Ahab's Wife (25 page)

T
HE
S
USSEX
sailed into the storms. The ocean bulged itself first into rounded hills and then into mountains, jagged, crested with foam and wind. The
Sussex
sailed up these slopes by staggering increments, almost as though she climbed an endless staircase. We jerked upward to a symphony of creaking and snarling wood, of wild screeching of wind, of canvas straining, sometimes bursting. The height of a mountainous wave obtained, the bow crashed and the ocean swept the deck.

Strung in lifelines, the men attempted the necessary work. Their faces were blue with cold, and their drenched clothing was shiny with water. I saw one man slammed against a rail, but it held, while the man was caught like a fragment against a strainer, the sea streaming over the wood. “Paul,” he cried out, and his mate was there with his arm extended. Far to starboard, I saw a wave as high as my old Giant, all movement and forward-falling weight, but we rode our own mountain, and the monster passed at our side. When I opened the galley door, the two men heaved themselves inside, to safety.

One morning, the gale increasing, I felt Captain Fry's wet mouth at my ear. “Our object is to get to latitude sixty. Take the wind on the larboard tack. Go round.” At ten, he double-reefed the topsails and soon furled the jib and mainsail. When I carried coffee to the door at eleven, I saw the main topsail was close-reefed, the foresail furled. Still that day, and each day, we progressed a little. But the fury and tumult of the gales escalated, and the men moved among torn sails, broken spars, and damaged rigging. Bit by bit, I feared, we were being torn
apart. Each hour, I hoped to glimpse Giles and Kit, to know they were alive. If the interval between sightings was long, I was frantic with anxiety. Not allowed to cross the deck myself except by Captain Fry's express permission, I sometimes stood in the portal of the galley and tossed bread to the men.

Once, there never being a safe time to get below, I stayed miserable and wet in the hurricane house all day. In the morning, the storm wind came from north-northwest, and poor sailors had to climb the tattered rigging to take in the mainsail and mizzen topsail. By noon, the blast increased to a gale from the west-northwest, and the fore topsail was taken in, and the foresail reefed. Around four, two men were sent to furl the foresail. As I watched, a wave reached up, shoved against their backs, and swept them into the boiling sea. I screamed and screamed, but my puny sound went unheard in the storm. Exhausted, I rolled myself into the driest corner of the house and cried, till I felt Captain Fry's hand on my shoulder. He tied me to himself and took my hand as well to escort me to the hatch. As we walked, he pointed out to sea, and I saw building there the most gigantic wall of water I had ever witnessed. We ran across the slippery deck.

Together, we scurried below. He ordered me to go to Chester at once and to stay with him, but I was mesmerized by that vision of what seemed our doom. Together, beneath the closed hatch, we listed to the storm and waited. The ship climbed up and up—I knew the wheel was lashed—we were lifted and lifted and then dropped and dropped till I thought us descended to the floor of the sea. So much water poured over us, fore to aft, that I knew the hull of the ship rode submerged for long moments.

The day came, Chester and I swaying and spinning in the gimbaled bed, in the dark, when we heard the ship scream. The fibers in the mainmast screeched and were torn asunder. The mast flew away from us, the captain said later, trailing her rigging with her, leaving a stump broken six feet above the deck. It was a miracle that the loosed mast did not become the battering ram of our destruction.

Chester told me that his father could sail with two masts or even one or none if he had to. And that masts were replaceable. But mostly there in the dark Chester talked of the beautiful Pacific, and how he would slip overboard and swim when we got there, with half the crew about him to watch for sharks. Some ships, Chester said, hurled themselves
against the headwinds for three weeks, but his father had navigated last time in two. When I questioned Chester closely, he said this rounding was no worse than the last, except for the loss of the mast. I added quietly, “And two men gone.”

Just as there had been several days in which the storms gradually intensified, so were there several days during which they diminished.

One day, the captain, carrying a candle, hurried through the door of the bedroom and told Chester and me to come topside—the sun was shining. All disheveled and sleepy—for we had confused night and day in our hideaway—we emerged blinking, and there was the sea, blue and sparkling as though she had never brooded a gray moment in her life.

And then, in as strange a sight as ever I saw, birds blew over us. Gulls, hundreds of them, as though they were pushed by a current of air that streamed across us, flowing rapidly toward the west. “The frost wind! The frost wind!” the captain shouted, and he gave orders to unfurl all the sails, should the wind descend to our masts. Chester and I watched the slack sails hang while high above the ship streamed the birds, pell-mell, using their wings for balance rather than speed. Then we heard the sails begin to stir.

It was a creaky, stiff sound, but the canvases were beginning to fill with wind. The captain called down the lookouts. Then I felt the stream of air lowering to us on the deck and passing around our bodies with a clean, clear, sunny chill. The wind was unremitting. In the two remaining masts, the sails luffed, then strained at their tethers, and we were off!

Like a magic ship we flowed with the wind in our sails toward the South Pacific. The sea surface itself was calm and unruffled, a steady, normal movement. How could the air be so divided and layered? I did not know. We stood like statues on the deck, our clothes, our hair catching, too, in the breeze as though we each had become masts hung with skimpy sails, and we, too, helped to move the ship.

“Let no man go aloft,” the captain said. He lifted his head to look up at our luck, but no one knew the force of the wind in the big bellied sails. It seemed to me that the two remaining masts almost leaned forward, out of the vertical, so great was the pressure of wind in sails. Nothing broke, nothing tore—so beautiful was our position and so constant the current of air. It made the blood sing in my veins, and I
knew I could be a sailor for life, if I chose. Yes, I could gladly wait a lifetime, a full sixteen years more, for such a sensation again. Without our effort, grace moved us forward.

Before the wind blew all the heat out of our bodies, the captain sent Chester and me below. All night we felt our speed humming in the boards of the hull and heard the water zinging past our ears. When we went up in the morning, the airflow had warmed, and, I thought, slowed a bit, but we were covering a great distance.

As the day wore on, the airstream could no longer be felt on the deck, though it still moved at the level of the sails. Toward dusk, I noted that the wind was far less in the lower sails than in the higher ones. At midnight—Giles came to get me—the sails were slack, but we were still gently moved in the current. “How far have we come?” I asked Giles. He thought hundreds of miles.

I asked him what had created that extraordinary wind, but he did not know. He answered whimsically, rather than scientifically. He said there was a flute player in the Andes, and he breathed a note purer and higher than the earth had ever heard before. Earth took the note and made it into a scarf of wind.

“The captain called it ‘the frost wind,' ” I said.

Giles smiled at me puckishly. “That is because the scarf of the high Andes is always fringed with frost.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, an ordinary wind blew for us, on course, increasing and decreasing, in puffs and pauses, under sunny, subtropical skies. The deck was crowded with cheerful sailors. Whatever task could be done on deck was performed there rather than belowdecks. Harry set up his deck galley again, and I helped him with hearty goodwill. He asked every idle sailor to fish, in the hope of a feast, but even the porpoises that jumped in the spray from the bows eluded us. He did snag a gigantic turtle. We were obliged to haul it up with a chain and tackle usually used to strip off the whale's blanket, and the captain
speculated that the sea turtle weighed a thousand pounds. To kill the beast, the captain shot him cleanly in the head with a pistol as we hauled him up the side.

Harry was a genius of seasonings. I think he even added some of his hoarded wine to sharpen the piquancy of the flavor. The turtle meat itself was savory and soft.

Oddly, Kit refused to eat it. “It's a curse to eat turtle meat,” he said, but I coaxed him to try the broth.

The shell was enough of a wonder to us that the captain allowed it to remain on deck. It would have made a nice boat for a child on a pond. Chester and I sometimes lounged against the greenish turtle back after we had finished our morning constitutional. Many days passed thus pleasantly. The two masts served us well, and we were in no great hurry, for we were again in cruising territory for whales. Chester told me it was his father's intention to put in at Hawaii, though it was still a very far distance. If the “frost wind” had not caught us in its breath, we would have put in on the coast of Chile, at Santiago, for repairs and supplies. But, really, we felt the need of nothing. Giles had suggested to Harry that he capture some of the torrents of rainwater to replenish our supply, and he had done so during the storm. The splintered stub of the mainmast stood like a totem over serene seas.

Nonetheless, we were a whaling ship, and to complete our completeness, if that is a possible idea, we began to watch eagerly, again, for a whale.

Aloft once more, I felt seasoned and relaxed. The height and the motion of my roost seemed natural to the world in which I lived. Since both Kit and Giles knew my identity, my very bones felt more comfortable and free of dread: the precautions I took with the other men and with Harry, Chester, and Captain Fry were habitual now. Sometimes I even thought of myself as a man and was proud of my manliness.

The question of the horror of killing and butchering another leviathan I tried to defer. I looked at the near and far heaving of the green sea and loved and relished the sight. Should a dark shape, moving—perhaps spouting—appear, I supposed that I would look carefully and then sound the expected cry. It was not my job to ride in a whaleboat, to row in pursuit, to dart the harpoon, to plunge in the lance. No. I was a pair of eyes. And when I tired of the sea, there was the cloud laden
sky inviting my soul into its blue expanse. If I gazed there, why, then there was no chance of sighting a whale.

Sometimes I saw other ships at a great distance—I had new letters ready in their envelopes—but Captain Fry was not interested in gamming. He had his Shakespeare and his son; now he had Giles to converse with, too, and he did not wish to stop his work to entertain himself. Perhaps the broken mainmast embarrassed him, too. The mates were so quiet and content on board the
Sussex
that I asked Harry if they were opium eaters. To my surprise, he said he did think they took a few grains occasionally.

As for Giles and Kit, we were friendly, but it seemed for Giles that conversations with us were perhaps less interesting than molding the young mind of Chester, or benefiting from the captain's broad nautical experience. Giles made little effort to talk with Kit or me since our stormy picnic in the blubber room.

Kit seemed to me a person apart simply because he was melancholy. Whatever pain had alienated him from Giles he never spoke of. He seemed to try to assume an air of normality. The other crew members enjoyed Kit's quick and unlikely wit, like the spurt of a match in darkness. The ship was not paradise, but there was order and goodwill to be found there, if not the vitalizing force of love or the pleasure of intimacy. And besides, we were in motion. New regions would appear. Weeks passed. I did my duty and waited for change.

From my perch aloft, I thought the smudge on the horizon betwixt the green sea and the pale sky too large to be a whale. Its shape reminded me a bit of the Island at home, for there was a steepness on one side like the headland under the Lighthouse and from that there was a gradual long slope into the sea. There was no tinge of green to this South Pacific island, such as one usually sees in mild climes. Instead it had a blackish appearance, and I wondered if it might be the eroded tip of an underwater volcano, basalt often having a deep blackness to it.

Then there was a small eruption—a short plume of smoke went up, strangely familiar in shape. Could the sterile isle be inhabited? Had I seen a sort of smoke signal such as the Indians of the American West were said to use? Surely it was a signal or a sign, but my brain refused to interpret it. Then the island sank from sight. I rubbed my eyes. Could it be so near to sea level that sometimes the waves covered it?
Surely there were some islands somewhere even now being built up from their bases at the bottom of the sea. Was I to be privy to such a land-forming process?

It was a drowsy day, and patience came easily. I thought of the six little plum trees at home and wished that I had a plum. I thought of Uncle and Aunt and Frannie. I pictured them around their new baby. I looked down to the deck. I saw Kit clap Giles on the shoulder in quite a natural and friendly way, and I was glad. Surely this was real friendship and not just gesture. Then I looked again for the black island.

Perhaps I had only dreamed. It would be nice to have a pet in the crow's nest—a little mouse would be fine, or a bumblebee that buzzed just for me. What kind of pet would a ship rat make if it was handled frequently and lovingly from birth? The knobby, hairy white knees of Apron came to mind, when she was a little goat. I sighed. I wanted to fold my arms on the edge of the crow's nest, close my eyes, and dream, lulled by the sea.

How was it that I had received a loving rose from a man who walked the deck below me but who now treated me like the man I pretended to be? How was it that another man had lusted for my body and now found little delight in looking at me? Was it a pact between them not to compete when the arena was so small? And what was the cause of the coolness between them? Had they quarreled about me?

I wanted no quarrels, but here in the Pacific, I had rather expected to return to the intense communion we had all had on the Island. They, on the other hand, having been so little expectant of seeing me, now seemed to discount the reality of my presence. I didn't care, I decided. I would marry Captain Fry! That would show them. And then I smiled at my childish petulance and felt lazier than ever.

I would not marry anyone anytime anywhere. I would sail as a man and live ashore as a woman. I would do just as I pleased. So long as I hurt no other being, why not do exactly as I pleased?

The black island was back. I had not realized that we had come round. I checked the azimuth. We had not come round; the island had.

“Shoals ahead!” I shouted down, for who knew how close our keel was to submerged rock or what new formation of land might rise hidden under our keel and scrape us out?

“Thar she blows!” shouted the other lookout.

No island, but an enormous black sperm whale, with a head steep as a cliff, erupting not volcanic smoke but a huge spume of water vapor.

“Lower way!” Captain Fry himself shouted the command, and there was a boyish crackling of excitement in his order. I didn't like such jejune glee. Instantly the crew rushed to the boats and piled in, and they began to be lowered into the rocking sea. The black whale seemed unaware of us. He lay on the water like a slope of coal. I imagined his tiny eye, the wrinkles around the socket.
King!
the word came strangely to mind, startling as the retort of a rifle. King of all lunged creatures, this whale; king, thus, of mankind? And then this dark idea spelled its way across my mind:
We shall never take him
.

I had seen bulls in the fields of Kentucky, and in their shoulders there was always such a concentration of unintelligent power that I always thought the word
brute
. Well, here was the Brute of Brutes. Though he had no shoulders in the bovine sense, there where shoulders are was that same concentration of force. How feminine we, the ship, seemed in comparison—how white and swanlike, despite our jagged stub, we had moved before the stream of frost wind. No wind would move his mass. Black and dense, completely powered only by his own will and muscle, he lolled before us. Who was Captain Fry to let his men attempt to dismantle this? Let them rather choose to assault a volcanic rock such as I had thought that I was seeing! Let them take little spoons and try to dent hardened lava! Let them try to shovel up an Alp and fling it into the Mediterranean! I wanted to tell him so, from aloft.

Bring them back aboard,
I wanted to say.
Keep them safe
. I saw the captain at the helm, and I knew that he but waited for the small whaleboats to clear the ship before he himself would use the ship as the largest whaleboat and sail directly upon the beast.

The whale's eye was like a star embedded in a night with only one light. Suddenly the great beast dove. Such a volume of water did he displace that I felt the ship rock with his passage downward. How could anything alive be so large? He was nearly twice the size of my sixty barrel whale. Could the animal really be stowed below as small casks of oil?
At your own death,
I asked myself,
can the vastness of your own experience be buried in the ground, funneled into nothing but the shape of a grave?
For how long could those gigantic lungs sustain him underwater?
water? And if this leviathan did fall to us, despite all his hugeness, what would be the quality of the oil?

“He rose in the vertical, jaw agape….”

He rose in the vertical, jaw agape under the lead whaleboat. It rose in the air with him, men falling into the sea, the boat shivering into planks and splinters. The men were tiny in the water. Foam and splash and bubbles washed over them. Immediately a boat turned to pick up its comrades. I watched as the eagle watches—high and detached. There was no blood. The black boulder dropped again; the foam subsided. The swimmers were pulled aboard.

Now we waited. I peered into the depths but saw no movement.

Captain Fry called up, “Cry out, Billy, if you see him flutter.”

I waited and watched. Like a mass of kelp, the wavering began deep in the sea, and I shouted out his position. He was going to come up under the double-laden whaleboat. Not waiting for the captain to direct, I yelled, “Pull for the ship!”

And they did. The shadow of the tip of my mizzenmast fell across them as they neared the boat. It was a pointer for the demon. This time he butted the boat into the air, and the men flew out like moisture along the curving lash of a whipline, their backs and necks flexed beyond endurance.

Again I saw no blood, but only a few souls came up swimming—three of sixteen. These flailed their arms and kicked their legs, swam straight for the safety of the ship, and my eyes filled with pity's tears.

From my perch I could see underwater where the whale changed the angle of his ascent, slanting outward. Glad-hearted, I called down to Captain Fry: “He's going away!” Could something so massive move with such speed? Underwater, the great tail muscle worked up and down, causing the dark body to leap ahead through the depths, angling away from us.

Dimly I heard the captain order me to come down, but I could not remove my gaze from the swimming monster. His outline was distorted by the water, of course, so I saw him as a great inkiness as though exuded from an octopus, an amorphous blackness. But he had been close enough for me to see the wrinkles in his skin, and I knew the intimacy of his eye. Now I saw a human body floating, facedown, and I called to the remaining boat and pointed out the form, but they did not hear me, for they were pulling for the ship.

The whale continued to move underwater like a dark, misshapen comet swinging out of our universe.

“What ho?” the captain yelled up.

“In retreat,” I replied. “Southwest.” I wanted to speak of his speed, but the number of knots he made I thought to be beyond credibility.

The captain went to the side and yelled to the approaching boat to turn and pursue the whale. To my amazement they continued to come mutinously home, and yet it was what I would have advised them to do.

“Southwest!” Captain Fry bellowed, stabbing the air with an impotent finger.

The whale was swimming with unbelievable velocity; no human crew could catch that torpedo of destruction. Then I saw the whale deviate from his trajectory, a curling round. He dashed at us, as though he intended to ram the ship. The crown of the massive head emerged.