Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

any word I looked up my initials US (for Una Spenser) and the date.
    I have already mentioned that Aunt herself had a collection of the poems of Byron, and she also had Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, which had been published in 1798. Her volume was the twin of one my mother had in Kentucky. Another collection, in a small greenbinding, was by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, though Uncle always affectionately called him Bobby Burns, as though he knew him. I should like to say sometime what those poems meant to me, line by line. When I read Wordsworth in the hammock, tended by the summer breeze, the poet’s reverence for Nature helped to fill the vacancy left by my father’s toppled God.
    Giles and Kit had yet to materialize out of thin air.
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    W HEN I THINK of Kit and Giles, I think of the summer birds that wheeled through the sky all the daylight hours. The Lighthouse seemed to organize us—the house and garden, the larger scallop of the Island. Those of us who lived there—four years for me—had our paths, our predictable rounds, all referenced to the Lighthouse. And these were lovely paths, for Torchy and Agatha had set about to make something of a little paradise of their Island, our Arcadia.
    But the summer gulls! The air was freedom for them, and they might come in close, or weave out of sight over the water. None flew so high as to fly over the Lighthouse, but once I saw a sea eagle stand on the knob above the lantern.
    Giles and Kit soared into our lives one warm day when I was sixteen, as freely as the ever-roving gulls. Though they came by water and not by air, of course, the sail of their tiny boat was like the wing of a gull. The dark boat itself was named the Petrel, because, they said, like Saint Peter, it could walk on water.
    But I would not skip over the time when I was fourteen, and for a week on the mainland I was reunited with both of my parents for the last time.
    Like the gnomon of a sundial, the tower did cast a shadow, as I had observed the day my mother left for Kentucky. We were under its measure of time, and many a day, since that first one when my mother embarked, was marked off as its shadow moved like the slat of a fan over the goats’ hill, and then down the boulder steps on the east, until the shadow-shaft again grew chaotic with the waves.

CHAPTER 12 : New Bedford
    O NCE EVERY SEASON , as I have implied, the packet boat came to us, but the winter boat came at the beginning of winter, and the spring boat came after mid-spring, so it was sometimes five months that we were alone on the Lighthouse with our books, with nature, and with ourselves. During the summer when I was fourteen it was successfully arranged for a June Saturday that my mother and father would come up from Kentucky to meet us.
    When I saw them at the New Bedford wharf from the deck of the Camel, naturally they looked smaller to me. But even when the boat was bumping the wood, to my surprise, they still seemed shorter than I remembered. My mother and I fell into each other’s arms immediately. She was the same, though smaller, with the same serenely parted, glossy-smooth hair. She fingered my curls tumbling over my shoulders in front and down my back and said, “My gypsy girl.”
    My father said, “Una, at fourteen, young women braid their hair.” He did not touch me and he stood like a column of darkness.
    â€œDoes not the scripture somewhere forbid women to braid their hair, brother Ulysses?” my aunt said subversively.
    My father’s eyes flashed black darts, but he spoke mildly. “I’m not such a literalist as that, sister Agatha.”
    Suddenly I wanted my two families to get along, and I leaned forward and shyly kissed my father high on the cheek, on the skin above where his black beard began. Aunt Agatha was right behind me, but she said with a note of merry mocking, “Clearly the scripture says to greet one another with an holy