Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  CHAPTER 133: The Woolsack

  AFTER THE PERSEID meteor shower of August, we entered into a quiet time of grief and into the routines of our lives. Justice and Jim were much to themselves outdoors. They learned to swim and to manage a small boat. When summer turned to autumn and the winds began, sometimes they rode the horses along the beach and came in rosy-cheeked, but strangely silent. I remember the boys were always tearing their coats, and we reset sleeves, sewed many buttons on, and stitched new bottoms into pockets. If they were fighting, they never did it in our view. Jim was older, but Justice was more compact and quick. Their garments seemed equally ripped. Mary and I had little of chatter as we sat by the hearth through the fall and winter, knitting and piecing quilt tops. Sometimes I wondered if Mary had unspoken blame to lay at my feet, since Ahab had been captain of the ship on which her husband was lost.

  Both the gradual coming on of spring—signaled by the greening and then the pinkening of the rose canes that lay atop Mary’s cottage—and a definite event marked the end of our mourning. At shearing time, Justice and Jim were still small enough to fit inside the woolsack but large enough to have the requisite weight for speedily packing down the wool. When they both asked to be taken to the spring shearing, I remember rising up from my chair and stretching.

  “Then you won’t have to oil my shoes,” Jim said to his mother. Since the news of his father’s death, Jim’s face had had a strained whiteness, a tautness as though some structure under the skin might snap. It seemed so to me now—as though he were starving and asking for bread instead of for a diversion.

  “They say it gets terrible hot inside,” Mary answered with a gentle smile.

  “We can stand it! We can stand it!” Justice insisted. He began to jump up and down on the spot to demonstrate his stamina. Here was practical energy, ready for purposeful harnessing.

  “Well, of course,” I said, taking over the decision. I looked at Mary. “Why not?”

  She stood up, put her knitting in her chair, yawned and stretched. “Why not?” she echoed.

  When we reached the shearing pens, a festival atmosphere made me glad we’d come. From the back of a wagon someone sold baked goods with dips of preserves. I saw Abram Quary with a rack of smoked fish tidbits and, remembering his kindness to Kit, made it a point to buy and to compliment him on the flavor. “Smoked in apple wood?” I asked, and he made one swift nod down. Many families with boys had come, as we had, so that the boys could pack down the wool, and their mothers and sisters had come as well with picnic lunches. Captain and Mrs. Maynard had driven out with a whole load of boys belonging to their neighbors. Boys who owned more than one pair of shoes carried them along in hand as they ran to get in line.

  Already-shorn sheep, pink and bleating, were running around in their pen. They corkscrewed into the air and skipped, light without their winter wool. One gleeful little girl pointed at the fleshy sheep with one hand and covered her mouth with the other. “They’re naked, they’re naked,” she giggled. On the other side of the shearing floor, the unshorn sheep milled about in their pens. Really, with their fat paddings of wool all about their bodies, they scarcely seemed to be the same species as the skinny, bare animals.

  The woolsack, perhaps twelve feet long, was held up within a tall wooden frame, against a high platform. Ladders made it possible to mount the scaffold. With a pulley system at one end, loose wool spread on a canvas square was hoisted up by the four grommeted corners to the platform. A stuffer-man threw the wool into the woolsack. And inside the woolsack—we could see the long white length of it pulsating as we approached—a boy jumped up and down to pack the wool for shipping off-island. As he pounded down the loose curds of wool, the lanolin penetrated and waterproofed the leather of his shoes, which would be put away for winter wearing.

  The boys vied to see who could pack down the greatest weight of wool into the volume of a standard bag, and each bag was weighed and labeled. Anew hoop, perfectly round, hanging on a peg, would reward the boy this year whose legs packed the wool most tightly.

  The long white sack gyrated in its rack, and boys yelled encouragements. “Harder! Faster! Hurry! Let me, let me, if you can’t!” Justice and Jim hurried to get in line. Packing down the wool was hard, hot work. As a boy tamped the wool and new loose wool was thrown down the open mouth of the sack, he rose higher on what he had trod. At the top, he grasped the frame for balance as he danced. Suddenly Justice returned to me.

  “What is it?” I asked my son.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. He looked at the woolsack with a hard, appraising stare. “It resembles Moby Dick,” he said. Then he ran back to Jim and whispered in his ear. Jim seemed stricken. The other boys in the line were practicing their leaping, challenging each other for the highest vertical jump, but Justice resumed his quiet, calculating stance, arms crossed over his chest, hands hidden, and Jim imitated him.

  When Mary and I approached the boys, she asked enthusiastically, “Do you think it will be fun? Don’t you want to practice?”

  “We will win,” Justice said.

  “I will win,” Jim said.

  Justice did not contradict him. “For now, we save our strength,” Justice said.

  Too small for a whole whale, to me the woolsack more resembled the head of a whale, which might be bailed for the case oil. And here was oil again, but innocent. No planking awash with blood. The shearers were experts and the pink skin of the sheep was only occasionally nicked and bloodied. I looked at the tent and picnic tables, sniffed in the festive atmosphere.

  “I think it’s like a whale’s belly,” Justice said, nodding at the long sack. “We’ll be inside.”

  Jim nodded in agreement, his pale face stretched with tension.

  “We must leave them to it,” Mary said to me and took my elbow.

  We walked to the shearers and watched a sheep come through the chute. One man with small shears trimmed the tags from around the eyes and ears. Next, a nearby man, sitting on a short stool, up-ended the sheep between his knees and began to cut loose the cloud of fleece. Beyond him, the woolsack jerked and trembled from the exertions of the lad inside.

  “A boy could make himself sick jumping so hard,” I said to Mary.

  “They’re strong boys,” she said. I wondered she had not seen the strain in Jim’s face. Perhaps she had not noticed Justice’s remarks.

  Wearing the red-checked gingham dress I had made for her some years before, Mrs. Maynard came to chat with us. As I always did when I saw her in this dress, my eye followed the tucks down the bodice to be sure I had sewn them perfectly straight. Of course, it had been easy to keep the lines straight with the checks as a guide; still, I always enjoyed their perfection. “Kit’s mother used to bring baking to the shearing,” she said. “It beat this.” She thrust a curl of cinnamon roll into my mouth. I expected the familiar taste and texture I had learned from Kit, but this bread was heavier and had not been made with enough butter.

  I watched Jim put Justice ahead of him to mount the platform. A load of wool was dumped into the flaccid sack, and Justice dropped out of sight on top of it. Quickly whole snowloads of the creamy, curdy wool were thrown down on top of him. I could tell that he used his hands to brush it off his shoulders and send it to his feet. His knuckles made little bulges against the side of the bag. I was pleased that he had a steady pace to his stamping; there was nothing of frenzy and all of method in his work. Sometimes his knees bulged the sides of the bag. His head was a long time emerging at the top of the sack. His black curls, wet with sweat, stuck to his forehead; his cheeks were flushed. He grasped the struts of the framework and danced himself higher and higher out of the sack, like a puppet on strings. Best of all, his eyes were merry.

  Soon I knew why: his bag was the heaviest so far.

  As Jim leapt into the bag, for his turn, he drew up his knees and thrust his legs down with the utmost force on the pile waiting in the bottom. Mary’s back was turned, and I began to debate with myself whether
I should share my anxiety with her. Not now, I decided. There’s nothing untoward about zeal. But I didn’t want the boys to exhaust themselves. So thorough was Jim’s tamping down of the wool that some of the boys grew impatient and taunted him to speed up. Jim’s head emerged pink and grinning. Excited and determined. His fair hair was dark against his scalp. He stamped on the wool as though it needed to be crushed and killed.

  Jim’s bag topped Justice’s in weight. They stood at the back of the line together, each happy in the accomplishment of the other, picking off stray strands of wool from each other’s sleeves, stooping to touch each other’s lanolin-soaked shoes.

  When I saw my minister, the Reverend Mr. Peal, arrive by buggy with his wife and an older woman, I went over to greet them. Learning the older woman was his mother, I complimented her on her recipe for plum pudding, which I had so enjoyed from the church Christmas baking. She was a bit deaf.

  “I live in Maine now,” she said, “but I grew up here on Nantucket.” Like her son’s, her cheeks formed defined curves at the corners of her mouth, as though all she said were spoken into parentheses. “The recipe has come home when it came back here with my son.” She was obviously proud of him.

  I told her that I and my son lived at ’Sconset, and I pointed Justice out to her.

  She gasped and then blurted, “He is the very image of a boy I knew. A boy who grew up here and went to sea as a cabin boy.”

  “Mother,” the minister intervened, “Una is the widow of Captain Ahab.”

  “Ahab dead!” Her eye fastened on Justice as though he were Ahab and could not possibly be grown and dead. “I scarcely knew him,” she went on, “but I watched him, on just such a day as this. He jumped in the woolsack. Ahab won the prize that day.”

  “You must watch Justice then, too,” I said. And I invited her to come meet Mary and Mrs. Maynard and sit with us at a table under the tent. Although I tried in all ways to be sure she got a friendly homecoming at the shearing, I longed for her to tell me about Ahab—what he had been as a boy. While I waited an opportunity, I watched the boys at their work and worried to see them emerge each time with fatigue on their faces. Not only their shoes but their clothes were soaked with wool oil.

  “I’m afraid I’ve ruined my pants,” Justice said at one point, eating some of Abram Quary’s smoked fish “for strength.”

  “And what of your shirt?” I added. When I poked him, he oozed.

  “Ruined, too,” he said. The word ruined held nothing but happiness for him.

  After he went back to his jumping, the elder Mrs. Peal said, “He has your quick smile. He’s not like his father in that.”

  “You said you didn’t know Ahab well.”

  “I was probably five years older. I think I was fifteen and about to marry and move to Maine when I last saw him. It was sheep shearing, and he was about ten years old. But he was not easily forgotten.”

  “No.”

  She took my hand. “I can’t tell you much of him. He was poor. Your boy has his eyes. Not his smile, though.”

  “What kind of eyes?”

  She released my hand. “We used to say such eyes could see into the waves. See the hidden things.”

  Jim—again triumphant over Justice and all the others—came and threw himself down on the ground next to his mother’s chair. She held him out a glass of lemonade, and I could see that Mary was beginning to worry. The pulse in Jim’s neck beat at a gallop. “I don’t think Justice can tie that,” Jim said, panting. “Nobody else can. That’s for sure.” When Jim went back to the line, he sat rather than stood in place. He laid his forearms over his knees and rested his forehead there. Justice stood beside him, his arms crossed over his chest. The hectic was in Justice’s cheek and his dark eyes snapped sparks. I thought of our first day at ’Sconset, when Justice and I had wrestled in the surf and he would not quit until I said that he had won the struggle.

  “All these years,” Mrs. Peal went on, “I remember his smile. Ahab’s smile. It was so slight.”

  The description was a needle in my throat: how I had treasured Ahab’s faint smile. Just a line of a smile it had been. So special and rare.

  “When they gave him the prize,” she said, “he smiled so faintly. I was surprised. I thought he’d show more pleasure.”

  “What was the prize?” I asked.

  “Oh, I know he was glad to get it. Ahab and his mother were poor, and it was a silver coin nailed to a pole. Where the hoop hangs now.”

  My eye traveled to the shiny circle of the big hoop. But I knew it was not the hoop that either my or Mary’s boy coveted. They wanted a victory over the sack itself. They wanted to dominate it—that whalelike memento of their fathers.

  “There was one other thing I remember about Ahab,” she said. “I don’t know I should tell it.”

  “It will not hurt me,” I said. “I’d like to know what I can of him.” I spoke with false calm. I knew him all, I knew him all, my inner voice protested.

  “He was said to be a boy who had broken a promise.”

  “No,” I said. And I was offended. Despite the reassurance I had just offered. Ahab had not broken a promise: not to me, not to his son. Nor as a child. Ahab had been Ahab.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She sounded tired and sad. “They said that he had broken a promise to the Indian woman Tistig. He had promised to catch her a fish one day and instead he had gone sailing. She was like an adopted aunt to him—a friend of his mother’s. For pure pleasure, they said, he went off sailing.”

  I felt a smile of satisfaction forming on my face. What was a promise? Away to enslave the future to the past. I was glad a poor boy had seized a chance at pleasure. I thought that I would teach Justice to sail.

  “They said,” Mrs. Peal concluded, “that Tistig cursed Ahab. I don’t know for sure if it was over a broken promise. Or why she would do that.”

  JUSTICE DID TIE and slightly top Jim’s standing record, but as my boy’s face rose above the top of the woolsack, his pallor was evident. No longer ruddy, he was as pale as the wool itself. Still he tramped down the fleece. To lift his leg, to cock his knee, to thrust down—it was all will. He did not smile. He looked older as he swung onto the platform. I rushed to the foot of the ladder. When he stepped back from the last rung, he looked at me and then to Jim. “This was the last for me.”

  Jim nodded.

  I felt smitten with shame. Justice had considered my anxiety and quit. Jim swung up the ladder for his turn.

  “Oh, son,” I said, almost trembling.

  Suddenly he smiled at me. Some of the color returned to his cheek. He looked long into my eyes, as his father used to do. He took my arm and walked me away from the group. “I wanted Jim to win, Mother. He needed it more.”

  Now I smiled down at him. Justice had made his own decision. “We’ll see,” I said, proud of my boy. When Jim won, we all were glad.

  That night as I went to sleep, I knew that I had won, too, and my trophy from the sheep shearing was the image of Ahab as a boy. I imagined him holding the prize coin between his thumb and finger, flashing the silver beauty of it.

  When I told my confidant the judge about our day, he asked me if I knew that in England judges sat on a pillow of sorts called the woolsack. “Suggests agrarian origins of civilization, doesn’t it?” Then he added that he, too, had seen Ahab as a young person.

  “You never told me,” I said.

  “I was about ten, and my mother had sent me down to the wharf. A whaler was being towed out. Somehow I knew it was the first voyage for the cabin boy, who was Ahab. I suppose he was thirteen or so. He stood at the rail and waved.”

  “What else?”

  “Not much. He wore a red cap.”

  CHAPTER 134: Letter from Margaret Fuller, from England

  My Una,

  “I accept the universe”—that’s what I told Mr. Thomas Carlyle, in London.

  And that renowned writer Thomas Carlyle replied, without a shred of understanding, “Madam, y
ou had better.” ’Twas then, dear Una, I thought to write to you, for you would grasp immediately the great distance that I have come in my psyche in order to accept that which I can neither control nor alter. For me to say I accept the universe is to say that I am at peace with myself.

  And with Mr. Emerson. What a height of mind is there! What a negative depth, a bottomless abyss, of heart is there! I accept both—his assets and his abysmal deficiencies. He, not unlike Mr. Hawthorne, is distrustful of what the body has to tell us. He knows not the rapture of the physical. How then, I ask, can either of them thoroughly respond to the sublime in nature? Show them a mountain—show them Mont Blanc—and do their bodies thrill to know it? To know it biblically with their whole being, with the thighs, with the lungs, with the quickened nostrils consuming the crystalline air in great gulps. They know not great gulps of anything! They are too restrained. They fear passion, though Emerson can write that marriage is surely true to one’s nature for only a time, that marriage is mortal and should be accorded a death of its own when it no longer serves the spirit.

  Yet he fears passion! When I visited him once in Concord, having had much correspondence with him, and looking so forward to the feast of the eye upon him, for the genuine physical ear to thrill to the vibrations actually issuing from his throat and not to the “voice” that we accord the written word, to even the odor of him! (yes, for he like any animal hath an odor! oh, for a poet, an American male who would sing of this as well as of the bright abstractions!), when, in short, we came before each other IN OUR BODIES, at Concord, then he assigned me to a room. He assigned Waldo, his little son, to be postman, and he proposed that we write to one another! I controlled myself till I trembled with indignation. Yet I acquiesced. I would have me near him, if not quite with him.

  Yes, Una, Margaret must settle for near. Why? My breath would scorch him! He cannot stand up to the flood tide of passion! He cannot weather even the forerunning, tumultuous clouds of an electric storm!