The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (7 page)

The ship is quiet at night. The birds have found their rest somewhere in this wide emptiness, and the sailors are asleep. The wind has slipped out of the sails. The ocean holds them gently.

John wipes the blood from her face. A spark still lingers beneath her skin. A soul preparing for a journey, if he believed in such. Nothing Asa said to him he ever understood, yet now he tries to cull the verses and hymns that spoke of immortality. He cannot let go. What succor he found after Helen’s death existed in this girl, and with her spirit blown away like a dandelion puff, there will be nothing but a vastness unfillable. The holes will swallow him. He holds tightly to her yellowed arm. He does not realize he is praying.

He wakes in the morning with a chill, his body sprawled across hers. He moves as if to close the window in his bedroom, but the rolling of the ship reminds him. The coldness comes from his child’s form. In her hammock she is held as sweetly as in a coffin. The jaundice still blooms on her skin. He lays her hands upon her chest in a cross and kisses her forehead, which feels like stone on a fall morning. It is time to take her home.

He finds Frith on the bridge deck. Blue Francis is there, looking sorrowful, to take over the wheel for his captain.

“We’re still a day out of Charleston,” Frith says. The two men face the stern and the slow boil their passage causes in the water. “We don’t keep the dead.”

“I’ll build her a box,” John says.

“And bury her where?”

“There’s a space next to my wife.”

“She’ll rot before she arrives, even in October. There’s no dishonor in the sea. We’ve a man can serve as priest, if that’s what you’re after.”

His fingers are still tinged red with her blood. “It must be done right this time,” John says.

“I’m not the master of your conscience,” the captain says. “I’ve a ship to keep. I’ll drop you off at port, for you’re little use, and you’ll take the child with you if you must hold to her. But it’s a long road back to Beaufort, and there’s no stopping the smell of her.” Frith places a hand on John’s back as brief as a lighting fly.

“Condolences,” he says. He steps among the lines and begins giving orders for the day.

Blue Francis turns and whispers to John. “You want to get her safe home?”

John glances at him, his hand still rubbing the stern rail.

“My grandmother had to mind a body once, back when she and my aunt, just young enough to walk, were taken by Indians. They scalped Aunty in no time, they did, and said my grandmother was plenty welcome to stay and find herself a family and pass the corn, but there was my grandmother wailing for the loss. The Indians being plenty obliging gave her a pot to pickle her in. With the last of the British coins she had on her, she bought drink off the Indians and filled the pot high and kept the little miss, my aunty, for three years before her husband’s brother found where she was hiding and carried her and the pot off too, and they married, paying no mind at all to my grandfather, and lived happy and had my mother and all the rest.” Blue Francis turns back to the listing wheel. “Rum’s kept below.”

John sleeps on the floor below his daughter in the hammock, on the boards stained with her illness. The soaked blanket brought to cool her is still in a wet heap in the corner. In this new life in which nothing is left to him, he is hounded by God. This god is a storm that requires settling, and he cannot think of what would calm it other than relinquishing Tabitha, consecrating his daughter in God’s name. Peace has eluded him since he watched Helen’s body taken away by his father-in-law without his consent, and there is nothing for it now but to believe in his own insignificance, to cast his lot to the gale and let his body be washed over, purified. His sin was in clinging to his wife and daughter as his own. But they are gone, and that is done. He lets go of the sail, watches it fly into the storm’s wind.

In the evening when the men are at mess, John takes a bucket below decks to the storeroom, where he tilts the kegs until he finds the ones that slosh. He uncorks a barrel and empties the rum a bucket at a time, taking the excess above to throw overboard, until the barrel is half full. With his knife he carves the lid off and stares down into the liquid left. He walks quietly back to his cabin and peels Tabitha out of her hammock, hoisting her thin body over his shoulder and wrapping his arms around her legs, which are brushed with the soft fur of youth. Her feet are bare. They must have been cold at night.

Through a burst of laughter from the foredeck, he carries her down to the storeroom and props her against the open barrel, his hands under her arms keeping her from sliding. John shifts his gaze from his child to the keg. He lays her on the floorboards, folds her knees to her chest, and wraps her dead arms around them. He lifts and lowers her pinioned body into the rum—feet first, then squeezing the center of her tight, then the rest of her, watching the alcohol float up around her. Her hair is caught by the rising liquid and it fans out, gold on gold.

His daughter.

He nails the lid of the barrel shut and reseals the wood with oakum and tar. With chalk he draws an
X
upon the side and below it the year: 1793. There is no reason to mark time except to ask God to slow his ravages.

Above decks he takes his plate of meat and bread and accepts the stares of the seamen, who know he carried the fever onto their ship. John takes Blue Francis aside and tells him of the barrel the doctor must roll off the ship in Charleston, straight into the market to sell, and there to deliver into John’s hands.

“And when Captain asks for the money of it?”

“You’ve lost it. It’s stolen.”

“Well, it’s not my rum,” Blue Francis says. “I’ll tell him Cook asked for a few extra dollars for salt and flour so we needs sell a keg. He doesn’t keep accounts. But I wished you’d have let me have the extra.”

A day later in Charleston, a bristle-bearded sailor rolls a barrel, lighter than its kin, off the
Fanny and Betsy
while his mates search out the taverns. He barters with a few merchants in the dock markets and then slips into an alley alongside a churchyard, where he passes his burden to a taller man, still young in the face. The second man hires a cart and horse with what’s left of his purse and hoists and secures the barrel with the aid of the hostler. It’s a warm day for October, and both men sweat. The hostler thinks he’ll be offered a pull from the keg, but the man drives off in silence. In five or six days, he will reach Beaufort, where he will make a hole beside his wife to lay the cask of his daughter. There he will wait to see how God scripts the rest.

F
or her tenth birthday, she is given a girl named Moll, who stands in the corner with blue ribbons in her hair. After her father leaves them, Helen stares at the child and wishes she had been given the ribbons instead. Helen had asked her father for a silver brush with boar bristles and a hand mirror. She has no sense of what to do with a negro girl other than to make her fetch things. She advances slowly, and when the girl doesn’t flinch, Helen reaches out and unties the satin loops.

“Those mine,” Moll says.

Helen winds them between her fingers. “I’ll tell my daddy.”

Moll throws out an arm, grabbing at Helen, who twists around to protect her plunder. Moll scrambles onto the other girl’s back, and within moments of the bedroom door closing, the two are scuffling on the ground, pulling at each other’s ears. Their struggle is silent, governed by the prideful solidarity of childhood. Moll, taller by an inch, prevails, and the girls lie on the floor breathing heavily while the slave twines the satin ribbons around the short puffs of her hair.

“You try again, I’ll kill you,” she says.

At dinner, Helen makes a point of being sullen. Her father hands her the knife to cut the cinnamon cake Mrs. Randolph baked, saying, “You’re the lady of the house now,” and Helen folds her arms across her chest. Moll stands again in the corner, in the shadowy space between the falling light from two windows, her ribbons glinting. After Asa has served Helen a slice of cake with a sigh, she glares at the slave, stuffing her mouth in revenge.

The girls sleep in the same room that night, one on a mattress stuffed with goose feathers, the other on the floor. When Helen wakes in tears, Moll climbs into the bed and lets the smaller girl curl up against her shoulder. Even in September, the floor gets cold without sun.

In the morning, Helen drags Moll to the neighboring plantation owned by Mr. Cogdell, to the cabin that has been set aside for meetings and church. A handful of older slaves gathers on the first few benches, their hands in their laps. Helen stands before them.

“This is Moll, and she was given me for my birthday yesterday, which makes me ten. She’s a teacher too. Any questions, you may ask her.”

“Who’s her people?”

Helen looks at the gray-haired woman on the front row and turns to Moll, who shakes her head. “She hasn’t any but me,” Helen says. “It may be she comes from Virginia.” She leads the group first in the alphabet, and then in catechism. Moll stumbles along with her, mimicking her authority. No one asks her any questions.

After her lesson is done, Helen takes Moll back to her father’s land and down to the river that elbows in from the sound and still carries a salt taste. Helen is a poor swimmer, but she is hot and feels a certain responsibility as a host to show Moll the charms of Long Ridge. The girls strip down to their shifts and float.

“Next time, you may lead them in ABCs,” Helen says. Above her are only a few thin streaks of clouds.

“I should, I’m older.”

Helen lifts her head from the water. “How much?”

“Eleven. You wasn’t even born when I was.”

“And you know your catechism?”

“I know more than that.”

Helen tries to tread water, keeping an eye on Moll to make sure she doesn’t do any tricks. She once had a friend who did somersaults in the water and always splashed her. “Most folks are slow,” she says, “so that’s about all we can teach them before their heads are full. First business is God, since that’s who’ll watch over them.”

“He watches over black folks?”

“Black and white both,” Helen says. “And heathen Indians. Everyone who believes in him goes to heaven.”

“And them who don’t believe?”

“They will. That’s our duty, Moll. We are handmaids of the Lord.”

“That like slaves?”

Helen lets her feet drift down to feel in the weedy muck, and stands. She lowers her head so only her nose breaks the surface of the water, her loose hair hanging in strands around her face. She looks at the dark reflection of her own eyes. “I suppose,” she says, and with her hands pushes a ripple of waves toward Moll.

“Don’t you get it in my ear.” Moll paddles away from Helen, keeping her head above water like a muskrat.

“Watch out for the big hole over there,” Helen says. “Snapping turtles live in it, so don’t put your feet down.”

Moll paddles quickly back. “You’re lying.”

“This creek is mine, and you don’t know anything about it.”

“That’s enough of that, then,” Moll says, heading for the bank.

“Wait!”

The girls watch each other. Moll makes a noise of exasperation and dives beneath the surface. She comes up a few seconds later with a shell in her hand. “Didn’t see any snappers,” she says. She scoops water with the shell and pours it on her other hand. This is to show that she is not afraid.

Helen smiles and dips down so the creek brushes her chin. “It’s almost like you being baptized. Here, what’s your name?”

“Don’t be foolish.”

Helen claps her hands on top of the water, sending up a plume of spray. “What’s your
name
?”

“Moll!”

“And who gave you this name?”

“Some white man.”

“No, you say, ‘My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism.’”

“Don’t have no godfathers.” Moll drags herself onto the river bank, her pale shift turning brown from the silt. Her hair is wilting.

“Well, it’s what you say. If you want to teach it to the others, you need to learn. Here, I’ll be your godmother, and I’ll name you Moll.”

The girl on the bank throws her shell at the girl in the water. Helen recites the next few questions, then races herself to a half-sunken log, where a sprig of oak leaves is still growing green.

It is 1771, and Long Ridge sits on the edge of the sound, siphoning the water for its mill, and pushes back through marsh and bottomland into flatwoods, where pines are tapped for turpentine. The house was built to be temporary, but in the years since its hasty construction by his forebears, Asa has added two wings, a classical facade, and a brood of outbuildings. A staircase sweeps ten feet above the root cellar to a shaded porch and a wide white door that faces the sea. Narrow steps behind the house lead from the servants’ pantry to what Asa calls the acres, where the smaller pines and scrub trees have been cleared to create pathways among the towering longleaf. This is where boys would have played, if he had had sons.

Asa was born on this land, when the house stood on four posts and was just rough boards pegged together and covered bit by bit, when his father had time, in cypress shingles. His family logged and built ships and began the project of acquisition that Asa would inherit. Turpentine was the business of the future. It required only a few bound slaves of his own and the rest hired, so it allowed Asa to join the ranks of coastal planters without their fear of black hands slashing white throats in sleep. His wife had been a neighbor, and he was more pleased when he stretched his log fence around her lands than when he first felt her warmth in their marriage bed. He never loved her as he should’ve till she was gone. But both acres and woman contributed to a singular image that Asa continues to pursue.

Weekdays he sends his daughter to pretty Miss Kingston, who teaches her letters and ciphering. Helen brings these skills back to Long Ridge to practice on the slaves. She is also learning the harpsichord, which shows off the length of her neck. Her education will be a stamp of status, and Asa sees enough of the old world in the new to recognize that the appearance of wealth can be as valuable as wealth itself. In her exuberance and opinion Helen is nothing like her mother, who was exactly the sort to be married well and loved calmly. Perhaps she would have taught her some of this passivity. But Helen’s only mothers have been substitutes: the teacher, the cook, the slave. If she can’t have a woman to hold her and love her, she should have a woman to order around. Moll, at least, will give her the pride and responsibility of stewardship. His daughter must be tamed enough to bring a husband and heir to the land, but otherwise her whims are of little concern to him.