Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  “I have talked with Giles. I agree with you.”

  “Suppose Giles should get washed overboard!”

  “Giles is too smart for that,” I said.

  “It’s only luck,” Chester wailed back. He was sitting up in the bed now. He looked like a little prince, coddled but needing a promise beyond human control. “In war, it’s only luck—the sailors told me so—who comes back and who doesn’t. A whale holds an army’s worth of blood. Then it’s only luck for us, too, like soldiers.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. But I was shaken. “It’s partly luck. Not entirely. Your alertness, your intelligence, what you know about wind—or the ways of war: these can save you over and over.”

  “Giles deserves to survive,” Chester said, suddenly calmed. “You can earn being safe?”

  “Sometimes,” I said, trying to take back any measure of comfort that seemed false.

  “During storms, I always sleep in here. Father never comes down.” He sighed heavily. “It’s almost Christmas.”

  “Your father’ll be on deck,” I said. Though I had not weathered a bad storm with Captain Fry, I had no doubt that he would be at the helm till he dropped or the sun shone.

  “You can sleep here with me. Come tonight.”

  “Not all night,” I said. “Maybe for a while. Maybe I could bring Giles and another friend, Kit—do you know him? We could picnic.”

  In retrospect, it seems odd to me that I should have wanted the first meeting of us three to include Chester. I can only say that my happiness seemed elastic. If three friends, why not four? I had had something of the same feeling when I turned the tap to steal Harry’s muscatel: that it was a shame not to include Harry. The theft itself seemed natural enough. Do not all people who live together intimately use each other’s goods? It is a sign of solidarity more than a matter of robbery. At least it had been that way at the Lighthouse. Even as I rationalized, conscience reminded me I had stolen from Harry: This is not the Lighthouse. Conscience added: There will never be another place like the Lighthouse. I envisioned my letters in their hands. I wanted forgiveness. I wanted them not to be afraid for me.

  When I went on deck, rain lashed every surface. I had forgotten that rain could be added to swelling sea. Yet able to discern the form of Giles, I stretched up to his ear and yelled the plan.

  “No,” he said definitely, glancing down at me.

  “Then come for me to the captain’s stateroom after Chester is asleep. Bring Kit.”

  As long as possible, the crew would keep its usual hours, but when storm compounded around the Cape, then double duty would be ordered.

  THEY ARRIVED TOGETHER—Giles with pleased triumph, Kit with dignity but less than happy, as though he had unwillingly acquiesced to a plan not in his own best interests. But I was jubilant, and I insisted on a three-way hug—they were quite wet—and babbled about the food I’d stolen.

  Giles nodded toward the door to the captain’s chamber. “It’s too close. Follow me. Bring a quilt to sit on. Wrap it in oilcloth.”

  He led us out into the storm and back down to the blubber room in the waist of the ship. The hatch banged closed on us and muffled the storm sounds. Once the stage of butchery, the room, like all the ship, now proclaimed its neatness and called that innocence. Giles told Kit to lean over—I thought his tone dangerously peremptory—and then Giles stood on Kit’s back to check the fastening on the hatch. We could still hear the muted sea crashing down on top of us and washing across the deck above.

  The blubber room seemed cavernous. There was another level, the hold, below us, where the casks of oil were stored. I spread the quilt—snitched from the captain’s chest—in the middle of the empty blubber room and felt the kind of excitement born not of storm but of the more subtle adventure of a party, with augmenting or diminishing of friendships at stake. I willed my stomach to settle itself against the pitching of the ship. I was not much afraid of the storm. Let a ton of water crash against us! Laugh at its impotence! The ship was made to withstand.

  “Does Chester worry about his father?” Kit asked.

  Though I did not speak, I doubted that Chester worried about his father; Chester perceived him as invincible. It was Giles who seemed so strangely precious or so newly discovered by Chester as to be vulnerable.

  With light irony, Giles said, “Ah, shall we discuss our fathers?”

  “Let’s have some wine,” I said.

  Kit laughed his hollow laugh, but there was some echo of pleasure in it: “You’ve started drinking wine?” Aberration was meat and drink to him.

  “Why not?” I said. “I’m sure royalty of both sexes drink wine.” I turned the flask up to my mouth, drank, and swallowed manfully. “To the Royal Friends,” I said. “To us.”

  “To us.” Each of them took the flask, toasted, and drank.

  “Sit down,” I said. “Sit down,” and when they did I proudly centered the bread and cheese and jam. “Compliments of Harry, unaware.”

  “Ah, Harry,” Giles said. And again that mocking tone. “Kit, how would you rank Harry?”

  “With the rats.”

  “We don’t have rats on the Sussex,” I said.

  “The Innocence of Una,” Giles said.

  “You haven’t been in the fo’c’sle,” Kit said.

  “I believe I found a rat in my hammock,” Giles said. “But never mind. Here’s cheese that rats will only dream of.” He chomped off the corner, and his teeth left slide marks in the yellow. “I guess fo’c’sle folk are not so dainty as the second cabin boy would like.” He passed the cheese to Kit, who decorously broke off a corner for himself. “Oh, bite it like a man, Kit,” Giles said.

  “Let’s not bait each other,” I said.

  “All right,” Giles replied, subdued and serious. “Harry? Cover your charms, Una, when you’re around Harry.”

  I was stunned. What could Giles mean? A quiet fell among us. I felt as hostess that I should make things smooth, but I had little practice in that art. On the Island, conversation had seemed a natural act. Yet, I recalled how sometimes awkward silences had fallen between Giles and me. “Why are we quiet?” I suddenly blurted.

  “Perhaps we don’t have so much to say,” Kit answered.

  “Well, we could speak of our charming fathers,” Giles said again.

  “You know that mine is dead?” I asked.

  “Yes, Kit told me. I’m sorry. Suicide.”

  Another silence fell upon us till Kit laughed. “I suggest we change the subject.”

  “Mothers?” Giles said.

  “Not a good subject for me,” Kit said.

  “We know nothing of either your mother or father,” I said to Giles.

  “Mother, a saint. An ignorant, strong, good saint. Father, a reprobate. A drunk. Deserted us on my twelfth birthday.”

  “What else?” I asked gently. Giles seemed to have sprung like Athena—even with her blue-gray eyes—from the head of some Zeus. “Where did you live in Alabama?”

  “Winston County. The Free State. No slaves.”

  Yes. Giles did not have that taint about him.

  “Soil?” he continued, as though catechizing himself. “Red.”

  “Red as blood?” Kit asked.

  “No. Ferric red. Iron-ore red. At Elyton, at the very southern tip of the Appalachian chain, they cook the iron ore with coal and limestone—all found right there—and make iron.”

  “Did you ever work there?” Kit asked.

  “No. My work, and Mother’s, was behind the ass of a mule. But we plowed the last cotton fields with me in harness.”

  “No!” I said.

  “No, that’s not true,” he laughed. “I think you two would believe anything I told you.”

  I thought that Giles was too arrogant for his own good, but I held my tongue. I thought he had some purpose or some need I could not divine.

  “What, in nature,” Kit asked, “is the most beautiful thing you’ve seen? Or the most terrible?”

  ??
?The Dismals,” Giles answered promptly. “A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land—north Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler—the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name—the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location.”

  “You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?” I asked.

  “It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What’s yours, Una?”

  “The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white—redbud and dogwood.”

  “And you?” Giles asked Kit.

  “Stars,” he said. That was all.

  A pencil of water streamed through the hatch.

  “Heaven is pissing on you,” Giles said to Kit.

  Why did I allow Giles to say anything and consider it holy writ?

  I trusted him, with a trust beyond trust.

  I snatched up the captain’s quilt from the puddle. A board on the hatch broke and a splash of water fell through.

  So there was a world beyond our egg of a world. A stormy place, strong enough to crack our shell. Fear stirred. I held the quilt to my bosom.

  “What pattern is that?” Giles asked, pointing.

  I suspected that he was pointing at my breasts, but I answered, “The forest.” The quilt pieces were stacks of triangles fitted together like pine trees, a rectangle of brown at the base to suggest a trunk. “Mostly green triangles,” I said, as though Giles could not see the pattern for himself. “An occasional brown, on a white field.”

  “Fry, like most sea captains, thinks he pines after the land,” Giles said dryly.

  Our picnic lacked ease, lacked kindness. Our fare was irony and cynicism.

  CHAPTER 36: The Frost Wind

  THE SUSSEX sailed into the storms. The ocean bulged itself first into rounded hills and then into mountains, jagged, crested with foam and wind. The Sussex sailed up these slopes by staggering increments, almost as though she climbed an endless staircase. We jerked upward to a symphony of creaking and snarling wood, of wild screeching of wind, of canvas straining, sometimes bursting. The height of a mountainous wave obtained, the bow crashed and the ocean swept the deck.

  Strung in lifelines, the men attempted the necessary work. Their faces were blue with cold, and their drenched clothing was shiny with water. I saw one man slammed against a rail, but it held, while the man was caught like a fragment against a strainer, the sea streaming over the wood. “Paul,” he cried out, and his mate was there with his arm extended. Far to starboard, I saw a wave as high as my old Giant, all movement and forward-falling weight, but we rode our own mountain, and the monster passed at our side. When I opened the galley door, the two men heaved themselves inside, to safety.

  One morning, the gale increasing, I felt Captain Fry’s wet mouth at my ear. “Our object is to get to latitude sixty. Take the wind on the larboard tack. Go round.” At ten, he double-reefed the topsails and soon furled the jib and mainsail. When I carried coffee to the door at eleven, I saw the main topsail was close-reefed, the foresail furled. Still that day, and each day, we progressed a little. But the fury and tumult of the gales escalated, and the men moved among torn sails, broken spars, and damaged rigging. Bit by bit, I feared, we were being torn apart. Each hour, I hoped to glimpse Giles and Kit, to know they were alive. If the interval between sightings was long, I was frantic with anxiety. Not allowed to cross the deck myself except by Captain Fry’s express permission, I sometimes stood in the portal of the galley and tossed bread to the men.

  Once, there never being a safe time to get below, I stayed miserable and wet in the hurricane house all day. In the morning, the storm wind came from north-northwest, and poor sailors had to climb the tattered rigging to take in the mainsail and mizzen topsail. By noon, the blast increased to a gale from the west-northwest, and the fore topsail was taken in, and the foresail reefed. Around four, two men were sent to furl the foresail. As I watched, a wave reached up, shoved against their backs, and swept them into the boiling sea. I screamed and screamed, but my puny sound went unheard in the storm. Exhausted, I rolled myself into the driest corner of the house and cried, till I felt Captain Fry’s hand on my shoulder. He tied me to himself and took my hand as well to escort me to the hatch. As we walked, he pointed out to sea, and I saw building there the most gigantic wall of water I had ever witnessed. We ran across the slippery deck.

  Together, we scurried below. He ordered me to go to Chester at once and to stay with him, but I was mesmerized by that vision of what seemed our doom. Together, beneath the closed hatch, we listed to the storm and waited. The ship climbed up and up—I knew the wheel was lashed—we were lifted and lifted and then dropped and dropped till I thought us descended to the floor of the sea. So much water poured over us, fore to aft, that I knew the hull of the ship rode submerged for long moments.

  The day came, Chester and I swaying and spinning in the gimbaled bed, in the dark, when we heard the ship scream. The fibers in the mainmast screeched and were torn asunder. The mast flew away from us, the captain said later, trailing her rigging with her, leaving a stump broken six feet above the deck. It was a miracle that the loosed mast did not become the battering ram of our destruction.

  Chester told me that his father could sail with two masts or even one or none if he had to. And that masts were replaceable. But mostly there in the dark Chester talked of the beautiful Pacific, and how he would slip overboard and swim when we got there, with half the crew about him to watch for sharks. Some ships, Chester said, hurled themselves against the headwinds for three weeks, but his father had navigated last time in two. When I questioned Chester closely, he said this rounding was no worse than the last, except for the loss of the mast. I added quietly, “And two men gone.”

  Just as there had been several days in which the storms gradually intensified, so were there several days during which they diminished.

  One day, the captain, carrying a candle, hurried through the door of the bedroom and told Chester and me to come topside—the sun was shining. All disheveled and sleepy—for we had confused night and day in our hideaway—we emerged blinking, and there was the sea, blue and sparkling as though she had never brooded a gray moment in her life.

  And then, in as strange a sight as ever I saw, birds blew over us. Gulls, hundreds of them, as though they were pushed by a current of air that streamed across us, flowing rapidly toward the west. “The frost wind! The frost wind!” the captain shouted, and he gave orders to unfurl all the sails, should the wind descend to our masts. Chester and I watched the slack sails hang while high above the ship streamed the birds, pell-mell, using their wings for balance rather than speed. Then we heard the sails begin to stir.

  It was a creaky, stiff sound, but the canvases were beginning to fill with wind. The captain called down the lookouts. Then I felt the stream of air lowering to us on the deck and passing around our bodies with a clean, clear, sunny chill. The wind was unremitting. In the two remaining masts, the sails luffed, then strained at their tethers, and we were off!

  Like a magic ship we flowed with the wind in our sails toward the South Pacific. The sea surface itself was calm and unruffled, a steady, normal movement. How could the air be so divided and layered? I did not know. We stood like statues on the deck, our clothes, our hair catching, too, in the breeze as though we each had become masts hung with skimpy sails, and we, too, helped to move the ship.

  “Let no man go aloft,” the captain said. He lifted his head to look up at our luck, but no one knew the force of the wind in the big bellied sails. It seemed to me that the two remaining masts almost leaned forward, out of the vertical, so great was the pressure of wind in sails. Nothing broke, nothing tore—so beautiful was our position and so constant the current of air. It made the blood sing in my veins, and I knew I could be a sailor for life, if I chose. Yes, I could gladly wait a
lifetime, a full sixteen years more, for such a sensation again. Without our effort, grace moved us forward.

  Before the wind blew all the heat out of our bodies, the captain sent Chester and me below. All night we felt our speed humming in the boards of the hull and heard the water zinging past our ears. When we went up in the morning, the airflow had warmed, and, I thought, slowed a bit, but we were covering a great distance.

  As the day wore on, the airstream could no longer be felt on the deck, though it still moved at the level of the sails. Toward dusk, I noted that the wind was far less in the lower sails than in the higher ones. At midnight—Giles came to get me—the sails were slack, but we were still gently moved in the current. “How far have we come?” I asked Giles. He thought hundreds of miles.

  I asked him what had created that extraordinary wind, but he did not know. He answered whimsically, rather than scientifically. He said there was a flute player in the Andes, and he breathed a note purer and higher than the earth had ever heard before. Earth took the note and made it into a scarf of wind.

  “The captain called it ‘the frost wind,’ ” I said.

  Giles smiled at me puckishly. “That is because the scarf of the high Andes is always fringed with frost.”

  CHAPTER 37: Collision

  THE NEXT MORNING, an ordinary wind blew for us, on course, increasing and decreasing, in puffs and pauses, under sunny, subtropical skies. The deck was crowded with cheerful sailors. Whatever task could be done on deck was performed there rather than belowdecks. Harry set up his deck galley again, and I helped him with hearty goodwill. He asked every idle sailor to fish, in the hope of a feast, but even the porpoises that jumped in the spray from the bows eluded us. He did snag a gigantic turtle. We were obliged to haul it up with a chain and tackle usually used to strip off the whale’s blanket, and the captain speculated that the sea turtle weighed a thousand pounds. To kill the beast, the captain shot him cleanly in the head with a pistol as we hauled him up the side.