The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (4 page)

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 scream to call the navies in. John tells her little of those days, so the scenes in Tab’s head are of her own devising. She is ten years old, of an age when the wicked are the heroes. She has outgrown tales of moral children.

In the night, when she had called out in pain, John told her they’d set sail with a black crew. She would be the ship’s queen, and with her scepter would guide them to the Indies. Sugar, gold, parakeets, beaches without muck and weeds. He told her of the blue and yellow of the islands and the bone-soaking sun and the wild ladies who brewed potions for their lovers. Tab said she didn’t have a lover. John told her to hush and keep still.

Now she watches him fumble through the house, shutting windows and picking up oddments, and wishes she could cut a finer figure as the lady of a ship. She senses her face has become unlike herself, for her father won’t look at her straight.

When he is ready, he straps the sack across his back and lifts her, still wrapped in the quilt, and with his foot pulls shut the door of their house. He has left a note for Asa, another for his partner in the store. Helen would tell him to stop, he hasn’t thought about a hundred things; what about a brush for Tab’s hair? If he paused, he would not be able to move again. He has always been led by a buried instinct, and this brought him his wife and it brought him his daughter, so he trusts it now and doesn’t go back for a brush for Tab’s hair.

He carries her, stopping along the road to adjust the weight, to the harbor, where the only men are foreign and tired eyed; the saints of the town are making their preparations for church. He lays her gently on the ground, leaning up against a hitching post, and searches out his old mate Tom who docks from time to time. In asking for him among the tattered crews, he faces blank looks and evasions. He heads to a man-of-war still loading provisions, and the captain is gracious enough, but he hasn’t seen John’s friend.

“Do you need extra hands?”

The captain shakes his head.

“I sailed for two years before the war, then put in good service in the army. I could show you letters,” he says, though he has no letters.

“I’m sorry,” the captain says.

At a smaller schooner, they ask to see his commendations, so he stands tall and tells them with a bite in his eyes that he has worked ships twice as big and for half shares, and they tell him to move on.

He should go back to his daughter, who might be cold, but he can’t walk away from the docks. There are no other paths that he can see. A sailor walks past with a load of nets and a familiar beard, and John asks once more about his friend, who would give him passage on any boat.

The sailor pauses and shifts his load. “Tom been strung,” he says. “Caught for something, maybe pinching rations.” When John doesn’t reply, the sailor walks on, dragging rope behind him.

John squints at the south horizon and a flat sea.

“Tom Waldron? He minded mast for me.”

John turns to see a young gentleman with a thin patrician nose smoking a pipe, his free hand playing about his ruffled neck.

“Hezekiah Frith,” he says, and tilts his head. “Looking for passage?”

“You wouldn’t take me. I’ve a daughter, ill.”

“And where are you bound?”

“Merely away. The Indies.”

Frith taps his pipe, then tugs his coat sleeves even. “I’m a man short. What ships have you ridden?”

“The
Mohawk
, the
Victory
, the
Tryon
. But a woman—” John says.

“I have no superstitions there. I like them for a cover.”

“And the fever.”

“We’ve a physician aboard. Keep her separate and well aired.” Frith glances toward the town road and sees the sagging patchwork bundle. “Little girls,” he says. “We’re making for Bermuda, catching what we will along the way. You’ll take Tom’s post for no pay. And no pinching. We run small business, and little harm. We’ll drop you on the island, and if you sail again, I’ll offer shares. Is that a bargain you’ll shake to?”

John sees his dead life breathing. He remembers taking another woman on a ship, carrying Helen—not ill, but a bride—on deck, her smile reflected in the sun, the sea not wide enough to mirror their affection. He is here again, grasping, because he is selfish of his child. He cannot lose another piece of his family. But Tab seems to yearn for this too. In his fatherhood, he is protecting her from death and God and misery, and so does what every man would do. He shakes Frith’s hand and takes his daughter on board the
Fanny and Betsy
, a cedar-hulled three-mast sloop. From the deck they can hear Beaufort’s church bells ringing.

Inside the small church, Asa sits in the last pew. When the service is finished, he will catch Dr. Halling and take him to the white house along the shore to speak words above his granddaughter. John has lost his faith, but Tab is still a green plant growing, absorbent to the Lord. He could not save his daughter, but he will save this little relic of her. There is still time to redeem himself. He bows his head as the visiting priest sermonizes. He should move to a city, where he could hear the gospel weekly. God is always listening, but Asa cannot hear his voice enough.

They stand for a hymn. Soon Tab will be back here beside him, her little hymnal in her hand, her voice ringing out her young faith. They sing verses about heaven and its pleasures, about the narrow sea that separates the living and the dead. Asa’s hands begin to tremble. He breathes deeply and hears his chest catch on his exhaling. The voices rise higher.

Another tolling of the bells frees the congregation into a warm October noon. From the steps of the church, they can see down into the harbor, where a single ship is bound for open ocean.

T
he rocking eases Tabitha to sleep, her aching body cocooned in a rope and canvas hammock in a small cabin next to the captain’s below the aft deck. She can hear the murmur of her father’s voice next door, the sigh of boards above her, the bullying of gulls through the small window cut high in the cabin wall. She presses her ear into the canvas of her bed. Through the fabric, she can hear bells.

Frith sets John to the dog watch, just two hours. In the meantime, the sailor will clean deck with his brethren. John asks the route, and the captain unrolls a map on the table. John stands to the side and looks not at the map but at Frith’s face. Frith pulls at the skin below his eyes, digs his thumbs into the flesh behind his ears. He sways. John cannot tell if the captain is still aware of his presence. His eyes do not seem to be moving across the paper but are rather fixed in the depths of the painted ocean.

“We sail straight for the island?” John asks. His voice is too loud.

Frith drops one hand flat on the map, covering the routes, and looks through John. “How old is the girl?”

“Just ten,” John says. “Not old enough to tempt your men. You’ll tell them.” He has been on ships where anything in skirts was a lure. Weeks go by at sea, and morals fade. But surely no man would risk the fever.

Frith nods. “I’ve one who’s five. Fanny.”

“The ship’s after her, then?”

“The name is not my devising.” Frith worries the edge of the map between his fingers. “Rum’s the game. We head south first. The hold is too empty yet for going home.”

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.