Ahab's Wife (41 page)

A
S
I
HAD
suspected that bleak night upon the moor, the exertion and cold made me sick, and I stayed abed till after the arrival of the New Year. Charlotte brought me bowls of chowder—cod or clam—and one evening a plate of steaming root vegetables—carrots, beets, a turnip, a parsnip, a whole cooked onion which fell apart in concentric, translucent shells. She made my bed, causing me to sit wrapped up in a quilt in a chair while she smoothed the sheets; she carried out my slops; she gathered up my nightclothes and undergarments for the wash pot.

When I told her of Kit's flight with the help of Quary and Tashtego, I concluded, “So his care falls to neither of us, Charlotte.”

“Then I shall take care of you, instead,” she said.

What a system of substitutes she had! If not Kit to meet her passion, then Mr. Hussey. If not Kit to care for, then his wife. It was in her nature to love and to nurture; she would not leave those feelings within herself to fester and sour, but instead she chose someone who would receive her gifts gladly. She did not hold herself to be so special that only one special person could she find satisfactory.

I was not truly
glad
to be the object of her concern, but I was grateful. Being sick in bed from exposure gave my mind and spirit as well as my body time to heal. It was good for me to be confined and cared for.

Charlotte had many questions to ask me about my life aboard the
Sussex,
the
Albatross,
and the
Pequod,
and as soon as I was well enough I gave her many details of the various ships, including descriptions of their captains and crews. She asked me nothing about the time on the open sea in the whaleboat, and we rarely spoke of Kit.

The twelfth day after Kit's departure, an extremely bright and crisp winter day, Charlotte said she was walking into town, and perhaps I could help Mr. Hussey a bit in the tavern. The bright day brought many sailors who boarded in town walking out the Madaket Road to us, and I quickly saw that Mr. Hussey had real need of my help. Merely dishing up and delivering the chowder kept me on the trot, and I developed an admiration not only for Charlotte's cheerful ability to organize the serving but also for her physical stamina. I was still weak from my illness.

Among the clientele of mostly sailors I was surprised to see Kit's gaoler, who asked to speak with me when I grew less busy. Such a moment was hard to come by, and I was sorry to make the man wait. After nearly an hour, I sat down in the vacant chair at the small table.

“You're pillar to post, aren't you, Mrs. Sparrow?” he began.

“It's been very busy, to be sure.”

“I'll say quickly then that I spoke with Abram Quary myself, after Judge Lord had had his chat. Kit stole Quary's boat and rowed to the mainland, but another Indian has brought it back.”

“And how is Kit himself? Does anyone know?”

“I asked Quary if he thought Kit would make his way back to Nantucket.”

“What did he say?”

“He said no. I expect he's right. I'm sorry, Mrs. Sparrow.”

The man's eyes more than his words told me he was sympathetic. I thought of the hard, unspeaking hand that had consoled mine on the dark road. Then I had said nothing at all, but this time I had the presence of mind to say thank you.

“My name is Isaac Starbuck. If I can assist you in any way, let me know.”

“I knew a Mr. Starbuck, first mate of the
Pequod
.” But the gaoler was not connected to that good Quaker whaleman. Still I associated them.

Afterward, I went up to my room to rest. As I was turning back the bedcovers, the little vixen walked in, her toenails clicking on the floor. I was too tired to care. I closed the door, and when I climbed into bed, Folly jumped in beside me. She made a nest next to me, and I let her stay. Thus it was that I acknowledged Folly as my rightful bedfellow. I went comfortably off to sleep with the fervent hope that Charlotte would return in time to wait the tables at the evening meal.

When Charlotte came into the room, I had napped for more than an hour, and the sunset was at the window. “See what I have,” Charlotte said, setting a bundle on the bed and turning to light the lamp. Folly instantly came and stuck her nose in the bundle.

“It's sailors' mending,” she said. “You like that better than cooking and serving, don't you? After you've sewn up the tears and holes, we'll launder and press them. Mrs. Hilda Macy isn't expecting that. This way you'll soon be quite in demand. Something extra, you see. You must offer something extra to be noticed.”

“You've gotten me mending work!”

She chatted on, as though the sizable walk, the conversations in the town on my behalf, the lugging home of the load of clothes had all been nothing but a welcome change in her usual routines. She emphasized how surely the “something extra” would cause my new business to prosper, just as she had known that not just milk but cream and butter must be added to make a chowder distinctively delicious.

And so it was that during that slow spring when I stayed with the Husseys, I earned my keep with my needle. Soon I delivered the shirts
and trousers and coats myself, and, indeed, Mrs. Macy, a bubbling, voluble woman, was charmed by the neatness and strength of my stitchery and by our laundry work. Mrs. Macy herself was the best-pressed woman I had ever seen. Perhaps she never sat down, for the back of her cotton skirt was as smooth as the front bib and straps of her apron. The cloth had a subdued, perfectly behaved surface. As she sorted out the shirts and trousers I returned to her, Mrs. Macy declared, “Why, these clothes could almost pass for new! You've a gift for the mending, girl.” She gave me a new bundle, one as large as I could carry.

As I made many journeys there, I began to speak to the people of the town, and once I walked in merely to attend a lecture at the Atheneum. Nantucket town was a pleasant place, with many independent and intelligent women. When men were home from the sea, they were happy to socialize along with their wives. I much liked the gabbiness of the town, for the talk was not mere gossip but of ideas and politics, spiced with the customs and sights from all around the globe.

I
T WAS DURING
this time that I began to attend first the Universalist Association and, later, the Unitarian Church on Orange Street, the gilt dome of which Kit and I had admired as we approached Nantucket aboard the
Pequod
. The message of both groups was much more hospitable to the human spirit than that of the Kentucky Christians, whose emphasis was on human sin and God's wrath. I came to the Universalists through Charlotte, and with that context, I understood much better her unwillingness to cast me into outer darkness for my unspeakable sin. The Universalists believed, quite simply, in universal salvation: no soul was eternally damned, as Mr. Stubb had reported during the maple-candy dinner that last night on the
Pequod
.

They argued that if Jesus was the Savior of mankind, then this was a fact, universally true, and whether one believed the fact or not did not matter, Christ having died for all. Further, the minister explained that while there might be some punishment for sin after death it was
not of eternal duration, the word
eternal
having been mistranslated from the Greek in many scriptures. Their position was that everlasting punishment was entirely inconsistent with the idea of a benevolent Father, since even earthly fathers could and did forgive their offspring for criminal acts. All their tenets were refreshing ideas to me. At meeting I found the congregation, simple farming people, to be a kindly group, slow to cast even verbal stones at one another. I cannot say how they might have responded, specifically, to my own crime, for I had had enough of confession for a while.

When I was with the Universalists, I felt a kind of peace, and I wished that both Kit and Giles had heard their message. To believe it was not necessary. Merely to know that some people had invented a more liberal view of Christianity loosed the bonds of the old dogma and its dependence on damnation. I had thought there to be only one Christian Way, straight, narrow, exclusive. And here was a road that went off at right angles, that could bend and double back, that was open to whatever sheep might wander onto it.

Though I did not think of Kit as dead, during the long-coming spring, there was a finality to his leaving. I did not expect him ever to come back. Yet my heart held a quiet hope for him. If there was hardship in the wilderness, it would distract him from his mental travail. If he was strange among the Indians, so long as he was not violent, then that strangeness itself might protect him. Elaborations of language had been a snare and a delusion for his thinking. The words that were the names of animals, of nuts and berries, those for fire and for shelter, would suffice.

Once, walking home from meeting, Charlotte asked me, “Do you not wonder where Kit is, fret for him?” Her question surprised me. She had kept silent till she judged I was strong enough to speak of Kit.

“I have taken a page from your book,” I replied. “I live the life that is before me.”

The gray moor about me, bathed in sunshine, was comfortably unprepossessing. I remembered that long, cold nighttime crossing of this same moor with a small shudder.

“Does your heart not search for Kit?” Her voice took on urgency.

“I loved Kit, but I count him gone.” I spoke slowly, wanting to speak truthfully. “My consolation is that I believe him to be alive. If I cannot be with him, I can bear that.” I paused and saw the windmill,
its arms fitted with canvas now, slowly turning. “Gladly would I have said good-bye to Giles, if it meant that he could live and walk the earth, though I never see him again.”

“Sometimes my heart yearns for Kit.”

“I am surprised to hear you say so.”

“I've sensed your letting go of him. As you let go, I miss him more. We grew up together. I had always thought to marry Kit Sparrow.”

I was astonished: because of her account of life with Mr. Hussey, I had counted Charlotte to be the most contented of women. “Kit is not fit to be any woman's husband.”

“Sometimes I think that he has met an Indian woman. In my mind's eye, he crawls under a deerskin with her.” She swept her hand about—the Try Pots lay ahead. “All this I would give up to be that wild woman, traveling with Kit.”

“Charlotte, your life is too full of chowder making. But there's no romance in being pissed upon. He slapped me once. He has reviled me many times.”

Here Charlotte fell silent. Finally she said, taking my hand first, “But, dear Una, I have not done what you have done.”

It was as though I had been slapped again. The taste of blood flooded my mouth.

“
Your
unforgivable sin would be adultery,” I said to her, for I knew Kit would find something unforgivable about any person who dwelt in a world that was itself unforgivable in its cruelty. “We all are unforgivable to him, and he punished us.”

“I think that I would lie,” she said. “He wouldn't know. I would tell him that Mr. Hussey had died.”

 

D
URING THE WEEK
that followed, while we worked together serving the tables or stirring the great pots, Charlotte questioned me about the onset of Kit's madness. She rightly guessed that I had seen a glimpse of aberration on the
Sussex
. I told her how, at the Lighthouse, I had come upon Kit high in the lantern room worshiping the lamps or trying to work some magic over them, and then how he had made mud for my lightning-blinded eyes, hoping to reenact the miracle of Jesus. I asked Charlotte about Kit's mother, who surely was the root of his madness.

“The urine!” she exclaimed. “His mother liked to squat behind a bush, only half shielded. She wanted to make the private into the public.” And then Charlotte hurried on with her serving.

That night when Mr. Hussey was snoring loudly, Charlotte came and knocked on my door. I was almost asleep, but she climbed up onto the bed with scarcely an invitation and commenced to talk.

“When I was just a little girl, I saw Mrs. Sparrow squatting at the privy ditch, this one well out of view, but she said to me, ‘Come, little one, come and confess with me.' I never knew what she meant by confession, but today it came to me. For them to take what is usually secret and hidden, shameful even, and make it public is to confess. They want to confess the animal side of their nature. To be as nonchalant and natural as animals.”

Charlotte was much excited about her reflections on the logic of madness. “Each night I shall tell you his history before you knew him, and then you shall tell me the history afterward, and together we will make sense of it—where the ideas come from, what they mean to him.”

I had not heard her speak in such a rush since the time we sat in the booth and she had told me Mr. Hussey was all lovers in one. That revelation had made me happy to hear, but now Charlotte herself seemed obsessed. After her season of patient silence, she was ababble with questions. “Will talk of Kit be too painful for you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. I sat up in bed. What I felt was not pain. “Charlotte, I doubt that we shall ever see Kit again. He will walk west. I know him. Even an addled brain can walk toward the setting sun. With a fierce determination. To what end do we plow up his history from our brains?”

“After he has reached the edge of the continent”—her eager face reminded me of Frannie and her fascination with Kit—“what will he find there?”

“The Pacific Ocean,” I answered.

“But Kit will have the habit of walking. When his quest is ended, he will turn around and walk east. I know him, too. I would like to be prepared when our paths cross.”

“He might ship to China.”

“I think that Kit has had enough of the ocean.”

“As you said, he may find some tribe where he feels at home. He may stay there. Take a new wife. Father children.”

She clutched my wrist. “Don't say that. Don't say that. How can you say that?”

“I wish him well.”

Here we fell silent for a moment. We both listened to Mr. Hussey's stentorian snoring.

“I thought you were content with Mr. Hussey,” I whispered, almost teasing.

“I was,” she said soberly. “I was. But now I am not. You have given up Kit. He could be mine.”

All that week, soon after Mr. Hussey's snores filled the upper floor like a gemshorn, Charlotte came to my chamber to tell the story of Kit. Folly the fox usually came to lie between us, and I felt we were something like characters from a fairy tale.

 

T
HE NEXT
S
ABBATH
, as we walked into town, I felt increasingly impatient with Charlotte. I wanted not to be so much in her company, for she sealed and stamped every step of the journey into town with images of Kit and her together, in a time innocent of my existence. As we walked down Orange Street, I suddenly said I would visit the Unitarians that day and walk home alone. “My aunt was a Unitarian,” I explained. “I've been curious about their creed.”

“You'll find them less Christian, but with little to replace it,” she said.

I thought but did not say: Good. Then I shall ponder my own beliefs.

“Mostly they pride themselves on their skepticism.”

“All my life,” I answered, “I have been a natural skeptic.” And I turned my life—is it too much to say?—away from her. My body seemed a boat, my clothes the sails, myself the captain.

 

I
T IS A
somewhat unnerving experience to enter a house of worship when you neither have a companion nor expect to see a familiar face. One feels an intruder. Almost as soon as I settled myself, however, I saw two whom I did know: Captain Ahab, with his shaggy, gray-white head, occupied a pew across the sanctuary behind me; and, just in front, was the kindly gaoler.

Captain Ahab sat with his face uptilted and his eyes closed. His brow was slightly drawn in concentration so that a line ran vertically between his eyes. He seemed the very image of a seeker; yet I knew him to be as much a skeptic as myself, and I felt, as I often had in his company, that we had something in common. He was oblivious to his surroundings.

The gaoler—Isaac Starbuck—somehow sensed my presence, turned, nodded, and smiled at me. I could not help but study the back of his head from time to time. His hair was indeed a fine cap of golden curls.

The sermon was one that saw Jesus as a great teacher, but at no time did the minister suggest he was divine, except insofar as he affirmed that all humans were divine, and, therefore, Jesus, too. What of the animals? I wanted to ask him. They have life, and their intelligence is only of a different order. Did not Saint Francis preach to the forest creatures?

I wondered if Ahab questioned in like manner, if Ahab considered the divinity, perhaps even the sanctity, of whales. The minister skipped over the animal question and went on to extol the beauty of nature, by which he largely meant the landscape. He spoke of God the Creator as an artist, and while this seemed a bit fanciful to me, I liked the poetry of the idea. As though he read my mind, the minister then considered metaphor and what relationship it had to truth. “Metaphor is a lens,” he said. “Metaphor is a mirror, a magic glass by which we see what we would otherwise not see.” To my amazement, instead of quoting scripture, the Reverend Mr. Peal quoted the poet John Keats:

It was a puzzling conclusion to his sermon. I felt unsettled by his ideas in a pleasant way and resolved to visit the surprising Unitarians again. I doubted that the Universalist minister had ever heard of John Keats.

In the foyer, the gaoler spoke to me politely, saying that he hoped that I was doing well, and he inquired after the Husseys. I'm sure that if he had further news of Kit, he would have given me some indication of it. Over his shoulder, I caught the eye of Captain Ahab—oh, gloomy countenance—but then, a lantern of delight—seeing me—lit his eyes
and then his whole face. At that moment, the gaoler suddenly asked if he might walk home with me.

“No,” I said. “No, thank you for your kindness.” And I hurried out into the street. Ahab was not long in approaching me.

“And might you want a gray-haired escort along the Madaket Road?”

“I think, sir, that you have walked that road with me before now, and at a time when I was sorely in need of comfort.”

“Aye.”

A silence fell between us, and the Sunday sun, crisped by the breeze of early spring, bounced from our shoulders. We both knew what that night had been like: there was no need to speak of it further.

“I'm surprised to see you, a Quaker, under a gaudy golden dome, Captain Ahab.”

“I grew up a Quaker. This morning I wanted change, fresh air.”

“What did you think of the message?”

“I wish that he had preached on Judas.”

“How so?” I felt shocked.

“It may well be that in the heart of man there is a goodness that is divine, that we are Jesus-kin. But that is only half.” His face contracted and darkened. “The other half is the Betrayer, the Liar, the Murderer, the Fornicator, the Cannibal, the Prince of Darkness. And I know, by thunder, that I have kinship there. It's that half of me that wants to be called brother.”

So ready was his pain, so anguished his speech, that a word leapt from me to him, as lightning might leap from one cloud to another: “Brother,” I said.

“Do you call me brother, Una? You do not know me.”

“I have said what I have said,” I answered and turned from him and began my walk home. Neither of us wanted further conversation after all.

 

A
S
I
WALKED HOME
, I thought about the gaoler. Was Unitarianism the source of his civil demeanor, as Universalism was the ground of Charlotte's acceptance? Did I want him as beau? His interest was evident. No. I did not want an admirer whose work it was to imprison others, no matter how civilly. He is not his work, my fair-minded,
skeptical voice suggested. I replied: He has chosen his work, though. Fairness insisted: And Ahab has chosen to slaughter whales. Yes, I answered, but Ahab is an altogether different case.