Ahab's Wife (27 page)

A
T FIRST
the men stood often and pissed over the gunwale. I waited till night when the watch was ours. Then Giles and Kit held my arms as I sat on the side and lowered myself till my bare bottom was just above the water. They always turned their faces and waited till I came up, pulled on my trousers, and said, “All right.” As the crew ate and drank less and less there was less necessity for anyone to relieve himself.

Our days were spent in glitter, dazzle. Sometimes the cups of light were small as thimbles, sometimes big as bowls. They rocked, they danced, they could not stand still. No. Not when I thought as loudly as I could
Be still!
did they cease their clapping of hands, their kicking up of heels.

Ceaselessly moving, endlessly spreading water.

Colors: green, blue, slate, gold. Pink at sunset.

Us: groaning. Feeble. Angry with a smoldering more malignant than the try-pots.

One afternoon Captain Fry said, “This is the last biscuit. I divide
it equally among us, regardless of our size or condition.” I could not look at his shining face, that abstract goodness that refused to fire on the disobedient, that flashed our human doom.

My crumb was the size of my little fingernail.

O
N THE
I
SLAND
, Una, what did you eat?”

The question came from Kit, with mischief in his eye. In New Bedford, in front of the Seamen's Chapel—not on the Sabbath—I saw a boy toss a stick over and over for his wolfish dog to fetch. So the question seemed to me: a stick tossed for me to fetch back, for no reason but the distraction of it.

“We never killed our animals. We had goats, and we milked them and made cheese, and we had chickens.”
This is the last biscuit
.

“Did you eat the eggs?”

“Yes.”

“And isn't an egg some form of a chick?”

“Still, we didn't kill the chickens or the goats.”
I divide it equally among us
.

“And what if a goat died? Did they ever die?”

While the memory was not pleasant, I liked being pressed against it. Here, in memory, was some other reality than sparkling blue water, sick, weak, slumbering men, a dark fin cutting round and round the boat. I thought of the shark that had circled Uncle and me, but that was not the memory I wanted—that moment was one both too near to the present scene and too totally different in degree of desperation.

“My favorite goat, Apron, a little white nanny, died in birthing. It was twins on her first time.” Was this history true? Or had the nightmare swamp within me spawned ghostly gas, independent of fact? Yes, Apron had died, between the installation of the Fresnel and my trip to New Bedford.

“Did the kids live?”
Regardless of our size or condition
.

“We hand-fed them at first. One lived and one died. We made another nanny claim the brown one that lived.”

“How did you get them to claim up?”

“You build a small pen so the nanny can't get away from the kid. The proximity kindles the nanny's maternity.”

“What happened to the carcass of Apron?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Well, did you have goat stew soon after?”

“Yes.”

“But no one spoke of Apron?”
This is the last biscuit
.

I thought of the stew, thick with innocent vegetables—onions, potatoes, celery, carrots, spiced very hot with black pepper. “Shall I describe the stew?”

Kit laughed. More a cackle, because his throat was dry. “I'll pass,” he said, and mischief burned in his glance. “What else did you eat?”

“Fish. Tons and tons of fish. Mackerel, cod, small tuna…But you see, we pulled them out of the water around the Island. They didn't live on the Island.”

“What about the creatures on the shore—sometimes in the water, sometimes out?”

“We counted the shoreline as part of the sea.”

“And so, you ate?”

“Our little Island was a complete world. It had every kind of shore. The Lighthouse was not at the crest of the headland, but about two-thirds of the way up. The hill behind it continued to rise on one side, almost a little mountain, all meadow, then at the crest, there was a drop of a hundred feet to the sea. The sea battered away at this bulwark, ate off big chunks of it in bad winter storms. That was why the Lighthouse was not built at the top of the crest.”

“I was there.”

“What?”

“Remember, Giles and I came to the Island in the
Petrel
.”

Why had I spoken to Kit as though he were a stranger who had never seen my home? I was embarrassed. My face burned in the sun. I shaded my eyes, looking for the tower.

“You said there were many kinds of shore.” Kit's voice was soft,
almost a murmur. Perhaps he had not asked. Perhaps I was fishing with Uncle Torch.

“I'm thinking of the eelgrass.”

“Where?”

“In the inlet. The leaves are green, like long ribbons. It's rooted in the mud, and when it's ripped up in the fall storms, it sinks to the bottom and decays into a rich, brown muck. The top of the grass floats on the surface. It's always swaying. A strand may be as long as a man.”

Once I measured Torchy with a strand of eelgrass. He lay on the beach, and I stretched it out beside him. It was the measure of a tall man, six feet tall. Or perhaps it measured him. “What's measuring is also measured by what it measures,” I said aloud.

“What did you find in the eelgrass to eat?”

“Mussels, scallops.”
Regardless of our size or condition
.

“Cats that eat scallops drop off their tails and ears.”

“It's not true.”

“Probably a myth perpetrated by cats who talk to people in their sleep. The cats want all the scallops themselves.”

“Why do you think, Kit, that if you hear a bell when you're sleeping, you can dream so fast that you make a place for the bell to sound in the story, and then it sounds right in its niche?”

“In dreams, the arrow of time is reversible.”

My mouth was dry. If you speak the air comes in, and the mouth dries. My lips were cracking, and the flesh in the cracks was tender. I moved my hip, though it was numb and continued numb against the boards in the bottom. My eyes were closing.

“Uncle planted dead trees to farm the mussels. Like the French do. These are dead trees, and you make them stand up, and the mussels cling to the branches. They festoon it. Every dead branch is a shelf with mussels clinging above and below.”

“How does a mussel clamp on?”

“It doesn't open up and clamp on. Each mussel spins out binding thread.”

“Like a spider?”

“A clam just spins out one thread, but the mussels spin and spin. Their threads are golden, called byssus threads.”

The sheen of gold seemed before my eyes. Cloth of gold can be woven from byssus threads, but Kit would not have believed that so I
didn't tell him. Aunt treasured such a cloth she herself had woven of threads spun by pen shells. Her cloth was narrow, and at Christmastime she laid it on the table, and it stretched from Uncle at the head of the table to the small, thick-sided window cut through the stone wall. On the runner of gold cloth she placed the Christmas candles, held by a curl of driftwood, and the candles were colored with cranberry and scented with bayberry, which grew, like everything else in the world, on the safe Island.

“I've thought of the true name of the Island,” I said. “Its name is childhood.”

“Not everybody has such a childhood.”

This is the last biscuit
.

“Remember, Kit, when you made the yeast rolls in the morning?”

“You could have gotten along with my mother. Most people couldn't, but I think you could have.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes you can think like her.”

But I thought of a madwoman urinating in bread dough. I knew Kit was not thinking of that. I loved to be praised. The comparison to a madwoman was made with approval, affectionately. I opened my eyes and looked at Kit. His nose had a long blister down it, and the skin from his cheeks was peeling. His skin seemed charged with brick dust. The sail hung listless.

“We're lucky it's not storming,” I said.

“Yes.”

I looked at the heads of the ten others. Each wore some sort of hat fastened under his chin. Discolored, bumpy, their faces looked like gourds blistering in the sun.

 

O
NCE WHEN
I sat at the head of the table, I looked down the shining cloth to the window, and I saw a ship, in full sail, centered in the square. It was the very picture of a ship, framed in stone. Leaning over the table, I pointed and said,
Look!
Aunt had said,
A merchant ship,
and Uncle said,
It will make Nantucket by Christmas Eve
. Aunt had asked if Boston was not the likely port—all laden with goods as she must have been, and Uncle agreed with her.

Kit and I fell from talk to silent memory.

T
HAT EVENING
, toward our discomfort and our growing fear in the small boat, the setting sun, dropping into the sea, threw out a cloth of gold from him to us.

I noted, but disregarded, such glory. Sleep sealed my senses like a black bandage.

In my dream, a starfish and a mussel. At low tide, the eelgrass lies flattened, combed down by the retreated tide, and piled on the eelgrass are starfish, all sizes and colors, lying limpsy. I am a starfish, and I fasten my five arms to the mussel I want to eat.
You shouldn't be here in the eelgrass; you should be safe in the farmer's tree,
I think to the mussel, though I know my logic is faulty. At first I cannot open the mussel, but I use only two of my arms at a time, and when they weary, I pry with two fresh ones. The mussel, exhausted, opens. Now I must get my stomach to it. My stomach is a thin sack. Turning my stomach wrong side out, I eject it from my body. I send my stomach inside the mussel shell, and it secretes its juices. I digest. When I am nourished, I pull my stomach back inside to the center of my starry body.

S
UCH DREAMS
began to fill my days as well as nights.

My eyes were swollen, but through a slit I checked from time to time to see if it was night or day.

Once I looked at Chester, unmoving, and wondered if he was dead.

Captain Fry—his face visible again since it had turned gaunt, blistered, and scabby as any of ours—sat beside his son like a heathen idol. No, he moved! He took off his hat and laid it over the boy's face.

 

O
NCE
I saw Giles take a jackknife and score the gunwale.

“What for?” I asked.

“Each mark is for a day passed since the last food.”

“All around us in the sea and the sky, there is a black glory we do not share.”

There were four upright marks. With his knife he crossed them with a diagonal.

 

T
HERE SIMPLY
is no more water.

 

W
AS THAT
a voice? It seemed like a flag.
No water
was the flapping flag under which we sailed.

Each man sat with a string in his hand. The strings passed over the sides and down into the water. I understood. We were fishing for water.

 

T
HE MURDERING
.
We shouldn't
. Voices cracked as lips and tongues.
We must
. Who wanted to wait, to debate at night?
Wait
. Night was the time to sleep.
Not yet
. I still knew that. There was the Big Dipper anyway, bringing me water.
Soon
.