The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (17 page)

At camp, William Dennis says, “Now aren’t you glad we saved that powder?”

Helen sleeps late on Sunday, for there is no one to wake her. When she puts her feet on the floorboards, their groan is the first sound she hears, the first mark of a human on the house’s emptiness. She is hungry, but Mrs. Randolph is feeding her own children on the other side of town. Moll is feeding her husband. Some tavern keeper must be feeding Asa. There are no biscuits in the pantry. In the back garden, the chickens are roosting in shrubs; no one has cooped them, and if she counts, she is sure to find one missing. Still in her stocking feet, she hunts for eggs, scrabbling in the bushes and behind fence posts until she finds two, brown and spotted. She stirs them in a pan with butter and onion and fries them over the fire.

She puts on clean stays and a skirt. After staying in bed for two days and being fussed at by the women who visited, she is ready to carry herself again. She takes a pencil and paper to the pine acres and makes note of the troughs that need replacing, the bark that needs to be whiskered, the weeds that should be cut. The catface trees have been neglected. The barrels of turpentine in the mill that were ready for shipment have been emptied by the British. When the ships leave and the slaves return, she will have them work double time to replace the lost inventory.

She doesn’t remember that it’s Sunday until almost noon. She walks to Cogdell’s cabin, but its benches are empty and she sits at the altar alone. A skink lazes on the windowsill, and when she reaches out for it, it takes a few sluggish steps and then stops. Its skin is soft and papery, and its chest moves in and out beneath her fingers. She kneels down to find its eyes. They are black and deep and mirrored; she can see her own face in them. No slaves are looking for God today.

Everyone she passes on the walk into town is quiet and watchful. The masts of the three ships in the channel cast long shadows. The church near the wharf has lost the corner of its roof to a cannonball, and Helen must step over a pile of rubble to enter the nave. A woman and a man sit inside on opposite sides of the aisle. Helen sits next to the man, who is raking his beard. He smiles when he sees her.

“How’d your fleeing go?” he asks.

“I suppose I should’ve waited a few hours, then. I’m glad to see you.”

The oysterman pats her knee. “We’re all taken sometime or another. I was ready for them to take me, and I’m pleased to be let go. I don’t try to hold on to my life too dear.”

“Your wife must have missed you,” she says.

“And who’s to say they won’t come for her tomorrow?”

Their whispers echo off the walls of the church, and the other woman has turned around to frown at them. Helen leans closer to the old man’s ear. “I thought I couldn’t swim, but the ocean carried me right to Bogue Island, just as you said. In the end, I wasn’t afraid. And then a soldier came for me and brought me home.”

“Next morning they rowed us to shore and took our ropes off and handed us right over. Five days of my life I didn’t need to wake by dawn or work in the oyster banks. And you’re right, she was glad to have me back and showed it too.”

“Then what do we ever worry about?”

The woman in the front pew, who had been praying for her son, stands and walks out of the church.

On Monday night, the men who have been collecting lumber gather to lash the boards together and paint them with pitch. They work in darkness on the grassy lawn of Long Ridge that slopes down to the water. They are mostly hidden from the British here. Helen has given them space and some raw pitch and now brings them mugs of drinking chocolate. The townspeople work on one raft, and the soldiers construct another. She avoids giving a mug to John because she is nervous of him, so she speaks to William Dennis instead, whose hands get tangled in the ropes; by the time she moves on, he has several splinters in his hands. The women gather in clusters by the front stairs.

Six men carry each raft on their shoulders. Their procession along Front Street down to the wharf resembles two moving altars and a train of congregants. On the pier, John and William tie the single barrel of powder to one end of a raft and unwrap the long fuse. The men slowly lower the rafts into the shallow water, where their presence changes the sound of the waves. The town waits for a few minutes, but the ships remain dark and quiet. The tide is slipping out, tugging at the bundles of scrap wood. There is only a sliver of moon to see by until they light the first torch.

The fire moves slowly into the pitch, simmering. The men shove the rafts into the harbor, and the wind tugs the fire up. Men and women move back from the shoreline. The tide is patient, and the rafts bob on the water. In a few minutes, tiny lights appear on the ship decks. A few shouts carry over the harbor. The rafts are halfway there, blazing now, a spectacle of light that reveals neighbors’ faces.

Without a chaperone, Helen finds John and takes his hand and kisses its palm. She slips a small wrapped parcel into the pocket of his coat and fades back into the crowd again. He has trouble breathing.

They can hear the winches pulling the British anchors up when the barrel explodes in a spasm of sound and light, sending shards of burning wood into the water and in arcs onto the sandbars, where they burn and pop and set skinny trails of fire running through the lines of grass.

In all the noise, the town is silent, watching, taking whatever evidence they can of God’s husbandry.

The rafts become mired in the marshes by Bird Island Shoal, where the fires burn through the pitch until they reach wet wood; the remnants crack and sigh until the blaze dies out. The smoke coils for hours after.

In the morning, the three ships are gone, and the two remaining pilots row to Beaufort in a dinghy, glad not to have been burned to death.

Long Ridge looks unkempt, and Asa has only been gone ten days. He spent one afternoon in the assembly hall of Hillsborough, surrounded by other wise and landed men, before the news reached him and he turned to panic. He told the others his plantation was in danger, the home he had built to stand taller than the others, his rich acres of pine. But all he could think of was his daughter, Helen as an infant screaming, Helen as a child in her first blue gown, as a domestic tyrant, with chicken pox, with Moll, on Christmas, the almond cake she made for his birthday, the painted portrait he’s never seen, her kisses until she became too old to kiss. There was a woman taken prisoner, Easton said, and Asa knew it was his.

His memories of the Spanish privateers, his offhandedness, must have brought this cruel repetition. Except unlike him as a boy under siege, she was alone. She had no parents to tell her to stay back, to worry not. He abandoned her, and someone else saved her.

There are black streaks of pitch on the grass, and sand has been tracked up the front stairs. Inside, his daughter is unchanged. She is so thin, her face is browned from sun, her feet are bare, and she is just the same. He holds her and he kisses her forehead, and she lets him. They sit in the parlor and he won’t let go of her arm.

“They were gentlemen, really,” she says. “I had no trouble.”

“It was God watched over you.”

“I suppose it was.”

“God was the father to you when I was gone.” He is recalling all his words spoken against his daughter’s faith. “I should sponsor the rebuilding of the church.”

“I’m glad you’re home again. Tell me what it was like.”

He stands up to get his satchel, to show her the papers he’s been working on, but as soon as he leaves her side, his fear returns. He sits down again. “I am used in a way that I am not used here,” he says. “I’m working not just for us, but for everyone, it seems. What will be a nation. Of course it means everything that you’re here to keep the business steady.”

“You’re going back, then?”

“The British won’t return,” he says. “They’re already drafting treaties in Philadelphia. You needn’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” she says, rising from the sofa and breaking the grasp her father has on her arm. She pours him a glass of Madeira wine. When someone knocks on the front door, Asa spills a little of it in his lap. “I can’t stay on this land forever,” she says.

“There’s someone at the door.”

“Have you thought what might happen when I marry?”

“That’s a long way off.”

“I’ve done what I can here. I’ve managed the pines and taught as many slaves as were willing to listen. You’re no longer here to take care of.”

“You need someone to take care of?”

“Myself, mostly.”

There is another rapping at the door.

“Please, dear,” he says.

When she returns to the parlor, John is with her, his hat in his hand. Someone has cleaned his uniform, or he has borrowed the clothes of a fellow soldier. He still smells like smoke from the rafts. Asa rises to take his hand. “I hear I must offer you my gratitude.”

“I merely assisted a fugitive,” John says, looking at Helen for some sort of confirmation.

Before the men are seated, Helen tells her father she’s in love.

Asa feels weak, his stomach tender. After her rejection of William Dennis, he had moved past frustration into a kind of security. So she wouldn’t marry, some women don’t. All the better. He had refashioned his life around her intransigence, and now he needs her. He doesn’t hear John ask his blessing, though he cannot take his eyes off the soldier’s face. “Who are you?” he asks. “You think you’ll marry in my house? Who are your people?” He should be standing for this, but he can’t trust his legs.

“There’s little I can offer that you would value, sir.” John would rather fight another war than ask a man for his daughter.

“You won’t have this land, if that’s what you’re after. You won’t get anything through her.” He looks at Helen again. “When was all this happening?” He is betrayed.

She reaches for his stooped shoulder but he shakes her off.

“This is not to be discussed. You will leave us now, sir. I am recently returned from Hillsborough, and I would like to rest in my home with my child.” He is certain he is going to vomit.

Helen goes to stand by John.

His empire is crumbling. He tries to recall his own young love, the bride he brought home to this lonely farm. Her shy face, her shy feet. She would not let him see her unclothed. When he was finally allowed into the birthing room to witness Helen—the third child, the one who survived—his wife was raw and bare. He was shocked, and then she was carried away as gently as she came to him. A woman stripped to her essence and evaporated. This was not Helen. He would not have a man see her like that. He would not have her loved, and certainly not lost.

“No,” he says, and again, louder. “Get out of this house.” He stands and takes his daughter’s arm, supporting himself as much as stopping her. John begins to back toward the door. “This is over. This home is complete. God has blessed us as we are.” John is out the door and down the stairs, and Asa still calls after him from the porch, Helen at his side. “Don’t return here, to my home. You are the son of no one, and you will not be mine.”

His voice begins to break, and Helen guides him inside. She sits him in a chair by the north window that looks out to the acres and hands him another glass of Madeira. Asa is surprised to see her face dry and composed. She kneels at his feet.

“Long Ridge is ours,” he says. “Not a poor soldier’s, not a privateer’s. He has no loyalties. You think he’d love you? He’d sell you to the Cherokees. He’d trade Long Ridge for a sloop of his own.” The more he says, the more he hears his words dropping like coins into an empty well. “Your mother would be ashamed.” Her face does not change. “I should’ve married you off at sixteen with Moll. You know she’s now with child? I don’t want to look at you anymore. No, stay. Stay.” He puts a hand on her hair. “I can sometimes see your mother in you. Somewhere in you is her gentleness.” He smiles. “Darling. In the fall you had your picture made. Don’t look surprised—I knew the painter was here. What was it, a miniature? You must have been saving it for my birthday. Give it to me now, so that we may make up. I never had a portrait of your mother.”

“I don’t have it.”

His hand moves onto her cheek, smooths over its smoothness. “I don’t mean to be angry with you.”

“I made it for someone else.”

He puts his hand back in his lap. There is a stain from the spilled Madeira. He must give his pants to Mrs. Randolph as soon as she returns. Where was she, while Helen was falling in love?

“I gave it away.”

“Tell me what it looked like.” It is only the afternoon, and he is thinking already of sleep, of what a night’s sleep could do for him. He has lost his energy for fighting now; he could do it better in the morning.

“It was just a little thing. My face, my hair. It wasn’t a very good likeness.”

“Tell me about it.”

Past him through the window, she can see the distant catface trees.

A few days later, trading ships begin returning to the Beaufort harbor. Asa promises funds to the priest for the church’s rebuilding. Children collect the British cannonballs and sell them back to the regiment, which is in the process of disbanding. There is no other place to send the soldiers. The day before Asa leaves again for Hillsborough, Helen packs his trunk and makes supper with the guidance of Mrs. Randolph. She scoops out hard rolls, fills them with oysters and sauce, and lays them on cabbage leaves. She bakes him an apple for dessert. When he is asleep and dreaming, she packs her own bag: a coat, her letter from John, a license for their marriage.

In the morning, a Barbadian ship sails out of the harbor through the channel between the shoals, past Bogue Island and Shackleford Banks, into the Atlantic. She is gone.

A
fter they bury the barrel in the churchyard, with the curate reading the liturgy and the words of rest, they do not speak to each other. John returns to the empty house, the upstairs window still open, and Asa walks back to Long Ridge. October’s warm spell is ending. Asa lights a fire in the parlor and lies down on his side on the sofa, folding his arms tight to his chest, hands clasped together, in a position almost like penitence. With his eyes closed, he pictures Tabitha. His only grandchild, the last in a line of women. Her body cramped inside a keg, wet, preserved. He had asked to shift her to a coffin, but John refused. Perhaps he wanted to think of her body as indissoluble. Both men were tired; there was little argument.