The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (18 page)

Nor was there any victory to claim. Asa swore the child would die if taken, and the child died, and what does that mean? Nothing. We are all dying.

He may be angrier tomorrow. Now he can only search vainly for sleep. When the fire dies out, he is still awake. He could get a blanket, but that would be an indulgence. He pulls his hands up to his mouth and blows into his cupped palms. His breath warms his face, like the breath of a child.

Mrs. Randolph wakes Asa when she comes to cook his breakfast. They are both slower now. When she bends down to sweep the ashes out of the fireplace, he tells her please don’t, he can do it when he rises. She nods and waits, kneeling on the flagstones for a few moments before standing again. Her children are older now, a few of them married, and he has repeatedly asked her to move to Long Ridge. She likes her independence, but then Asa has never been as alone as he is now.

“You should have the young man live here,” she says. He doesn’t answer, so she climbs down to the cellar to pull scallions and strips of pork. The stock has shrunk since Helen’s death, and half of the shelves now stand empty. Mrs. Randolph looks at the jars of sugar and cocoa and doesn’t know what he’ll need them for, now that Tabitha won’t stop by for sweets. If only there were another woman to come and see him. Pity Widow Dennis had passed on; there might have been a match. She resolves to adjust his purchasing. It’s hard to keep a ready kitchen for a single man. She’ll have to stop in on John now too—make sure he’s feeding himself and keeping the rats out. It’s pride that keeps them apart, gives her twice the work.

Asa decides not to get up from the sofa. Who is watching to see him take his place at the head of an empty table? Mrs. Randolph finds a tray for his plate, and he watches the food until all the warmth is gone and Mrs. Randolph has left the house to forage in the garden, and then he touches it with his fingers. The porridge has begun to harden. He scoops into it with his hand and brings it to his mouth, eating as cleanly as he can. He dips his fingers into the mug of cider she brought, then licks the taste off. If he were a blind man, he would have no images to haunt him. He sleeps again.

Mrs. Randolph finds a blanket to cover him. She sweeps out the ashes.

Every corner in John’s house is a corner she once rounded. The walls still carry her fingerprints. When the wind comes through the bottom of a propped window, it makes the same sound as when Tab was in the room, and John keeps turning to find her. She does not even visit his dreams, which he spends haunted, hunting her, calling her name down empty paths, standing up in a skiff to look for her head in the waves. Waking, he feels like a plug has been pulled from the bottom of his feet, and all the unnameable things have drained out of him. Touching a doorknob, lifting a fork, he fears that the husk of him will break. This was a house the two of them came to, and is not a house that holds just one.

He drags his mattress down the road to the store, pulling a ridge of dirt behind him, and settles it in the back room, where her presence is most faint. He sleeps there for three days before he can open the store again. The only things to eat are candy and dried fruits, and he gorges on these, finding her in the sweetness. The first customers discover a rattled, ransacked space. He sells his goods without speaking, though he gains nothing from silence. He sometimes wishes Asa would stop by, or even Blue Francis, so he could grab a man’s shirtsleeve and say, “Do you remember when? And the way her eyes fit in her face?” They would look down at their hands and speak of her shell-pink fingernails. He is grateful that Asa does not visit, or Blue Francis, who hardly knew her.

A boy comes in one afternoon with eggs to sell. John considers him from across the counter: his nubby hair, his wide brown eyes, his little straw basket.

“Only five eggs here,” John says.

“That’s what I got,” the boy says.

“Who’s going to buy five eggs?”

“To put in a pie, or any other thing.”

“They’d only last a day.”

“Then it’s a day’s worth of eggs.”

John counts out a quarter dollar in coins. The boy counts them again. “You’re taking that money back to your mother?” John asks.

“They’re my chickens.”

“And what’ll you spend it on?”

“You have any peel?”

“Lemon or orange?” John asks, before remembering he has neither. The night before, after the town had guttered into darkness, he had sat on his mattress in the windowless room and eaten all the candied peels, their sheen absorbing the only vestiges of light in the air. They flickered in his hands. When they were gone, another thing that reminded him of Tab was gone, and he slept again.

“Orange, please,” the boy says.

“Save your money for something nicer. Moll won’t like you spending it on candy.”

The boy kicks the counter. John never got to know Moll’s son, though they came into the store sometimes. He was born after John took Helen to sea, and when they returned they had their own pregnancy to tend. Without Helen, John had trouble facing Moll. He bore a guilt that all men bear who lose their wives in childbirth; the sight of other women embarrassed him.

But here is a boy who is eleven, maybe twelve, who could have died also, or instead.

John watches him move idly around the store, brushing his fingers against the things he could buy for a quarter dollar. When the boy stops to inspect something, he rises up on his toes, bouncing his ankles. John cannot imagine the energy it takes to achieve this. If he stays here alone for another week, he will lose the ability to move at all. He will close his eyes and grow into the ground and a rough hide will cover him. He closes his eyes to test the feeling. There is a quiet in his limbs that is very soft and easy, and he almost can’t breathe out of fear of himself.

A button hits his forehead. He opens his eyes. The boy is tucked behind a stand of brooms, smiling.

He is just a child. Has lost nothing.

“What’s your name again?”

“Davy.”

“Would you like a job? I’ll be needing some help. Stocking, seeing to customers.”

“Putting in orders?”

John leans his arms onto the counter and looks at the boy intently. “You can leave that to me.”

“Just that you seem to be out of things, like peel.”

The receipts on Asa’s desk are out of order. He hasn’t entered them in his ledger since John left with Tabitha, but the mail has not ceased, and business piles up. His turpentine production slowed after the war, after Helen was gone, and now he can see even less incentive to labor. The empire he had mapped for himself is shrinking. Cogdell, his neighbor to the west, has put in an offer for a third of Asa’s pine acres, perhaps to start farming tobacco. Asa cannot find a reason to refuse. His hands are sieves. His body is losing its cohesion, like old paper gone to dust. The line of Asa’s blood has reached its terminus. He has stopped imagining a future, the way he did when he was young and every path led to better versions of his own life. Paths narrow and end; his legs are weary.

He wants to ask John to dinner, to ask John to live with him. Long Ridge wasn’t built to house one old man. But when he pushes aside the receipts and the unopened letters and draws a blank page toward him, he is frozen. The invitation cannot be written. This is a man who has, in selfishness, taken away everything Asa has loved. His daughter, his granddaughter. Both seaborne and now dead. He is perhaps most frustrated at the obliqueness of John’s guilt. Women die in childbirth. (But Helen may not have married at all, that was always a possibility. Would he have given up the chance at Tab to keep Helen? Would he have sacrificed Helen to have his own wife back, whole? There is a reason men do not decide their own fates.) Yellow fever is capricious. If Tab was going to die, she would have died on land or at sea. (But he stole Asa’s chance to be with her at the last, to minister to her soul. Where is her soul now without religion’s stamp?) His thoughts are all circular, leading him back to self-blame as much as to hatred of his son-in-law. The endlessly forking paths of his youth have become an inescapable loop. Death is a given; then where is his death? He can only conclude that God has spared him to suffer.

There are too many crosses to bear and still proceed; they have collapsed him. He is laid out, waiting for his body’s end, his joints screaming under the weight of the crosses on his back. He does not have the strength to contemplate forgiveness. He dips the quill in ink and asks John to dinner.

She had loved the first child because she had no choice. It came out of Moll’s body still attached and its dependence bred devotion. She loved before she could stop herself, before she knew any better.

Two years passed before her second child, and by then she understood that these babies belonged to somebody else. Love was weakness. Love was acknowledging the rightness of the world, and this she could not do. The children were beautiful and they deserved affection and she would do her almighty best, but her firstborn son was the last thing she allowed herself to cherish.

She wonders if her own parents, whoever they were, felt this. If the farm in Virginia, which she only remembers as swatches of green and hard labor, broke them of any love. Did they run away? Were they beaten to death? Does it make a difference?

She crawls next to Moses on the mattress but does not touch him. Davy sits in the corner and rocks the baby in its wooden cradle.

Moses speaks quietly. “Why don’t you take her to the fields?”

“It’s dangerous. There are snakes.”

“The other women take their babies.”

“Some do.”

“Those who want to feed them from the breast.”

“I didn’t take the others.”

“You took Davy.”

She did take Davy. She had woken up in astonishment each morning to find him beside her. His fists like flower buds. Even when he was older and the other children went to the granny, she hoisted him on her back, singing to him in the rows, or tying him in a sling from a branch when she was tired. His smile, his little pearl teeth, did not belong to the plantation, or Cogdell, or Moll. Not even God owned him.

But the love he demanded of her was finite. She had just one jar of it, and when she gave it to him, she had none left.

When the second child arrived, Moll’s eyes were clear. She saw it for what it was: a burden, a weight tied to her ankle, a reminder of their mutual fate. A victim. If she had understood this sooner, she may not have loved her son.

The new baby is nothing but another body. This is what she tells herself to survive.

“She’ll live,” she says to her husband.

John is pulling down all the packages of cotton and string and foolscap from the shelves in the store’s back room when Davy finds him. His mattress, tangled with a damp sheet, is littered with parcels. John steps among them clumsily, and when he trips on a small box and falls to his knees, he begins to punch his fist against the soft bed.

“I came for work,” Davy says, standing in the doorway. “You looking for something?”

John stays bent among the parcels, so Davy retreats to the store. A young woman is fingering some raw wool and looks at Davy with concern. He is not old enough for much pride, so he smiles at her and opens his hands wide the way he has seen shopkeepers do. He is too nervous to form any phrases. He stands still with his hands spread and hopes she understands his role in this business.

“I’d like a little of the wool,” she says, and a surge of ownership rises in Davy and warms him.

He pulls the skeins she asks for and carries them to the counter. He stands there for a moment, assessing the goods, his ease in handling them, when he remembers he should be on the other side of the counter. With a loud cough, he masks his misstep, hurrying around to the back. He takes the money she gives him because he doesn’t know the price of the wool and in her face he cannot detect any deceit, and deceit is an expression on which he was raised. When he thanks her for the coins, he looks straight in her eyes and dares her to punish him. She takes the wool with a smile—she is almost still a girl—and leaves him alone in the shop, a master at last.

John comes out of the back room to find Davy rearranging the jars of spices, in order from dark cloves to the brightness of ground ginger. The mace, fire-bitten, sits on the shelf alone, uncategorized. John picks it up, and it’s a comfort. The boy’s organization touches him. He wants to remember Helen, her line of ship treasures arranged by size and with such affection, his body wrapped around hers, but he has a greater hurt that needs honoring. He cannot keep all of his memories and survive.

“I should have an apron,” Davy says. “They might not guess I’m a shop man. Also, you need more colorful things, or folks won’t stop in to purchase. And baskets. My mother is always wanting a good basket, for they break and fray all the time.”

“Do you know where my house is?” John asks.

“I suppose so.”

“In the hearth room, on one of the shelves, there should be a parcel in brown paper.”

“A box?”

“Thin and soft. Would you look for it?”

“Just walk in? No one around?”

John sets the small jar of mace on top of the ginger. Would it have been easier to lose a son? There is something unprotectable about a boy. The journey he makes, to life or death, is simply the one he forges. But Tab—and Helen—lay in stillness, in wait, breath held, for the world to wreak its vengeance. He should have served them better. It is his fault. His own fault. He scrambles to climb out of that thought. He is getting better at dipping in and out of the darkness. In these moments of paralysis, what carries him up again is the reassurance that there is no grief left to him. There is no further sorrow. He has been to the bottom of it and seen God’s worst. A man who loses his daughter to the world is his own punishment. He forgets what his daughter actually was, how her eyes jumped at the unknown, how she sought herself in isolation and dreamed her own hand into battles.

Davy is cautious of getting beaten, so he insists on an apron before walking to John’s house. He meets the eyes of the men he passes and feels golden in his white smock. The door is unlatched, and when he sticks his head in, he sees a woman’s figure on the floor of the hall, scrubbing the pine boards in idle circles, no more deliberate than a crab sifting through sand with one claw. He recognizes the wild white-and-drab frizzles of Mrs. Randolph’s hair. She must have been loaned out from the big house at Long Ridge. She once brought bread to his mother when she was too laid up to bake. Moll was proud and wouldn’t eat it, so Davy didn’t tell her that the white woman’s bread was better. It must have had a little sugar in it.