Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund Page B

Torchy. Suddenly I wished that I had climbed to the top of the Lighthouse and stood there, beside Uncle Torch. Soon after I had come to the Lighthouse I had asked Frannie if she ever went up in the Lighthouse, and she had replied that she was not big enough. This had set me to thinking if I was big enough. After a month on the Island, with no one having suggested I might climb the tower, I asked at the supper table if I might and added, lamely, that the view from the top was probably wonderful—as though I needed some reason for ascending.
    â€œI think your legs turn into steel,” Frannie had said solemnly, “if you climb the steps often. Papa’s have.”
    Laughing, Torchy pushed back his chair and straightened out his leg. (My mind left the sermon.)
    â€œFeel, Una,” he had said, pointing to his thigh muscle.
    I put my fingers lightly on the corduroy cloth of his trousers. “Press down,” he said. When I obeyed, I felt, indeed, a muscle as hard as a steel plate under the cloth.
    â€œBut this is fifteen years of climbing,” he said. “You won’t turn into steel right away.”
    I had thought it might not be too bad to turn into steel if it made one the happy, self-assured person that my uncle was. But I had never climbed the tower with him. My partial ascent had taken me only to the level of fear.
    All of this came into my mind when I but glanced down the church pew and saw the red hair of my uncle, as though his brain were erupted in flame. It pleased me to think that he was in fact no blood kin, but a stranger who liked me. I regarded my aunt beside him. Then I contemplatedmy parents together and thought it might be very nice to marry a man with red hair.
    When we left the Seamen’s Bethel Chapel, my father looked straight into my eyes—we were the same height—and said that it had pleased him to sit beside me in church, as we had done when I was a little girl. There was a glitter in his black eyes and a soft nostalgia swept over his face, and I was glad that I had not bellowed No! at the pulpit.
    I resolved that I would not provoke him. The two families stayed more than a week in New Bedford (the government having provided a substitute for us at the Lighthouse), and, as my mother suggested, we visited many different places of work while we were there. How lovely to have my mother beside me, often touching my shoulder or hugging my waist, pointing for me to look at this or that. I saw men making barrels and candles and items of metal. I saw harpoons forged and rope braided by the mile. I saw great pans of hardtack baked and then packed into barrels—all of those items that a whaler, gone to sea for two or three years, would need for the lengthy voyage. My mother said that she would have me to notice what kind of man did what kind of work. I want you to learn, she said, how men differ from each other . Mainly I noticed how my gloomy father differed from Torchy’s cheer, from the silver minister’s serenity.
    During these excursions around New Bedford, the sense of the six of us gradually became a sense of five, as my father drew more and more to the periphery. Once I said to my mother, “He looks like an ember smoldering, over there.”
    â€œYou don’t need to be afraid,” she said quickly.
    I had not really felt afraid, only observant, though in the woods he had seemed dangerous. I remembered the retort of his gun as he stood on the threshold and King’s blood in the dust. Then I thought of the shaft of the great white pine I had climbed. At intervals, the branches shot out from the trunk like the spokes from the hub of a wheel. And the sprays of yellow-green needles were limber and redolent.
    When we went again to church the next Sunday, I studied the faces of the men who were returned from sea or who were likely to go there soon. It seemed to me there was an alertness to them that I seldom saw among the landsmen, and a knowing.