Ahab's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

with more conviction and said, Certainly you are not lord of that, for the sea takes you from me, and am I not your heaven? Here I traced the zaggy mark that began at his temple. How can you be lord of an element having the power to take you from your heaven? Ahab scooped up sand, and in a warm trickle, he poured it on the back of my other hand. The sea has brought me back. Once, to thee .
    O, Ahab’s smile! rare and shy. Precious then and now to my constricting heart. For even on that balmy day, I would have thought what if those lapping waters should not bring him back the second time, or the third time? Perhaps I swallowed and said to Ahab, If the sea bring you back a second time and a third time, then truly will I make you lord of me and of our bed .
    But he was already that. In our happy leisure, I might have thoughtindolently of the brown people, so far away on the Pacific Islands, perhaps lounging on their own sand, which Ahab said was white as sugar, not golden like these grains. I saw Ahab as a young man going to them. I did not begrudge him his happiness there. In imagination, I became one of them. From the women on the islands, he had learned how to touch the magic places on my body. If there were children left behind in the South Seas—well, I would people the world with Ahab’s. Once I asked him, what would a girl-child be with his spirit? And he answered, Una, thou art she . If there were children begot in the South Seas, they would be my older sisters and brothers in age, for in his middle years, Ahab went to the island women no longer, saying it was not right for a captain. (He had no prejudice against the mingling of brown and white.)
    I teased him, home from that short first voyage, as we picnicked on the Nantucket moor, said that certainly Captain Peleg, and probably Captain Bildad, used to sport in the grass huts, but even during that first, idyllic homecoming, if I saw the moral fervor was on his brow, I desisted. It would not be kindness to tease Ahab on the subject of good or evil, and whether simply custom makes it so.
    He believed the moral powers—demonic and heaven-generated—are separate things, must be separate to be themselves; eternal. But I see them as all nested and layered together, sometimes with no clear seam between, but a gradation; transient. He wanted something ultimate and absolute. If there be reality beyond the appearance—be that reality ultimately good, or evil, or indifferent—then it must be so always.
    That second homecoming brought him home dismasted, one-legged, raging; yet he would go forth again to war upon the deep.
    Before he left, he, seated, called me to stand between his knees, one leg bent naturally, the other outthrust in tapering ivory. He twisted the sculpted nuptial bracelet on my wrist and made the whales depicted there swim round.
    Wouldst thou have an ornate ivory cross? he asked me. And the flicker of rebellion and wildness galloped across his face.
    I do not hold well with the Christian symbols, and he knew it.
    Nay, my wife, he said (for he could ever read my thought). The storm gathered in his mien. My girl-wife shall have a crown, and I will carve it myself from the jawbone of Moby Dick!
    He reached up, placed his hands on my hair, surrounded my skull,and squeezed till he trembled, his force caught statically between his knowledge of my human frailty and his power.
    Yet, I thought how I might yield, unharmed, and I knelt till my knees were on the carpet and I looked up at him. Then he left off squeezing my head, but those strong hands had bequeathed the pressure of a crown that never was to be, except as memory and imagination conjoin to circumscribe my scalp.
    Art thou afraid?
    When I shook my head no, he kissed me upon the lips, passionately, and then upon the brow, in tender blessing.
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    O SUNNY DAY , O golden sand, O loving breeze—I would lounge and loaf forever, my spirit basking in your clear goodness, if I could.