Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer Read online

  When he cried, our screams sank to silence, and each of us snuffled back tears. Together we sounded like a quiet surf. Spent.

  “You be all right.”

  And I was.

  We named the baby Liberty, but he was listless and did not try to suckle me. Though I had no belief, I bargained with God, offered my life instead, but the universe did not listen. I planned how Susan could have taken my baby with her, had I died. Found sanctuary from the cold as soon as they crossed into freedom. But my baby died.

  Susan stayed with me.

  That night with the wind howling above the snow-laden roof, I thought of wind in canvas, at sea, and of Ahab, sailing the South Seas. Standing at the rail each morning, Ahab surely would think that each new day the sun might be message-boy with news of a child for his old age. Sleepless, lying on my back, with both hands and groping fingers, I searched the loose flesh of my belly—a husk, my fruit stolen away. I had only disappointment and an empty womb to offer. In his age, with passion, Ahab had given me seed; I in my youth had failed to birth a thriving child.

  The only comfort was to turn and curl toward the warmth of Susan’s dark body, radiant beside me in the bed. I nestled against her as though she were my husband, mother, sister, shadow, angel.

  CHAPTER 2: The Dirge

  IN THREE DAYS, the snow had still not melted, but the river had begun to break up. Those days! I will not tell of them now. Imagine Christ crucified and not yet risen.

  Imagine him comforted in the bowels of hell by an angel, who was neither named nor imaged in the Gospels. But such a one was she who was small and dark, her hair standing up in pigtails. We wrapped the baby in soft white lamb’s wool and placed him tenderly under the snow not far from the mound where the men had stuck their torch.

  When neighbors came across the snowy yard, I quickly hid Susan in the sea chest I had used to transport my goods from Nantucket to Kentucky. These neighbors said that my father’s old buggy, driven by my mother, had turned over through the office of a deep rut hidden under the snow; and my mother had frozen before anyone found her. Her skin had turned black from the freezing. Black, like a cinder, one neighbor said, before they could stop her describing.

  I heard Susan sob once from inside the green-painted chest, so great was her sympathy for me. For myself, the quick and caring and grieving part of me already frozen beyond feeling, I wanted not my mother so much as that hidden person who could sob for her.

  “Take the baby,” I wailed, “for he’s dead, too!”

  The neighbors and I agreed that the ground would surely thaw enough to dig in three days, whereupon someone would come for me, and we would have the funerals.

  “You and your news of death, leave me!” I blazed at them. “Take the second corpse and leave me!”

  When they had reluctantly gone—I stood before the closed door and watched their progress in the snow—then, as I turned, up from the sea-green trunk rose Susan, like a dark waterspout unwinding grief for me. I watched the flowing of her tears, but my own were unshed. Instead, I felt my thudding heart, a pump whose shaft was sunk in a dry well.

  In her gush of tears, Susan said though she had never had a child, she had had a loving mother, left behind in slavery.

  “Your mama be black like my mam,” she sobbed.

  I reached out my hands and arms to enclose and comfort her, while she yet stood in the chest. I envisioned my mother’s cheek—leather-slick as well as black. Feeling myself to be a jointed doll, stiff and unnatural in my movement, a wooden thing, I reached for Susan.

  “Your mother lives,” I said.

  My bodice was soaked with her weeping, and though I could not cry, my swollen breasts unloosed my milk, which mingled with her tears.

  “We ain’t got but one mam,” she wailed. “Never be no other.”

  Standing knee-deep in the chest, like a spent jack-in-the-box, she leaned on me and sobbed—for her mother, not mine.

  SUSAN HAD LEFT her mam for the sake of freedom, but for my sake she lingered, even though the river ice was thawing.

  “You stay with ’em?” she asked anxiously, referring to when the neighbors would return.

  “No. I’ll stay here.”

  “You don’t care for them folks?”

  “I don’t know them.”

  “But they be good to you.”

  “I know.”

  I got slowly out of bed and held out my hand to her. I took her to the mirror and framed both our faces. She looked solemnly at us.

  “I think we look alike,” I said.

  She did not laugh. “How that?”

  “I think we both will go where we will go and do what we will do.”

  For three days, we prepared for Susan’s journey. When the neighbors returned, she folded herself back into the Nantucket sea chest.

  LIKE A STONE STATUE I walked away from my cabin with them. Like a juggernaut, that stone car pulled forward relentlessly by the Hindi, I was pulled forward, arms outstretched, by my neighbors. I do not know how my adamantine body was able to bend enough to sit in the wagon.

  The world was a vast whiteness barred by the black trunks and limbs of trees. Half a world away, did Ahab stand on the wooden deck, feet firmly planted, watching some mournful scene? Perhaps a sailor, fallen, sewn into canvas, was sinking into the water. I seemed to feel the pitching of the Pequod. Did Ahab also mourn? I fastened my gaze on the brown haunches of the two horses, and their color was a relief from the world of alabaster and ebony.

  BESIDE THE COFFIN of my mother I held the body of my boy in my arms. Susan and I had cocooned him in wool, and the neighbors had added batts of cotton to try to soften him for me, and they had wrapped him again in white crochetwork, and so he seemed larger, as though he had grown. Yet I could feel the stiff, unbending hardness. Slaunchwise, across my bosom, his little fleecy oblong looked the picture of a cloud. His face was covered. They had bound this cloudy shape with string, a little parcel of mortality.

  I laid him down beside that bundle of sheet-shroud they said was my mother. I committed him to her care, and them both, their coffin lidded, down into a muddy grave.

  Anger that she should have died lay in my left hand and sorrow, for him, in my right. Someone had knitted black mittens for me, and within their muffling wool, over the mud-stained grave, sorrow clasped anger and anger sorrow, with all their might, till they were the same. I would not move from my clenching till they shoveled clean snow over the brown smear.

  After that, I looked skyward. I wondered if the universe was punishing me.

  CHAPTER 3: The Crossing

  THAT NIGHT, Susan and I stood on the banks of the river, which was moving blackly with its load of white ice floes. The floes were flat on the top and big as the floor of my cabin. Some were as big as a river barge. They all moved downstream in a ghostly procession, separated by jagged black lines where the water was bare. The edges crunched when they touched and hissed when they swept by. In the center of the river, where the current ran swifter, a band of floes moved much more quickly than those near the sides.

  The moon was full, which would make the footing easier for Susan, for she must jump from floe to floe to cross the river. We stood alone—hand in hand at the edge of the water, our skin separated by the wool of our mittens. No other eyes, no other soul, would watch her go. Silence, stillness, cold. They chimed about us as one snowy chord.

  Susan and I had fashioned her a coat from a quilt, and called it a Joseph’s coat, because it was truly of many colors, and I had given her my own knitted cap and, under the patchwork coat, an oat-colored sweater. In a cloth bag, she carried some cooked potatoes and johnnycake and a pair of my mother’s shoes. She wore another pair of Mother’s shoes, and we had driven nails from the inside so that the soles would prick into the slippery ice and keep her feet from sliding. Around her neck, in a tiny gathered bag, she carried a lock of my baby’s hair, for he was born with hair and it was red as flame. I have a lock of it, too, intertwined with one of Susa
n’s, but I do not have a lock of my mother’s hair. I’d given Susan my red mittens; I wore the new black ones. We loosened our grip on one another’s hand.

  When I saw Susan step upon the ice, I bit my lower lip till the blood flowed down my chin and crusted in the cold. Here the riverbank was no higher than a step, as from house to yard. In the moonlight, new snow like sugar glittered atop the sheet of ice lying along the bank. Behind her, in a lengthening path, Susan’s footprints indented the sparkling snow. She moved toward the center of the river as calmly as though crossing a broad moonlit road cut through the brush and trees of the wilderness.

  When she came to the first black edge, she stepped across the open water as though it were a mere stream. The next floe was smaller, and the next even smaller; they dipped or tilted slightly when she stepped onto them. The spans of open water between them seemed wider and wider, and sometimes she waited for the current to bring the ice rafts closer together. Then she leapt the narrowed fissure and walked on.

  It seemed to me Susan was walking on clouds in a black sky. There were clouds in the sky, but they stayed far from the moon and did not block her benevolent light. I blessed the moon that held up her lantern for us. Over the water, from seeming cloud to cloud, some silvery, some gray, some white and bright as mirrors for the moon, Susan stepped across the black water.

  As the current accelerated and the spaces between floes widened, Susan ran and jumped from raft to raft; my heart hung in the air with her. In the center of the river, the swifter current zipped the ice rafts downstream, with Susan standing on one of them. Her arms fluttered once for balance, twice.

  I began to walk downstream and then to run to keep up with the central river as it swept Susan’s floe downstream. She never turned to look at me, nor did I want to distract her, and I never called any words of encouragement except as the mind blazes out messages brighter than a lighthouse.

  Fly! Fly! as she leapt and landed, the floe she landed on already taking her downstream.

  “The Crossing”

  At last the treacherous midsection of river was traversed. She was far from me now—a dark upright using the flatness: flying and landing, running and leaping, from floe to floe. I saw shapes in the ice rafts, mostly like enormous animals, flat, not like a natural swan or bear but flat as a cookie animal or a tin weathervane. Near the other side, approaching a bend, she had to wait for her floe to come close to the bank. Holding the stitch in my side, I continued walking as rapidly downstream as I could till I came to a high but tangled shoreline that thwarted me. Soon the current would sweep Susan’s floe beyond my sight. O, carry her close, carry her close, now, I prayed to the ice, and I prayed that Susan would not feel herself passing beyond my sight and take the risk of trying to jump ashore when the gulf remained too great. The floe that wheeled her toward the far shore was like the palm of a hand, open and presentational.

  Patient Susan! Her ice raft nudged the shore, and she jumped. Even as her shoes landed on the snowy bank, she turned and looked exactly where I stood. Together we lifted our arms, blowing each other a kiss across the water, for we had not kissed on parting, saving it till she should be safe, and trusting the sweet air to be our go-between. And then one shout, though it was small from the distance, from Susan: Freedom!

  IT WAS DURING Ahab’s first voyage after our marriage that I had and lost my first baby, and when Ahab came home, in much kindness, he did get me with child a second time, and that is our boy together, whom I borned in Nantucket, there being no reason to go back to Kentucky and many reasons not to. When he returned from the second voyage, though yet in agony from the loss of his leg in the Sea of Japan, Ahab loved Justice as soon as he saw him, and said he liked the name right well.

  The night before he shipped again, Ahab asked the boy to touch his ivory leg, and said, “What would you trade for that, my little Justice?” And the boy ran and brought back in his hand a small rocking horse, also all carved from ivory and decorated in scrimshaw drawing with a curly mane and saddle and reins. “Nay, lad,” my husband said. “Bring me the white whale.” And the boy went and fetched that ghastly thing from the window ledge. I called it gruesomely carved because when you turned it over, the sailor had hollowed out the chest and left there a heart like a dove’s egg, all rounded, and through it an ivory splinter, toothpick-size, a lance.

  CHAPTER 4: Reverie

  THIS TIME of reverie I have spent lounging on a golden sand dune. Such a mild blue day it is here in Nantucket, where the breeze sometimes whips me, sometimes caresses me! Yet intact Ahab, back from his first voyage, once said of just such a changeable breeze, This contrast is the way of life itself. All playfully, he added, But were I God, then would every day be invariantly good. Then he asked me if he might be the god of my world.

  I teased back and denied him that Never, I said, as long as sky arches over or earth lies under. Once, out of guilt and grief, I had given my will away, but ever after, I kept my soul for myself.

  And Ahab asked, Thou wouldst have me unvault the firmament to prove my godhood? Exalt the valleys? And what dost thou require that I demand of the sea?

  Then I spoke with more conviction and said, Certainly you are not lord of that, for the sea takes you from me, and am I not your heaven? Here I traced the zaggy mark that began at his temple. How can you be lord of an element having the power to take you from your heaven? Ahab scooped up sand, and in a warm trickle, he poured it on the back of my other hand. The sea has brought me back. Once, to thee.

  O, Ahab’s smile! rare and shy. Precious then and now to my constricting heart. For even on that balmy day, I would have thought what if those lapping waters should not bring him back the second time, or the third time? Perhaps I swallowed and said to Ahab, If the sea bring you back a second time and a third time, then truly will I make you lord of me and of our bed.

  But he was already that. In our happy leisure, I might have thought indolently of the brown people, so far away on the Pacific Islands, perhaps lounging on their own sand, which Ahab said was white as sugar, not golden like these grains. I saw Ahab as a young man going to them. I did not begrudge him his happiness there. In imagination, I became one of them. From the women on the islands, he had learned how to touch the magic places on my body. If there were children left behind in the South Seas—well, I would people the world with Ahab’s. Once I asked him, what would a girl-child be with his spirit? And he answered, Una, thou art she. If there were children begot in the South Seas, they would be my older sisters and brothers in age, for in his middle years, Ahab went to the island women no longer, saying it was not right for a captain. (He had no prejudice against the mingling of brown and white.)

  I teased him, home from that short first voyage, as we picnicked on the Nantucket moor, said that certainly Captain Peleg, and probably Captain Bildad, used to sport in the grass huts, but even during that first, idyllic homecoming, if I saw the moral fervor was on his brow, I desisted. It would not be kindness to tease Ahab on the subject of good or evil, and whether simply custom makes it so.

  He believed the moral powers—demonic and heaven-generated—are separate things, must be separate to be themselves; eternal. But I see them as all nested and layered together, sometimes with no clear seam between, but a gradation; transient. He wanted something ultimate and absolute. If there be reality beyond the appearance—be that reality ultimately good, or evil, or indifferent—then it must be so always.

  That second homecoming brought him home dismasted, one-legged, raging; yet he would go forth again to war upon the deep.

  Before he left, he, seated, called me to stand between his knees, one leg bent naturally, the other outthrust in tapering ivory. He twisted the sculpted nuptial bracelet on my wrist and made the whales depicted there swim round.

  Wouldst thou have an ornate ivory cross? he asked me. And the flicker of rebellion and wildness galloped across his face.

  I do not hold well with the Christian symbols, and he knew it.

  Nay,
my wife, he said (for he could ever read my thought). The storm gathered in his mien. My girl-wife shall have a crown, and I will carve it myself from the jawbone of Moby Dick!

  He reached up, placed his hands on my hair, surrounded my skull, and squeezed till he trembled, his force caught statically between his knowledge of my human frailty and his power.

  Yet, I thought how I might yield, unharmed, and I knelt till my knees were on the carpet and I looked up at him. Then he left off squeezing my head, but those strong hands had bequeathed the pressure of a crown that never was to be, except as memory and imagination conjoin to circumscribe my scalp.

  Art thou afraid?

  When I shook my head no, he kissed me upon the lips, passionately, and then upon the brow, in tender blessing.

  O SUNNY DAY, O golden sand, O loving breeze—I would lounge and loaf forever, my spirit basking in your clear goodness, if I could. From how far away does the sunlight come to fall upon this one glittering grain I hold between my forefinger and my thumb? This grain is square as a quilt block, its edges straight as any carpenter cuts wood or glazier scores glass. Perhaps it is glass, or salt—a crystal left by the water. I put it on the tip of my tongue and taste nothing salty. I push it sideways with my tongue and it is grit between my molars. I take it out again, all wet from my mouth. My stubborn sand grain lies drowned on the whorls of my forefinger. It can tell its fellows that it has been in a strange place. A wet, pink cave.

  Perhaps the mind as well as the mouth is a glistening, pink cave. As a child that image was available to me, for my mother read aloud how Plato likened his mind to a cave. But his was dark instead of pink. With this writing I wish to enter that opalescence and inhabit the pearly chamber of memory. Hindsight, retrospective wisdom, I leave, to the extent I can, at the threshold. But as a child, I was given much of the language of adults, and I continue to use it, even to describe my youth. I court the freshness, the immediacy, and all the resources of language that make the past tense strangely shine as though it were the present.