The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (13 page)

“You don’t think he has any say in our fortunes on earth?” Helen asks.

“I can’t see how she would have left you with anything like faith, you not even knowing her.”

“We choose what to take,” Helen says.

“From people and God too,” Moll says. Her feet are entirely under the rug, and she won’t look at Asa.

“What do you take, Moll? I can’t see you’ve been treated very well.”

The fire has swallowed the cut wood now and Mrs. Randolph leaves the room with her head down, hoping not to be questioned on her faith.

“Helen says the Bible teaches us to be dutiful. I can see that’s well enough for keeping people quiet and getting in the crops on time. And the reward lasts forever. I suppose I’m of your mind, sir, that God only comes in at the end.”

“Why go to church?”

“We must know how to recognize him when he comes for us.”

“If you lead a proper Christian life,” Helen says, her fingers drumming on the mantel, “he’s with you always. There’s no end of one thing and beginning of another.”

“Then what’s heaven?” Moll asks.

Helen comes to sit next to her on the sofa. “It’s just a greater closeness with God. Which is a reward, as you say.”

“Do you believe you’ll see your mother there?” Asa asks.

“It doesn’t so much matter,” she says. “It’s not a place with real people.”

“I thought you said it’s whatever we can imagine,” Moll says.

“Then you are not afraid of death,” Asa says.

Helen looks from Moll to Asa. “I’m afraid of you dying. I’m afraid of being left alone. But I think after we die there’s only goodness.”

“I don’t see why there can’t be goodness before we die,” Moll says.

“You think I should begin to pray?” Asa fiddles with a candlestick on the table by the window, picking at the dried wax on the silver.

Helen laughs. “What, you think I’d recommend against it?” She doesn’t find any smile in his features. “I think God likes to hear his name being praised. He’s a father, isn’t he? And he always listens.”

“Especially to white folks,” Moll says. She removes her feet from the warmth of the rug and, after a short curtsy to Asa, grabs her shoes by the door and leaves the room.

Helen finds her struggling with her heavy gray coat on the back steps. Moths have eaten through the shoulders and the breast pocket. “I wanted to have a nice talk with you,” Helen says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Perhaps in winter everyone thinks of the things they’ve lost.”

Moll waits for a moment to see if Helen will continue, and then speaks into the silence. “I’m going to have a baby.”

Helen grabs her wrist. “Moses’s?”

“It’ll join the rest of his little bastards.”

“Moll, I’m so happy for you. Is it a good thing? I always find myself envious of you.”

Moll buttons her coat, or those buttons that are left. She reaches up and strokes Helen’s hair, which is coming loose from its pins on one side and which catches what little light sieves through the clouds. “Somehow I don’t think your heaven will look anything like my life.” She yanks the end of Helen’s curls, then heads back toward home.

“Let me be its godmother,” Helen calls after her.

“You can’t even get your own daddy to pray!”

Moll looks like a heron crossing the fields with her skirts pulled up in a bunch around her shins, the tails of her coat flapping behind her. Helen cannot imagine such a thin bird becoming a mother.

That spring there is a sense that the Americans are winning. Since 1775, Asa has no longer sold his turpentine to the British, and now his gamble is paying off. War is good for his business, so he has been content to wait. In March, he receives a letter from the North Carolina General Assembly. They praise his industry, they flatter his loyalty, and they ask him to serve as the representative from Carteret County in the summer deliberations. He is ready for a larger role in the trajectory of his state, and Helen has proven herself more than capable of handling the daily operations in his absence.

When he tells her of his decision at supper that night, she congratulates him.

“They meet in Hillsborough now, so I’ll be there for much of the summer, though of course I can ride home when I’m needed. I’m no more than two days out.”

“To do what? Check my additions?”

He stirs his spoon around in his soup. As the master of his house, he has never been able to dictate what would be served him each night. “I wouldn’t want you to be lonely.”

“I’ve been thinking of teaching some of the younger slaves to read. There are several children in town with time on Sundays.” Helen rings the bell for Mrs. Randolph.

“You’ll get Miss Kingston to help you?”

“Mrs. Foushee now.”

“You’re getting a little old to be so much alone with them.”

When Mrs. Randolph takes his bowl, the spoon clatters to the floor. She bends with a sigh to salvage it. She is hardly a discreet servant, but they have employed her long enough that they are stuck with her, as with a poor relation. “He won’t even eat the soup with the first of the carrots,” she says. “As sweet as I could make it and with a little cream too. You’d tell me if you were getting sick, sir?”

Asa nods.

“The man is just not one for soups,” she says, backing out of the room with the bowl in one hand and the dripping spoon in the other.

“What would you have me do?” Helen asks. “Gossip with her all day? Sit in my room and write a novel?”

“I will say I’m happy enough you haven’t found a husband yet. It’s in my interest to still have a daughter to order around. Though you might find time to prepare for that day. Take a larger hand in the cooking, for instance.” Mrs. Randolph has come in with two plates of fish, undoubtedly cold.

After she leaves, Helen smiles and accuses him of snobbery. He reaches across the table for her hand. “I wish I had a little trinket of yours to take with me to the capital. I would treasure it.” He thinks of the portraitist who brought his small canvas and brushes to Long Ridge over a year ago. What has she been saving it for?

“I’ll think of something,” she says. “It must remind you of my virtues. I won’t have you cursing the time I broke Mother’s vase or remembering when Moll and I let the snake inside the house.”

He ignores the fish and rubs her fingers between his. “You’re always the home I want to return to.”

That night, sitting at his desk next to the bed he used to share with his wife, he writes the president of the North Carolina Assembly to accept his assignment in the House of Commons. He is filling the seat of William Blount, who will serve as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The path he’s on is a ladder; men are being swept up the rungs to greatness. On a separate paper, he begins writing out instructions for his daughter: where the ledgers are stored (though she knows), the lists of negroes, the addresses of his purchasers, the coin available for new hatchets, shipping barrels, sugar.

The papers say the war is done, that the British surrendered at Yorktown in the fall. But still the ships are roaming the coast, as though the bitterness were not yet purged. Beaufort has survived the first seven years of war; the last few months will make no difference.

A pile of folded breeches lies beside Asa’s dressing chair, where it has escaped the notice of all the women of the household. A hired man closes and ties the last trunk, stacking it on top of the others at the base of the front stairs. Two horses nudge heads. With their tails, they flick at the first of the summer flies. The session begins on April 13, and Asa sets out on a Wednesday, ten days before, to allow time for traveling the two hundred miles and then settling. He stands just past the carriage, looking out over the weedy grass and through the few scrub trees to the lip of the sea. It is a warm day, and he would be happy to shed his coat in the carriage except that he is now a North Carolina assemblyman. He will in all things be dignified. In the small traveling case that he will carry beside him, he has packed two quills and half a dozen new nibs that Helen bought for him in town. They have promised to write each other every few days, though he also imagines writing bills for the betterment of his state and soon his nation. He is newly concerned about his penmanship.

The night before, she gave him a soft package. He did not smile immediately upon opening it, so Helen rushed to explain. “I was making it as a fire screen, but I wanted you to have something to take, so it’s now a pillow. It’s supposed to be Long Ridge, but I’ve put in too many birds.” He told her the embroidery was beautiful and thanked her. He said there couldn’t be too many birds.

Through an open window, he hears a woman’s yell; a few moments later, Moll rushes out the front door and down the stairs with his breeches in her hand. “You would’ve been pantsless, sir.”

He motions to the coachman, who looks from Asa to Moll before coughing and reaching out for the stack of clothes. Moll knows it is beneath his station, but then so are most things they do. “I wish you safe travels,” she says, and briefly bows her head. “May the Lord guide your horses.”

Helen hurries from the house with a cloth-wrapped bundle. “Bread for the road,” she says. Asa takes the warm package from her, and the two men stand there with full hands, uncertain of how to leave.

“I’ll write you in the carriage,” Asa says to his daughter.

“It will be illegible.”

He presses her to his chest and then kisses her cheek. There are men who have no daughters, he thinks.

In trying to contain his emotion in the carriage, he misses the parting scenes of Beaufort: the dusty drive west out of Long Ridge, the street that divides the town from the ocean, the marshes that lead to pine forests that lead to hardwood. The roads are almost fully shaded before he can bring himself to look out the window as a man again, as a legislator.

That night Helen sleeps in her father’s bed. She finds his shape in the mattress and lies next to it, resting her hand in the dip where his shoulder was. This is her tribute to him, but she doesn’t miss him yet; she is too young to regret her independence. Through the open window, she can hear the distant chop of waves. Sometimes she thinks men are coming in rowboats, their oars splitting the water with that repetitive thwack. When she was younger, she had pictured them docking at Long Ridge, sneaking into the house, and carrying her away in a flurry of sheets. Before she could imagine where the boats would take her, she had always fallen asleep.

Now in the half-stages between consciousness and dreaming, she maps out scenes of reunion. She is sitting with her feet in the back creek when he appears; she is stirring cake batter; she is dozing in the gazebo. Most nights, she doesn’t get to the point of having him speak. He is wearing a patched uniform with his musket strapped to his back, and they mostly just look at each other. Once she walked up to him and wrapped her arms around his chest and held him until she fell asleep. During the day, she remembers these figments as if they were real. When Mrs. Randolph asks her why she smiles, she has to stop herself from saying, “John came home, and in his eyes I saw he loved me, and then I held him.”

Tonight the sound of slapping water is the sound of John in a small boat. She places her dream-self on the edge of the bay, her bare feet in the water, and waits.

In the morning, three ships round the corner of the buffer islands and appear in Topsail Inlet. They slacken their sails just beyond the sandbars and reefs that protect the town from the sea. Helen watches them float, flagless, as she walks to town to purchase coffee. By the late morning, they haven’t moved, and a small crowd of men has gathered by the docks to speculate. Their best guess is northern traders. One of the older oystermen calls to Helen when he sees her.

“Does your father have any shipments expected?” He knows Helen as he knows all the town’s children, having none of his own.

She looks out at the three ships, resting her parcels against her hip. “We sent a load just before he left,” she says, “and I don’t think anything is wanted.”

“They may be here for Johnson or Foot.”

“I can go home to check the ledgers again,” she says. “You don’t think they might be British?”

“The British fleet is dead, miss, and there’s certainly nothing in Beaufort for them.”

“Looks like someone ought to pilot them in,” a younger man says. “They must not have been here before.”

“They’re not fool enough to go rampaging around the shoals,” the oysterman says. “I suppose they’re waiting for rescue.”

“Should we ask the rice men?” his companion says.

“Better send a boat out. They want to dock, or they wouldn’t have come in at all. We can’t get trade back soon enough.”

Helen can make out the forms of men on deck, none of them moving quickly. Perhaps one is John, come for her after all, two years of fighting done and honorably released. She is tired, having woken up before dawn to walk the fields, policing the acres of pine. She sits on a stone bench on the slope between Front Street and the wharf and watches the fishermen ordering themselves. They decide to take out two dinghies, each with a pilot; a handful of men who have already brought in their nets take the empty seats from a mingled sense of duty and curiosity. There may well be a reward from the local merchant who’s had his goods rescued. Surprise is what keeps men alive, Helen thinks.

She looks out at the phantom John, a speck on the ship. Is God offering her his hand? She is not superstitious, does not believe in graveyard ghosts, but if John truly was a passenger on one of those ships, wouldn’t fate send her a dinghy? She has been seeing his face everywhere; it is only just that she should find it at last.

“May I come?”

The oysterman who first called Helen has the boat’s rope half unwound. He used to let the children ride on his back when he was a younger man. He looks up at her with pleasure. “You wouldn’t mind a short trip, miss?”

Did all explorers launch toward the unknown with such joy? She hoists up her packages and hurries down the slope, taking short steps to keep from stumbling. The oysterman reaches out for her burdens and she drops them in his lap, climbing in after. She has spent her entire life by the ocean and yet has never felt comfortable on boats. There is something additionally precious about the stability of land when surrounded by water, and this is what she loves about her home, not the water itself. The oysterman sits her on the thwart next to him and wraps his arm around her waist. He is happy to have secured himself a young lady.