of ivory. She will help her father build a house there, and everything she does will be an echo of her mother, so John will be content again. This is the life he was meant for, the life Tab had kept him from. Women, with their death, with their birthings, are not fit sailors. But Tab fixes a bargain, neither to die nor to beget life, and she asks the God of her grandfather to witness. Asa had always told her that if she was good, God would be her final home, and though he described it dully, he said her mother was waiting there. Tab is not sure whether she is good, but she knows that in her old home her father was restless, unhappy, wearied. Nothing grew on that shore but Mrs. Foushee and the church, and the ghost of a mother who would always every day be newly dead.
In her corner between the barrels, Tab tells God she will be good, that she will seek adventure and so redeem her mother’s absence, and in that moment with the sun on her face like a warm hand, she chooses to believe in his promise of everlasting life. To seal the compact, Tab sings one of Asa’s hymns. She sees John by the foremast siphoning powder into small kegs, and though she cannot see him smiling, she knows that he is joyous here, and free.
John labors with new gaiety. His daughter has sprung to life, a fever victim become a child again. He knows that yellow fever always has this pause, this reprieve that leads loved ones to hope, and that afterward the patients are either well or dead. But seeing her body in motion, her legs fumbling across the swaying deck, he swallows hope and lets it burn inside him. He pulled his daughter from the godly quicksand of Beaufort and now, in the clear and open air, he has saved her. He has done for the child what he could not do for the mother. A peace settles on him as he packs the powder kegs and carries them below to the gun deck. This ship is a haven, and even amongst two dozen of the roughest men he has no fear for his daughter. She is less a woman than a thin angel, the specter of her departed mother.
As an unpaid seaman on board a black-flagged sloop with no purpose but idle raids, John has few duties. He scrubs the weather deck, coils lines, sometimes climbs the shrouds to tie the mainsail, though never the topsails, which are another man’s province. He tidies the berths below the forecastle deck, where the rest of the sailors sleep, and lends aid to the cook, who has no mate. They apportion the dried meat and barley, the malt and the limes; they ration the rum. John has hardly spoken to Frith since they embarked, though only a thin wall of boards separates their cabins on the quarterdeck.
He takes on some tasks only to keep his hands busy, so that he’s not caught dancing with his daughter from foremast to mizzen-mast. After the powder kegs are safe below, he tends to the loose seams between the planks on deck, finding cotton and oakum in the stores and caulking the gaps with fibers and tar. This is a job done sitting down, and requires nothing but pressing hands and a little brush. He should be doing this when the ship is docked and dry and the wood has shrunk, but his fingers need a duty. Here, crouched near the bowsprit, he can look back on the expanse of the Fanny and Betsy and observe the small colony of men and the ten-year-old girl, who is sneaking between laboring groups and bending down to catch at what John assumes must be treasure. The sight of her, and her curious hands, brings back John’s wife. She was the first to know which objects mattered.
Years ago, he and Helen and the smallest version of Tab were on just such a ship. His wife’s belly was growing into a little drum. He asked what sort of mother she would be, and she asked what sort of father, and they laughed, having no guides. The ship was heading north again for home, laden with stolen goods, but that day, in the blue and gold of summer, they were docked at Antigua. The sailors were in town, some spending coins on women, others spending them on trinkets for the women they left behind: carved coconuts, painted bowls, bones. They would sail the next morning, the captain believing that one could outrun the diseases that thrived in the Indies.
In the cabin they shared, not six feet wide and with one hammock hung above the other, the afternoon glowed on the walls. Helen had pulled him here when the men filed off the ship. He asked didn’t she want to see Antigua, and she had kissed him, and he said no, he didn’t either. This cabin was Helen’s refuge when the ship engaged with trade boats on the ocean; even though they were rarely in danger, she was still shy of criminality.
“Come see,” she said, her hand tight around his arm.
Her open face reminded him of childhood. There was a song the boys would tease the girls with. “Be kind, my love, be kind,” he said, “and you shall ever find—”
“That a long, long absence can’t alter my mind.” She smiled.
They both were children once; and here she was, with child.
She made him sit cross-legged on the floor. Her dark hair had glints of bronze. She took a box with a metal clasp from the shelf and sat before him, the bare soles of her feet pressed together, her stomach a little ball beneath her skirts. He reached to touch her.
She held up her hand. “I wanted to show you,” she said.
Helen pulled from the box a series of strange objects—strange not because they were uncommon but because they had found their way into a box, gathered by a single hand. She first held out the button, taken from his coat when she was mending it, and then the glass rubbed smooth from Grenada. A musket ball. Three inches of frayed rope from when the lines were trimmed. He laughed at the pit of a plum.
“You kissed me with the fruit still in your mouth,” she said. He had not remembered.
These were her treasures, the bits of life she collected to remind herself of life, the tokens of experience. Her story of land and sea. He had wondered what she needed them for, what eventuality she was predicting.
She lined them up on the wooden floor, in order of size. He held his arms open, and she crawled into him, the two—or three—of them in a tight knot. He kissed her ears and said there was no need for memory, that’s how much he loved her. She tucked her head into his neck.
A sailor stopped by with fresh baked fish from shore, and they squeezed into one hammock and ate the fish with their fingers, and he put his head on her stomach and listened, and she watched the row of treasures march from the brass bell down to the tiny broken pearl, and the light slipped down the window and faded into the ocean, and the boisterous noise of men on land accompanied their sleep.
He is careful now not to forget things.
He tamps another line of oakum into a seam. This world is blue and brown and white. The sky and water with their indeterminate shades of paleness and depth reflect only each other. This is the purity that existed for him and Helen, and here it is again, just waiting to be taken up.
At dusk, he finds Tabitha spidered onto the web of ratlines and pries her off, a laughing bundle. They gather with the others at the mess table and John helps the cook serve another stew and heels of bread. When the meal is doled out, he sits Tab down and with his body shields her from most of the men’s wildness. Other than the ship surgeon, they’ve developed no particular fondness for the girl and find her little different from an indentured boy too young for whiskers, and of even less use. Their language is not tempered in her presence.
Blue Francis bangs his mug on the table twice. “If it’s ghosts you’re after,” he says in a hoarse voice, and the others roll their eyes and blow through their lips, adjusting themselves for a long tale, bound to be false. “Listen, listen,” he says. The curve of his back rises higher than his shoulders, and he leans into the table with his arms spread out on the grease-spotted wood.
John interrupts him. “Nothing bloody, Frank. You forget the young ones.” He keeps one hand on his daughter’s back while he sops up the rest of his stew.
The doctor winks at Tab and turns back to his audience. “It were on the Bonny Jane some score years ago, in the—”
