The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (11 page)

He pushes the folded note aside and retrieves a fresh sheet of paper from his desk. With an unsteady quill, he begins, “Most excellent lady.”

In the last of the day’s light she slips down to the marsh’s edge, frightening off a cloud of plovers. John is waiting, silhouetted against pale violet, jabbing a stick into the mud. She stops before the ground grows moist and waits for him to turn. They play the game in which he inches toward her, swallowing the space between them, measuring her stillness, until she laughs and spins away, reclaiming distance. He has come within a foot of her.

“I’ll tell you more of my pirating days, and then you won’t miss me.”

“Don’t,” Helen says. “I’ll turn you in.”

“We’d kidnap captains’ wives and use their finery as fish bait. Many a time I cut my finger setting ribbon and lace on hooks.”

She holds up her hand, and he raises his so they can feel the warmth between them. “Your stories are all the more wicked for being false,” she says.

He throws his stick into the sound, where it floats. “Do you mean to encourage William Dennis?”

“He’s a friend of my father’s.”

“He knows I see you sometimes.”

“You mention it, do you?” She wishes she had brought the little folding chair. Her body is tired. She begins to walk back toward the house.

“He asked me to speak well of him. To mention his merits to you.”

“Proceed,” she calls back.

“I will not court you for my brother.”

Helen stops. In the distance, she can make out the opening faces of the moonflower she planted to creep up the front steps of Long Ridge. She turns around, and John has not moved. For two weeks, they have traded stories of sea and land but have built no castles. There have been no promises. If asked what she wants, perhaps Helen could not answer coherently. She wants to do right, above all, and the man in his summer uniform, heat radiating from his fingertips, does not fit with what she has been told is the purity of love.

And yet they are undoubtedly courting, even in the absence of words. Whether she is hungry for him because he is a man and she is lonely, or whether she is hungry for
him
, she is bound now. He approached her as a friend, reminding her how few of these she has. She has begun to understand that her life is small, and she cannot accept smallness.

She continues on to the house, not responding.

Helen wakes with the feeling of a deep concavity in her abdomen: giddiness. The soldiers are mustering today in the field north of town, but there is no everyday course that will take her walking past them. She gathers her needlework in a bag instead, and visits the store that stands two blocks from the church. She leans against the wooden counter as the boy in the apron tries to match her thread. He holds up a yellow that looks like summer weeds, and she says, “Paler.”

When Moll comes in, head down, Helen turns to look away. There is hardly any need for awkwardness; the women have not seen each other since Mrs. Easton’s tea, but there has been no argument, only the growing up that happens so much faster at this age than at any other. Helen in the third week of July is a stranger to Helen in June. Moll stabs her with a finger as she passes, and Helen gives a little leap of surprise.

The boy has wrapped her thread in paper and has tried to sell her a broom, and now Helen lingers outside with her parcel, waiting for Moll.

“You haven’t any money to buy things,” she says when Moll comes out empty-handed.

“Will soon. I asked him if he’d take eggs to sell and he didn’t see why not.”

“Where’d you get chickens from?”

Moll takes the thread from her hand and peels back the paper to see what color she chose. “Moses is what we call a finder.” Helen begins to walk home, and Moll takes a half skip to catch up to Helen’s pace, thrusting the thread back at her. “Mending?”

“A fire screen, I expect,” Helen says. She concentrates on her steps, directing the fall of her feet, heel and ball, careful to avoid kicking dust on her dress. “I can’t imagine you’ll get more than a few shillings for your eggs. You’ll be wanting to buy your freedom soon.” It is hot, and she’d rather be thinking of other things.

“You have a way of laughing at me.” Moll stops in front of the church and Helen turns around, impatient. “But you’re the one hasn’t done anything at all.”

Helen opens her mouth to say the dozen things she has accomplished that day alone, not the least of which is finding the yellow thread to suit the warblers in her pasture scene, but Moll has a hand around her arm now.

“You’ve just been playing at hearts.” She gives another tickle under Helen’s arm, and Helen pushes her away.

“When I wish to discuss love with you, Moll, I will certainly inform you, but I have no inclination for it when you act like a child.” She turns for home again. The paper around the thread, clenched in her fist, is damp now, and she ignores her steps long enough to turn her hem red with dust. She hears Moll behind her, and she is sorry for her anger. Tomorrow she will have to sit in that church and listen to a layman describe God’s mercy, or his wrath, and it will take all her strength to recall the fervor she had for Jesus. She is worried enough about her heart without Moll examining it.

Two men pass on the other side of the road; they look at her and nod. She sees what they see: a white woman running away from a slave. One spending money for woven silk, the other pocketing pence for eggs. She slows to signal to Moll her forgiveness. The other woman slows too, maintaining the distance. When they have reached the green alley leading to Long Ridge, out of any man’s earshot, Helen stops. She does not face Moll but knows she is listening, the shadow behind her.

“I don’t want to marry.”

“Neither did I.”

“That’s entirely different.”

Moll laughs. “It sure turned out to be.”

When Helen looks at her, the sun is cutting across her face through the oaks, turning triangles of her dark skin golden. “Do you want me to apologize?”

“Sometimes I wish you would talk to me,” Moll says. “And sometimes I wish you would leave me alone. Doesn’t matter much what I’d rather.”

“You didn’t say a word to me at the soldiers’ tea.”

“I took your glass from you when you were done.” Moll swats at a horsefly that has begun to circle her head.

“Will you come inside? Mrs. Randolph is squeezing lemons.”

“Yes, I will gladly be served by a white woman.” Moll tries to smile. “You want me to carry your thread? Lift your dress up from the road so it doesn’t get dirty?”

“Don’t be rude. I miss you, and I’m too tired to play cat and mouse. Come tell me whether this color will do.” The two women walk side by side toward the white house at the end of the alley. “I’ve done the meadow with the rabbits, but I can’t get the sky right. I thought it looked too empty, and now I fear it will be overrun with birds.”

His parents having died when he was young, and himself having been raised by impoverished cousins in a village outside of Beaufort’s orbit, John sees love, or rather desire, as a gift the world offers, to be claimed like any other. His nights, at first, are not sleepless. His breath is not disturbed. He remembers Helen’s face clearly, even the tapering corners of her eyes, and does not spend his hours between musters trying to recapture her features. While William Dennis still languishes, John must be silent, and the lack of a confidant does not trouble him. He is a man who takes things as they are given to him.

He only feels discomfort when William Dennis sits beside him on his cot in Widow Dennis’s house, for they are sharing William’s old bedroom, and asks him how to win a woman’s love. John has had few opportunities in his life for deceit. He speaks to him of courage and patience and avoids the subject of resignation, which is at every road’s end, without which the world would have long since died of grief.

“Haven’t you any sweetheart?” William asks.

“There was a girl before I enlisted.”

“She let you kiss her?”

Had John wanted to kiss her? When he thinks of her face, he sees Helen’s. “She brought scones to my cousin’s house, each with a
J
written in currants.”

“She would have been sorry to see you go. She’s the type who’d send you letters.”

There are no letters. Thinking on it, he had never given her encouragement, though he would have kissed her. He hadn’t given her anything in return, and for the first time, he imagines the girl at home, brokenhearted. She is not sending letters because she wants him to feel her lack, to punish. And he has not felt anything at all, has not noticed until William Dennis, with his lion’s heart, has come to her defense. Could anyone leave Helen so abandoned? “I don’t know what women would do without their letters,” John says.

Neither is an unhandsome man. William is thinner, his eyes lighter and more vulnerable. “I believe her father supports my cause,” he says.

“Any parent would.”

“Then you think I should ask.”

The sun through the south window falls upon the back of John’s neck. He had wanted to sleep this afternoon. His nights have become Helen’s. William would have made her a moon goddess by now, would have translated her paleness into an angelic affinity. John has never regretted his lack of sentimentality, but perhaps women wish for some servitude. He has doubts where he had none. “What does her face look like when you speak to her?”

“She is all kindness,” William says.

“Melting eyes?”

“I think she is too much a lady to betray herself.”

Helen’s arms last night. John does not want to think of her; he wants to sleep. He lies back on the cot, folding his legs behind William, who still looks into his open hands. “Could you live without her?” John asks, eyes closed.

“Could anyone?”

He is still sane enough not to dream of her, or not to remember his dreams. When he wakes, William is gone. One of his legs has gone numb. Soldiers are useless in Beaufort. Where will he go when the war is done? Take his commission, buy a farm, learn to farm. He cannot return to sea with a wife. Her arms are like the sea. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes. There is no way in which her arms are like the sea.

“You never act like yourself anymore,” Helen says. They sit in the parlor, surrounded by low cushioned chairs and the painted ladies on the wallpaper that beckon to the painted men. Helen has hung a crucifix on the wall above one of Asa’s desks as a rebuke. The figure’s doleful eyes observe her struggles; his wounds remind her that he is an ally. She is glad Moll followed her home from the store because now they can forgive each other.

Moll rests her lemonade on her knee, rubbing the imprinted glass with one finger. The bottom of the glass is wet from washing, and it leaves a dark ring on her skirt. “I suppose you know me better than anyone, is that it? You who wouldn’t care if I was married to a monster or sold to Georgia.”

“Is it this house? You’re not comfortable here.”

“Oh, too grand for the likes of me?”

“Very well,” Helen says, standing up. “I see we won’t make any progress.” She reaches for Moll’s glass. “Give it here.”

“I’m not done.”

“You’re too busy mocking me.” She grabs the glass from Moll’s hand. “I’ll tell Mrs. Randolph you found it too sweet. Up, up. We’re going outside.” Helen clears the room of dishes. She is tired of having her intentions judged and misjudged.

By the shore the grass is dry. They have not had an afternoon thunderstorm in days, and some of the weeds are singed from the heat. Helen lies down on her back and digs her fingers into the dry dirt. Moll stands beside her, scuffing the toe of her slipper along the ground. Her hands rest on her waist, and she squints to filter this scene: the sun mirroring off the water, the white woman in her white dress ablaze on the ground, a lizard shimmying down the marsh reeds, stopping to puff out its red neck. There are no clouds for cover. A schooner is slack-sailed beyond the opening to the sound. Windless, the land buzzes and waits.

Moll sits beside Helen, taking a handful of the other woman’s dress and smoothing its folds between her fingers, admiring the linen. Helen’s eyes are closed, and she smiles at this touch.

“Why must you hold everything against me?” she says.

Moll lets the fabric drop and lies back on the grass next to her. “You think you’re in love?”

Helen rises up on her elbows. A dragonfly is wavering over Moll’s shoulder, dipping as if to drink. “It seems a luxury, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t have thought anything was a luxury to you. You snap a gold spoon and your daddy hands you another.”

“Gold spoons.” Helen laughs and falls back again. She had never minded the North Carolina heat, for it was always tinged with this spark of salt. Opening her mouth, she can taste the weather. If called upon to travel, by a husband perhaps, Helen would embark willingly. She is young enough to adore her home and to leap at whatever is not her home. But in her years of girlhood, she has defined her duty narrowly: she owes her service to her father and her slaves, to the turpentine business and to the catface trees behind Long Ridge. She is a servant of God, whose scope is small.

“Which soldier is it?” Moll says.

“Would you say you love Moses?”

“Now you believe marriage is about love?”

“Father made that match. I had nothing to do with it.”

“You sure saw it through.”

A feather, some tuft of egret down, tumbles up the bank and settles against Helen’s hand, making her start. Her chest grows warm with unhappiness.

“There were no women out on your ships, I suppose,” William says, gnawing the meat off the bone of chicken.

Widow Dennis brings in a platter of rice and onions. “Yes, tell us stories of pirates, John. Give them a better name.”

“I was hardly pirating,” John says. Two other men from the regiment have joined Widow Dennis’s table to avoid the army’s cauldrons of rabbit stew. They repay the widow’s generosity by eating in silence. John spoons some rice onto his plate. “I manned sails, coiled rope, scrubbed boards. Took a turn as cook.”

“Never killed a man?” William asks.

“Can’t say.” John smiles. “Through the smoke, I never saw the cannonballs land.”