Ahab's Wife (22 page)

T
HE TABLES SET
and the cooking ready, except for the egg-drop soup for Captain Fry, which was to be last-minute, Harry and I returned to the steward's pantry and continued to talk. I soon learned that he was forever between the two places, and that he really did have too much to do. Hence I was not a mere companion to Chester but a sort of apprentice to Harry. As we settled ourselves, he on the high stool, I on a box, he pointed to a small bell, which was wired to be rung by a tug from the captain at his table. He lighted a tiny spirit lamp under an iron plate in the galley to keep the water boiling for the captain's soup. When we heard the ding, Harry would drop the raw egg into the boiling water, leave the serving, which would be almost immediate, up to me, and himself go up on deck to set out platters for the crew, which numbered about thirty.

Harry having shared so much with me, I thought I would tell him of some of the landscape of Kentucky. I felt confident that my description of mere landscape would not signal that I might be female. I
seemed to owe him something true and real for all the pictures he had made to dance before my eyes. But almost at once the little silver bell dinged, and I postponed a narrative of Kentucky.

Today's setting was one in which the officers ate at the captain's dining table, which had a rail called a “Scotsman” to save the dishes from sliding off in rough seas. The captain's table was flanked by padded benches bolted to the floor. At the head of the table was the armchair for the captain, but today, he and Chester (and I) were to lunch in the more private stateroom. In fact, this arrangement continued for almost the whole first week of the voyage, so my acquaintance with the first, second, and third mates was delayed.

I did hear the third mate, who was new, remark on the unusual arrangement of the crew's meals being prepared in the pantry instead of on a deck galley. Harboring something of Harry's secrets, particularly the first one of the “better” water, I knew, I thought, exactly why this arrangement prevailed on the
Sussex
.

The second mate explained to the third that it was a matter of Harry's serving as both the cook and steward to the captain.

“And why is that?” the third asked.

“Economy,” answered the second.

The first put in that this way the crew ate not so much worse than the officers, as there was overlap in the food preparations.

It seemed to me that Harry having been with his captain for probably half his life, longer perhaps, and, in a sense, more intimately, than the captain's future wife in New Bedford, he had earned the right to a few adaptations. Certainly he was sincere in his belief in the economy of overlap, even to the purchase of knobby vegetables. I did not know what most crews ate on whaling vessels, but I would warrant that those manning the
Sussex
were exceptionally well fed. This seemed to me a credit not only to Harry but to Captain Fry, who had the wisdom to allow an unconventional organization on the vessel where he ruled supreme.

Both the captain and Chester seemed glad to see me, and I resolved to make myself agreeable company to both, once I got the food on the tables. During those hours when I helped Harry and was entertained by his stories of savory rats and Fiji cannibals, Chester had been assigned to read Shakespeare. He seemed not to have made joyful headway
with the bard. I entered their presence bearing the Chinese soup, and I must say it had an enticing aroma, and I felt proud of it even if it had been mostly Harry's doing. Though I had set the table earlier with bowls and spoons, they had been replaced with small China ones with oriental designs painted on their sides—cunning little red dragons—and the spoon itself was made of porcelain and had a little bowl and tonguelike handle so that it seemed more like a small ladle than a spoon.

The oriental spoon served very well when I finally did sit down at our charming table. My soup was good, but a little tepid in temperature, and I felt that Harry had been right in presenting the soup as hot as possible. The captain told me whimsically that the soup tasted better served in tableware of similar origin. Transported by the accouterments of exotica, I felt as though I were already experiencing China, though the captain said our longitude was about that of New York.

“Look yonder,” he said, gesturing toward the porthole. “It's the
Balance
out of Bristol.”

I looked through the round porthole and saw the vessel in full sail, head-on, slender and leaning. Framed by the circle, it is my mind's prettiest, most untroubled image of a whaling ship.

“The skipper is a drunk,” put in Chester.

Captain Fry looked at me and smiled. “From Samoa, he put out so drunk that he sailed the ship in circles. Tacked the ship some thirty times till she was like a duck going round in a puddle. He was out of his mind from drinking so hard, and so the crew took him back to Samoa, to the port of Apia. He and Captain Smith from New London had drunk two barrels of rum the few days before they set sail.”

I thought the
Balance
a lovely name for a ship; too bad the captain was so unworthy of her. I remarked that racehorses in Kentucky, like ships of all types, had beautiful names, and sometimes odd ones. “I knew of a horse,” I said, “named Beware-the-Demon-Drink. It was a filly and owned by a woman and her husband who believed in temperance.”

“Take the motto to heart, Billy,” Captain Fry said. I wondered if he could smell Harry's muscatel on me. “Many a promising man has been ruined by drink.”

“Tell about Captain Swain,” Chester said.

This was a name that interested me, though I now knew that many a person from Nantucket was named Swain and it might not be Rebekkah Swain's husband.

“Out of Nantucket, on the
Globe,
” Captain Fry began.

Again I thought it a lovely name, and remembering the captain's book, I said, “Shakespeare's theater was named the Globe.”

“How did you know that?” the captain asked.

I felt unveiled. I shrugged, dropped my head, and tried to look ordinary.

Getting no answer, the captain spoke again: “And, Chester, do you remember the name of Swain's monkey?” But Captain Fry aborted the tale to get out his telescope and to report on another ship crossing the portholes.

“Out of Nantucket, the
Pequod,
” he said, “and Captain Ahab, I'll warrant.”

I trained the spyglass as best I could. Uncle Torch had said they ruined the eyes and did not keep one at the Lighthouse, and, further, he said that he did not care to see farther out than nature had intended. But I was shocked at how the device made the ship in much detail appear before me. I reached out my hand as though to touch it and heard the captain chuckle.

“Everyone makes the same gesture,” he said, “looking the first time. Even a Shakespeare scholar. What do you see?”

“Ivory. Polished ivory hangs round the bulwarks. And she's all fastened up with whale teeth for pins. Even the blocks for the tackle appear carved of ivory.”

“Let me see,” said Chester, and I handed him the glass. He ran to the second porthole to look. “There's no wheel. They use an ivory tiller, and it's the lower jawbone of the sperm.”

“The
Pequod
is called the cannibal craft,” the captain said.

I could see why, for she was all bones and teeth wherever such material could be used in place of wood. Her mien was that of a grinning, toothy jaw.

“It was Peleg decorated her thus, but Ahab likes it well enough.”

“Who is Ahab?” I asked.

I expected a jocular story, a narrative of drunken escapades such as that told of the captains of the
Balance
and the
Globe,
but Clifford Fry
shook his head and did not smile. “They say he's lived among the cannibals.”

“Fought the cannibals?” I asked timidly.

The captain said nothing else but shook his head in the negative and looked grim. “They say he's been to colleges, too, as a young man,” he added. “Harvard and Yale.”

Those last names were uttered with bitterness, and I thought of the inscription in the flyleaf of his book,
Shakespeare is my Harvard and my Yale
. If Giles ever had to make such a statement, the list of authors would be very long, not confined to a single name, no matter how singularly worthy. I was troubled, as I pulled the bones from my fried catfish, that my perfect Captain Fry had in him an element of discontent, even of regret. I thought of Kit saying that he had been fascinated with the contentment he had found among us at the Island. How lightly I had thrown away content for adventure, but I could not imagine regret. And soon I would write letters explaining everything.

“What age man is Captain Ahab now?” I asked.

“Over fifty and still sailing. With iron-gray hair and the mark of lightning down his cheek.”

I went to Chester and took the glass from him. At the tiller, I inscribed Ahab, for surely it was he, his legs planted, his trousers rippling. Hatless, his gray-almost-to-white hair feathered in the breeze. All puissance, he held the ivory tiller against his hip, and it seemed to spring out from him like a third leg, a superfluous ivory one. I looked hard, focusing both my excellent natural eye and the extended one to see what expression figured the face of this associate of cannibals and colleges.

I saw there
joy!
Fierce joy and pride.

P
EOPLE CROSS
our paths casually, when trumpets should blast. So it was with my first sighting of the
Pequod
and the man who would become a husband. Had I met Ahab face-to-face and not across a wilderness of water with him all unaware that his face had become a cameo—had I done so my first days at sea, I would have had only a vague response. I was not then ready for Ahab. Yet, I did feel kin to him when I saw his exultation in wind and water and speed, his pleasure in his own preeminence. High in the Lighthouse, though motion lay around me in the wind, the traveler-clouds, the fluid sea, the pilgrim birds—there, close to the sun, alone, I myself had known strange joy and the strength that attends such joy.

He, too, has stood next to lightning,
I thought, remarking the brand on his face. I touched my own cheek, glad that it was not marked, remembered Frannie, the permanent pitting of her face. Remembered my gratitude that my prayer for her recovery had been granted. My hope that she played contentedly.
No
. Frannie was lonely. And it was my fault.

Aboard the
Sussex,
we went on with our luncheon, and Captain Fry told me I should begin in the post meridiem to learn to climb the rigging. “We want to be able to send those fine eyes aloft,” he said, “safely.” Then he asked Chester and me what program we could devise to achieve that end.

The answer was as obvious to Chester as it was to me—that I should practice climbing to low altitudes and then, by degrees, climb higher.

“Mounting under full sail is quite a different thing from a climb in port.”

“You'll be cold,” Chester said.

“And what's the remedy—nay, the preventive?” the father asked.

Chester volunteered the use of his own thick peacoat, which was too big for him now. They had purchased it in anticipation of still being at sea some two years hence when Chester should have grown into it.

The coat was fetched, and it was large even for me. They must have prophesied prodigious growth for Chester. It was the most tailored and expensive garment I had ever put on—a thick, navy wool,
top stitched on the collar, double-breasted, ornamented with a double row of brass buttons stamped with a smiling anchor. The lining was a slippery silk, also navy blue but figured with small gold anchors. I was profuse in my thanks and could not help but exclaim in ways that might have been considered girlish. But nothing was interpreted from my enthusiasm.

When I climbed, I required my arms to do perhaps more than their fair share of lifting my weight aloft in order to develop them. The muscles in my arms could not, of course, take on that definition that is characteristic of males, but my arms did grow much stronger. The palms of my hands blistered and then callused. When I went to sleep at night I felt again the pressure of the ropes across the balls of my feet. After a week had passed, when we were skirting the wide Sargasso Sea in the regions of the Caribbean, I climbed, with the ship under full sail, all the way to the masthead.

The
Sussex
began to feel like home. For the most part, Kit and Giles had been avoided. I deduced that they had been given nightwatch duty, and that reduced the risk considerably of encountering them. Though I held no particle of anger toward them (for having neglected to call at the Sea-Fancy Inn in New Bedford), I found that I did not need them. Tucking into my own duties, listening to stories from Harry and the captain, tutoring Chester in a random, peripatetic manner, all this filled my hours in an interesting and comfortable way. Sometimes when I lay in my hammock at night, I thought about Kit and Giles, just as I did about my parents and my folk on the Island, but my friends seemed almost as remote to my present existence as my family. Should I ever become bored on ship, I decided, I would enliven my existence at that point by speaking with Kit or Giles. Yet, as I had told Chester upon meeting, I was a person very rarely bored.

I did learn that Harry had made the acquaintance of Giles, for Harry passed on sometimes the interesting things he had learned and his wonder at Giles's wide reading. My own days fell out along these lines: breakfast and an hour's walk with Chester; in the pantry with Harry preparing the noon meal; trips to the galley, where the food was cooked; my service and meal with the captain and sometimes the mates; the cleanup aftermath of lunch; tidying of the captain's quarters, sometimes assisted by Chester (this seemed his only duty as cabin boy; his father attended to most of his own needs). My time aloft fell in mid afternoon.

“
Aloft”

Surely it was the best time to be aloft. Especially as we sailed closer and closer to the equator, the air was so warm that I unbuttoned the peacoat and let the air bathe me. As the weather grew warmer and then hot, Harry moved his food preparation out of the pantry area and to the galley deck. Even the food for the captain and mates, who ate together now, was prepared there, and I took it below.

The possibility of sighting whales began to excite the atmosphere on board, and the sound of hasps honing the steel of lances and harpoons filled our ears throughout the day. Many a sailor sat on the deck, his back propped against any upright structure, his legs spread, and his whetstone moving back and forth against the edge of his harpoon, or lance, or cutting spade. These edges were stroked to the point of flashing silver, and all over the deck when I was above, I could see the short reflective dashline of a sharpened steel edge. High above the din, the sound put me in mind of a pack of demons patiently filing their teeth. Another lookout saw a whale, a right whale, and we gave chase, though the sperm whale was preferred. The beast escaped us. Nonetheless, the sighting sharpened the edge of excitement the way the whetstones sharpened the killing tools.

I once spied another ship in the offing and called down the news, but Captain felt we could not stop to gam until we had taken a whale. That night, I resolved, I would write my mother and my aunt the true story of my whereabouts.

For more than a month, we saw neither whales nor ships. We seemed suspended in time; our killing tools grew sharper and sharper.