Ahab's Wife (8 page)

But the summer gulls! The air was freedom for them, and they might come in close, or weave out of sight over the water. None flew so high as to fly over the Lighthouse, but once I saw a sea eagle stand on the knob above the lantern.

Giles and Kit soared into our lives one warm day when I was sixteen, as freely as the ever-roving gulls. Though they came by water and not by air, of course, the sail of their tiny boat was like the wing of a gull. The dark boat itself was named the
Petrel,
because, they said, like Saint Peter, it could walk on water.

But I would not skip over the time when I was fourteen, and for a week on the mainland I was reunited with both of my parents for the last time.

Like the gnomon of a sundial, the tower did cast a shadow, as I had observed the day my mother left for Kentucky. We were under its measure of time, and many a day, since that first one when my mother embarked, was marked off as its shadow moved like the slat of a fan over the goats' hill, and then down the boulder steps on the east, until the shadow-shaft again grew chaotic with the waves.

O
NCE EVERY SEASON
,
as I have implied, the packet boat came to us, but the winter boat came at the beginning of winter, and the spring boat came after mid-spring, so it was sometimes five months that we were alone on the Lighthouse with our books, with nature, and with ourselves. During the summer when I was fourteen it was successfully arranged for a June Saturday that my mother and father would come up from Kentucky to meet us.

When I saw them at the New Bedford wharf from the deck of the
Camel,
naturally they looked smaller to me. But even when the boat was bumping the wood, to my surprise, they still seemed shorter than I remembered. My mother and I fell into each other's arms immediately. She was the same, though smaller, with the same serenely parted, glossy-smooth hair. She fingered my curls tumbling over my shoulders in front and down my back and said, “My gypsy girl.”

My father said, “Una, at fourteen, young women braid their hair.” He did not touch me and he stood like a column of darkness.

“Does not the scripture somewhere forbid women to braid their hair, brother Ulysses?” my aunt said subversively.

My father's eyes flashed black darts, but he spoke mildly. “I'm not such a literalist as that, sister Agatha.”

Suddenly I wanted my two families to get along, and I leaned forward and shyly kissed my father high on the cheek, on the skin above where his black beard began. Aunt Agatha was right behind me, but she said with a note of merry mocking, “Clearly the scripture says to greet one another with an holy kiss.”

Uncle loaded our valises onto a hand truck and paid the boy to trundle them to our hotel, while Mother and Father greeted Frannie, whom Father had never seen before. Frannie was unafraid, and she shook my father's hand as though she were as tall as he was.

Then my mother put her arm through my father's elbow and held out her hand to me. As we started toward the hotel, I joined with them. Then I held back my free hand for Frannie. She took it and grabbed her mother, who in turn playfully took Uncle's hand, so that we made a chain with six links in it as we walked along.

I think my father had eyes only for the churches of New Bedford,
for as we passed them, he stopped to read the sermon topics tacked to the doors. We all stood patiently, still holding hands, while he read. He looked like a dark minister seeking a home for his little flock.

“We could play crack the whip,” Frannie said, all smiles, for that was a game that all four of us sometimes played on the beach. I shook my head solemnly at her.

At Seamen's Bethel Chapel, after Father read the sermon notice tacked on a blue-painted door, he announced, “This will do.” My mother moved beside him in front of the door also to read. Then we moved on, but we did not take up our linking of hands again.

When I had the chance, I inquired of my mother what was the promised sermon topic. She said that the next day we were to hear a discourse on loving obedience and loyalty. Her eyes looked into mine with such love and loyalty that the protest which rose to my tongue subsided. All evening, I felt fixed in the admonition of her gaze, and I tried to please my father as the six of us ate supper. I asked him about the horse that pulled the buggy and about his fishing in the Ohio, of catfish and bass and bluegill, and I reminded him of when I had fished with him, and as I spoke of these things, I discovered that I did indeed care about them. But I felt as I imagined an old person might, reminiscing about times long gone and far away.

Sunday morning found the six of us entering the Seamen's Bethel, an odd church with a pulpit shaped like the prow of a ship. No sooner had we seated ourselves in a pew about halfway down, on the left, than the minister ascended the pulpit. To do so, he climbed up a rope ladder, then hauled the rope up into the prow. He began by reading from the Book of Ruth. During the night, I had slept off my acquiescence to the tyranny of religion and paternity. I listened to the reading grudgingly, sitting between my parents, instantly in hot rebellion. When, in the sermon, the minister began to generalize on the application of Ruth's words—
Thy people shall be my people and thy God, my God
—the words hit my heart as the sea hits the headland rocks—to be turned away with its own force. I thought,
Thy people shall not be my people—I choose my own—and thy God shall certainly not be mine, for I have my own allegiances
. I seemed to grow taller, as though my shoulders had shot up to the level of my parents' ears. I felt fiercely gigantic, and I knew that I could begin to roar, if I chose, that neither they, who sat so close, nor the congregation as a whole could keep me from roaring
one gigantic No! in the face of the high minister. After that, they might drag me out, true, but really I could say whatever I pleased.

Yet I knew my words themselves would dash senselessly against the pulpit. That ship would sail right over me. Instead of roaring my dissent, I studied the minister, who was tall, lined, and battered in appearance, as though he himself had often been to sea. While his words seemed foreign and offensive to me, he himself was a pillar of dignity. I could not help but like him. His figure contrasted with that of my father, who was short and powerfully compact. The minister was silver like driftwood, not the certain black of my father.

Down the pew was the blazing head of Torchy. Suddenly I wished that I had climbed to the top of the Lighthouse and stood there, beside Uncle Torch. Soon after I had come to the Lighthouse I had asked Frannie if she ever went up in the Lighthouse, and she had replied that she was not big enough. This had set me to thinking if I was big enough. After a month on the Island, with no one having suggested I might climb the tower, I asked at the supper table if I might and added, lamely, that the view from the top was probably wonderful—as though I needed some reason for ascending.

“I think your legs turn into steel,” Frannie had said solemnly, “if you climb the steps often. Papa's have.”

Laughing, Torchy pushed back his chair and straightened out his leg. (My mind left the sermon.)

“Feel, Una,” he had said, pointing to his thigh muscle.

I put my fingers lightly on the corduroy cloth of his trousers. “Press down,” he said. When I obeyed, I felt, indeed, a muscle as hard as a steel plate under the cloth.

“But this is fifteen years of climbing,” he said. “You won't turn into steel right away.”

I had thought it might not be too bad to turn into steel if it made one the happy, self-assured person that my uncle was. But I had never climbed the tower with him. My partial ascent had taken me only to the level of fear.

All of this came into my mind when I but glanced down the church pew and saw the red hair of my uncle, as though his brain were erupted in flame. It pleased me to think that he was in fact no blood kin, but a stranger who liked me. I regarded my aunt beside him. Then I contemplated
my parents together and thought it might be very nice to marry a man with red hair.

When we left the Seamen's Bethel Chapel, my father looked straight into my eyes—we were the same height—and said that it had pleased him to sit beside me in church, as we had done when I was a little girl. There was a glitter in his black eyes and a soft nostalgia swept over his face, and I was glad that I had not bellowed No! at the pulpit.

I resolved that I would not provoke him. The two families stayed more than a week in New Bedford (the government having provided a substitute for us at the Lighthouse), and, as my mother suggested, we visited many different places of work while we were there. How lovely to have my mother beside me, often touching my shoulder or hugging my waist, pointing for me to look at this or that. I saw men making barrels and candles and items of metal. I saw harpoons forged and rope braided by the mile. I saw great pans of hardtack baked and then packed into barrels—all of those items that a whaler, gone to sea for two or three years, would need for the lengthy voyage. My mother said that she would have me to notice what kind of man did what kind of work.
I want you to learn,
she said,
how men differ from each other
. Mainly I noticed how my gloomy father differed from Torchy's cheer, from the silver minister's serenity.

During these excursions around New Bedford, the sense of the six of us gradually became a sense of five, as my father drew more and more to the periphery. Once I said to my mother, “He looks like an ember smoldering, over there.”

“You don't need to be afraid,” she said quickly.

I had not really felt afraid, only observant, though in the woods he
had
seemed dangerous. I remembered the retort of his gun as he stood on the threshold and King's blood in the dust. Then I thought of the shaft of the great white pine I had climbed. At intervals, the branches shot out from the trunk like the spokes from the hub of a wheel. And the sprays of yellow-green needles were limber and redolent.

When we went again to church the next Sunday, I studied the faces of the men who were returned from sea or who were likely to go there soon. It seemed to me there was an alertness to them that I seldom saw among the landsmen, and a knowing. And I thought of Uncle, who had been many places in his youth and now seemed so content
with his small family on the small Island with the tower, plus one niece, myself, and how he was cheerful for weeks and months and years. And I wondered for the first time where I myself would go next, and, if I went there, if that path might branch as elm trees do and as rivers do and go elsewhere. Would I ever come back to the place where I started? What portion of my lot would be choice and what part accident?

That night, at a New Bedford tavern named the Hollyhock, I was surprised that during our last dinner together before my parents returned to Kentucky, my father asked me a question along these very lines.

“Una,” he said directly to me, “do you hold that our lives are determined for us or that we are free to choose?” It was as though the dark case of a coal lump had split open, and I saw the fire within, like a wound.

I glanced uneasily at my mother and felt afraid that their nice visit might end in contention. I had tried to conform! I had concealed my growing unease! My mother nodded yes at me, ever so slightly.

“I think we are free,” I said. I helped myself to another portion of beef stew, as though it were a normal question and my answer a casual one. “We don't eat so much red meat on the Island,” I said, “do we, Aunt?” But she made no reply.

“Until recently,” my father intoned, “I thought so, too. I thought you, daughter, were free to choose to believe, but now I think that fate, or God, determines it all.”

I was afraid to speak, because it seemed to me that again fanaticism was contracting and smoldering within him. I studied my napkin and the hastily done embroidery on it—a pink hollyhock, to remind one of the name of the place. I could have said,
I believe in neither God nor Fate,
and the conflagration would have been upon us.

Uncle asked in a kindly way, “What caused you to change your mind, Ulysses?”

My father ignored my uncle and focused on me. “I thought you, daughter, were free to choose and that you freely disobeyed. It was my solemn duty to punish you.” He spoke all on one pitch, an intoning, as though he were mesmerized. “I have changed, by the will of God!” Suddenly his voice blared, and the word
God
was almost a shout. The other diners at the Hollyhock turned to look at us. My mother put her white hand on my father's dark shoulder, but she said nothing.

In a lower voice, he continued, “I was in church. You know there is a great debate in Kentucky, south of us, near Tennessee, between those who believe in free will and those who hold with predestination. I have always believed I was free. Look at this hand,” he said. “It will not rise from the table unless I will that it do so. No, it lies inert.”

Suddenly his hand shot up in a definitive gesture. He held it aloft over us. “I choose,” he said.

We stared at him. Aunt Agatha frowned and looked away.

“Am I as a body so different from my hand?” he went on. “That is what I thought, and my minister with me. If I choose whether my hand should rest or move about, can I not make the same decision concerning the entirety of the body? I went to hear my minister say, far better than I could ever formulate, what my soul clung to—autonomy, self-governance. I seemed to need the idea. Was I not like God, in my own world? Were not things done as I ordered them to be done? How could God be less than I?”

He rose slowly from his chair. It was as though he were in a trance, as though his high hand held a rope that pulled him from his seat. He was not noisy or dramatic, but he began to circle the table. Once when I was out fishing with Uncle, a shark circled our boat just in that way, its fin held out of the water up in the air and quietly gliding.

“In his sermon, my minister summarized the arguments of our opponents. As he is an honest man, each argument was given its full weight and its attractiveness. Those predestinating views claimed such as this: that if God were all-powerful, as he must be to be God, then what mattered our puny human will? Could not God have had the power to prevent the crucifixion of his only son? Did not Jesus say, ‘Not my will be done, but the will of my father who is in heaven'?”

When my father circled round to his empty chair, I pulled it out and said softly, “Father, won't you sit down again?”

He rushed back his hand as though to strike me. Though the hand did not flash, in the gasp that ran round the table, I was sucked back to Kentucky, back to when his palm smote my cheek, and he thundered,
Believe!
But now he slowly brought the hand before the dark cloth covering his chest, he turned the hand palm up, as though he were testing the air of the room for some interior rain. He looked up questioningly at the low, beamed ceiling. Then he placed his hands together in the attitude of prayer. Slowly he rubbed them against each other, as
though to let the one warm the other. The sound was like sheets of fine sandpaper abrading one another.