Free The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel by Katy Simpson Smith Page B

congregants are surprised. She leads them in a carol, which she sings partially in Latin to impress her audience. They mumble along. Her fervor is surely contagious. When the slaves can no longer keep the fire, they leave, and Helen counts it a good day. Souls are always ripe for saving.
    In the evening Moll dresses her in green silk for a neighbor’s Christmas ball, where she is always the youngest one invited. The other girls her age wear plain white and have no hand in plantation management. They have two parents kissing them to sleep at night, long before Helen is in bed.
    Moll asks if she can come, and Helen slaps her on the bottom. In the ensuing chase, a silk sleeve is torn, and Mrs. Randolph sews it up by candlelight before the carriage comes. Moll eats an iced cookie and under the table kicks Helen, whose arm is pinned to inaction by Mrs. Randolph’s needle.
    Miss Kingston is at the ball in taffeta, and the teacher and student dance together, pausing for breath beneath a mistletoe. The woman, blushing, kisses Helen on the forehead.
    That night, curled together like cats, Helen tells Moll that when she’s a lady, there won’t be room for a slave in her bed. Miss Kingston is dancing through her head, the ghost of her mother behind her, keeping time.
    “When’ll that be?” Moll asks. Her eyes are closed and she has already drifted in and out of a dream.
    “Very soon, I should think.”
    In 1778, Helen is sixteen. Asa now spends weeks at a time in New Bern, waiting for the British, too awkward to wield a musket, too proud to hide at home. His involvement in the Provincial Congresses doomed him to patriotism, though his inclinations are entirely loyalist. The turpentine business is prospering with his daughter looking after the books; she has inherited his interest in precision. In the airy hall of government, he half-listens to the arguments for new levies and fixes his gaze beyond the windows overlooking a grove of blooming dogwood. Asa imagines a governorship, if these efforts on the part of young men are not in vain, or some permanent post that caters to his penchant for organization and control. Perhaps he will lay roads from Wilmington to the back woods, from the coast to the Cherokees’ rocky outcrops.
    Arrangements for Helen must be made soon. When the younger delegates propose further military engagements, Asa recommends simplicity and speed. The war interrupts stability. In Beaufort alone, most of the marriageable men are absent. The town is becoming a macrocosm of Long Ridge. When he returns home during recesses, he seems to trespass on a woman’s world. The solution for his daughter’s slave is more straightforward: Cogdell, his rice-growing neighbor, has a young man, skilled, who requires some discipline. The man had been corrected once after an incipient plot but was not counted dangerous enough to outweigh his usefulness in smithing. There is nothing to settle a man like a woman. A match will also fetter Moll, who because of Helen’s sporadic indulgences is becoming willful.
    He closes his eyes against the filtering sun. As he ages, he finds his body resting more, and his mind taking longer walks. Here he usually finds his wife again. Shapeless, still, silent. Her chaos muted. The strongest image he has of her is the last. He was kept from the birthing room, or rather, he kept himself, and spent the afternoon picking apples from the back garden so the wind wouldn’t toss them against the house. The sky was low and gray and the birds had mostly vanished. A butterfly still fluttered in the banks of sage, its orange lighting the dimness. He could hear waves crashing into the marsh. The slaves had disappeared from the pine groves. In the absence of their chatter and the crying of seabirds, Asa caught the first high whine of his daughter, the first of his children to live past infancy and the last to be born. They had been married four years, and two children had come and slipped away before he felt