The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

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СКАЧАТЬ Of all the soldiers, John is the only one who stayed. Loss has a way of paralyzing even the brave. She reaches out now and pats his knee. “We’ll see her through it, don’t worry yourself.”

      When she leaves, John is grateful for the quiet. In the first few years after Helen’s death, he thought he might be lonely, but Tab is all he wants in the way of company. He carries a slice of cake upstairs, but his daughter is sleeping, her mouth open.

      Yarborough returns in the afternoon and places his cool hands on the girl’s body. She is asleep again, though there is no restfulness about her. John sits on a rush-bottomed chair in the corner and watches the doctor’s face. Yarborough opens her mouth, looks at her tongue. He peels back her eyelids, which are still and pliant. He rubs his fingers along the pale insides of her arms, looking for the blood within. He examines her as a child picks at his supper, knowing already what is there.

      When the doctor turns, John is shaking his head. “Yellow fever,” Yarborough says. “She may improve. The likelihood, indeed, is that she will improve. But the danger is in the lapsing. Steady rest, fluids, quiet.”

      “Nothing to be done?” John asks.

      “Prayer,” the doctor says. “The minister from New Bern returns on his circuit tomorrow. You might have him stop in with a word.”

      John is left alone in his daughter’s bedroom. He remembers being her age, being God-loving and prayerful. Believing in a goodness without end, and wrath for the undeserving. Even aboard ship, his cannon pointed at another crew, his sins could be laundered. But in the birthing of his child, he had forgotten to call out to the Lord. He only saw his wife, her belly, his infant. And without his prayers, she had been taken. This began his acquaintance with God as a vengeful child who, if ignored, will snatch his favorite toy away. So John offered him nothing. Unable to blame his daughter, he understood that God was the only one left to punish.

      John had let Asa bury Helen in the churchyard, but the stone wings above her name seemed to him a mark of God’s victory. No more kin of his would find their rest there. He was only happy, Helen was only whole and well, on the open ocean. It was land that killed, not sea.

      When Tabitha wakes, John cannot go to her for fear. “Will you take something?” he says. “Broth?” She moves her head once, as if to shake it. “Yarborough says you will be climbing trees tomorrow.” He stands and then sits again, his head in his hands, his fingers feeling at the roots of his hair. He looks at the grain in the floor of the house that he did not build but occupies.

      Tab only sees a shape moving in distress.

      “Would you like to sail a bit?” he asks her.

      Now she remembers the toy boat wrapped in brown paper, and in that thought is clarity, a small space of focus in the haze.

      The second night Tab is sick, John leaves her for an hour in the care of Dr. Yarborough and walks east away from town to Cogdell’s plantation, which adjoins Long Ridge, and circles around to the slave quarters behind the rice fields. He knows which is her cabin. A man answers his knock, and calls for Moll. The woman who comes to the door is still young and strong, her hair wrapped tight in a red cloth and her face unscarred. A newborn crawls against her chest. Its hands open and shut, catching folds of fabric, searching for milk.

      “What’s wrong?” she asks. No matter that he hasn’t spoken to her in years, though she once thought of him almost as a brother.

      “I’m ashamed to come here like this,” he says. His wife died ten years ago, and this woman with the infant had been her property, her maidservant, her confidante, her friend. Though now that he is standing here, he doesn’t know whether Moll would have claimed that friendship. “My daughter’s sick.”

      “What is it?”

      “They don’t know. Yellow fever maybe.”

      A boy curls around Moll’s hip to see the visitor, but she pushes him back into the cabin. “I don’t know much about herbs,” she says. “And no one here could do much for the fever.”

      He nods.

      She watches him wanting something more. She is sorry for him. She misses Helen, but she has no debt to John or his daughter. After Helen’s death, they moved in separate ways; Moll had her own life to battle. She is a field worker, not a guardian angel. His concerns are not greater than hers. The baby begins to cry: a long, piercing syllable that dissolves into hiccups. “We can’t do anything for yellow fever,” she says again. “Ask some other conjure man.”

      “I didn’t know,” he says, gesturing toward the infant. “I should congratulate you.”

      She waits for him to blush, to back away, to excuse himself, but he doesn’t move. He’s waiting for something too. If it’s sympathy, he knocked on the wrong cabin door.

      “And the boy?”

      “Davy,” she says.

      “Can I see him?”

      She scratches at her covered hair with her free hand, then calls for her son. The boy runs back to the door, almost bouncing. John is exhausted to see so much frantic energy. He nods once. The boy nods back, three times.

      Moll, holding the infant with one loose hand, puts her other palm on Davy’s head, runs it along his scalp, squeezing it, as if to feel for soft spots. He shakes his head to free himself, but Moll slips her hand down to his neck to hold him still.

      John could stand here and watch this mother love her son for days.

      “Where’d you get your coat?” Davy says, pointing a finger toward John’s chest.

      John looks down and says a tailor in New Bern made it.

      “What’s his name? In case I wanted one someday.”

      John waits to see if he’s teasing, but the child’s eyes are happy and serious, so John gives him the name.

      Moll’s husband calls out from inside, and she can hear her girls’ voices escalating toward a fight. She bounces the baby to calm it, her hand still draped around Davy’s shoulders. “I’m sorry I can’t help,” she says. She should say she’ll pray for the child, but she doesn’t.

      He rubs his face and leaves.

      In the morning Tab cannot stand to walk. The dizziness turns her body into vibrating points. John tucks the quilt around her, lifts the damp bundle, and carries her downstairs to rest on the sofa while he gathers meal and potatoes into a sack, some jugs of water. To save her from the graveyard, he must take her to sea. He took her mother once, and being on the water only made her bloom. Tab will get well beyond the reach of Asa’s religion. He looks at the paper parcel above the shelves in the hearth room and wonders if a dress could be made of such fine silk aboard a wayward ship, with villains for seamstresses. No, it will be here for their return. She will come back whole and womanly.

      Tab’s vision is clear this morning, and though her body rejects her guidance, she is well enough to feel a thrill at what the day will bring. She is trailing in her mother’s path.

      It is Sunday and the ships are come to harbor. Trading ships and whaling ships and ghost ships whose crews know her father. When Mrs. Foushee reads them stories, she calls them buccaneers. Wicked men who lure vessels for the plunder, who tie ladies to the masts and make them СКАЧАТЬ