The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (12 page)

“Did you travel far, John?” The widow has eaten nothing. After the men leave for the evening march, she will collect their scraps and make a plate for herself. She has not gotten rich by wasting food.

“To any island you can imagine. I’ve seen more monsters than women.”

“You would’ve wooed them all,” she says. She looks around at the men at her table. “Be careful of your handsome faces, my boys. Don’t let the British near them. We’ll have little else after this fight.” Widow Dennis has already buried her plated silver under the holly tree. She winks at her son.

John does not touch her. At most, they stand side by side and look out together, assessing the ocean. They find points on the horizon and imagine traveling there: the West Indies, Charles Town, the sandy shoals that stand between Beaufort and the Atlantic. John tells her there was once a fort on Bogue Island, to the west of the inlet where ships come through, built to protect the town from Indians and anyone else with a cause, but the army never finished the southern wall. The fort was made of bundles of sticks tied and stacked like firewood, and it is true that this might stop a musket ball, but cannon would have scattered the battery as easily as kindling. She says, You think of the world in terms of what it will withstand; he does not yet know how she thinks of the world. They imagine building a home in the wreckage of the fort.

They have sat next to each other, and the edge of her skirt has fallen on his crossed knee. He remembers these moments but does not dwell. He has no need to think of them often. But he has not thought of marrying her either; he has assumed they will always meet at night in unplanned places and share some silence. Family life is not something he’s been fitted for. And if William Dennis asks her? She’ll say yes; that’s what women are accustomed to do. And then, when he is ready and less awed, he won’t be able to reach out for her arm. She’ll be married and using that arm to hold her children.

At the end of the summer, the regiment folds its uniforms and fills its sacks with meal for the road. William Dennis has bent his head in the garden of Long Ridge and asked for Helen’s whole heart. He has found solace in his mother, who made him a pudding with the last of her sugar. He shared the treat with John and the two other men, and they cursed women together and let the night slide away in drink when the pudding was gone. In the morning, William had finished combing his hair before he remembered. He then lay down, brokenhearted, until dinner.

On their last day in Beaufort, the soldiers say their parting words. Mrs. Easton’s home is busy with grateful men, and a few young ladies host those men who have declared themselves stricken with love. They place ladyfingers on small china plates and wait for their mothers to leave them for a final kiss with their beau and a promise of letters. In the evening, John visits Helen.

“I don’t expect you to write me,” she says. They stand in the hall by the door. Since she first reached for his arm in Mrs. Easton’s house, passageways have seemed romantic places. She does not let him into the parlor or offer him any sustenance. Their bodies fit shyly into a corner of the hall, just beyond the window’s slant of moonlight. He takes two of her fingers in his hand, then three. She fidgets, listening for Asa’s step on the stairs.

“I don’t want you to wait,” he says.

She pulls her hand back. It is hard to speak of feeling to a man who will soon be the target of British muskets. But she is young still, and danger, like all things, is transitory. She speaks with her head down.

“I want you to wait,” she says. John doesn’t reply, so she lifts her head and repeats herself. “Don’t find anyone else.”

He reaches for her waist and she pulls away.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever see you again,” she says, “and I don’t want any memory to linger over. I don’t want to be kept up nights thinking of a kiss.”

“It’s like loving a ghost.” He gently kicks her shoe with his.

It’s the first time he has mentioned love, and she regrets it. She has always buffered her life against pain, and this is a new worm in the heart. “Don’t promise that you’ll come back.”

“I’ll come back,” he says.

The darkness folds over him. All she can see, standing at the open door, is the glint of the moon on the moving sea.

Two days outside of Beaufort, the men pause in a meadow for their dinner. It is the middle of August, and they huddle around the trunks of pecan trees like cows. The commissary hands out salted fish and apples requisitioned from a farm. William Dennis’s canteen is empty; he asks John for a sip from his.

“Your mother will be glad to see you settle in Beaufort again,” John says. “After this is done. Save you from the shad.” He eats his ration with his hands, for there is no juice left in the fish to be neat about.

“You think we’ll make it home again?”

John stops eating. William is sitting with his knees pulled up, his back against the tree. He twists one foot slowly back and forth, scraping a fan in the dry dirt, and doesn’t look at John. The men’s coats are beside them, dust-colored from the summer. A bluebird shuffles among the branches above them, darting out for an insect in the open air and falling back into the pecan again.

“Did you speak to her before you left?” William asks.

“I did.”

“Is it you she wants?”

John swallows the last bite of his fish. “It isn’t our will that brings us to the battlefield and leaves us there or leads us away.” John stands up and wipes his hands on his pants. “That’s what’s been told us. That’s why we don’t all hide under our beds. If there were no God, would you have left your mother’s house?”

“If there were no God, I wouldn’t have a mother at all.”

The men begin to sort themselves for the afternoon’s travels. From the other side of the tree, John can hear the smooth metal sounds of a man cleaning his gun.

Her shoes sit on the porch by the front door, their heels in clods of mud. Asa sits next to them in a straight-backed chair, turning from the view of his lawn to the empty shoes and back to the lawn. Colonel Easton once questioned its expanse, its British emptiness. “Grass is no crop I know of,” he said, and Asa said, “But it looks well.” It suggests leisure.

The shoes have been empty all afternoon. His daughter is closed in the parlor with a gentleman whom Asa believes is some sort of itinerant, but Helen has made him promise not to ask. “A merchant here on business,” she said. This is his second day in the house, so what else could he be but a painter? There are ladies in New Bern having their miniatures done, and it was only a matter of time before the art arrived in Beaufort. Asa imagines his daughter’s pose.

He digs at the ankles of his own shoes until they slide off, one landing on the buckle. The small clink sends a hawk bolting from the oak; it cuts across the breeze and then drifts back, watching the earth for movement. Asa stretches his socked feet, flexing his toes. A laugh spills out of a window. If she were being painted, shouldn’t she be still? He’ll put it on his desk, propped up behind his ledgers. When she gives him the little painting, he’ll say, “But when did you have this done? What a secret-keeper!” He closes his eyes to better set the scene. He is ready to let her carry the weight of his endeavors, though it would calm him to have a grandson before settling his accounts. He doesn’t know what happened with Widow Dennis’s son. Young ladies these days are expected to find a little love in the match; no harm in that, if the lady is not unreasonable. Asa loved his wife. That is, he wished mostly to be near her; he looked on her with pleasure; and when she died, he felt the lack of her—felt it as an emptiness in his leg bones that made his walking hard.

Her parents had introduced them, just as he had pushed William Dennis Helen’s way. They had sat politely in someone’s drawing room and there had been a fascination on his part with the half-open window, through which he could observe freedom. His mother asked the girl questions, and she spoke so quietly that sometimes his mother said, “Pardon?” He would glance back into the room, and she would turn her eyes at him like a rabbit in the woods, and he would cough until his eyes watered. That was courtship.

He had no image of her, no ivory painting the size of a thumbnail or sketch drawn hastily on a summer’s picnic. But there was an impression that lasted longer than ink. He did not have to see God’s face to believe in him. There is a searing in the body’s innards that never leaves; it’s the thumbprint of the beloved, and its formlessness does not diminish its endurance. Like his wife, God has left him empty-handed, forsaken.

It is January, and the farm has quieted to a hum. Asa has hired his slaves out to the men clearing fields for rice. The pines are rebuilding their sap for the spring’s cutting. Some mornings are warm, but on this one, Helen wakes to a web of frost on her window, through which the sea appears hazy and jagged. Downstairs, she helps Mrs. Randolph roll out flour for biscuits; they knead without speaking, their hands dusted white. A hired man walks across the back fields, and the sound of his feet on the hard grass reaches the women with their dough.

It is already 1782, a year and a half since Helen last saw John, and she has had only one letter, brief, with the smell of fighting on it.

I am in a tent with three other men, somewhere inland. We had meat on Sunday. Col. Ward has joined us and seems a just man. Daniel Foot is here, you’ll remember his Beaufort cousins. He writes a sweetheart but won’t tell who she is. Perhaps it’s you. I haven’t killed a man yet, I hope you’re pleased to know
.

She had taken pains only to read the letter twice before she folded it away, but it was not hard to remember. Her parsing of it revealed little. He may feel jealousy, he may desire her good opinion. Nothing more could be proven. She imagines slipping out of the house one morning and walking to wherever he is, across the miles of unknown. His face when he first spots her through the trees. Her hands pressing his neck, finding his ears. This is her beginning to imagine. But at twenty years old, she is still digging the heels of her palms into biscuit dough, the bread to be eaten only by her father.

Mrs. Randolph begins to whistle. Helen brushes away a strand of hair, wiping a streak of flour across her forehead, and leans against the wooden table.

“You needn’t do more, miss.”

“We’re almost through. Hand me the jar.” Helen presses circles in the dough. “Do you miss your husband, Mrs. Randolph?” He had died looking for free land on the frontier, shot through with a Cherokee arrow. His partner had buried him in the west and sent Mrs. Randolph his musket and his spectacles. The gun she keeps hung behind her cabin door, where all the little Randolphs know to find it.

“I mostly miss the money he brought in, to speak frankly. He was a good father to the little ones and did well by us, but there’s something rather nice about one’s own life. Making decisions without someone to tell you no, best not do that. He never thought I could do much for myself.”

“We’re lucky to have you,” Helen says.

“There’s no telling what all I can do without him, miss.” She arranges the biscuits on a sheet and hangs them over the fire, where they already look golden in the light.

Helen carries a basket of the fresh-baked bread to the cabin where she leads prayer. Two elderly women sit on the front bench, and Moll sits behind them. Only when Helen sets the basket down on the altar and opens her mother’s gilt-edged Bible does she see her father sitting in the back corner in a rush-bottomed chair, separate from the pews of the faithful. His arms are crossed.

She leads the slaves in the Lord’s Prayer before asking them their catechism.

“What is your name?”

They each call out their name. Asa is silent.

“What is your duty toward God?”

They speak in a jumble. “To believe in him, to fear him, and to love him with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength.”

After the service, Helen walks with Moll back toward Long Ridge. She looks along the path for Asa, but he left when she was speaking to Aunt Caty about her grandson. Moll pauses when they reach the dividing creek, and there is a moment in which Helen feels like she is being asked to cross Styx alone, that every friend she’s made in life will desert her before the final passage. She does not yet have Mrs. Randolph’s resignation. Helen reaches for Moll’s hand. “Come home,” she says. “For a little while.” She pulls her across the creek, and the grass in the late morning is once again soft under their feet. Helen’s fingers tighten in Moll’s.

When they come into the parlor, a sprig of holly in Helen’s hair, Moll carrying her muddy shoes in one hand, Asa is sitting in a chair by the window. His coat is draped over his lap, and his hands are buried in its folds for warmth.

“Has no one put a fire in the room this morning?” Helen releases Moll and goes to call Mrs. Randolph.

Asa turns away from the window and looks at Moll. “Did you enjoy church this morning?”

“Your daughter is a fine speaker, sir.”

“And do you believe in the answers you gave to the catechism?”

Moll looks at the sofa, and Asa nods his head. She sits. “The Lord does his best by us, sir.”

“Even by you?” The older Asa gets, the more often he wishes he were asleep. Even now, he envies Moll the sofa, the possibility it provides of horizontal rest. The conversations he starts, he could slip away from unfinished, without any feeling of loss.

Helen returns to find them silent. She brushes at the dust on the mantel above the cold fireplace. In a moment, Mrs. Randolph arrives with wood under her arm and kneels on the stone flagging.

“Have you always been faithful to God?” Asa asks Helen.

She glances at Moll, who is tucking her bare toes under the Turkey rug.

“I mean since you were a child. I only wonder if you always had this faith.”

“It was something my mother left me,” Helen says.

“I should be getting home,” Moll says, but does not stand.

Asa shakes his head. “What my father told me was that our lives are our own and only when we die do we hand them over to God and heaven.”