Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Requiem for Ahab
    Requiem for Ahab
    Requiem for Ahab
    Ebook117 pages5 hours

    Requiem for Ahab

    By G. J. Lau

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Requiem for Ahab is a 30,000 word novella set in 1863, using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as a springboard for a tale about fathers and sons, war and its warriors, suffering and reconciliation.

    Anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows that Captain Ahab and his crew die hunting the white whale, Moby Dick. The only survivor was a sailor named Ishmael, who tells his story and then disappears. What most don’t remember is that Ahab left behind a young wife and child, Hannah and Thomas. Ahab's life has ended, but their lives must now go on without him. They move to a small town near Boston, where she meets and marries Aaron Stoddard. The years go by, and Thomas Stoddard grows into a young man. Ahab's memory recedes deeper and deeper into a past seldom revisited by either mother or son.

    When the Civil War breaks out in 1861, Thomas enlists in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and sees action at Antietam and Chancellorsville. Then comes the Battle of Gettysburg, where Thomas is wounded and has his leg amputated. He can't help but remember Ahab's fate, and he wonders if he too will go mad. Thomas realizes he knows very little about his father's death ... or life. There is only one man who can help him discover the truth about his father’s madness—the sailor who called himself Ishmael.

    The search for Ishmael leads Thomas first to New Bedford and then to a small town in central Massachusetts where Thomas finally meets the elusive Ishmael, who has found chasing after dreams to be as perilous as chasing after Ahab’s white whale. Thomas and Ishmael find common cause in laying Ahab’s ghost to rest once and for all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherG. J. Lau
    Release dateJan 8, 2012
    ISBN9781465948342
    Requiem for Ahab
    Author

    G. J. Lau

    G. J. Lau was born in a small town near Boston. He was raised on a steady diet of family, politics, and the Red Sox. After graduating from Georgetown University, he spent two years in the Army, including a year in Vietnam in the 1st Infantry Division. He worked in as a radio operator and had the opportunity to serve in many varied locations including a battalion night defensive position, a special forces camp, and an indeterminate piece of real estate populated by scorpions and Montagnards. He then worked for the Federal government in Washington, D.C. until retirement. Since then he has done a stint in retail and now works in elections. He has volunteered as a literacy tutor, a hotline listener and as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for children in need of assistance. He currently resides in a small city just far enough from Washington DC to be somewhere else. Visit the author’s blog at: http://www.windroot.blogspot.com/

    Read more from G. J. Lau

    Related to Requiem for Ahab

    Related ebooks

    Historical Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      As the World Collapses

      Jul 27, 2017

      As the World Collapses
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Lightning Thread

      Sep 1, 2021

      The Lodge was a Victorian shooting box of minimal architectural distinction, belonging perhaps to the psychiatric baronial school. Its heavy, irregular exterior was set off by monkey puzzle trees, a mossy lawn and an embattled garden. The household w

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Chapel of One’s Own

      Nov 21, 2022

      A Chapel of One’s Own
      5 min read

    • Article

      My So-called Cottage Life

      Jun 26, 2019

      My So-called Cottage Life
      7 min read

    • Article

      Where The Living Is Easy

      Aug 5, 2020

      Where The Living Is Easy
      13 min read

    • Article

      This New Religion

      Jun 2, 2020

      He introduced himself as Captain Jack Lash Lannigan, and he said that he was an Irish pirate. “You don’t sound very Irish,” I told him, and he laughed. We—Maia, Gustav and I—had met Captain Jack outside the Nocturnem Draft Haus, a bar on Main Street

      5 min read

    • Article

      American Summer

      Jul 13, 2021

      American Summer
      7 min read

    • Article

      I Discover A Place I Already Knew

      Jan 8, 2020

      I felt cold chills down my arms when I realized that I recognized this book's setting: We had a home on the exact river the author was describing.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Eating My Words

      Nov 15, 2021

      Eating My Words
      9 min read

    • Article

      Low Expectations

      Feb 1, 2019

      Low Expectations
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Armchair Angler

      Oct 5, 2021

      Custom House The most influential and recognizable family name in American fly-fishing literature is undoubtedly the Macleans of Missoula, Montana. In Home Waters, John Maclean — son of Norman Maclean, the author of A River Runs Through It — offers a

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Washington Island Boyhood

      Mar 7, 2023

      A Washington Island Boyhood
      8 min read

    • Article

      Forever Wild

      Oct 1, 2018

      When I think of the Scarborough house, I remember the wind whipping through my salt-hardened curls and my little-girl feet bare and crusted with sand as I run through its heavy wooden doors. I was four and wild as the landscape itself. My grandparent

      3 min read

    • Article

      Memory Bank

      Mar 18, 2021

      Memory Bank
      3 min read

    • Article

      Our Secret Island

      Mar 5, 2020

      Our Secret Island
      2 min read

    • Article

      Your LETTERS

      Nov 12, 2021

      Your LETTERS
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Book To Get Lost In

      Feb 17, 2020

      A Book To Get Lost In
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Story Behind…

      Dec 16, 2022

      The Story Behind…
      2 min read

    • Article

      There Be Treasure, Danger And Death

      Dec 3, 2019

      What if I told you there is a treasure chest filled with precious gemstones, gold nuggets and priceless artifacts hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains? That an eccentric art collector buried an antique, metal box worth over $5 million dollars some

      7 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Nov 6, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Nov 6, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Modest Man

      Oct 17, 2019

      The Modest Man
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Requiem for Ahab

    5/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Requiem for Ahab - G. J. Lau

      Requiem for Ahab

      G. J. Lau

      Copyright © 2012 G. J. Lau

      Published by The Windroot Press at Smashwords

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

      ISBN: 978-1-4659-4834-2

      Cover Design by G. J. Lau

      Blog: http://www.windroot.blogspot.com/

      Other Books by G. J. Lau:

      The Magpie’s Secret

      SitRep Negative: A Year in Vietnam

      Fifty Years of Global Warming

      A Misunderstood God

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1 – Beginnings

      Chapter 2 – Brook Farm

      Chapter 3 – Culp’s Hill

      Chapter 4 – Flotsam and Jetsam

      Chapter 5 – The North Star

      Chapter 6 – Homecoming

      Chapter 7 – Abby

      Chapter 8 – Aaron

      Chapter 9 – Hannah

      Chapter 10 – Ahab

      Chapter 11 – Lindsey

      Chapter 12 – The Inquiry

      Chapter 13 – The Crew

      Chapter 14 – The Spouter Inn

      Chapter 15 – Princeton House

      Chapter 16 – Ishmael

      Chapter 17 – Breakfast

      Chapter 18 – Mount Wachusett

      Chapter 19 – The Cemetery

      Chapter 20 – Departures

      Chapter 21 – Requiem for Ahab

      Chapter 22 – The Letter

      Soundings

      Chapter 1

      Beginnings

      I was not quite seven years old when my father died. His name was Ahab, and he was captain of the whaleship Pequod out of Nantucket. She sank off the Solomon Islands in March 1843, with all hands lost save for one sailor who was picked up two days later by another whaleship—the Rachel, captained by Josiah Gardiner—that was searching for its own lost crewmen in yet another of the mishaps that made whaling a dangerous and often fatal enterprise. The Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford never lacked for new names to be engraved on the markers that adorned its spare white walls … markers that would never see a graveyard, memorializing sailors who would never again see the land. My father’s name was not among them. Ahab was an outcast, this being the result of the unspoken sentiment of a whaling community that resented the loss of ship and sailors not in the normal course of a dangerous trade but rather because of one man’s madness … or so it was said. The only available facts were collected during a brief official inquiry into the loss of the Pequod, facts derived mainly from the testimony of the lone survivor, a sailor identified only by the name Ishmael.

      These things I was to learn much later in life. I knew nothing of them as a child growing up. I entered the world kicking and screaming on an unseasonably warm mid-June day in 1836. I was named Thomas, after my mother’s father … also a whaling captain … also lost at sea. Ahab was there to witness the blessed event and no doubt held me as any new father would, but I was still a babe in arms when he set off on yet another of the seemingly continuous whaling voyages that resulted in his being largely absent from my life from the time of my birth until his death. My mother Hannah was much younger than my father, by some 20 years. I knew very little of the circumstances of their meeting or their life together as a married couple, my mother being reluctant to talk of that time in her life, especially that period after Ahab received a terrible wound from a whale that resulted in the loss of his leg below the knee. Upon Ahab’s return home, the mood in the household changed to the point where, even as a child, I was able to understand that some terrible and sad cloud now hung over us. One of my few strong memories from that period is the sound of his ivory leg thumping against the wooden floor as he paced restlessly from one room to another, long into the night.

      The death of Ahab at sea left my mother alone and without means of support by which to raise a small child. She returned to live with her mother, but both soon realized that New Bedford was not the ideal place to raise a small child. It was decided that we would go to Cohasset—a small town located about 20 miles south of Boston along the coast—to live with an aging maiden aunt who could provide a home for mother and me in return for cooking and housekeeping. After two years of caring for Aunt Polly, my mother met and married the man I came to consider my father, Aaron Stoddard. Soon after that, my grandmother in New Bedford died unexpectedly from scarlet fever, leaving us no reason to return to the place of my birth. I was by then twelve years old and had very little memory remaining of New Bedford or of Ahab. The one thing I have from that time is a piece of scrimshaw that he carved on one of his voyages: a whale tooth that depicted a ship sailing past an island under scudding clouds. I used to stare at it on my dresser and wonder what it was like to sail the Seven Seas in search of whales, but that life would remain forever a mystery to me, as would Ahab.

      The father I did know and love was as tireless as he was energetic. A compact man with a strong body and a friendly demeanor—but don’t get found to be cheating or lying, for then the storm clouds would swiftly gather across his brow—he ran a ship chandler’s business that provided comfortably for my mother and myself and my half-sister, Abby. After Abby was born, we moved to a larger house that could better accommodate the needs of a growing family. That would have been in 1848, when Stockbridge Street was little more than a widened pathway bounded at both ends by the harbor. Our house was set on a small hill that overlooked a cove and the wider harbor beyond it. Behind us were marshes and woodlands perfectly suited to a small boy’s thirst for exploration and adventure. As befitted a man of my father’s growing importance in the town’s commercial affairs, we lived in a comfortable two-story clapboard house, with a first floor living area and basement that held a kitchen. The second floor held three bedrooms, two of which were arranged such that my sister had to walk through my room to get to hers … but at least I had the larger of the two.

      At the back edge of the property sat a barn, where the horse and carriage were kept. Hay would drift down from the loft above, where my mother often found me stealing a nap on a hot summer afternoon. I used to love swinging open the wide doors of the loft and hanging on the block and tackle used to haul hay bales to the loft … but only when mother was not watching. In winter, the slope behind the house became a place for sledding and snowball fights between my sister and I and the other children who lived on our street, mostly the sons and daughters of the recent wave of Portuguese immigrants who provided many of the captains and crewmen who manned the fishing schooners that set out in search of mackerel. In summer, my mother maintained a vegetable garden where the fruits and vegetables we ate and preserved for winter were grown and harvested. A rose garden shaped like a horseshoe adorned the front of the plot facing Stockbridge Street. I still remember the fragrances from those roses, as sharp in my memory as the thorns that would occasionally prick my overeager fingers reaching for an especially full bloom for the vase my mother liked to have at our table.

      I was given a good education through high school—where I was an average student save in the mathematical disciplines, where I displayed a natural facility for numbers and calculations—and was well positioned to assume a hard-working and hopefully successful position in my father’s ship chandlery business. Perhaps due to some residual fear instilled in me because of Ahab’s death at sea, I was a confirmed landlubber. The other children could handle a skiff as easily as walking across the street. I preferred to keep my feet on the ground, and so never worked at getting my sea legs. Despite my aversion to the sea, I soon found myself immersed in things maritime as a consequence of working in the chandlery. My nonexistent aptitude as a seaman was more than offset by my practical skills in the keeping of the accounts and the inventory. I also developed no small ability as a bargainer, such being the nature of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1