The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (10 page)

“Is it time for a song?” Mrs. Easton asks, spreading her hands out to suggest ease and plenty. She is small and topped with tight gray curls. “Eliza? Helen?”

Helen demurs, and so must listen to Eliza, a former schoolmate, bang out a hornpipe on the harpsichord while the soldiers practice their attentive looks. She is perched on a low chaise by the window and can angle her head toward the day outside while appearing contemplative. During the applause for Eliza, a young man standing behind Helen leans down and says, “Lovely.” She nods without turning to look at him. The skin on the back of her legs goes cold.

As the entertainment progresses and the men begin to converse, Helen takes her turn and plays a slow piece by Scarlatti, inspecting the men in the corner behind the chaise. Young men look alike to her, and the artificiality of this gathering makes her wary. She has been conditioned to solitude. Even if she found a man to love—in the way that love is usually described—she doesn’t know that she could enjoy it. Perhaps she wouldn’t have understood this if she hadn’t been placed on a harpsichord bench in a room full of lusting men and women, their hands twitching with the hope of the unexpected, but here she is, a girl who thinks in increasingly small orbits, thrust into a miniature of the world. She has no plans; she only knows that home, crop, and God are not plan enough.

In the late afternoon, when the tide is up and the town smells less like fish, Mrs. Easton herds the party onto the lawn. Some claim the scattered benches, others venture into the peach orchard, and a few young men stand by the front door, waiting for their colonel to claim them. Helen faces the sea, wondering if she’ll be found again.

Mrs. Easton is at her side. “Darling, I want to present—here, step forward—William Dennis, the widow Dennis’s son, though of course you may remember. Fighting for four years and a true patriot, with wounds to prove it. Your father—well, no need to be shy. I’ll leave the pair of you, and very handsome-looking too.” She unclasps her hand from the young man’s arm and glances around for another opportunity to intervene.

“Welcome home,” Helen says. The boy can’t be more than nineteen, his face pimpled, his eyes permanently widened by war. “You sat in Miss Kingston’s school for a short time, I believe.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please. Helen.”

“Your father’s well?”

“Yes,” she says. “And your mother?”

William clears his throat and joins his hands behind his back, as if it were a trick to appear older. “I’d be glad to call on you. During our stay.” His eyes are too pale to be blue.

“How’s the fighting been?”

“Oh!” He laughs, surprising himself. “Not for ladies’ ears.”

Helen turns back toward the sea. “I imagine one finds religion quickly on the battlefield.”

“Not so much religion, ma’am, as faith in men.”

“With a thousand aiming to kill you?”

“Well. There are those who’d pull you out of ditches, no fear for their own skin.”

“Don’t you think of death?”

He reaches for his chest to hold on to his musket strap, but of course he’s left it at his mother’s house. “It’s present always, so we don’t mind it. Just a little step between that path and ours.”

“And you’re not afraid of that little step?”

“We all take it, ma’am.”

As dusk is covering the peach trees, the soldiers return their empty glasses and the women smooth their stomachers. In dim corners, parting words are exchanged. Helen has found her way back to the chaise in the parlor, which has yet to be lamp-lit. She is waiting to walk home with Moll and ask her what it’s like to be married to a man such as Moses, what it’s like to be married at all. What are the mysteries? Though of course there was no choice. Any fear that Helen has, Moll must have had too. If she were better at admitting fault, she would feel some guilt in this. What is a life without the ability to choose? This over that; him, or not him. Moll’s life is not so distant from Moll’s death.

A man sits down beside her. He looks like any other soldier. He speaks to her in a calm, low voice, like a man to a horse. “William Dennis says he’s to be your husband.”

“Not so at all,” she says.

“The bride of Dennis,” he says, “who launched a thousand ships.”

“No, nor burned any topless towers.” She stands. She wants to be indignant. “You’re a bit fine-read for a soldier.”

“Got my start on Goodrich’s boat. A rather literary man.”

“The pirate?” she asks. “And you dare stand among American men?”

He rises from the sofa and looks at her with his head to one side. Helen is caught between curiosity and shame. “I’ll bring you to sail one day. Wherever you like.”

She shakes her head. “I get seasick.”

“Are you afraid?”

His eyes grow deeper the longer she looks at them. “I can’t swim,” she says.

“So say the faint of heart.” He turns toward the door and gathers his cap from the hall stand. Helen follows him. Through the open door, they can hear Mrs. Easton’s noisy farewells. Helen puts out her hand to stop him. It is almost night, and she can still see him perfectly. He waits, her hand almost on his arm.

S
he sits on the edge of the sofa so her feet can touch the ground. Her skirts, patterned in a red floral stripe, balloon over her knees and hang just above the satin points of her shoes. She has only recently become conscious of the female artifice. William Dennis perches on a chair across from her and fiddles so much with his cup that his saucer fills with tea. Though the windows are open and they can hear a breeze lifting the leaves outside, the room feels close.

“The regiment leaves next week,” he says.

Helen’s mind crawls in slow circuits. She drags her civility to the surface. “And will you miss Beaufort?” This is the wrong question.

“I will certainly miss its beauties,” William says. He dips his head forward, signaling, but looks like a puppy searching for a teat.

“We are all proud to have you elsewhere, though. Your heroism is best practiced on a larger scale.” She pauses to let him work out a reply. “I’m sure your mother will miss you.”

“And you?” His cheeks are red in patches.

“I pray nightly for all our soldiers.” She stands and tries to shake out her skirt, which catches in folds over the rough fabric of her petticoats. The costume of young women is altogether absurd. Yet even in this interview, Helen strives to appear beautiful. She is aware of the escaping curls that frame the base of her neck, and when she holds out her hand to mark the tea’s conclusion, she looks forward to William’s bewilderment when he presses her soft fingers.

“May I come again before I leave?” he asks, her hand still caught in his.

“We would never turn you away, Captain Dennis.”

The graveyard by the church is hemmed by a low stone wall, and in the afternoon the sun comes through the oaks in slowly moving disks. A wind sends them brushing along the tops of headstones. The graves are arranged in scattered clusters around the cemetery, kin with kin. The mockingbirds hop through the canopy of hollies and cedars, but the ground is empty of bird life and cooler than any other shade.

“Do you think we’re feeling ghosts?” John asks. He stands by a row of small markers, their size corresponding to the age of the dead.

Helen, several steps ahead, turns. “It’s only cooler because of all the stone. I didn’t take you for superstitious.”

Their voices seem out of place here. He worries that they will never find the words for each other.

John had called on her father today, introduced himself briefly, and asked Helen for a walk. Both father and daughter looked skeptical. But she had come, and they had spoken little. He took her from Long Ridge down the oak-lined road to town, along Front Street where the voices of fishermen filled their own silence, and back in a loop down Ann Street. He would not have taken her through a cemetery if she had not asked.

If he tried to say what drew him to her, he would only find a handful of gestures. Her first refusal to perform on the harpsichord; her focus beyond the window in a room crowded with friends and strangers; her glances, which were as direct and unblinking as a hawk’s. The feeling of her hand an inch from his arm. He does not consider himself a lonely man, and yet he needs something in her gaze. Honesty, perhaps, or conviction.

John came to Beaufort as an ex-pirate and a soldier, not a son, not a brother. His youth was spent inland—without the breath of the ocean—where his cousin’s farm melted into the fields of other farmers. There was little worth owning. He had no mother or father to hold him and tell him he was precious; he had nothing to love in return. There had been idle friends, neighbor girls, the woman who cooked his meals, but never someone like this. Someone who belonged.

John waits as Helen examines a grave that looks like the others. A vaulted tomb, low, covered over in brick. Looking down a row of these half cylinders humping from the ground, he gets the impression of a sea serpent, or a row of waves.

“They look like cannon,” she says, following his eyes.

He looks up. Of course they do.

“Have you any family here?” she asks.

A circle of sun is sliding across her face, brushing her shoulder. He is drawn to the softness within her practiced husk, the sadness that led her to her mother’s grave; now he can read the name on the stone. He is drawn to the part of her that will never tell him this is her mother’s grave. The fear inside her fearlessness.

He sits on one footstone and she sits on another and he gives her a sketch of his childhood, from his parents’ death to the crowded mattress in his cousin’s home. “I can’t imagine visiting a place like this to look for family. I suppose I’ve been told that when they’re gone, they’re gone.”

“It wouldn’t be a comfort to find them again?”

“The past is not particularly interesting to me,” he says. Life is what’s ahead of him. These monuments around them don’t call to mind the bodies beneath. They are merely stones over dirt, stools on which a person can sit. The lack of birds does not actually alarm him; his talk of ghosts had been a reach for the romantic in her. Perhaps her denial had a similar intent.

He looks over, imagining now this mutual impulse of theirs, and waits for her to turn to him with a response in her eyes.

Instead, she stands, brushes off her skirt, and holds out her hand for him to shake. “Thank you for the expedition,” she says, and before he can respond, he is alone in the graveyard.

Two days later, he is at her door again. Helen refuses to walk with him. She cannot always say yes, and she is tired from lack of sleep. Sleep lost to thoughts of him. She takes him across the lawn to the water’s edge, where a yaupon holly hangs over a rowboat run aground. They climb in and sit on the thwarts, facing each other.

“Shall I row us?” he asks.

Helen cannot determine what about this person draws her. He is not plantation management, not father, not church. There is nothing familiar about him. At night, when she should be dreaming, she has worked him over like a puzzle. Maybe it is simply having something to think about. He could be the grit that she will worry until it becomes a pearl, beloved.

“Where would you like to go?”

“If this boat were in the water?” Helen’s imagination is weak, only because she has never wanted something desperately.

“I’ll take you to Barbados. You should’ve brought a hat to keep the sun off.”

“What will you do when the war is over?”

He pulls in the dry oars. His face is open and clear, as though he has no attachments, and thus no guilt. This openness is hypnotic. She finds herself wanting to brush her fingers across his forehead.

“I’ll find a job somewhere, or a bit of farm,” he says.

“You could ferry young ladies from place to place.”

He shakes his head. “Too dangerous. My heart is susceptible enough on dry land.” He rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “What about you? What will you do when you put down your gun?”

“I should like to see a little of the world. Do the things I have not yet done. And then I should like to be a vicar.”

She has never had such pleasure from making a man laugh, and it is not a feeling of conquest, as she might have thought, but surrender. When he laughs, she wants to swim into him. She knows that his pleasure is not in her dream’s absurdity, but in its aptness.

There are no bodies to haunt them in this boat beneath the holly. When John holds his hand out, he’s surprised that she takes it. Her smile when they touch is unexpected.

The note Asa receives from Widow Dennis is not accusatory, only concerned. Her boy shows signs of melancholy. She told William how women lead men with a string through the forests of love, but her son cannot read any hope in Helen’s flirtations. Asa folds the letter into squares. So perhaps the boy isn’t in love after all. He tosses the little packet on his desk, where it splays open again. Love breeds delusion.

Asa knows his daughter has begun to keep her heart a secret. He has bribed Moll for hints, but there are things a father will never know. Was his own wife’s father cut off like this? He could confront her, take away her inheritance for any whispers of an unsuitable match, but that would be doing himself no favors. There are no other heirs, only distant cousins who wouldn’t move to a shrinking town on the nubbin of North Carolina. Years of war, of ship-building and ship-sinking, have turned his farm into a business; he could sell it all if he were offered some governmental post, give Helen the money, abandon his trees for the oversight of citizens. But then why has he had a family? What will remain of him on this earth when his flesh molders? If there is a heaven, what will he look down to see?

If there is a heaven, he has made no provisions for it.

Whether it’s fortune or a governorship for Asa, his daughter won’t marry a parentless privateer. He has created dignity out of thin air, his own grandparents being no more than laborers, immigrants to an open land. He has claimed a stake now and will not regress. William Dennis’s kin brought Africans to this coast and turned plots of cabbage into acres of rice. William Dennis’s kin have left a visible streak through the darkness of the past.