The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (20 page)

“A man I used to sail with has found a farm inland and a job felling timber. Land is cheap and labor needed. It’s easy to start fresh, he says, and build yourself again.”

Asa nods. He can see his body from the outside, a picture of tolerance, a modern Job.

“West of the mountains. I didn’t want to leave without consulting you. If you needed anything, of course.”

“You’re going on a trip?”

John runs his hands up and down the wooden arms of his chair. “I’m thinking of buying new land out west,” he says. “In the Southwest Territory, near the Watauga. I’ve got some money saved, and will be paid well to cut lumber from the forests there. Plenty of old hardwoods, more than are left near Beaufort.”

“For shipbuilding? No, that’s too far for ships, couldn’t get the lumber to port.”

“It’s for building houses, I imagine, and laying roads and fences,” John says. “The West is getting bigger.”

“Yes, houses. It makes a man, to build his own house.” Asa gestures with one arm around the room. “This, of course, was once nothing, just posts and boards.”

“I plan to leave next week, if I can get a buyer for my share of the store.”

“Why are you leaving the store?”

“I’m going to move to the Southwest Territory.”

“The Southwest Territory,” Asa says. He frowns. “What about Tabitha?”

John waits to see if Asa has forgotten, if his distraction is in fact senility, but he can’t read the older man’s face. His guilt flushes him, curdles in his throat. “I don’t imagine her ghost will ever leave me.”

“You are an optimist?”

Moll comes in to clear the dessert and finds the men looking at each other, mystified. When she asks if she should bring out the decanter, Asa looks up at her, his eyebrows raised into a plea.

“John says he’s going to leave us.”

“Is that right?” Moll stands with one hand on her hip beside Asa, forming an alliance. “Can’t take the sorrow?”

John stands and refolds his napkin with a few quick snaps. “I’ve been offered a chance beyond this town, and I would prefer to be useful. Excuse me.” He walks out to the front porch and sits on a rocking chair, not rude enough to leave his host entirely.

After the span of time a mother usually gives an unhappy child, Moll comes out and sits beside him. “I didn’t spend as much time with her as I’d have liked,” she says. “She reminded me of Helen, and of course I had my own children to raise. You did a fine job on your own, I wasn’t worried about that. But now I do wish I had known her more.” She unties the apron from around her waist and rolls it into a ball. “You sure you want to leave him behind?”

“I’m not much use to Asa.”

“I imagine it’s hard for men to see that they’re much use to anyone. He’ll be lonelier if you’re gone, I’m certain. And you—what’ll you do without a friend in the world?”

He is silent.

“And you’ll make it out there by yourself?”

“I haven’t planned the details of my journey, Moll, but I am not a newborn child.”

“Just thought it’d be nice to have a soul to talk to, all that way. If you’re set on it, there’s little I can say. I do call you a coward, though.” She waits, and then briefly touches his arm.

The sea today is flat and looks like a silvered sky. This is what he will leave; this is what reminds him of her.

The back room of the store smells like sweat and cinnamon. Someone has asked for fishing line and Davy stands in the doorway, scanning the crowded shelves above the limp mattress for rolls of horsehair and gut string. The room is dark, and unidentifiable objects pick up glints from somewhere. He is afraid to go in.

“No, sir,” he says. “All out of that.”

The customer looks at him suspiciously.

“We have plenty of currants, though.” Davy extends his arm behind him, showing off the wall of small jars. “Do you have a wife? My own mother would kiss me for some currants. All the ladies are using them in cakes. Then of course we get to eat them, don’t we? You can’t go wrong with currants, sir.”

The man walks out of the store without speaking, and Davy pulls down his cheeks to make a face at the man’s back.

John returns to find the boy digging into the side of the counter with a pocket knife. “Carving your name?”

“Folk won’t buy from me.”

“I hear it’s the other way around. Didn’t I show you where goods are kept?”

“It looks like some kind of conjure den in there. I’ve seen eyes looking at me where there weren’t no cause to be eyes.” Davy squats down behind the counter, illustrating his fear.

“How old are you?” John knows how old he is. He remembers Moll’s round shape when he and Helen left Beaufort, and the colicky baby that was just learning to stand and falter when they returned to bear their own daughter into the world. Even at a distance, the boy had always been a marker of Tab’s growth, the line drawn just above her.

“Come here,” John says. He lights a lamp and hands it to the boy, leading him into the back room. “Stand there while I look for demons.” He makes a show of pulling out jars and boxes and digging behind barrels and standing on his toes to peer onto top shelves. “Not a thing.”

Davy points down to the mattress, which looks to him like a giant strangled snake. John paws through the sheets and his discarded clothes from yesterday. “That,” Davy says, pointing more emphatically at the glistening skin that seems still to breathe.

John picks up the long banner of blue silk, with its veins of pink and green. Since Davy brought it to him, wrapped in brown paper, John has slept with Tab’s birthday present every night. In the dark hours, the endless waking night hours, the coolness of the silk on his cheek has reminded him of his daughter’s skin before the fever. After the fever. Is her body still cool in its barrel of rum, nestled like an egg deep in its nest of soil? He doesn’t think of her often like this, her physical body, its inevitable decay. His daughter is not really there, in that silence. Where, then? In this scrap of wrinkled fabric, twined around his sleeping body? Is she—or a shard of her, a soul—with God? John is tired of looking for her, and cannot stop. Wherever she is, surely Helen is there too.

“It’s just a few yards of silk. No ghosts.” He holds it out, but the boy dances away.

“That’s nothing for a man to get all curled up with. You should give it to a lady who could use it. Bet you could get five dollars for it.”

Of course he should sell it. It’s empty. He could give it to Davy right now to take to Moll. Give her some beauty in her life. He folds it up and puts it under his arm. “Now tell me where the fishing line is.”

In the late afternoon, John hands the boy a rag and sets him to dusting. He sits behind the counter on a stool and watches Davy move his hand along the shelves, in the spaces between boxes, along the tops of jars. John can hear the murmur of a song half-sung. The boy flips the rag with a flourish, as if his life were a pleasure. Moll is right. If John travels by himself, he may not make it past the mountains. He carries instincts within him now that leave little room for hope, for forward movement. It is not impossible that he would find a child-shaped rock to curl around and clutch until the snows came and he was buried under. He needs a guide in the wilderness. A bird to sing him through the dark.

He must leave his daughter and yet keep living, to prove it can be done: that man determines his own life, and his sins are his alone.

On Sunday, John finds Asa in church. The older man’s head is bowed, and he remains still when the others rise and sing and sit again. John sits behind him and watches the subtle movements of his shoulders, the thin hair gathered in a ribbon at the neck. A few strands tremble when John exhales. The homily floats in and out. Words like
charity
and
tolerance
mean little. A silver hair curls loose on Asa’s coat, and John reaches out to pluck it free. He absently winds the hair around his finger and then brushes it to the floor. The woman next to him pulls in her feet to avoid it.

The door of the church has been left open for the cool November wind, and the air carries with it the hushing sound of water. The curate’s voice rises above it like a buoy, and the congregation nods. Asa’s head remains bent, his body folded. John thinks of an even older man sitting in the sky watching these obeisances. What can a single man do, even if he is God? Take your loved ones, and then take your pain away? There’s no purpose to that game beyond whimsy. John stands. Taking hold of the pew in front of him, he gropes past several women, stepping on a foot, pardoning himself. It’s colder in the sunshine. He wraps his coat more tightly and waits for the service to end. A horse tied to a post has eaten all the grass she can reach and begins to snort. John smooths her neck and tugs out the knots in her mane. She chews the edge of his coat thoughtfully. John can still hear the curate, testifying to an unknowable omniscience.

The faithful are always happy to be released; they file out into the morning with plans for airing the rugs, visiting the sick negroes, writing overdue letters to cousins. John catches Asa’s eye, and the two men separate from the crowd, walking slowly toward the waterfront.

“You should wait for spring,” Asa says. “The passes will be snowed in before long.”

“I’ll cross before then.”

“The dirt will be frozen when you start building a house.”

“Better hard ground than mud. Come, there’s no reason to stay here through the winter.” A pair of fishermen are cleaning their nets by the wharf and nod as John and Asa walk past. Their hands are chafed and red, and one man whistles. There are scenes that will not be repeated on the far side of the mountains. John stops when he sees a dried sand dollar and almost picks it up for Tab.

“I’ll sound like an old man, but don’t you think of being lonely?” This may be the first time Asa has said the word aloud. Did he ever think of it when he was younger? He remembers missing his mother when she rode to visit friends, but he has not felt like such an aching human fragment since boyhood. Now all he sees are the open-mouthed gaps in his life, the absences that threaten to swallow him. Is he alone in his loneliness too? This man, the husband to his daughter, his grandchild’s father, who stares at a sand dollar on the ground with an expression that could be melancholy—he is now uncoupled from Asa, and is probably grateful. Asa bends to pick up the white shell, which weighs as much as a bird. “Take it. You’ll miss the sea.”

All grown men miss the sea.

“You still own Moll, don’t you?” John rolls the sand dollar between his palms as they turn back toward Long Ridge. “Cogdell didn’t take her on after the marriage with Moses?”

“No, she’s still mine.”

“I was wondering if I could make a purchase of you.”

“You want Moll?”

“Her son, actually. The oldest.”

They have passed the waterfront and are on a tree-lined path that winds northeast to Asa’s plantation. Half the leaves are gone, and those that are left shiver in the wind. Asa does not consider himself a sensitive man, but he twists away from this proposal. “It would be a hardship for Moll, surely.”

“I have reason to believe the boy would not mind. It’s your decision, of course.”

“My decision? Well.” This seems unfair. Asa fiddles with a button on his coat, worrying a loose thread. Moll hasn’t brought her son around in years, but Asa still spots him on warm nights, sneaking through the fields with a little gang of howling children. “I can’t see he’d be much use to you. You’d have him carry your bags, that sort of thing?”

“Better to have two men on a trail than one. And he can help me break land for the farm.”

“The farm?”

“When I get out there, get some land.”

“What will you grow?”

“He’ll be useful.”

Asa tries to remember where his son-in-law is going. Somewhere west. He can’t grow rice if it’s dry, but maybe cotton. Pines, they have pines everywhere, but it sounds as though he’ll be cutting them down. No use in teaching him turpentine. What would John find to talk about with a little negro boy? But then again, almost all of it is still unsaid. They could talk for days and not reach the end. Before they arrive at the house, he shakes John’s hand and promises to consider it.

Returning to town, John tosses the sand dollar into a hedge of fruiting holly.

Inside, in a soft chair, with a cup of tea in his hand, it seems to Asa that John is saying yes, he is lonely, he does miss his child, he does want to carry some history with him. It isn’t Asa’s place to deny him comfort. And what he failed to say was that Moll belongs to Helen. Belonged. So the boy is rightly John’s, in any court where property is apportioned. In a higher court, Asa has his doubts. Who most deserves a child? He rests his hands on the arms of the chair and closes his eyes, waiting for something to fall into his open palms. He wants to fill whatever holes riddle John, for he knows that no one is left to fill his own. The light beyond his eyelids fades. He sleeps.

“How far?”

John is sweeping the store while Davy sits on the counter and swings his legs, kicking the wood with his heels. He and the boy have started a pile of items he’ll need for the journey; a man from New Bern is coming this afternoon to pick over the rest of the stock. The owner of the building has agreed to look for another renter, but John must earn his capital back from the bags of flour and packets of coffee beans. He’s selling the house in town to a landowner who wants a wedding present for his daughter. He also has a little money saved from Helen’s dowry, the belated sum that Asa gave her when she returned from sea, full-bellied and back-sore. Browned and smiling. Who could have denied her? Always hungry for the next experience, Helen would have given him her blessing, would have wanted the money to be employed in just this way. “It’s of no use to
me
,” he can hear her say, the back of her hand cool on his cheek. “What would I trade it for, where I am?” He strains to see her body; he begs his reverie to include Tab by her side. The women together, not grim and pale, or lost, or dead.

“I said how far?”

John leans on his broom and watches the dust motes rise in the columns of light: even the inanimate is still alive. The only cure for thought is action. “Four hundred miles or so.”