ended at Ahab's heart.
That pull of cloudâtapered and blunt at one end and frayed at the otherâseems the cottony representation of his ivory leg. But I will not see him all dismembered and scattered in heaven's blueâthat would be no kind, reconstructive vision;
no,
intact, lofty and sailing, though his shape is changeable. Yesterday, when I tilted my face to the sky, I imaged not the full figure but only his cloudy head, a portrait, glancing back at me over his shoulder.
What weather is in Ahab's face?
For me, now, as it ever was in life, at least when he was looking at me alone and had no other person in view, his visage is mildâwith a brightness in it, even be it a wild, white, blown-about brightness. Now, as I look at those billowed clouds, I see the
Pequod
. I half raise my hand to bid good-bye, as it was that last day from the eastmost edge of Nantucket Island, when, with a wave and then a steadfast, longing look, till the sails were only a white dot, and then a blankness of oceanâthen a glitterâI wished his ship and him
Godspeed.
Nantucket!
The home where first I found my body, my feet not so much being pulled into this sandy beach as seeking downward, toes better than roots; then my mind, built not to chart this blue swell of
heaving ocean, but the night sky, where the stars themselves, I do believe, heave and float and spin in fiery passions of their own; Nantucket!âhome, finally, of my soul, found on a platform eight-by-eight, the wooden widow's walk perched like a pulpit atop my house. These three gears of myselfâbody, mind, and soulâmesh here on this small islandâNantucket! Then, why, when I look into the mild day sky, do the clouds scramble, like letters in the alphabet, and spell not Nantucket, but that first home,
Kentucky?
And those clouds that did bulge with the image of Ahab show me the map of that state, flat across the bottom and all billowed at the top?
As a child of three, lying on my back close to the Ohio River, when I looked up, the puffy clouds formed neither map, nor portrait, nor white animals grazing the sky, but I thought:
Beautiful! This is what they mean by beautiful
.
Even as a child, I wanted to know what words meant and marked those occasions when I did learn as memorable. Once when I sat on a stump in the yard and watched my father drive away in the black buggy, his whip in his hand, I thought,
Sad, I feel sad,
and I knew that it was my first matching of that word and that feeling. I asked my mother to show me the letters for that word, and thus I began to write as well as read at a very early age. “S-s-s,” she said. “The letter looks like and sounds like a snake, and
s
begins both
sad
and
snake
.” Well might
sad
be matched to my father, for though he was kind to me as a child, he became a moody and then a desperate and violent man, who took his own life.
His ghost rides by in black; standing at his knee, the whip, its lash dangling like a thin banner.
Â
I
DID NOT
consult Ahab about my decision to spend my pregnancy in a rough Kentucky cabin, with my mother, instead of staying in the gracious home of a captain's wife on Nantucket. But I wrote him, of course, and sent the letter after him on the ship called the
Dove,
so he could imagine me aright.
That time spent with my mother outdoors in the sweet summer and golden Kentucky autumn was augmented by our indoor companionship of sewing baby smocks and cooking and reading again those great
works of literature my mother had brought with her to the wilderness, green-bound books I had read as a child or she had read to me.
Sometimes my mother and I stood and looked at our faces together in the oval mirror she had brought with her from the East. Along with her library chest of books, the mirror with its many-stepped molding distinguished our frontier cabin from others. Thus, elegantly framed, my mother and I made a double portrait of ourselves for memory, by looking in the mirror.
Â
W
HEN IN MID-
D
ECEMBER
the labor began but tried in vain to progress, my mother went from our cabin, driving the old mare in the black buggy through a six-inch crust of snow, for the doctor. In my travail, I scarcely noticed her leaving. When my mother did not come home and did not come home, and the pains were near unbearable and the chill was creeping across the cabin floor and into my feet as I paced, I grasped the feather bed from my bunk and flung it atop her bed. In desperation, between spasms, I gathered all the gaudy quilts in the house, and then, leaving the latchstring out so that I would not have to venture from my nest when she returned, I took to my childbirth bed. There, softness of two mattresses comforted me from beneath and warmth of myriad quilts, a cacophony of colors, warmed me from above, but still I worked my feet and legs and twisted my back.
Despite the heat of my labor, I could feel my nose turning to ice, long and sharp as a church steeple all glazed with frost.
Parsnip!
I thought of; frozen and funnyâa vegetable on my face! I chortled and then prayed, wondering if prayer and laughter gurgled up, sometime, from the same spring.
Let nose be parsnip, parsnip be steeple, steeple be noseâwhatever that protuberance, it is frozen to the very cartilage. Warm it! Save me, gods and saints!
Wild and crazed by pain, my thoughts leaped about in antic dance, circling one picture after another. Nose! Steeple! Parsnip! My desperate, laughing prayer from within that quilted hump below its parsnip was only that I should be delivered and nothing at all for the welfare of the rest of the world.
And yet I wanted to wait for my mother's return, and I was afraid because I had little idea of how to catch the baby. So even as I prayed,
I prayed against myself, that time would not pass nor take me any closer to the port of motherhood. I thought of Ahab, as if his ship were wallowing, going neither forward nor drifting back but immobile in a confused sea. Sometimes I slept a little.
During an exhausted respite from the pains that wrung me, and yet amid my anxiety for my too-long-absent mother, I thought I heard the door creak open and an attendant puff of colder cold, but sleep claimed me again. In my sleep Zephyrs roamed the room. Their cheeks were bloated with frosty breath, which they jetted through pursed lips across the tip of my nose, down the part of my hair, and into my ears.
Then there came such a pounding at the door that I thought,
Volcanos! It will burst through!
“Open the door,” they shouted. “Give her up now!” And terrible pounding of closed fists on my boards.
“Pull the latchstring,” I called, for terrifying as they sounded, I didn't want my door shattered by their anger, nor did I want to leave the bed. Seeing how humped I was, wouldn't any being attached to human voice pity me? Around me, the cabin was almost black, as I had left no candle burning, and the windows had been shuttered for the winter. The fire was no more than red-glow.
“No latchstring out!” one man called. And gruffer voices growled without human language. So I lifted the covers and stood by the bed, but before I did their bidding, I covered my warm spot atop the two feather beds with my quilts. Slowly I crossed the dim cabinâI imagined a dark ghoul crouching along the wallâharbinger of pain to come?âbut I opened the door and faced the snow. As though frozen in the icy air, a group of six, all bundled up in wool and fur, stood around a torch of blazing pine knot.
“Her tracks come to your door, Madam,” one said. “Give her up, now.”
These bounty hunters seemed to lick their mouths where frost was caked in their long mustaches and beards. They were like ice demons, but my innocence made me brave, for I harbored no runaway slave.
“I am in childbirth at this very moment.” They could clearly see my great roundness in my flannel gown. “I'm waiting my mother and the doctor. Have you seen them?”
One of the six was much smaller than a normal man. His head rose only to the waists of the others, and he wore the pelt of a wolf. I would
have thought the man a child, but his face was heavily bearded, and the hair of his face joined and blended with the wolf fur. The ears and snout of the wolf hooded his head, and the wolf's ivory teeth were fastened in the man's hair. Were he not diminutive, he would have suggested a frontier Hercules cloaked in skin of wolf instead of Nemean lion. The dwarfish wolf-man held the high-lifted, blazing pine knot, big as a thigh, in the center of the group. As he lifted his torch higher, the pack stretched to see beyond me into my house. Beyond them, in that flickering, orange light, I could see bare footprints in the snow, small ones, such as a woman might make, and indeed they led toward my door, at least to the great mauled patch where their boots were shifting and scratching.
“We must search your house.”
The frigid wind swept over my skin like icy water, and then hot water poured from between my legs and wetted my gown and the floor. I stepped back.
“Look, you,” I cried. “My water's breaking!” I would use my shame to rebuff them.
“Still, we'll have the wench, and you must yield her up.”
“Look in my house, if you like,” I replied, resigned. “But I must go to my bed.”
And I did, sniffing back my fear, and wanting my mother, and watching them. From the big torch, which they stuck in a snowbank, they each lighted a taper of fat-pine kindling and entered my house, closing the door. They held up the flaming sticks like candles and filled the cabin with light. Deep in my bed, I wondered,
Will these ruffians stay while my sweet babe comes out?
The room glowed, and rosin-scented smoke curled to the ceiling.
Among these demon-angels, is there a father who might help me?
But the thought of their awful paws between my thighs frightened me so much I would not ask. I lay gasping and groaning while they looked around and beneath the furniture. There was little place for concealment in the room.
“Search under the bunk.”
The dwarf dropped to all fours, and then he truly looked like a wolf snuffing under the beds. And when he stood up again, he seemed a magic wolf, trained to walk unnaturally in houses, on his hind legs. One hunter opened my sea chest, which I knew to be empty, and peered in.
“You have a hill of cover upon you.”
“The lass is a mountain in herself, Jack,” another said quietly, and I heard the Scotch burr in his voice.
“Could you bring in wood for me? afore you leave?”
The rough-spoken man put his hand on my cover to jerk it back in his search, but the Scotsman restrained the hand and said, “No, Jack. Be leaving her her warmth now, and let's be off.” I have always thought the Scotsman would have brought in wood for me, but because he knew the men to be mean and ready for roughness of unspeakable kinds, he set them on the hunt again.
“Sometimes they walk backward in their trails,” the dwarf added persuasively, “to throw us off the chase.” I started at his voiceâsoft as fur. “She's not here,” he added, in the same caressing tone. Pivoting in a furry blur, he scampered across the room to the door.
A pack following their leader, the hunters clomped after the wolf-cloaked dwarf, and as they passed through the door, they doused their firebrands, each stick hissing as it entered the snow. From the drift, the Scotsman took up the blazing torch, the pine knot whorled like a hip joint. Then someone eased the door shut, and the cabin was utterly dark again.
My fear seemed to have stilled my labor. I listened to the crunch of the men's boots going toward the river, which was frozen solid. At a distance, they sounded almost merry, like Christmas revelers, rather than a cruel posse on a deadly hunt for a human being.
Their coming and going had let out all the warmth from the fire, which was sunk almost to embers, no bigger than eyes. Though my labor stood still, and I did not knead the covers or corkscrew my back, I quivered and shookâwhether with fear that the men might come back or with dread that my baby was to be welcomed only by my ignorance and the winter's cold, I don't know. If I did not die of childbirth, I and my child would likely freeze to death. I knew if I rubbed myself that friction would warm me a bit, but I was too fearful to make the effort. Involunteer, I lay and quivered and shivered. It seemed, after a long time, that the bed itself was cold and also shivering.
Typhoon sleep enswirled my mind and I dreamedâof the dwarf, his eyes brown and warm as ancient amber, beautifully human in his animal face. Did he know the midwife's art? The dream dwarf asked me my name. “Una!” I said sharply and woke myself.