The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (24 page)

But Moll is not a man. She has never known a woman who tried to run, and this gives her a sense of protection; she cannot fail. She has seen enough of the failures to guard against their mistakes: she doesn’t share her secret, she doesn’t ask for help, she doesn’t try to take her children. The women would have asked her how she could desert three daughters to chase one son, knowing that not even Moses would love them once she left. What could Moll have said? That she would chase her firstborn until everyone she ever loved was dead and buried?

The new moon is just a week out. She will carry her sack, the extra food, a cloth for sleeping, her shoes. All her saved-up money she sewed into Davy’s coat before he left. She’s only made a few coins since from selling eggs, but she doesn’t count this as a great obstacle. The road she’ll take is a sacred one, the path smoothed for mothers. She has no fear.

After the bell is rung at the end of the day to scatter the slaves, she cooks a poor stew for her family out of the scraps that will not keep. As the girls eat and Moses rubs the calluses on his hands, Moll excuses herself to borrow parsley from a neighbor. She slips down the row of cabins until she comes to Abel’s. His mother is already asleep, so they whisper. She pulls an egg from her pocket. She is bartering away her own children’s nourishment.

“They knew the path,” he says. “Five days out, and they came on horses. We never came out of the forest, and still there were people said they’d seen us, pointed to the hollows where the dogs could get our scent. Every other slave must’ve come the same way.”

“The man you were with?”

Abel chews his last bite of bread, taking his time. “Tried to run. Shot him.” He picks up the egg and rolls it from one hand to the other. “When they see you, it’s over. You got to stand still and let them take you. They can see about as much as the Lord can.”

Moll shakes her head. “Whatever happens is what he plans.”

“You believe that?”

She looks at him holding the egg, his clean hands, the twists of flesh where his ears once were.

“This is what he wants?”

She won’t know until she finds Davy again. That’s the only measure by which she can judge. “You went north through the back of the rice fields and then turned west after the marshes. What other way is there?”

“If I did it again?”

“I just never get to see the country, so I wonder what it’s like.”

“Straight west, then. I’d get a boat somehow and row straight down the sound, between the shore and the islands. Land a few miles west, or as far as I could get, and then walk down to Wilmington before turning west again. It’s mostly swamp, so no one goes that way. All that water, the dogs couldn’t smell me.”

“Would you really do it again?”

“It’d be harder without the boat; you’d have to go far enough north to loop over the inlets before you could head down the Wilmington road, and there’d still be rivers to cross. Depending on when they noticed, they could get you while you were still in the pines.” Abel’s mother stirs on the mattress and says something jumbled in her sleep. He doesn’t turn to look at her. “Better to have a boat. You had a boat, I almost think you could get away.” He looks at her to see how her face changes.

“Good luck to you,” she says. “I promise I won’t say anything.”

“I didn’t say I was going anywhere.”

She thinks maybe he can hear her blood beat; the veins in her eyelids are thumping. “I can’t imagine how anyone would have the courage,” she says, and rubs the chills on her arms, trying to look small and weak. “I didn’t mean to drag such a story out of you. Just wanted to offer what I could.” She stops in the door and looks back at him, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I wouldn’t say anything,” she says.

He brings his hand up to cover his mouth.

She nods and leaves. How stupid to have asked him. Her journey now rests precariously on a bond of trust, and she has been conditioned against trust, against dependence on others, having been betrayed by everyone she once believed.

In her cabin, the baby is already asleep, her chin stained with soup. Moll curls around her, picking up her infant hand in hers, playing with her tiny fingers. Moses asks did she not find any parsley, but she pretends not to hear. She has never rowed a boat, but surely she could; she has seen it done and is a fast learner. One oar, then the other, making halves of a circle. This is a fishing town. Somewhere is a boat untied, ready to be taken. God gives what is needed. What is it like to be on a boat in the moving water? How much strength does it take to move forward?

He has run out of meat. The back garden is crowded with loose hens and pullets, but Asa cannot bring himself to slaughter any of them. He has chased a few, but they’re clever and he respects their ability to evade him. Once he coaxed a hen on his lap, smoothing down her wings and rubbing the bone between her eyes until she closed them, but it felt like circling his daughter’s back when she was sick and couldn’t sleep, so he had to let her go. How easily Mrs. Randolph could snap a chicken’s neck.

He picks some of the greens and stirs them in a pan with bits of salted ham over the fire. He takes his plate of dinner into the garden. This is what the slaves must eat. The veins of the collards stick between his teeth, and the ham tastes of dust. He could hire a girl from town to cook him something decent once a day, but that would leave him dependent again; he is too old for that. It’s time he took responsibility for himself and his dwindling empire. Pull the barricades in. Prepare his soul for the final siege.

His bread, burnt and poorly leavened, soaks up the grease. Asa wipes the bread around the porcelain and considers the plate clean. He returns to the house, puts it back on a shelf for another meal. He should walk up to the acres, or what’s left, to check on the new hand, make sure his tools are sharp, but he wanders down to the shore instead. The boat sits where he left it, perched on the last patch of dry land, just above the line of reeds. He takes the oars out—still rough; he forgot to sand them—and prods the boat until it slips down the bank. He steps on a clump of the marsh grass and then into the boat, clutching the oars to his chest. The boat, half on reeds and half in water, rocks beneath him. He is already queasy. With a few more pokes at the bank, Asa manages to shove off. When the rowboat settles into the curve of the sound, Asa holds his breath and waits. A small leak in the bow, out of which a bubble of seawater froths, but otherwise the boat is steady and whole. It floats.

Asa takes a few hesitant strokes. The oars are heavier than he thought, or rather the water is heavier. His muscles strain to provoke any movement in the boat. Tomorrow he’ll plug the leak with tar. He crawls up to the middle thwart and puts his shoe over the hole. He can only hold one oar at a time, so he goes in circles, getting used to the feel of his body and the wood in the water, facing first the shore and then the sea and then the shore. He has already drifted several yards past his entry point, so he abandons his lesson and pushes the oar down into the muck to get back to the bank of reeds. He feels like a one-legged crab.

Only when the boat is back on land—half on land, half buried in the wet weeds—and tied to a willow trunk does Asa note the missing oarlocks. He smiles. There is incompetence, and then there is memory loss. Of course a man couldn’t wield two oars on his own strength, not even John. Asa pauses at this image. It threatens to carry his thoughts beyond his own limited scope, beyond the small and daily tasks he has set for himself, so he stops. Oarlocks. He will go into town tomorrow and buy some off of the fishermen.

At night, with the one candle he affords himself, amidst the long and wavering shadows that single flame casts, Asa thinks of the boat. The boat—its boards, its little leak, its missing oarlocks—blocks out the faces and the words. The vanishing land, the collards in his teeth, the blame he places on God. The conversations no one would have with him. His open hands, their emptiness. The bodies of the women, the women who begat women who died. His eyes water of their own accord, they wet his pillow in patches, even though he isn’t thinking of everything he’s lost, though he’s only thinking of the boat he’s found. Come back to that. Just the boat—its boards, its little leak.

Two days later, Asa makes it all the way from Long Ridge to the wharf. A mile of rowing; Asa’s arms tremble, and the boat groans. He buys a bag of paint powder from the store that used to be John’s, and some oil for mixing. He will thin it with his own turpentine and restore the boat’s old boards. The abandonment beneath the shrubs will be wiped clean. It will be a vessel any man would be proud to own. Should he repaint his wife’s name?

On his way back, he wavers between the shore and the sandbars, though the water is calm and responds easily to his oars. But he is a hesitant rower, and his right side is stronger. The boat drifts patiently. On Long Ridge’s weedy banks, a woman is standing, her skirts twining between her legs in the breeze. He is lucky he never used to row, for this would surely call forth every memory of paddling home in the evening to find his daughter waiting on the shore. The oars drop in their locks as he tries to recall those scenes, only to find they don’t exist. There are ghosts of the dead and ghosts we create from nothing, just to have the company.

It’s not Helen but Moll. He wishes she wouldn’t watch him struggle toward the bank. She holds out her hand for the rope, and he throws it to her. She pulls him in and wraps the lead around the willow and stands back as he clambers out, one foot sinking into the muck, heaving himself toward the dry ground, falling on one hand. She waits for him to recover. Asa feels red and bullish. His kerchief has come loose and the sun finds the back of his neck, drawing out the sweat. After weeks of loneliness, to be watched like this—he would do anything to be alone again. He pulls at his coat sleeves and wipes his forehead once. He stands at attention and extends one arm toward the house, inclining his head slightly, his feet together. She nods in return and precedes him across the dry lawn to Long Ridge. He looks behind him at the rowboat, askew in the reeds.

She takes one sip of the tea he offers her and returns the cup to the side table. It is the first tea Asa’s made, and he is embarrassed. The parlor has a musty smell, and letters and receipts have collected on the sofa. Moll looks at her knees instead.

“I’m surprised you’re not needed in the fields,” he says.

“It’s Sunday.”

“Is it?” He wonders why the store was open. After all that, he left the oil and paint in the boat. He looks out the window. Is it going to rain? “I missed church,” he says. It’s harder for him to remember, now that Tab’s gone. He has also been avoiding her grave. She never liked it, sitting on the pew and being faithful. Not like her mother, who had taught them all, father and slave alike. Where had religion been in his own childhood? His mother and father are just hints of people. They worked, he knew that; they labored and built and sweated and slept. First the land, then the small house on posts, then the pine acres. They left him with the seeds to everything he desired. His father had died in a logging accident, and then his mother a few years later of exhaustion, or grief. They were just shadows. His wife had been a glimmer and Helen, finally, had been the light.

He closes his eyes to find her face.

“Why didn’t he take me?” Moll asks.

Asa snaps awake. She is looking at him directly. He should have tasted the tea before offering it to her. She’ll think he’s trying to poison her.

“Your son by marriage owns me and mine, isn’t that what you said?”

“John.”

“He could’ve taken both of us.”

“A hard journey for a woman,” Asa says. “Think of the mountains in winter.”

“Who is my master, without him?”

Asa hesitates. He has recently sold the last of his men, using only hired hands for the diminishing acres. Once he sells the rest of the pines, he will have divested himself of human connection. He is severing ties, not seeking them.

“It’s you, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it makes sense to sell you to Cogdell now that Helen—now that John is gone. Better that you share a master with your husband.”

“Will you free me?”

He notices how straight she sits, how clean her hands are, folded neatly in her lap. Her hair pulled away from her face and bound in a red cloth. Her hazel eyes, their streaks of brightness suggesting a slave owner in her ancestry. He was never such a man, though he gave her to a man she didn’t love, then stripped her of a son. We make choices in order to make it to the next day. What does he owe her?

She stands up. “Will you free me?”

Why won’t he? Even now, he tracks his profits, keeps a tight hand on the money from the land sales, the sales of men, the last few barrels of turpentine. He is conserving, not giving things away. He cannot say who the money is for. John? Even the little slave boy, in due time, if he turns out right. But it is a process; wealth must be earned, not taken. He worked for years, piling, piling, to prove this.

“I have great affection for you, Moll,” he says.

She nods, urging him on.

“Freedom—I believe freedom would put you in a difficult position, hard for a woman to sustain. If it’s what you sincerely want, however, I think Helen would have encouraged me to provide a way.” He is loath to involve himself in anything beyond his own walls. He is hoping she sees his discomfort.

“I agree. I believe my freedom would honor her memory.” There is no tool she will not use. She supports herself with a hand clenched on the back of the sofa.

“Yes. Well. You may be right. Here: I can speak to some of the families in town about purchasing your eggs and produce. I will even give you some of my own chickens to start. You will want to be careful about saving your money—don’t let Moses get a hand on it—and with other jobs added, I think in a few years you might collect a nice sum.”

There is a quiet to the room that seems impenetrable, for all his talking.

“You want me to buy myself.”

She is still standing, so Asa gets to his feet defensively. “That seems only fair.”