Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  I waved and shouted, “Hooray! Hooray!” though it was no husband of mine who returned in standing triumph. But none were lost! All returned! Let me wave them home anyway, as wife of all—welcoming and glad-hearted for dangers survived and safe return. Joy did leap to all their faces, and they waved back and returned the hooray. Cook grabbed the bell and added its din to the victory. From below, two men carried up the great steaming, gleaming pot of bird-and-onion soup, and a third in the parade came with a high stack of bowls, and a fourth carried fistfuls of spoons. From the porters’ feet rose small clouds of snow that caught the glint of sunshine and were suspended lightly in the cold air like swarms of glitter.

  Lines were thrown over, and Ahab and Starbuck came up the sides of the boat more nimbly than goats—monkeys or apes, rather, all hands and feet engaged. Ahab was pleased with himself, pleased to be noticed, though still his face bore something of the mask of his usual dignity and reserve. And in Starbuck I saw relief as well as joy. His honest sighting of the prey had brought neither disaster nor undue delay.

  Now the process began again of bringing the whale alongside the ship, the lowering of the cutting stage, the peeling away of the blanket blubber, the ooze of fat and the flow of blood as the ship became a factory. Already, the first kindling wood was being placed in the tryworks. The men hurried like ants over the deck, but in my woman’s garb, I was excused and excluded.

  Ahab had gone to the taffrail, where he stood looking steadfastly about, first to the north and then before us to the east. His brow was contracted, and he shaded his eyes with his hand.

  “What do you see, Captain Ahab?” I asked.

  He pointed, and my gaze followed the line of his finger to an iceberg. It floated like an enormous tooth, like a molar upside down with the jagged roots thrust up.

  “There’s much more below the waterline,” he said.

  I glanced about and saw that there was a whole flotilla of icebergs. But they seemed safely distant. They looked almost like distant clouds, low on the horizon, but cloud shapes have more roundedness and less jaggedness to their shape. The maverick iceberg, Ahab said, had a great white frozen mass below it. Like a ghost ship, but solid ice, it traveled the water submerged.

  “It has great power,” Ahab said. “We are less than the thin shell of a pecan to that jaw.”

  “But we can avoid collision,” I said quickly.

  “Aye, Una, we can, given that we keep keen watch. That we get well to south before night.”

  The day was so bright, the morning so youthful, that I thought to myself that there was little worry. But I checked this dismissal, knowing that Ahab’s experience was vast, and unwarranted caution impossible for such a man.

  “I could stand lookout,” I said.

  Ahab’s head pivoted swiftly. “It requires a trained eye and standing aloft.”

  I hesitated. Should I cite my experience? I looked seaward. I only said, “The glare requires a patch of soot under the eyes.”

  “Aye.”

  Again I hesitated.

  “How fares Mr. Sparrow?” Ahab asked.

  “He is asleep. But last night, he spoke to me.”

  “Lucidly?”

  “Yes.” And I shivered. Not only lucidly but tactfully—referring to our crime, but not calling its name lest we be overheard. Careful and tactful, like the Kit of old.

  I turned my back to the sea and regarded the deck. The snow had been ruined by trampling. The icicles were dripping water from their tips and falling.

  “It would not be safe for any man to go aloft yet,” I said.

  “Aye.”

  I regarded the little hurricane house. Its roof still wore an unsullied cap of snow. It looked like a small deserted house in the countryside. A slope of snow leaned against the windward side.

  “In men’s clothing,” I said, “I can climb as well as any man. On the Sussex, there was no man with either keener eyesight or better brain for imaging the form of a distant whale.” I dared not look at Ahab as I spoke even that very truncated version of my history.

  “I’ve thought that ye were Ahab’s daughter,” he said. His hands swept the top of the taffrail, and ice sputtered loose.

  CHAPTER 64: Ahab in His Cabin

  WEAR WHAT YE think suitable, I said to her. Go aloft when ye think it less than foolish.

  Almost I added, Watch not only north and east. But I looked in her eye and saw beyond a brain nimble enough to know already or to deduce in an instant the wiliness of icebergs, how they may ride a deep current to emerge far south of any expected appearance.

  Will she play the fool and scamper up prematurely on some female whim? No, not Una. She’s seen too much.

  She’s seen him, lying trussed up in my hammock here like a Kentucky ham. The hectic flush lies on him. There may be pneumonia in him. But he’s young. He could fight that. If there’s fight in an addled brain.

  Despite the hectic, there’s a comeliness about his features. She loves him well. He’s blessed, I think, in such a wife. If people jeer his madness, her nose will be up at the topgallant level. Still, she’s little more than a girl.

  Last night in the storm, I thought of her safely within this room, and I was glad of it. She’ll find some hut in Nantucket and make it home. And him? Will he be swung from the rafters as he is here? Perpetually nursed? Should he survive this, then what for Kit Sparrow?

  The Madaket Road, with the Indians, that would be the place. The Indians have a tolerance for madness that the Quakers of the town lack. I have a fellow feeling with Abram Quary. But what sort of life for her? Well, she’s not usual. It might suit her.

  All is scurry above my head. Again the whale: the chase, the butchering, the casks and barrels stowed below. We’ll come in full. The carpenter can build bins in the blubber room. We needed only this, and Starbuck sounded the cry. Starbuck, whose only desire is to move like a shooting star to the doorway of his home. Starbuck enters there to the glow of homecoming, to a warm hearth and a warmer wife. He said he has a son. But they’ve given him no name. Not likely they’d call him Ahab.

  So, where’s my tom-girl? Aloft, or feet still firm on deck? I’ve left it to her, as though she were sensible as Starbuck. She’s not awash in men’s clothing. No. While the ice melted, she came here and ran up seams and seams from his trousers and jacket, till all was neat. Her hair tucked inside the collar, a kerchief tied over the crown of her head, she looked a boy. As likely a cabin boy as anyone could sign.

  Starbuck might think it sin—a woman in man’s clothes—but I care naught for that. Even Starbuck will give chase on the Sabbath. He is a man who bends only enough not to break.

  This poor wretch, hung swinging like a babe in my cabin—he’s known too much of both bending and breaking. She would put her needle to his brain to seam him up where all is tatters.

  CHAPTER 65: Aloft, the Pequod

  THE SEA is silver as far as eye can see. Soft silver, bending and bluish, sometimes brushed with mist above the swells. And in the distance to the far north, yes, a white expanse of iceberg. Here’s its breath, all about me. I feel the little hairs in my nose trying to freeze for all the light of the sun. Light with scant heat up here. Time to pull out the red mittens.

  Beneath my feet the ship moves more smoothly than any horse could canter. We slide south, and the sails below me are bellied out but unstraining. Ah, to be a sail! To be a pair of wings! I would name this ship not Pequod but Pegasus of the strong, white wings.

  When I turn south, the silver water flashes mirrorlike. There is a perfection of the color today. It’s been too long since I stood this high. What is the world but water and sky? Did Kit ever love it as I do? I do not think so. I do not think his heart unfurled and filled with it like this. For he could have it now. He could stand here, higher than all he surveys, for today there are neither birds nor clouds. Only the sun insists on his sovereign height. But he is a friend of mine.

  Below me, the deck flows with blood. Their shoes and the cuffs of
their pant legs are stained and dyed with it. From the tryworks issue twin curls of smoke. The hatch cover is removed and I can see down into the cutting room. Off comes the first of the blanket strips; swung across the deck from the whale by the great hook, the piece oozes oil and fats that congeal in the cold in yellowed fists.

  Now I look at our prow. We cleave the water, and the foam and spray sweep back. What a whiteness we turn up from the silver-blue. The rising and falling I see of the prow I can feel in my feet. A smooth, triumphant rhythm of our riding. Here, let me watch most carefully for the floe beneath the water. But I see no appalling mass. The way is clear. The way is ours. Nantucket! I can all but breathe it into my nostrils.

  Let there be help, and kindness and patience, in Nantucket.

  And to the north again. A vast, what is that form? It slides under the water all square in front and tapering. How came that iceberg so rapidly, so close? Not ice. Living flesh. A sperm whale the color of ice!

  He turns and swims parallel to us. He is like a ghostly shimmer under the blue-white water. He could be a mass of bubbles, a cloud. Would any eyes but mine ever have discerned his shape? He melts now into something bluish. I know there is a great blue whale, but I have never seen it. This white one is of enormous size, but his shape is clearly sperm. Is? I must say was, for he dissolves.

  Why should I cry out? He doesn’t spout his presence. He is all submerged, peaceful, a warm-blooded part of the blue-white-silver of this day. No, Starbuck shall not be harnessed up again to give chase. Nor any of them. Let them complete the bloody work on deck. Let us clean ourselves as we sail ever closer to Nantucket Harbor, arrive like a honeycomb, every cell filled.

  Ah, Ahab, you assigned me to sing out for icebergs only. I will bless you, this voyage, with silence on the subject of a white whale and all his massive innocence.

  So I subverted the trust of my captain. But instead of guilt, I felt an invigorated peacefulness. Let nothing deter our forward progress. The ghostly whale had disappeared, and we alone moved at the center of a crystalline, encircling sea and sky. Surely in such a pure, blue-white world there was hope for Kit. The sheer expansiveness of the ring around me seemed to suggest it.

  I stood the watch for two hours, while the sun was at its zenith. My cheeks, my fingers and toes, became stiff with cold. Gradually, the icebergs to the north became a mere line, a blur of white. In my descent, at the height of the main yard, I could see nothing of the Arctic ice. At that low altitude, my nose filled with the foul clouds of smoke roiling up from the tryworks.

  Putting my feet on the greasy and bloody deck seemed a defilement. The joking and swearing of the men—to which I had become perfectly accustomed on the Sussex—annoyed me now. But as I walked among them in men’s clothing, they mistook me as one of them, and no one curbed his tongue. Perhaps there was a kind of music I had forgotten in their rough rhythms and gritty syllables.

  I felt convinced that no ice floes had broken loose to pursue us, and I told Ahab as much. Since he sent no one else aloft, I surmised that he trusted my judgment, and this pleased me more than a little. With the stench and soot in my nose, the fat and slime underfoot, the swearing in my ears, I felt descended from angelic heights to the realities of earth, albeit the Pequod, as a ship upon the water, was but a chip of the mainland.

  As I went below, yet another level down, the closeness of the quarters, the wooden walls, and the despair I felt about Kit’s condition combined to suggest that now I traversed a dismal and confining underworld. Before I entered Ahab’s chamber, I removed my gory shoes and left them by the door.

  Kit had turned on his side while I was aloft, and I took this to be a good sign.

  “Kit. Darling,” I called him, and he opened his eyes. Darling—there is magic in that word. Giles once addressed me as darling, in his letter to the Lighthouse, and the world changed its hue.

  Clouds seemed to float before Kit, so hazy his gaze.

  “I’d like to talk to Giles,” he said.

  “In a bit, love,” I answered. “Talk to me now, won’t you? How do you feel?”

  “Hot. Sick. Have I been sick long?”

  “Not so very long. You seem better, don’t you think so?”

  “There are things that are wrong.”

  “It’s an imperfect world, love.” I smiled.

  His eyes blinked, and a fear washed over me that he would sink again to sleep. “But just now,” I went on, “I was aloft. And such a day it is, Kit. All silvery, brushed with blue. And white at all the edges, just behind or beyond.”

  “Or below,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Did the mad have an uncanny ability to read the minds of others? Could he picture the white shadow under the waves?

  “Why are you afraid, Una?”

  “I am only afraid,” I said, “because you are not completely well.”

  “And so,” he said, stirring in the hammock and glancing around as though he would see for himself, “tell me more of the day.”

  “We’ve been far to the north. There was a winter storm—”

  “Yes. The wind will give chase to us even as we give chase to the whale.”

  “But today,” I went on hurriedly, for I did not want him to remember how it was he himself, within the hurricane house, who had bruised his body and bloodied his head. “Today, there’s only a good wind, and it blows us south and west, back to Nantucket. The sky is the palest, most fragile of blues, and the air seems purified with cold. We had snow on deck this morning, and the yardarms hung with icicles. We were a fairy boat, Kit. As far as I could see, there was nothing but beauty.”

  “Were you aloft, then?”

  “I was. The captain let me. To watch for icebergs.”

  “Can you tell an iceberg from a whale?” There was a twinkle in his voice. Something of the old teasing Kit.

  “I think so,” I said, but I wondered if I had been wrong about the white whale. Trying to be chipper, I amended, “At least we’ve not been stove by whale or floe.”

  I could have bitten away my tongue. Once, of course, we were rammed by a whale, and all our dark history had funneled through the hole created by that black monster. That horror came back to Kit like a black tidal wave. I saw it crash on his brow and swamp his brain as surely as I saw any occurrence.

  “Why do you want to lie?” he said nastily.

  “I didn’t mean that time,” I faltered. “I meant now. Now we are safe. This ship is intact.”

  “Isn’t this a ship like any other ship?” he said. He was angry. “The only safety’s here!” And he smote his forehead with the palm of his hand. When he drew his hand away, having dislodged the scab, his palm was smeared with blood. “I’m stove,” he muttered.

  At that moment, I heard someone pass in the hall. That man’s voice, too, muttered, and he muttered the cry of the whaleboats: “A stove boat or a dead whale.”

  “Was that Giles?” Kit asked.

  “No.”

  And from outside, the voice murmured, “Break your backs, boys. Why don’t ye row till you break your backs?”

  “I’ll inspect your lovely day,” Kit said.

  So I gave him my hand and helped him to stand up and then to walk to the door. I was afraid to speak.

  “Lady Una,” he said as he moved uncertainly, “for you are a lady, Una. Giles always said so.”

  When we opened the door, the dark smoke of the tryworks and its awful stench puffed in. The hallway before us was awash in whale blood. Kit grabbed the door and slammed it shut. “You are a witch from hell!” he said. “For you, hell is heaven! But you’ll not take me there. I’ll ’bide with you no more!”

  “It’s only the trying out,” I said. “They’ve taken a whale.”

  “ ‘They’ve taken a whale,’ ” he mocked me. “It’s you with your she-eagle eye who took the whale. You feast on blood and flesh. You have the fangs of a wolf. I don’t want you. I have never wanted you. He was the one who wanted you.”

  “You did
want me,” I said.

  Then he lifted his hand and struck my cheek.

  I ran from the room.

  I would not go up to that butchery.

  There was nowhere to go but deeper down. My head rang like a struck bell. Trembling with outrage, I could hardly run, my knees wobbled. You did want me. You did. I pressed my cheek with the palm of my hand to quiet the throbbing. I descended to the hold.

  In that dim space, dominated by the unadorned ribs of the ship, I climbed into a pen of barrels. I sat on the flank of one and cried upon the curve of another.

  Giving Kit the name “love” had no magic power. He hated me. At least at times. The cup of my heart overbrimmed with bitterness, sorrow, pity, anger.

  CHAPTER 66: Starbuck: Ship’s Log

  MONDAY, November 15. Having taken a right whale yesterday, of 40 barrels est., in the midst of the trying out, a naked madman, one Kit Sparrow of Nantucket, ran amongst us in the freezing air. He offered his flesh, in particular his manly member, to us to butcher and rend for oil, if we would but spare the whale. At my order, Mr. Stubb has dressed him and manacled him to the far side of this cabin where I sit writing. I do not know what he has done with his wife. Pray God he has not thrown her overboard, for he raves and curses her. Mr. Stubb is to supply him rum until he falls into a stupor. We are but three days out of Nantucket, if this fair weather hold. All of us lean toward our homes and hearths.

  CHAPTER 67: Starbuck Communes with Mary, His Wife

  EVENING STAR, forever when I sail, your name is not Venus the pagan goddess, but Mary. Though I be no Papist, that name is sacred. That name is all gentleness, steadfastness, affection. Mary means home. If ever Starbuck sink beneath the waves, may the evening star be the last of my beholding. If it be daylight, may imagination, though in me it is sluggish slow, bring to my mind this star. Gentle Mary, would that I could have spoken with your voice today! Would that I could have soothed with your hand.