The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (6 page)

“You kissed me with the fruit still in your mouth,” she said. He had not remembered.

These were her treasures, the bits of life she collected to remind herself of life, the tokens of experience. Her story of land and sea. He had wondered what she needed them for, what eventuality she was predicting.

She lined them up on the wooden floor, in order of size. He held his arms open, and she crawled into him, the two—or three—of them in a tight knot. He kissed her ears and said there was no need for memory, that’s how much he loved her. She tucked her head into his neck.

A sailor stopped by with fresh baked fish from shore, and they squeezed into one hammock and ate the fish with their fingers, and he put his head on her stomach and listened, and she watched the row of treasures march from the brass bell down to the tiny broken pearl, and the light slipped down the window and faded into the ocean, and the boisterous noise of men on land accompanied their sleep.

He is careful now not to forget things.

He tamps another line of oakum into a seam. This world is blue and brown and white. The sky and water with their indeterminate shades of paleness and depth reflect only each other. This is the purity that existed for him and Helen, and here it is again, just waiting to be taken up.

At dusk, he finds Tabitha spidered onto the web of ratlines and pries her off, a laughing bundle. They gather with the others at the mess table and John helps the cook serve another stew and heels of bread. When the meal is doled out, he sits Tab down and with his body shields her from most of the men’s wildness. Other than the ship surgeon, they’ve developed no particular fondness for the girl and find her little different from an indentured boy too young for whiskers, and of even less use. Their language is not tempered in her presence.

Blue Francis bangs his mug on the table twice. “If it’s ghosts you’re after,” he says in a hoarse voice, and the others roll their eyes and blow through their lips, adjusting themselves for a long tale, bound to be false. “Listen, listen,” he says. The curve of his back rises higher than his shoulders, and he leans into the table with his arms spread out on the grease-spotted wood.

John interrupts him. “Nothing bloody, Frank. You forget the young ones.” He keeps one hand on his daughter’s back while he sops up the rest of his stew.

The doctor winks at Tab and turns back to his audience. “It were on the
Bonny Jane
some score years ago, in the—”

“When you were just an old man,” someone calls out.

“That’s right, just me and your wench,” he says.

John tries to nudge Tab out of her seat, but she begs to stay.

“It were a slaving ship and we were nearing Charleston for the trade with more than half the bodies still well and good.”

“The others?” Tab whispers, and John tosses his head to one side to signal “overboard.”

“They made their moanings, of course, so the whole ship sounded like a bull with its neck cut, but we’d been used to such for weeks and paid it no mind. The last night before port, Captain sent Little Tom up the topgallant to watch for lights and Little Tom quivering in his boots, just as shivered as a boy can get. Had never seen a black before and thought they were singing for his soul.” Blue Francis peers over at Tab, whose head cranes out from behind John. “Just about your age, miss. Now Tom was used to ghosts, for wasn’t a ship didn’t have a dead sailor wandering around it, his neck cracked from falling from sail to spar, or his hair all floating up from the water drowned him. So when I heard him start the screeching and saw him clambering down the yards like a man chased, I thought he’d seen something solid. He ran straight for the captain’s cabin, saying it’s raining blacks, his hands swatting all about his head. I looked up and don’t see nothing, so I followed him, shouting that there weren’t any such things, but he’s shrieking and batting his hands around and now the rest of the men woke up and come out to see. Little Tom busts through the captain’s door, and the devil damn me if the captain didn’t rise up from his bed with his pistol in hand and shoot him clean through.” He pauses for effect. Some of the sailors pick at their teeth. “I held his head in my hands as his life slipped out of him and he said, ‘Blue Francis, they was blacks raining down on me, they was falling from heaven right on me, clawing and moaning and calling my name,’ and before I could tell him they was just ghosts, he dropped his head down and died right there.”

“So the negroes go to heaven and the rest of us damned to hell?” a seaman calls out, and there is a clanking of tin mugs and bowls. As Tab twines her arms around her father’s chest to stop her own heart from beating fast, one man begins a beat on the table while two more stand and stomp about. The company sings words Tab’s never heard, and John carries her back to their berth, across the new-caulked deck, under the white stars.

Held in her hammock again, Tab asks her father why some bodies would go to heaven and others to hell. She knows of these places from Asa, but why would sailors be damned instead of slaves, and why were haints always wicked?

“It was just a story,” he says.

“Ghosts aren’t true, are they?”

John smooths her hair back, which is growing knotted without its brush. “When folk die, it’s just their bodies. There’s something inside that stays alive always.”

“Our souls,” Tab says.

“Souls, spirits, ghosts. Memories. I always remember your mother.”

“And she’s in heaven, don’t you think?”

“Some call it that,” John says. “She’s wherever there’s goodness, I imagine.”

Tab closes her eyes and speaks in a whisper. “I don’t see her.” When John takes his hand away, she tries to make the miniature come to life, her mother’s small head with green points for eyes, a ribbon round her neck. She moves the head around her mind, placing it in different rooms, on the shore, on deck. It never moves, or smiles.

“You’re what’s left of her,” John says, and she opens her eyes. “If you wonder where she is. I sometimes think she’s all in you.”

“Do pirates always sing such bad songs?”

He laughs. “No.”

Tab catches his hand between hers and smiles up at her father. He leans down and kisses her forehead, which is cool and dry, and he hums quietly as she lets her muscles ease into sleep.

In the morning, Tab wakes in a writhing green room. The cabin is trembling. No, her eyes are trembling. She sits and fills her lap with bile, then crawls out of the hammock and lands in a heap on the floor. Her nose is wet and she wipes it against the boards, leaving a trail of red. Something is running fast in her chest. Her heart runs so fast it leaves a cool breeze fluttering through her limbs. There is no heaviness left in her body, only a froth of pain. Through the window, she sees a rain of black bodies, mouths open, her mother pale among them.

She starts to shake and is turned inside out. What existed within her, secret, unseen, is flung on the floor, her vomit, her blood, her limbs spasming away from the core of her. She is an oak leaf spinning in the moat, moss blown by her own breath. Her very particles are leaving her. The room falls into shadow. Her delirium can no longer coalesce to find her mother’s ghost in this mirage. The gull calls splinter around her head. The world is breaking.

John returns to the cabin with two red potatoes in his hand and finds his daughter in convulsions on the floor. He falls onto Tab’s body, pressing his weight into her to stop her shuddering. A passing sailor looks in, runs for the doctor. The potatoes roll to the corner of the room, then roll back as the sloop crests a swell. Her body is beginning to quiet when Blue Francis hurries in. John looks up, his arms still around his daughter, and shakes his head. The doctor gently lifts John away, rolls the girl onto her side to clear her mouth and free her tongue, and kneads her arms and legs until she is quiet. He tells John to fetch water, and the father stumbles onto the open deck. The tears dry and shrink on his face. There is no emotion the wind cannot erase.

He wraps his arms through the knotted shrouds holding up the mast and hangs there, rubbing his forehead against the rope. This day was always coming. Since losing Helen ten years ago, his life has been a series of breaths held. He only lives to wait for loss. Without believing in the God of salvation and forgiveness, he has faith in God the Punisher.

When he returns, the doctor is cutting thin lines in his daughter’s arm, drawing blood in beads to the surface. He looks at John as his fingers wrap around Tab’s elbow. Her face is yellow now, her jaundiced skin standing out from the white of her shift. Her eyelids flutter but do not open. Her mouth parts and closes like a fish. John presses his ear to her chest and hears the sound of a woman walking through an overgrown garden, her silk dress brushing against, caught, torn by rose bushes. Tab’s heart is walking in that garden.

The doctor digs his fingers into his beard and loosens the tangles. “I wish we had some balsam, to spread a little on the skin, but it would be more for easing than the cure. We have a man was in Philadelphia some weeks ago, and many was laid up with it, no one knowing how to do. Nothing left but to give the bark and cool her down a bit. Any humors in her will leave through the bleeding once they catch a smell of salt air.”

John points to the drops of blood along Tab’s arms. “That’s not enough, is it?”

“She’s just a little one, a’n’t she, sir? Look at the body of her.”

“Bleed her more,” John says.

“She’s as thin as poles and the heart’s not beating strong.”

John grabs the lancet from the doctor’s hand and cuts into his daughter’s yellowing forearm; a small stream of blood flows onto the linen of her dress.

At the stab, the girl wakes, her face twisted. Unable to cry, she leans to the side and heaves up the contents of her stomach, which are black and wet. Her eyes do not open.

“The black bile, sir,” the doctor says, as if it were a sign John could read. He watches the surgeon clean up Tab’s messes, the black vomit off the floorboards, the blood off her yellow arms.

When she is smooth and clean again, the doctor brings in a blanket wrung in cold water to lay over her body. “I gave the word to Captain, sir,” he says. “He let you off watch.” He lingers in the door. “I can’t do for her more than any other man, but no less either. I never did have a lady patient. She’s a lamb in God’s hands now, just a child who might be going home.”

Through the afternoon, John and Tabitha wake and sleep, one crying out from dreams, the other wrenching in pain. John finds one of the potatoes and eats it raw. When she groans, he pulls himself up and rests his hands on her cheeks, absorbing the heat. When she shivers, he pushes the wet blanket off and lets it fall with a slap to the floor.

The room darkens and John lights two candles. He eats the salted pork a sailor brings him, but Tab consumes nothing. Even the water he pours into her mouth dribbles out. In ten more years, she would look just like her mother. The candlelight catches the blood that is beginning to seep from her eyes and nose. Her lips are already tinged with red.

Her form—bleeding, limp, and pale—resembles the crucifix hanging in Asa’s parlor. He used to sit and stare at Christ’s body sagging on the wall while he waited for Helen’s company. Helen herself had died with none of the weakness of self-sacrifice. Her cheeks had been flushed, her arms plump, her eyes bright with exertion. She had borne Tabitha in a tumult of sound and motion; only when the baby was followed by the pooling of blood did she turn white, but she slipped away still vibrant, surrounded by the pulsings of life. In the vigor of her death, John could deny God’s power. It seemed her own doing.

But this is different. Tab’s life is leaking away, is being siphoned. What force is sucking at her but the universe? What power but a black and holy one?

When the dusk has become night and only one side of things is lit by the candle glow, Tab murmurs, “The ship.”

He stirs from a half rest and twines his fingers in hers. She glances down at her open palm. “We
are
on a ship,” he says. “The
Fanny and Betsy
, bound for Bermuda. You’re in the cabin now.”

“Small,” she says, and gestures with her empty hand. “Birthday.”

“You had a birthday a few days ago. Turned ten years old. You were ill, so I brought you on the ship for a little sea air.”

“Birthday,” she repeats. A tear mingles with the blood from her eye and leaves a pink streak across her temple.

“I’m sorry you weren’t well for it. I had a present for you.”

She squeezes his fingers.

“I left it in Beaufort—it was too fine for pirates. It will be there when we return. But I’ll tell you what it was. Five yards of finest silk, to make a grand dress for you, a lady now.” Tab closes her eyes. “Blue it is, with vines going up and around in pink and green. I’ll ask Mrs. Randolph to make it into something for parties and such, and you’ll be the little queen. The image of your mother.”

Tab is weeping now.

“You’ll be well in a few days, and I’ll order Frith to turn us around and take us to port whenever you please.”

“The little ship,” she says, and closes her hand.

In this last hour of consciousness, Tab floats on the ocean, no ship beneath her, surrounded by her mother and father and grandfather and any brothers and sisters who were caught unborn in her mother’s womb. She might have had four siblings by now, all of whom would follow her to the shore and curl up next to her at night to keep her warm in the winters. She is part of a family halted. She blames the sea for being romantic and God for killing. The room fills up with ghosts.

Her grandfather is singing death to her. She asks her hands to cover her ears, but they do nothing. She will not yield. Her limbs are steeled against God’s assault.

Her hairs enter each pore with pinpricks; her whole body is alive to the sharpness of pain. The candlelight in the room blends with the darkness, and her vision slowly vanishes in a blackening muddle. The voices rise around her. Her hammock is wet with sweat and blood, is wet with the sea. She is leaving the world in a red storm, through the body of one already dead. She can now remember what it was like to be born.