Ahab's Wife (43 page)

“Ready to go home, are you?” he hailed me, as though he had been expecting me.

I was tempted to say yes, but instead I replied, “Not yet. But my letters are. Will you take them? One to the Lighthouse, one to forward overland to Kentucky?”

“We'll send it by steamboat,” he answered. “I know captains who know captains all the way to New Orleans. For me they'll leap ashore at any port.” He added that he no longer served the Island, but he would find a carrier in New Bedford.

I jumped lightly from the pier to the prow of the
Camel
and handed him my precious doves.

“Come with me now,” he said.

“I have to say good-bye here.”

“Send letters to them that's here that you have gone. Postlude instead of prelude. You come with me.”

His insistence seemed almost rude. He breathed deeply, his mustaches hiking up. “Rose, Rose,” he said. “Let this vessel be your vase. I'd make you a proper husband, Una, if you be not wed. Are you wed?”

“Captain,” I laughed. “You have not seen me for nearly two years.”

“I know freshness when I smell it,” he said. “I know sweetness and beauty. I know you. Will you have me? Are you wed?”

I saw he was earnest. “I am not wed,” I said soberly.

“And you'll have me?”

“You do me honor—” (How could I wed such mustaches? Something in me wanted to giggle. I made myself be solemn.)

“—but you won't have me.” His head dropped, and I saw he was truly grieved. The mustaches almost tipped his waist, so low was his head sunk, and when he raised his face the silver trails of tears ran from his eyes down into the hair of his face.

“Oh, Captain,” I said softly.

“Well, I'll take the envelopes then.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I'll mend, to be sure,” he answered and tried to smile.

“Do you have clothes that need mending?” An imp gave me an idea.

He looked at me wonderingly.

“May I borrow your handkerchief?” I asked.

He handed me a yellow one, with red spots on it. Quickly I put it in my mouth and tore a rent in it.

“Now,” I said. “On the sincerity of your question to me, you must take this handkerchief to Milk Street. There you will find a widow named Mrs. Macy, who mends and launders and is equipped to tolerate a husband's journeying, and you must say to her that I have sent you to her, and she is to mend and wash and iron your handkerchief dry while you wait—”

“On Milk Street?”

“Yes.”

“But, look, Una Spenser—” He raised his finger and pointed. At first I thought he was pointing to the dome of the Unitarian Church, which was the only bright spot, being high enough to catch the last of the setting sun, but then I saw the dark smoke that drifted between the wharf and the dome. We both sniffed for smoke, and there it was.

“If there is a fire,” I said. “It's far from Milk Street, which is at the other end.”

“Shall I really take only a handkerchief to the mender?”

“Shall I tear a sail?” I teased.

He folded the little square of cloth so that the rent was uppermost and put it in his shirt pocket. “You have sharp little teeth,” he mused as we walked the wharf.

Though it was not an accusation and I did not feel stricken, I sealed my lips over my teeth. Fatigue washed my body. I felt my newness dulled. “I want to see the fire,” I said and parted company with the captain of the
Camel
.

As I walked toward the fire, I felt a clear bubble of humor rise in me like a gurgling spring at the proposal of Captain Mustachio. Laughter would renew me again. What had Shakespeare written?
Thou purple-hued, mustachioed Malt-Worm
? But I would bless and not curse the
Camel
and her master, who saw and smelled me sweet, and beautiful, and worthy.

Hurrying down the street, I passed Tashtego and Daggoo, the
Pequod
's harpooners, walking together toward the wharf—no doubt to spend their last night in port aboard the ship. But I did not see Captain Ahab. I wished that I
would
see him now that I was bathed. My father's scripture came to me:
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow
. As I passed other crew members of the
Pequod,
some of them recognized me and tipped their hats or raised their hands in farewell. To each I said, Godspeed, Godspeed, and I felt forlorn to think that I was being left behind. And yet, as Charlotte said of Kit, I knew that I had had enough of oceangoing.

T
HE FIRE
raged in four buildings, their shingles buckling and springing away from the walls. Like bursting buttons, the hot tiles shot out toward the people, who stood well back. A line of men passed buckets of water as quickly as they could. The crowd looked wild-eyed, and some neighbors tried to divert the buckets to douse their own walls or roofs, though they were not yet burning. On all our faces there was soot, and I thought of the night-burning of the tryworks, and this seemed to have the desperation of that butchery, though merely wood and not flesh burned.

The townfolk wept, distraught over the loss of their property. Then the cry went up that there were yet people in one of the houses that was blazing like a torch.

“Who? How many?”

“A child. A boy. He was asleep. An orphan, with no parent to count him.”

“Who?” they asked again, as though the answer had not sufficed.

“We don't know him. A child.”

“But who is it?”

“One,”
a voice whispered beside me. It was the gaoler. He pulled off his shirt (skin pink, with golden hair in the middle of his chest, like a fleece). He stepped to the bucket line and plunged his shirt down into water, then held the dripping wad against his mouth and nose and ran into the house. Now my own breath went sharp, and apprehension coursed my veins.

“Who? Who?” they called out again, as though there could never be an answer certain enough. “Who is inside?” Yet some replied, “A man!” for Isaac Starbuck did not return as minutes ticked on, and the Unitarian clock struck six. I looked up and saw how the cruel flames reflected red in the dome. “Who? And who?” voices both mumbled privately and shrilly cried.

The terror of the scene brought back the sailors in the open whaleboat, whose names and faces had returned to me when I was lost on the moor. In the flames, I saw and heard them again. Sometimes they had muttered, on and on. Sometimes a shriek more piercing than a bird cry emanated from an anonymous throat. No, that was Oscar who cried and rolled his eyes toward me. A white bird had perched on the mast, and we had longed for it, debated throwing a shoe or weaving a net to cast over it.

“Who?” I myself cried out, though I meant to ask
How long?
A velvet voice spoke naturally in my ear. “A man, a boy.”
Ahab!
I thought, but the voice was that of the judge.

“No,” I roared. And No, and No, and No, I screamed. Till Isaac, the gaoler, suddenly staggered out, double-headed. Peeping over his shoulder was a little black face. Isaac stumbled and Judge Lord caught the boy from Isaac's back and laid the child on the ground. The gaoler fell like a charred beam. The boy, I cried, and someone gave me wet cloth, and I scrubbed and scrubbed until I realized that he was not black with soot but that he was a little black boy. He opened his eyes, and the judge lifted him up in his arms.

A man pushed on the gaoler's chest to squeeze the smoke from him. He pushed and pushed, and, still on my knees, I heard myself saying “Again” and “Again,” but the attendant stopped, shook his head, and stood up. I flung myself on the prostrate Isaac Starbuck. I drew deep
breath into my own lungs and tried to force my breath into his lips and down into him, because he was human, only for that reason, and needed his life. But when I looked up from this fruitless labor, I saw Judge Lord all sooty now standing above me, watching, with the little black boy gathered up in his arms. The judge, smudged black with the soot from the child, seemed to step backward, and without turning away from me, they were absorbed into the night.

Then there was Mrs. Macy, and other women, helping me up and leading me away from Isaac. They held my hands and washed and dabbed at me. While they did this, I saw someone take a sheet and spread it over the naked chest and body of the gaoler, whose last whisper had been for the worthiness of one life, and so of us all. Then I wept for Isaac Starbuck, and despised my superiority and my hauteur.

“ 'Twas he you were learning to love then,” Mrs. Macy said.

“No,” I sobbed. “Not nearly enough.” But I did not mean as a beau.

I spent myself crying, leaned against Mrs. Macy's shoulder, so watering her apron shoulder strap that it loosed the starch in the fabric, and I tasted the sourness of the starch. I thought of all Isaac Starbuck's aliveness—his quick nod of recognition in the church; his compassionate discourse with the judge the night of Kit's liberation; his pleasure in the little sandwiches and tea we were served; the way the palm of his hand unconsciously brushed and enjoyed the nap of the velvet couch; the way he swung my bundle of mending onto a clean table at the Try Pots and smiled. Who else in Nantucket would remember his friendly ways? I had not had enough interest in Isaac to find out whom he knew.

Finally, I wiped my nose with the back of my hand as though I were again a sailor myself. My grief for Isaac was excessive. It was beyond my connection to the man. Yet those tears had washed out something of the old grief. I asked Mrs. Macy if Captain Mustachio had visited her, and she replied that she must have missed him. I let the frivolous-seeming matter drop.

Again my ear registered the roaring of the fire, and my eye fell on the unmistakable shrouded human shape lying on the ground. They were bringing up a hand wagon because the horses would not come close to the flames. Two men approached with a broad board.

“I'll go now,” I said, not wanting to see the gaoler taken away. I thought,
I've missed him
. Not as a beau. I had missed his goodness, his humanity—I had failed to acknowledge those. Some were saying that Isaac was a hero, but I thought only that he was dead.

The fire continued to crackle and spread. Sparks flew so high that their red flicks mingled with the yellow stars. In the streets, the pandemonium multiplied. I turned away from it.

I walked the dark streets as though they were a labyrinth. I met no one. Eventually the human misery and the elemental fury of the flames beckoned me back. I would find a vantage point from which to view the fire. When I mounted the stairs to the South Tower, as the Unitarian structure was sometimes called, my body confided encouragement. Oh, I was a climber of stairs! The muscles had not forgotten. So easy was the ascent, I only lightly skimmed the tops of the stairs. But now I was not a girl, and I climbed to see neither clear sky and bountiful clouds from the Lighthouse nor the vast and wrinkled sea pleating itself in blue or green below the masthead. No. My mind's eye saw the inert, shrouded body, the low earth-resting sheet over Isaac. The drapery of the covering sheet.

As I climbed inside the church tower, I passed the gears and mechanisms of the timepiece and noted a circle of red around the edges of the fire-facing clock, where the fit was imperfect. The rippling and flickering of the flames could be seen even in the thin line around the clock rim.

A door led from the interior of the tower onto a railed balcony, which was situated on the square portion of the building, just above the four-faced clock. I thought fantastically that I had climbed beyond time. But my body yet made the ordinary gestures. I opened the door cautiously, in case other viewers might be standing in such a way as to be hit by the opening door, but others, it seemed, had not thought of such a vantage point.

No, not others, but one other.
One
. To that one my heart flew out. Never does a heart leap so but toward a beloved, when his face is turned, your presence unrealized. You
must
become real to him. Though you stand quietly, your heart has already leapt forward. Where the railing made a corner, a hand on each of the perpendicular rails, facing the fire, stood Ahab, speaking.

N
ATURE
, ye term yourself. Fire, earth, air, and water. Essence of nature, ye pretend to be. But what is natural, Fire, about eating men half my age and sparing me? But I have seen the little one snatched from your glowing jaws, your deadly black breath. (I imagine him so black and small, his rescuer would not have found him except for his whimpering. A puppy?
I have visited the heart of the inferno,
that rescuer would think,
for the sake of a puppy
. The judge can put him to school here, and when I come back, I'll take him—Pip—with me as my cabin boy. How he clung to the judge's neck—tighter than barnacles to the pier, tight as his own curls to his scalp.)

No, I'll not call ye Natural, even if ye be set by lightning spark. Ye can burn naturally in the forest, or gallop naturally over the prairie like bison with collars of flame and crackling hoofs. But here ye feed on timbers torn from the forest, planed and tamed, and shaped and nailed by men. Ye take their toys one by one—so they seem from this height—toys—and my own ship
Pequod
safe beyond at anchor, another kind of toy among these stationary ones. These little houses are the hopes of men. Habitats for us naked creatures who having less of fur and feather need more of shingle and brick.

How come ye here, Fire, ravaging the homes of humans? Ye are will-less. I know it well. Leibniz claimed this was the best of all possible worlds, and so he would say, Lick away, little flames, toast all those who live on this street—it's for the best. Indeed, the next street would be worse for all. A stupid faith, this best-of-all-possible notion. Let Leibniz stick to calculus. Let him invent one that calculates human misery and holds God accountable.

This town pays for Prometheus' insolence. Yet contained in the hearth, Fire, thou art the most comforting of friends. I'll have one yet! Hearth, that is. Friend, too. Friend of my bosom. My eye seeks for her, but I cannot find her in that labyrinth. I saw her wiping the face of the black boy, and then she moved and the roof of the building shielded her from view. (The man who bore the boy from the flames—him I love, too. For he alone risked himself for the cinder boy.)

“Una,” I'll shout for her. Una! Let me bay it like a solitary, shaggy wolf. Roar, Fire, you will not quench my howling till she look up, and
like a visitor to the Vatican, she will look up and see not God, but Ahab in the clouds, reaching down to her, quickening her even as the Creator touched Adam.

“Ahab Addresses the Flames”

Fire, I see thou art my brother, for with such heat Ahab rages. The fires of hell, the fires of creation—they are all one—and they burn all knotted in Ahab's bosom's heart. Burn, my heart! Burn, my town! Burn! For thy Flames are like a refiner's fire, and thou shalt purify them—

Why come these sobs?

Thou shalt purify me!—

Let not sobs come and quench the flame within till it has done its work and I am fit for hearth and home—

Let this church and its tower be my stake. Here let the demonic in me writhe into nothingness. Una!—Obsession! I fear ye more than flames!

[Here he sank to his knees, still clutching the railings, as though the church's altar had come external, bent itself into a corner where he might kneel so as to better relinquish his pride and sin.]