Ahab's Wife (48 page)

I
FIRST SAW
her bent, cultivating the garden. Even as my hired driver stopped the buggy, she straightened and peered to see who was arriving. In an instant, she knew me, dropped the hoe, almost stumbled over its long handle, and ran toward me with both her arms spreading out like wings. And I to her.

My mother! Found. Found again in all her softness and love, generosity and intelligence. Holding me. Almost, the pleasure in her face assumed the lines of pain.

Inside, the cabin was dark in the way log houses are, but I saw that her bed was covered with a new quilt, and a new braided rug was upon the hearth. The interior seemed at once both strange and familiar, and it held a strange quietness. Dangling from a peg on the mantel, a shiny popcorn popper glinted. After the driver placed my travel chest at the foot of the smaller bed, I watched my mother pour sassafras tea—we were together, yet caught in a strange medium of air and time that never stirred—watched her cut a slice from a loaf of bread and butter it for me. Two chairs were placed already facing each other across a table before the spring fire, but she moved her chair so that we were side by side and passed her arm around my waist.

“You are my Easter,” she said.

Only my letters from New Bedford and those borne by the
Thistle
from the
Sussex
had ever reached either her or the Lighthouse folk, from whom she had received communications.

She fingered the ivory bracelet I wore instead of a wedding band, the circle of whales. “You have had much to do with the sea?”

“I am married to the captain of a whaler. We will have a child. He's gone back to sea, and I've come home to you to have my child.”

She smiled at me a slow, tired smile. “It takes the place of the child I lost.”

I held her in my embrace, and we rocked each other. With our rocking I felt that sometimes I mothered her and sometimes she mothered me, and that was how it should be.

Releasing me, she said, “Eat your bread, Una.” And she straightened her back.

I asked her about Aunt Agatha and Uncle Torchy and learned that they had been yet unsure which of the Great Lakes they might settle on when they had last written to her.

“They have reversed themselves,” I mused. “Once they were on land surrounded by ocean, and now their water is embraced by land.”

Their baby thrived, as did Frannie. “Do you notice?” my mother asked. “I've reversed the room so that I can lie abed and see the rising of the full moon.”

“I have been married before, Mother. I married Kit Sparrow, about whom I wrote you when they visited the Lighthouse.”

“Kit and Giles.” She rose and took a worn envelope from under her pillow. “It was the last letter I received from you from the Lighthouse.”

I let it lie on the table. I did not want to clutch after the hopeful girl who had written that letter. Her disappointments made me sad.

“When did Kit die?”

“I don't think he is dead. I hope he is alive. But as a husband, he is dead to me, Mother. He became insane. I heard he's traveled to the far West. He sent word he would never return.”

My mother squeezed my hand, and that was the last we said of my marriage to Kit. But of Kit himself, and of Giles, of Ahab, of Charlotte, of Sallie of the
Albatross,
we spoke freely during that spring, as we worked the earth. Through the days, we planted vegetables, picked
wildflowers, cooked, sat outside before the sunny door to sew. I did not tell my mother of the hardship I had undergone in the open boat—only that we had been stove by a whale and rescued by the merchant ship.

“Stove?” she asked. “Stove?”

And this and many other seafaring terms that appeared in my speech I explained to her. I had brought the Goethe translations with me, and, to my surprise, she liked the tale of Young Werther very much. “That is how much it hurts sometimes,” she said, and I knew she spoke of the loss of my father.

I sensed that she felt delicate about discussing him with me. “Religion closed his mind with a darkness,” she said one night, sensing my questions. “He was not always that way. He once loved light things.” She shook the popcorn popper above the embers. “Popcorn,” she said. “And honey. He would guzzle honey like a bear.”

Through the spring, we cultivated and planted, expanded the old garden in anticipation of even greater bounty. In the barn she kept but one cow, and once a week some neighbor would usually come by to exchange game for our excess of dairy products, or some of our eggs. Sometimes my mother swapped a few chicks for venison, saying I needed to eat some red meat, but this meat was stringy, the deer not yet having fattened very much.

Though we did not hitch the mare to visit—people came to us—I was delighted to find the same old mare in the barn that my father had had when I was a small child. She nickered and seemed to know me, and we took her out once a week just to keep her used to the harness.

“The barn was difficult for me,” my mother said. And she pointed to the rafters from which his body had hung. It was not hard to imagine him darkly swinging there, where dust motes danced in a shaft of sunlight. “The neighbor men came and cleaned the floor and the stalls and the loft, and that seemed to help. They offered to take this one down and build me another smaller barn from the boards. Two offered to buy the whole place.”

“You could come home to Nantucket with me. Our house is very large.”

“I'll visit you. When you have your next baby. I don't want to leave my home. Not yet.”

That summer we often walked the woods; several times Mother and
I walked as far as the river and baited up our hooks and fished. Sometimes a paddlewheeler would pass, and we would wave.

All the time, my baby grew within me. My body was completely at ease. I loved my roundness, the way my stomach bloomed under my apron. My mother made a little quilt for the baby, and its stitches were but half as long as ordinary. I told her it seemed that it had been sewn by an ant. I had brought delicate cotton batiste with me in the sea chest, and I made the baby seven little dresses, one for each day of the week, and each with a bit of embroidery in a different color around the collar or sleeves or hem. Sunday's dress had a purple cross-stitch about the neck, and Monday was a yellow chain running across the bottom of the yoke. Tuesday was a feather stitch, cardinal red, around the tiny sleeve cuff. Thus, I moved through the week in a rainbow, with the trim a bit lower, on the collar, the yoke, the sleeves, the waist, and down the skirt, for each day. Saturday was represented by a double row of green and blue scallops, for the sea, at the hem of the little garment. I didn't know why I did this: it pleased my fancy.

I described the
Pequod
to my mother, and she gave me the back of an old envelope to sketch it on. The preciousness of paper was a sign of how backward we still were on the Kentucky frontier.

“Though Lewis and Clark ran short of nearly all their supplies,” I remarked, “when they wintered beside the Pacific, they always had plenty of paper.”

“Clark's brother died at Locust Grove, down the river ten miles or so. I imagine they had plenty of paper, too.” She lifted her eyebrows and smirked. “But this ain't Locust Grove.”

Although my drawing was wobbly, my mother used it as a pattern to work a cross-stitch sampler of the
Pequod
. “You must hang it in your cupola,” she said. “Show it to the baby, and tell him to watch through the spyglass for that ship.” Under it she worked a rhyme, which she said she had heard in her Boston Quaker school. The cross stitched verse was supposed to encourage boys to stay home and be scholars instead of running off to sea:

I did not tell her that a whaling ship could be more like a Butcher's Shop than a Breath of Romance. It sometimes amazed me how well I knew, now, with my mother, what to say and what to omit. I was sure she did the same for me, and always had, though our discourse was unusually free. But we would not give each other pain.

Always on her face was her love for me. Even if I had only been out in the yard a few moments, when next she saw me, her face shone out in gladness, and always there was a steady radiance. Many times she thanked me for coming home to share the joy of my waiting with her.

Of Ahab I thought chiefly at night, as I lay in bed waiting for sleep. I missed him and loved him. I thought in his direction, but I did not try to write to him. The fate of letters, as I knew it now, seemed too precarious. Before I left Nantucket, I had sent Ahab a letter to tell him of our coming babe and of my pleasure in our home. Sometimes as I waited for sleep and watched the full moon sail up the window (my mother and I decided to share her bed), I imagined what might be in Ahab's letters. Certainly he would describe the sea to me and report what whales they took. I hoped that he might write of his love for me, but so much of the bond between us had traveled the path of the eyes that I did not require, with Ahab, a stream of romantic words.

Often I remembered our wedding night, the gentleness of his hard hands upon my body, the joy of our uniting. Had it been after that last time, that morning when I held out my arms to him, that his seed had impregnated me? I thought so.

I had told my mother that at the dawn after our wedding night, we had entered the cupola and angels of resplendent hues had flown around us, for I wanted her to know how I loved my husband, his mind, body, and spirit.

 

W
HILE
I
THOUGHT
of Ahab by night, by day those summer and fall hours were filled with the love between my mother and me. Perhaps it would have been a more ordinary time if we had both not known that at the end of the next spring, our year together would be over, and I would take my babe of five months age or so back with me to Nantucket.

When the fall vegetables were ready to gather, Mother got out her Keats volume and read his “Ode to Autumn” to me, and I loved the full sadness of the poem as never before. Especially the description of the
gnats
moved me—that such a small part of nature was yet worthy of a place in his lines about that remote English world of harvest.

Our root cellar, with its new stock of vegetables which we ourselves had not only grown but also harvested, dried, preserved, and pickled, seemed as rich a treasure house as Keats's granary. The burlap sacks were lumpy with cobs full of dried corn, and we had large jars of beans and tomatoes on the rough shelves. Against the dirt walls we had baskets of black walnuts we'd gathered in the woods and boxes of dried blackberries. We had a store of turnips and radishes, carrots and potatoes. It was a pleasure to crunch through the fallen leaves down into the ravine, to open the heavy wooden door, and to add to the bounty. When we entered the cellar, we deeply inhaled the aroma of vegetables mixed with earth. “We'll run out of room,” we told each other, proclaiming the success of our agriculture.

Perhaps it was because of my own round shape that I particularly loved the apples that fall. Though my belly was not blushed with red, as they were, I seemed gaudy with joy. (Giles once told me the root of the word
gaudy,
in fact, means joy.) I ran up a lovely loose dress of red-and-gold plaid from the yardage in my trunk, and when I wore that, I felt most applelike, plump and ripening. Reaching up to the low, heavy-laden boughs, I felt one-with-the-apples as my fingers closed around them. Mother would not let me climb the ladder up into the trees, but she herself did the climbing. It made her blithe as a girl to be aloft on the ladder, though when she looked down and smiled at me, I saw many wrinkles of middle age in her skin. I told her how I had loved to climb aloft, dressed as a boy, almost a hundred feet into the air, with the ship plowing the waves far below.

In late fall, we harnessed our mare to the wagon to carry some of our apples to the press, so we would have cider through the winter. It was a merry gathering of families scattered throughout our area, and there was square dancing that night, but being so big with child, I did not wish to dance. After much encouragement from me (and from a widower who had a farm a half-dozen miles away), my mother did join the dancing. I think she rather liked showing off before her daughter.
Her feet moved nimbly and her face grew rosy and steamy. I thought of how that first night at the Lighthouse we had all danced together, and I wished that those members of the family were with us now.

We spent the cider night, all the women, wall to wall on pallets, with all the men in the barn. And that night there was much joking and singing among the women as we waited for sleep. Strangely, me thought of how people might lie in a graveyard, somewhat cozy with the proximity of other bodies, but here, more cheerfully, we were a prone community of the living, of sisters of all ages, myself a woman accepted among women.

When Mother and I drove home the next day with our load of cider-filled bottles, I felt a little wary of the mare. She pulled too hard, I thought, and when she sensed that we were near home, she was hard for Mother to hold. It really made me quite angry. We had had her many years, caring well for her. Perhaps she rebelled now because my father had kept her under such a tight rein.

But there was an element to our speed that I relished. The fall colors, particularly of the maples, dogwoods, and sumac, were beyond compare, and the speed of our passage seemed to make them swirl together in a phantasmagoria. Occasionally a puff of wind would bring down a shower of leaves from a tree that overhung the road. Then we were in the thick of it! Leaves flying like colored froth. I wanted to write to Ahab about it. The speed alternately thrilled and frightened me.

We had left the barn door open, and though Mother hauled on the reins, the mare ran right in. When we got out, I saw the pallor under Mother's tan skin, and she was shaking. “That's the last time I drive Penelope till next spring,” she said. “And then I'll have a neighbor take her out till she's calmed down.”