The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (21 page)

“Would we both have horses?”

“I wouldn’t make you walk. I’ll toss you on the mule beside the bags and canteens.” He pushes the door open to sweep the dirt into the street. A woman crosses to the far side of the road.

“I’d want room and board and pay.”

“Pay?”

“I won’t be forced to do things.” Davy hops down from the counter and digs an almond marchpane from a glass jar. He sucks on it while watching John’s face.

“Won’t your mother miss you?”

“She’s got my sisters to fuss over. I only get into trouble anyway.”

“Well, I certainly don’t want any troublesome boys along.”

Davy stands a little straighter and pulls at his shirt. “I was only fooling, sir. I’d work very hard. As long as I’m compensated.”

“Where did you get these words?”

“My mother tells them to me in case. I should be prepared to take advantage of fortune.”

“Do you know what fortune is?”

“I suppose it’s you taking me to the territories, sir. With compensation.” Davy takes another candy and begins rubbing down the counter with an oiled rag. He has no allegiance to the sea, has never learned to swim, does not look south to the water when he walks along Front Street. He has always looked straight ahead, and is only interested in things he’s never seen.

Something blows through the front door with a bang, and Asa spills his soup. The tablecloth is collecting stains, patches of muted color. His hands have taken on a tremble since the burial. Even his comb wrenches out accidental strands at his morning toilet. He always seems to be wavering. His coat is hard to button. The pen jumps around in his fingers. He rubs at the small golden spot on the cloth, licks his finger, and rubs again.

Moll walks in, and before her angry skirts swirl to a halt, she points her finger and says, “You son of a
bitch
.”

There is a precision in this gesture he cannot avoid. He sinks an inch into his seat and wipes his mouth with his napkin, looking up at her like a schoolchild.

“You who
know
better.”

Mrs. Randolph appears behind her, lurching and apologetic. “Please,” she says, holding one arm out toward the door, as if Moll could be herded.

Asa raises a hand and nods at the older woman, who steps back, thinking of her bread almost done on the hearth. He stands slowly and reaches to pull a chair out from the table.

Moll’s eyes are red, her face swollen. “What price are you taking? Is this some vengeance?”

“Do sit down.”

“I’d rather be whipped. What would your daughter say?”

Asa sits again and twists one of his rings. The fire behind him is keeping his back warm, a very human comfort. He has been a diligent master, and keeps his slaves in firewood, cloth, and fresh meat on Sundays. He is not a barbarian. He didn’t sell Moll to her husband’s master because he wouldn’t fully trust Cogdell’s self-discipline, his Christianity. His few slaves lead better lives here, surely, than on plantations of rice or tobacco, and certainly they are better taken care of than if they had been left in native Africa, victim to lions and who knows what other creatures. And hadn’t Helen taught them their letters and some morality? Looking back on this now, he can see its value. They were raised as Americans.

“I thought you might see it as an opportunity,” he says. This is a word that has led men by the nose to battlefields, women to the altar.

Her hands grasp in the air. “I wish you had something you still loved that I could take from you.”

“I don’t see it like that at all. You have other children, haven’t you, and John says the boy’s keen to go.”

“You heartless son of a
bitch
.”

He stands and pushes past her into the hallway. “I will not have a conversation like this.”

“You
had
a child,” she says.

He is on the porch, and she has followed him. “I’m sorry,” he says, avoiding her eyes. “The boy seems eager, and John I think could use the company.”

She begins to nod. “I see. I see. A substitute child.”

“Nothing like that. It’s hard on the road, and he’ll be starting a new home.”

“Hard for a man to ride a hundred miles by himself.”

“It’s been hard for all of us, without her.”

“Take what’s mine, then. All those years Helen preached to us, said we were all people, same as each other, that was a lie.” Her last words come out through tears.

“I should remind you that your son is mine to sell. This isn’t really a matter for discussion.”

She drops to her knees, and he steps back, afraid. She places her palms on the porch and begins dragging them across the floorboards. The old wood, which has needed new paint for years, splinters into her hands.

“Stop that.”

She drags and drags her hands. Her face twists with pain.

He reaches down to grab her shoulders. He knocks her arms away. He is on his knees, pinning her wrists together. She is keening, making childbirth cries. He is terrified, but her wrists are now limp in his hand as she sobs. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” It is cold, and he can see the beads of blood congeal on her shaking palms.

When she has gathered her breath again, she looks into his eyes, inches away. She holds up her hands to show him. “I will not live like this,” she says. “You cannot make me live like this.”

The store is almost empty now. The man from New Bern has carted away most of the large boxes, and other goods have been sent to Charleston by sea. In the back room, John and Davy fill knapsacks with provisions. Davy puts a jar of candies into his bag, and when he goes to fetch something from the main shelves, John pulls it out again. The boy has brought all his clothes from home—two pairs of trousers, two linen shirts, an overcoat, and a man’s hat, probably stolen from his father—and has rolled them into a ball. John untangles them, folds them into neat squares, and stacks them in his bag.

“Can I stay here tonight?”

John sits back on his heels and studies the room. He will have to be careful about overloading the mules. Whatever he has told Asa, he is not looking forward to crossing the state at the beginning of winter with an eleven-year-old boy. But it is the only way to survive. The thought of that sharp discomfort is preferable to the weight that swamps his hollow chest every time he rounds a street corner or faces the open sea and doesn’t find his daughter. Will Moll miss her son this much? No, no one can miss a child as much.

“You’ll spend tonight with your mother, and I’ll see you here at dawn.”

“What if she kills me before then?”

“Then I’ll have more room to carry biscuits.” He hands the boy some parcels of dried meat wrapped in paper and twine. “Split these up between our sacks. I’ll take a last glance at things.”

The main room looks smaller empty. He finds a box of nails in the far corner of a shelf, and a roll of tallow candles. Underneath a hat stand lies a pile of mouse droppings that the broom didn’t catch. Tab used to hang from the arms of the stand when she was little, monkey-size. Behind the counter he finds the first scratchings of a boy’s name:
D-A-V
.

In the back room again, Davy has his hands wrapped in the yardage of blue silk.

“What are you doing digging through my bag?”

“I thought you said you were giving it away.” Davy stuffs it back into the satchel and replaces John’s clothes and drinking cup and the apples and packs of meat. His voice gets quieter. “Can’t figure what you’d do with it. Waste of space. Could take an extra blanket.”

“What’s that?”

“Sure would be easier to spend the night here, sir.”

“Out you go. I’ll finish up. Get, get.” John shoos him from the room. Davy yells a protest and then pounds his hand in a bouncing rhythm along the counter on his way out. The force of his exit leaves the room humming. Children, even the most shy and tongue-tied, spill all their vibrancy out into the world. There are no reserves, no deep wells where emotion sinks and is buried. It takes all of John’s energy just to reach the open door and pull it shut.

In the morning, he will force himself to move. He will keep moving until his legs give out, and then the ghosts will carry him home.

Moses shaves the sides of a wooden last into the fire. He has gotten too many burns from smithing and so is practicing to be a cordwainer’s assistant, but he cannot shape a proper mold. When he tries to fit it into his own shoe, the leather sides collapse. The shavings are wet with oil and send sparks caroming through the fire. Moll sits on a mattress and braids a rug out of fabric scraps. Neither looks at Davy. The boy has taken off his stockings and is picking at a boil on his toe.

“You can’t tie me up,” he says.

Moll reaches down to pull another twist of fabric from the bag. She leans her head back to stretch the soreness from her neck.

“I’m not a baby either.” Davy tosses a sock across the room. On the second mattress, two young girls roll onto each other and kick.

Moll stops her hands and looks at him. Moses shifts on his stool and releases a grunt of frustration. His knife is too dull. When he puts away his last and crawls onto the large mattress, Moll blows out the candle for him and moves to finish her strand by the hearth. Davy scratches at his legs. There are too few things in the cabin to occupy his hands. He scoots over to the cradle where the baby sleeps and rubs his fingers in her hair. Moll slaps the floor twice and Davy pulls his hand back.

“You’re never going to let me grow up,” he says.

“Shh.”

He comes closer to the fire and begins separating the strips of cloth. He bends into her ear. “You heard what Daddy said.”

“He’s not the boss of you.”

“The man’s giving me wages. I can buy my freedom in a year.”

She shakes her head.

“You don’t want me to be free. That’s it.”

Moll bites on a piece of fabric and tears it with her teeth. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand, and then her eyes, and then she puts down the rug and leans her head onto her knees. Davy reaches out, but doesn’t touch her.

“Mama,” he says.

She can’t say what she wants. What can a mother like this want for her child? It does no good to tell him he’s breaking her heart. He will blow away from this town, out of her arms, will always be a boy, fighting out of wherever he is. She lifts her face and wraps her arms around him and rocks him until his shoulder is wet with her tears. God has never seen her family. The catechism that she learned and repeated until Helen stopped correcting her was always a lie. Does she believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting? Hasn’t she died a hundred times and seen no resurrection? On the other side of this life, on the other side of slavery, on the far side of this sea, what is there waiting? Emptiness; it’s all she’s ever seen. In the morning, her son will ride into that blank and will not return. Is it freedom if she’s not there to witness it? Is it love if it has no object present?

After she wraps him in a blanket next to his sisters, she sits with her hand on his back, making figure eights, until he falls asleep. She knew a woman who cut the ropes inside her son’s ankles so he couldn’t walk. Couldn’t work, couldn’t be sold, couldn’t stand for a whipping. She fed him her own portions for a year and taught him how to write and slept with her hand in his until one morning he crawled into the river with weights around his waist. That was not a life. Moll touches the boy’s feet, feels the thin muscles webbed down to his toes, the thick cord at his ankle. She tucks the blanket over them and rubs them until she thinks they’re warm.

John is not a bad man. He is stealing her child—he is purchasing her child, which is worse. He loved Helen, and he loved the little girl. But it is not always in white men to love beyond that. She has no choices here. She prays, forgetting that she has dismissed God as a fraud. “Thy kingdom come,” she whispers. She begs. “Thy kingdom come.”

Halfway through the night, she wakes with the baby’s cry. She has fallen asleep in an awkward drape over Davy’s legs. When she sits up, her back shoots with pain. She crawls to the cradle to give the child a breast. All her children are killing her. She doesn’t know how not to love, and she will die from it. And God will take her wherever he pleases, and she releases herself to this. If it is more pain, she will recognize it. If it is emptiness, it will be welcome. Just let him bring his kingdom soon.

Asa wraps his blanket around his shoulders and leaves his house, making his way slowly down the front stairs in the darkness. He can almost see his father standing in the uncut grass, squinting at the structure that has risen where his boards and posts once were. Who will be left to climb these steps, to have these visions? Now in the grass himself, Asa stops. He has forgotten his shoes. Like a child. He brushes his feet through the lawn, not minding the damp, and follows the path that winds west through the forest on the way to town. The dirt is studded with pebbles and pine needles and sharp bits of leaf that scrape against his feet. Closer to the water, the trees thin out; the oaks here are half-size and writhe away from the wind off the water. The arms reach desperately inland. He remembers another walk, a dozen years ago or more, with Tab. No, it would have been Helen. She had climbed a tree, called it cheerful. Near the top, she raised her hands and moved them in a slow dance. Her limbs and the tree’s like seaweed. Asa had smiled, and sometimes as he walked to town in later years it did seem like a whimsical sort of gnarl. At night, though, there is no mistaking.

He stops before he comes to the first houses and rests on a rock that someone has rolled close to the water. Across the moon-tinged channel, the shoals seem like a mirage of dry land. A wild horse left by the Spanish grazes on sea oats. Her snorts carry over the surface of the water to Asa. In the night quiet, he can almost hear her teeth at the roots of the grass.

If he had asked John to move to Long Ridge, perhaps he could have kept him here. The man might have wanted just a gesture of company. Instead, he’s taking himself and a young boy into an endless unknown. Traveling west is no better than traveling east, for all the monsters one could meet. This is some men’s way of living, though Asa will never comprehend it. There is only satisfaction in stability; one only grows when one is steadfast. He could try again with John. Keep him at the house a month and teach him how to tap pines, and maybe he would begin to settle. Asa could show him how. He could raise him.