The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

the pine floorboards are warping. The church does have a little square tower and a cupola with a bell, but from the street one can see they rest at a tilt.

      Sitting in the pew with his granddaughter, he wishes for cushions. When he was a boy, services were held in the courthouse; he had a gilded Bible and his bottom could rest on a pillow while he listened to the Lord’s word. But now the sons are moving away, leaving their fathers’ farms, and churches are left wanting. The town talked of building a canal to join the two rivers on the way to New Bern so boats could pass with goods, but the men who had the funds were loath to spend them, and Beaufort—which could have controlled the inland trade—became stagnant, and then began to shrink. The goodness in the world he knew has contracted; the common feeling they had under royal rule has turned to self-interest. Men grasp at money instead of virtue. All the men he knows are common bandits. He hopes God is watching.

      Tabitha, who swings her legs when she is forced to sit, kicks the back of his ankle, sending his leg knocking into the pew in front of him. The minister pauses, and resumes. Asa pinches her wrist and glares.

      The Reverend Solomon Halling stands at the pulpit and makes gentle flourishes with his hands. The pulpit is made of pine, carved with a large flower and several smaller flowers, which might also be four-petaled crosses. Asa always wonders if a woman made it. Halling comes down from New Bern a few times a year; mostly, they listen to vestrymen or sing songs amongst themselves. The congregation has been halved in recent years. Instead of gathering at the front, they keep their family seats, the spaces between them widening. Halling reminds the listeners what it is to be Episcopalian, that it is merely Anglicanism without the thrall to monarchy. A few women fidget in the pews. A child sneezes and then begins to cry, so Halling shifts to a hymn. The people stand, and those who earn their living by the sea rub their woolen vests. They blush to hear the sound of their own voices.

      During the hymns, Asa always hears his absent daughter. The clarity of her tone once reminded him of his wickedness. He is one of the men who comes to church to punish himself, though of course there is pleasure in this penance. When he glances down at his granddaughter, she seems like a stranger.

      After the parishioners have offered prayer and been exhorted to goodness and donation, the Reverend Dr. Halling stands on the sagging steps and shakes their hands. On this Sunday, Asa gives him a half pound for the new church and pushes Tabitha forward to shake his hand. Though new to the parish, the minister is worn, with graying locks frizzed around his shoulders and dull brown eyes. He was a surgeon during the war, and after the piecing together of men’s bodies, the care of their souls has finally tired him. When he smiles, his teeth catch on his lip, so he is ever adjusting his mouth to bring it to stasis.

      “My granddaughter,” Asa says, his hand tight on her shoulder. Tabitha wipes her palms on her dress. “She and her father are wayward in faith.”

      Halling nods. “Has she her own hymnal?” He slips back into the church, upsetting a flock of older women who croon after him, and in a few moments returns with a tattered brown book and hands it to Asa. “Mostly Watts,” he says.

      “I fear I am her only guidance,” Asa says.

      Halling shakes his head and holds his hand out flat, palm up. “You forget the Lord.” He turns back to the crowd, which is still absorbing the presence of ordination.

      Tab pulls on her grandfather’s hand. The tides are rolling out, and she can smell the fishermen’s catch, can hear the gasping holes the crabs make in the sand.

      Asa holds the book on the walk home, wondering about the rightness of letting a heathen child possess the word of God. Where is the purpose in watering fallow fields? He wishes there was a minister year-round. His God is a fickle one, and Asa does not always comprehend the trajectories of the lives around him. He looks only for evidence of justice. He looks for reasons why he has been so punished.

      In the summer of 1783, his daughter, Helen, returned to him after a year of dissipation. She had been seduced by John, a common soldier, married without her father’s blessing, abandoned her inheritance to set sail with the soldier on a black-flagged ship, and had come home with a belly full of child. Asa waited for God’s fist to fall on her husband. As John built new shelves in the merchant’s store in which he had purchased a share, Asa waited for the hammer to slip and strike John’s hand, the board to crack upon his head. During August storms when John and Helen would stand by the water, arms entwined, bodies warm for each other, Asa waited for the swells to pull John in, leaving his daughter alone on the shore. He wanted her back, untouched. He watched as they fixed up the house left to them by John’s cousin, painting it fresh white, filling it with oddments from the sea, tilling the grit outside for potatoes and corn. He never saw them sad or thoughtful. Their joy was the devil’s mark.

      When her time came in October, a storm swept in from the southeast and whipped up the waves. Asa wanted to carry his daughter inland for the birth, to protect her among the trees, but she clung to the house she and John had adorned. If her child was going to know the world, she wanted it to know all, the gale and breeze alike. Despite Helen’s requests, Asa refused to pray for her. He had prayed for his own wife during a similar storm, during the same mortal passage, and she had been taken. He could not pray again, not in the same way. But he came to her when she began to labor, and he waited with her, as he had not waited with his wife, and the whole scene was a mirror to him, as if God was showing him what he missed the first time.

      He and John carried water for the midwife, tore scraps of linen, carried more water. They did not speak, and when John reached for his arm, Asa pulled away. Neither man should have been a witness, but Asa insisted; he would no longer let women control this moment. They stood in the corner of the room with their arms crossed, eyes on the floor. Looking over the shoulder of the midwife, whose hands were busy with cloth and water and touch, Helen begged her father to tell her if this was how it usually happened, and whether her mother had felt this way. She was a child again, and needed his voice. He nodded and said everything was just as it should be, though he had not seen his wife in labor and wouldn’t know what was ordinary, but yes, no reason to worry, and surely Helen had the strength for it. But she was not listening.

      As the storm tunneled through the streets of Beaufort, an infant arrived: red and angry and screaming over the howls of wind. The midwife placed the child in a basket while she pressed vinegar rags to the mother’s wounds. John and Asa stood beyond the cast of candlelight, staring at the weeds of hair pressed against Helen’s white cheeks, listening to the thinness of her breaths. She began to weep.

      Asa left in the morning, after the squall had blown away north, and took his daughter’s body with him. He said he would come back for the living child.

      When Asa goes to church, he carries a list of sins in his heart, waiting for forgiveness.

      Summer blends into fall. Yellow warblers and flocks of bobolinks arrive on the salt marshes, and sandpipers poke along the mudflats, watching for holes. In the forests around Beaufort, the sumacs turn fiery red, and the wild grapes grow purple and fat. By October, the evenings are finally cool.

      Tab cannot sleep the night before her tenth birthday. She has a rasp in her throat that feels like dry biscuits. Kneeling instead by the window, wrapped in her mother’s shawl, she traces patterns in the stars, fingering out dogs and chariots on the frosting pane, her chin propped on the sill. She closes her eyes only to imagine the model ship that might appear wrapped in brown paper at dawn. It has three masts and is made of thin paneling stained nut brown. Its sails are coarse linen, and a tiny wheel spins behind the mizzen-mast. Netting hangs along its decks. On the starboard side, a small trapdoor is cut into the planks that you can lift and peer through into the hold. She would fill its empty belly with detritus. Acorns, feathers, moss. She saw it in a shop in New Bern on their last visit there to purchase fabric for the store. Tab made a point of standing still before the window until her father, strides ahead, missed her and turned.

      “Ships, eh?” he said, and tugged gently at the back collar of her dress.

      “Tell me something again,” she said, and as they walked away from the shining toy boat, he began another tale about her mother, and she knew that he had known, that he had seen the want in her eyes and