The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (5 page)

On deck he meets Blue Francis, the ship’s surgeon, who asks after his daughter. John thanks him for looking in on her. The doctor smiles and shakes his shaggy head. “If women be the sailors’ bane, then I think the young of them be treasures. Little ones are the lights that ease our blackness, a’n’t they?”

From the mast, John sees nothing. The waves near the ship are yellow-tipped from the candles burning, the ones farther out are silver. He knows there are bodies beneath him. Below the lip of ocean swim schools of mackerel and drum, below them the whales, dipping to find their feed, and below them all the unnameables, the serpents, the kraken, the giant conger. What he has learned of the Bible are the bits Asa recited to him and the pieces that the sailors tell, the story of Job’s Leviathan, who
maketh the sea like a pot of ointment
, who
maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary
. John sees the monster’s frost spread across the water, the unknown of it, the lurking danger universal.

When he was young, John thought the night gave cover to those who would steal him from his bed, who would select him as a prize from the sprawl of cousins he slept among. At night, the shadows pooled and left no inch uncovered. Only when he took to sea did he find the light again, collected as it was in concentrated smears on the sky and water, capping and puncturing the dark. He had taught Tabitha to see this. He had taken her to the marshes in the evenings so she could amend her sight, could watch the sun fade and reconstitute. Now she seems afraid of nothing.

After a burst of laughter from the sailors’ bunks, a loud report issues from the stern. The quartermaster is knocking about. These men seem far beyond John’s scope. Though once as rowdy and unconcerned as the petty officers, he now finds himself circling around a single set of images—child, God, woman, home—his duty never easing.

The sea air that opens lungs is the same that chafes the skin to scales. There is no version of this play in which he has done right. He has chosen rashly, and the fading stars remind him of the home to which they all will go, whether he professes faith or not. There Helen, if she waits anywhere, is waiting for her daughter.

A loud stirring of sailors and buckets and hauled rope wakes Tab. The sun already washes in through the window over the shelves and barrels and John’s empty corner berth. She feels weak, but also hungry. Her muscles that had clenched into resistance have eased again, and she is moved, emotionally, by the desire to stand. In attempting to untangle herself from the tight hold of the hammock, she tumbles to the floor, catching herself with pudding arms. There is no vomit here from the night before. She sits on the planks until her vision clears, then stands like a calf. The ship’s rocking is unfamiliar to her feet, and she grasps the rope of her bed to steady herself. There is no mirror in the cabin, but, trading hands on the rope to keep her balance, she takes down her hair and smooths it back into its wrinkled ribbon. Her legs sway. The breaking of the fever has made her giddy. She loses hope for her appearance, but there are none here but unkempt seamen; if she wishes to join their company, a little dirt will not prevent her. She pushes the cabin door open and slides down a short passageway past the captain’s room and up three steps into a glory of sunlight and ocean. She is a captive, the slave of notorious buccaneers, the masthead for a ship of villains. Her lungs take in the salt and spray of liberty.

The decks are alive with men and movement, sails snapping and lines pulled and tied, figures climbing masts, the sea bouncing the ship on an endless, landless plane beneath a rounded sky. This is what a proper town should look like, an upturned anthill of activity. She steps into the motion and weaves slowly among the men at their business. Seagulls churn in their wake. Every wave seems to break over a fish’s back. Tab is light-headed but certain that she can now do anything with her body. What had kept her father so long from these ragged perfect men? From their house in Beaufort, all they could see was sand and marsh and a still and silent sea. Here, on the
Fanny and Betsy
, even the ocean is a riot.

She balances against the mizzen-mast. Over the crack of the wind-taut sails, the men are singing. She laces her fingers into the rigging. A whistle draws her attention skyward, and she spies a sailor perched on a spar between the main sails and the topsails, his legs dangling like a child’s. He waves down at Tab, and she rises on her toes in her enthusiasm to respond.

A seaman wrapping lines by the starboard shrouds calls out, “Johnny, your miss is loose and about!”

Her father comes loping from the bow, swings her by the waist, and sets her three feet from the mast, where, without the wood to clutch, she falters. He grabs her arm to steady her.

“What business have you on your feet, Tab?” John feels her forehead.

“I feel a hundred times improved,” she says, and clings to his coat. “Have you seen the ship? Have you been everywhere?”

“I’ll carry you back to the cabin and have the doctor look in. You need rest still.” John wraps his arm around her back. “It’ll be here when you’re all well. I’m the one must answer for your health.”

Back in the dark cabin, bunched in her hammock, Tab lets Blue Francis poke at her ribs and glance behind her ears. “Seems the welts have whiled themselves away.”

“Never
had
welts,” Tab says.

“Little ladies don’t care for the welts. They leave spots on the face, don’t they, and then it’s a hard road catching the gentlemen, don’t I know. Though I married a lady with the spots and a prettier one would be hard to picture, excepting yourself. Shame to leave her behind, haven’t seen her in a dog’s year, but I imagine she’s fixed things up fine by now and keeps a pot on the fire against my return. In a year or so, whenever we make Barbados again.”

Tab struggles to sit up. “Is she a negro, doctor?”

“Can’t find any signs on you left, and your little heartbeat is running along smartly. I didn’t even have to use the mustard paste, which we don’t have aboard anyhow, but could probably purchase in Charleston for such a one as you. Frith’ll give me a few pence here and then for oddments. Better captain I’ve never known, the way he lets us do. I was once a surgeon on a navy ship, full frigate, and men of the queen’s own wouldn’t give you a bottle of the bark, they wouldn’t. They say men under the black flag is nothing but scoundrels, but here I can treat a little miss as right as you please. And now you’re fit and fine. Fetch me if aught else should happen, if your toe finds a splinter, or you start seeing merfolk from the decks.”

“This is the happiest ship on the ocean, isn’t it?” she says.

The doctor squints at her from the lit doorway. “If you call it happy where men die.”

She is silent as he leaves.

She has not thought of battles, of raids, of disease, of thirst and starvation. Of cannonballs landing with cracks on the boards of the main deck, lodging with deep thuds in the hull. The sharks waiting to sup on sailors when the ship goes down. She had yellow fever and now is better. Her mother went aboard a ship like this and was a queen. Only the land can kill people. Only the solidness and the long stillness and the heavy quiet can bring them to their knees and press them down until they die for lack of breath. The doctor shouldn’t worry about her, but about his land-bound lady, who is likely dying in childbed even as the sun shines on this salt water.

From her bed, she can see only the sky through the small window. A single tern cuts past, crying. She will leave her room again and ask her father about her birthday gift, just after a brief study of sleep. The walk from cabin to mast to cabin has left her legs pleasantly lame. She makes space in her open hands for the toy ship from New Bern, the wooden infant of this grand vessel.

She wakes in the afternoon feeling stronger yet. On deck she searches out the cook and finds him sleeping behind an iron cauldron where a stew is simmering. The smell is rich and just short of rancid. She takes her bowl and biscuit into the sun again and finds a space between two barrels to fold herself, safely distant from the lines. Two dozen men seem to be playing a game with coils of rope, vast sheets of linen, and the open ocean. The sloop is making progress, but Tab cannot tell in what direction they’re moving, or whether circles are being transcribed in place of a forward route. Whenever she looks at the sun, it’s a step to one side of noon.

Even with the wind, the air is warmer here than on the Beaufort shore. She tucks a bent nail into her dress pocket. Once in Bermuda, she’ll find not only shells and crab husks but also the beached carcasses of sea monsters with tusks of ivory. She will help her father build a house there, and everything she does will be an echo of her mother, so John will be content again. This is the life he was meant for, the life Tab had kept him from. Women, with their death, with their birthings, are not fit sailors. But Tab fixes a bargain, neither to die nor to beget life, and she asks the God of her grandfather to witness. Asa had always told her that if she was good, God would be her final home, and though he described it dully, he said her mother was waiting there. Tab is not sure whether she is good, but she knows that in her old home her father was restless, unhappy, wearied. Nothing grew on that shore but Mrs. Foushee and the church, and the ghost of a mother who would always every day be newly dead.

In her corner between the barrels, Tab tells God she will be good, that she will seek adventure and so redeem her mother’s absence, and in that moment with the sun on her face like a warm hand, she chooses to believe in his promise of everlasting life. To seal the compact, Tab sings one of Asa’s hymns. She sees John by the foremast siphoning powder into small kegs, and though she cannot see him smiling, she knows that he is joyous here, and free.

John labors with new gaiety. His daughter has sprung to life, a fever victim become a child again. He knows that yellow fever always has this pause, this reprieve that leads loved ones to hope, and that afterward the patients are either well or dead. But seeing her body in motion, her legs fumbling across the swaying deck, he swallows hope and lets it burn inside him. He pulled his daughter from the godly quicksand of Beaufort and now, in the clear and open air, he has saved her. He has done for the child what he could not do for the mother. A peace settles on him as he packs the powder kegs and carries them below to the gun deck. This ship is a haven, and even amongst two dozen of the roughest men he has no fear for his daughter. She is less a woman than a thin angel, the specter of her departed mother.

As an unpaid seaman on board a black-flagged sloop with no purpose but idle raids, John has few duties. He scrubs the weather deck, coils lines, sometimes climbs the shrouds to tie the mainsail, though never the topsails, which are another man’s province. He tidies the berths below the forecastle deck, where the rest of the sailors sleep, and lends aid to the cook, who has no mate. They apportion the dried meat and barley, the malt and the limes; they ration the rum. John has hardly spoken to Frith since they embarked, though only a thin wall of boards separates their cabins on the quarterdeck.

He takes on some tasks only to keep his hands busy, so that he’s not caught dancing with his daughter from foremast to mizzen-mast. After the powder kegs are safe below, he tends to the loose seams between the planks on deck, finding cotton and oakum in the stores and caulking the gaps with fibers and tar. This is a job done sitting down, and requires nothing but pressing hands and a little brush. He should be doing this when the ship is docked and dry and the wood has shrunk, but his fingers need a duty. Here, crouched near the bowsprit, he can look back on the expanse of the
Fanny and Betsy
and observe the small colony of men and the ten-year-old girl, who is sneaking between laboring groups and bending down to catch at what John assumes must be treasure. The sight of her, and her curious hands, brings back John’s wife. She was the first to know which objects mattered.

Years ago, he and Helen and the smallest version of Tab were on just such a ship. His wife’s belly was growing into a little drum. He asked what sort of mother she would be, and she asked what sort of father, and they laughed, having no guides. The ship was heading north again for home, laden with stolen goods, but that day, in the blue and gold of summer, they were docked at Antigua. The sailors were in town, some spending coins on women, others spending them on trinkets for the women they left behind: carved coconuts, painted bowls, bones. They would sail the next morning, the captain believing that one could outrun the diseases that thrived in the Indies.

In the cabin they shared, not six feet wide and with one hammock hung above the other, the afternoon glowed on the walls. Helen had pulled him here when the men filed off the ship. He asked didn’t she want to see Antigua, and she had kissed him, and he said no, he didn’t either. This cabin was Helen’s refuge when the ship engaged with trade boats on the ocean; even though they were rarely in danger, she was still shy of criminality.

“Come see,” she said, her hand tight around his arm.

Her open face reminded him of childhood. There was a song the boys would tease the girls with. “Be kind, my love, be kind,” he said, “and you shall ever find—”

“That a long, long absence can’t alter my mind.” She smiled.

They both were children once; and here she was, with child.

She made him sit cross-legged on the floor. Her dark hair had glints of bronze. She took a box with a metal clasp from the shelf and sat before him, the bare soles of her feet pressed together, her stomach a little ball beneath her skirts. He reached to touch her.

She held up her hand. “I wanted to show you,” she said.

Helen pulled from the box a series of strange objects—strange not because they were uncommon but because they had found their way into a box, gathered by a single hand. She first held out the button, taken from his coat when she was mending it, and then the glass rubbed smooth from Grenada. A musket ball. Three inches of frayed rope from when the lines were trimmed. He laughed at the pit of a plum.