The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

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      When John returns to the cabin, Tab is sitting in the hammock like a trapped crab, her legs crooked at the knees. She is heaving, retching.

      On deck, John leans behind a mop, working at the filth that has grown since yesterday morning. Beaufort harbor had broken up like a reflection and now is gone, the horizon having swallowed his home. They have slipped through the shoals, and now the greenish water has turned dark and gray, the bottom invisibly deep. The men aboard are strangers to him. As a younger man, he had been the darer, the rope swinger, the one who leaned over the rails into the spray. But after ten years on the shore, his hands have grown papery from handling coin and cloth. They turn raw around the wooden handle of the mop.

      He has kidnapped his daughter and brought her on a black ship, away from God and medicine, with no hopes but a distant island, the reaching of which will probably require the death of seasoned men. Though the war has ended, these are the men still fighting. There are no reasons to bring a child on a sloop except selfishness and a wild response to loss. If he had a vision of her as her mother, soaking up the open sea, he has his own willful blindness to blame. Tab is a child; she is sick. He cannot re-create what has already happened. He can imagine Helen as a young woman encouraging this girl’s adventure, laughing at John’s subterfuge, but as a mother? John never knew her as a mother. She may well have acquired the fierce protectiveness that John is now violating. He has betrayed the woman she would have become.

      He wrings out the mop over the side of the ship. He will disembark at Charleston, after the sea air has done its work, and they’ll travel back home slowly, by stage, and when she’s older, Tab will remember this as something lost and golden, the dreamy heart of a happy childhood. When she is asked how it was to become a woman motherless, she will say, “But I had my father,” and will think of seacaps and the swamped roads running between rice fields, the egrets delicately stepping. A slow circle from her home out into water and back through the Carolinas.

      Did he board the Fanny and Betsy for her, then, to wrest her from a biblical death, a sanctioned passing into God’s hungry arms, or had his yearning for landlessness overcome him like a tide? He remembers Asa, after Tabitha’s birth, dragging his wife’s body away.

      The speech of birds fades as her window darkens, and all Tab can hear is the insistent watery press of waves on cedar. She has woken from a nap into the dimming and so cannot place which sill of day she’s crossing. The smell of sweat and salted meat reminds her she’s not at home, not in anybody’s home, but on a barge of plunder. If her knees didn’t ache so, she would smile at the thought of it.

      A man squeezes in through the door, and, unable to lift or turn in her hammock, she assumes it’s her father.

      “Ship doctor, miss,” and a hairy brown hand reaches into the hammock and fumbles for her wrist. She pulls her arms tight to her side. “Here now,” he says, and wrenches an arm out into the open. He holds his fingers on her wrist, and by the candle in his other hand, Tab sees a great round hairy face, bursting with bristles from eyebrow to ear, nose to chin.

      “Blackbeard,” she whispers. Mrs. Foushee had shown them a picture of the man.

      “Yellow fever, they say. Is that what’s troubling?” He leans an elbow on the side of the hammock so it rocks outward, nearly tipping her. “Now let me tell you what all I know about the fever. It comes hot and cold, does it, with the welts up your arms and down. Nights, the vapors leave you to go dancing with the devil, I’ve seen them myself, I have, and in the mornings they come settling back, all wearied out, and that’s when the welts turn blue. In ladies the feet take to tapping, and that’s the devil’s work too, to pound it out of you.” He looks at her kindly, at her eyes, which are still staring. “Have your feet been tapping?”

      She shakes her head.

      “So the cure, you ask me. Most will say bleeding, and that may work, but I’d first give it a good broth to ease the lungs and a little mustard paste to draw the welts back down.”

      Tab whispers again.

      “What’s that, my miss?”

      “I haven’t any welts.”

      “Oh, that’s just time’ll do it. Not to worry, your ladyship. Rest up, and I’ll be sending the broth in with your father.” He lifts his leaning body from her hammock and sends it swaying again. “Cheer up, miss. I’ve cured half the men I haven’t killed.”

      When John returns to the cabin, his hands blistered and his lower back pinched, Tab is awake and silent in the dark. Below her hammock spreads a small puddle of vomit. He places one hand on her forehead and closes his eyes.

      “This is not dying, is it?” she asks.

      He pulls away from her, lights a candle, finds an old cloth among the piles of oddments in the cabin, and wipes up the traces of her sickness. “There is no sun you’ll not see. How’s that for a promise?”

      He fetches her broth from the mess table and spoons it from the tin bowl into her mouth, which is a lurid pink.

      “What will we see on the islands?” she asks.

      John begins again his list of wonders: elephants, he promises, and cinnamon. The landscapes she hasn’t seen are the ones that buoy her.

      The room is close and warm, lit by the candle that wavers on a shelf. Shadows are larger than objects. A curl of Tab’s hair springing free of her sweated face makes a snaking sea monster on the wall. In their quiet, they can hear the clanking of mugs from the mess, the bursts of profane humor, the endless wash of the ocean.

      “Did you tell Grandfather?”

      John considers. He’d left the letter next to Helen’s miniature in the parlor, where Asa would notice it. The older man always sought out the little painting on his visits, holding it when he could. He had a possessiveness in him that encompassed his house, his land, his women. And whatever didn’t belong to him belonged to God. Asa would be happy to have the girl in heaven, might consider it safer than Beaufort, but John has no such faith. He could not leave his daughter’s body with a man who would not mind it, whose vision of God implied the reclamation of his flock. John believes in flesh. His love survives no transubstantiation.

      A seaman has found his fiddle and is setting a simple meter for a few drunken dancers. Soon John is due at his post on the bow, watching the stars again and searching for motion in darkness. Before he’d met Helen, in amongst stints of pirating, he had spent a year on a whaler and learned the smallest undulations of the sea, the telltale kick of spray from idle waves, an underwater hum. Here he must look for nothing but other masts. He leaves Tab’s unfinished broth on a shelf and eats his own tack and lime. Her eyes have closed, and he rests his fingers on her cheek once more. Her face has slipped into a fevered sheath. Her shift is damp. The loose curl still stands away from her forehead, trembling in the thin breeze that sneaks in through the cabin window. He kisses her and leaves her, without what the faithful would call hope.

      On deck he meets Blue Francis, the ship’s surgeon, who asks after his daughter. John thanks him for looking in on her. The doctor smiles and shakes his shaggy head. “If women be the sailors’ bane, then I think the young of them be treasures. Little ones are the lights that ease our blackness, a’n’t they?”

      From the mast, John sees nothing. The waves near the ship are yellow-tipped from the candles burning, the ones farther out are silver. He knows there are bodies beneath him. Below the lip of ocean swim schools of mackerel and drum, below them the whales, dipping to find their feed, and СКАЧАТЬ