Ahab's Wife (4 page)

T
HIS TIME
of reverie I have spent lounging on a golden sand dune. Such a mild blue day it is here in Nantucket, where the breeze sometimes whips me, sometimes caresses me! Yet intact Ahab, back from his first voyage, once said of just such a changeable breeze,
This contrast is the way of life itself
. All playfully, he added,
But were I God, then would every day be invariantly good
. Then he asked me if he might be the god of my world.

I teased back and denied him that
Never,
I said,
as long as sky arches over or earth lies under
. Once, out of guilt and grief, I had given my will away, but ever after, I kept my soul for myself.

And Ahab asked,
Thou wouldst have me unvault the firmament to prove my godhood? Exalt the valleys? And what dost thou require that I demand of the sea?

Then I spoke with more conviction and said,
Certainly you are not lord of that, for the sea takes you from me, and am I not your heaven?
Here I traced the zaggy mark that began at his temple.
How can you be lord of an element having the power to take you from your heaven?
Ahab scooped up sand, and in a warm trickle, he poured it on the back of my other hand.
The sea has brought me back. Once, to thee
.

O, Ahab's smile! rare and shy. Precious then and now to my constricting heart. For even on that balmy day, I would have thought what if those lapping waters should not bring him back the second time, or the third time? Perhaps I swallowed and said to Ahab,
If the sea bring you back a second time and a third time, then truly will I make you lord of me and of our bed
.

But he was already that. In our happy leisure, I might have thought
indolently of the brown people, so far away on the Pacific Islands, perhaps lounging on their own sand, which Ahab said was white as sugar, not golden like these grains. I saw Ahab as a young man going to them. I did not begrudge him his happiness there. In imagination, I became one of them. From the women on the islands, he had learned how to touch the magic places on my body. If there were children left behind in the South Seas—well, I would people the world with Ahab's. Once I asked him, what would a girl-child be with his spirit? And he answered,
Una, thou art she
. If there were children begot in the South Seas, they would be my older sisters and brothers in age, for in his middle years, Ahab went to the island women no longer, saying it was not right for a captain. (He had no prejudice against the mingling of brown and white.)

I teased him, home from that short first voyage, as we picnicked on the Nantucket moor, said that certainly Captain Peleg, and probably Captain Bildad, used to sport in the grass huts, but even during that first, idyllic homecoming, if I saw the moral fervor was on his brow, I desisted. It would not be kindness to tease Ahab on the subject of good or evil, and whether simply custom makes it so.

He believed the moral powers—demonic and heaven-generated—are separate things,
must
be separate to be themselves; eternal. But I see them as all nested and layered together, sometimes with no clear seam between, but a gradation; transient. He wanted something ultimate and absolute. If there be reality beyond the appearance—be that reality ultimately good, or evil, or indifferent—then it must be so always.

That second homecoming brought him home dismasted, one-legged, raging; yet he would go forth again to war upon the deep.

Before he left, he, seated, called me to stand between his knees, one leg bent naturally, the other outthrust in tapering ivory. He twisted the sculpted nuptial bracelet on my wrist and made the whales depicted there swim round.

Wouldst thou have an ornate ivory cross?
he asked me. And the flicker of rebellion and wildness galloped across his face.

I do not hold well with the Christian symbols, and he knew it.

Nay, my wife,
he said (for he could ever read my thought). The storm gathered in his mien.
My girl-wife shall have a crown, and I will carve it myself from the jawbone of Moby Dick!

He reached up, placed his hands on my hair, surrounded my skull,
and squeezed till he trembled, his force caught statically between his knowledge of my human frailty and his power.

Yet, I thought how I might yield, unharmed, and I knelt till my knees were on the carpet and I looked up at him. Then he left off squeezing my head, but those strong hands had bequeathed the pressure of a crown that never was to be, except as memory and imagination conjoin to circumscribe my scalp.

Art thou afraid?

When I shook my head no, he kissed me upon the lips, passionately, and then upon the brow, in tender blessing.

 

O
SUNNY DAY
, O golden sand, O loving breeze—I would lounge and loaf forever, my spirit basking in your clear goodness, if I could. From how far away does the sunlight come to fall upon this one glittering grain I hold between my forefinger and my thumb? This grain is square as a quilt block, its edges straight as any carpenter cuts wood or glazier scores glass. Perhaps it
is
glass, or salt—a crystal left by the water. I put it on the tip of my tongue and taste nothing salty. I push it sideways with my tongue and it is grit between my molars. I take it out again, all wet from my mouth. My stubborn sand grain lies drowned on the whorls of my forefinger. It can tell its fellows that it has been in a strange place. A wet, pink cave.

Perhaps the mind as well as the mouth is a glistening, pink cave. As a child that image was available to me, for my mother read aloud how Plato likened his mind to a cave. But his was dark instead of pink. With this writing I wish to enter that opalescence and inhabit the pearly chamber of memory. Hindsight, retrospective wisdom, I leave, to the extent I can, at the threshold. But as a child, I was given much of the language of adults, and I continue to use it, even to describe my youth. I court the freshness, the immediacy, and all the resources of language that make the past tense strangely shine as though it were the present.

 

O
H
,
MY LOST
A
HAB
. I had my prayer then, if not my God:
Let the green land and the warm hearth call you home. As surely as after our first night in the marriage bed, the sea called you away
.

If I turn back the years, Justice is standing in the water, but he
hears me over the surf and turns to wave. He is five years old, his hair black as soot. Though the hair of your head, Ahab, was gray and white, yet you were still sooty in the loins, as young as my first husband when he was eighteen and I was seventeen.

I met my first husband when he visited my aunt and uncle, who kept an island Lighthouse out from New Bedford, but first I must turn back more years to say how it was that I who was born in Kentucky on the banks of the Ohio came to be with Aunt and Uncle near New Bedford. When I was twelve, my mother sent me there to save my life, for she was afraid that my father would kill me.

W
HAT INCITED
my father to fury was my lack of Christian belief. I wanted no part of the church because I could not believe its dogma. Perhaps there was some imbalance in my brain—I don't know. But the belief that was imbibed by everyone I knew, with scarcely a moment of skepticism, seemed to me most unlikely. Whether there was God or not, I admitted I did not know, but it was Jesus as God, or the Son of God, that seemed to me highly unlikely.

How do you know it's true? I asked. One would say that the Bible was God's holy word and that it said so, but I saw no reason to think it holy just because that was the custom. Did I not feel myself a sinner? they would ask. Readily did I acknowledge I had many shortcomings, but why should I think there was a hell waiting to swallow me? And what was the evidence that any part of me was immortal? Perhaps I just wished it so. And how could belief that one good man, long ago, was actually the incarnation of God wipe away my sins? What possible connection could there be between the two ideas?

“If you believe the sky is red,” I said to my father, for I had a small paring knife in my hand and was peeling the waxy red skin from an apple, “would it make the corn grow?”

At this, my father struck my face with his open hand. “Believe!” he shouted.

“Neither you nor I can command belief,” I replied, though I was only twelve. I was shocked not so much at the blow but by the calmness of my own voice. But tears had jumped into my eyes.

He harnessed the buggy and rode away into the woods, lashing the horse.

I watched through the cabin front window, which had just been unboarded from the winter. Often, as a younger child, I had followed him into the yard, sat upon the stump, lamented his leaving. No longer! Now, from the house I read him, crossing the window left to right, how the harried buggy and his flailing arm moved as a unit from the left pane of glass to the right pane of glass, and out of sight. How undisturbed the trees seemed in their dark uprightness, how intact in their neatly fitting bark. My father had seemed so till his recent conversion.

I ceased looking through the window in order to contemplate the wavy glass itself. What was a window but a machine for making the opaque transparent? Then I regarded the window framing, which divided the four small lights by a slender, equal-armed cross between the panes.

My mother came to sit at the table. She remained unconverted. Why did his wrath not fall on her? With her hand and arm she swept her dress to one side from beneath her bottom as she sat. I registered that competent, automatic gesture, and the way her face shone at me in sympathy. With a light stroke, her fingers acknowledged the smarting of my cheek.

“What are we to do with your unbelief?” my gentle mother asked.

“Let him accept me as I am. As you do. As we both are.”

“It's through my blood that tolerance and unbelief have run to you.” She gestured that, twelve-year-old girl though I was, I should come and sit on her lap. “My father was a Quaker of Rhode Island,” she said. “And my sister is a Unitarian.”

I had never heard the word
Unitarian
before, for all about me were Methodists, like my father, and Presbyterians and German Lutherans; I had heard them speak of Catholics, but I had never seen one.

“Do you believe in Jesus as God?” I asked my mother.

“Most do,” she said.

“But you yourself?”

“It does not matter to me if Jesus was God or not.”

“It does not matter if a person can really be God?”

“It would have been a long time ago.”

I sat on her knee and listened to a bird sing. Mine was a darting mind, and it darted after the bird and its world, while I partly talked with my mother. With its song of
Pretty, Pretty, Pretty,
I imagined its crested red among the high green leaves of the tulip poplar, and then, again diverted, imagined the way light shone through leaf so that you can see compartments and veins within the thin flatness.

“Think,” she said. “Does it matter to you whether Caesar captured Gaul or not? If you think, ‘Why, yes, he did,' are you not the very same girl sitting on her mother's lap? And if you think, ‘No, I don't believe he did,' don't you love me just the same as before and hear the same bird singing?”

Her eyes were dark brown, and she never spoke seriously without a sheen of love over her eyes.

“It might be quite a different thing about God,” I said.

“If it makes you happy, believe it.”

“But I want to know the truth.”

Again she was silent, then she sighed. “The truth about the unseen makes little difference to me.”

“It would make a difference to me,” I answered. “But I do not believe that a man was God.”

“Perhaps we each adopt or create our truth.”

When my father returned, he was morose. “Struggle with the devil,” he told me. “I will ask you again in a week.”

The next day the dog, King, playfully chased a pullet, and when my father called the dog, he disobeyed. Reaching over the door for his long rifle, my father stood on the threshold and shot the dog.

He said, “The Lord has given man dominion over the creatures of the earth.”

I climbed the tallest white pine I could find.

Nonetheless, when he next asked about my belief, he found that the week was to no avail. Nor the months, though my father's rage at his helplessness compounded, and each time he struck me, he added a blow. “Children, obey your parents,” he thundered. Each time I watched him drive away in a fury, lashing the horse, the buggy rattling across the yard. I watched him through the window, the cross of its mullions interpreting the scene, as he drove from the left side of the window to
the right, and out of sight. I thought of him as a crusader; I saw his head as though it were encased in a gleaming helmet. I saw him as zeal-driven as those warriors of old, violent in their love of Christ, approaching unbelief with raised sword. I had read
Ivanhoe,
one of two or three dozen books my mother kept in the humped trunk.

Once my father did not drive away, but stood in the cabin door holding the buggy whip. My mother stepped before him and said only “No.”

He went into the yard and lashed the little stump where I liked to sit till foam came to the corners of his mouth, and he fell in a faint. Then my mother tore a strip from the hem of her green dress, wet the cloth, went to him, and bathed his forehead. She crooned his name,
Ulysses, Ulysses.

That night my mother asked me if I would consent to live with her sister. “She is a Unitarian,” she said again. And when I asked my mother what that meant, she said, “With her, you can believe what you will. Only your behavior must be according to what is commonly held to be good. You must be kind. As you always have been.”

And that is how I came to live at the Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse itself became my church, my single tall tree trunk, my faith in stone and earth, and, eventually, my conduit to the sky.