Read Online Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund - Free Book Online

hard wood for carving. “So they represent the sea and the land,” he added.
    â€œAnd the board is the beach where they meet.” I spoke so quickly. Thoughts never fell from my lips like that at home, before the words were in my brain.
    What with watching the other board out of the corner of my eye, I could barely pay attention to the moves Aunt set up for Frannie and me. I terribly wanted my mother to win, and she did. “Bold move,” Uncle said, as he laid down his king in defeat, “to sacrifice your queen.”
    â€œBertha always knows what she’s doing,” Aunt Agatha commented.
    I thought that was true, and if my mother wanted to return to Kentucky though I was to live at the Lighthouse, she surely had goodreason. Though I had not been safe with my father, she would be. But I knew her only motive could be love of my father and loyalty to him—a priority that was difficult to swallow.
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    A FTER OUR WEEK of radiant, expanded domesticity, she did, indeed, depart. The small cargo boat (the Camel ) came to fetch her, and I watched her seat herself beside a water keg; she tucked her skirts around her and looked pleased and excited to be going somewhere. Her skirts bunched smoothly from her waist; her hair fell serenely from the part. Her eyes glistened. The two men quickly unfurled the single sail, and she was off. How quickly they skimmed my mother away from us. Without variation, she steadfastly smiled and waved at us till her features became indistinct with the distance, and they all four—mother, men, and boat—were but color upon the water.
    At that moment, I felt a shadow fall across me. I looked up, yet I saw no cloud.
    Frannie took my hand.
    Aunt said, “It’s the shadow of the Lighthouse.”
    â€œDo you know what a gnomon is?” Uncle asked.
    â€œIt is the stylus of a sundial.”
    And I saw that a long bar of shadow began at the base of the tower and fell like a slat across the face of the Island, across us, upon the close-in water, into the chaos of the waves.

CHAPTER 10 : The Giant
    B Y DAY , the Lighthouse stood like a great, gray stalk, and that first summer Frannie and I contracted to worship it together. I had been exiled for my unbelief—but that was for the ready-made mythology I inherited. Left to myself, like an innocent savage or a younger child, I toyed with objects of veneration, sought constancy and comfort in some dominant force.
    Who else gazed skyward? The roses, whose exuberance had given me satisfaction with the extremity of nature, had first attracted my admiration with their profuse beauty. The mass of roses lay supine atop the cottage roof. Each rose had at its center a yellow eye, gazing upward. “Do the roses worship His Highness?” I asked Frannie, as I indicated the great, gray tower. “Or do they merely take his measure?”
    Frannie gaped at me and gave no answer.
    â€œThose yellow eyes are saucy, ” I opined. “They use the tower like a highway to take their gaze to heaven.”
    While Frannie and I hoed and tended the early summer garden, she suddenly said, “Una, the roses worship the sun.”
    â€œYes,” I agreed. “Those rose-eyes see the sun as a distant kinsman. He’s yellow, like them, and the roses take from him whatever they need.”
    But the goats led me back to a contemplation of the tower, for I observed how warily they glanced at it. There were six goats, one billy, three nannies, and two kids—one of which was brown and one white. Apron was the white kid. The billy was also white, with strong curved horns the color of slate. Once, in late summer, when Frannie and I were taking a walk on the high land just above the Lighthouse, we saw the billy run across the hill and butt the tower.
    â€œThe color of his horns matches the granite,” Frannie said.
    â€œHe is the minion of the tower,” I replied. “The roses are of the sun’s