Ahab's Wife (66 page)
Authors: Sena Jeter Naslund
Dear Una. I pretty sur you be real surprised to see how good I write. And to get this letter. How do I aim to mail this letter. Well, I am at your house again. Been north for quite a while. When I got back here, I seed your note saying Welcome Traveler and also how Any business can be conducted by your neighbor, so I just now put your name and then care of him on this envelope. Figure next traveler will take it to him. As I doesnt dare. It dead of winter here now. Just like it wuz when we both here. Good fire going in the hearth. But I be thinking Whoa, Susan. Back up and tell Una where you ben and how it wuz and why you here again.
Where I ben. Maybe four or five days after I lef you and we shout Freedom, I look behind, see I be followed. I knew who. Wolf-man bounty-hunter you told me about. Had to be. I could see the wolf snout point up over his head, and his beard, and him so small. I saw he wuz gaining, but I move fast as I could. Snow everywhere. I says to myself Just get on top of that little snow hill in the middle of the cornfield. But time I got up on the noll, he caught me. I wuz so scared that I split off and part of me just hung up in the air and watched. But I wuz able to think what to do, anyway. I bought myself free with your money.
You might wonder how I got the time to tell all this. Trapped in
the snow again, here at your house. Me and my friend who was resting here. My friend, he say it must be zero outside. I get to my friend later. Snow near bout to the knee outside, but we warm in here.
Once the wolfman wuz out of sight, I call out to my part left hanging, just a air shiver-self like ice crystals. Self she come on through sunset air to be with me, and I start on.
Come deep dusk and the night wind, I know I got to find a place to stay. No house in sight. I start down a little rise and I stumble. I roll down the hill till I a white snowman. Then I have to bust out of all that snow. I done rolled off a little creek bank. Well, I start digging me a cave under the little overhang. I make me an ice cave. Once I get inside, I block up almost all the front opening with snow and ice.
I go to sleep for a while. Dream I home, warm on the porch, got a sugar cane joint in my hand. Purple case all peeled back, me chewing and sucking on the good part till it limp. It flop over on my hand like a little white mop head. I wake up.
I wake up hungry in the ice cave, safe from the wind, take off my mitten, grope till I get into my napsack. Touch cornbread with ham bits. Potatoes gone. Still got some honeycomb in your little tin box. I feel around, put my fingertips under that little curled lip, hinge the lid on backâhoneycomb just waiting. All sticky. I can't see much in my ice cave. Jus feel and taste. Doorwall gray with dawn light. I scoop up snow for thirst then I kick and bust out. All bright dazzle.
I walk on some more. Peddlers pick me up in they wagon and I stay warm in a little tiny room inside the cart, got a little stove even. Her name wuz Judith and she got a black cloud for hair and silver-rim eyeglasses. She stay in the warm room while her husband drive on through the cold. We kin hear the horse feet, so soft, wind moan. She give me some hot tea and it wuz in a clear glass set in a silver cup-holder. She got stacks of dishes in there. Every plate with a silver rim. Silver buckles on harnesses. Pile of silver money on the tableâeverything all snug in that little moving room. They drive on to some friends of theirs and that woman had a baby while we stayed there. I learn some mid-wife from Judith. I felt good for Emma, but I felt so sad thinking of your baby. We stayed there a bit.
One night Judith told my fortune and it was a black Jack and a red heart Jack, and she say that Coming and Going may be the same thing, far as I wuz concerned. It upset me.
Spring come on. Judith and Abraham drive off with the cart, me up on the box between them. Cart wuz yellow with red curly cues, and they give Emma and Paul a little baby cradle painted the same yellow with curly cues on the head hood. But soon they need to drive west and I got to walk north, but it spring now.
One day I go to sleep under a apple tree covered with blossoms. I chose that tree. You never saw so much pink blooming as that apple orchard and I just wanted to be part of all that pink. Little white girl woke me. She was dressed all in pink check gingham. Her folks wuz mighty nice to me. I did a few chores, stayed there several months, on through the summer.
The woman picked up with my reading and writing where you left off. She wuz teaching little Molly at the same time. I must brag on myself because my teacher did. I didnt let on that you already started me out and I already got the hang of what it all about, how you sound out the letters. Sometimes I jus spell the way it sound. I know better. That I ought to always write
was
and not
wuz,
but if Im thinking about what it is I want to say, I forget the spelling. I can spell just, not
jus,
too, when I think about it, but I dont want this to be full of blots and cross-outs, so I let mistakes stand. Guess I ought to told Mrs. Anderson I already had some learning but I
just
bout to bust with pride when she brag on how quick I catch on, and I end up not ever telling. When we read out of the Bible once I get a few words I know what got to be next. Mrs. Anderson say I just about grade eight in reading.
In one lesson, we was learning the names of shapes. She point out circle, like the lids on the stove, and lines that run parallel, and rectangle like the bed. Then we came to triangle, and go look at the rafters, but I be thinking Triangle, triangle, that what this family be. Three parts. No real place for me. And it weigh on me. It weigh on me so I miss my mam. Weigh like being a slave. They wuz good as could be. But I dont fit into they shape.
One night Mr. Anderson showed us a comet in the sky up over the barn. I took it as a sign. Like the light of the Lord which led me this far. Next morning I in such a hurry to go, I dont even say
good-bye. But I write a note. My first letter to anybody. It say Thank you for your kiness.
Next place I stayed was with Shaker folks. And they invited me to move right in. Already one old black woman staying there. When I walked across the yard, she rake behind me. Rake out my footprints. She say she dont ever want to own nothing, but if she was young like me shed get something for herself. She didnt even own the rake.
I stayed on a bit. They wuz wonderful dancers, but men and women all separate. No kind of marriage at all. I think This here some kind of idolatry spite of all they say about Jesus. They got twin stairsteps all in a spiral like they done twirled off the fingertips of God. Staircases so pretty they scare me. Belong in heaven, not this world. Everything so neat and well-made. Chairs hanging on pegboard all around the rooms so cant no dust hide under chairs.
Then I learn they got overseers. Two women two men live in high rooms looking out over everybody else. They see you do wrong, lazy or grouchy, got envy, het up, anythingâyou got to confess. Or they confess for you. I dont want to live my life watched. I ben watched.
They give me a nice oval basket, sausage and bread, a little patty-pan with the cake still in it. Walked north till I come to big water. My heart about broke. Nothing there. Nothing but water and sandy beach. I think this be the ocean you told me about. I taste it, but the water be sweet. Is this why you left your mam and all you know I ask myself. To come to this. This was the wilderness and the dessert. Nothing but sweet water and too much of that.
Then I see a trunk bobbing along on the waves. Here come something for me. Thats what I told myself. That place wuz
such
a disappointment. It was nothing. Wasnt nothing there meant anything at all to me. So what if it be freedom. It Was Nothing. I put my hopes in that trunk just jigging along out on the water.
Fore long it washes up and I step out on the wet sand to grab a handle, pull it in. Didnt have any lock and I opened it right up. I thought Wouldnt it be great if this trunk full of hot bread. Now I knowed that couldnt be, still I hoped. Mighty cool wind off the water.
Trunk was full of two printed books and lots of hand-written pages. These books said on they cover Faust, on one, and Wilhelm Meister, on the other, and when I open them up, I cant read a word. Now I know I can read. Finally it come to me they got to be in some other
language. But the loose paper handwriting was in English, but it wasnt a good handâjust dashed cross the page so you had to go slow to make out a letter. I made out one whole sentence. It said Of all the Greek myths that of Orpheus and Eurydice is the sweetest I know.
I dig on down in the trunk but it was wet and the ink was smeared. Looking for some little something to cheer me up. At the bottom, the words was all washed off. They wuz just pale blue pages. I picked one up. Like a square of sky. I held it up, all tender and wet, and it matched the sky.
Made me mad as a hornet. I kicked that trunk over. Then I dragged it out to the water. Same water, always moving. Same blank nothing sky. Not even a cloud for me to look at it.
Why
this place hurt me so, I asked myself. Nothing here for me, I answered myself. Now, I thought, if my mam wuz hereâ
Thats when I knew my path and the meaning of Judiths fortune cards. Yes, I knew the way. I wuz going back for my mam. I thought a sentence Of all the folks, love for my Mam sweetest I know. So I have started back. Winter has caught me here for a while.
Im thinking about you Una. Im hoping this letter find you. I hope that your heart is cheered. I sur did hate to leave you by yourself, but I had to go. You musnt try to find me. Dont forget me. My friend stirring. This be the morning we leave. I got to stop. I aint afraid cause I scaped the jaw of death crossing back over. Another chance, I write you all bout that and my new friend. I will find a way to write to you again for I have copied down the name of your neighbor to send in care of. The reason I dont have the address you wrote down for me it blew away while the dwarf took the money. I still got Libertys hair curl. Hope you dont mind I take a book cause I might not ever see one down there. It say Nature Ralph Waldo Emerson on the cover and I ben reading it.
Susan
Spenser,
if I can borrow your name as it was writ in an old book.
P
RECIOUS PERSON
,
precious letter! So Susan had looked freedom in the face and found it sterile. But I hated to think of her traveling south.
Don't, don't!
She had written not a word of the danger or of fear. She could not accept freedom when those she loved were left behind. But still I wanted to shout
Don't
. The Shakers must have been at South Union, Ohio; the great body of sweet water, where she found only a trunk of books and papers, might have been Lake Erie. I thought of her eagerness to learn, of how much she had already learned from kind Mrs. Anderson. And Susan had loved me enough to write to me. I felt alive again.
For a week, scenes from that time with Susan came back to me frequently. And I was pinched by anxiety about her passage south. Then I received another letter from Ahab, delivered in a roundabout way and not directly by the vessel to which he had first transferred it. It was a gloomy letter, full of forebodings, and since Justice was playing down at the wharf when I read it, I deemed it best not to share the missive with him. Apparently, his father had not received Justice's request for a rousing description of A Chase.
“Pip has twice leapt from a whaleboat. Pip's being left alone in the vast ocean, with no ship in all the circle of his seeing, cost the little black boy his senses. So even did Lear have his fool,” Ahab wrote. “Pip is a hundred times more dear to me now, and me to him.”
I thought how in my extremity, Susan had become so dear to meâa shadow selfâso kin she had seemed. But Susan had kept her wits, even when the dogs were barking behind her.
Ahab wrote, too, that Queequeg (the tattooed harpooner I had just glimpsed in the mist that Christmas Eve) had decided to die and had had his coffin prepared. Eventually Queequeg rose up from his tomb (Ahab queried, “Is his savage, incised face the true face of Christ?”). The
Pequod
's life buoy had filled with water and rapidly sunk when it was sent after a sailor who had fallen at sunrise from the fore masthead. Ahab noted that the sailor swallowed by the deep was the first man who
mounted the mast to look for the white whale in the whale's own particular ground. “At last we have reached those grounds of the Sea of Japan,” he wrote, “where I lost my leg, and where I shall find my revenge.”
What needed my boy to hear such news of fear unto madness, of death and revenge? And soon enough, by spring, we had other troubles come sailing in.
I sat in the parlorâit was unseasonably hotâsometimes fanning myself, sometimes crocheting on a white, fleecy coverletâI knew not for whom, it was about the size of a baby's blanket, the combination of air and yarn cloud-softâwhen Justice burst into the room, pulling a sea captain by one wrist. The sleeve of his other arm, I noted at once, hung empty.
“I do apologize, madam.” He spoke with an English accent. “I be Captain Boomer of the
Samuel Enderby
â”
“Mother, he has seen my father! He has seen the white whale!”
“Is it true?”
“Show her!” Justice commanded.
From within the slack fabric of his coat, he produced an ivory arm, ending in a hideous ivory hammer! I gasped and all but fainted. I was glad I was already seated on the sofa.
“It's a startling sight, madam. Not meant at all for ladies. I do apologize.” His words were clipped, British. “But then my life is spent at sea, and there's need there to occasionally hit something.”
“I know,” I managed to murmur.
“Tell her!” Justice commanded, his eyes wild. “Spin her the yarn!”
“So like his father he is. He said the very words to me, that I must spin him the yarn of how I lost my arm, though I never got the companion tale of how he was missing his leg.”
“Shall I bring you tea, or a cool lemonade?”
“Nay. We have but put in, and there's much I must oversee. But the lad here, Ahab's son, such insistence! I confess I am surprised to find myself swayedâeven by such ardor. But here I am, and so let me spin the yarn, even as I did for Ahab.”
“Please do.” There was something about Captain Boomer, or perhaps his English speaking, that made me want a polite manner and proper introduction. “I am Una, the boy's mother, Mrs. Captain, as you have no doubt surmised.”
Captain Boomer bowed and commenced his tale.
“After we spoke the
Pequod,
Ahab came riding up and over the bulwarks of the
Sammy E.
on our blubber hook, landed on the capstan head. Seeing his appendage, I held out my ivory arm, and he his ivory leg, and it was as good a handshake between comrades as flesh itself ever pressed. We crossed our ivory like fencers unashamed of whatever rapiers we possessed.” Captain Boomer heaved two bushels of air into his lungs. “But it was with Moby Dick we had both already fenced.
“Ahab seemed full of joy to meet such a brother as I.âAye, aye, hearty!' he says.âLet us shake bones together!âan arm and a leg!âan arm that never can shrink, d'ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see the white whale?âhow long ago?' I answer, âOn the Line, last season.' 'Twas the first time, madam, I'd cruised on the Line, and of the white whale I was ignorant. Amongst a pod of four or five whales, he bounced up as though he owned them, a great whale with milky-white head and hump, all crow's feet and wrinklesâ”
“Moby Dick,” the boy breathed reverently.
“ âIt was he, it was he!' Ahab exclaims.âAnd harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin?' I add.âAye, ayeâthey were mineâmy irons,' cries Ahab, boiling with joy. When I tell Ahab that the white whale runs all afoam into the pod and goes to snapping my fast-line, Ahab says, âAye, I see!âwanted to part itâan old trickâI know him.' ”
“My father knows all his tricks, all of them!”
“The white whale was the noblest and biggest I ever saw in my life.” Captain Boomer jumped to his feet. “And I let the old great-grandfather have it.” He pretended to throw with the arm that ended not in a harpoon but an ivory hammer. “Next instant, in a jiff, blinded I was by foam and the whale's tail straight up like a marble steeple inclined to fall. Another instant, the boat is splintered, all chips, and I am hooked in the arm by the barb from the second iron, and down the watery ladder to the depths I ride, towed by Moby Dick.” He sat down again on our sofa and spoke quietly. “Yet an arm is but human flesh, and I too puny a fish for such a fisherman as Moby Dick, and the hook tore down the length of my arm and out, and I rose to the surface.
“I told this tale to Ahab, my ship's surgeon, Dr. Bunger, standing by and verifying all that I said. But Dr. Bunger is a joker as well as a surgeon, and he made light of my missing limb, much to the annoyance of Ahab, who wanted only more information. Had I seen the whale
after my loss? Aye, I told him, twice. I allowed as how there would be great glory in killing Moby Dick, but I says to Ahab, âHark ye, he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?'
“Ahab knows I am meaning his ivory leg, but he answers most strangely, reasonably and yet at the same time flinging reason away with both hands. I only have one hand now to throw away reason myself. So when I say Moby Dick is best left alone, Ahab answers, âHe is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.' He said that the whale was a magnet for him, and he asked, âWhich way heading?'
“Before I can reply or fling some one-handed reason back into his face, Dr. Bunger notes Ahab's agitation and goes to joke about it.âBless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's,' Bunger says, and making like a dog, he snuffs around at Ahabâ”
“Snuffs my father!”
“And Dr. Bunger says, âThis man's bloodâbring the thermometer!âit's at the boiling point!âhis pulse makes these planks beat!' and Bunger takes his lancet from his pocket and approaches Ahab's arm as though to relieve him of too much hot blood.âAvast,' roars Ahab. And any man would describe his sound that way. It was a roar such as a lion might make.âAvast,' roars Ahab.âMan the boat! Which way heading?' And then when I ask of the Parsee, âGreat God, what's the matter here?' that ancient pedestal-for-a-turban slides over the bulwarks, brings round the boat, and Ahab commands my men to lower him as he came, astraddle the hook.”
I sit in silence a moment, and even Justice is quiet.
“There's no more to tell,” Captain Boomer said. “And I should return to my ship.”
“May I visit you, sir, to hear it again?” Justice asked, all politeness.
“Aye, lad. I'll tell you again, if you must have it. I'll introduce you to Dr. Bunger. He's a jolly one. He'll make you laugh.”
