The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (19 page)

The boy doesn’t know how to address the older woman, so he whistles. She starts up, sending a splatter of dirty wash water across the wall. He can see the panic in her eyes before she remembers.

“Is that Moll’s boy? What are you doing?”

“I work at the store now,” he says, coming inside and shutting the door behind him as if he owned the door and its hinges and its rusted iron latch. “I need to find a parcel for Master John.”

“Master John, is it now? Go on, you seem to know what you’re about, but no snatching from the pantry.”

“I
work
at the store,” he says again, sidling past her with some disdain.

The hearth room is shambled with boxes and jars and loose paper and dust. It looks as if an October storm has blown through and no one has set it to rights. Davy picks up a few of the smaller boxes and stacks them in a corner on top of a wooden trunk. They leave behind empty mirrors of themselves in the dust, ghost outlines. He begs a whisk broom from Mrs. Randolph and sweeps the dust around, fetching it from underneath chair legs and pushing it in circles until it has collected itself, the particles finding one another like family. He opens the back door and sweeps his pile out in dramatic bursts, each accompanied by a muffled howl of pleasure. The floor ready now for Mrs. Randolph’s wet rag, Davy turns to the shelves, righting glass jars, refilling them with spilled beads, metal hooks, and thimbles. One pot of pickled kidney beans had shattered, and he picks through the shards, slipping little bites of the vinegary mush and enjoying the salt. He wipes the shelves dry and sorts the jars by how full they are, left to right, the heaviest ones on the top shelf. Scrabbling on that top shelf for a dropped lid, Davy feels a soft package. He thinks about leaving it. After all, white men have their magic too, and Davy has been fairly warned about meddling in the unknown. His mother says the devil comes in shapes we don’t already know.

But now he is a worker and he has been told to fetch something, and he might get paid for it. On the farm, they are pounding the rice that was harvested in September. They’ll be pounding the rice until the new year and the fields are ready for clearing again, and Davy isn’t yet old enough to contribute his labor. They have calculated the age at which a boy slips over the threshold between diminishing risk of mortality and increasing strength. He’ll keep his wages until his master finds out, and then he’ll hand some of them over. Between his eggs for sale and his straightening a man’s hearth room, he figures he can soon buy his mother, and then she’ll buy him, and then they’ll buy a proper house. Right by the water, where he’s never allowed to play.

He holds the parcel in two hands, away from his body, and walks it out of the hearth room, past Mrs. Randolph—who sits back on her heels and watches the procession—and all the way to town, the parcel leading the way. It flops heavily, like a dead cat. It makes Davy’s spine twitch.

One evening a man comes to visit John in his empty house, a sailor from his sailing days. The man had asked in town for him and found his way here. He knows nothing of a wife and child, but says that John looks well, for he still has both his legs and seems well fed.

“I haven’t been to sea in years,” John says. He doesn’t count the four days with his daughter.

“That’s it, then,” he says, “the look of a landed man.”

John finds some bread and a jug of old beer, and his friend counters with rum from his sack. They toast their old friend Tom, who is confirmed dead, hanged for hoarding limes.

“It could have been me,” the sailor says, and John nods. The pirate’s motto. The lines walked between life and death were mere filaments.

The man slides into false tales of bounty—gold and virgins—and paints the air in the dark room with his hands. The monsters were larger, the plagues were viler, and the Spanish had more cannon than he’d ever seen. But when the night finally falls and the rum he brought is mostly drunk, his stories fade, and John fails to fill the silences. The men soften, grow tired, are melancholy together in a pleasant way.

“I’ll tell you, I’ve given it all up, same as you,” the man says. “I’d get letters from my old father, worried about me, thinking I’d fall overboard at a gust of wind. So I put up my ropes and bought a little land in the territories. It’s nice there, plenty of space and work to go around.”

John leans forward and rubs his knees. “What sort of work?”

“Trees, mostly. You can cut them down for days and not see any less.” The man puts his fists together and gently swings his hands back. “Chop, chop. All day, for days.”

“Just men out there?”

“Oh, and a few wives. It’s dangerous if you don’t keep an eye open, but they teach you how, and there aren’t many mishaps. The men who get hurt are those busy thinking about other things, about families at home and the price of tobacco, but I’ve nothing else to think on, so it suits me well.” He stretches his feet out in front of the fireplace, which is unlit, hoping this might prompt his host.

John is not cold. Or rather, he has come to accept the chill as his due. He could leave. If there is nothing left—and surely there is nothing visible left—he could save himself. There is a suction of pain here that will not release him, whether he is in his house or behind the store’s counter or knee-deep in reeds, looking out at the dawn for traces of lost things. The desire to preserve himself is a recent impulse and, he thinks, a healthy one. It is a different kind of giving up.

“There are still jobs?” John asks.

“Some of the men are always moving on. I’m leaving myself, back to Maryland now that my father’s finally passed on. You’re interested? I could give you the names of a few men who’d serve you well. You’d like it, being just a lone man yourself.”

John pours the last drips of rum into their cups. The walls seem plastered with Tabitha’s handprints; every surface still rings with her presence. He has trouble believing that his visitor is immune to the girlishness of this house, and yet he cannot correct him. He is alone.

“How far out?”

“A day past the western edge of Carolina. There are paths well laid by now, some Indian. I wouldn’t make the trip by myself, of course. Any number of things could get you. But find a man to take along, and you’ll both do well for yourselves.” He looks around, sniffs. “This is a fine house here, but you could claim a hundred acres soon as sneeze. Men are moving west, and that’s going to be the way of it, I figure. I’m not a sentimental man, but it’s lovely country too. Beautiful in the mornings. Cool.”

John gives the visitor the parlor sofa, for there is no longer a mattress in his own room, and he pulls a blanket for himself to where Tab once slept, spreads it on the floor by her window. The glass is still smudged. From her fingers? Her small nose? He holds his palm an inch away from the pane and closes his eyes. Each day that she isn’t raised from the dead, the weight of her memory grows heavier around his neck. What is there left of her to abandon?

In the night he dozes and wakes, and wonders what leaving means.

The slaves have moved from the fields to the barn, where the rice is dried, threshed, and winnowed. Soon they will begin the pounding, which will last most of the winter. Moll has trouble keeping up the pace, and when she becomes dizzy, two men carry her outside and rest her against a corner of the barn. Moses, who cannot stop, sends word for Davy; the boy comes with water and bread to revive his mother.

He dips a rag in the water and places it on top of her head. She reaches a weak hand up and moves it to her forehead and cheeks, the back of her neck. The October days are still warm, and the barn heats up with all those bodies.

“Someone said you might be—” He pats his belly and puffs out his cheeks.

She looks over at her son with suspicion.

“So? Are you eating enough?”

“I’m eating enough,” she says. “Lord help us both if there’s another one in me.” If Moses touches her again, she’ll cut his manhood off. She is done with him, with people taking what is hers.

“Well,” Davy says, reaching over for her hand, “I don’t mind babies. Maybe you’d even have a boy.”

“Heaven forbid.” She stands, leans one hand against the wall. “Come here.”

Davy ducks away, thinking it’s a game.

“Come here,” she says.

He looks disappointed. He takes the rag from her shoulder, wrings it out, dips it in the water again. “Don’t get silly,” he says.

She wraps one hand around his neck, pulls him close. She is still just taller than her son.

He wriggles within her grasp.

Moll does not think of herself as a demonstrative mother. She does not heap praise upon her children; her attentions are aimed at keeping them out of trouble. Her son and the daughters that trail after him like stepping stones are still young, not yet caught in the violence that will become mundane. But what she would tell her son, if she could find the words and if he would sit still enough to hear them, is that he is the reason she still exists. The daughters came because that’s what babies do, they come, but none of them answered her doubts the way Davy did. He’s the light that keeps drawing her on.

She is glad Helen never met him; the boy is her only own thing, inviolable.

“Get on home,” she says, pushing him away. When he laughs, she pinches his nose. “I’m fine, I’ve just been working too hard.”

“Maybe you’re getting sick.”

“And maybe I’m getting sick, that’s right.”

He tucks the jug of water under his arm and starts back for the cabins, where he has been cleaning.

“Davy,” she says. He turns around. “You’re the only baby I want.”

John is coming to dinner, and Asa is in the back garden, picking the last of the roses before they are consumed by frost. He prefers the blossoms with petals tightly packed, like women’s skirts. Along the kindling fence grows a prairie rose whose single blooms look naked, their golden stamens rude. It was his wife’s favorite. His wife, whom he rarely thinks about in these days of new loss. She brought a cutting of the wild rose from her parents’ garden and planted the start in the sandy soil behind the house. When it began to flourish, she made Asa build a fence for it, adding pickets as it clambered west and east, reaching for any horizon. She weeded beneath it weekly, coming in only when her fingers were dimpled red with pricks. The thorns were small and crowded on the stem, and their points recurved like cat’s claws. She never cut the flowers to bring inside the house, so he does not cut them now. Their color is the same as a woman’s lips, flushed, after being kissed. He was not as sweet to her as he could have been.

In the absence of the beloved, there is new space for guilt and should-have-dones. Regret only exists once the opportunity for change is gone. Asa counts a hundred things that might have saved him in God’s eyes—small gestures, touches of love. In imagining them, he can almost pretend they once took place. She is sitting in the garden on a little stool, just a few inches above the overgrown grass, her hands resting on her neck. He kneels down behind her and begins to knead her shoulders. He places his cheek against her back. His hands curl around her, and they warm each other in the already warm sun. This is something he never did. Who is the woman in the garden? It doesn’t matter; he never held her close.

He weaves some asters into the plucked roses and carries the handful inside. Mrs. Randolph is busy with a sick child, so he has asked Moll to help him with dinner. He brings her the flowers and asks for a vase to put them in. She looks tired, but she takes them and squeezes his hand. Hers is a presence he is still negotiating. It hurts to have a young woman in the house who is as tall as his daughter, who knew his daughter, though she is now ten years absent. When he sees Moll, he remembers Helen as a ten-year-old, chicken-poxed, and then his throat collapses because he remembers that girl is dead. No, it’s not her; it’s Tabitha. Tab is the little girl. He fights to call up her face. So where is Helen? Ah, Helen is gone too. When Moll brings him the roses in a blue glass vase, he resents the life that still warms her hands, still moves her feet noisily across the stone floor.

With the flowers in the center of the small dining table, and the two cloth napkins spread out beside the wine glasses, and the porcelain bowls waiting for their soup, the room almost looks alive again. Asa sits and rubs the stem of his glass, an act in which he has traditionally found comfort. Within the slim crystal column are two intertwining ribbons, opaque, like drops of ink released into water. His eyes trace them, separating them, tracking their spirals from the glass’s bowl to its foot. At the base, the ribbons vanish into a lumpy pool, clear, with a single trapped bubble. He begins again at the top.

John finds him sitting, hunched over the table, his eyes fixed on his wine glass.

They shake hands and for the first two courses speak of farming and the expected frost and what the General Assembly will decide on rates of export. When Asa’s soupspoon trembles at his chin and sends a few drops smattering on his shirt, John looks down. They fall into a silence when Moll brings them saucers of spiced apples. There are men who can sit in peace without speech, but not when a hole the size of a child sits in the room with them. Neither knows how to proceed. They move their apples from one side of the dish to the other.

John starts to speak, but his throat has gone dry and his words turn into a startling cough. Asa flinches, and his spoon flips a slice of buttered apple onto the white tablecloth.

“There’s something—excuse me. Something I’ve been thinking on,” John says.

Asa doesn’t want to be shouted at when Moll finds the stain on the tablecloth. He eats the fallen slice and pulls his glass closer so the foot covers the brown mark. She won’t remember which side he was sitting on.

“I’m finding it difficult,” John says.

“The Lord tries us.” Asa is not sure what is being discussed.

“I don’t believe I can continue an ordinary sort of life. Here.”

Asa is adrift again. An ordinary sort of life. He cannot imagine what this means. It is afternoon now, and the sun is cutting through the crystal and sending little shoots of light into the corners of the room. Not all men marry, or have children, and they too make up God’s flock. There are roles for all of them in this pageant, surely, and patience is rewarded. Asa must believe God is watching. Reminded of this, he smiles at John with encouragement.