Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

“I found a wolf cub and gentled it, in secret. But it was to do my will. I trained it like a hunting dog. When my wolf was full-grown, I sicced it one night on Norman—that was his name—when he was near to home. My sister found him in the morning on the path, his throat tore out.”

  My earliest image of David, when I was in my labor, came back to me, how he had scuttled about my cabin trying to sniff out Susan, how on all fours he looked under the bed, how when he stood up he had seemed a magic beast, as much wolf as man. I said nothing, but sat quietly on my side of the fire, looking at him. Throats? I could tell him something of that. Captain Fry rose up, stood in the whaleboat next to the clumsy cleat, his sword in his hand. The hilt came down on Chester’s curls, the tip lost not a moment lodging under the captain’s own ear. I looked at this small man beyond the campfire, lying on his side with his head propped by spread hand, forearm, bent elbow, and said nothing. After a moment, he raised his eyes to look into mine as he spoke again.

  “I told her and the kids that I would kill the wolf that killed their father. So I took my rifle, went into the woods. I called my wolf, and when he come to me, I killed him. This is his pelt between me and the ground.”

  That he had killed the innocent wolf, obedient to his training and his nature, shocked me more than his human murder. The smoke from my father’s rifle as he stood in the doorway had drifted back into the cabin when he shot King.

  “My ways might not be as powerful or bold as a normal man’s, but I swear the man deserved to die. Once I asked him not to mistreat Nora, and he just sneered at me. ‘You gonna stop me?’

  “I did stop him. There is ways to compensate. The weak of the world should remember that. Your Susan, she compensated for her weakness with gold. Once money and death was invented, the weak only need to use their wits.

  “When I dragged the bloody wolf to the door, Nora and her kids took me as a hero. I was a hero, for I killed Goliath, but not the hero they thought.”

  Again I said nothing, but I felt for this small man, and I hoped that the gaze between us conveyed some sympathy, for I didn’t know what to say. I have not spilled blood, but I have drunk it. I could have said that. After a moment, he averted his eyes, stared again at the flame, and spoke even more softly.

  “So perhaps it’s not so hard for me, after all, to be gone from home. She’s only my sister. Perhaps it’s harder for your Ahab.”

  “He’s sailed a long time by himself. Many years.”

  “There’s no man leaves his wife, I’m sure, but what jealousy gnaws him. Is she faithful? It eats him every night.”

  I offered the counterpart anxiety for any sailor’s wife: “Ahab sails the South Seas. He has gone there before. He has lived there before, with the women, yes, long ago, and he came ashore and hunted with the savage warriors.” I did not say, Why do you suppose my husband speaks of himself, in the midst of domesticity, as ‘cannibal old me’? “But Ahab would not take an island wife now. I trust that.”

  David said nothing. He poked small wood into the flames.

  “Was it true—you told me that you wanted to go home and buy normal-sized furniture for the children?” I prodded.

  “Yes. There’s no reason they should be cramped sitting on a little box that fits me.”

  “No Procrustean beds?”

  “You’ll have to explain that.”

  I did, and our conversation grew lighter, but all the time I told the myth of Procrustes, I was picturing a short-legged table and little chair where David sat when he was home. Diminutive furniture for the murderer. Well, he’d said boxes. No doubt he had had a diminutive rifle to point at his faithful wolf. Did he think he might dispatch the wolf within, his own rage, by pulling the trigger in the actual world? And on a brute, who was his friend. I knew better: that I was then, beside the campfire, the Una who had been cannibal in the whaleboat; and ever would I be the same. There is no exorcism or expiation, I could have said. But I would not tell him my own story—how strangely it had come about that fate had provided a fine home for a cannibal.

  “Let’s eat the last of the jam cake,” I said.

  When I handed him the larger portion, he said, “But I’m the smaller person. I don’t need as much.”

  “ ‘Reason not the need,’ ” I quoted Lear’s statement to his unfeeling daughters. “Besides, I know how to make another jam cake, when I’m home in Nantucket. And you don’t.”

  “You’re a person,” he said, “who makes me think about things. From being around you. I don’t mean the poetry. It’s you yourself. Always taking things in. Always thinking. I like the way you think.”

  His sentence made me gasp. So had another little person, just his size, but young and girlish—Frannie—so had she once said this to me. Suddenly I missed her terribly. I wished that her words could call her back, that she could sit here by the fire, in the freshness of the Kentucky spring, listen with David and me to Milk cropping off the grass. Speak whatever was on her own innocent and inexperienced mind into this flickering circle.

  But I did not speak what was in my own heart. I had told Charlotte my horror, but she was another woman.

  “Because I’m around you, I think new thoughts,” David said.

  “What were you thinking?” I asked.

  “About the big and the small. It’s occupied my mind much of my life. Walking along today, I thought how there was ways of being big and small that had nothing to do with size.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. But it surprised me that the idea was only now occurring to him. Such a simple idea, like the nugget of truth in a homily from some backwoods preacher.

  “Take you,” he went on. “It’s your nature to be tolerant. I am a murderer. But you swallowed that right down. It wasn’t hard for you in the least. But for me, it’s hard to be tolerant. I can’t tolerate the idea that somebody stupid or somebody with a black skin is as smart as I am.”

  “Yet I’d say Susan knew how to buy you.”

  He threw wood at the fire, and the sparks shot up like a fountain. “That sticks in my craw,” he said. “And your toleration makes me feel small. I feel the size of an ant alongside you.”

  I felt ashamed of my own reticence. “Perhaps I am tolerant of murder because I know what I myself am capable of.”

  “No, I think tolerance is in your bones. You might be able to do certain things other people can’t do because of it. Things most folk would call outrageous. Like travel with me. Few women would do that. But you say to yourself, ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m willing to take a chance with him. I want to go home.’ And so you’re off. You don’t even care what your husband might say about it. You might not even tell him.”

  “Sometimes I don’t tell things. Then later I feel I was a coward.” I wanted to tell my history, but I felt cut off from it. The loss of my child, the loss of my mother—those were worse and more immediate horrors.

  “There aren’t many rules for you. That’s the thing. You decide.”

  “I think there might really be some rules.”

  “Think there might be! Most preachers would rise up out of their graves to hear you say that. You don’t go to any church at all, do you?”

  “Well, I’ve tried the Universalists. And the Unitarians.”

  “Universalists?”

  “They say you’re saved no matter what you do. God loves his creation universally, and he won’t destroy it.”

  “So their God loves me?” I nodded. He continued, “You believe in the eternal life?”

  “I don’t know. I hope.”

  “God damn it, Una. You’re as slippery as an eel.”

  I laughed and asked him if he’d ever eaten eel.

  “River eel.”

  “In the ocean, there are eels like giant sea serpents. Sometimes boats go out to the Pacific from Nantucket to hunt them, like whaling boats.”

  “Which do you like better, the river or the ocean?” he asked but didn’t wait for an answer. “The ocean is just there. It don’t go no place
. It just comes to shore and goes back. Just bounces up and down. People have told me. But a river—now that has some direction, some purpose. It gets someplace. You can ride its back better than riding an elephant.”

  “I’ll bet the people you talked to had only seen the ocean from the shore,” I said. “There are currents in the ocean. And winds.”

  “Somebody told me the Amazon River holds its own in the ocean. A hundred miles from its mouth, you can let down a bucket in the ocean and get fresh water. I love that idea. See”—he got another wind—“that’s a big idea. Ideas are just like people. They can be big and they can be small. That’s a big one.”

  “Why is it big?”

  “It makes a shiver go down my back. That’s not all.” He sat up and crossed his ankles in front of him. “It’s an unnatural idea, unexpected. You wouldn’t think it was possible. Impossible ideas—those are the big ones.” Then he fell silent for a time.

  His enthusiasm was like that of a child suddenly allowed to speak his piece. He seemed naive. Was I arrogant enough to be amused by him? Yes, a little. But so must it have been for Margaret Fuller when I told her my naive ideas about the nature of art. But Margaret had received my ideas and responded to them with substance, not with these effortless Socratic questions of why? and what? I could not give to him as Margaret had given to me. But did he want me to? No, I thought. He wants me to listen.

  “I’ll tell you something else, Una.” Now he spoke with a note of defiance in his voice, though more quietly than ever. “When I go home, my sister and I will sleep in the same bed. Oh, we’ll put up the bundling board while the children are still awake. They have sweet snores, like little piglets, and when their little grunts get going, then we take up the board, and lie closer. Sometimes it’s her head on my shoulder, sometimes it’s mine on hers. What’s the harm in it? It’s not like husband and wife. But once, months after I done for Norman, she took the palm of my hand and laid it on her breast. She don’t mind a little touching. Nor do I.” As though to hide his face from me, he pressed his body and face against the earth, his forehead on his forearm. After a bit, his voice muffled, he continued, “But we know the limit. Then sometimes it’s best if I leave home for a while. Travel about.” He paused. “Someday I’ll come home, and she’ll be married again. I know it’s bound to happen.”

  I dared not move. So fully had he revealed himself, so trustingly, that even to twitch would have been sacrilege. When I made no reply, he stretched himself out again on the wolf skin. He looked into the flames for a while, and then just once, but long and intently, at me. Again, I made no response. He rolled to his back and closed his eyes. At length, I heard him snore, himself somewhat like a shoat.

  I retreated farther back into the lean-to and wrapped myself in my cloak. By day I had no need of it now, but it was good to have at night. David had a supreme sanity. Nothing was twisted or dodged. Murder—yes, justified, in the circumstance. Incest—no, the necessity for it was not so great that it could not be denied. What would David say of the lesser crimes—bigamy, adultery?

  Along the trail, David had stopped to carve his name on the smooth gray flank of a huge beech tree. Other travelers had left their names or initials there. I said the tree reminded me of an elephant in its girth and color. After he carved David Poland, he had walked around till he had arrived at a respectful distance, placed the tip of his knife against the bark, and asked if I would have my name engraved there.

  “Yes,” I had answered. “Una Spenser.” I was surprised, for that was no longer my name. But I let what I had said hang in the air, uncorrected, till it was cut into the tree. “And put up Milk’s name, too,” I added. “Milk Donkey.” He laughed and did so.

  Our names were not very high up, since he was small, and all the other names seemed to float in a spray above us, as though those people were our thoughts.

  “Would you put my baby’s name, too?”

  Without having to be reminded of the word, he merely nodded, and close to my name, he began the L of Liberty. The tail of the y he drew down long so that it touched the U of Una.

  AT BREAKFAST, David was quiet, and so was I. Sadly I mounted the sidesaddle—perhaps my last ride on Milk’s small back. We knew we were very close to the ferry crossing for the Ohio. “Perhaps it’s beyond that crest of cedars,” he said. “I’m not sure.” Maybe neither river nor ferry exists, I thought, but we plodded on. We were drawn toward our goal, and yet we dreaded it. At last we came to the top of the bluff, and through the donkey’s long ears I saw below us not only the landing, but a steamboat with red paddle wheel ready to depart port. Even as we watched, the whistle blew and a puff of steam drifted up.

  “Hurry!”

  “Hold on tight,” he called back, and we started down the red-clay gully. Milks at back on her haunches, and we half slid, half fell down the incline. The dwarf leapt from side to side in our gully, sticking a bit against a side, and then with his small legs rebounding. Like a spring, he compressed and bounced from side to side, pulling Milk’s reins and encouraging her to sit and slide in the central trough. I did hold on, as tightly as I could, and we raised a great cloud of red dust as we descended. Even as we slid, even in the rush and dust of all that, I thought, I have not been as honest with you as you were with me.

  At the bottom, we were full of our triumph and excited. The steamboat was as pretty as a bridal cake. I dismounted and felt strange and short as we walked toward the landing. I was sorry to be covered with dust.

  “Lean down,” David said.

  When I bent over, as though he had read my thoughts, he wiped my face with his handkerchief. I could have whispered to him, You are not alone in your infamy, as he cleaned my face. But without my having spoken, the handkerchief was gathered back into his hand, stuffed into a pocket. Quickly, he turned to unstrap my roll from Milk’s rump. “Get out your ticket money,” he told me, and leading Milk along on the dock, her feet clopping on the planks, he escorted me to a man who had emerged to accept my passage.

  With my ticket in one hand, David looked up at me and offered to shake hands. I sank down on my knees on the boards of the dock and insisted on embracing him.

  “David, I meant to tell you last night,” I whispered. “Then I grew afraid. I was afraid you would not tolerate what I have done in my life.” I could feel the eyes of the ticket-taker watching us curiously—a woman down on her knees whispering in the ear of a bearded dwarf.

  I pulled back to see what impression my words had made; the triumph left David’s face.

  “I wanted to respond to your—your trust,” my whisper whisked on, “but I could not.”

  David’s face infused with beauteous hope, he looked across the narrow space at me, his lips parting in surprise. Lovely as art, lovely as Susan showing me the indentation in the palm of her hand. What was that hope?

  “I am a cannibal,” I whispered. “In the strictest sense of the word.” No matter if it be in a loving face, when lips reveal teeth, when your lips reveal teeth, I think, “How strong? how sharp?”

  “How?” he asked, looking straight across with his amber eyes, level, into my eyes. They were the last part of his face to lose the sudden softness I had seen.

  “At sea. In an open boat.”

  He seemed stunned. I stood up, stepping awkwardly on my hem.

  Suddenly, before I got my balance, he embraced me, around the thighs, as a child might hug his mother. He looked straight up at me, his beard pressed against my dress. “I forgive you,” he said in his mellow male voice that seemed to blend God and nature. His short arms were strong as tongs about my legs.

  “And I you,” I replied.

  Then I crossed the gangplank.

  STENCILED on the white-painted side of the boat, in red letters outlined in gold, was the name of the paddle wheeler: the Lorelei.

  David Poland and I had had our good-bye, and I did not prolong it by standing at the railing. When I got inside, I sat down on the nearest chair. I could feel the great hea
rt of the boat, driven by steam, thudding under my feet. How many times, I asked myself, must I tell and be forgiven? Charlotte, David. My own heart thudded in time to the engine. Not my friend Judge Austin Lord (too much of mischief and high jinks in our gossip), not Margaret Fuller (too high in seriousness and philosophy), not my mother (for us had been communion, and communication was lesser). How was it the heart decided whom to tell? My own physical heart rushed away from the moment of my telling David. I thought of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, with his glittering eye, compelled to tell his guilty tale to the wedding guests, to anyone. I was not like that. Yet sometimes, as with Charlotte and David, my soul would have shriveled if I had not confessed. And to Ahab? Ah, he knew. He knew without having to be told.

  The sound of wood gliding through water came to my ears—I was leaving Kentucky—and I thought of the Ancient Mariner’s message: “He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small.”

  I should have quoted that to David when he was sharing his ideas about big and little. It was not transfer of coin that connected us, but life, and our need for compassion. I felt stunned, as though I had kissed him full upon the lips, so intense was the intimacy of our parting.

  The Lorelei: Appropriate for a riverboat. Margaret Fuller had told me that along the course of the Rhine River, they had named a dangerous boulder the Lorelei.

  David was standing on the dock, probably puzzling over the name of my boat as she worked her way upstream against the current.

  Ich weiss nicht…I don’t know why I’m sad. I’m going home.

  CHAPTER 97: In the Cupola

  NOT WISHING to frighten the housekeeper, I knocked at my own Nantucket door. What a glorious sound—the heavy brass pineapple, clunking against its plate.

  The door was opened almost at once, not by my yellow-haired housekeeper, but by my former employer, her sister.

  “Mrs. Macy!”

  “No,” she said, but I ignored her reply.

  “Mrs. Macy, how wonderful to see you! And where is Miss Sheffield?”