Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  “A little,” I said.

  “Perhaps I ought to tell you the rest of the story.”

  I only looked at him.

  “I took Susan back to the road, and I pointed out a house I knew to belong to abolitionists. Big white square house. I told her they would help her, but they knew me, as I knew them, and I couldn’t go to the door.”

  “How do I know that you’re telling the truth?” The question blurted from me.

  “Susan thanked me. She said to tell you, if I saw you, for I gained her trust, anyway, this string of words: snake, tub, snake again, prayer, and fence. What does it mean?”

  Gladness flooded my being. “It is her name,” I said. “It describes the printed capital letters in her name.” I took up pen and paper and drew the letters, naming them as I drew.

  “I see.”

  When my visitor got up to step outside, I could scarcely believe how small he was. How did such a man come to be a bounty hunter? I did not know, yet I knew there was goodness in him. When he returned, he sniffed deeply, enjoying the aroma of the ham and beans, as any person might. I wished that he had not taken Susan’s money and thimble, yet he had let her go. It was more than many would have done. He did not need to be perfect to be good.

  I asked him to tell me of his travels and his family. He said he was from Virginia, and there he had a wife, a son, and a daughter. His wife was only a bit taller than he was, but his children were full-sized, by which he meant normal. “My boy is six,” he said, “and already as tall as me.” He told me they sat on small boxes, he and his wife, and when he got home, he would buy normal furniture for his growing children. “No need they be cramped up by what fits me.”

  But I did not tell him my secrets. I told him only that I lived in Nantucket and would return when the river was navigable again.

  “Do you want to go sooner?” he asked.

  “I would if I could.”

  “I could take you out. You could sit the donkey, and I would lead. I would do it for a fee. You’d be safe.”

  “I think we should wait till the melt.”

  “Let part of my pay be a place to sleep and food, till the thaw.”

  “I must ask you,” I said. “Will you deal with me honorably?”

  “You’d be safe. I’d take you as far as you needed to go. To Cincinnati, I think. You can take a coach from there.”

  “I would like to see the donkey. Tomorrow. Tonight you can sleep in the bunk in the corner, but you must not cross to my side of the cabin till I am up.”

  “Done!”

  I felt happier. I did not want to stay in this cabin where I had had so much sorrow. The food supplies would run low before the steamboats came. Living in a corner with some other frontier family seemed unbearable. In Nantucket, I had an ample home, if I could but get to it.

  As we chatted on into the evening, I felt that I was right to trust the dwarf. Nevertheless, that first night, I slept dressed and with a butcher knife under my pillow. As I lay in bed, I swallowed my tears for my child and my mother, lest the dwarf hear me and come to comfort me.

  I HOPED Susan had found shelter in a stable or house. I could not know her story, but she had one, as surely as I did. Perhaps some omniscience, with stars for eyes, saw her walking, knew her mind. My life and that of Susan, though I could not tell her story, were surely a parallel that made loneliness in the universe impossible.

  “Merry Christmas,” I called out to the dwarf, as I sat up on my elbow to blow out my candle. In the dark, in a nice, male voice, he called back the same to me.

  CHAPTER 95: Getting Started

  FOR THE NEXT few days, the weather seemed too cold for me to inspect the donkey. During this time, I took woolen blankets and sewed them together, shaping shoulders for a smooth fit, for a long cloak. So that I could wrap it over my knees when I sat sidesaddle on the donkey, I made the cloak quite full. I joined a hood at the top, and then I stitched myself a muff as well, since the dwarf would lead the donkey for me and my hands might as well be warmly lodged. I sewed rapidly and almost carelessly, for I wanted to be ready to leave at the first possible moment. I felt like a hare pursued by the hounds of grief. Faster, faster, I urged the needle. February, I promised myself. We’ll leave by February.

  Of course we could not take the sea chest with us, but I made a roll of a few clothes to carry behind my saddle. I could make new clothes in Nantucket. In the center of the roll, I placed the spring dress my mother had made for me. I left Liberty’s little clothes in the sea chest.

  When it was warm enough to walk to the barn, I visited the donkey, who was white and named Milk. She was as docile and willing a little beast as though created just for me. She had large soft eyes, and long ears like a rabbit’s. She was so small I almost hesitated to sit upon her, but the dwarf, whose name was David Poland, reassured me her back was strong, and I weighed less than a hundred pounds.

  Once a day, after picking our way across the yard around melting clumps of snow, David saddled Milk, and I sat upon her inside the barn. He led us for turns for half an hour or so, so that we might all be accustomed to each other. This is the barn where my father hanged himself, I could have told David, but chose not to. Instead I listened to the soft placement of the little donkey hoofs on the dirt floor. The bad weather lingered into March. When my neighbor Roger Pack checked on me, he was relieved to find David with me and trusted him at once. At night we played cards, or I read to him. I taught him chess.

  I did not understand David, but I grew to like and trust him more every day, as we waited for the final thaw. What I did not understand about him was his readiness to do hideous work, such as bounty hunting, or any other job—guiding me to Cincinnati—if there seemed to be a profit in it. I asked him once, and he said, “Like any man, I must support my family. I am an opportunist. I look for opportunity, for I am quick-witted, and I make more money that way than I would in any steady employment.”

  “But you are far from your family.”

  “So is your sea captain, Una, far from you.”

  As David led Milk and me about in the barn, I asked him if he thought a woman could be a sea captain, and he replied, “Why, I don’t know. I don’t know nothing about the work.” But he had not laughed, and I liked him for that.

  After discussing it with David, I decided that on our way out, I would stop at my neighbors’, where we had had the cider-pressing and dancing, and where they had kept my mother’s body in a shed, and leave Roger Pack a paper authorizing him to sell my farm. He would send the money, through banks, to Nantucket. And the sea chest.

  When the day came that the snow was gone and the ground drained enough of runoff for David and me to commence our journey, I let the hearth fire sink to ashes, and I pulled out the latchstring. I put a small sign on the door welcoming any who needed shelter and giving the name of my neighbor, should anyone wish to buy the property. Then I climbed up on Milk, and with David leading us, we started our journey through the wilderness.

  We had gone only a mile when we met my very neighbors coming to call. Cecilia sat on their mule, with one child fore and two aft, and Roger had packsaddles full of food draped over his gelding. It was a pleasant meeting on the road.

  We decided to go back to their place, and for a while we were a little caravan on the road, like Chaucer’s pilgrims. Each of us, too, I thought, had a tale, though for their children the stories lay mostly ahead. Short and bitter, unjust! had been the story of my Liberty’s life.

  I tried, as we sat by their hearth, to be cheerful, but my tongue was slow to bend to sociable chatter. David seemed to sense my discomfort, and he told stories of horse races in Virginia. When he was a boy in his teens, he had been much in demand as a jockey, being so small and light. Sitting on the floor with his back to the fire, he scarcely rose above the height of the children who sat around him. Like an elf king speaking of a faraway land, he described the horses—colors, markings, dispositions—and their owners and jockeys with such language that we
all had picked our favorites by the time the races began. My eye fell upon his small but chunky hands, and it was easy to imagine him guiding a racehorse. The children of the family adored David; indeed, they were enchanted by him and his stories and the curiosity of his own diminutive person. Sometimes as he spun his stories he called a child by name, as though the story were just for him or her.

  Nonetheless, I was glad when it was time to set down the pallets, and I wrote the short legal document, witnessed by David, authorizing Roger Pack to sell my farm.

  CHAPTER 96: Forest Murmurs

  THE NEXT MORNING, David and I had gone but a mile when I felt the weather warming, and I pushed back my hood to free my head to the air. As each day passed, David leading Milk in a northeasterly course, I could feel spring creeping along behind us. She, too, needed a guide, I thought. Often I glanced back on the trail to see if greenery was in pursuit. After a week of progress—we had slept at a cabin with a family named Mackensie—when I came out the door, I saw that spring had caught up with us in the night, and her net of green was flung over the brown grasses and the bare twigs of the trees.

  Along our way, people were surprised to see us—a young woman on a white donkey led by a dwarf—but they were unfailingly hospitable. One little girl asked me if I was a preacher lady. She was disappointed to learn that I was only a traveler. “Bet you could preach,” she said. I told her I was a seamstress, and I could show her how to make some fancy stitches if she liked. So I asked David to lend me the silver thimble he had got from Susan. I took out some bright floss and showed the child how to pull the six-ply apart into two-ply, and how to make cross-stitch, and feather stitch, and seed stitch, and French knots. She loved the French knots the most and laughed out loud when she saw them, like miniature popcorn. I, too, laughed aloud, for the first time since Liberty died.

  I told Carol she might decorate her collars and cuffs with such stitchery, and while she stood there, still and solemn, I slowly circled her, embroidering a pretty scallop trim for her collar. Of course her mother had a needle, but I gave the sweet girl two twists of floss, spring green and daffodil yellow, to make things pretty with. As I was about to remount Milk, I noticed that Carol’s eye fell on my puffy muff, which dangled from the saddle horn. I gave it to her and told her she might embroider flowers on it so that whenever she looked down at her hands in winter, she would remember spring.

  “Forest Murmurs”

  David and I left the Falls of the Ohio–Lexington Road to cut north toward Cincinnati along the old Buffalo Trace. Once we passed a small band of Choctaw Indians. Four braves stood along the path, with their arms folded over their chests. I followed David’s example and did not look at them, except with the corner of my eye. They were immobile as tree trunks, and both we and they pretended the other did not exist.

  Once we passed a family whose skins were gray. Gaunt and hungry looking, they sat beneath the long golden fronds of a willow tree. Their hair was dirty and matted, and they scratched as though they had lice. The gray hue to their skin was caused by a layer of dirt and grime long left undisturbed; it had spread out evenly over their faces and necks and hands, like a gray envelope. A little bright-eyed boy ran out from the group toward us and asked if we had any food. I placed a package of biscuits into his gray hand. When I looked back at them, the willow fronds curtained them off.

  The greenery that had started out as mere dots and dashes, which at a distance looked like a hazy net hanging over the earth, now broadened into real leaves and blades of grass. These were not palms, of course, but there was jubilation in the spring that made me think of Palm Sunday.

  I felt now at perfect ease with David and Milk. As the weather grew warmer, I preferred that we stop by ourselves, instead of buying a bed in a cabin. David would erect a little hut from saplings over which we flung a tarpaulin and before which we’d have a warming fire. With Milk tethered nearby, we boiled corn and threw in bits of the sacred ham. After supper, by the flickering flames, I sometimes read from my mother’s volumes of Keats or Words worth. I had brought along only two books, but I had placed the others in the sea chest, and asked Roger Pack to send the chest to me, when he could, by paddlewheeler. I thought that I would put the books from home in a special place in the Nantucket library, by themselves on the mantel.

  David found the poetry almost as impenetrable to his understanding as if it were written in a foreign language. After each line, whose meaning had been clear to me since childhood, he would say, “Now what does that mean?” After my exegesis, he would ask that I read the line again, and even then, sometimes, the words did not fall into meaning for him. Occasionally I would turn the tables on him (as Margaret Fuller had done when introducing me to the German language) and ask him to guess the meaning. Such answers were often painfully askew, though we dealt only in English.

  “I get part of it,” David said once, “but I need you for digging out the deeper meaning.”

  These smoky evenings were as pleasant as anything could be. My strength was not entirely with me, though, and I continued to ride on Milk. David took it on himself to rehabilitate me, and once in the morning and once in the afternoon he would ask me to walk a bit.

  “Do you think Milk is tired?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I be. I’ll just ride a bit myself.”

  During such times, I led. Once we passed a foot peddler with David up on Milk. As we passed, the peddler muttered, “My, what a beard on a child!”

  I began to giggle, and when I looked up at David, he was smiling broadly, too, all his nice white teeth showing between his mustache and beard. I recalled noticing his teeth—he had smiled slightly and continuously as he spoke—when he told the racing stories to the Pack children.

  There was something about David’s being small and yet a full-grown and strong man that I came to like very much. I could rely upon him, but he never assumed the stance of dominance so common in men speaking to women. Yet he was not shy, nor even particularly gentle. Once I saw him hit Milk sharply on the nose, when the donkey had insisted on cropping a particularly juicy-looking bunch of grass by the wayside. David’s fist was as authoritative with his world as any man’s, but he being small, his hand and fist were also smaller. He was normal in every way, a friend.

  To my senses, the spring sang both lullaby and reverie. I was both soothed and alerted by what my eyes saw and my ears heard and my skin felt. Merely breathing the fresh air wafted on us by the surrounding sweet gum and maple, the creekside sycamores, was a pleasure. My hands felt fresh in the moist spring air. Sometimes Milk’s feet crushed mint or chamomile, and my nostrils feasted on that natural perfume. My menses had not reestablished themselves yet, and I traveled like a young girl free of sexuality. I absorbed every beautiful detail of the Kentucky forest. Here I was in harmony. And the steady clip-clop of Milk’s hoofs and David’s high, reedy whistle were all a part of the enchantment.

  I thought of the storm at the Lighthouse that had blinded me and how beautiful was the world when I could see again. In childbirth, my own life had hung in the balance, and now I had it back again. I lifted my chin and sucked in life, heavily, with both nostrils. When crows cawed, I would caw back at them, and when cardinals rolled an ornamental note, the tip of my tongue trilled reply.

  I hoped that David was as happy as I was. I knew that I was neither kith nor kin to him—indeed, I paid him to guide me—but still I hoped the forest magic spoke to him. For my part, I could not imagine a more perfect companion. The first time I mocked a raucous crow, David merely turned his large head, glanced back over his small shoulder, and grinned.

  The last night we camped, he unpacked the wolf skin and laid it out for himself to sit on. How benign that flat head looked now, as it lay on the ground. The vacant eyes were mere wobbly holes, the shiny nose an innocent. I sat across the little fire from him with the sapling lean-to, like a scoop, to catch the heat at my back.

  “The river’s clear of debris,” he said. “You could ta
ke a steamer now, if you like.”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned around the flames to hand me something. It was the silver thimble.

  “If ever you see Susan again, give it back to her for me.”

  “And her gold?” I said mischievously. I stuck the thimble on the tip of my middle finger.

  “Well, I must have that.”

  I leaned over and tapped him in the middle of the forehead with the thimble.

  “Shall I pay you now?”

  He nodded, and I counted out the agreed-on sum, which he promptly pocketed. Then he stretched himself on the wolf skin, straightening out his short legs quite the same way a man with long legs straightens his.

  “You watch me all the time,” he said, “to see if I am different.”

  I only nodded, for it was true.

  “I’ve told you a lie or two.”

  “How so?”

  “The woman with the children. She’s not my wife. She’s my sister.”

  “But you make your home together?” I did not want to think of David’s not having a home. I cared little that he had lied. He nodded affirmation. Sensing that he had a story to tell, I asked him how it was that he and his sister had come together in their living arrangement, and were the children his sister’s or his own?

  “I would never marry nor risk the chance of children. I would not bring another dwarf child into the world to face what I done faced. But she did. She’s a bit taller, like I said. And a full-sized man was the father of George and Martha. He liked my sister’s littleness well enough. He could pick her up with one hand if he wanted to. Shake her till her ears bled.”

  He looked at the campfire rather than at me as he spoke, and the shadows of the flames rippled across his face like insubstantial whips.