Ahab's Wife (5 page)

M
Y MOTHER
and I journeyed downriver by buggy to start our voyage up. (Is it not the case that many a life journey starts out in the opposite direction to its destiny?) Our land was located some twelve miles north of the Falls of the Ohio, where the city of Louisville had sprung up at the portage. Steamboat travelers, as well as freight, were obliged to disembark on the upriver course and to change boats, Louisville being the northernmost port for those who had traveled up the Mississippi and then branched to the right, leaving the muddy waters of the Mississippi for the clearer water of the Ohio. Though the falls were rather low, they were unnavigable.

The night before our journey, our trunks standing like dark twins before the small summer fire, my mother had negotiated with my father that she alone would drive us to the Falls and then hire a boy to return the buggy, as she would travel with me all the way to her sister's home.

“Certainly you will return, Bertha?” An anguish masked my father's eyes—not that I was being escorted to a tiny island populated by only one family but that my mother might decide not to return to him.

For a moment I dared hope that she would
not
return, but a glance at her loving, loyal face, even before she spoke the words
he
needed to hear, told me otherwise.

The morning of our departure, after loading the trunks, he seated himself on my stump in the yard. I almost passed him without looking at him—for I loved my Kentucky home that I was being forced to leave—but I could not. He loomed like a black rock whose size and shape I must register in order to pass safely around. But I looked in his eye, and it was as though lightning leapt from both of us! Instant and powerful, undeniable connection!

“Una!” He ejaculated my name, and I ran to him for a farewell embrace.

His hands on both my shoulders, he pushed me back to look again into my eyes. His voice choked, he croaked, “Doubt not that I love you.” I made one quick nod and fled to the buggy.

From my seat I looked back at him as the wheels began to turn. I waved, one quick pass of the palm through the air—
his
style of wave—and thought now we were reversed, now he sat on the stump and I rode away in the buggy. I knew that he was
sad
. And much more.

 

A
S WE PASSED
through the woods, though it was a warm day, my body felt cold, especially my hands, which were clinched tight into fists. On either side of me I pressed my cold knuckles against the buggy bench for balance. Before long, my mother transferred both reins to one hand and with the other covered my cold fist. My hands felt as though they had turned into toads or stones. Her palm was warm and comforted me, but it was also damp as though her hand had been crying.

Because I did not want her to think I was indifferent to her comfort,
I uncurled my fingers, turned my hand over, and returned her clasp. Still, my torso felt petrified, the fibers of my being turned insentient.

As we stood on the street admiring the steamboat, a plume rose from her and immediately a blasting sound that reverberated up from my feet, through viscera, and out the top of my head. I was surprised it did not lift my scalp and attendant hair as though I wore a wig. And with this mighty noise gush, I was blasted from numbness back to life. Like gunpowder clearing the river of ice, the sound cleared me and life flowed again, seeking its own expression and adventure.

I gasped, my mother looked down at me, we exchanged excitement, wonder, hope, even happiness at our decision, and stepped forward. Thus began our upstream journey. When I looked down at the giant wheel turning, I thought of Don Quixote's windmill.

 

A
STEAMBOAT
is a pretty thing, trailing its black cloud; to tour its tiers, to look out at the slowly passing landscape are activities so purely recreational that one feels deliciously leisured. Sometimes a drab barge, headed west, would pass us. We gloried in the white-glazed gingerbread of our railings and our knowledge of the appointments within, the shined brass and the velvet seat covers. We felt valuable and promenaded the balconies daintily, stopping at the railing first on the Kentucky side and then on the Indiana side to admire the vistas.

We walked past one gloomy section. On a bulletin board affixed to the cabin were tacked several Wanted posters, advertising Rewards for runaway slaves. I yet remember three of these declamations and the Value they attached to Property:

When I walked with my mother I did not look at the posters because it seemed degrading to even glance at the offering of blood money. Whenever I promenaded the deck alone, I stopped and read the notices in horrible fascination. The girl with the golden eyes was my own age. There were three notices with sketches of men who looked through me at the passing Kentucky shore, but I did not think the pictures would be of much use in apprehending any particular slave. The runaways had been drawn so as to look more or less alike, as though to be a Negro were simply to have certain lips and hair. All the eyes looked haunted and frightened.

After supper but before we retired to our sleeping berths, Mother said, “Come, Una,” and took me for another stroll on the deck. The sun was setting and breezes had come up. Most women and children
had gone straight to bed and the men to the card room. The stench of cigars polluted one section of our walk. Mother pointed out how the smokestack blew a dramatic black plume across the red of the western sky. Someone played an accordion from within. I peeked in to see an old black man with tight-curled, snow-white hair hunched over the squeeze-box, an unvarying smile carved into his face, his eyes focused on the floor. Sometimes he closed his eyes as his fingers flew over the buttons and keys.

Mother walked me around to the rear, on the Kentucky side, where the posters hung. Without hesitation she grasped the edge of the paper bearing one of the sketches and ripped it from the cork. The tacks burst out. She dropped the page over the side into the river. My heart leapt, for in small print on each sign was the instruction: Do not remove.

I grasped the one from Sweet Clover Farm and mailed it over the side and into the water. I ripped off the poster concerning the Mother and Daughter and would have cast it into the wheel to be churned into bits, but Mother stayed my hand.

“Over the side! It might be bad luck to grind them in the mill.”

So I cast the heinous advertisement over the side. It curled and rode the water a bit. I was glad when it swamped and sank, its message never again to be read.

“Would I had the nerve to do it,” my mother said, “by light of day.”

We were both agitated and walked to the prow of the boat so that the breeze might cool our faces. We liked having our backs turned to that infamy. I fancied the boat moved more swiftly against the current as though unburdened not of ounces but of tons and weighty years of guilt. My mother spoke through her teeth:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
. In my feet, I felt the vibrations of the heavy, turning wheel, propelling us forward.

W
HEN MORNING CAME
, I felt it still, the rhythmic, powerful turning of the wheel, and I decided to spend part of the day with it.

Painted a glossy, bright red, the wheel made me think at once of my own heart that beat my blood so that I might have life and movement. The wheel's red paint was so thick as to look like enamel; the sturdy lathes were slick-armored against the ravages of water-wear. The wheel's method was to gain purchase against the surface and to push itself forward as it encountered the resistance of the submerging water, but also it lifted the water in the rear and seemed to purify it. Cascades of bubbles, made all the whiter for pouring over the red paddles, sang of rushing glory. More powerful than any Kentucky stream splashing and dashing over smooth rocks, this turbulence shouted Red and White, White and Air, Splash and Foam till I was dizzy with it.

For an hour I watched the powerful, mechanical lifting of water and its immediate rush and fall back to the river, white foam yielding to the dun flow. Our wake was white-churned for only a short distance and then the seam we constantly opened was sealed over as though we had not passed. To myself as a young girl our passage seemed significant and momentous, as though it told me important things.

When we reached Cincinnati, the wheel turned more slowly and more slowly with less and less foam and splash till it stopped. My feet tingled after the vibration of the pistons ceased. In quietness we drifted a few feet till we were close enough to the shore for lines to be thrown and secured on the pilings. The gangplank was lowered, and Mother and I took a brief walk on the shore. I looked back at the giant paddle-wheel, wet and dripping, reared up, immobile as a statue. A gray engraving of a rose in a book came to mind, but enormous now and bloodred. It made me catch my breath—the paddlewheel—a gigantic rose, brilliant, red, perfect, still as eternity.

M
Y MOTHER
, who had been to the Island once before, first pointed out the Lighthouse to me from the ferry. The Lighthouse seemed only a line. A short vertical line, with one end in the sea and one end in the sky. How unaspiring it seemed! Such a puny human effort to draw a mark an inch up the dome of the great sky. A mere budge of the pencil, a dash of graphite, gray against pale blue. But suddenly, at the top of that stubby thing, there was a glint!

“It's on!” The exclamation broke from me.

“No,” she answered, pressing my hand, for she, too, was excited. “It shines only at night. The sunlight has caught the windowpane like a mirror.”

Then a wave of homesickness lapped within me, for I thought of my forest and the shiny objects my mother hung among the dark trees.

“Why did you hang the mirrors in the woods?” I asked.

But she didn't answer.

Instead, she asked me how was my stomach and did the motion of the water make me queasy. When I looked at the water, I felt contempt. The color was more green than the dark blue of the English poets, and the waves were small and choppy.

“It's not wild enough,” I said.

“You always loved a storm,” she said. And she told me again how when I was a small girl, only freshly equipped with language, when it rained I had said, “Harder,” and begged her to make the rain bigger and more extreme.

“How do you like the Lighthouse?” she asked.

“I wish that it were taller.”

She laughed. “Accept the world, Una. It is what it is.”

Gradually, the vertical line of Lighthouse widened, so that the Lighthouse seemed not like a mere pencil line but a brush stroke with width as well as height, inching up the sky. For a time, the sunlight on its high glass glared steadily, but as our angle of approach changed, the whole column went gray and lightless. It grew taller and more satisfactory.

I could see the shaft was made of stone, and some of the stone jutted out so that it appeared knobby as a spine instead of smooth-sided. It
tapered like a candle as it grew taller, and at its base was a stone house, the roof of which was shake shingles, covered with a splash of pink roses.

“Oh, the roses,” I said.

“They lie on the roof in the sun all day.”

“And the goats!”

“They're nimble enough not to fall off the island rocks into the ocean.”

“Did they swim here?”

“The goats were brought by boat. Like us.”

I admired their dark, spiky horns and their big, dark udders.

“My sister shovels up their manure to feed the roses. Perhaps you can help her.”

In Kentucky, small white roses grew in sunny places in the woods, and I loved them well, but these were pink and so profuse, I could scarcely believe in them. The roses climbed up to the roof on wooden trellises, and on the roof lay another trellis which roses' stems wove under and over. Those roses were the first time nature surprised me; for the first time she exceeded not only what I wanted but what I had imagined possible.

“We'll have goat cheese for supper, I imagine, and toast, and rose-hip tea.”

At the corner of my eye, I saw a goat jumping, jumping as though to greet us. And then when I looked closer, it was a white apron flapping, and a little girl, jumping and jumping—Cousin Frannie. And I remembered that Aunt Agatha had written I would be good company for her little girl, isolated on the Island. She was four, and I loved her at once for her joyful jumping.

Soon we were disembarked, and when I hugged Frannie, I felt I was hugging a sturdy little churn. The moment I let go of her, the dasher inside made her jump and jump again with joy. Her hair was the color of nutmeg, between red and brown, and across her nose and cheeks were scattered freckles of the same nutmeg color. Her eyes were as green as the sea, and forever I forgave the sea for not appearing blue.

Oh Una, oh Una, oh Una, you're here
was all she said, over and over, in a voice like little bells jangling—with that same pleasant discord. And I held her hands, and big girl that I was, jumped up
and down with her. Breathlessly, I asked could we pick the roses and could we pet the goats, and my aunt sent us off to do whichever we preferred without demanding so much as the semblance of proper introductions.

We scampered away, through a gate, up rocks till I knelt to pet a little white goat, and its hairs were very distinct, long and wiry, not nearly so soft as a cow's, but less sharp than a pig's. With its insistent, solid little head, the kid nuzzled hard against my chest and hurt me where my bosom was beginning. I looked up from my kneeling to Frannie and, laughing, said, “Make her stop butting.”

“You can't make her do anything,” Frannie answered. “You yourself must stand up.”

But she took the goat by her shoulders and pulled her back. I stood up, and then the goat butted at my knees.

“Does she have a name?”

“You can name her.”

“She's ‘Apron,' then, because she is white as your apron.”

Then I looked up and, for the first time since our landing, noticed the Lighthouse, which was, indeed, a great gray tower so stern and austere in its height that I let my gaze slide down to the cottage.

“I've named the Lighthouse,” Frannie said.

“What?”

“His name is ‘the Giant.' ”

I thought it fit him perfectly, and I took Frannie's hand, and we walked rather soberly back to our mothers, who, from that little distance, appeared as blotches of windblown color. My mother's dress was ocher, as was my own, and Aunt Agatha's dress was deepest indigo. I was startled that here on the bare rock of the Island, colors suddenly had meaning, as though the light itself were defining. Only the stone of the Lighthouse seemed sullen, as though there was no color there to be brought out by even the strongest sunlight. My mind went dizzy with abstraction—the great gray upward sweep, and at its base, a blotch of yellow, a blotch of blue: mothers.

“He can't move,” Frannie said confidentially. “He can't step on us.”

 

O
UR MOTHERS' NAMES
were complementary—Agatha and Bertha. Their names belonged together. I wished my mother would not go
back to Kentucky, but she planned to stay with us on the Island only a week.

My mother was slightly taller than her sister, and her dark brown hair tended more toward black than red; it was parted smoothly in the middle and soft wings framed her lovely forehead. Aunt Agatha was shorter, and rounder, like her daughter; her brown hair tended toward red, and it was frizzy. She pulled it straight back from her forehead, but a cloud of fine frizz hovered at all the edges. About Agatha, who was the older, there was a certainty, while about my mother, the dominant air was gentleness. I later came to think that they both knew the foolishness of the world, to which Agatha remained unyielding while my mother, less certain that any view could be absolute, responded with pliant accommodation.

For our first meal, they sat together on one side of the rough table, Frannie and I sat together on the other, and Uncle sat at the end of the table facing a small window. From my bench, it was easy to watch the two sisters, and I rather regretted that I did not myself have a sister who was a friend and with whom I could compare myself, the better to understand both my singularity and our commonality. But I had Frannie.

I saw that little Frannie was mostly a replica of her mother, though she had Uncle's green green eyes. I had Agatha's eye color, which was the same deep blue as her dress, but my hair color was dark, like my mother's. The texture of my hair was even more wavy and frizzy than Agatha's, and everyone who saw it in Kentucky said I had gypsy hair. My body was and is slender, like my mother's. I was glad of that, as I didn't like large breasts on women, though they fascinated me on cows and on the goats and seemed quite comely there.

My uncle Jonathan had crisp red hair, and freckles, like Frannie, all over his face and arms to match. He was clean-shaven, and his hair stood up thick and tall and bright. I wondered if he could get a cap down over his hair, but perhaps he didn't need one.

When he caught me staring at his head, he said, “All lighthouse keepers must have red hair, you know.”

I gasped.

“Should the light go out, I myself would stand at the high window and glow.”

I bowed my head in confusion.

The white goat cheese bubbled in a wrought-copper chafing dish, in the center of the table where we could all reach it. “Now, take your toast,” Uncle said, “and spoon the cheese on it. Here are the herb leaves—dill, sage, and thyme—roll the herb you like best between your fingers”—he did so to illustrate—“and sprinkle it over the cheese. Careful not to burn your tongue.”

I did burn my tongue the first time, but then I noted how they all held the toast and melted cheese before their mouths and blew on it before biting. So between the talking, sometimes in the middle of the sentences, there were little huffs and puffs of breath. In a blue bowl there was a pile of stiff, dark green vegetable, all dried, and Aunt told me it was seaweed and good for me.

Glancing toward the small window at the end of the table, I saw twilight was coming on. Uncle Jonathan and Aunt Agatha and Frannie, with my mother joining in, began to sing a song about a lighthouse keeper, but I did not know the words. While they sang, Uncle put a hurricane glass over the candle, the glass settling nicely into a circular groove in the wood of the candlestick holder. I could well imagine that he would not want to climb all the way to the top only to have his candle extinguished accidentally. Then he went to a low door in the side of the room and opened it. The stone steps, quite steep, began at once and bent around the inner wall of the tower.

“The steps are blocks of Belgium granite,” my mother said through the singing, “brought over as ballast in the ships.”

Uncle bent down and passed from the house to the shaft. His voice took on an echo in the tower, and I saw the circle of light disappear.

“Sing
la,
” my aunt commanded, “till you know the words,” and so I did, with loud and lusty LAs, for it was nicer to join in than to hang back. We seemed most peculiarly snug, we two girls and two women, with the colorful driftwood fire—red, blue, green, yellow flames like feathers—the strange food on the table, and the pretty copper chafing dish. Even the window through which I could see the graying sky was peculiar, for its walls were stone and very thick-sided. I watched the light outside gray until it matched the stone.

Soon we could not hear Uncle's voice at all, he was so high up. A chilly wind blew down the tower, and Aunt told Frannie to close the door, but I felt uneasy that the door be closed behind him while he was ascending the stone vault.

Then Mother and I sang them a slave song, “Go Down, Moses”—rapt, Frannie breathed,
I want to learn it
—so we sang it again till she had the words and her eyes glowed with the heroism of Moses. Then Agatha and Frannie sang “Loch Lomond” with a jaunty Scottish accent. After a while, we sang marching music, and Uncle came through the wall, or rather the wooden door in the wall, blowing a harmonica. The notes came and went with his breathing, and his mouth slid back and forth.

“Make a square,” he called, and we all hopped up and circled and danced, Aunt Agatha making the call. What a jolly evening, my first at the Lighthouse, and how my mother's eyes sparkled beyond their loving glow!

That was not all. Tired out, we sat before the fire, and Frannie passed around saltwater taffy, and Aunt Agatha read Lord Byron aloud. In Kentucky, only the Bible was read aloud when we gathered, but Mother had always read me her poetry books from the trunk when Father was away. When bedtime came to the Lighthouse, my mother went to her traveling locker and took out a quilt she had made for a gift. My aunt exclaimed, “Twelve stitches to the inch, Bertha,” and Uncle asked the name of the pattern.

“Log-cabin,” my mother said, “light and shadow.” It was a very beautiful quilt, pieced with strips, like logs of different lengths, instead of blocks, except there was a small square block in the center, and the section as a whole formed a square before the pattern repeated.

“The red square in the center represents the hearth,” I said, my mother having explained it to me in Kentucky. “Because it is the center of the house.” Actually, the fireplace was in one end of our cabin at home, and not in the center, but I had known that my mother was speaking symbolically.

“The dark green tones are for the forest all around us,” Mother said. “The brown tones are for the deer and the bear and the trunks of the trees.”

“And everything pale is the light, when it can get through.”

“We will let Una have it on her bed,” my aunt said, “and it will remind her of home.”

“I should very much like Una to keep up her own sewing,” my mother said.

“I'll make you a quilt,” I promised, and I went to stand beside her,
feeling again that it would be hard to let her go home. I thought of my father and his black beard and long black hair. And the whip with a handle of black, braided leather, and its long black lash.

“Bertha and I used to run races with our needles,” Aunt Agatha told me.

“Frannie,” her father said, “show your auntie and cousin your seashells now.” I knew that he had seen the shadow of memory darkening my mood; he would defer bedtime till ocean charms occupied my thoughts.

After Frannie fetched her collection, housed in a basket woven of sea grass, with a woven lid, Uncle took out shells one by one and explained that many had come from far away. As I touched their whorls and knobs and spines and admired their spots and shadings of brown, pink, purple, he described to me what oceans the shells had lived in, and what kinds of people and what languages were spoken in those distant places, and what the people wore and ate. It was the most marvelous telling I had ever heard, and yet I grew sleepy listening. Sometimes Uncle himself was in the stories, for he had been a sailor to the South Seas.