Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  I have told how when I was alone with my birthing pain, Susan emerged from between my mattresses to help me. And we laughed. My mother was still alive then; my baby still a promise. Though neither my mother nor a doctor returned, Susan was there. And later it was Susan who helped me when his weak little mouth could not suck. It was Susan who devised a sugar tit for him and gave him the strength to live and to be loved for a day. When Satan dragged me into sleep, it was Susan who held my babe and changed the cloth and did not wash it but saved the one wetting for me to see.

  When Liberty died—

  That moment is beyond my writing. Perhaps Susan was in the room, but I was alone, as everyone is when the universe opens its black mouth. It swallowed my babe and me, and spit me out again.

  And then Susan kept the fire going, cooked, held me while I cried. She cut a lock of his red hair, swaddled the babe in burial clothes, with spices, cloves and myrrh, to keep him, and placed him in a bed of snow. And the neighbors came, while I hid Susan, to speak of the buggy overturned, my mother dead.

  And all the time Susan should have fled, but she refused. I told her, that night, to bring me scissors and a needle. From every dress and cloth I owned, I cut a piece and sewed them together and made her a coat for her journey, stuffed with the thickest wadding. And I told her to bring Mother’s shoes, and tacks and the hammer, for we had decided she would go over the ice. I could not get out of bed, but these things I could do for Susan, and I told her to bring me the skillet and I turned it over for an anvil so that I could hammer in bed.

  My mother—it was as though she had melted into the air. When I looked up, she who had been with me in the cabin for months had vanished. And she was no more. The neighbors had her body. In some dark shed her body lay wrapped, preserved by the cold that had killed her. She lay stiff, long and cold, her hands folded over her chest, her being wrapped in strips of sheet, safe from the nibbling mouse. I could picture her thus, but it was her absence, not her death, that seemed real. The way she was not held by the walls of the cabin. The vacancy in the air. My mother, my babe, forever dead. If only tomorrow they would begin again to breathe.

  When all the quilting was finished on Susan’s jacket, I tasked myself again to sew a parallel row, with smaller stitches, inside the loops of the first quilting. And then I imposed a running rain of stitches over all the design so that the jacket grew heavy with thread. I listened to the silence of the house as I sewed.

  Susan had never been taught to sew, because her mam worked in the fields. I gave her a scrap of velvet to make a small bag, which was a first project I had had as a child. I told her how as soon as she saw the tip of the needle emerge from the nap of the fabric, she was to make it dive down again, to gather at least four stitches on the shaft of the needle before she pulled it through. How we must keep the thimble on, for though it was clumsy at first, it was our friend, our shield, while the needle was our spear; how since it was too large for Susan’s tiny finger, we would pack it with a fold of yarn. I pretended that life was nothing but the craft of sewing. And no, we would not sew with a double thread, but learn to pull, just so, using the friction of the thread so that the unsecured end never slipped through the eye of the needle. But how to roll a knot between the thumb and forefinger off the end of the thread, I never succeeded in teaching her—that being a gesture that takes a great deal of practice—and her knots were loose globs, wet with spittle.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ll hide the knot on the inside of the bag. Sewing has always been my friend,” I said. “It’s the way a free woman can earn her keep.”

  “I will be free,” Susan answered. “If ice jaw open up, drag me down, I still be free.” Her courageous statement settled on my head with the weight of melancholy.

  “Have you ever seen the ocean?” I asked, to stir up a new topic.

  “I’ve heard ’bout it.”

  “I was once a sailor.” I showed her the sampler my mother had cross-stitched of the Pequod and the verse. “My husband is the captain of this ship.” But Ahab seemed no more real to me than if he had been a man made only of cross-stitch.

  “It start to soften up outside.”

  “Probably they’ll come to get me for the funeral tomorrow.”

  Susan put down her sewing. She brought me a quill. “Teach me the letters of my name,” she said.

  I was ashamed I had placed sewing before reading and writing. I wondered if Margaret Fuller could sew at all. Susan sat beside me propped up on the bed, and we made our knees into a desk. I put my hand over hers to guide it: “The S is like a snake and makes the sound of hissing, the U is deep like a tub, and then we have an S again. The A is like hands coming to pray, the tips together, but not the heels; with a crossbar. The N is like a rail fence, squeezed up a bit. And there you have it, S-U-S-A-N. Snake, Tub, Snake again, Pray, Fence. And look, the same letters, rearranged, can make UNA.”

  “I done learned two names at once,” she said, pleased.

  “It’s always that way. In learning, one thing always has something else in it, or leads to something new.” When had I used that tone before? Beside the Lighthouse, when I had appointed myself little Frannie’s teacher, and we had sat in the bright sun on the smooth shoulders of rocks. Not a tone that I liked, now, and I modified it to something less tyrannical and more appreciative of Susan’s progress.

  Susan began at once to copy over and practice the shapes she had learned. I watched her and encouraged her. She didn’t know till I told her that the letters were to sit on a line and not be flung down randomly all over the page. It warmed me to teach her, and the glances between us were of conspirators, not instructor and student, as we made the letters march along.

  Between myself and my grief, I had lowered a window sash. As glass keeps out the storm, so some barrier in me separated me from the death of my mother, the death of my child. On the other side of that glass, the earth tossed like a sea, and lightning stabbed anything that raised its face from the mud. On this side of the glass, I bowed my head to sew or to draw letters, or I stretched out my hand to touch, affectionately or encouragingly, the dark skin of Susan’s small arm.

  Often she touched me too; sometimes smoothing my back, with the cloth of my gown between her skin and mine, but sometimes along the naked curve of my cheek. Talking little, we loved the skin itself, the envelope that held each of us.

  The blackness of her skin was a particular, fascinating beauty to me. She was very black, but with different shades and textures of black. At her temples her skin seemed soft as soot, but over the arch of her brow it was shiny, like fire scale on a pot. Her throat had a purplish hue to it, like a dark eggplant, and her knuckles were more brown than black. The palms of her hands and the soles of her feet were light tan, with a pinkish cast.

  On the back of her right hand stood a pinkish knot of skin, shaped just like the rosette you can crochet. I put my finger on it and didn’t need to ask aloud.

  “Once I was in a place, two days hungry, and I come on an owl nest, big as your pillow. I hid down beside it, and sure ’nuff, ’fore long here come Mama Owl, got a squirrel dangling. Well, I gots to have it, so I snatch and she rear back, pull with one foot, fight with the other. But I have me a little squirrel meat that day, cooked on a little bitty twig fire, seasoned with what blood dripping out the back of my hand. No need to waste.”

  I turned her hand over to see if the talon had pierced the palm. I saw an indentation, a pulled-in place, where the claw tip had caught flesh. When the talon had pulled back out, it had drawn the hooked palm skin after it and tucked it into the wound.

  Susan’s eyelids were half down and the curly lashes made perfect backward-turned black rows, almost like a buttonhole stitch. She looked like a goddess carved out of African wood and shined with oil, like a Madonna but more alive, glowing. I took her other hand to see if it was likewise crowned on the back with a pink rosette of flesh, but it was uncrucified.

  I showed her the white scar that skated
across the back of my hand. “I had a fight with an eagle, on top of a tower.” Her eyes questioned. I added, “Over a bonnet.”

  Sometimes when we sat on the bed together, I thought of Chester, and how I had taught him, and how he never knew me as anything but a boy. And I thought, too, of being in the open boat. I hoped Kit was sheltered from the wilderness and weather in some hogan or tepee. As they traveled west, Lewis and Clark, over two decades before, had wintered in the earthen hogans of the Mandans on the banks of the Missouri.

  When I got up from bed to walk around, I placed my hands on my womb, as though to keep from dropping something. Where I had been so full, I was empty now. And no babe to raise to my breasts, which filled and filled.

  In the night my gown was soaked with wasted milk, but my body replaced that overflow, and my breasts ached till I thought I would go mad. To relieve the tightness, I cradled the curves of my breasts and tried to make milk flow, though the slightest pressure was pain. At the news of my mother’s death, they had released milk. Now they were obdurate.

  “You must milk me,” I said to Susan, and she tried, but my nipples were as unyielding as sharp stones.

  “Try your mouth,” I urged.

  Susan did not hesitate.

  Like a kitten making a trough of its tongue and stroking, she suckled me. Tears of relief flowed from the corners of my eyes as she eased me. What could I feel when I looked down on her little upstanding braids, the back of her head, but love? And I hoped my milk was good nurture, she being run-down.

  “Quick now,” she said. “We bind them flat.”

  Though the binding was a misery when the milk tried to return, it was nothing compared to the former agony. Susan never spoke of what she had done for me, but when we cuddled together to sleep, I dreamed I was a mother cat with rows of nipples up and down my body, and she was my only kitten.

  As a girl rebelling against my father’s dogma, I had scoffed at Job for accepting God’s consolation of a new wife and new children. But I, most Joblike, when Giles was dead, embraced Kit, and when Kit conveyed that he was not coming back, it was the messenger himself, Ahab, whom I immediately loved. If Mother and Liberty were gone, then here was Susan to unburden me of love. Not to be loved but to love lightened my load of grief and gave value and direction to my life.

  CHAPTER 92: The Lantern

  THE LAST NIGHT we spent together, Susan set the tallow candle on the table between us and said, “I mus’ tell you how I come so far.”

  I nodded, for I wanted to know her story, though I had asked her nothing. I did not want to test her trust.

  “You’ve come a long way,” I said. “And from a warmer place.”

  “Well, there be walking,” she said. “Walking aplenty. But that ain’t how I come.”

  I was perplexed. She leaned her face into the candlelight, and I saw a wildness to her eyes that I had not seen before. I felt afraid that she would fabricate.

  “You needn’t tell me,” I said quickly.

  “It were the Lord,” she said.

  “Oh!” I recoiled a bit.

  “I ain’t heard the name of the Lord once in this house,” she said wonderingly, “nor spoke it myself till now.”

  It was not I who had broken through Susan’s trust; she had blundered through mine. I was shocked by Susan’s religiosity. Her eyes were stretched wide so that pupil and iris burned darkly surrounded by white, and her lips were parted so that her white teeth reflected like wet ivory.

  “When my mam tell me one night go, she say, ‘Look over your shoulder,’ and when I did, then I saw a lantern light out the window. ‘It is the light of the Lord,’ my mam say.”

  Hearing Susan’s words, I felt the blood drain from my face and then a flash of heat. My mind began to heat like an ember, and my face felt scorched from that burning coal that was once my brain. “I’m not well,” I said to Susan. I didn’t want to be confined in the cabin with a Christian fanatic.

  She got the whiskey jug and poured me some in a cup. When I drank it, my whole throat was a ribbon of flame.

  “And I pass through, like I going through the wall, but through the door.”

  No. Stop, I wanted to scream.

  “For every step I take, the Lord move on. Carrying the light up ahead. It be summer, and the road dust fine as flour under my feets and soft as pillows.”

  Was she going to scream at me? Try to force me to believe?

  “When daybreak ’bout to come, he lead me off the road to the deep thicket. He shrink hisself up like a little lightning bug when the bushes be thick and low, and when I parts them, then there my space to hide in.”

  I felt my pulse beating in my brain. I drank the whiskey again. I was caught in the rush of it and in the flow of her uncanny story the way a person can be caught in a flash flood. You may stand in an ordinary, clear place, they say, in the mountains in Kentucky, and suddenly out of nowhere a wall of water comes for you because some- place up in the heights streams from furious rains have come together—maybe they’ve been dammed up in some natural way—and then they sweep down and take everything.

  “I hide by day in the bush like a little child kin hide in her mama’s skirt, and I travel by night. Then one daybreak I part the bushes and there already be another soul there, a little old man like a raisin wearing clothes. ‘I be your guide now,’ he say. And we walk many a mile. He knowed some Indians who hide us, and they be on the drive, too. One day, he say we done made it to Tennessee.”

  “What state were you born in?”

  “I just not so sure ’bout that,” she said. “I don’t remember nobody ever say, when I was little, only how Shady Grove be not too far away. Luverne, they sometimes say, and Petrey and Ramar? Highland Home not too far, and Helicon.”

  I shook my head. I put my arm on the table and laid my cheeks on it. My womb throbbed.

  “Now don’t be getting the miseries,” she said. “Here, you drink some more of this good liquor.”

  I obeyed, but my face was a flame and I kept my head on the table. This was Susan, who had saved my life. Like a child, I took my thumbnail and cut the rim of the candle so that the melt flowed through and down the side of the taper and clung there, hardening into a line of drops. When Uncle took us to Boston, I saw among religious artifacts from around the world a picture of Jesus in a shop window, and down his face was a line of blood drops oozing from the crown of thorns. There was a gush from my body, and I knew I was passing blood again, but it did not keep up.

  “Then he died.”

  “Jesus?”

  “The old raisin man. I asked him did he reckon the Lord would come back with his lantern for me, but Old Sam just stretch out his thin little arm and show me the stars and the Drinking Gourd. The last thing he say was ‘The stars they jes’ the same as Jesus.’ ”

  With a jolt, I caught myself sliding off the chair toward sleep. “Couldn’t you say,” I asked as kindly as I could, “that Sam was your guide?”

  Susan slapped both her palms down on the table and jumped up. “Then who lifted me? Who lifted me high in the tree and made the tree grow up so tall like fifty years passed so dogs couldn’t catch no scent ’cause I was caught up in the clouds with the Lord?”

  “Dogs!”

  “Oh, yes. Dogs with teeth long as your fingers, sharp as your needle.”

  I sat up straight and watched Susan pace around the room. I resolved to force no more skeptical interpretations on her story.

  “Love lifted me,” Susan went on. She stopped pacing, stood still, and slowly raised her hands so that I might understand the idea of being lifted. “The true name of the Lord is Love.” And she smiled wide. Then she brought her lips together and said, “There is faith that move mountains. That make a scrawny tree grow tall. That lift you high above the dog bite. That’s what I mus’ tell you ’fore I leave. I could reach in this hearth fire, reach on in there, draw out burning coal, and not be burnt no more than Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

  “Then do it,
” I said. I felt all my love for Susan fall away from me the way a ginkgo tree can suddenly drop its leaves in the night. I stood up, too, ugly and skeletal, as though pain and anger had burnt me and I stood a column of blackened bone. “Oh, Ahab,” I called. “Lightning has struck me as well as thee!”

  Susan ran to the fireplace, knelt, and drew out an ember. She tossed it from one hand to the other, and then she plucked out another glowing coal and another. She commenced to toss and catch them in a small circle over her lap like the stars in Betsy Ross’s flag till she slowly rose up, enlarging the circle as she stood. Then her whole form stood in a hoop of flame, and she began to dance. She caught the coals against the insides of her ankles and on the tops of her feet, and tossed them up again, but there was no sign of pain or burning. She appeared to have many arms and she danced in a circle of fire.

  “Shiva!” I gasped and fainted.

  HAD I DREAMT? I know I dreamt of humpbacked whales that night, and how they formed a circle and blew a net of bubbles, how they lunged up through the center of that net, jaws agape, funneling the tiny sea creatures into their massive bodies, fueling whatever fires must be kept burning to warm them when they returned to the depths.

  And I dreamt a Greekmyth, of Cronos eating his baby.

  And then it was time to wake, time for our last day together, and for the final preparations for her journey.

  And my love for Susan? Returned and freshened. Our differences mattered not at all. Just as new leaves return to the branches of the winter-black tree, so was I, all aflutter with green love. Susan had lived her own story. If I lacked tolerance—she had not tried coercion as my father had—then I was the smaller person for it.

  After the funeral, I could reenter the cabin because Susan was there, hidden in the sea chest, ready to rise up and embrace me.