The Story of Land and Sea. Katy Smith Simpson

and there’s no stopping the smell of her.” Frith places a hand on John’s back as brief as a lighting fly.

      “Condolences,” he says. He steps among the lines and begins giving orders for the day.

      Blue Francis turns and whispers to John. “You want to get her safe home?”

      John glances at him, his hand still rubbing the stern rail.

      “My grandmother had to mind a body once, back when she and my aunt, just young enough to walk, were taken by Indians. They scalped Aunty in no time, they did, and said my grandmother was plenty welcome to stay and find herself a family and pass the corn, but there was my grandmother wailing for the loss. The Indians being plenty obliging gave her a pot to pickle her in. With the last of the British coins she had on her, she bought drink off the Indians and filled the pot high and kept the little miss, my aunty, for three years before her husband’s brother found where she was hiding and carried her and the pot off too, and they married, paying no mind at all to my grandfather, and lived happy and had my mother and all the rest.” Blue Francis turns back to the listing wheel. “Rum’s kept below.”

      John sleeps on the floor below his daughter in the hammock, on the boards stained with her illness. The soaked blanket brought to cool her is still in a wet heap in the corner. In this new life in which nothing is left to him, he is hounded by God. This god is a storm that requires settling, and he cannot think of what would calm it other than relinquishing Tabitha, consecrating his daughter in God’s name. Peace has eluded him since he watched Helen’s body taken away by his father-in-law without his consent, and there is nothing for it now but to believe in his own insignificance, to cast his lot to the gale and let his body be washed over, purified. His sin was in clinging to his wife and daughter as his own. But they are gone, and that is done. He lets go of the sail, watches it fly into the storm’s wind.