The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (9 page)

Helen fixes on a line from her reading—
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit
—and repeats the sentence until it becomes a puddle of the day’s impressions. Moses and Moll and the spring minnows. Her father’s letter, her mother’s voice. Her own wedding day. The ringing bells.

In the morning, Helen visits the acres, where the spring sap is running. Two men peel the bark away from the pine trunks, leaving them pale and nude, and a third comes behind them to carve angled grooves in the raw flesh. Her father calls them catface trees. The sap oozes from these cuts in a slow bleed. A wooden trough catches the resin, which the distillery will turn to turpentine. The forest rises naked from the ground for four feet, four feet of white skin, before the trunks sheathe themselves in bark again. Helen knows better than to run her fingers down those glittering cuts.

Are any of these men a man that Moll would marry? She watches them drive their blades into the bark, their backs wet in the sun. She allows herself to think for a few moments of hands around her own waist, and then asks the foreman if Moses is working on the acres today. He shakes his head without looking at her. Men of any color are beasts.

Her hem already muddied, she crosses the trickling creek that divides Long Ridge from Cogdell’s land. The cabin, her church, is empty. A dead bough from Christmas lies in the corner. She crushes the pine needles between her fingers and smells them. She probably has not saved a single soul. The men and women who sit on these hard benches are merely seeking shelter. She had a child’s arrogance in starting this congregation, but no mission. Their bodies have been a grace to her. Who is a grace to them? They cannot keep a fire in this room, and still they come, even in winter. Rest, release. They come to her to be alone, sitting with their thoughts, while she seeks them out for the reflection of companionship. God is merely the lack of a whip.

She throws the dead branch outside and walks home.

The marriage takes place in the summer, among the heaved-up roots of the live oak, the lone tree that curves over the front lawn, bent and contorted to the shapes the easterly wind made. Moll fidgets in a yellow linen dress with two petticoats and holds a spray of goldenrod that she pulled from the back garden; no one else had thought to. One of the vestrymen from St. Paul’s, whose roof is losing its shingles, shifts from one foot to another before the two negroes and mumbles out the service. Helen thanks him afterward with a piece of the groom’s cake, and he bows and heads straight back to town with the crumbling slice in his hand. Asa is absent, accompanying a load of lumber to a new-built fort on Cape Lookout, eleven miles south. He told Helen to do as she liked, so she strung white muslin banners among the outbuildings behind the house, and here a little band sits and tunes, and a few of her pupils from the negro church gather silently. She demands merriment, and the newlyweds comply with a country dance. One old woman begins to clap her hands while two men slip away, back to their Sunday rest.

Helen cuts Mrs. Randolph’s cakes and serves the slaves on china plates. Several guests sit on the ground to rest their saucers safely. A few speak a low-pitched language that is not English. Helen engages Miss Kingston, who has brought her beau; the three of them will dine together after the festivities. The young man is from Wilmington and refuses his piece of cake, assuming it is a negro dish. When he is seeking out the housekeeper for a cloth to clean his boots, Helen asks Miss Kingston if she’d wish for a marriage herself.

“With Frederick?” She delicately sucks the icing off her fork tines. “My dear.”

The women lean against the back staircase, and the white wood warms them through their dresses with residual sun. Helen has mostly stopped attending the schoolhouse now that she’s busy with more important things; as the manager of the town’s largest turpentine plantation, she deserves some acknowledgment, certain confidences.

“Are these a happy couple?” The older woman gestures toward Moll and Moses, who are sitting on a bench a few feet away, silent.

“Happy in God’s eyes, certainly,” Helen says. “Duty done.”

“Mr. Foushee has fine prospects,” Miss Kingston says. Despite being almost thirty, she has a habit of flaunting her position.

“You’re fortunate he’s not fighting.”

Miss Kingston doesn’t respond, and Helen realizes her error. There is unspoken shame here that the women maneuver around. These days, a man without a gun is hardly a man.

Helen takes Miss Kingston’s arm and strolls her to a little gazebo that her mother had envisioned and her father had built after her death. They sit on the warping white boards and smooth their skirts, adjust the braids in their hair. Miss Kingston’s little lace cap has migrated to the side of her head, and Helen straightens it. “I played here as a girl,” she says, feeling sleepy and dull. It was hard to arrange for the wedding by herself, and she’ll get no thanks from Moll.

“When were
you
a girl?” Miss Kingston asks. “You’ve been the boss of us all since you began coming to the schoolhouse.”

She smiles, taking a compliment where it may not have been intended. “I suppose one takes the place that requires filling.”

“I’ve always mourned for you, Helen, not having a mother, though I can’t find any fault in you that would betray the lack. If I wished one thing for you, it would have been a little imagination.” Through the screen of rambling clematis, the women can see the lap of ocean against the shore, the sea’s slow breaths coming to them as a soft rustle. “Some of the negroes can read now. Perhaps you should leave them to teach the others. And now that Moll’s got a partner, you can find your own path as a lady and a Christian. They’ll need to learn to fear you.”

Standing up impatiently, Helen catches the back of her skirt in a cluster of wooden splinters and tugs at the fabric. “I am more than grateful for your guidance and instruction, and I wish you and Mr. Foushee all happiness, but I already have a path for myself. It has been marked by necessity and the grace of God. Though I end my life a spinster, this plantation will be richer for it, and heaven will have its due.”

Miss Kingston removes herself from the gazebo and deploys her parasol. “A spinster? Then your little farm will be sold at auction, parceled out to yeomen.”

The shade of the heavy vines gives Helen a chill.

Frederick has reemerged from the house, boots shining, and is tapping his cane to the fiddler’s rhythm, pretending not to search for his companion. Miss Kingston finds him, puts a hand on his arm, and gives him a look of gratitude.

Helen’s shoes are loud in the slave cabin, which is nothing but a box made of boards. The cradle she has brought makes the room look smaller. An empty cradle in an empty home.

“At least take a rug from our house.”

Moll is bent over, pulling at a loose plank in the floor. “I can make what I need,” she says. Moses is absent for the housewarming.

Helen waits for Moll’s fury. She will ask why Helen did nothing to stop this marriage and is leaving her alone in a house with a stranger. Helen would be terrified to be so abandoned, but what can she say? The lives around her are mapped by a higher hand, and she has learned to trust this. If she began now to doubt, if she studied unhappiness rather than duty, she might find her own life vulnerable. It hurts to see the people she loves in pain; she has no guarantee, after all, of God’s promises. But she tells Moll to hold on because Helen is holding on too. They are all waiting for whatever will redeem them. And isn’t the world, on the whole, a beautifully drawn thing? Can’t she count back generations, through people that lived and begat life, to arrive at Adam himself? If this marriage is an evil, she hopes it’s a small one.

Helen walks out to the porch, where breathing is easier. An old woman is returning from the fields, an empty pitcher in her hand. She doesn’t look at Helen but keeps her head back, scanning the sky as if for Gabriel.

Helen has borne her share of small evils. She grew up motherless after all. Would she change this if she could? She sits on the edge of the porch, her feet brushing the tall grass. Would she ask God to provide a mother? Her hand combing through the girl’s hair, catching out the knots. Her counsel at all the hard turns of Helen’s life. Asa has not given her enough pieces to hold on to, so what she imagines is fiction. The only object she has is her mother’s Bible; as a child learning to read, she translated God’s word into her mother’s voice. Faith was bequeathed to her. When she envisions the woman who bore her, she sees Mary and Martha and Ruth and Esther.

She feels a hand on her head.

Moll gives her two soft pats, and Helen doesn’t know if this is scolding or reassurance. “Give me one of your nice brooms,” she says.

“Is that all you want?”

“I wouldn’t mind if I had some say in who I laid down with.”

Helen nods. She puts her chin in her hands, nodding. People want what isn’t given to them. And this is not sin, but hope.

What if God didn’t put us here to accept, but to struggle? Isn’t love itself built of that precise impossible hope?

When Moll sits down, Helen reaches out and holds her. Moll does not respond to the embrace but waits. Helen digs her fingers into Moll’s back.

The next Sunday, she stands before three rows of black faces and tells them the shepherd’s story. She reminds them that God loves each soul in his flock, that though a woman may find herself bound to heavy weights, God has not abandoned her, but will seek her and will find her. Helen asks Moll to read aloud.

Moll comes to the front of the room and opens her Bible. The other slaves who have learned to read follow along, trailing the words with their fingers.

“What man of you,” she says, “having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” She looks up and Helen nods. “And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing.” Moll closes the book, puts it on the altar, and walks out of the makeshift church.

At eighteen, Helen has already rejected two suitors, one of whom was just home from war, legless. Asa introduced the men to her. They had each sat in the parlor, and Mrs. Randolph, whose children were beginning to be wed themselves, brought them a tray of sweets. From his desk across the hall, Asa could hear that Helen was polite and attentive. He saw her burn their letters in a bucket behind the house.

After Helen—who is perhaps more wealthy than beloved—dismisses the last visitor, she bids her father good night and slips down the back stairs, through the rangy garden, and across the creek. Asa watches from his window. Moll sleeps now in her husband’s house on Cogdell’s plantation, squeezed among the houses of other slaves. She has become less of a companion, more of a housemaid. He knows his daughter still seeks her out some nights for discussion. These are the times he considers moving his family to a proper town, one with more than a handful of oystermen and halfhearted farmers. But if ensuring his daughter’s marriage requires abandoning his empire, then what good is empire? He is building something to last. The pine farms to the north are already sending their resin to his distillery.

A local regiment is returning to Beaufort for the summer to shore up the defenses along the sound. The fort to the south at Cape Lookout has been dismantled for lack of funds and ammunition, and the Continental Line is aware of the coast’s vulnerabilities. With the additional men, Asa has more confidence about husband-catching. The fellow needn’t be more than simply respectable. Helen already possesses the bounty.

Asa sets aside his accounts. Outside the window, the stars mimic his candle’s flicker. He is older now than his father ever was.

A letter from his friend Colonel Ward of the Carteret County militia contains a few useful names, bachelors of good character, though men of their age were not meant to be matchmakers. Helen has grown headstrong in these years of his intermittent absence, and she may not suit an ordinary man. It’s as well she’s kept herself from novels.

In the morning, he’ll call on William Dennis’s mother, a widow who could not object to a visitor bearing a small bag of coffee and news from the Assembly. These soldiers all have sweethearts, of course, but Asa is objective enough to rate his daughter’s beauty highly. He should really have a portrait done of her, to catch the brown curls and small, flowery mouth before she begins to fade. He and the widow will discuss weather and the war, and he will mention his daughter’s pious ministrations and her health; Widow Dennis will remark to her battle-worn son on the benefit of an association. Seeds are easily planted—the reaping is the challenge.

Asa’s mind rests on a plan like a man on a raft; it keeps him from the deeper waters. By the time he blows out his candle, the wax of which has pooled into a sort of continental map, he has forgotten about his daughter’s night walk and anticipates his bed with pleasure.

In the summer of 1780, the ragged North Carolina regiments are tufts of themselves. The Beaufort soldiers are ashamed to be returning to their coastal home for this assignment, and relieved. Their brothers-in-arms have surrendered Charles Town to the British, and they have a sense that they are children in a man’s game. Some board in the public house, others with kin. The embellished invitation to a gentlewoman’s welcoming tea, while vaguely embarrassing, is a pleasure to receive.

Mrs. Easton, the colonel’s mother, enlists the eligible young women of Beaufort to provide decorations for the event—a few doilies snatched from dowry chests and whatever flowers have survived the swamping heat of July. Helen brings rose mallow and yellow tickseed, feeling bridal. She is well aware of her father’s gentle scheming but has no plans for conquest. Her passions are not yet directed toward love.

The soldiers arrive in a group and stand stiffly while Colonel John Easton kisses his mother. Bows are exchanged. Moll and another girl serve cakes and berries with averted eyes. Helen believes that her conversations with Moll are becoming less welcome, and when the slave passes her with a pitcher of lemonade, Helen pinches her on the leg. Moll slaps at her hand.