“If ye did not try to walk upon irregular rocks or the beach—”
“Ahab will go where Ahab decides to go, Una.” He did not speak unkindly, but patiently, for he loved me. I am sure he loved me then. “Note this.” He reached in the pocket of his nightshirt and held up a slender glass tube, closed with a cork. “ ’Tis sand of Nantucket. I scooped it up just before that minion of Moby Dick betrayed me.”
“The whale’s minion?”
“The leg! the leg!” He pointed to the spare one, a disembodied bone, standing in the corner. “I do not trust the ivory.’Twas the devil-cousin of this bone that betrayed me. My head dashed against stone? driftwood?—found senseless, brought home senseless.”
Stem the tide—the rage of Ahab would not be stemmed. He had no wish to harm me, but I was battered by his raging. Bruised into quietness. His finger shook as he pointed at the new leg standing in the corner.
“ ’Twas the shaft that bruised the groin—it was my splintered leg has sent me back groaning to bed for these last days before my leaving. It did not pierce the groin—no. But mocks me freshly to incapacity all the same. Yes. That incapacity that so gores my spirit. But here’s Nantucket”—he waved the vial again drawn from his pocket—“though Moby Dick send me to the ocean floor, I shall triumph—remember that—for I shall be buried in Nantucket soil.”
“Ye could have a wooden leg!” I exclaimed. “Ye could pursue every whale but Moby Dick.”
“Nay, nay.” He contemplated the vial of sand. “Moby Dick is the King of Dragons, Una. Too many Nantucketeers—he has devoured too many of us.”
“Let some younger knight take up the battle.” I could have bitten off my tongue to say such a thing. Nights he lay beside me, he had muttered, Injury or age? and I had kissed his face slowly and more slowly till he slept.
Now he looked at me. Now his face softened. “My girl-wife,” he said quietly.
I stepped toward him, my tears ready to fall.
“Stay.” He held up his hand. His gaze moved back to the ivory leg in the corner, a virgin leg, yet untried. “No, it is ivory, bone of his bone, that will carry me to revenge.” Suddenly he raged again, “What is revenge but extravagant justice?” He did not look to me for answer. He opened his own jaw, curled down his lip, showed his lower teeth, became what he hated—the sperm whale. His body grotesquely lunged itself upward as far as it could, as leviathan heaves itself from water to air, yet twists its body, eyes its adversary. “Moby Dick! Vanquished! Dead!” Ahab sank back into his bed, his gaze still fastened on the leg standing in the corner.
I stepped between him and the bone.
“Ahab, husband.” My voice shook, not with fear of him but with fear of failing to persuade him. Only the words of my father came to me, “ ‘Vengeance is mine. I will repay,’ thus saith the Lord.”
“Yes,” Ahab said, exhausted by his passion. He closed his eyes. “I will repay.”
Something like the smile he had always reserved for me rippled over his lips.
CHAPTER 116: Christmas Eve
IN THE SWIRLING FOG, on Christmas Eve, I walked with Ahab to the wharf for his third voyage since our marriage. Each step forward was agony to me, a hideous mistake. Ahab’s ivory leg tapped on the stones, and the sound rang and echoed in the street.
“Well, it is not the sound of a coffin hammer,” Ahab said. “Not mine. Perhaps it bespeaks a coffin for Moby Dick.”
“He is but a beast.” I envisioned the long, Arctic shape—now made of ice, now pale as the mist around us. Such a mist could conceal a white whale, could conceal the Pequod. Let us be lost in fog; let us wander lost till reasonableness be found.
Ahab’s whisper was like the release of angry steam. “Dismasted, I am. Unmanned. I leave ye as I swore never to do, unless ye wished it, with an empty womb.” Ahab leaned heavily on my shoulder.
“We have our Justice. He is enough.” I heard the whine in my voice and replaced it with firmness. “I am happy and complete in him and in you.”
“Well, I shall have a second kind of Justice. Not with any woman. With the sea. She shall open her thighs and yield up the whale to me. By thunder, she shall.”
“Aim your harpoon at your own obsession,” I urged. There was the great gray hulk of the Pequod. “Fragment this monomania.” Firmly I grasped him round the waist. Would that my arm were a monkey-rope, that whaling device that insures the man on the cutting stage from slipping off into the jaws of the sharks.
He said nothing, but his hard hand squeezed my shoulder.
“My husband, I shall pray for you,” I said desperately.
“What, religious?” He glanced down at me. The fog obscured objects ten feet away, as though they were shrouded in a whitish veil.
“Nay. But I cannot help my prayers for you. They tumble out. They are but ardent hopes and wishes.”
The golden-haired gaoler materialized from the mist, tipped his hat to us, and tried to pass.
“Hold, man,” Ahab said. “You look to be a man without a grudge. How can that be, when Ahab’s heart is all grudge and malice? Tell thy bright secret, for ye emerge from this mist and fog like some bright thing.”
“I go to fetch Mrs. Maynard. My wife is about to deliver our fourth child.”
“Heaps of gold, heaps of gold,” Ahab muttered bitterly. “Give me your hand, man. Nay, not to steady me. Hand in hand. A man to a man. Ye spoke of your wife. Look beside me. Here is a wife! Mark her.”
All bewildered, Isaac looked at me, refused evasion in his gaze.
“Not now,” Ahab said. “For later. Come, Una.”
The ghostly mist and fog thickened as we approached the water. Tap—tap—tap, we walked, and I heard many feet about us, strangely furtive. Suddenly Ahab reached out and grabbed a shadow. “Fedallah,” he hissed.
“All is as you have instructed,” the man replied and twisted away into the pale darkness.
Ahab took no further step. “Tell the boy, wife, I will yet come again to rock him on his horse, and I will play with him again from my chair. Don’t let him forget me. I’ll come again to dance and dandle him between two strong hands.” Ahab smacked his palms together. “Tell him good stories of me, whitewashed stories, of cannibal old me.” He nodded toward a whitish wall of mist. “Yon group of yellow men—I would speak to them.”
“I see no group.”
“There, scurrying in the fog. My special crew. My secret crew. I shall pack ’em in the hold.”
“Not the forecastle?” I could detain him with questions. There were thousands to be asked.
“We’ll part now, Una.” He sighed as though he were fetching up words that were known but needed to be uttered. “My infirmity has embarrassed me; know that my heart is yet a man’s, and I love thee and cherish thee.”
“And will you look at the moon, the benign, serene moon, and ask Luna to mirror your love to distant Una?”
“Aye, aye. I did that before. I’ll not forget thee. Nor thy fresh bread, dainty dishes, juicy berries.” Here he grappled me to him—not the fond and loving embrace I had known before, but a desperate clenching. “Moby Dick slain, I shall return to you not a whole man, but more than I was, avenged, puissant, all puissance.” He hurried on in his speech, his lips in my hair, his voice the rumbling of his thoughts. “But Una, if the bitter time comes when it would be best for thee to forget me, do it.”
I did not try to contradict him; he regarded his own mood and thought as law. The tears came to my eyes. I reached up in the white mist to kiss him. “Peace be with you.”
I pulled my cloak around me—winter was full upon us—and walked homeward in white confusion. I berated myself: I should have spoken better. I pictured my heart upon a platter. If only I could have rightly presented him my heart. Would it have given me the power to convince, gladly would I have eaten my heart. Let my mouth gush with blood if that were a lubricant for language. As my feet came down on the paving, I bit my tongue to punish it, till it bled.
CHAPTER 117: A Last
Glimpse of the Pequod: Christmas Day
I SLEPT but ill that night, alone, while my husband slept cabined, his ship at the wharf. I dreamed of a medieval castle bedecked with pine and holly. Before a roaring fire, a minstrel played the lute and sang carols, but his music was deadened by a great pounding. A battering ram assaulted the castle door. I ran down stone steps to the door, which, at that instant, splintered, with a rush of water, and the mighty head of the white whale broke through.
It was not yet six in the morning in Nantucket and there was no sign of dawn. Mrs. Maynard came. I dressed, donned my wolf-trimmed cloak, and hurried down to the wharf. The white mist continued to hang about the streets, and I was cold. I saw the Pequod, still at the wharf.
“Avast,” I heard someone call out, but it was not to me. Vaguely in the fog, I saw three men, one detaining the other two.
“Going aboard?” the first one asked.
“Hands off, will you,” one of the men replied. His back was to me, so I heard his words only spottily. But he and his companion were, indeed, about to board the Pequod, their traps being already aboard, apparently. In a jaunty, defiant manner, the sailor spoke of venturing to the Indian and Pacific oceans. He has no idea, I thought, of those vast immensities of water.
“Ye be going thus, be ye?” The lone man seemed to mock the adventurer and his silent companion. “Coming back afore breakfast?” The speaker was Elijah, a crazed wharf man who fancied himself a reincarnation of his biblical namesake.
“He’s cracked, Queequeg,” the sailor said. “Come on.” The sailor’s voice was hearty, but it had the veneer of civilization to it.
Then I glimpsed the face of the man addressed—Queequeg, not the speaker—and that visible face was shockingly inscribed with tattoos, a South Sea Islander. He carried his harpoon. The natural complement to Daggoo and Tashtego—a triumvirate of pagan harpooners! This harpooner and his well-spoken companion started to move off toward the Pequod, but Elijah halloaed them again. I heard the sailor repeat, “Never mind him, Queequeg, come on.”
The two men did walk on, but Elijah continued to speak to the mist: “Oh! I was going to warn ye against—but never mind—it’s all one, in the family, too.” (I felt jolted; did he know I was at hand?) “Sharp frost this morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.”
“Sir,” I called to him. “What warning would you give those men?”
“Mrs. Ahab, ain’t it? All in the family, ye too? Ahab boarded last night. I saw ye kiss on the street like a harlot. Well, I should think ye’d know.”
“Know what?”
“The cabin door’s locked from the inside. I tried it. He’ll not let ye in, or any Christian soul. I heard him gnashing his teeth in there.” Elijah had a cruel pirate face.
“I only came to see the ship. I’ve had my farewell with Ahab.”
“That ye have.”
I drew back from Elijah and went home for breakfast. Mrs. Maynard and I played with Justice till late in the morning. Then once more, I put on my cloak. I would see the Pequod once more, if not her captain.
The Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf and waited in the harbor. Aunt Charity was coming off in a whaleboat. Soon she stood with me on the wharf and watched as her brother Captain Bildad and then Captain Peleg appeared on the ship’s deck. Peleg’s words to the first mate carried over the water: “Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure all is right? Muster all hands, aft here—blast ’em! Captain Ahab is ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh?”
Charity whispered in my ear, “I took Stubb a nightcap—he’s my brother-in-law, ye know. And an extra Bible for the steward. I’ve ransacked my mind for what else might be needed, but truly I’m content. They’re well supplied.” She clasped her white hands over her black cloak and leaned back into her heels with satisfaction.
Bildad took his position as harbor pilot, and Peleg swaggered and swore about the deck as if he were commander: “Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!” and the crew sprang to the windlass, fitted the handspikes, and began to weigh anchor. I saw Queequeg was among those at the handspikes, and also the sailor, his face concealed by the slouch of his hat, who had companioned the Polynesian. Unfortunately, that slouch-hat sailor paused in his work, and Captain Peleg’s foot delivered a swift poke to his rear.
“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” Peleg roared. He pronounced the word marchant the better to express his contempt. “Spring, spring and break thy backbone! I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog!”—I had heard the Polynesian’s name to be Queequeg. “Spring thy Scotchman, spring Green Pants, spring your eyes out, Quohog!”
To those he kicked, I thought ruefully, “Merry Christmas.”
Pip was running about the deck, peeking over the rails, for Ahab had kept his promise, despite his black and narrow mood, to take Pip as a cabin boy. After Ahab had learned to walk on his ivory leg, he had interviewed Pip, to see if it was still his inclination to go a-whaling. Pip had been steadfast, but after he left that interview with Ahab, his whole little body had shivered like a struck tambourine. He whispered to me, “Cap’in Ahab done been saved from fire, like Pip. Cap’in Ahab done been tied to the stake. Who cut him down? Pip don’t know.”
This primitive appraisal of Ahab had smote my heart: I had had so little balm to offer.
My bruised heart felt wrapped in chains and anchors, lay strangled in the deep.
Followed by the small sailboat—to bring back Bildad and Peleg—the Pequod seemed to shrink as she left me. A carol chant silently recited itself:
I saw three ships come sailing in,
come sailing in, come sailing in;
I saw three ships come sailing in,
on Christmas Day in the morning.
But it was a worthless charm. My eyes beheld, that Christmas Day, but one ship, sailing out.
CHAPTER 118: The Jeroboam Returns
THAT VERY DAY, even though it was Christmas, Justice spent an hour in the cupola, watching for his father’s return. I could not dissuade him. I told him clearly it would be next Christmas and beyond before his father would come back, and there was no hope in watching for him. But the boy had something of his father’s—and his mother’s—stubbornness about him.
I thought that I would let him exhaust himself with the vigil, and during the days that followed, he often went aloft. I myself did not return to the cupola for a fortnight. When I did, I found the boy in the room so forlorn in his watch that I told him he might bring up his rocking horse and whatever other toys he liked, and that I myself would use the room to sew in. With light coming in the windows from every direction, it was an excellent place to sew, though too small for laying out cloth and cutting. Throughout the spring, Justice and I were good companions in the cupola. After a few months, I preferred that small, light place to any other room in the house.
Sometimes I would raise a window, lean out, and think, No matter how far away Ahab is, I am now two feet closer. And to get closer still, I would hurry down from the cupola to walk the wharf again, my eyes leaping to the horizon, seeking with a shrewd, focused gaze the shape of Ahab’s ship. Those days, I scarcely wanted our boy to grow, but to keep him unchanged at each darling moment till Ahab would return. I thought cheerful words to myself: He has survived a thousand lowerings.
My skeptical self countered: But this time he goes with only one leg.
The hopeful, loving wife and mother, watching our young son playing with his ivory toys, added: Ahab knows well the limits of the ivory leg. On the Pequod he fits it in a pivot hole when he would steer. And in the whaleboat, there’s a notched place in the prow for him to wedge against, and the hull of his whaleboat is double-sheathed to withstand the pressure of the timbertoe.
But I wished he would not go into the whaleboat.
I felt it my duty to be calm and assured for the sake of our son. Ahab was beyond my help, and though I had spoken of praying fo
r him, no prayer burst spontaneously from my lips. My constantly serene behavior did, after a time, soothe my inner self. I remembered the strange evenness I had seen in Maria Mitchell, at our first meeting, and attributed to her Quaker upbringing. So during Ahab’s third voyage, I made something of a Quaker woman of myself, in placid manner and even temperament. My greatest joy, after mothering, was my sewing, and while I stitched, my mind lay smooth and quiet.
Thus not only spring passed (with Justice’s fifth birthday), and summer with its little outings, but fall and winter and spring again. As each season turned, I wrote a letter to Ahab, and sent it by whatever ship was at hand.
My son continued his watch at the window for his father through all these seasons. In the warm weather, we spent our hour in the cupola in the morning, with the sashes up. In cooler seasons, we climbed aloft in the late afternoon when the room had had time to collect and multiply whatever warmth of the sun came there, and we left open the trapdoor so that heat from the house rose up. Thus we kept tolerably warm, or cool, as the season required.
The cupola was like a miniature or a sampler of the house, offering a roof over our heads, windows, and a doorway of its own though the door was in the floor. Now it was as imaginatively stocked as if Aunt Charity had provided: holding my sewing basket, a little standing bookcase, an ivory stool (the duplicate of one Ahab had taken on the Pequod), a lap writing desk (equipped under its lid with extra paper, quills, ink, sand, and blotting paper), pillows, a small rug, a quilt or two, a basket of snacks, a corner full of toys. Once I wrote to David Poland, at his sister’s, that my cupola and my house provided material for a meditation on little and big, with the small really holding the heartbeat of the large, though its space was only a fraction of the volume bound by the whole house.
THE SPRING of my son’s sixth birthday, I glanced out to see something of a commotion on the wharf. The whaler the Jeroboam of Nantucket had returned. Justice did not remark it, but I told him, our hour being almost over, that I had bethought myself of a pressing errand and needed to go down, and he should go across to the judge’s when he finished his sea-watch.