The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

a small space of focus in the haze.

      The second night Tab is sick, John leaves her for an hour in the care of Dr. Yarborough and walks east away from town to Cogdell’s plantation, which adjoins Long Ridge, and circles around to the slave quarters behind the rice fields. He knows which is her cabin. A man answers his knock, and calls for Moll. The woman who comes to the door is still young and strong, her hair wrapped tight in a red cloth and her face unscarred. A newborn crawls against her chest. Its hands open and shut, catching folds of fabric, searching for milk.

      “What’s wrong?” she asks. No matter that he hasn’t spoken to her in years, though she once thought of him almost as a brother.

      “I’m ashamed to come here like this,” he says. His wife died ten years ago, and this woman with the infant had been her property, her maidservant, her confidante, her friend. Though now that he is standing here, he doesn’t know whether Moll would have claimed that friendship. “My daughter’s sick.”

      “What is it?”

      “They don’t know. Yellow fever maybe.”

      A boy curls around Moll’s hip to see the visitor, but she pushes him back into the cabin. “I don’t know much about herbs,” she says. “And no one here could do much for the fever.”

      He nods.

      She watches him wanting something more. She is sorry for him. She misses Helen, but she has no debt to John or his daughter. After Helen’s death, they moved in separate ways; Moll had her own life to battle. She is a field worker, not a guardian angel. His concerns are not greater than hers. The baby begins to cry: a long, piercing syllable that dissolves into hiccups. “We can’t do anything for yellow fever,” she says again. “Ask some other conjure man.”

      “I didn’t know,” he says, gesturing toward the infant. “I should congratulate you.”

      She waits for him to blush, to back away, to excuse himself, but he doesn’t move. He’s waiting for something too. If it’s sympathy, he knocked on the wrong cabin door.

      “And the boy?”

      “Davy,” she says.

      “Can I see him?”

      She scratches at her covered hair with her free hand, then calls for her son. The boy runs back to the door, almost bouncing. John is exhausted to see so much frantic energy. He nods once. The boy nods back, three times.

      Moll, holding the infant with one loose hand, puts her other palm on Davy’s head, runs it along his scalp, squeezing it, as if to feel for soft spots. He shakes his head to free himself, but Moll slips her hand down to his neck to hold him still.

      John could stand here and watch this mother love her son for days.

      “Where’d you get your coat?” Davy says, pointing a finger toward John’s chest.

      John looks down and says a tailor in New Bern made it.

      “What’s his name? In case I wanted one someday.”

      John waits to see if he’s teasing, but the child’s eyes are happy and serious, so John gives him the name.

      Moll’s husband calls out from inside, and she can hear her girls’ voices escalating toward a fight. She bounces the baby to calm it, her hand still draped around Davy’s shoulders. “I’m sorry I can’t help,” she says. She should say she’ll pray for the child, but she doesn’t.

      He rubs his face and leaves.

      In the morning Tab cannot stand to walk. The dizziness turns her body into vibrating points. John tucks the quilt around her, lifts the damp bundle, and carries her downstairs to rest on the sofa while he gathers meal and potatoes into a sack, some jugs of water. To save her from the graveyard, he must take her to sea. He took her mother once, and being on the water only made her bloom. Tab will get well beyond the reach of Asa’s religion. He looks at the paper parcel above the shelves in the hearth room and wonders if a dress could be made of such fine silk aboard a wayward ship, with villains for seamstresses. No, it will be here for their return. She will come back whole and womanly.

      Tab’s vision is clear this morning, and though her body rejects her guidance, she is well enough to feel a thrill at what the day will bring. She is trailing in her mother’s path.

      It is Sunday and the ships are come to harbor. Trading ships and whaling ships and ghost ships whose crews know her father. When Mrs. Foushee reads them stories, she calls them buccaneers. Wicked men who lure vessels for the plunder, who tie ladies to the masts and make them scream to call the navies in. John tells her little of those days, so the scenes in Tab’s head are of her own devising. She is ten years old, of an age when the wicked are the heroes. She has outgrown tales of moral children.

      In the night, when she had called out in pain, John told her they’d set sail with a black crew. She would be the ship’s queen, and with her scepter would guide them to the Indies. Sugar, gold, parakeets, beaches without muck and weeds. He told her of the blue and yellow of the islands and the bone-soaking sun and the wild ladies who brewed potions for their lovers. Tab said she didn’t have a lover. John told her to hush and keep still.

      Now she watches him fumble through the house, shutting windows and picking up oddments, and wishes she could cut a finer figure as the lady of a ship. She senses her face has become unlike herself, for her father won’t look at her straight.

      When he is ready, he straps the sack across his back and lifts her, still wrapped in the quilt, and with his foot pulls shut the door of their house. He has left a note for Asa, another for his partner in the store. Helen would tell him to stop, he hasn’t thought about a hundred things; what about a brush for Tab’s hair? If he paused, he would not be able to move again. He has always been led by a buried instinct, and this brought him his wife and it brought him his daughter, so he trusts it now and doesn’t go back for a brush for Tab’s hair.

      He carries her, stopping along the road to adjust the weight, to the harbor, where the only men are foreign and tired eyed; the saints of the town are making their preparations for church. He lays her gently on the ground, leaning up against a hitching post, and searches out his old mate Tom who docks from time to time. In asking for him among the tattered crews, he faces blank looks and evasions. He heads to a man-of-war still loading provisions, and the captain is gracious enough, but he hasn’t seen John’s friend.

      “Do you need extra hands?”

      The captain shakes his head.

      “I sailed for two years before the war, then put in good service in the army. I could show you letters,” he says, though he has no letters.

      “I’m sorry,” the captain says.

      At a smaller schooner, they ask to see his commendations, so he stands tall and tells them with a bite in his eyes that he has worked ships twice as big and for half shares, and they tell him to move on.

      He should go back to his daughter, who might be cold, but he can’t walk away from the docks. There are no other paths that he can see. A sailor walks past with a load of nets and a familiar beard, and John asks once more about his friend, who would give him passage on any boat.

      The sailor pauses and shifts his load. “Tom been strung,” he says. “Caught for something, maybe pinching rations.” When John doesn’t reply, the sailor walks on, dragging rope behind him.

      John squints at the south horizon and a flat sea.

      “Tom Waldron? He minded mast for me.”

      John turns to see a young gentleman with a thin patrician nose smoking a pipe, his free hand playing about his ruffled neck.

      “Hezekiah Frith,” he says, and tilts his head. “Looking for passage?”

      “You wouldn’t take me. I’ve a daughter, ill.”

      “And where are you bound?”

      “Merely away. The Indies.”

      Frith