The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (23 page)

The path opens out into a meadow, and the man and the boy tie their horses to a tree and find a dry spot in the sun to collapse. Davy digs his heels into the grass, kicking out little bits of soil. John crosses his arms over his chest.

“I’ll bury you here,” Davy says. “When the Indians find us.”

“What did your mother make?”

“Oh, a ham, and sometimes a cake.”

“Where did she get a ham?”

Davy is silent for a few moments. He doesn’t know where being a slave begins and ends anymore. He can sometimes forget that there are laws, that there are systems he is subject to. It is too big a world for all that. “I suppose she stole it,” he says.

He turns to look at John, but his eyes are closed.

“And what about your mother? Did she make a ham?”

John, half asleep, is surprised. He shuffles through the memories he has kept. He must have had a life before Helen, but was it good? Was it happy? A sediment of grief has compressed any pleasure he might have remembered.

“I think she must have,” John says.

“Who’d she steal it from?”

“Or maybe that was only later. She died when I was younger than you, and those that kept me weren’t much in the way of money.”

Davy turns over on his stomach and begins picking grass. “I miss mine.”

John’s mother was small, half the size of his father, wore whites and pinks. Was quiet, had some-color eyes. Did she sing? Perhaps she sang at night, under her breath, when he was sleeping. There was a peace in her. And then: years of searching for that again, of climbing toward happiness and falling. Here he lies, in a meadow, beyond even the bounds of his country, recalling the forgotten undertone of his life.

“You better say you miss yours too, or she’ll be mad.”

“I miss mine too,” John says.

“We’ll write them letters.”

In the cabin once used for church, Moll and the others are silenced by the screams. A few of the slaves still gather here on Sundays to share a quiet company, though there is rarely any formal prayer. An old woman on the back pew turns toward the open door. Two white men are dragging a writhing black body across the fields toward Cogdell’s house.

“Who is it?” Moll asks.

The woman doesn’t recognize him from this distance; he looks like a dark spider, limbs flailing between his captors. The rest of the congregants gather by the door. A woman cries out. She shoves past the others and runs in the wake of the violence toward the big house. Moll, who has continued these gatherings since Helen’s death, guides the others out. She had been reading from Luke: the prodigal son, the shepherd’s story, the lost coin. They return to the quarters, where they wait on porches and front steps. Someone makes corn cakes and passes them around. They are all trying not to imagine.

Moses is out hunting, so Moll lies down on the mattress and covers her eyes with one hand. Her daughters are with the granny. Two men ran away last week, and if Moll prayed, she would have prayed for their disappearance. Neither had families of their own yet; there were none abandoned. She was never told of their plans, but she knew, the way one part of the body knows of the hurt in any other part. As the moon faded from quarter-full to a gray shadow of itself, they had all held their breath, avoiding quarrels with the driver so when the time came, the men could slip into the darkness unobserved. And when the two of them left, they waited for them not to come back.

The men would have gone west, into the mountains. They might have found a white man and a black boy still building a house of logs, still plowing the earth for a garden, still cutting lumber for pay. The runaways did what she was too afraid to try. Did she fear for her own body? Had she not acquaintance enough with pain? Did she think she would find her son’s corpse, beaten and abused in a ditch ten miles out of town? There are things she doesn’t want to know.

It is Abel they bring back to the quarters, his head swollen with brown bandages, his eyes pursed shut. The driver carries him and lays him on his mattress, and the women watch as his mother unwraps the cloth and finds the raw edges where his ears once were. One woman boils water; another tears strips of cloth from her skirt. A few speak in a low, rhythmic language, rubbing their hands and kissing their fingers. Moll stands in the door and watches the women tending Abel’s body. His mother stone-faced and methodical. He is no longer conscious and cannot feel the touches on his welted torso and the tender pressure against the holes in his head. His skin is pale brown, with rust running along the shape of his muscles, like a painted man. Fresh blood pools in his collarbone, caught by the light of the candles. Moll turns and walks away.

In the morning, if he wakes, they will huddle around and ask Abel about the other slave, whether he climbed a tree when he first heard the dogs and Abel was too slow. They’ll ask how far he got, what the land looked like, where the fresh water was to drink. Some will tell him to try again, and some will hold him close. The loss of his ears will not be his last loss. The white men will take every part of him that does not sow, weed, harvest. He will keep his hands and his feet and his spine. Everything else he will lose.

This is what a mother dreams about at night. She plants herself between these things and her child. She is no defense, but she stands there nonetheless. And that standing is the most protection a man will ever know.

In bed that night, her baby curled between them, Moll asks her husband whether Davy is better off gone.

“Wasn’t a choice,” Moses says.

“He said he could earn wages, buy his freedom after a year.”

Moses turns over, and the baby reaches out her hands to touch his back.

She remembers when Davy was that young. Never cried, was waiting for her every night with smiles, and later, with treasures from his day. A caterpillar, a wooden ball the granny carved him. Once, stolen bread from the kitchens, for which she beat him. Her own mother was sold away, and she never had a father claim her. No one to protect her. She holds the baby’s feet.

“In a few months, they would have put him to work here. I couldn’t watch him so much once he was in the fields. And you didn’t teach him to mind his mouth like he should.” She listens to their breathing. “He wouldn’t have run away, but he would’ve been beaten soon enough. And out there, who’s to say? I don’t know what goes on. It could all come true.”

Moses reaches an arm back across the baby to grab Moll’s waist. “Sleep,” he says. “You got three children left to worry over.”

She does, and they happen to be girls. But she cannot bring her mind back to them. “There are wolves in the West,” she says, “and he’ll be lonely.”

The baby’s hands slip down from Moses’s back; she is asleep. Moll watches their bodies at rest and thinks of her only son, gone. Is his face still whole? No one will ever tell her. Will he remember her when he is a free man, with a free family? She’ll be long dead then. When Davy was born, she knew him to be the one sheep among the ninety and nine. The Bible itself told her that the one is the only one that matters.

If there is a place where women meet their children again, if God is the overseer there, she will pray. But only if she can be sure there’s such a place. She waits for an answer, for a promise.

The boat is buried beneath a yaupon that in ten years has grown to swallow the peeling hull. Two oars dangle from the side like broken limbs. Asa tries to drag it out, but the keel has sunk into the mud it sits on. He returns with a pair of shears and spends a morning cutting away the lower branches of the yaupon, just the parts that touch the boat, no more. When he is done and his shirt is damp, the boat sits under the pruned shrub as though it were at rest in a bower. Half of the blue paint has been chipped off by wind and age and the curious teeth of mice. The boards are cool. Asa swats at the cobwebs with an oar, twisting them around the paddle and then wiping them on the grass. He makes sure there are no possums under the thwarts and then climbs in and sits. The lowest branches brush his ears. The shade here still tastes of winter.

When he looks up, he sees a small brown bird looking down at him. It bobs its tail while Asa tries to remember its name. It rubs its bill along its wings, like sharpening a knife. In these moments of focus, Asa can forget everything that happened before. Who can he ask to help? He’ll have to wait until it rains and then drag it out through the softened mud himself.

It is still light, and Asa is not yet ready for his supper. Strange how schedules melt away when a man lives on his own. He could not even name what day it was; weeks have passed since he signed away the upper acres. No one is there to tell him when things must happen. He’ll wait and have some bread and cheese before sleep. Now he returns to his bedroom and collects the linen for washing. He folds the quilt and places it beneath the window. No matter how still he lies, each morning the bed sheets are in knots. He untwists them, pulls them off, piles them by the door. The cotton mattress still has two hollows: his own, deep and knobby, and the shallowest scoop that he alone knows is still his wife. He could turn the mattress over and she would disappear.

He carries the sheets downstairs and outside, along with several shirts, the tablecloth, the basket of dirty napkins. Mrs. Randolph always said he should build a separate laundry, but he had said no, not with just one child. He fills a copper tub with water from the well and bundles the linens in. A stool lies next to the garden wall, overturned by some night animal, and he fetches it and sits next to his task. He puts a hand in; the water is cold and unpleasant. Is there some instrument Mrs. Randolph uses? He gets a wooden spoon from the kitchen and begins to stir. He remembers soap and retrieves the small block from his washstand. He knocks the soap around the sheets with the spoon in the waning light. Think of all the women sitting in gardens from here to New Hampshire, doing what he is doing in the last hour of the day. He is encouraged and stirs with more diligence. When he is tired, he tries to drain the water from the tub, but it is too heavy to lift, so he pulls the wet linens out, which now feel like iron sacks. He throws them over the branches of some low-growing trees and tries to straighten them. The dirt of his body is now being replaced by the dirt of an aging bark, the movement of ants, sparrows’ feet.

Inside, the rooms carry an underwater green from the dusk’s uncommon light. The sheets outside shiver in the wind. What does that mean? A storm is coming? He should busy himself. He could read the week’s newspaper, or write a letter to his old friend from the Assembly, who has sent him two letters now without reply. But the green fades so slowly, and his body is a difficult thing to move. He abandons the parlor and avoids his desk. He lights one candle for bed, lies down on the bare mattress in the imprint of his own body, and falls asleep before he can remove his shoes. His sleep is the quiet kind, soothed by labor. His only dreams are of bread and cheese.

When the rains come, he is ready. He ties a rope to a hole in the boat’s breasthook and wraps the other end around a fence post, unwinding the length of it and walking backward until he is on a line with the yaupon again. When he pulls, the rope tightens around the post; next to him, he can hear the rowboat groaning. The ground is soft and sucks at his feet when he tries to adjust his position. Even with the leverage to support his strength, his body quivers. The rope is hard to hold tightly. John would’ve had the boat out with a shove.

But the keel digs through the muck, and the rain smooths a path, and the rowboat jolts out of its bower onto a patch of grass, where it looks even more broken and forlorn. Asa wipes his face and climbs into the boat again, this time in the open air. Tomorrow he will sand the oars. Who acquired this boat, to so abandon it? He didn’t remember Helen ever using it; she only played in shallow water. It must have been his wife’s. Yes, brought from her parents’ farm as part of her dowry. His own father, who had helped build three-masted ships, never had a boat of his own; Asa once stole onto a fisherman’s dinghy to reach the open ocean and was brought home green and retching. Owning a boat suggested both prosperity and skill, and when his wife said she didn’t think they’d need her little rowboat, Asa insisted. It was another acquisition. He should have taken her somewhere in it. Back in the marshes, maybe, at sunset.

He runs his hand along the topside boards where her name used to be painted in white letters. She always had a stomach for the sea, and would sometimes row the short distance to the fish market rather than walk from Long Ridge to Front Street. She was a quiet girl, a holy woman. Asa no longer thinks he was the cause of her death—though it was his seed that had grown and ruptured out of her in violence—how many years ago? Thirty-two, soon thirty-three. That’s enough time for fists to become open palms.

The rain slackens; the clouds swell with brightness. His shoes have filled with water. So many things become easier with age. Those dire emotions that wracked his body, pulled it from guilt to rage, from desire to accusation, have been softened, the sharp edges rubbed dull. If Asa has learned one thing in his years of grabbing and planning and blaming, it’s that he is nothing but a bystander in God’s game. If there is joy in life, it lies in patience, in watching the Lord’s creations unfold. He sits in the boat, clean of any anger, and witnesses the rain, the boat, the yaupon, the clouds, the spring. He waits.

She begins to save part of her dry rations in a sack that she tucks between the mattress and the wall, covered by a drape of quilt. The first night, she put the bag under the steps to the cabin, but in the morning it was gone, a few crumbs showing where a raccoon or fox had torn the bag open. These biscuits, these strips of dried fish, this ground corn, she should be offering to her daughters, whose bellies are already hard as drums. Instead, she secrets food within their own home, a cache that a dog could find, if they had a dog. It is already April, planting time. She is in the fields until dark and again by dawn. Their bodies are counted more regularly now. This is not the time when men run away.