Ahab's Wife (31 page)

A
S WE APPROACHED
the Azores, a whaling ship that once I had watched through a spyglass came into view—the
Pequod,
out of Nantucket. I knew that whaling ships did not often stop to gam with merchant ships such as the
Alba Albatross,
but when the
Pequod
hove into view, I got the scent of home—Kit's island home—and I asked my captain if he would not try to hail the
Pequod
and prevail upon its captain to take Kit to Nantucket, if they should be homeward bound, as they appeared to be.

“What of yourself?” Sallie asked. “Will you stay with me?”

“I doubt the captain yonder would board Kit without a caretaker.”

“But if he will…”

My mind would not knead the question.

I did not tell Sallie that I had agreed to marry my Kit. Perhaps Kit himself had forgotten. Let it be as Kit willed, but I knew that if I was married to him then I would have some say in his care. Who would care for him if not I? Charlotte, that name, came to me—his friend who had kept his pet vixen. But he never spoke of her. And he had lain with me.

And I had had enough of trying to live at sea.

T
HEN THE WORLD
was full of sails as the
Pequod
and the
Albatross
drew together. I saw the ivory tackle of the squarish
Pequod,
built so much more sturdily than the clipper
Albatross
. And the captain—Ahab with the zaggy mark down the side of his face. I thought of how, when I was still a girl at the Lighthouse, the lightning had come close to me. Ahab had an eagle's face; he wore no hat, and his gray-white hair streamed back from his brow.

He was of medium height, and though he was not young, his body had an extraordinary hardness to it, as though he had endured much. Whatever the gods had hurled at him he had withstood, I reasoned. Time might blanch his hair, calamity might mark his face, but he strode the deck as though every nail belonged to him. His hands had a peculiar reddish hue, as though they had reached into a fire and snatched out whatever it was that Ahab wanted.

His foot in a rope loop, Captain Swain was swung by the cargo crane to the
Pequod,
which then moved off a short distance. With the calm certainty that my life had come to another crossroads, I watched the two captains talking on the deck. Captain Swain gestured back to the
Albatross,
and Captain Ahab looked at me.

At once Ahab walked to the rail of his
Pequod
toward us, speaking to Captain Swain as he moved. They boarded a whaleboat, were lowered and ferried back toward the
Albatross
. I stood still and waited. Someone brought Kit to stand beside me. He seemed to know that some judgment was to be rendered on us, and he stood quietly, though I could sense the contraction of tension in him. I knew he would insist on being judged aright.

As Captain Ahab strode toward us, I heard him mutter, “I never liked the tread of a merchant vessel.”

“Nor I,” Kit suddenly said.

Ahab eyed him closely. “Ye'd go to Nantucket on a whaler then? With Ahab, would ye? With cannibal old Ahab?”

“Brother,” Kit said, unsmiling, challenging. He stared at Ahab as though he were the sun.

“Brother?” Ahab questioned. “Ye'd better count me on fingers and toes and teeth as well. I'd say ‘Father,' were I ye, before I said ‘Brother.' ”

“With my wife.”

I felt my head jerk up with surprise.

“Captain,” Sallie said, “they're not married.”

“Marry us,” Kit said, turning to Captain Swain.

“I won't,” he answered. “It's not fitting.”

“Marry us,” Kit said to Ahab, “on your ship.”

“The man's mind spins like a weathervane,” Captain Swain said.

“What would ye?” Ahab asked me, and as he asked, there was a softening of his tone, imperceptible to the others perhaps, but soft as dew to me.

Kit grasped my hand and squeezed till it hurt. “I will not go,” Kit said to me, “if you fail in your promise.”

“Una!” Sallie exclaimed, gently taking my hand away from Kit. He let go and watched. Sallie led me aside. She spoke softly, directly into my ear; she implored me to consider the seriousness of marriage.

“I did say that I would,” I answered.

“A promise to a madman cannot be binding,” she said. “You were probably half gone yourself. Did you think of what you were saying? Answer truly.”

I told her no, that I had not thought. I had only said the word that seemed inevitable.

“Inevitable?”

“The universe prepared us for each other.”

She put her gentle hands on my shoulders and shook me.

What sentences could I speak that would seem meliorating and reasonable? I told her that I had loved Kit for many months, that I was not afraid, that I believed that he would never hurt me, that we had an old understanding.

“It was Giles you loved.”

“Sir,” I called to Ahab, “will you marry us?”

“If ye wish it,” he said.

“You are a barbarian,” Captain Swain said to Captain Ahab.

“She chooses her fate,” Ahab said. “Look at her.” Something like a smile passed his face.

So I turned to Sallie and asked if I might take a few things with me.

“Whatever you like,” she said, true to her generous nature to the end. But she did not accompany me belowdecks.

In going toward my cabin, I passed one of the merchant sailors whom I had seen before only at a distance. Though I was preoccupied,
I looked at his eyes, and he stopped and looked deeply at me for a moment as we passed in the corridor. A voice within me spoke:
He is the most interesting man I have ever seen
. In an abstract, detached part of my mind, Giles and Kit grew pale.
Interesting
—why that cold word? Did I mean
promising?
And promising
what?
As I walked into the room to pack a few dresses, my inner voice added with regret:
But now is a time when I must leave this place
.

I had said I would go with Kit, and I would. I wanted to be
truthful
and
loyal
.

I was wearing a navy dress, and I was glad of it, for marriage, like leaving the Island, had the feel of beginning a journey, even though I had already put my foot upon the path. I selected two of Sallie's older dresses, folded and placed them in a pillowcase along with a few other items. A sad little part of me thought of the dried rose petals, the gift of Giles, that had accompanied me onto the
Sussex
and sunk with her. I threw the pillowcase over my shoulder like the sailor boy I had tried to be and hurried to the deck.

Ahab and Kit had already crossed over to the
Pequod,
and Ahab, his hand at a long bone of a tiller, was bringing his ship close beside the
Albatross
. In Ahab's stance—legs spread, body balanced—I thought there was something wild, outside the usual laws of risk and chance. At the corner of my eye, I saw Bob in his red-and-white-striped shirt. I crossed to Bob, held out both hands to him, but the words of thanks would not come.

“I was glad to help ye,” he said simply, his face red, his eyes teary.

I kissed Sallie through her weeping, tried to thank Captain Swain, and settled myself into the half-barrel chair, upholstered in red oilcloth, with which the
Albatross
had equipped itself for the sake of comfortably transporting Sallie onto or off the vessel. Thus, seated in the barrel chair, I was swung by a crane from one ship to the other, though Ahab had brought the
Pequod
so close I could have walked a plank between the ships.

Kit came to me with that gallantry I had noted so long ago on my Island, to help me from my seat. There we stood together on the deck of the
Pequod,
holding hands, not looking back at our kind friends. We sailed west. When we were at a distance safe from accidental collision with the
Albatross
and yet again some—far enough to feel our freedom
—Ahab gave the tiller to the first mate—Starbuck, he called him—and approached us.

“Now be it true,” he asked, “be it true still that ye both would be married?”

When we both answered yes, Ahab reached for our hands. He held them between both of his—rocky hands, like the kind of outcropping that could scrape the hull out of a ship, but forming for our nuptial a natural cathedral, one flinty hand for our floor and another for our ceiling. Within that strong vise, he pressed our hands together. “Now ye be married,” he said.

G
INGER COOKIES
,” Kit said. “One pint molasses, one cup sugar, one of butter, one-half cup water, two cups flour, one of saleratus, and one of ginger.”

“His mother was a baker,” I said to Ahab. “Of Nantucket. Their name is Sparrow.”

“Ye have the name, too, now,” Ahab said.

I felt surprised, a nudge, as when the search boat, bearing nothing of Giles and all of a new reality, had nudged against the
Albatross
.

“She has the ginger in her,” Kit said to Ahab.

“Man, take your little wife below,” Ahab said. “I'll give ye and her my quarters. I'll sleep with the mates.”

I was astonished that a captain would casually give up his quarters, but Kit gestured toward the hurricane house built on the deck. “Who lives there?”

“Naught. Naught but time and weather. That little house is reserved for winter wind. We'll meet him as we sail. He'll be stamping his foot on deck in a week or two.” Ahab stared at Kit with the fixed gaze of a man mesmerized by fireplace embers. “Take your wife and go below,” Ahab repeated.

Kit pointed up the mizzenmast. “Who inhabits the heights?”

“Lightning and thunder, sea hawks and wind.”

“My wife would like that.”

“Go below. Take your sweet wife. She's married you, man.”

 

W
HAT
K
IT
dreaded most was to be locked up belowdecks, but I coaxed him into Ahab's chamber, a room very spartan compared to the other two samples of captain's quarters I had known so well aboard the
Sussex
as a boy and aboard the
Albatross
as a woman. The captain of the
Pequod
slept in a hammock, not a gimbaled bed. He had slung the hammock in the stateroom.

Ahab had an enormous library of maps, with shelves built vertical to stand them in, and a very large table upon which to spread them. His clothes had been relegated to an ivory-plated sea chest, with scrimshaw ovals and rectangles. These decorative lozenges, of varied styles and motifs carved by many hands, were fastened with tiny screws to the wood of the chest so that it looked shaggy, covered with a congeries of whitish scabs. In the corner stood bundles of harpoons and lances wired to the wall so that they could not shift in some swell and strike the hand or person of him who should have wielded them. When I opened the door to the chamber usually used by captains as a bedroom, I found an extra storage space stacked to the ceiling with small casks of spermaceti.

Kit peered out one after another of Ahab's three aft portholes. Anxiety swept his countenance. “Where have we been?” he asked. “And where are we going?”

“Home,” I said. “To Nantucket.”

“We'd best study the way.” He reached up into the vertical shelves and clutched the gilt spine of a map book. Spreading the map on the table, he remarked, “I'll copy this. This time we'll know the right way.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, a bit timidly. “We're married now.”

“If you say so.”

A knock at the door, and a rough-and-ready steward appeared with a stack of covers. He stammered that they were “for a pallet” and retreated, red with embarrassment.

I arranged our bed and called Kit to come and sit, but he replied that he needed to copy a map, before the ship sank and we were adrift,
chartless in an open boat. “Which is this?” he asked. “The South Pacific or the North Atlantic?” When I told him, he set to work, making free use of Ahab's pens and paper and Ahab's broad table.

As Kit worked, my eye visited the shaggy chest decorated with little ivory plates. Among the scrimshaw pictures was a particularly fine row of whales, a kind of encyclopedia, including narwhals with their unicorn horns, the right whale with his ironic smile, the finback, the great blue with his mammoth pleated baleen hanging like a basket under his mouth, the sperm whale whose body is one-third head, the orca shaded in black and white, and many others.

Through the porthole, I watched dusk and then night come on, but ere nightfall, after a knock, I found left at our door a burning candle and a platter of food. Ahab had had sent to us a common salver, assuming that I and my husband were one. But at night Kit climbed into the hammock and I slept on the pallet.

I could not sleep for wanting the comfort of my husband. Gladly would I repeat the pain for the sake of his warm embrace. Perhaps in his mind we were not even married. But we had lain together on a hard bed. That forecastle floor of the
Albatross
was the hard fact of Giles's death. Kit and I were married then more than by words uttered and hands pressed together on the
Pequod
. Had he forgotten the
Albatross
? Suppose he did not want me, but dreamed of Charlotte? But he
had
wanted the pleasures of the flesh, with a natural, male wanting, on the Island. And my body had yearned in response.

Certainly he dreamed, for he mumbled continually in his sleep, but the words were misshapen and incomprehensible. Not English words, nor words in any language, but syllables cut loose from sensible words. From his fitful slumber, sounds rose and fell, in volume and in pitch, as though his tongue were a sea-tossed ship.

But Shakespeare counsels that sleep can knit up the raveled sleeve of care, so I let Kit be. The babbling might have come from a babe rocking in his cradle.

At length, I rose and stood at the porthole and looked at the starry sky. I was grateful for the glass between us. What did I know of madness? Only what the poets taught. I knew Lady Macbeth, Hamlet and Ophelia, Lear. None of them ate dung. I knew a bit of my own madness from the boat. Now the stars were sturdily framed by Ahab's
porthole, but then they had been loose in the sky and diving into the sea. There had been another universe, one in my mind, so lonely and distant that its presence was an absence.

What would I do with my mad husband? Here all was in suspension. But when we came to port in Nantucket? Then life would be real. It would be no transition from one state to another. Nantucket would be my lot. It would be my penance. Had not Giles commanded Kit and me to love one another?

I turned and looked at Kit, trussed up in his hammock. He had a bonny face, though now it looked hurt even though there was no mark upon his skin. Gazing at his lowered lids, I knew that a strange universe lay behind a veil I could not lift. I wished there were a sound I could make, a bell to ring, that would make time rewind behind his veiny eyelids.

We would go back to New Bedford. I would lean out Mrs. Swain's third-story window and yell at them. Giles was there! We would not go to sea at all, but westward, wanderers walking to the heart of the land.

I began to pace the cabin, and finding it confining, I took up the candle and slipped up the companion way to the deck.

As I walked to the prow of the ship, the candle guttered and went out in the breeze. Before us, in the west, hung the crescent moon. When I was a little child, my father had said, “There, you see, God has been paring his fingernails.”

But then, why wasn't the sky full of crescent moons—ten of them? Did God have only one finger? Yes. It was the one he used to smite us with.

I listened to the wind smacking and flapping the sails. Someone was aloft, two men, taking in canvas. Not Giles and Kit. I did not look.

The moon was enough to see. She was like a shuttle. I smiled to think of my tatting. I had left the yards and yards of lace under Sallie's pillow. By this time, her fingertips had found the strange mass of threads, had pulled out the lacy wad, had exclaimed to her husband. Perhaps, missing me, she had cried, and he had comforted her. And in her grief, perhaps, she unleashed passion warm and free.

Certainly for me, grief had flung open the doors of passion.

I had been a welcome companion to Sallie, though I had felt myself apart from her in spirit because she knew nothing of the human capacity for savagery, the inevitable animal within.

Now there was no one who could ever tell that I had lived on human flesh. All of the others were perished; Giles dead; Kit mad.
Nobody knew
. Though I could think of a smug safeness, I could not enter it. What was safety? A room, but I was without that room; I could stand in the open door and look in at its boxy comfort. Or I could look in at windows and see those cozy rooms where others lived, but I was forever unhoused. And yet I was intact.

“Mrs. Sparrow,”
a voice whispered in my ear.

It was Kit. Kit's eyes—wounded—but knowing me, calling me by my name, his arms open. I entered their haven, was guided downstairs to our pallet.

 

S
O, IN SOME MEASURE
, I had my Kit. For a fortnight, aboard the
Pequod,
his mind was with him, and my body was wife to his body. Then he seemed like the Kit of the Lighthouse. The kindness he had shown to Frannie he showed to me. The passion he had had for me, then much suppressed, he expressed freely. I had not had a woman's sensitive response till Kit loved me.

The nights gave us to each other. We often left the candle burning, and in its glow his skin and eyes and hair were radiant for me, and all of me, he said, for him. That candle glowing on the floor beside our pallet seemed to have a double, for I swear there was a glowing within my body. Glory—flesh of thigh, of breast, of buttocks, and humbler flesh of palm and ear and cheek and tongue—all existed to rhapsodize! Their song had only two words:
Kit Sparrow, Kit Sparrow, Kit Sparrow
.

If Giles had to die, then let him have died to give us this joy. I think he would have smiled to see us.

When Kit and I were not together, even when I walked about on the deck, I felt him physically within me. This was a new fulfilling, a new secret about my body. The shape of him had a ghost, and it haunted my flesh. He seemed yet palpably with me when I leaned my elbows on the taffrail, hands clasped, skirt billowing. And there, under my skirt, the shape of Kit yet, within my womanness.

The crew seldom spoke to us—I saw Ahab occasionally at the bony tiller, but he, too, was unobtrusive. They seemed to let Kit and me live in a giant bubble. We might walk as we would, sleep and eat as we wished. Food was left at the door twice a day—coarse, hard fare, but
the hard biscuit had beside it a bit of pickled herring, or mackerel in mustard, or a pot of honey, so we had our flavors. I did not imagine our captain ate any better; he had thrived on hardship.

During that honeymoon fortnight, Kit seemed to give his mind to me to steer, and when the wild sentence came—“Now we eat our fingernails. Now the spiny stars”—I turned abruptly, shook my head, and said, “No, Kit.” He would fall silent for a time. Then I would ask some innocent, simple question. “Do you see that school of cod, starboard?” With his careful reply, we'd be on course again.

But one night, he boxed the compass with his mind. No statement or question of mine could stop the whirling. He could not stop his mind or feet, and as we walked round and round the deck, he touched the railings and pins and cables we passed. Many times we passed Ahab, and he stood like a statue, his hair white in the full moonlight. The sailors we skirted in our rounds were as phantoms who offered no interference, but each paused in his task, suspended by the wonder of our journeying.

Finally, Kit stopped beside a hinged chest and opened it. Within, piled to the top, were coils of thick rope.

“You,” he said. “I don't want you. I'm going to bed. You stay here.”

Placing his hands atop my shoulders, he forced me to sit on the coil of ropes.

“You are a she-eagle. Sleep in your nest.” He gashed my heart.

“No, Kit. I am a woman and your wife,” I said quietly.

“It takes a beak to strip flesh from bone. As you did.” My soul gushed from my heart.

“Hush.” He risked me with the sailors.

My heart ran out of me, up the mizzenmast. From that height, it looked down at my shame. I wanted to throw out the ropes, to hide in the chest and pull the lid down after me. I wilted on the hard nest of ropes, and he left me. I felt frozen there. Certainly I could not follow him. And what he had implied was true. Had they heard?

I had no strength to move. Though Kit had gone below, I was now haunted as though by his whole physical being, standing beside me with an accusing finger. I felt as though I could not remember when last I ate, so little strength came to my limbs.

What could I do but wait for dawn? The disk of the moon went
high and small. Our fortnight of honeymoon had waned as the real moon waxed. Without a word, a sailor placed a prickly blanket around my shoulders, and with that act of kindness the looming sense of Kit left me. Still I sat immobilized. When daylight came, someone brought me a plate of food and placed it in a shallow box at my feet. Through much of that day the ghost of the full moon was visible in the blue.

I saw nothing of Kit, and the sailors moved about me as though I did not exist. To them, I was free to sit or walk or go. I sat on the coils of rope in the chest. I sat in a misery of rejection, of utmost anxiety and loneliness.

At noon, Ahab came and squatted down beside me. He looked only once in my face and then said, “I've put a padlock on your husband's door. He flings himself about in the room.”

“Your maps?” I said dully.

“We took them out. There's no great damage done. He ate some strips of paper.”

Then I turned to look at him.
No great damage?
I thought, but did not speak.

He read my gaze, and he looked down. “Ye cause me to look away,” he muttered. “Is it possible that ye, a mere girl, have seen as deep as Ahab?”

“What is the stuff a mind is made of?” I asked.

Ahab rose and walked away. His tread was steady, but slow, as though he felt his age.