Ahab's Wife (24 page)

S
INCE MY TIME
on the
Sussex,
I have ever feared the weathervane in me. Sometimes I point toward Independence, isolation. Sometimes I rotate—my back to Independence—and I need and want my friends, my family, with a force like a gale. I have in me a spinnaker sail that finds the breeze and leads all my sails in that direction. I do not count myself fickle, for I have much of loyalty in me, but I am changeable.

Before the taking of the whale, I had had no need of Kit or Giles. Now I longed for them, and I felt that Kit, at least, had need of me. But he did not seek me out.

Now when I passed Giles boldly on the deck, I
hoped
he would glance into my face and know me. Kit's mind was in danger; I knew no remedy; I needed Giles to help me save Kit.
Lust
was a word I knew, and I knew it was all mingled with my anxiety for Kit. Yet I hesitated to make myself known to Giles. I had new connections—Chester, his father.

As we approached Cape Horn, Harry conveyed to the captain that Giles was a person of learning, and Captain Fry asked Giles to serve as Chester's tutor for an hour in the afternoon. This circumstance provided me with an opportunity: playfully—ah, that was the way to unveil myself to Giles—playfully. I told my little ward, one morning when the sky was piling up with gray clouds and the wind was freshening, to ask his afternoon tutor to tell him the name of the lady of the Red Cross Knight. “The right answer, Chester, is Una. If he gives you the right answer, tell him he may send back a question for your morning tutor.”

When I saw Chester next, he said Giles had answered the question and sent his own: What French physicist had invented a new kind of lens for lighthouses?

“Fresnel!”

“Did you go to the same school?” Chester asked.

“I think we did.”

I found Giles leaning against the bulwarks, looking out at the waves. I, too, placed my elbows and looked out. Without turning his head, he said, “You are a remarkable woman.”

I laughed. “Are you surprised?”

“Una, Una. How did you do it? When did you do it? You've contrived a sky trapeze and dropped down from it, I know. But how?”

“First I lured the eagles to come into the Lighthouse. When I had ten, I began to teach them to follow directions—all flap south, all veer east. I made harnesses out of braided kelp, and off we flew.”

Very quietly, with long pleasure, he pushed the word through his lips: “No-o-o-o-o.”

“I've found a way,” I said, “to wish till things happen. The very atoms I'm made of come apart in a kind of sparkle. A cloud of sparkle propelled by will. When I crossed Cuba—it was night—they thought I was a comet. At Rio they said gnats—a strange phosphorescent pod of gnats on the move. During the last rain—whenever that was—has it rained?—I attached myself to individual drops, fell into a puddle in a low place on the deck, and reconstituted myself as a male, and here I am.”

“Are you male, now?” For the first time he looked at me.

“No. I am purest female. Virginal, virtuous, and…and…voluptuous.”

“You are bold, inventive, unconventional, and…ambitious.”

“So are you—ambitious! ‘Quantities equal to the same or equal quantities are equal to each other'—Euclid. I am your equal.”

“No. I am not your equal. I pity the man who is.”

“Giles!” Reproof, though quiet, was in my voice.

“How lovely, Una, to hear you say my name.”

“Then you're happy that I'm here. You'll meet with Kit and me in the masthead at night; we'll talk the dark away; and you'll always keep my secret.”

“You're much less shy. Full of directives.”

“They have made a man of me. I say what I want.”

In what sense, I asked myself, was my jest true? The words were Kit's, who had said them bitterly, as though my thoughts and feelings were unnatural.

“I believe you are the second cabin boy,” Giles went on. “These last two weeks—how have you worked?”

“Like everyone else. I may have stood beside you—I don't know. We were all disguised in soot and grease.”

“Ankle-deep in blood. I threw my shoes to the sharks.” He shuddered the way a horse does after the race is over. “Won't Kit be startled,” he added more cheerfully.

“No.”

“No?”

“He already knows.”

“You told him first?”

I laughed. “He discovered me. He recognized my voice, at the tryworks.”

“Kit is angry with me just now.”

“I know,” I said soberly. “But I don't know why.”

“I'll talk with him. With you here, with all of us together—maybe he'll forgive. So you two meet aloft for midnight confabs?”

“We did once.”

“Tonight, then. I'll tell him you'll be there.”

It pleased me to think that I was the bridge over their discord.

I decided to make us a picnic treat. From Harry's larder, I stole a flask of wine, a slab of cheese, a jar of raspberry preserves, a small loaf of bread. I was a whirligig of joy.

B
Y NIGHTFALL
, the ship was tossing. Swells rose like hills—I did not know the sea could be so high, a gray wall moving toward us. It broke over the sides and ran on the deck. The most experienced men were sent up to trim sails. The mainsail was struck and furled. Night
came early. The ship's bell clanged continuously till Captain Fry caught the clapper and throttled it. He sent me to be companion to Chester, who had crawled into his father's gimbaled bed and tucked his face under the covers.

When I saw him there, the bed swaying and gyrating above the floor as though possessed, with only his brown curls visible over the spread, I sympathetically put my hand on his head.

He jerked the covers from his little pale face and commanded, “Don't touch me.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I'd let Giles pat me. But not you.”

How quickly had I been demoted in preference!

“Do you feel sick?” I asked. “I am, a bit.”

“I hate the storm,” he declared vehemently.

“You've made this passage before, Chester.”

“It's too soon. I was to have another day of tutoring. It will be nothing but mountains of water and everything wet for days.” He wailed. “And I'll be in jail, in bed!”

“So the fire to learn burns in you now?”

“Billy, you should talk to Giles.” Chester's tone changed from petulance to wonder. “He knows everything. Truly, he knows everything. He likes every idea in his head.”

Chester's enthusiasm, like his fear, made him seem younger than Frannie.

“I
have
talked with Giles. I agree with you.”

“Suppose Giles should get washed overboard!”

“Giles is too smart for that,” I said.

“It's only luck,” Chester wailed back. He was sitting up in the bed now. He looked like a little prince, coddled but needing a promise beyond human control. “In war, it's only luck—the sailors told me so—who comes back and who doesn't. A whale holds an army's worth of blood. Then it's only luck for us, too, like soldiers.”

“I don't believe that,” I said. But I was shaken. “It's partly luck. Not entirely. Your alertness, your intelligence, what you know about wind—or the ways of war: these can save you over and over.”

“Giles deserves to survive,” Chester said, suddenly calmed. “You can earn being safe?”

“Sometimes,” I said, trying to take back any measure of comfort that seemed false.

“During storms, I always sleep in here. Father never comes down.” He sighed heavily. “It's almost Christmas.”

“Your father'll be on deck,” I said. Though I had not weathered a bad storm with Captain Fry, I had no doubt that he would be at the helm till he dropped or the sun shone.

“You can sleep here with me. Come tonight.”

“Not all night,” I said. “Maybe for a while. Maybe I could bring Giles and another friend, Kit—do you know him? We could picnic.”

In retrospect, it seems odd to me that I should have wanted the first meeting of us three to include Chester. I can only say that my happiness seemed elastic. If three friends, why not four? I had had something of the same feeling when I turned the tap to steal Harry's muscatel: that it was a shame not to include Harry. The theft itself seemed natural enough. Do not all people who live together intimately use each other's goods? It is a sign of solidarity more than a matter of robbery. At least it had been that way at the Lighthouse. Even as I rationalized, conscience reminded me I had stolen from Harry:
This is not the Lighthouse
. Conscience added:
There will never be another place like the Lighthouse
. I envisioned my letters in their hands. I wanted forgiveness. I wanted them not to be afraid for me.

When I went on deck, rain lashed every surface. I had forgotten that rain could be added to swelling sea. Yet able to discern the form of Giles, I stretched up to his ear and yelled the plan.

“No,” he said definitely, glancing down at me.

“Then come for me to the captain's stateroom after Chester is asleep. Bring Kit.”

As long as possible, the crew would keep its usual hours, but when storm compounded around the Cape, then double duty would be ordered.

 

T
HEY ARRIVED TOGETHER
—Giles with pleased triumph, Kit with dignity but less than happy, as though he had unwillingly acquiesced to a plan not in his own best interests. But I was jubilant, and I insisted on a three-way hug—they were quite wet—and babbled about the food I'd stolen.

Giles nodded toward the door to the captain's chamber. “It's too close. Follow me. Bring a quilt to sit on. Wrap it in oilcloth.”

He led us out into the storm and back down to the blubber room in the waist of the ship. The hatch banged closed on us and muffled the storm sounds. Once the stage of butchery, the room, like all the ship, now proclaimed its neatness and called that innocence. Giles told Kit to lean over—I thought his tone dangerously peremptory—and then Giles stood on Kit's back to check the fastening on the hatch. We could still hear the muted sea crashing down on top of us and washing across the deck above.

The blubber room seemed cavernous. There was another level, the hold, below us, where the casks of oil were stored. I spread the quilt—snitched from the captain's chest—in the middle of the empty blubber room and felt the kind of excitement born not of storm but of the more subtle adventure of a party, with augmenting or diminishing of friendships at stake. I willed my stomach to settle itself against the pitching of the ship. I was not much afraid of the storm. Let a ton of water crash against us! Laugh at its impotence! The ship was made to withstand.

“Does Chester worry about his father?” Kit asked.

Though I did not speak, I doubted that Chester worried about his father; Chester perceived him as invincible. It was Giles who seemed so strangely precious or so newly discovered by Chester as to be vulnerable.

With light irony, Giles said, “Ah, shall we discuss our fathers?”

“Let's have some wine,” I said.

Kit laughed his hollow laugh, but there was some echo of pleasure in it: “You've started drinking wine?” Aberration was meat and drink to him.

“Why not?” I said. “I'm sure royalty of both sexes drink wine.” I turned the flask up to my mouth, drank, and swallowed manfully. “To the Royal Friends,” I said. “To us.”

“To us.” Each of them took the flask, toasted, and drank.

“Sit down,” I said. “Sit down,” and when they did I proudly centered the bread and cheese and jam. “Compliments of Harry, unaware.”

“Ah, Harry,” Giles said. And again that mocking tone. “Kit, how would you rank Harry?”

“With the rats.”

“We don't have rats on the
Sussex,
” I said.

“The Innocence of Una,” Giles said.

“You haven't been in the fo'c'sle,” Kit said.

“I believe I found a rat in my hammock,” Giles said. “But never mind. Here's cheese that rats will only dream of.” He chomped off the corner, and his teeth left slide marks in the yellow. “I guess fo'c'sle folk are not so dainty as the second cabin boy would like.” He passed the cheese to Kit, who decorously broke off a corner for himself. “Oh, bite it like a man, Kit,” Giles said.

“Let's not bait each other,” I said.

“All right,” Giles replied, subdued and serious. “Harry? Cover your charms, Una, when you're around Harry.”

I was stunned. What could Giles mean? A quiet fell among us. I felt as hostess that I should make things smooth, but I had little practice in that art. On the Island, conversation had seemed a natural act. Yet, I recalled how sometimes awkward silences had fallen between Giles and me. “Why are we quiet?” I suddenly blurted.

“Perhaps we don't have so much to say,” Kit answered.

“Well, we could speak of our charming fathers,” Giles said again.

“You know that mine is dead?” I asked.

“Yes, Kit told me. I'm sorry. Suicide.”

Another silence fell upon us till Kit laughed. “I suggest we change the subject.”

“Mothers?” Giles said.

“Not a good subject for me,” Kit said.

“We know nothing of either your mother or father,” I said to Giles.

“Mother, a saint. An ignorant, strong, good saint. Father, a reprobate. A drunk. Deserted us on my twelfth birthday.”

“What else?” I asked gently. Giles seemed to have sprung like Athena—even with her blue-gray eyes—from the head of some Zeus. “Where did you live in Alabama?”

“Winston County. The Free State. No slaves.”

Yes. Giles did not have that taint about him.

“Soil?” he continued, as though catechizing himself. “Red.”

“Red as blood?” Kit asked.

“No. Ferric red. Iron-ore red. At Elyton, at the very southern tip of the Appalachian chain, they cook the iron ore with coal and limestone—all found right there—and make iron.”

“Did you ever work there?” Kit asked.

“No. My work, and Mother's, was behind the ass of a mule. But we plowed the last cotton fields with me in harness.”

“No!” I said.

“No, that's not true,” he laughed. “I think you two would believe anything I told you.”

I thought that Giles was too arrogant for his own good, but I held my tongue. I thought he had some purpose or some need I could not divine.

“What, in nature,” Kit asked, “is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?”

“The Dismals,” Giles answered promptly. “A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land—north Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler—the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name—the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location.”

“You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?” I asked.

“It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?”

“The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white—redbud and dogwood.”

“And you?” Giles asked Kit.

“Stars,” he said. That was all.

A pencil of water streamed through the hatch.

“Heaven is pissing on you,” Giles said to Kit.

Why did I allow Giles to say anything and consider it holy writ?

I trusted him, with a trust beyond trust.

I snatched up the captain's quilt from the puddle. A board on the hatch broke and a splash of water fell through.

So there was a world beyond our egg of a world. A stormy place, strong enough to crack our shell. Fear stirred. I held the quilt to my bosom.

“What pattern is that?” Giles asked, pointing.

I suspected that he was pointing at my breasts, but I answered, “The forest.” The quilt pieces were stacks of triangles fitted together like
pine trees, a rectangle of brown at the base to suggest a trunk. “Mostly green triangles,” I said, as though Giles could not see the pattern for himself. “An occasional brown, on a white field.”

“Fry, like most sea captains, thinks he pines after the land,” Giles said dryly.

Our picnic lacked ease, lacked kindness. Our fare was irony and cynicism.