Ahab's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

longer! Now, from the house I read him, crossing the window left to right, how the harried buggy and his flailing arm moved as a unit from the left pane of glass to the right pane of glass, and out of sight. How undisturbed the trees seemed in their dark uprightness, how intact in their neatly fitting bark. My father had seemed so till his recent conversion.
    I ceased looking through the window in order to contemplate the wavy glass itself. What was a window but a machine for making the opaque transparent? Then I regarded the window framing, which divided the four small lights by a slender, equal-armed cross between the panes.
    My mother came to sit at the table. She remained unconverted. Why did his wrath not fall on her? With her hand and arm she swept her dress to one side from beneath her bottom as she sat. I registered that competent, automatic gesture, and the way her face shone at me in sympathy. With a light stroke, her fingers acknowledged the smarting of my cheek.
    â€œWhat are we to do with your unbelief?” my gentle mother asked.
    â€œLet him accept me as I am. As you do. As we both are.”
    â€œIt’s through my blood that tolerance and unbelief have run to you.” She gestured that, twelve-year-old girl though I was, I should come and sit on her lap. “My father was a Quaker of Rhode Island,” she said. “And my sister is a Unitarian.”
    I had never heard the word Unitarian before, for all about me were Methodists, like my father, and Presbyterians and German Lutherans; I had heard them speak of Catholics, but I had never seen one.
    â€œDo you believe in Jesus as God?” I asked my mother.
    â€œMost do,” she said.
    â€œBut you yourself?”
    â€œIt does not matter to me if Jesus was God or not.”
    â€œIt does not matter if a person can really be God?”
    â€œIt would have been a long time ago.”
    I sat on her knee and listened to a bird sing. Mine was a darting mind, and it darted after the bird and its world, while I partly talked with my mother. With its song of Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, I imagined its crested red among the high green leaves of the tulip poplar, and then, again diverted, imagined the way light shone through leaf so that you can see compartments and veins within the thin flatness.
    â€œThink,” she said. “Does it matter to you whether Caesar captured Gaul or not? If you think, ‘Why, yes, he did,’ are you not the very same girl sitting on her mother’s lap? And if you think, ‘No, I don’t believe he did,’ don’t you love me just the same as before and hear the same bird singing?”
    Her eyes were dark brown, and she never spoke seriously without a sheen of love over her eyes.
    â€œIt might be quite a different thing about God,” I said.
    â€œIf it makes you happy, believe it.”
    â€œBut I want to know the truth.”
    Again she was silent, then she sighed. “The truth about the unseen makes little difference to me.”
    â€œIt would make a difference to me,” I answered. “But I do not believe that a man was God.”
    â€œPerhaps we each adopt or create our truth.”
    When my father returned, he was morose. “Struggle with the devil,” he told me. “I will ask you again in a week.”
    The next day the dog, King, playfully chased a pullet, and when my father called the dog, he disobeyed. Reaching over the door for his long rifle, my father stood on the threshold and shot the dog.
    He said, “The Lord has given man dominion over the creatures of the earth.”
    I climbed the tallest white pine I could find.
    Nonetheless, when he next asked about my belief, he found that the week was to no avail. Nor the months, though my father’s rage at his helplessness compounded, and each time he struck me, he added a blow. “Children, obey your parents,” he thundered. Each time I watched him drive away in a fury, lashing the