Ahab's Wife (18 page)

N
EVER WHILE
I was at the Sea-Fancy did I sit down at the table with my sisters. I feared hearing more stories, uniquely female, uniquely painful. I wanted shed of such stories.

I wanted my own life. And I wanted it to be different.

Choice lies in the purse. In mine, a denim bag with a drawstring, I had had the foresight to place, besides the money, my needle and thread, for those implements, for a woman, can be transformed into
money, or as good as money. And I had in my purse also the dried petals of Giles's rose, but they were coins of the heart. The money intended for hiring the
Camel
to ferry Mother and me to the Island I quickly spent on coarse clothing and a larger needle at a shop near the wharf. And I bought one gold-plated earring.

Then back to the Sea-Fancy. Scissors I borrowed from Mrs. Swain for cutting my hair, which I stuffed into the kitchen garbage under some potato peels. I also used the scissors to cut two other pairs of trousers and their linings, using the bought ones as a pattern, from my navy dress. Lightweight, for the tropics, I thought. How my needle flew up and down those flat-felled seams; men's britches must be firmly stitched. A loose jacket, with warmth, was a necessity—and that afternoon I found one at a pawnshop, cheap, because both sleeves were partly torn away from the armholes, but again my sewing skill prevailed. With the large needle I pierced one earlobe, and then inserted the golden hoop.

Then I told, or rather wrote, the necessary lies. To Uncle and Aunt and Frannie I conveyed the news of the miscarriage and claimed that I had gone to Kentucky. To Mother I wrote that I had returned to the Island. The fall supply boat would leave tomorrow for the Island, and it would be months more before any news would pass among my family. When I was safely at sea, I would send back a letter with more truth in it. Since Mrs. Swain had read the letter from my mother telling me not to come to Kentucky, I left on the receiving desk a note saying I had gone back to the Island. And should Giles Bonebright or Kit Sparrow call for me, to tell them I had gone home!

A loosely filled duffel sagging on my shoulder, I strode all-boyish under the elliptical sign,
Mrs. Rebekkah Swain, Proprietress—The Sea-Fancy—Hotel for Ladies,
and set out for the wharf, to see what job I could procure. Suppose, having done so much, no ship would have me? I posed the question as I descended the street toward the boats, my feet shod in men's shoes, for which I had swapped my button boots. Would I ship with whatever vessel would take me? Yes. Yes, I would.

I found a red cap in the street, with a dusty footprint on one side, but I took it as a good omen, brushed it off, and put it on my head. How light and free it is to have short hair! My neck felt bare, and longer, as though it had grown up out of my shoulders.

How full of scurry had been the taking of definitive action! But
when I reached the wharf and looked up at the
Sussex,
I stopped as though a stick had been stuck among the spokes of my wheel. I saw standing on the deck the very picture of what I myself would be: a cabin boy. His hair, too, was dark and curly, and he was as pretty a chap as any girl. I judged him to be about ten years old. His jacket fit tightly while mine was loose, but aside from that, we were almost the mirror image of each other.

“Hi, there,” I shouted, with all the confidence of an older boy. How much older? I decided to be thirteen and a half.

“Hi, yourself,” he said. “Come aboard.” He spoke as though he were the captain. Later I learned that this was his usual manner of speaking, and for this much of the crew disliked him, since, of course, no captain was he; but he was the captain's son, Chester Fry.

He rightly divined that I was looking for a berth, and I found out from him that the
Sussex
was due to embark on the morrow. How little time Giles and Kit had allotted for me! I was angry at them both.

The
Sussex
was British-made and christened, I learned, but now she flew an American flag. I had never walked the deck of a big ship before, let alone a whaler. There were the brick furnaces for trying out! Cold, of course, now.

When I asked the boy how he liked serving the ship, he said it was boring.

I laughed at him. “I've never been bored in my life,” I told him.

This surprised him. At once, he took me for an inventive, entertaining chap—a valuable one to have at sea. He ushered me directly to his father, a man with kindly eyes and somewhat older than I would have expected. Before I could open my mouth to account for myself (in the tradition of lies I had newly taken up), the boy explained that I wished to be a cabin boy, second to himself!

The captain inquiring my name, on the spot I took my father's: “Ulysses Spenser.” The captain said he really had no need of a second cabin boy, but his son would be happier for a companion, and what else could I do? Quickly I said that I could be cook's help as well and could mend as well as a girl. On the last, I felt particularly audacious.

Captain Fry replied that all sailors sewed well and would this be my first voyage.

I readily admitted my greenness.

“But what can you do for a whaler?” he said. His manner was so
sweet and meditative, his tone so conversational and eschewing of authoritativeness, that I thought of Giles. Just such a quiet captain could he make!

I told the captain I had remarkable eyes.

“But can you climb the rigging? The height might make you sick.”

Then I said that I could stand a hundred feet high and not be sick, for I was a lighthouse boy, but that I would have to learn to go up the ropes.

“A hundred feet? What lighthouse, Ulysses?”

Here I was in trouble, for I did not want to name my own. I could not say Alexandria or Cordouan or Eddystone—historical and foreign! I knew but one at all likely and named it: “Sandy Neck. The light at Sandy Neck across from Barnstable.”

“Sandy Neck is scarcely a hundred feet, boy.”

I said that was true, but I
could
stand at a hundred feet.

“Then you must show me,” he said. “But take your time climbing. I'll not have you splattered on the deck.”

Chester hugged his dad as though he were a child of six, and the captain's gnarled hand rested lovingly in the boy's curls. I saw why the boy was aboard; his father could not bear to part with him. I wondered if Chester did any work at all.

“What do you see, Ulysses, that you stare so at us?” my captain asked.

Ah, he was quick as Torchy had been, when first I met him, to read my face for my thoughts, or, at least, for their shadow.

“Would there not be, Captain Fry, quite enough of the usual cabin boy work to spread out between the two of us?”

The captain glanced up the mast as though to check its height.

“You are afraid?” he said.

With that I turned to the lower footings and began my ascent of the rigging. I went willingly, for I was not afraid and he misquestioned me there, but I was careful.

“Sailors go faster, Ulysses,” Chester called to me.

Promptly his father called up an amendment: “Take your care. As you are.”

Thus instructed by my captain, I climbed with a light heart, for surely I was a girl who could climb. Now I remembered climbing white pine trees in Kentucky, for the mast of a ship reminded me more
naturally of a tree trunk than of the innards of my old friend the Giant. After climbing the standing rigging, I passed the lower of the furled sails and looked sternward to the mainmast and beyond that to the timber pole of our third mast. Beyond that I looked into the rigging and masts of other ships, and the horizon of the waterline began to be perceived at a different angle. I could see down into the whaleboats hoisted on the davits of the whalers, and the aspects of items left on their decks were now a matter of an above-perspective. From this height, a coil of rope looked like a button with a spiral design, and a bundle of lances, standing like a shock of wheat, were seen mostly as their bright tips, the rest of the head and their staffs being foreshortened. Here was the wind! Here was the sense of sky and air, and this I recognized from standing on the platform of the Giant more than being among the white pine, for in the woods the view was obstructed. The rigging seemed like cobwebs before my eyes that I would brush aside because I was used to the view of utter clarity the Giant afforded.

Now my body spoke to me—my arms trembled. To climb rigging, the legs are not enough, and my arms were all weak and unpracticed in comparison. Yet my legs were so extra-strong that they compensated without complaint. It was more for balance that I wished my arms to be stronger, and I vowed to exercise them till they were the fit companions for my wonderful legs.

Legs like springs! I would glance down at the tops of my shoes occasionally to be sure that I purchased the rope at the ball of my foot and did not work dangerously toward inserting only the toe into the rigging. Though these shoe soles were thick and less sensitive than my button boots would have been, still I could feel the sagged rope of the ratlines underfoot. Below my toes, I saw once or twice the upturned faces of Captain Fry and Chester, and how their bodies disappeared so that they were only faces floating like face-fishes some yard or two above the planking of the deck. Surprised fish, they. But with kindly eyes and smiling mouths. Excitement on Chester's face, that I could do such a thing. Pleasure on the captain's face, caused by the same reason. Then I climbed higher.

Up and up! How to tell you about it? You have looked from the edge of a cliff? Climbed your own trees? Those efforts suggest a whiff of rigging-climbing—as the volatile oil from an orange peel suggests the full flavor of its ecstatic juice.

Think of a kite. You know the pleasure in that, I am sure. It is you who are up there dancing, riding the wind. Yes, those who really love to fly the kite no longer have two feet planted firmly on earth. Though there is pleasure in the horselike, alive-seeming pull on that elongated rein of kite string, if you soar airborne with the kite, then perhaps you rejoice with me in the eagerness and liberty of my sky-climbing.

I hope so, for this physical thrill—as wise Wordsworth knew—is but prelude to the symphony of soaring that I would show you and share with you before this tale is done, for it is of the spirit.

I reached my goal—the palms of my hands imprinted with the twisted and tarred hemp. I threaded my body through the opening that is the eye of that tall, upright needle of the mast. And immediately, I began to use my eyes, for of what use is a lookout if she can only climb? There must be some advantage for the ship; it must profit. I looked to sea.

Ah, training of the eye! How many ships had I spotted from the Island? High in my tower at home had I not seen specks in the air and come to know them as the precursors of birds? I could tell by the shape of the speck, the proportion of horizontal dash to vertical depth, by the flying habit of dipping or curving, by its very speed of approach, whether I was looking at a gull or sea eagle or tern or puffin or lone goose blown off course. Likewise the distant bodies of whales strung on the line where water meets sky; that shape was long known to my eye and distinctive as to species. Take the plumes they made—well, that had been my ocean-fashion show, a parade of parasols, and as surely as some girls might say “made in Paris” or “domed up in the English manner” of city sunshades so could I say, noting the distant promenade of whale spouts, “a finback” (whose origin I knew—having asked—from Uncle to be the Azores) or “a right whale” (swum up from Cape Horn). If the beast was a humpback sounding, I knew it by its flukes, and the sperm whale by its gigantic battering-ram head.

(But more of that last quality anon—and doubly more of that, and tragically. How the excitement comes upon me to tell it all! In the quest of writing, the heart can speed up with anticipation—as it does, indeed, during the chase itself of whales. I can swear it, having done both, and I will tell
you
though other writers may not. My heart is beating fast; I am in pursuit; I want my victory—that you should see and hear and above all feel the reality behind these words. For they are but a mask.
Not the mask that conceals, not a mask that I would have you strike through as mere appearance, or, worse, deceitful appearance. Words need not be that kind of mask, but a mask such as the ancient Greek actors wore, a mask that expresses rather than conceals the inner drama.

(But do you know me? Una? You have shipped long with me in the boat that is this book. Let me assure you and tell you that I know you, even something of your pain and joy, for you are much like me. The contract of writing and reading requires that we know each other. Did you know that I try on your mask from time to time? I become a reader, too, reading over what I have just written. If I am your shipbuilder and captain, from time to time I am also your comrade. Feel me now, standing beside you, just behind your shoulder?)

When I reached the crow's nest, I heard a faint “Bravo” waft up. A strong, good, male voice: Captain Fry extending congratulations. But I could not let myself be distracted by that.

My well-trained eyes swept past the harbor—there was someone manning the masthead of our sister ship the
Essex,
for what reason I didn't stop to imagine—and my gaze roved out to sea and on to the horizon. But stop. Back up. Well before the horizon, just three eye steps out to sea—say, three thousand feet—what was that submerged shadow? Did I see a treacherous rock waiting to scrape out the hull of some harbor-bound ship? No, it moved. There it was again. A dark gliding. Rapid.

I looked down to aim my voice at my captain. “Whale, ahoy!” I sang out. All triumphant now.

But his words climbed slowly up: “Not possible, boy.”

I doubted not my vision, or my judgment, but I looked again to make it more precise. “Killer whale, sir!”