Ahab's Wife Read Online Free PDF

From how far away does the sunlight come to fall upon this one glittering grain I hold between my forefinger and my thumb? This grain is square as a quilt block, its edges straight as any carpenter cuts wood or glazier scores glass. Perhaps it is glass, or salt—a crystal left by the water. I put it on the tip of my tongue and taste nothing salty. I push it sideways with my tongue and it is grit between my molars. I take it out again, all wet from my mouth. My stubborn sand grain lies drowned on the whorls of my forefinger. It can tell its fellows that it has been in a strange place. A wet, pink cave.
    Perhaps the mind as well as the mouth is a glistening, pink cave. As a child that image was available to me, for my mother read aloud how Plato likened his mind to a cave. But his was dark instead of pink. With this writing I wish to enter that opalescence and inhabit the pearly chamber of memory. Hindsight, retrospective wisdom, I leave, to the extent I can, at the threshold. But as a child, I was given much of the language of adults, and I continue to use it, even to describe my youth. I court the freshness, the immediacy, and all the resources of language that make the past tense strangely shine as though it were the present.
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    O H , MY LOST A HAB . I had my prayer then, if not my God: Let the green land and the warm hearth call you home. As surely as after our first night in the marriage bed, the sea called you away .
    If I turn back the years, Justice is standing in the water, but hehears me over the surf and turns to wave. He is five years old, his hair black as soot. Though the hair of your head, Ahab, was gray and white, yet you were still sooty in the loins, as young as my first husband when he was eighteen and I was seventeen.
    I met my first husband when he visited my aunt and uncle, who kept an island Lighthouse out from New Bedford, but first I must turn back more years to say how it was that I who was born in Kentucky on the banks of the Ohio came to be with Aunt and Uncle near New Bedford. When I was twelve, my mother sent me there to save my life, for she was afraid that my father would kill me.

CHAPTER 5 : The Window
    W HAT INCITED my father to fury was my lack of Christian belief. I wanted no part of the church because I could not believe its dogma. Perhaps there was some imbalance in my brain—I don’t know. But the belief that was imbibed by everyone I knew, with scarcely a moment of skepticism, seemed to me most unlikely. Whether there was God or not, I admitted I did not know, but it was Jesus as God, or the Son of God, that seemed to me highly unlikely.
    How do you know it’s true? I asked. One would say that the Bible was God’s holy word and that it said so, but I saw no reason to think it holy just because that was the custom. Did I not feel myself a sinner? they would ask. Readily did I acknowledge I had many shortcomings, but why should I think there was a hell waiting to swallow me? And what was the evidence that any part of me was immortal? Perhaps I just wished it so. And how could belief that one good man, long ago, was actually the incarnation of God wipe away my sins? What possible connection could there be between the two ideas?
    â€œIf you believe the sky is red,” I said to my father, for I had a small paring knife in my hand and was peeling the waxy red skin from an apple, “would it make the corn grow?”
    At this, my father struck my face with his open hand. “Believe!” he shouted.
    â€œNeither you nor I can command belief,” I replied, though I was only twelve. I was shocked not so much at the blow but by the calmness of my own voice. But tears had jumped into my eyes.
    He harnessed the buggy and rode away into the woods, lashing the horse.
    I watched through the cabin front window, which had just been unboarded from the winter. Often, as a younger child, I had followed him into the yard, sat upon the stump, lamented his leaving. No