The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

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      When she is smooth and clean again, the doctor brings in a blanket wrung in cold water to lay over her body. “I gave the word to Captain, sir,” he says. “He let you off watch.” He lingers in the door. “I can’t do for her more than any other man, but no less either. I never did have a lady patient. She’s a lamb in God’s hands now, just a child who might be going home.”

      Through the afternoon, John and Tabitha wake and sleep, one crying out from dreams, the other wrenching in pain. John finds one of the potatoes and eats it raw. When she groans, he pulls himself up and rests his hands on her cheeks, absorbing the heat. When she shivers, he pushes the wet blanket off and lets it fall with a slap to the floor.

      The room darkens and John lights two candles. He eats the salted pork a sailor brings him, but Tab consumes nothing. Even the water he pours into her mouth dribbles out. In ten more years, she would look just like her mother. The candlelight catches the blood that is beginning to seep from her eyes and nose. Her lips are already tinged with red.

      Her form—bleeding, limp, and pale—resembles the crucifix hanging in Asa’s parlor. He used to sit and stare at Christ’s body sagging on the wall while he waited for Helen’s company. Helen herself had died with none of the weakness of self-sacrifice. Her cheeks had been flushed, her arms plump, her eyes bright with exertion. She had borne Tabitha in a tumult of sound and motion; only when the baby was followed by the pooling of blood did she turn white, but she slipped away still vibrant, surrounded by the pulsings of life. In the vigor of her death, John could deny God’s power. It seemed her own doing.

      But this is different. Tab’s life is leaking away, is being siphoned. What force is sucking at her but the universe? What power but a black and holy one?

      When the dusk has become night and only one side of things is lit by the candle glow, Tab murmurs, “The ship.”

      He stirs from a half rest and twines his fingers in hers. She glances down at her open palm. “We are on a ship,” he says. “The Fanny and Betsy, bound for Bermuda. You’re in the cabin now.”

      “Small,” she says, and gestures with her empty hand. “Birthday.”

      “You had a birthday a few days ago. Turned ten years old. You were ill, so I brought you on the ship for a little sea air.”

      “Birthday,” she repeats. A tear mingles with the blood from her eye and leaves a pink streak across her temple.

      “I’m sorry you weren’t well for it. I had a present for you.”

      She squeezes his fingers.

      “I left it in Beaufort—it was too fine for pirates. It will be there when we return. But I’ll tell you what it was. Five yards of finest silk, to make a grand dress for you, a lady now.” Tab closes her eyes. “Blue it is, with vines going up and around in pink and green. I’ll ask Mrs. Randolph to make it into something for parties and such, and you’ll be the little queen. The image of your mother.”

      Tab is weeping now.

      “You’ll be well in a few days, and I’ll order Frith to turn us around and take us to port whenever you please.”

      “The little ship,” she says, and closes her hand.

      In this last hour of consciousness, Tab floats on the ocean, no ship beneath her, surrounded by her mother and father and grandfather and any brothers and sisters who were caught unborn in her mother’s womb. She might have had four siblings by now, all of whom would follow her to the shore and curl up next to her at night to keep her warm in the winters. She is part of a family halted. She blames the sea for being romantic and God for killing. The room fills up with ghosts.

      Her grandfather is singing death to her. She asks her hands to cover her ears, but they do nothing. She will not yield. Her limbs are steeled against God’s assault.

      Her hairs enter each pore with pinpricks; her whole body is alive to the sharpness of pain. The candlelight in the room blends with the darkness, and her vision slowly vanishes in a blackening muddle. The voices rise around her. Her hammock is wet with sweat and blood, is wet with the sea. She is leaving the world in a red storm, through the body of one already dead. She can now remember what it was like to be born.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ