Ahab's Wife (3 page)

The pain was hard, tight and dark within me. I lay still except for my involuntary shivering and the bedding shivering on its woven ropes in return. The fire had fallen to ash; the last ember eye had closed.

I shivered and the bed shivered, till finally in my delirious state, the bed seemed to be offering a signal, and I thought it was a friendly signal, that it, too, was cold, and I was not alone. Finally, thinking that if
somehow
I
should
live, I should not want to do so without a nose, and if I did not cover it, mine might freeze solid and crack off, falling like a tree cut at its base, I reached up for the edge of the covers and pulled them over my head. Fingering that vulnerable member, I said,
Thou shalt not freeze—not at least if I've brains enough to pull thee under cover!
Then I smiled, to speak to my nose in the voice of Quaker English.
Art turning into Ahab?
I asked.
Nose first?
And, under the quilts, I thumped myself there till I did sting with the feeling, and tears squeezed from my eyes.

But the tears were for the loneliness of the gesture, not for the stinging, but for my longing for my husband. If Dr. Carter was not to be found, what harm or danger prevented my mother's return? I realized cold was but a cloak for the more fearsome specter: alone-ness.

As I continued to thump my nose, then it was I heard a voice, coming, it seemed, from my own belly! Or from my back? Within my cave in the bed. I opened my eyes to look down my body, to see if somehow I had, unknown, produced a vocal babe. Under the covers, the blackness of the cabin—the fire having gone totally out—was compounded to the most profound degree.

What had my babe said?

I waited in the dark, but heard nothing. I felt my belly; the babe was yet within. I shivered. Yes, the bed shivered.

“O, Natural Vibration!” I said aloud, but did not know how to further address a Vibration. And so I laughed, an unearthly, merry peal.

Then, it occurred to me to jiggle the bed. I did shake the mattresses upon their web of rope, and in return, from beneath me—a jiggle. Complexing the signal, I jiggled twice—and twice the bed jiggled in return. I skipped ahead in my addition and jiggled seven times for the days in the week. When seven jiggles, to the very count, came back, despite my crazy dilemma, I giggled.

And then the voice, low as though filtered through baffles, said, “We be lots warmer, we put our skins together.”

“Lazarus, come forth,” I commanded and laughed joyfully, till a birth pain cut me short.

I was not alone.

From between the two mattresses, under my back, I felt her body moving. And though I saw nothing, I imaged with my inward eye her fingers grope the edge, her head and neck thrust through, and then in a smooth lunge—so as not to disturb me on the upper mattress—she slid out onto the floor, her landing muffled by the braided rug. I pictured her quite flat as though passed through the wringers over a washtub, and then puffed up to normal, once free of her compression. Lifting up the side of my cover, I welcomed her, emissary of the lost tribe, into my tent.

Though she had run far in the snowy night, she was wearing but a shift, and her body was colder than mine. I turned to her, and she curved her small self, lean and taut, to my belly as though it were a great hot rock. I bent her close to me and she pulled herself yet closer so that our bosoms touched, and I rubbed her back, and
she
rubbed the flat space between my shoulder blades and all down my spine, and what with the friction of it and the two of us constantly moving, we did become warmer. And then I kissed her on the cheek, and she did me, and it was settled that we were sisters and more than that, for the spirits of sisters are not always married.

Before I had seen either her face or the smooth cheek I had kissed, my labor seized me. I needed to turn on my back, and needed to bear down and needed desperately to lift my knees—oh, let some contortion expel this babe!—let me thrust my legs straight. Again, I needed to draw them back and thrust, and coil and uncoil, and again. After much of this labor, during a lull, I learned her name, and she said that she would go out to the woodpile and I said that she must wrap herself in the top two quilts.

She slid out from our bed, and, still not visible in the darkness, carefully drew off the top layers of cover, wrapped herself, crossed the floor, and passed through the door. So quickly did my state vacillate now, between dozing and consciousness, that I am ashamed to say that I kept no vigil for her but awoke when she returned. From the moonlight reflected by the snow, I saw her figure in the door opening, one
arm curled up carrying the logs, the other free to reach back. With the closing of the door, her image was lost to me again, but I pictured her by sound. When she straightened her arms, the wood rolled down to the hearth, and the rumble of the pieces jouncing each other, bruising and kissing the bark of their fellows and tumbling onto the hearthstones, was as pleasant and promising as any sound I know.

After she had kindled a blaze for us, in the warm glow of the fire, I could see her—Susan—moving about the room, enfolded by the quilts, the red patch-blocks catching the fireglow with their congenial color. The dark curve of her head and her small pigtails sticking up, which I had known by feel in the bed, I saw in silhouette.

Soon, I discerned her face and believed it to be the color of dark walnut. Her lips, leaning over me, her lips very even in the fullness of the upper and lower lip, and most generous, shaped words: “You be all right, soon now. Push on, now.” Her dear lips pushed the air when she said
push
in a soft puff of encouragement. “You sure to live.” Her hands briskly rubbed my belly, so fast and light that I could not feel pain where her fingers shimmied.

“You be all right. You be all right.”

“You must reach inside me,” I said.

“I afeared,” Susan answered, but she did not refuse.

“Give me your hands.” I took them and kissed her fingertips. “Now,” I said, “reach in.”

Susan nodded yes and, between my tented knees, bent her head to the work; her short pigtails marched in a single row over the top of her head. Quicker than a gasp, I saw ancient helmets with their row of short, stiff horsehair, line drawings of warriors in Mother's
I liad for Boys
.

“I not want to hurt you.” Her voice was a sweet whisper of kindness. Through it ran the silver vein of intelligence.

I told her I couldn't feel. I smiled as I lied. That the feeling was elsewhere.

We screamed together. The screams tore out of us.

She tore the baby out of me.

“Aloft! Aloft!” I shouted, and she held him up by his heels, the purple cord spiraling down.

When he cried, our screams sank to silence, and each of us snuffled back tears. Together we sounded like a quiet surf. Spent.

“You be all right.”

And I was.

We named the baby Liberty, but he was listless and did not try to suckle me. Though I had no belief, I bargained with God, offered my life instead, but the universe did not listen. I planned how Susan could have taken my baby with her, had I died. Found sanctuary from the cold as soon as they crossed into freedom. But my baby died.

Susan stayed with me.

That night with the wind howling above the snow-laden roof, I thought of wind in canvas, at sea, and of Ahab, sailing the South Seas. Standing at the rail each morning, Ahab surely would think that each new day the sun might be message-boy with news of a child for his old age. Sleepless, lying on my back, with both hands and groping fingers, I searched the loose flesh of my belly—a husk, my fruit stolen away. I had only disappointment and an empty womb to offer. In his age, with passion, Ahab had given me seed; I in my youth had failed to birth a thriving child.

The only comfort was to turn and curl toward the warmth of Susan's dark body, radiant beside me in the bed. I nestled against her as though she were my husband, mother, sister, shadow, angel.

I
N THREE DAYS
, the snow had still not melted, but the river had begun to break up. Those days! I will not tell of them now. Imagine Christ crucified and not yet risen.

Imagine him
comforted
in the bowels of hell by an angel, who was neither named nor imaged in the Gospels. But such a one was she who was small and dark, her hair standing up in pigtails. We wrapped the baby in soft white lamb's wool and placed him tenderly under the snow not far from the mound where the men had stuck their torch.

When neighbors came across the snowy yard, I quickly hid Susan in the sea chest I had used to transport my goods from Nantucket to Kentucky. These neighbors said that my father's old buggy, driven by
my mother, had turned over through the office of a deep rut hidden under the snow; and my mother had frozen before anyone found her. Her skin had turned black from the freezing. Black, like a cinder, one neighbor said, before they could stop her describing.

I heard Susan sob once from inside the green-painted chest, so great was her sympathy for me. For myself, the quick and caring and grieving part of me already frozen beyond feeling, I wanted not my mother so much as that hidden person who could sob for her.

“Take the baby,” I wailed, “for he's dead, too!”

The neighbors and I agreed that the ground would surely thaw enough to dig in three days, whereupon someone would come for me, and we would have the funerals.

“You and your news of death, leave me!” I blazed at them. “Take the second corpse and leave me!”

When they had reluctantly gone—I stood before the closed door and watched their progress in the snow—then, as I turned, up from the sea-green trunk rose Susan, like a dark waterspout unwinding grief for me. I watched the flowing of her tears, but my own were unshed. Instead, I felt my thudding heart, a pump whose shaft was sunk in a dry well.

In her gush of tears, Susan said though she had never had a child, she had had a loving mother, left behind in slavery.

“Your mama be black like my mam,” she sobbed.

I reached out my hands and arms to enclose and comfort her, while she yet stood in the chest. I envisioned my mother's cheek—leather-slick as well as black. Feeling myself to be a jointed doll, stiff and unnatural in my movement, a wooden thing, I reached for Susan.

“Your mother lives,” I said.

My bodice was soaked with her weeping, and though I could not cry, my swollen breasts unloosed my milk, which mingled with her tears.

“We ain't got but one mam,” she wailed. “Never be no other.”

Standing knee-deep in the chest, like a spent jack-in-the-box, she leaned on me and sobbed—for her mother, not mine.

 

S
USAN HAD LEFT
her mam for the sake of freedom, but for my sake she lingered, even though the river ice was thawing.

“You stay with 'em?” she asked anxiously, referring to when the neighbors would return.

“No. I'll stay here.”

“You don't care for them folks?”

“I don't know them.”

“But they be good to you.”

“I know.”

I got slowly out of bed and held out my hand to her. I took her to the mirror and framed both our faces. She looked solemnly at us.

“I think we look alike,” I said.

She did not laugh. “How that?”

“I think we both will go where we will go and do what we will do.”

For three days, we prepared for Susan's journey. When the neighbors returned, she folded herself back into the Nantucket sea chest.

 

L
IKE A STONE STATUE
I walked away from my cabin with them. Like a juggernaut, that stone car pulled forward relentlessly by the Hindi, I was pulled forward, arms outstretched, by my neighbors. I do not know how my adamantine body was able to bend enough to sit in the wagon.

The world was a vast whiteness barred by the black trunks and limbs of trees. Half a world away, did Ahab stand on the wooden deck, feet firmly planted, watching some mournful scene? Perhaps a sailor, fallen, sewn into canvas, was sinking into the water. I seemed to feel the pitching of the
Pequod
. Did Ahab also mourn? I fastened my gaze on the brown haunches of the two horses, and their color was a relief from the world of alabaster and ebony.

 

B
ESIDE THE COFFIN
of my mother I held the body of my boy in my arms. Susan and I had cocooned him in wool, and the neighbors had added batts of cotton to try to soften him for me, and they had wrapped him again in white crochetwork, and so he seemed larger, as though he had grown. Yet I could feel the stiff, unbending hardness. Slaunchwise, across my bosom, his little fleecy oblong looked the picture of a cloud. His face was covered. They had bound this cloudy shape with string, a little parcel of mortality.

I laid him down beside that bundle of sheet-shroud they said was my mother. I committed him to her care, and them both, their coffin lidded, down into a muddy grave.

Anger that she should have died lay in my left hand and sorrow, for him, in my right. Someone had knitted black mittens for me, and within their muffling wool, over the mud-stained grave, sorrow clasped anger and anger sorrow, with all their might, till they were the same. I would not move from my clenching till they shoveled clean snow over the brown smear.

After that, I looked skyward. I wondered if the universe was punishing me.

T
HAT NIGHT
, Susan and I stood on the banks of the river, which was moving blackly with its load of white ice floes. The floes were flat on the top and big as the floor of my cabin. Some were as big as a river barge. They all moved downstream in a ghostly procession, separated by jagged black lines where the water was bare. The edges crunched when they touched and hissed when they swept by. In the center of the river, where the current ran swifter, a band of floes moved much more quickly than those near the sides.

The moon was full, which would make the footing easier for Susan, for she must jump from floe to floe to cross the river. We stood alone—hand in hand at the edge of the water, our skin separated by the wool of our mittens. No other eyes, no other soul, would watch her go. Silence, stillness, cold. They chimed about us as one snowy chord.

Susan and I had fashioned her a coat from a quilt, and called it a Joseph's coat, because it was truly of many colors, and I had given her my own knitted cap and, under the patchwork coat, an oat-colored sweater. In a cloth bag, she carried some cooked potatoes and johnnycake and a pair of my mother's shoes. She wore another pair of Mother's shoes, and we had driven nails from the inside so that the soles would prick into the slippery ice and keep her feet from sliding.
Around her neck, in a tiny gathered bag, she carried a lock of my baby's hair, for he was born with hair and it was red as flame. I have a lock of it, too, intertwined with one of Susan's, but I do not have a lock of my mother's hair. I'd given Susan my red mittens; I wore the new black ones. We loosened our grip on one another's hand.

When I saw Susan step upon the ice, I bit my lower lip till the blood flowed down my chin and crusted in the cold. Here the riverbank was no higher than a step, as from house to yard. In the moonlight, new snow like sugar glittered atop the sheet of ice lying along the bank. Behind her, in a lengthening path, Susan's footprints indented the sparkling snow. She moved toward the center of the river as calmly as though crossing a broad moonlit road cut through the brush and trees of the wilderness.

When she came to the first black edge, she stepped across the open water as though it were a mere stream. The next floe was smaller, and the next even smaller; they dipped or tilted slightly when she stepped onto them. The spans of open water between them seemed wider and wider, and sometimes she waited for the current to bring the ice rafts closer together. Then she leapt the narrowed fissure and walked on.

It seemed to me Susan was walking on clouds in a black sky. There
were
clouds in the sky, but they stayed far from the moon and did not block her benevolent light. I blessed the moon that held up her lantern for us. Over the water, from seeming cloud to cloud, some silvery, some gray, some white and bright as mirrors for the moon, Susan stepped across the black water.

As the current accelerated and the spaces between floes widened, Susan ran and jumped from raft to raft; my heart hung in the air with her. In the center of the river, the swifter current zipped the ice rafts downstream, with Susan standing on one of them. Her arms fluttered once for balance, twice.

I began to walk downstream and then to run to keep up with the central river as it swept Susan's floe downstream. She never turned to look at me, nor did I want to distract her, and I never called any words of encouragement except as the mind blazes out messages brighter than a lighthouse.

Fly! Fly!
as she leapt and landed, the floe she landed on already taking her downstream.

“The Crossing”

At last the treacherous midsection of river was traversed. She was far from me now—a dark upright using the flatness: flying and landing, running and leaping, from floe to floe. I saw shapes in the ice rafts, mostly like enormous animals, flat, not like a natural swan or bear but flat as a cookie animal or a tin weathervane. Near the other side, approaching a bend, she had to wait for her floe to come close to the bank. Holding the stitch in my side, I continued walking as rapidly downstream as I could till I came to a high but tangled shoreline that thwarted me. Soon the current would sweep Susan's floe beyond my sight.
O, carry her close, carry her close, now,
I prayed to the ice, and I prayed that Susan would not feel herself passing beyond my sight and take the risk of trying to jump ashore when the gulf remained too great. The floe that wheeled her toward the far shore was like the palm of a hand, open and presentational.

Patient Susan! Her ice raft nudged the shore, and she jumped. Even as her shoes landed on the snowy bank, she turned and looked exactly where I stood. Together we lifted our arms, blowing each other a kiss across the water, for we had not kissed on parting, saving it till she should be safe, and trusting the sweet air to be our go-between. And then one shout, though it was small from the distance, from Susan:
Freedom!

 

I
T WAS DURING
Ahab's first voyage after our marriage that I had and lost my first baby, and when Ahab came home, in much kindness, he did get me with child a second time, and that is our boy together, whom I borned in Nantucket, there being no reason to go back to Kentucky and many reasons not to. When he returned from the second voyage, though yet in agony from the loss of his leg in the Sea of Japan, Ahab loved Justice as soon as he saw him, and said he liked the name right well.

The night before he shipped again, Ahab asked the boy to touch his ivory leg, and said, “What would you trade for that, my little Justice?” And the boy ran and brought back in his hand a small rocking horse, also all carved from ivory and decorated in scrimshaw drawing with a curly mane and saddle and reins. “Nay, lad,” my husband said. “Bring me the white whale.” And the boy went and fetched that ghastly thing
from the window ledge. I called it gruesomely carved because when you turned it over, the sailor had hollowed out the chest and left there a heart like a dove's egg, all rounded, and through it an ivory splinter, toothpick-size, a lance.