The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (2 page)

Tabitha, who swings her legs when she is forced to sit, kicks the back of his ankle, sending his leg knocking into the pew in front of him. The minister pauses, and resumes. Asa pinches her wrist and glares.

The Reverend Solomon Halling stands at the pulpit and makes gentle flourishes with his hands. The pulpit is made of pine, carved with a large flower and several smaller flowers, which might also be four-petaled crosses. Asa always wonders if a woman made it. Halling comes down from New Bern a few times a year; mostly, they listen to vestrymen or sing songs amongst themselves. The congregation has been halved in recent years. Instead of gathering at the front, they keep their family seats, the spaces between them widening. Halling reminds the listeners what it is to be Episcopalian, that it is merely Anglicanism without the thrall to monarchy. A few women fidget in the pews. A child sneezes and then begins to cry, so Halling shifts to a hymn. The people stand, and those who earn their living by the sea rub their woolen vests. They blush to hear the sound of their own voices.

During the hymns, Asa always hears his absent daughter. The clarity of her tone once reminded him of his wickedness. He is one of the men who comes to church to punish himself, though of course there is pleasure in this penance. When he glances down at his granddaughter, she seems like a stranger.

After the parishioners have offered prayer and been exhorted to goodness and donation, the Reverend Dr. Halling stands on the sagging steps and shakes their hands. On this Sunday, Asa gives him a half pound for the new church and pushes Tabitha forward to shake his hand. Though new to the parish, the minister is worn, with graying locks frizzed around his shoulders and dull brown eyes. He was a surgeon during the war, and after the piecing together of men’s bodies, the care of their souls has finally tired him. When he smiles, his teeth catch on his lip, so he is ever adjusting his mouth to bring it to stasis.

“My granddaughter,” Asa says, his hand tight on her shoulder. Tabitha wipes her palms on her dress. “She and her father are wayward in faith.”

Halling nods. “Has she her own hymnal?” He slips back into the church, upsetting a flock of older women who croon after him, and in a few moments returns with a tattered brown book and hands it to Asa. “Mostly Watts,” he says.

“I fear I am her only guidance,” Asa says.

Halling shakes his head and holds his hand out flat, palm up. “You forget the Lord.” He turns back to the crowd, which is still absorbing the presence of ordination.

Tab pulls on her grandfather’s hand. The tides are rolling out, and she can smell the fishermen’s catch, can hear the gasping holes the crabs make in the sand.

Asa holds the book on the walk home, wondering about the rightness of letting a heathen child possess the word of God. Where is the purpose in watering fallow fields? He wishes there was a minister year-round. His God is a fickle one, and Asa does not always comprehend the trajectories of the lives around him. He looks only for evidence of justice. He looks for reasons why he has been so punished.

In the summer of 1783, his daughter, Helen, returned to him after a year of dissipation. She had been seduced by John, a common soldier, married without her father’s blessing, abandoned her inheritance to set sail with the soldier on a black-flagged ship, and had come home with a belly full of child. Asa waited for God’s fist to fall on her husband. As John built new shelves in the merchant’s store in which he had purchased a share, Asa waited for the hammer to slip and strike John’s hand, the board to crack upon his head. During August storms when John and Helen would stand by the water, arms entwined, bodies warm for each other, Asa waited for the swells to pull John in, leaving his daughter alone on the shore. He wanted her back, untouched. He watched as they fixed up the house left to them by John’s cousin, painting it fresh white, filling it with oddments from the sea, tilling the grit outside for potatoes and corn. He never saw them sad or thoughtful. Their joy was the devil’s mark.

When her time came in October, a storm swept in from the southeast and whipped up the waves. Asa wanted to carry his daughter inland for the birth, to protect her among the trees, but she clung to the house she and John had adorned. If her child was going to know the world, she wanted it to know all, the gale and breeze alike. Despite Helen’s requests, Asa refused to pray for her. He had prayed for his own wife during a similar storm, during the same mortal passage, and she had been taken. He could not pray again, not in the same way. But he came to her when she began to labor, and he waited with her, as he had not waited with his wife, and the whole scene was a mirror to him, as if God was showing him what he missed the first time.

He and John carried water for the midwife, tore scraps of linen, carried more water. They did not speak, and when John reached for his arm, Asa pulled away. Neither man should have been a witness, but Asa insisted; he would no longer let women control this moment. They stood in the corner of the room with their arms crossed, eyes on the floor. Looking over the shoulder of the midwife, whose hands were busy with cloth and water and touch, Helen begged her father to tell her if this was how it usually happened, and whether her mother had felt this way. She was a child again, and needed his voice. He nodded and said everything was just as it should be, though he had not seen his wife in labor and wouldn’t know what was ordinary, but yes, no reason to worry, and surely Helen had the strength for it. But she was not listening.

As the storm tunneled through the streets of Beaufort, an infant arrived: red and angry and screaming over the howls of wind. The midwife placed the child in a basket while she pressed vinegar rags to the mother’s wounds. John and Asa stood beyond the cast of candlelight, staring at the weeds of hair pressed against Helen’s white cheeks, listening to the thinness of her breaths. She began to weep.

Asa left in the morning, after the squall had blown away north, and took his daughter’s body with him. He said he would come back for the living child.

When Asa goes to church, he carries a list of sins in his heart, waiting for forgiveness.

Summer blends into fall. Yellow warblers and flocks of bobolinks arrive on the salt marshes, and sandpipers poke along the mudflats, watching for holes. In the forests around Beaufort, the sumacs turn fiery red, and the wild grapes grow purple and fat. By October, the evenings are finally cool.

Tab cannot sleep the night before her tenth birthday. She has a rasp in her throat that feels like dry biscuits. Kneeling instead by the window, wrapped in her mother’s shawl, she traces patterns in the stars, fingering out dogs and chariots on the frosting pane, her chin propped on the sill. She closes her eyes only to imagine the model ship that might appear wrapped in brown paper at dawn. It has three masts and is made of thin paneling stained nut brown. Its sails are coarse linen, and a tiny wheel spins behind the mizzen-mast. Netting hangs along its decks. On the starboard side, a small trapdoor is cut into the planks that you can lift and peer through into the hold. She would fill its empty belly with detritus. Acorns, feathers, moss. She saw it in a shop in New Bern on their last visit there to purchase fabric for the store. Tab made a point of standing still before the window until her father, strides ahead, missed her and turned.

“Ships, eh?” he said, and tugged gently at the back collar of her dress.

“Tell me something again,” she said, and as they walked away from the shining toy boat, he began another tale about her mother, and she knew that he had known, that he had seen the want in her eyes and understood.

In the carriage home, her father hid a large package beneath the seat and winked at her. All she had to do was wait for it to come into her hands.

John sleeps sometimes in his bedroom across the slanting hall from Tabitha, but there are nights when he can smell his wife’s body in the bed and he takes his blankets downstairs. He finds a space among the furniture in the parlor—pieces given to his wife by her parents, and to them by their parents—on rugs bartered or stolen from vessels he has hailed on the saltwater rises, below paintings of flat faces and flat children holding shrunken lambs, between cabinets of glass bottles, Spanish gold, musket balls, a rusted crown, bells. The remnants of booty that are now only treasure to a child. There is a mirror in this room with a peeling silver back, and sometimes in its spaces, Helen appears, wearing blue, her dark hair in braids behind her head, curls sprouting. Her green eyes depth-colored. He talks to her here, or he is afraid, the way her eyes follow him, and he takes his blankets into the hearth room, where pots with grease line the fireplace and shelves hold dry goods, bolts of fabric, sacks of meal. This is where he keeps the store’s excess. When customers ask for mustard seed, he brings them here, or says it must be delivered special and so gets a few pence extra. They have never wanted, he and his child. And still her phantom moves through the rooms, reminding him of what they lack.

The night before Tab’s tenth birthday, John sleeps on the low green sofa in the parlor. It faces a portrait of his wife’s grandmother as a girl, who looked nothing like her, so he can imagine that he has loved someone else entirely.

He wakes in the middle of the night, as he often does, to her voice calling him. He walks out of the house, across the dirt road, and down to the marsh, where he closes his eyes and lets the wind pulse at him; through the harshness of brine and shore decay, he catches again the blooming smell of her. He has fallen asleep here before, but it scared his daughter not to find him in the house, so he’s more careful now. The grief, besides, has waned to washes of melancholy, impressions connected to no specific hurt but to the awareness of a constant. He is in no pain but the pain of the living.

The frogs are calling in the darkness, hungry for rain. If flocks of birds migrate by the stars, perhaps the spaces between those points of light are not blackness but the bodies of birds; perhaps there is in fact no absence of light in the sky, only stars and birds. When he walks back toward the house, he sees a small shape against the upstairs window. The head of his sleeping daughter, pressed against the glass. So there are nights when neither of them can sleep in beds. This is what she has done to them.

John comes from no family of his own, so every turn of love and lack of love surprises him. His parents were dead before he knew them, and he was raised by kin who had kin of their own to cherish. He was caught between families, on a rural farm, with ties to no one. When he first left for the sea, his mother’s second cousin wrapped him up a sack of crackers and was in the fields again before John was half down the road. When he came back as a soldier, there was no embrace. He wonders if fatherhood is easy to men who had fathers.

In October, meadowlarks descend on the shores and islands, and mockingbirds brighten the early days of fall with song. The morning raucousness is a sign that Tabitha’s birthday is nearing, that time is passing. These days, when John sees her ramble into the house, mud-splattered, with bursting pockets and hair escaping from its pins, he senses he has not done right. He has not been a mother and father to her. She is a woman after all—if not yet, then soon—and he has allowed her to grow sexless and wild. He should ask Mrs. Foushee over more often, or Mrs. Randolph, his father-in-law’s housekeeper. They could show her how to make tea.

A few weeks ago, they traveled in the trap to New Bern, and while Tab peeked in shop windows and pitched stones at the governor’s palace, he bought supplies for the store. Fabric, soaps, medicines. Rubbing the cloth between his fingers, he had chosen some simple linens for his customers in Beaufort, stripes and ticking, linsey-woolsey, a heavy damask. But there had been a silk that shone. Blue, with vine patterns in pink and green. The polish of it felt like the skin of his wife. He bought yardage for a ten-year-old girl, had it wrapped in brown paper, and they rode home in the carriage the following day. She had seen his proud grin. Fathering had no end. There was no stage at which you could no longer improve. They rode back through swamps and prairies and wooded hammocks, and as John guided their horses over the puddled roads, he watched sidelong as his daughter slumped and slept, her face against the carriage side.

He returns to the house, mud on his bare soles, and as the sky turns from purple to gray, he begins a pot of hominy in the hearth, spicing it with old fat and pepper.

She is asleep against the sill, her breath fogging the window in steady rhythm. The moon sheen in the sky begins to dim. Her head rests on one cocked arm, pressed against the chilled glass. Her knees are bent beneath her, and one hand curls into an empty cup. She is dreaming of water; always dreaming of water.

Below, John stirs the hominy. He pours a spoon of fat into the iron pot and watches it ease across the corn. When Tab was younger, his wife’s father loaned them Mrs. Randolph, who cooked proper in the kitchen near the well. But like all grown women, she had reminded him of Helen. Now the outbuildings are home to the roaming chickens that Tab won’t let him catch, so he buys dead ones at market. Sometimes she cooks, sometimes he. He sits back on his heels, his hands around the ladle, and stares into the fire. It moves like a woman.

The musky smell of the fat climbs the stairs, and Tab is awake. Her face contracts into the beginnings of a cry. Her body hurts from sleeping against the wall, though sometimes this pain is better than waking up in a soft bed. The bottom of the window has frosted over from her breath. To the south are no warm yellows, only a dull gray that lightens when she turns her head away and then back. When an egret bobs in slow flight beyond the far marsh, pale white against pale gray, she remembers it’s her birthday.

Tabitha comes downstairs in bare feet, her head feeling crowded with sharp rocks. She follows the scent of breakfast. John is kneeling with the ladle by the hearth. She leans against the doorpost and closes her eyes. John turns at her small sounds, and smiles. “Look at this stranger, a girl of ten. What does she fancy?”