Ahab's Wife (28 page)

W
E DECIDED
. They said.

Why, what could we even use as lots?

“I have paper, Captain.” Giles.

“Let it be on your head.”

We decided in the night.

“Suppose we're rescued? It could be next hour.”

“Do you see a ship?”

“Would you have everybody draw? Even the cabin boys?”

Regardless of size or condition.

 

M
Y FINGERS
are in a hat sorting cracker crumbs thin as paper, but I am glad. How slowly my hand moves to my mouth. Someone impedes
me. “Wait,” he says. I try to disobey. “Wait!” Kit commands, and he holds my wrist so that I cannot eat. Unfolds paper.

 

“I
T
'
S THE
little boy!” The voice is Giles's, and it is a wild, despairing shriek.

The captain is standing in the boat, his saber in his hand. “Let no one touch him!”

Kit asks Chester, “What would you?”

Chester responds, piping, “It is as good a fate as any.”

The captain brings the blunt, knobbed hilt of his saber down on Chester's head. A measured blow. To stun. He holds the saber low, and with its tip he opens his own throat. Opens extravagantly. Without restraint. He tosses the saber the length of the boat to Giles, who catches it and stands. The captain falls among the men. He falls straight, like a cut tree. Like a fountain. Only he is a bone among dogs.

S
OMEONE RELEASES
my wrist. I get to chew my paper.

Someone puts a finger in my mouth. I suckle. But I know. I will always know. I am drinking blood.

W
E DRANK
and ate. We slept. We dreamed, and believed reality was dream. I crooned the song of the Lighthouse, as though torture were sung in a long, stone throat. It seemed that as days passed, other people left. And why was that?

My cheek on the gunwale, I saw so many scratches. The point of a jackknife making another. What does a steel tooth like to eat? Wood. Just some shavings. Another calendar, Frannie?

Giles pulling my head up by the hair.

“Do you want my throat?” I asked.

“Look! Look!”

Why, I could still read, and yet be a cannibal!

A ship. The
Alba Albatross
. Distant. Closer. Closing. A merchant vessel, the
Albatross
. She swooped down for us, appearing not at all like her namesake with wings spread out and out on both sides fifteen times in length the width of the bird's own body, but like a white mother hen, feathers all heaped and ruffled, ready to settle over her chicks.

Six sailors came over the side and down the ropes like six seraphs, though they were weather-brown and whiskered, one in a shirt of broad red and white stripes, looking jolly as Christmas or St. Valentine's Day, though I did not believe such days existed anymore. Two on each side, they helped Kit and Giles into the slings, but Red-and-White, whose name I later learned was Bob, sat in the sling himself, saying of me, “This one is so slight, I'll hold him before me, lest he fall.”

He folded his arms across my stomach and chest, and I did not care that one thick forearm surely felt the shape of my breasts, for he adjusted his arm so that it rode under and not across me. But he said nothing except, lifting his face toward the deck, “Heave away.”

Our miserable state was so urgent to them that I saw the hands of one sailor tremble as he worked to secure Kit in the sling. He moved away, in fact, too rapidly, and did a poor job. Kit was scarcely three feet above the water before he toppled into the sea. Another sailor dove after him immediately. I watched them both disappear under the waves. I watched with interest, but it was a slow interest. I wondered if they would emerge, what beasts under the water they might encounter if they continued to descend. But I made no cry and felt nothing. I looked away.

Giles, who was rising beside me, was in a swoon. I looked up at the cloud of sails hovering above us. Surely the Second Coming! Our Savior and his clouds had come, and even as it was written in Revelation, we quick, we dead—whichever one we were—were caught up to meet him in the clouds, halfway to heaven.

When we lay in the makeshift sick bay, I saw there were three of us, and a woman with a wadded white cloth gently bathed the salt water off Giles's naked body. So must the women have bathed the body of Christ, taken down from the cross. Behind a black curtain of my mind, it was as though my father read the scriptures to me that I needed in order to interpret my experience. The sailor who had borne me up swabbed my own lips with blessed water. I could not open them, but with a large wet finger he most gently went into my mouth. I could feel him prying past my teeth, but even this was done with no more force than was necessary to accomplish the saving of my life. He did this over and over. It seemed an eternity, and throughout the corridors of timelessness, I heard him say to others, “No, no. I'll attend.”

Likewise the woman would not leave her post with Giles. I wanted to turn to see if Kindness Incarnate, a human of one sex or the other, had also come to Kit, but there was no part of me that might turn, or bend, or twist, or fold, or glance, not even so much as to shift my eyes in their socket-beds. But I could hear. And that part of me worked that counted and shuffled numbers. I had seen Kit go under the waves, but Kit was beside me; at some point I had counted us Three upon the cots. Blessed Three, take away Two Known, and the Unknown must be, was most surely, Kit.

Giles should have lain in the center, for surely he was the Christ upon Golgotha, and Kit and I were but thieves in comparison. But it was I who lay in the center, and blasphemy came with the position, for on my right hand of myself, God the Daughter Almighty, was Kit. What sinister meaning was hidden in having Giles to the left? Whose promised place was on the left?

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.

Da da da-da.

Three halves divided by zero: Won't go. Won't go.

 

M
Y SAILOR
painted in blood. My lips are at the veins. Not his, her, your, their veins. Just the veins. Veins removed from the body, miles like thread. Stitch a quilt with veins, pocket full of sixpence.

Your penance lies in your fingers. The graveyard quilt. That morbid thing stretched from one corner of my mind to all its corners and covered the floor of thinking. All colors are gray or brown or charcoal,
burnt wood, blackened fish, glistening coal, octopus ink, the black of the pupil of an eye. All dark fabric, crossed or paisleyed only with like darkness, or darker. We stitch the coffins, the names in black thread on their lids. All the coffins go like boats, but they are out of their element, for this is on land, a graveyard near a church, perhaps. And there is a gray fence. Inside are the already dead. Outside are all whom we know, waiting to die. There's a crowd of us—too many ships in the offing waiting, crowding, jostling each other for the narrow neck and the spacious harbor within.

Gray squirrels run over the tombstones, and the stones are white and sparkling marble. The squirrels cavort and one runs up the magnolia, in full white blossom, and there twitches its tail, a flurry of gray air. And Giles's voice tells me Sanskrit—that
squirrel
in Sanskrit means “ass-flasher.”

It is Uncle Torchy, head flashing like a lighthouse. He takes the needle from my fingers. Ah, the dear needle. I want it. Its sides are smoothest steel, smoother than any silk. Let me prick my fingertip, the very bull's-eye of the whorl, let blood soak into the graveyard quilt, for everyone weeps blood when making such a quilt. I must make a graveyard quilt for penance. He puts an eagle feather in my hand.

Surely blunt, but no: it is a quill, his knife has sheared it slanted and sharp for me.

 

I
SUCK
the finger in my mouth. I am Apron's child, Apron Young Nanny dead in birthing, and the little thing made to suckle on my fingers.
Ah, yeah,
the flag over me says, red and white unfurled. The squirrel turns the magnolia cone under its paws; the cone turns like a wheel. Handspikes turn the windlass. The squirrel seeks one red seed left neglected in the dark honeycombs. The windlass winds the chains; the anchor lifts from the bottom.
Ah, yeah,
the angel croons, and my tongue seeks around the fatty pad of his finger and
wants
.

Now I would hold his finger tight with my teeth, but he slides past my clamping, and comes again, dripping water. And again.
Wait now
. But he puts his finger in my fist to hold. The part of me that sends out numbers knows the dripping water came three times, and when it comes again, it will be three times. It will not be less, but the same, the same, I sing it, or
more!

When I counted on the road to Emmaus, were there not four of us, though we had started three on the road? Had I not secretly counted four, though logic told me three? Tom's ears were burst for it. Mine worked. I was the thief who robbed ears. I could hear creaking, the safe slow creaking of the timbers of the ship. And I safe inside. And the cradling timbers brown and thick, once of the forest. And this timber, brown and sturdy, shaped, artfully turned, a scroll, an arabesque. Turned not for the strength of it, though it was strong, but for the beauty. And then, with open eye, through the slit of it, I saw also Red-and-White who had lofted me, that flag like shirt, the brown scroll of the ship timber beside his head.

His eye must have been ever fastened to mine, for through that slit, his stared back at me, and again he gave me water on his finger, though the interval had not passed, but to reward me.

Next, thee will be having it by the spoonful. Very soon now. Rest now.

 

T
HE PRISM
light focused a dim and greeny light upon Kit's attendant. I had no doubt that he was attended by a kindly woman, for there was her long hair pinned up, and she wore a dress with a wide lace collar.

“Mrs. Swain,” my Red-and-White said in a low voice. He laid aside a flap of my shirt and rose.

What was that small huff, that inward sucking of life? It was the surprise of another woman. And after that, she leaned to me, her cheek against mine. “Oh, my dear,” she said.

It was Sallie Swain, the wife of the captain of the
Alba Albatross,
a merchant ship, who became my devoted nurse. From Swain to Swain,
I thought, remembering the proprietress of the Sea-Fancy Inn. In life, do we but swim from pole to pole? Do we seek our origin in our destination? Though I felt much gratitude to Sallie, it was old Red-and-White who saved my life, and I wanted him now. The red men have a custom, I've been told, that if you save a man's life then you are responsible for him. It would seem to me more fair the other way around. But, in any case, though he had been all gentleness and consideration to me, Red-and-White retreated to the edges of my recovery. One time he approached me on the deck, when I was sitting with Sallie in our chairs, I wearing a plaid dress she had taken in so it would not hang on me too loosely, and said, “I'm glad to see thee filling out. I'll catch you a little dolphin for supper, over yonder.”

I must say, I wetted my lips and smiled, for my appetite had become wolfish. I would not think of what I had eaten. I was alive. And hungry. And the
Alba Albatross,
despite her kind rescue, had a scarcity of food, many barrels having been ruined when the ship had sprung a leak several weeks before it rescued us. Despite his good promise, Bob never presented me with the dolphin, and he did not often cross my path, even in such a small world as the ship.

The first real food I ate was a kind of miracle, though. A flying fish jumped through the open porthole of Sallie's cabin and landed in her lap! She seized the fish and called the cook. My recovery was somewhat faster than that of Giles and Kit—they still could drink only broth—so I got to eat most of the fish myself. Sallie generously declined, saying I needed it more than she. Thus she became my savior, and the love I would have given to Bob of the striped shirt I transferred to Sallie Swain. Bob had no use for my female devotion anyway.

I preferred to spend all my days with Sallie. This may seem like an odd betrayal of Kit and Giles; indeed, I would have thought it so myself, if my mind had pondered my conduct, but I preferred not to think of it at all. I know why I wished not to see them, though. I did not want to see in their eyes the reflection of what we had done together. Sallie was delighted simply with my sisterhood. Once she asked me about the ordeal; I began to tremble, and she put her pretty hand on my wrist and said, “Never mind.” She had had no companion woman for many weeks, and then came the gift from the sea of me. Her pet name for me was Undine, and it made me smile in a smug and crafty way. Such a sea-clean name.

Perhaps I should have felt only shame. But let any of you suffer damnation and return to the living! Put a plaid dress or butternut trousers upon you, and I defy you not to feel a smidgen of smug. We survivors! There is a cult of pride among us—as surely as there are demons who come for us just when we think we deserve some good fortune or peaceful moment.

Did you survive at your fellow's expense and not have the demons at your throat? No inexplicable rage? No blackest melancholy? No fear that the cosmos was a mouth ready to swallow you? No terror of Nothingness itself? The wrath of God? Then you are a blessed angel, or an automatic man made of blacksmith's iron and less than human. Or a demon yourself.

I had had enough of this: mouths like that of the moray eel. In nightmare, a boat full of eels, some slipping over the side, some devouring others. Some falling with fountains of blood before the sword. Till we were only three, and Giles threw the saber into the sea.
Through the air, the saber spins on itself, climbs in hyperbolic ascent, faster and steeper than the sun
. That picture:
the saber spins, climbs like a wheel between strings, fast and steep till it joins the sun
. That picture: always in the present tense, always available.

To survive again, on the
Alba Albatross,
I felt I must clear my being of Kit and Giles. I must sit beside Sallie and learn to tat.

Lace must fall from our fingers—a blunt shuttle, no sharp needle, thread not piercing fiber, not binding cloth to cloth, but purest thread knotting on itself. Thread mixed with air, the lace of snowflakes. My lap rising with the purity and lightness of new-fallen snow.