Cape Cod (70 page)

“His eyes is
blue
. He ain’t my baby.”

“All babies’ eyes are blue when they’re born,” said Nancy.

“He
ain’t
my baby.”

vii.

The
Nancy
put in at Annapolis Royal, which was still known, on some charts, as Port Royal.

The organization that would later assist runaways in Canada was still in its infancy, but Nancy Drake Rains knew the identities of sympathetic families, and she left the Nances with a Presbyterian couple named Frederick and Alice Campbell, whose home was within the shadow of the old French fortress.

The Campbells promised that the Negroes would be treated well. Since each of them knew a trade, there would be work for them, and an enclave of other runaways to join. But sometime during the night, Jacob took his axe and slipped away.

Dorothea was inconsolable. Alice Campbell urged her to think of the child, but Dorothea’s milk stopped flowing. The old woman, who had never had a child of her own, fed little Sam milk from a bottle and wondered at the blue of this Negro baby’s eyes.

But there was no wonder in it. Dorothea had been one of her master’s most desirable possessions, light-skinned and fine featured, a house slave unbowed by heavy work. And beyond that, she had intelligence. She knew that a master would not sell a slave who made him happy. So, when her master came to her, she made him happy, in hope that she and Jacob could remain together….

Unlike his ancestor, Jack, Sam Hilyard left Port Royal with a sense of ineffable sadness. There was no redemption in life, no forgiveness. The joy they felt at Samuel Isaac’s birth had faded in Jacob’s despair.

“So old Jacob’s gone off on his own to follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.” Isaac stood the helm on a bright southbound day.

“Maybe he’ll come back.” Nancy touched the blisters she had earned hauling tarred line, a small physical pain to distract from her heartsickness. “I hope he comes back.”

“He might.” Isaac laughed. “Where’s a nigger gonna find another high-yeller woman in Nova Scotia, anyway?”

“You’re a crude man.”

“A plain-speaker.”

“He’ll come back because he loves her,” said Sam. “He’ll see that she done it because she loved him.”

“For a lonely man, you speak well of love,” said Nancy.

“It’s the loneliness makes you appreciate it.”

Sam had done what Hannah asked. Now he was free to do as he wished. He had much to tell Nancy, a legacy to give her, whether she wanted it or not. He had traveled to this moment over many years. But still he hesitated, because nobody ever reached the North Star. They simply beat on, sloops thumping over the waves.

“Did you love someone once?” Nancy asked him.

“More than one… more than once.” Sam smoothed his hands over the ancient vest and went into his cabin.

“
I
love women,” announced Isaac. “All kinds.”

“I think you love something else, Mr. Hilyard. ‘Lust’ is the most polite word for it.”

“The world could do with a little more lust. It might take everyone’s mind off all this do-goodin’.”

Nancy found herself amused by Isaac’s honesty, her first amusement since the blue-eyed birth. “You do good rather well, for a man who professes so little interest in it. Perhaps I shall ask you to do more good, on another voyage.”

“
Perhaps
I’ll do it… if the fish ain’t bitin’.”

viii.

Sam plotted his course as though dropping a plumb line from Nova Scotia onto the sand at Provincetown, and he guided his little sloop straight and steady for two days of clear weather. But on the second afternoon, high, thin clouds came striping across the blue.

The mackerel sky, Sam knew, swam in the current of a changing wind. And by the following morning, the mackerel had become a raging serpent of a northeaster.

On Cape Cod, tight-lipped women watched the wind rip sheets of rain across the dunes and prayed for their men at sea. Hard-eyed masters went down to the harbors to secure their vessels against the tide. And sharp-eyed scavengers walked the back shore, watching for salvage thrown up by the storm.

In the Hilyard house, there was quiet. After a prayer, which Mary led and Will did not sing, the family went about its rainy-day business as though none of their number were in mortal danger. They had lost one son to the sea. They knew that worry would not save the other from the fate that God had designed. Best to keep busy.

In her house at Barnstable, Hannah watched the rain wear at the window while her great-grandsons played checkers by the fire. From their nervous talk, she knew that double jumps were not what concerned them. They had lost a father to the sea, but they lacked the stoicism of a fisherman’s family. They were too young for that, and Hannah was too old to lie to them.

The wind that shook the Cape Cod houses and thrashed the stands of pitch pine blew like a breeze compared to the living gale that consumed the sea. In the center of the storm, there was neither time nor place… only sensation.

The head throbbed from the roar, the skin stung from needle pricks of rain, the stomach churned with each sickening rise and precipitous drop and vomitous roll of the sea. Liquid cold seeped through every crevice between oilskin and flesh, filling the boots and soaking the body and dulling the brain to distraction. And where there was only sensation, thought retreated to the barriers of instinct.

For six hours, instinct held the
Nancy
before a wind that pounded her ever southward, allowing her no more control than a bottle cast over the side. But a mariner who had not merely
lived
fourscore and seven, but spent most of it at sea, was the kind who might pilot that bottle.

Sam lashed himself to the helm and watched the compass. Isaac and Nancy tied lifelines to the mast and watched for the beams of light that meant safety or disaster. If, in that time, Sam thought to reveal his truth to his granddaughter, he did not act upon it. There was too much else to do.

An hour after dark, as best they could tell, the
Nancy
came down on the tip of the Cape.

Isaac saw the Race Point light flash off the starboard bow.

“How far?” shouted Sam.

“A mile sou’west.”

“Sou’west?” Sam turned to Nancy, “Look for Highland! And pray you see it afore you hear breakers!”

“Can you hear breakers over this wind?”

“Hear ’em or hit ’em.”

“Long Point just showed for a bit,” Isaac hollered.

“Port or starboard?”

“Starboard.”

“Damn.” Sam Hilyard’s instincts had failed him.

Race Point to port and Long Point right after—that had been his plan, to come at the bay with room to spare, swing around Long Point, and into the lee of the Provincetown shore. But the lights told him he was northeast of the Cape, coming down on the back shore before a following wind.

“I see it!” cried Nancy.

The rock-steady beam of Highland Light appeared through the storm three miles to the south. That meant the
Nancy
was straight on the Peaked Hill Bar.

Then, like a pair of evil spirits greeting each other some where beyond the bow, the roar of the wind met the thundering surf.

Nancy remembered the rest as a dreamer recalls small pieces of a sleeping story.

When the sloop struck, the shock threw her to the deck and a sea as black as the grave poured over her. Then a loop of rope was passed around her waist.

At the helm, Sam was shouting about principles and honor… and comeuppance.

He raves, she thought. His words rushed like water bursting an ancient dam.

The mast was down, the sail blown off, the sloop breaking apart in the surf, and yet Sam’s voice screamed above it. “You’ve saved me again, Nancy, just as—”

A crashing sea lifted Nancy over the side, and she grabbed madly for a line to pull herself aboard. Then she felt the pressure around her waist, holding her against the tons of cascading water, holding her in this world when the ocean would take her to the next.

As the wave receded, Isaac dragged on the line that tethered her to him, lifting her back to the canted deck.

“… I let slaves die, little children and all, just to own a damnable book, just to get comeuppance on the Bigelows.”

Isaac reached Sam and cut one of the lines that lashed him to the helm.

“I sinned against God, against principle, all for the log of the
Mayflower.
”

Isaac tried to cut the other lashing, but Sam shouted, “Leave me. Let me go down with my ship. Save yourself and find the book, in—”

The sea struck again, and this time the sloop split open like a rotten melon.

Sam screamed, “Save her! Save my granddaughter.”

Then there was blackness, cold, a tumbling, turning ride through the surf, wet sand in her eyes… and Isaac’s hands pressing into her breasts, pressing hard, a rough lover, pressing the water out of her, and now his mouth on hers, wide open, breathing life, as intimate as… two people huddled together in a Humane Society hut, beneath heavy dry blankets, their wet clothes stripped off and hung before the fire, their arms around each other for simple animal warmth.

ix.

“He lashed me to himself, though I could have pulled him under.”

Nancy and Hannah were sitting once more in the upstairs parlor. Outside the window a locust tree shed its yellow leaves.

“He saved my life.”

“And for
that
you wish to marry him?” asked Hannah.

“He asked to marry
me
.”

“He asked?”

Nancy nervously tucked her hair behind her ears. It was now cut very short, as she no longer needed a bun. “Well, actually, he said it was time he settled down with a well-padded woman, someone who could keep his mind occupied as well as his… instincts.”

“He’s a crude man.”

“He’s a plain-speaking man, and a brave one.”

“He’s a mackerel fisherman, Nancy. You come from shipmasters.”

“And when have you ever seen a Cape Cod mackerel fisherman step aside for a shipmaster?”

Hannah well understood the attraction that Nancy might have for a plain-speaking Hilyard. “Have you said yes?”

“Not yet.” Nancy folded her hands and stared at her grandmother. Her face, but for a bruise beneath her left eye, was composed beyond any imagining of impulsiveness.

In the foyer, the grandfather clock chimed three times. Hannah’s teacup rattled against its saucer. A horse clopped by on the road.

“Do you love him?”

“I may.”

“Perhaps you should spend more time with him.” Hannah cast her eyes toward the ceiling, which had just creaked. “You might ask him to transport my current houseguests to Nova Scotia. See if he is still brave.”

“He’s already agreed. And we both agree that you shouldn’t hide any more runaways, at least until Heman and Sheriff Emulous have gotten over their resentment.”

“On that, I agree with both of you. On other things, I have my reservations.” Hannah furrowed her brow.

Nancy did the same. “Such as?”

“Did Sam reveal anything before he died?”

“He spoke of a book—the log of the
Mayflower.
”

This caused Hannah’s brows to rise. “He mentioned it?”

“He said he killed slaves to get it, for comeuppance. He tried to tell us where it was, but—”

“It still exists.” Hannah shook her head and fixed her eyes on the pattern of colors in the Oriental carpet—blue, gold, much red. “He told me he had destroyed it.”

“Why should you worry about it?”

“ ’Tis poison. It poisoned his grandmother. It poisoned my father. It poisoned him.”

Nancy knelt by her grandmother’s side. “You sent us to Sam so that he could salve his conscience by saving those slaves, didn’t you?”

“I sent you to the best seaman I knew.” Hannah pulled her shawl around her shoulders. “It happened to be Sam.”

“You once loved him?”

“I loved what he was before he became obsessed with comeuppance. We’re not meant to look to the past each morning and fill ourselves with resentment and dreams of revenge. We should look to the past for examples, then get on with our lives.”

“You loved a Hilyard. Why can’t that be my example?”

“Because Isaac is your
cousin
, girl.”

Nancy sat back as though she had been struck. She thought she had heard Sam say the word “granddaughter,” but she had not believed it.

“I may be old now, but I had my passions, even before I married your grandfather.”

“But, Grandmother—”

“I’m too old for apologies.”

“You need make none.” After a time to digest this news, Nancy laughed and threw her arms around her grandmother’s neck. “From what I saw of Sam Hilyard, I’m proud to have his blood in my veins.”

“That’s the problem, dear. There’s an old Cape saying and not a very gentle one: As the cousins get closer together, the eyes get farther apart. Do you remember the Doone brothers?”

“Their parents were
first
cousins. Isaac and I are—”

“Your children may yet turn out idiots.”

“Or geniuses.”

“Whatever they are, don’t let them waste their gifts in search of a book. Think of the future, always the future. It was the past in that book that ruined your grandfather… that kept you from ever knowing him and him from ever knowing you.”

And that was a tragedy for both of them, thought Nancy.

x.

On a June afternoon seven years later, Nancy Drake Rains Hilyard packed the book into a satchel that also contained several sticks of smoked herring, some bread, a dozen stalks of asparagus, fresh strawberries, and a jug of water.

She and her son Tom, the only child she had had by Isaac, took the stagecoach from East Dennis to Pond Village in Truro. From there, it was a hard walk down a sandy path to the back shore. The drisk—Cape Cod for a miserable combination of drizzle, mist, and rain—had settled onto land and sea, making the hearth more attractive than the heath. But as this was Nancy’s first anniversary without Isaac, she thought to make some gesture to his memory.

They had married, after several Canada runs during which Isaac had proven as resourceful as any Cape shipmaster.