The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson
“Oh, that’s just time’ll do it. Not to worry, your ladyship. Rest up, and I’ll be sending the broth in with your father.” He lifts his leaning body from her hammock and sends it swaying again. “Cheer up, miss. I’ve cured half the men I haven’t killed.”
When John returns to the cabin, his hands blistered and his lower back pinched, Tab is awake and silent in the dark. Below her hammock spreads a small puddle of vomit. He places one hand on her forehead and closes his eyes.
“This is not dying, is it?” she asks.
He pulls away from her, lights a candle, finds an old cloth among the piles of oddments in the cabin, and wipes up the traces of her sickness. “There is no sun you’ll not see. How’s that for a promise?”
He fetches her broth from the mess table and spoons it from the tin bowl into her mouth, which is a lurid pink.
“What will we see on the islands?” she asks.
John begins again his list of wonders: elephants, he promises, and cinnamon. The landscapes she hasn’t seen are the ones that buoy her.
The room is close and warm, lit by the candle that wavers on a shelf. Shadows are larger than objects. A curl of Tab’s hair springing free of her sweated face makes a snaking sea monster on the wall. In their quiet, they can hear the clanking of mugs from the mess, the bursts of profane humor, the endless wash of the ocean.
“Did you tell Grandfather?”
John considers. He’d left the letter next to Helen’s miniature in the parlor, where Asa would notice it. The older man always sought out the little painting on his visits, holding it when he could. He had a possessiveness in him that encompassed his house, his land, his women. And whatever didn’t belong to him belonged to God. Asa would be happy to have the girl in heaven, might consider it safer than Beaufort, but John has no such faith. He could not leave his daughter’s body with a man who would not mind it, whose vision of God implied the reclamation of his flock. John believes in flesh. His love survives no transubstantiation.
A seaman has found his fiddle and is setting a simple meter for a few drunken dancers. Soon John is due at his post on the bow, watching the stars again and searching for motion in darkness. Before he’d met Helen, in amongst stints of pirating, he had spent a year on a whaler and learned the smallest undulations of the sea, the telltale kick of spray from idle waves, an underwater hum. Here he must look for nothing but other masts. He leaves Tab’s unfinished broth on a shelf and eats his own tack and lime. Her eyes have closed, and he rests his fingers on her cheek once more. Her face has slipped into a fevered sheath. Her shift is damp. The loose curl still stands away from her forehead, trembling in the thin breeze that sneaks in through the cabin window. He kisses her and leaves her, without what the faithful would call hope.
On deck he meets Blue Francis, the ship’s surgeon, who asks after his daughter. John thanks him for looking in on her. The doctor smiles and shakes his shaggy head. “If women be the sailors’ bane, then I think the young of them be treasures. Little ones are the lights that ease our blackness, a’n’t they?”
From the mast, John sees nothing. The waves near the ship are yellow-tipped from the candles burning, the ones farther out are silver. He knows there are bodies beneath him. Below the lip of ocean swim schools of mackerel and drum, below them the whales, dipping to find their feed, and below them all the unnameables, the serpents, the kraken, the giant conger. What he has learned of the Bible are the bits Asa recited to him and the pieces that the sailors tell, the story of Job’s Leviathan, who maketh the sea like a pot of ointment, who maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. John sees the monster’s frost spread across the water, the unknown of it, the lurking danger universal.
When he was young, John thought the night gave cover to those who would steal him from his bed, who would select him as a prize from the sprawl of cousins he slept among. At night, the shadows pooled and left no inch uncovered. Only when he took to sea did he find the light again, collected as it was in concentrated smears on the sky and water, capping and puncturing the dark. He had taught Tabitha to see this. He had taken her to the marshes in the evenings so she could amend her sight, could watch the sun fade and reconstitute. Now she seems afraid of nothing.
After a burst of laughter from the sailors’ bunks, a loud report issues from the stern. The quartermaster is knocking about. These men seem far beyond John’s scope. Though once as rowdy and unconcerned as the petty officers, he now finds himself circling around a single set of images—child, God, woman, home—his duty never easing.
The sea air that opens lungs is the same that chafes the skin to scales. There is no version of this play in which he has done right. He has chosen rashly, and the fading stars remind him of the home to which they all will go, whether he professes faith or not. There Helen, if she waits anywhere, is waiting for her daughter.
A loud stirring of sailors and buckets and hauled rope wakes Tab. The sun already washes in through the window over the shelves and barrels and John’s empty corner berth. She feels weak, but also hungry. Her muscles that had clenched into resistance have eased again, and she is moved, emotionally, by the desire to stand. In attempting to untangle herself from the tight hold of the hammock, she tumbles to the floor, catching herself with pudding arms. There is no vomit here from the night before. She sits on the planks until her vision clears, then stands like a calf. The ship’s rocking is unfamiliar to her feet, and she grasps the rope of her bed to steady herself. There is no mirror in the cabin, but, trading hands on the rope to keep her balance, she takes down her hair and smooths it back into its wrinkled ribbon. Her legs sway. The breaking of the fever has made her giddy. She loses hope for her appearance, but there are none here but unkempt seamen; if she wishes to join their company, a little dirt will not prevent her. She pushes the cabin door open and slides down a short passageway past the captain’s room and up three steps into a glory of sunlight and ocean. She is a captive, the slave of notorious buccaneers, the masthead for a ship of villains. Her lungs take in the salt and spray of liberty.
The decks are alive with men and movement, sails snapping and lines pulled and tied, figures climbing masts, the sea bouncing the ship on an endless, landless plane beneath a rounded sky. This is what a proper town should look like, an upturned anthill of activity. She steps into the motion and weaves slowly among the men at their business. Seagulls churn in their wake. Every wave seems to break over a fish’s back. Tab is light-headed but certain that she can now do anything with her body. What had kept her father so long from these ragged perfect men? From their house in Beaufort, all they could see was sand and marsh and a still and silent sea. Here, on the Fanny and Betsy, even the ocean is a riot.
She balances against the mizzen-mast. Over the crack of the wind-taut sails, the men are singing. She laces her fingers into the rigging. A whistle draws her attention skyward, and she spies a sailor perched on a spar between the main sails and the topsails, his legs dangling like a child’s. He waves down at Tab, and she rises on her toes in her enthusiasm to respond.
A seaman wrapping lines by the starboard shrouds calls out, “Johnny, your miss is loose and about!”
Her father comes loping from the bow, swings her by the waist, and sets her three feet from the mast, where, without the wood to clutch, she falters. He grabs her arm to steady her.
“What business have you on your feet, Tab?” John feels her forehead.
“I feel a hundred times improved,” she says, and clings to his coat. “Have you seen the ship? Have you been everywhere?”
“I’ll carry you back to the cabin and have the doctor look in. You need rest still.” John wraps his arm around her back. “It’ll be here when you’re all well. I’m the one must answer for your health.”
Back in the dark cabin, bunched in her hammock, Tab lets Blue Francis poke at her ribs and glance behind her ears. “Seems the welts have whiled themselves away.”
“Never had welts,” Tab says.
“Little ladies don’t care for the welts. They leave