The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ right, just me and your wench,” he says.

      John tries to nudge Tab out of her seat, but she begs to stay.

      “It were a slaving ship and we were nearing Charleston for the trade with more than half the bodies still well and good.”

      “The others?” Tab whispers, and John tosses his head to one side to signal “overboard.”

      “They made their moanings, of course, so the whole ship sounded like a bull with its neck cut, but we’d been used to such for weeks and paid it no mind. The last night before port, Captain sent Little Tom up the topgallant to watch for lights and Little Tom quivering in his boots, just as shivered as a boy can get. Had never seen a black before and thought they were singing for his soul.” Blue Francis peers over at Tab, whose head cranes out from behind John. “Just about your age, miss. Now Tom was used to ghosts, for wasn’t a ship didn’t have a dead sailor wandering around it, his neck cracked from falling from sail to spar, or his hair all floating up from the water drowned him. So when I heard him start the screeching and saw him clambering down the yards like a man chased, I thought he’d seen something solid. He ran straight for the captain’s cabin, saying it’s raining blacks, his hands swatting all about his head. I looked up and don’t see nothing, so I followed him, shouting that there weren’t any such things, but he’s shrieking and batting his hands around and now the rest of the men woke up and come out to see. Little Tom busts through the captain’s door, and the devil damn me if the captain didn’t rise up from his bed with his pistol in hand and shoot him clean through.” He pauses for effect. Some of the sailors pick at their teeth. “I held his head in my hands as his life slipped out of him and he said, ‘Blue Francis, they was blacks raining down on me, they was falling from heaven right on me, clawing and moaning and calling my name,’ and before I could tell him they was just ghosts, he dropped his head down and died right there.”

      “So the negroes go to heaven and the rest of us damned to hell?” a seaman calls out, and there is a clanking of tin mugs and bowls. As Tab twines her arms around her father’s chest to stop her own heart from beating fast, one man begins a beat on the table while two more stand and stomp about. The company sings words Tab’s never heard, and John carries her back to their berth, across the new-caulked deck, under the white stars.

      Held in her hammock again, Tab asks her father why some bodies would go to heaven and others to hell. She knows of these places from Asa, but why would sailors be damned instead of slaves, and why were haints always wicked?

      “It was just a story,” he says.

      “Ghosts aren’t true, are they?”

      John smooths her hair back, which is growing knotted without its brush. “When folk die, it’s just their bodies. There’s something inside that stays alive always.”

      “Our souls,” Tab says.

      “Souls, spirits, ghosts. Memories. I always remember your mother.”

      “And she’s in heaven, don’t you think?”

      “Some call it that,” John says. “She’s wherever there’s goodness, I imagine.”

      Tab closes her eyes and speaks in a whisper. “I don’t see her.” When John takes his hand away, she tries to make the miniature come to life, her mother’s small head with green points for eyes, a ribbon round her neck. She moves the head around her mind, placing it in different rooms, on the shore, on deck. It never moves, or smiles.

      “You’re what’s left of her,” John says, and she opens her eyes. “If you wonder where she is. I sometimes think she’s all in you.”

      “Do pirates always sing such bad songs?”

      He laughs. “No.”

      Tab catches his hand between hers and smiles up at her father. He leans down and kisses her forehead, which is cool and dry, and he hums quietly as she lets her muscles ease into sleep.

      In the morning, Tab wakes in a writhing green room. The cabin is trembling. No, her eyes are trembling. She sits and fills her lap with bile, then crawls out of the hammock and lands in a heap on the floor. Her nose is wet and she wipes it against the boards, leaving a trail of red. Something is running fast in her chest. Her heart runs so fast it leaves a cool breeze fluttering through her limbs. There is no heaviness left in her body, only a froth of pain. Through the window, she sees a rain of black bodies, mouths open, her mother pale among them.

      She starts to shake and is turned inside out. What existed within her, secret, unseen, is flung on the floor, her vomit, her blood, her limbs spasming away from the core of her. She is an oak leaf spinning in the moat, moss blown by her own breath. Her very particles are leaving her. The room falls into shadow. Her delirium can no longer coalesce to find her mother’s ghost in this mirage. The gull calls splinter around her head. The world is breaking.

      John returns to the cabin with two red potatoes in his hand and finds his daughter in convulsions on the floor. He falls onto Tab’s body, pressing his weight into her to stop her shuddering. A passing sailor looks in, runs for the doctor. The potatoes roll to the corner of the room, then roll back as the sloop crests a swell. Her body is beginning to quiet when Blue Francis hurries in. John looks up, his arms still around his daughter, and shakes his head. The doctor gently lifts John away, rolls the girl onto her side to clear her mouth and free her tongue, and kneads her arms and legs until she is quiet. He tells John to fetch water, and the father stumbles onto the open deck. The tears dry and shrink on his face. There is no emotion the wind cannot erase.

      He wraps his arms through the knotted shrouds holding up the mast and hangs there, rubbing his forehead against the rope. This day was always coming. Since losing Helen ten years ago, his life has been a series of breaths held. He only lives to wait for loss. Without believing in the God of salvation and forgiveness, he has faith in God the Punisher.

      When he returns, the doctor is cutting thin lines in his daughter’s arm, drawing blood in beads to the surface. He looks at John as his fingers wrap around Tab’s elbow. Her face is yellow now, her jaundiced skin standing out from the white of her shift. Her eyelids flutter but do not open. Her mouth parts and closes like a fish. John presses his ear to her chest and hears the sound of a woman walking through an overgrown garden, her silk dress brushing against, caught, torn by rose bushes. Tab’s heart is walking in that garden.

      The doctor digs his fingers into his beard and loosens the tangles. “I wish we had some balsam, to spread a little on the skin, but it would be more for easing than the cure. We have a man was in Philadelphia some weeks ago, and many was laid up with it, no one knowing how to do. Nothing left but to give the bark and cool her down a bit. Any humors in her will leave through the bleeding once they catch a smell of salt air.”

      John points to the drops of blood along Tab’s arms. “That’s not enough, is it?”

      “She’s just a little one, a’n’t she, sir? Look at the body of her.”

      “Bleed her more,” John says.

      “She’s as thin as poles and the heart’s not beating strong.”

      John grabs the lancet from the doctor’s hand and cuts into his daughter’s yellowing forearm; a small stream of blood flows onto the linen of her dress.

      At the stab, the girl wakes, her face twisted. Unable to cry, she leans to the side and heaves up the contents of her stomach, which are black and wet. Her eyes do not open.

      “The СКАЧАТЬ