The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (22 page)

This is the hole in him talking. Though he is grieving now, patience, faith, and the will to repeat his daily motions are bound to bring him peace again. He cannot save other lives, is not responsible. Family is illusory. There is God, and there is man. There is the earth, and there is the sea. There is that moon, this horse, the wet grass in his toes. If there are worms in the soil, it is not his place to see them.

They stop at Long Ridge in the morning. Davy waits with the horses and mules while John walks up the front staircase, which in his courting days once seemed insurmountable; now it’s just another barrier to be climbed. Asa comes to the door in a dressing gown. John refuses to step inside but holds out a small box.

“I don’t mean to leave you. That’s not my intention.”

Asa takes the box.

“I’ll write, if you’ll let me.”

“Will you stay?”

John looks at him without expression.

“Then. I don’t begrudge you a new life. We take our own paths.” Asa wraps the gown tighter with one hand against the dawn air. He is tired, and his feet are sore. “We all want to end up someplace different.”

“Heaven, isn’t it?” John smiles. Asa looks older in his sleeping cap. The light dips into the wrinkles at his eyes, the furrows cut around his mouth. He will probably not see Asa before he dies. The thought reminds him of everyone else he cannot see again, and floods him.

Asa picks at the string around the box, but John stays his hand.

“Open it later. I wanted to say farewell.”

Asa looks past him to the lawn below, where Davy is trying to catch his own horse’s flicking tail. “Nice to have a young one.”

“I want to thank you for giving me what you did. For your daughter.”

“I said I don’t begrudge you.”

“What we felt—what we are feeling now—it’s not so dissimilar. It will be easier when we’re not here to remind each other.”

“And this you’re certain of.”

“When we find each other after all this, you’ll tell me everything was all right.”

Asa takes a step back into the hall. It is too early for this; it hurts. Easier to keep closing the door, to stay still, to pray.

John holds out his hand to shake.

Asa stands in the door until they wheel their animals and start for the north. Their road flashes before him—the forests and open prairies and the endless jumbled mountains—and when the boy lets out a whoop, two egrets burst from the marsh and glide toward a horizon he can no longer see.

Inside the box is Helen’s small face, painted in simple colors on a piece of ivory. It is the face she wore on that summer day when her muddy shoes sat by the door, and her bare feet running from the parlor to the porch sounded like the steps of a child. Innocent, he had not known she was in love; the thought of waiting for this proof of her affection had charmed him. Had he forgotten about it? No, because it does not surprise him to find the miniature in his hand, all these years later.

He closes the front door and kneels on the rug in the hallway and places his hands together. He could pray for the children he has lost, or John, or the woman whose son he has sold, but his heart is quiet now, and all he can manage is a few murmurs for his own soul, may it be held and kept.

T
he dirt runs through Cogdell’s fingers. It’s pale brown, sand mixed with loam. He picks out the pine needles and peels off the papery red cap that holds the fascicle together.

“Hasn’t been well tended,” he says, looking up at Asa, who leans against a trunk.

“Suits fine for trees.”

“Not much turpentine business after the war, I’ll bet.” Cogdell stands and toes over the bare patch. “Not much help, either. How many do you own?”

“Four, but I hire enough so everything gets done. It’s brought in plenty.”

“Getting too old, is that it?”

“There are other things to be done.”

“With everyone leaving town, there’s not much. In ten years, I’d be surprised if the whole place wasn’t turned into a big plantation. Ship everything upriver or by sea. No need for anyone to live here at all. We’d be better off in Wilmington where the ladies are.” He waits for Asa to respond, but the older man is still looking at the ground. “Since your son-in-law left, you can’t even buy a good pound of coffee.”

“They’re stocking it again.”

“Seems like everything’s flowing out of Beaufort on the tide. You’re wise to sell.” Cogdell turns back to the house, slapping his palm on the trunks as he passes them. Asa thinks he’ll have a hard time washing the resin off. “I’ll need to dig channels through here to bring enough water for rice. The dirt’s been dried out from all these roots. Prices have gone up since the war, but we’re still selling it cheaper than the Indies, and it cooks better. That’s what I hear. There are men by New Bern who are even shipping overseas.” He doesn’t look behind him to see that Asa has stopped at the edge of the pines, reluctant to step out into the open.

It is early March, and the soil has recently thawed. The hardwoods are bare or budding. Asa has pulled his hat low and turned up the collar of his coat, but his ears are still exposed, and they ache in the wind. Even with the disturbances of men, who each year clear the undergrowth beneath the pines, the acres are once more spilling the first wildflowers. They appear like new coins. Trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple. By the house, yellow jessamine hangs in the top of a small oak and smells like satin. These are the things his wife would have noticed, so Asa notices them in her stead.

Inside the house, Asa draws up the agreement for the back section of land; he is selling half instead of a third, but he’ll still have enough trees left to make a few dozen barrels a year. Cogdell reads over the paper, following the script with his finger.

“Fifteen acres,” he says. “Doesn’t seem like much.”

Asa points his quill at the paper. “You’ll get the land and the five thousand trees too, to do with as you like. Always a market for lumber. You’ve been wanting to stretch the rice fields out as long as I’ve known you.”

Cogdell scratches his cheek, then signs. They shake hands, and Asa walks him down the back stairs again. A dirt footpath has been rubbed from the small garden over the creek to the neighbor’s lands. It passes through the slave quarters and the row of empty cabins. Even from here, they can hear strains of song from the fields, where men and women pull through soil and muck to make furrows for the seed. A spotted hen sits at the base of the stairs, ruffling her feathers in a dirt patch, and doesn’t move when Cogdell shakes his shoe at her. The men step around her.

“You’ll be selling the rest before too long,” Cogdell says.

“That may be.”

“There’s no use in holding on to land out of pride. A man has to learn to be on his own.”

The men have never been close as neighbors. There have been few shared suppers. Cogdell’s wife never approved of the women’s behavior at Long Ridge and told her friends that she sometimes saw ghosts in dresses walking through the pines at night. Asa’s wife thought the woman was shrewish. Asa will tell her about this latest impudence. She’ll say they don’t need any more friends, and will squeeze his knee. This is a great intimacy.

But when he climbs the stairs again, the house is dark and quiet. The only fire is in the kitchen hearth. It’s on shaky kindling legs.

Mrs. Randolph takes Asa’s hands and plunges them in the bowl of milky water. “Nothing to be scared of,” she says, and adds the soaked yeast and the quarter pound of butter. “Go on, break it up with your fingers.” She mixes two eggs in another pan, forking the yolk into yellow strings, and pours them into Asa’s bowl. He feels the pleasures of childhood, of direct contact with the forbidden. He actually remembers very little of being young; most of his memories he created, to show how far he’s come. Did he even love his mother and his father? There were few embraces. His father had been a servant as a boy; he always expected Asa to do better, and Asa’s son to own the whole colony. But Asa didn’t have a son, and his parents were no longer alive to see what Long Ridge was, or what it was becoming.

Mrs. Randolph dumps the flour in, and his hands become weary as the dough stiffens. She covers the bowl with a cloth, and they sit on stools with cups of tea to wait for the dough to rise. Asa picks at his fingernails, digging the flour out. The fire has been built properly, and the room is warm and smells sweet.

Mrs. Randolph is beginning to feel old and her children are growing up, and she is no longer quite comfortable working at Long Ridge with all the women absent. She stayed on after Helen’s death because of the little girl, who needed plenty of mothering when she was young and who continued to visit the big house on Sundays, when Mrs. Randolph would bake her Chelsea buns and show her how to tie ribbons. With only Asa left, it’s time to return to her own family. She doesn’t believe in hauntings, but she has a sense of being exposed when she’s dusting the furniture of Long Ridge. It’s a lonely house now. She is sorry to leave Asa in it, but she can train him to take care of himself, and he’ll be happier with more to keep him busy.

They talk about Mrs. Randolph’s children, and the families who have left Beaufort since the war, and their hopes for a wet spring. When the dough is ready, Asa pulls it into pieces and rolls them between his hands to make little balls, which Mrs. Randolph lines up on a pan. She slides them on the shelf above the fire, and they watch the rolls turn golden. Asa writes down the cooking time on a sheet of paper: quarter of an hour on one side, quarter of an hour on the other. Once he knows how to make bread, porridge and ham for breakfast will be simple. He has promised Mrs. Randolph that he can learn, that he doesn’t need to hire a younger woman. She has been gracious in believing him. He holds his pocket watch, glancing from the minute hand to the bread and back. He flips them with a damp rag and Mrs. Randolph nods.

They wrap them in napkins and carry them to the dining room, where Asa cuts and butters them for a morning snack. They have run out of conversation. Mrs. Randolph is glad to be served for once, and she watches Asa’s movements as if he were a lady pupil. When he sucks the butter off his fingers before passing her a roll, she laughs. “I think you were meant for a bachelor, sir,” she says.

“There is something easier in it.”

“I shouldn’t have said. But yes, now you needn’t mind your steps so much.”

“And who’s to say I’ll take the time to make proper bread? If you visit, you may well find me foraging for scraps in the chicken troughs.” Asa smiles at the woman to put her at ease. The rolls are not as good as when she makes them herself, but he doesn’t say anything.

“You’ll be all right, sir.”

He is loath to let her go. She will be the last bird to leave, and his forest will become as silent as winter.

“And what’s that one? Right up there, on the crooked branch. Look, I’m pointing.”

John shakes his head.

“It’s not a woodpecker, I know it.” Davy pulls his horse up short and turns its reluctant head around. “Do you see the long tail?”

They are on a trail that circles the settlement and runs behind the logging fields. It is one of the first warm days, and Davy jogs his horse up and back, kicking at the layers of mulch that have broken down after the winter. John is on scouting duty; the man and boy travel the perimeter once a week to look for hostile Indians, whom they never find. Instead Davy pesters him for information about the world—birds, Cherokees, mathematics, ghosts. John is newly aware of his own ignorance.

“We’re eating supper with Foster tonight.” John is now well ahead on the trail. The boy comes galloping up behind him, passes him, turns sharply with one hand on the reins, the other tossed in the air. John cannot help but smile.

“He only eats turkeys,” Davy says, settling down in his saddle again.

“There are plenty of turkeys to be had,” John says. “Maybe that’s what you saw.”

“I think it was a flycatcher. Are they this far west?” John has taught him all the birds he knows, which is not many. In just a few months, with scarce and irregular food, Davy has grown an inch at least, and he feels it. He finds himself extending his limbs, stretching his wrists and ankles and neck at every opportunity, as if by wriggling he could force another inch. Most mornings, he tells John that his bed is shrinking.

The houses here hardly look like houses: rough boards leaned together, notched so they won’t fall down in a wind, topped by branches with the leaves still on. They borrowed their home half-built from another man who moved on before the winter, and they’ve been adding to it piecemeal, which has allowed for Davy’s own ideas. He insisted they cut a window in the door so they could see their visitors, coming and going.

“What visitors?” John had asked.

“When we’re rich, they’ll come,” Davy said. “You’ll see.”

Their shelves hold a few sacks of dry beans and strips of salted venison, and there’s a hammer and an auger, and on the top shelf is a wooden box with a metal clasp where Davy puts feathers that he finds. He can’t make sense of the other things inside: glass, rope, a little wrinkled rock. John said they were his wife’s treasures, so Davy adds his, which are much nicer.

The men in the camp had not allowed Davy to work, but he swore he was sixteen, and John shrugged his shoulders, not saying any different. They spend time in the forests, in their house, in other men’s houses, along the trails that dip between the mountains. They stay up late, they take days off, they swim when it is not yet warm enough to swim. They struggle to find food, they work through blisters, their fires spit back at them, and they are almost always cold.

“Who are we eating with for Easter?”

John’s horse slows to pick its way down a hill. He takes off his hat and wipes the sweat back into his hair. “I thought we’d make our own meal,” he says.

“No turkey,” Davy says. “We’d have to make something that didn’t taste of ashes. Easter’s supposed to be nice.”

“I made you a very nice squirrel last week that didn’t taste of ashes.”

“Excuse me; it tasted like squirrel.” Once they are on a flat stretch again, Davy kicks his horse into a trot. “My mother always said we ate well then because of Jesus.”