The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

when he moves, takes the shape of her father. One of them says, “We can only wait now,” and the other three men nod.

      John leads the doctor out, and Asa brings the vestryman closer. He does not speak clearly, but she thinks he is blessing her. Though ten years old, she feels very young and is wise enough to know that death only comes to mothers, and this she plans never to be. When she blinks, the vestryman is soaked, as though her grandfather rescued him from the sea, and the marsh grasses cling to his bald skull. His eyes are the sockets of a pecked-out butterfish. His wrists end in squids. When she opens her eyes again, the room is black and empty. Her pillow is damp, and her knees ache. She pulls her legs to her chest to stretch them and in this ball of pain, she rolls herself to her floor. She knows the thud will wake her father, but from here she can see the moon, pulling and pushing the ocean, kneading it along the shore. She hears its voices and is calm on the coolness of the boards.

      When John appears in the doorway, she asks him to leave her where she is.

      When the sun rises, they are both on the bedroom floor. Tab is dreaming of underwater. She wakes and remembers all the hurt, which pierces her back and knees and makes her muscles quiver and her stomach riot. She crawls downstairs and into the remnants of her mother’s garden and heaves blood again.

      Asa finds her here, curled around a cabbage rose.

      In bed again, wrapped in quilts too heavy to slip from, Tabitha hears the men below. She feels as if she is fainting, though she knows that if she were, she wouldn’t be able to tell. In the spaces between knowing and not knowing, she sees her mother sitting on the side of the bed, a leg swinging below the mattress. Tab knows one of them must be ten years old. They both have dark curls twisted up and away from pale faces. Her mother’s eyes are green, and Tab thinks her own are brown. Her mother’s dress is white and thin. She reaches out for it, but her fingers are weighed down by the quilt. Her mother is not smiling; if this were a dream, her mother would be smiling, so this must be real. When she moves her eyes, her head spasms, so she closes them and enjoys the feel of her mother’s weight on the side of her bed.

      “She’ll be better cared for at Long Ridge,” Asa says. Asa named his turpentine plantation after his own wife died in giving birth and a farmer told him land unnamed brought the devil walking. It lies a mile east of town, a white house planted between acres of pines to the north and a lawn that slopes south to the water. A white house in the midst of nothing.

      “She stays.” John is not looking at Asa but at the waving rushes on the shore below town. They toss around and tell you nothing of the wind’s direction.

      On the sofa, Asa crosses a knee and lets his hand fall on the side table, which holds remnants of his daughter’s life. A pincushion, a hair catch, a miniature on ivory that he once thought was being painted for him, before he knew his daughter had fallen in love. With his thumb, he presses the pins in to their heads. “I do this for the child, you understand,” he says. “I have no intent to punish you.”

      John turns from the window and listens for any upstairs sound. “It wasn’t the sea that killed Helen.”

      “No,” Asa says, “but it was you, and that amounts to the same.” He knows this isn’t true as he is saying it, but it feels good to cause pain, and it isn’t wholly false.

      “Then despise Tab too.” John walks to the side table and places a finger on the pincushion so that Asa draws his hand back into his lap. “You are welcome to stay, but my daughter will be with me. Dr. Yarborough is tending her, and if there’s any danger, it will be the same there as it is here.”

      Asa stands. “And what of your daughter’s soul? Will you let her go to the next world without a minister present?” He almost says, Won’t you pray for her? In blaming John, he is only blaming himself.

      John pauses at the stairs, his back to Asa. “Tab isn’t going anywhere. And if their souls are what they live on by, then I am in keeping of them.”

      Mrs. Foushee comes with a lemon cake, but she doesn’t ask to see the girl. John guides her to the parlor, where she sits and waits politely until John stands again and fetches a knife and two plates. She cuts thick slices.

      “You know how much I care for your family,” she says. Before she married, Mrs. Foushee had taught Helen her letters. Though the teacher had left her stamp on most of Beaufort’s youth, she and Helen had been close. She had supported John’s cause when they were first courting. But like Helen’s other friends, she has drifted away since Helen’s death. She is thinking of this now, looking around the messy parlor. “I’ve tried to keep an eye on Tabitha, but she’s an independent sort, isn’t she? I don’t mean to neglect her, or you, certainly. I’m sure you’ll let me know if there’s any way I can be of service. If the girl needs some womanly guidance.” She has finished her slice and eyes the rest of the lemon cake on the side table.

      John asks if she’d like some more.

      “I couldn’t possibly. It’s really for Tabitha, bless her. You know girls this age are always getting ill—I think it’s part of growing. Soon she’ll fill out into quite a lady, you’ll see.” As though she were brushing away crumbs, Mrs. Foushee smooths her own ample sides, demonstrating what exactly a woman looks like. “Her mother was the same. Little complaints.” Despite having a husband at home, she harbors an affection for the young men of the town that is not entirely maternal. She misses the men who were garrisoned in Beaufort during the war—William Dennis, Daniel Foot, Colonel Easton—and who have set up lives in more prosperous places. Of all the soldiers, John is the only one who stayed. Loss has a way of paralyzing even the brave. She reaches out now and pats his knee. “We’ll see her through it, don’t worry yourself.”

      When she leaves, John is grateful for the quiet. In the first few years after Helen’s death, he thought he might be lonely, but Tab is all he wants in the way of company. He carries a slice of cake upstairs, but his daughter is sleeping, her mouth open.

      Yarborough returns in the afternoon and places his cool hands on the girl’s body. She is asleep again, though there is no restfulness about her. John sits on a rush-bottomed chair in the corner and watches the doctor’s face. Yarborough opens her mouth, looks at her tongue. He peels back her eyelids, which are still and pliant. He rubs his fingers along the pale insides of her arms, looking for the blood within. He examines her as a child picks at his supper, knowing already what is there.

      When the doctor turns, John is shaking his head. “Yellow fever,” Yarborough says. “She may improve. The likelihood, indeed, is that she will improve. But the danger is in the lapsing. Steady rest, fluids, quiet.”

      “Nothing to be done?” John asks.

      “Prayer,” the doctor says. “The minister from New Bern returns on his circuit tomorrow. You might have him stop in with a word.”

      John is left alone in his daughter’s bedroom. He remembers being her age, being God-loving and prayerful. Believing in a goodness without end, and wrath for the undeserving. Even aboard ship, his cannon pointed at another crew, his sins could be laundered. But in the birthing of his child, he had forgotten to call out to the Lord. He only saw his wife, her belly, his infant. And without his prayers, she had been taken. This began his acquaintance with God as a vengeful child who, if ignored, will snatch his favorite toy away. So John offered him nothing. Unable to blame his daughter, he understood that God was the only one left to punish.

      John had let Asa bury Helen in the churchyard, but the stone wings above her name seemed to him a mark of God’s victory. No more kin of his would find their rest there. He was only happy, Helen was only whole and well, on the open ocean. It was land that killed, not sea.

      When Tabitha wakes, John cannot go to her for fear. “Will you take something?” he says. “Broth?” She moves her head once, as if to shake it. “Yarborough says you will be climbing trees tomorrow.” He stands and then sits again, his head in his hands, his fingers feeling at the roots of his hair. He looks at the grain in the floor of the house that he did not build but occupies.

      Tab only sees a shape moving in distress.

      “Would