The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (8 page)

Helen gets the chicken pox a few days before Christmas. When her skin turns rosy, Asa is at the meeting house in town, discussing taxes with the elders. The colonial delegate from Beaufort has recently died, his body lost in a shipwreck and nothing for his wife to bury, and the elders ask Asa, as the next wealthiest landholder, to take his place in a room in New Bern and uphold their interests. Asa is in the business of empire building, though his vision is narrow. He is training his daughter to one day raise his grandson well, to be an image the grandson will recall, as a man, with satisfaction. He has no doubts that there will be a grandson. He accepts the elders’ offer.

Home again, he finds his daughter ablaze with fever on the sofa, idly stretching her arms out while Moll dances close and spins away, just shy of being caught.

“What is this?” he asks, reaching a hand toward her forehead but pulling it back again before touching her.

“Moll says conjure,” Helen says. Moll is now straight and still by the fireplace, head down.

“We’ll send for Stevens.” He looks around for a blanket to put over his daughter. “Mrs. Randolph?”

“She’s washing,” Helen says.

Mrs. Randolph has a family of her own, all yellow haired, behind the fields where the townspeople grow their rice. She rolls her sleeves up past her elbows when she works, and when she is sitting with her skirts bunched, bent over some pot or board, Asa has seen her calves above the limp collapse of her stockings. She is only a woman to keep Helen fed and scrubbed, not a replacement for his wife.

He finds her behind the house, kneeling over a soapy bucket in the small garden that is decaying in winter, her hands thrashing a pair of breeches in the water.
His
breeches. She describes the measures she’s taken—some brandy and a little willow bark—and says she’s had children with just the like and they’re all alive yet. “Except for Betsy, and little Andrew, but they hadn’t chicken pox, sir.”

Asa twists his hands behind his back and nods. “I’ll send Moll for Stevens.” There is no sense in having so many women on his property.

Mrs. Randolph smiles at him again in that simple, maternal way that stings him. He leaves her, her wet arms red with the chafing cold.

When Stevens arrives in the evening, Moll, tired from her jog to town, is curled on the parlor floor, her head resting on Helen’s blanketed legs. Both girls are asleep. The two men consult in whispers by the fire, which sends coughing sparks into the room. The doctor shakes his head to reassure; little danger here. He prescribes rest and alternating heat and cold to confuse the illness and any devils responsible. Asa presses his hand and sees him down the front stairs, at the base of which Stevens’s horse is stamping.

He carries Helen upstairs to the room she shares with the slave. She is quiet and not unhappy. She lets her hand linger on Asa’s arm after he rests her in the bed. A doll made of dried rushes with a braided waist lies on the pillow next to her. It fits in Asa’s palm.

“Moll made it,” Helen says.

“For you?”

“She lets me play with it sometimes. You can leave it on the dressing table.”

These are the relationships that should be managed by women; mothers are the ones who prevent slaves from slipping out of place. He fears that he has somehow allowed an unraveling.

In the morning, Helen’s redness has mellowed some, and she is well enough to be carried downstairs again, where she and Moll play rummy by the window. Helen leans her cheek against the glass to feel the air outside.

“What is it you’d like for Christmas?”

Moll thinks, fingering her cards. She brings them up to her mouth and nibbles at the edges.

“Stop!” Helen slaps a hand out.

Moll pulls her cards down again. “I do have dreams about a yellow dress.”

“You’re being vain.”

“You got one,” Moll says.

“And I’ve a right to it.”

Moll sets down her cards and crosses her arms. “You’ll give me what you’ll give me. No use in me wishing.”

“What about a little Bible of your own?” Helen asks.

“And you read it to me?”

“You know most of the letters on your own now. Come, it’s been your turn for ages.” Helen fans herself while Moll sifts through her cards again, slowly selecting a knave, which Helen snatches the moment it’s laid on the table.

Disease has left Long Ridge by Christmas, and Helen is pleased with her complexion. The few slaves gather by the back steps and call
Christmas gift
, and Helen takes them bundles of fabric and oranges. One older man spits into a clump of weeds.

Inside, Helen unwraps a wool coat and a novel from her father and an apron from Mrs. Randolph, who has stitched the girl’s name in pink thread, copying out the letters from Helen’s own lesson book. Later, when Mrs. Randolph and Moll are exchanging gifts in the pantry, she tells her father that she doesn’t read novels.

“This one was said to be very moral. The author tells about his travels, which I thought you would enjoy.”

“I read the first page and it seems silly,” Helen says. She is ten years old, not a child.

“You’ll be the judge. Surely a diet of prayer alone—”

“Prayer
alone
, Papa? There is nothing better; that’s what Miss Kingston says. If I’m to save myself and all the negroes, I must keep on the straight path.” She offers him the novel on outstretched hands, as if she were holding a dead toad. “You’d do well to heed the Lord’s call yourself.”

“The Lord doesn’t speak to me, child.”

“The day will come when the deaf shall hear the words of the book. Isaiah.”

Asa wonders if he should remove his daughter from Miss Kingston’s care.

In her room, Helen folds her new coat into the armoire, next to her dead mother’s gilt-edged Bible, which she hides under her stays so Moll won’t steal it. She likes to think of her mother’s slender fingers turning through the gospels, or maybe her fingers were stout, but surely they left a trace on the pages. Miss Kingston is not actually so religious, but she told the girls once that God was a woman’s province, and this made sense to Helen. Women were the ones who died.

Mrs. Randolph smoked the ham, but Helen brings it to the table, where she and her father eat alone.

In the afternoon, Helen leads a service in the cabin and a few slaves attend, sucking their oranges. She has arranged some green pine boughs and strands of ivy along the small table that serves as an altar. She emphasizes the importance of being kind because Jesus was, and when she mentions that it’s his birthday, a few of the congregants are surprised. She leads them in a carol, which she sings partially in Latin to impress her audience. They mumble along. Her fervor is surely contagious. When the slaves can no longer keep the fire, they leave, and Helen counts it a good day. Souls are always ripe for saving.

In the evening Moll dresses her in green silk for a neighbor’s Christmas ball, where she is always the youngest one invited. The other girls her age wear plain white and have no hand in plantation management. They have two parents kissing them to sleep at night, long before Helen is in bed.

Moll asks if she can come, and Helen slaps her on the bottom. In the ensuing chase, a silk sleeve is torn, and Mrs. Randolph sews it up by candlelight before the carriage comes. Moll eats an iced cookie and under the table kicks Helen, whose arm is pinned to inaction by Mrs. Randolph’s needle.

Miss Kingston is at the ball in taffeta, and the teacher and student dance together, pausing for breath beneath a mistletoe. The woman, blushing, kisses Helen on the forehead.

That night, curled together like cats, Helen tells Moll that when she’s a lady, there won’t be room for a slave in her bed. Miss Kingston is dancing through her head, the ghost of her mother behind her, keeping time.

“When’ll that be?” Moll asks. Her eyes are closed and she has already drifted in and out of a dream.

“Very soon, I should think.”

In 1778, Helen is sixteen. Asa now spends weeks at a time in New Bern, waiting for the British, too awkward to wield a musket, too proud to hide at home. His involvement in the Provincial Congresses doomed him to patriotism, though his inclinations are entirely loyalist. The turpentine business is prospering with his daughter looking after the books; she has inherited his interest in precision. In the airy hall of government, he half-listens to the arguments for new levies and fixes his gaze beyond the windows overlooking a grove of blooming dogwood. Asa imagines a governorship, if these efforts on the part of young men are not in vain, or some permanent post that caters to his penchant for organization and control. Perhaps he will lay roads from Wilmington to the back woods, from the coast to the Cherokees’ rocky outcrops.

Arrangements for Helen must be made soon. When the younger delegates propose further military engagements, Asa recommends simplicity and speed. The war interrupts stability. In Beaufort alone, most of the marriageable men are absent. The town is becoming a macrocosm of Long Ridge. When he returns home during recesses, he seems to trespass on a woman’s world. The solution for his daughter’s slave is more straightforward: Cogdell, his rice-growing neighbor, has a young man, skilled, who requires some discipline. The man had been corrected once after an incipient plot but was not counted dangerous enough to outweigh his usefulness in smithing. There is nothing to settle a man like a woman. A match will also fetter Moll, who because of Helen’s sporadic indulgences is becoming willful.

He closes his eyes against the filtering sun. As he ages, he finds his body resting more, and his mind taking longer walks. Here he usually finds his wife again. Shapeless, still, silent. Her chaos muted. The strongest image he has of her is the last. He was kept from the birthing room, or rather, he kept himself, and spent the afternoon picking apples from the back garden so the wind wouldn’t toss them against the house. The sky was low and gray and the birds had mostly vanished. A butterfly still fluttered in the banks of sage, its orange lighting the dimness. He could hear waves crashing into the marsh. The slaves had disappeared from the pine groves. In the absence of their chatter and the crying of seabirds, Asa caught the first high whine of his daughter, the first of his children to live past infancy and the last to be born. They had been married four years, and two children had come and slipped away before he felt like a father. The torrents of rain hit, and by the time Asa was blown back inside, the apples rolling from their basket, his wife was already gone. Her soul had taken cover with the thrushes and the gulls, had found a dark corner squeezed between slaves, had walked into the protective darkness and let the wind carry her away. An elm cracked on the east lawn and tumbled onto the house, its crown scraping across their roof. The midwife and the doctor jostled for the child and brought her out screaming. The mother remained, limp and damp, her body to be redeemed when the storm had passed.

Not Asa, but a slave had done it, had fetched his mistress’s body and carried her, shawled and still wet, to the surgeon, whose son built coffins out of pine.

Death is not unusual. He had lost three brothers, two newborn sons before Helen’s birth. His parents long dead, his wife in the ground with other men’s wives. This war would claim thousands more. Bodies are weak, just flesh and bowels. Men should be surprised that they live at all. Asa opens his eyes, content. The Assembly has decided to ask the women for homespun cloth, and Asa concurs. The dogwood blossoms lift on a breeze.

Helen is crouched behind the altar in Cogdell’s cabin, her hands clutching the table legs for support. Moses, who is twenty years old and crosshatched with scars and muscle, throws his Bible at the wall above her head. The book falls to the floor, pages exposed, like a shot bird. She shuts her eyes and says she will have him beaten for disobedience. When she opens them, he is gone. She has been instructing him in Christian behavior since she was a child.

Safe on her own land again, she finds Moll, who is spending Sunday by the sound, her feet plunged in briny muck. A boiled egg is half in her hand, half in her mouth. Spring has brought with it the ripe smells of decay, uncovered by melting frost. In another month, Long Ridge will begin to smell brighter, green and new. Helen removes her shoes and stockings with shaking hands and wades into the cold water. She carries her skirts to keep them dry.

“I told him of Father’s orders.”

“You can say all you like, no one’s marrying no one,” Moll says.

“It’s not his choice.”

“He told you about the girl he already has? Full up with child?”

“I’m the manager while Father’s away.” The spring-sluggish fish are beginning to kiss her ankles.

Moll throws the yolk into the river and sucks her fingers. “I don’t see anyone hitching
you
to a stranger.”

“That’s because I don’t
let
them!” Helen kicks a spray of water at the bank.

Moll doesn’t respond but slowly dries her arms with her skirt.

Helen is embarrassed by her outburst. Anger makes her no better than Moses. She is proud of her orderly heart, for it has come from years of training. Moll will learn, just as she has learned. She settles herself and looks at her friend again with a smooth brow. “When you become plantation manager, Moll, you can do as you like.”

“Till then, breed me out.”

“It’s what we all do. You’re being spoiled.”

Moll waits to see if Helen will catch the absurdity, will take it back. She doesn’t. “God will hate you for this,” Moll says.

Helen drops a handful of skirt and slaps Moll’s face, softly. She fights her way up the bank again and wrings out her wet dress. The two girls carry their shoes back to the big house, where they leave them by the back steps for Mrs. Randolph to clean.

Helen eats dinner in silence, alone. One hand ladles rabbit soup while the other pages through the latest receipts for flour, cotton, coffee. She must pay in advance for space on the ships that carry the kegs of turpentine to New England and the Caribbean for trade. After spending an hour with her needlework and another hour reading
The Progress of Sin
from the tract society, she undresses and crawls into bed by herself. Moll has begun to spend more nights away. Helen doesn’t know where she goes, what friends or lovers she has, but she is angry at her absence. Angry because she herself is as fixed as a potted plant. Yet where would she go if she could wander? By tying Moll to marriage, she is keeping them both in the same soil, root-bound. She cannot decide if this is unkind.