Ahab's Wife (72 page)
Authors: Sena Jeter Naslund
“They said,” Mrs. Peal concluded, “that Tistig cursed Ahab. I don't know for sure if it was over a broken promise. Or why she would do that.”
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J
USTICE DID TIE
and slightly top Jim's standing record, but as my boy's face rose above the top of the woolsack, his pallor was evident. No longer ruddy, he was as pale as the wool itself. Still he tramped down the fleece. To lift his leg, to cock his knee, to thrust downâit was all will. He did not smile. He looked older as he swung onto the platform. I rushed to the foot of the ladder. When he stepped back from the last rung, he looked at me and then to Jim. “This was the last for me.”
Jim nodded.
I felt smitten with shame. Justice had considered my anxiety and quit. Jim swung up the ladder for his turn.
“Oh, son,” I said, almost trembling.
Suddenly he smiled at me. Some of the color returned to his cheek. He looked long into my eyes, as his father used to do. He took my arm and walked me away from the group. “I wanted Jim to win, Mother. He needed it more.”
Now I smiled down at him. Justice had made his own decision. “We'll see,” I said, proud of my boy. When Jim won, we all were glad.
That night as I went to sleep, I knew that I had won, too, and my trophy from the sheep shearing was the image of Ahab as a boy. I
imagined him holding the prize coin between his thumb and finger, flashing the silver beauty of it.
When I told my confidant the judge about our day, he asked me if I knew that in England judges sat on a pillow of sorts called the woolsack. “Suggests agrarian origins of civilization, doesn't it?” Then he added that he, too, had seen Ahab as a young person.
“You never told me,” I said.
“I was about ten, and my mother had sent me down to the wharf. A whaler was being towed out. Somehow I knew it was the first voyage for the cabin boy, who was Ahab. I suppose he was thirteen or so. He stood at the rail and waved.”
“What else?”
“Not much. He wore a red cap.”
My Una,
“I accept the universe”âthat's what I told Mr. Thomas Carlyle, in London.
And that renowned writer Thomas Carlyle replied, without a shred of understanding, “Madam, you had better.” 'Twas then, dear Una, I thought to write to you, for you would grasp immediately the great distance that I have come in my psyche in order to accept that which I can neither control nor alter. For me to say I accept the universe is to say that I am at peace with myself.
And with Mr. Emerson. What a height of mind is there! What a negative depth, a bottomless abyss, of heart is there! I accept bothâhis assets and his abysmal deficiencies. He, not unlike Mr. Hawthorne, is distrustful of what the body has to tell us. He knows not the rapture of the physical. How then, I ask, can either of them thoroughly respond to the sublime in nature? Show them a mountainâ
show them Mont Blancâand do their bodies thrill to know it? To know it biblically with their whole being, with the thighs, with the lungs, with the quickened nostrils consuming the crystalline air in great gulps. They know not great gulps of anything! They are too restrained. They fear passion, though Emerson can write that marriage is surely true to one's nature for only a time, that marriage is mortal and should be accorded a death of its own when it no longer serves the spirit.
Yet he fears passion! When I visited him once in Concord, having had much correspondence with him, and looking so forward to the feast of the eye upon him, for the genuine physical ear to thrill to the vibrations actually issuing from his throat and not to the “voice” that we accord the written word, to even the odor of him! (yes, for he like any animal hath an odor! oh, for a poet, an American male who would sing of this as well as of the bright abstractions!), when, in short, we came before each other
IN OUR BODIES
,
at Concord, then he assigned me to a room. He assigned Waldo, his little son, to be postman, and he proposed that we write to one another! I controlled myself till I trembled with indignation. Yet I acquiesced. I would have me
near
him, if not quite
with
him.
Yes, Una, Margaret must settle for near. Why? My breath would scorch him! He cannot stand up to the flood tide of passion! He cannot weather even the forerunning, tumultuous clouds of an electric storm!
I have done with all that restraint! I wrote him that I felt like bursting through the wall, plunging through the barrier between us! And he was only alarmed. I have fled the prudery of America. I shall embrace the wiser sophistication of Europe. I shall rebel. This I mean most literally, for my next stopis Italy, where I shall play nurse to the troops. The nationalist feeling there is necessary, for only if the parts combine to make a whole can the yoke of the French, the Austrian, the last of that great Hapsburg Empire which outlasted even the ancient Roman empire, be thrown off forever. And I shall be there with my eyes open and my ears open, my woman's hands ready to nurse. And to write! Yes, to write, write, write. Horace Greeley begs for more and longer
Tribune
articles in every letter I receive from him.
Let the Transcendentalists manufacture their own nothing. But I
leave them in peace, wishing them well. In the political world, not the philosophical, I find my analogue. I, like Italy, rebel. I, like Italy, shall throw off tyranny and create my own being.
You, Una, understand this. I passionately embrace your life. For what I am doing by dint of will and intellect, you have done most naturally. You create your own being. You trust your body, you send your spirit voyaging; you think. You are the American woman, an Eve more fittingly named Dawn, new and brave.
Braveâhow truly that rings upon my ear as your epithet. But why? I know not. Yet because I trust myself, because my impulse is naturally spontaneous, even holy, yes that, I know that
brave
is the very word for Una.
Suppose you never receive this letter? Yet you will know my feeling for you. Do you read the
Tribune?
Have you seen my articles? I tell all that I see, but I do not tell all that I feel. That requires a willing ear. Indeed, I think we cannot access our truest minds unless we direct ourselves toward some sympathetic and admired reader.
You will marvel at my energy! You wonder now: why has she not mentioned headaches and illness? I feel them not! This old air, this Europe, reassures me. Here Margaret is not so shocking. They have known George Sand, after all. They have had great women before me. But Carlyle! The author of
Sartor Resartus
(The Tailor Retailored, if thy Latin be not at hand), the creator of the great iconoclast Teufelsdröckh (Devil's Dung, if thy German hath not progressed), plays the pedant with Margaret. “Madam, you had better!” Who is he to say? Has he climbed Mont Blanc? Ah, that Byron lived! I would seek him out. We would go a-soldiering together. You know he died helping the Greeks? Yes, for you do know your Byron and Wordsworth, though I think you have too much a tendency to divorce the works, as though they were worlds of their own, from the lives of the men who made them.
Ah, but let me slow my headlong pace, and think more particularly of the mind of Una, for it is consistent that you emphasize “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and not John Keats, that you love “Tintern Abbey” and care little that much of it was taken from the journal of poor, crazed sister Dorothy. For you, Una, look at creation and divorce it from the creator. You look at the sublime, feel it as such, but think not of the Sublime.
Yet, let me slow not only from gallop to trot, but from trot to walk. This is your way. This is your own exploration of the path that is both divine and leads to the divine.
And it is as good as mine.
Ah, Carlyle could not modulate my egotism, but you, the thought of your thought, brings me to a humbler plane. And it is the way of women. We allow each other our individuality. We do not insist that we dominate or control. How well Carlyle understands freedom for his characters, how poorly for his fellow mortals. And now I pity him, for he is bound by his own self-importance. It constrains him, pitiably. Carlyle is himself a part of the universe that I accept.
Yours very truly,
Margaret Fuller
Dear Mrs. Una,
I come to New Bedford with a new posse to take back an escaped slave. His master apprenticed him to learn ship caulking. He was able to learn it. But he took advantage and disguised himself as a sailor and escaped.
I am writing to say that he has become a respectable man in New Bedford. They are very kind to slaves and runaways there. I hope your friend Susan made it to New Bedford.
When I talked to this man he told me the story of his life as a slave. It was funny, how stupid his masters were sometimes. I laughed with him. I decided not to try to take him. I gave him the equal of the money that I took off Susan, which you gave her. To help other slaves. I wonder if I am becoming an abolitionist. I thought you would be glad. I know I am through with bounty-hunting.
Yours, David P.
Dearest Aunt Agatha, Uncle Torch, Frannie, and Butch,
I have moved from the town of Nantucket to the eastern edge of the island, known as the town of Siasconset or 'Sconset. I live simply, but I have been left very well off by Captain Ahab, who died perhaps a year agoâwe do not know exactly when the
Pequod
went down, stove by a white whale. We have lived with the news for several months. I think often of you. I wish again to ask forgiveness for the pain I gave you. With the loss of Ahab, I understand afresh that love is the sharpest lance. Again, now, in grief, I am flooded with gratitude that you have forgiven me.
I am thinking of Frannie. I am remembering her restlessness. I honor the patience she has shown these years. I am remembering, too, my promise to her that someday she would be invited to travel and to live with Justice and me. Butch's time will come, too, when he is a big boy, if you wish it.
The messenger who brings you this letter and the sum of one thousand dollars in gold is a man to be trustedâDavid Poland. His short stature should not make you think of him as dubious in any way. I wrote to him, in Virginia, asked him to come to Nantucket, gave him this letter and the money, and sent him to you.
As you see he has fulfilled this mission. Neither David nor the money has disappeared between Nantucket and the Great Lakes. When I left Kentucky, it was David who guided me out. I rode a white donkey named Milk, whom he led. You see that he still has Milk, and is probably this minute giving Butch a ride on him!
I send the money because I have it and as a way of thanking you for the four wonderful years I spent with you. Money can never repay you: you gave me a family when my own could not keep me.
I do remember what it was like to be young, Frannie. My proposal is that you come and live with me for a while. I propose, dear Aunt and Uncle, that you allow and trust David Poland (whom I have already paid) to escort Frannie to Nantucket. I feel that Frannie
and I have much to talk about, and that I can introduce her to the broader world in a safe way. And her presence will help our lives to heal.
With abiding love to all of you, and gratitude,
Una
Precious Friend, dear Una,
The guns are booming beyond my hospital window where, on the sill, I put down the iodine bottle for a moment to write a few lines to you. Una, I know you have seen madness and death, but you have not seen war, nor even its aftermath. The sheer number of destroyed men before me is completely overwhelming. I dash the tears from my eyesâtears are uselessâso that I can see to help. The doctors work tirelessly, cleaning, stitching, amputating, bandaging, and I try to keep up, to make their work lighter. I have ever hated to sew, even cloth, but yesterday I sewed up a bleeding gash in a man's arm because there was no one else to do it.
Let Emerson see this! He would faint. I have fainted, at first. But now I put on the whole armor of Compassion. It flinches not, it cannot allow cringing from wounds of the most horrible sort. If Emerson could see this, I think that he would put all of his mighty mind to the teaching of one lesson: we must not kill one another.
And yet, when Italian children starve under the yoke of foreign domination, is not that a reason for self-defense? Surely it is only self-defense to strike back then? I do not know. Not even Jesus is clear on the matter. He wants us to turn the other cheek, yet he says that he comes not to bring peace but to place a sword between us. It is the Old Testament whose beautiful words give me hope for a future
time, when swords are beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks.
Ah, the trees beyond my window, the beautiful olive trees of which the Italians are so rightly proud, have been pruned and shattered by bursting mortar shells. We have taken this city. The fighting, the booming that has punctuated every sentence of this letter, sometimes more often than that, is off in the hills beyond the city.
The city of Rome! I have seen the Colosseum, where men brutalized men more than a thousand years ago, for entertainment. I have seen the domed pagan temple, the Pantheon, where men aspired to something beyond their brutish nature. Una, in its stone floor there are holes, slanted like nostrils, to carry off the rainwater to drains beneath the paving-stone flooring, for the apex of the dome is, by design, an open circle, open to the sky! There is a structure to worship in! Not like St. Paul's of London or St. Peter's in this great city, both temples closed to what lies beyond their own hemisphere.
When I summered on the Great Lakes, I grew weary of hearing folk debate the issues of Trinity and Unity. All such dogma stands in the way of the true religious spirit. That spirit must be open, I am convinced. It must admit light, air, and, yes, even rain.
Una, there is a soldier here who loves me. His name is Ossoli, and by him I shall have a child. I am fulfilled. He is noble of spirit and in title, though not wealthy. My mother would find him wealthy, you would find him so, for his soul is not only rich but generous. I do not know what Emerson would think of him, for Ossoli is not a man of letters. But neither my passion nor my mind frightens the spirit of my beloved. He finds me beautiful. How difficult it is to see him march off, past this window, each morning, to the hills, toward the sounds of guns!
But my babe is safe within. For him, I would gladly die. Sometimes I dream of dying. I am swimming in a sea of blood, and I have no corks to keep me up.
May all things go well for my Una. If you were here, we would nurse together. Since you are not here, I look at the shattered olive trees and see, over the tops of them, the broken, curving wall of the Colosseum. Time, mere time, has crenellated it in places. Is not time foe enough for us mortals? Why do we hasten each other's deaths,
when all our rationality and all our religion should combine to extend life and to make it lovely?
To know you has made my life more lovely.
Â
Margaret
