“There’s no place free, ’cept in here.” He tapped his skull.
“Do you stay free in here”—she tapped her skull—“with rum?”
“Rum, women, and never fear death. Fear death, the sea smells it and comes to take you. Beyond that, you brook the bad tongue of no man and stick your neck out for none.”
“You stuck your neck out for Jacob and Dorothea. You may be more principled than you let on.”
“Heman made me mad.” Isaac adjusted the heading a bit, with nothing more than a small, skillful movement of his thumbs. “I did it to make Heman mad.”
“I suppose we could call that a principle.”
Isaac grunted. “There’s many a principled man on the sea. But the sea takes principled men just like it takes the rest of us.”
Scores of running lights dotted the sea around them; scores of vessels carried the commerce of New England on the endless black highway of night. A great going and coming of lights, a north and south passage of lumber and fish, cotton and rum, tanning arsenic and hemp, gingham and steel gears, a silent waltz of lights, a dance to the richness of America. Some of the lights coasted close, but most remained no more than distant stars, and no more interested than the stars in the cargo of this little sloop.
Yet none of them, thought Nancy, carried the future as surely as they did, and it cried out an hour later, in the voice of Dorothea, daughter of slaves who would be mother to a free man.
Nancy thought the first muffled noise was merely a sleep sound, the dreaming whimper of one whose mind still lived under the lash. Then she heard it again and hurried into the forecastle.
“Miz Nancy? Is that you Miz Nancy? I’m a-scared.”
Nancy took her hand, said the appropriate words, and asked the appropriate questions. Then Jacob rolled from the deepest slumber he had known in months.
Nancy heard the whistling of his axe a moment before it struck. She ducked, and it sliced off the top of her bun.
Axe in hand yet still asleep, Jacob jumped up to protect his wife, struck his head on the bulkhead and collapsed.
The night passed quickly, especially for Jacob.
The ocean, lead gray in the hour before dawn, came pink with life. The sun appeared on a horizon as sharp and cloudless as honesty itself. The sea rose and fell with the rhythm of the ages. And the birth pains drew closer together.
Nancy stayed with Dorothea, held her hand, mopped her brow, and timed the pains. When they came, she put the leather strap between Dorothea’s teeth and told her what a beautiful day was rising to greet her baby.
Dorothea said, strangely, that she prayed the night would be as kind.
On deck, Jacob studied the lettering on the axe, balanced it in his hands, polished it with his sleeve, spun it on the deck and watched it fall, polished it again.
“You’re like to wear that thing out,” said Sam.
“I so jumpy, I nearly kill Miz Nancy with it.”
Isaac laughed. “Don’t worry ’bout that. Ruthie’ll use the hair you cut off to make a wreath, a freedom wreath.”
From the forecastle came another scream.
“Easy, lad.” Sam pressed a hand on Jacob’s shoulder.
“Yes, yes,” said Isaac, “nothin’ for us men to do but keep the Nancy on course.”
“Mebbe they is.” Jacob looked Sam in the eye. “If’n you a real sea cap’n, I mean.”
“I got you through the Slew, didn’t I?”
Jacob slipped the axe into the length of rope that held up his pants, planted both feet on deck, and announced, “We wants to be married.”
“I don’t think Sam’s that kind of cap’n,” said Isaac.
“I damn right well am. If this boy—”
“Man!” said Jacob.
“If this man wants me to hitch him, then I’m proud to be asked.”
From the sea bag in his cabin, Sam took the ancient silk vest, which he had put away thirty-five years ago. He smoothed it over his bony chest and patted each determined, furious, passionate dragon in turn. Then he took the Bible and led the men to the forecastle. He was now closer to forgiveness than ever he had been.
First, he read: “ ‘If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become a soundin’ brass or a clangin’ cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and have all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothin’.’ ”
After another pain had passed, he told Jacob to kneel and take Dorothea’s hand. He promised to speak quickly, as the pains were not more than three minutes apart. He had never performed a marriage ceremony and had seldom heard one, in that his glowering presence was rarely welcomed at Cape Cod weddings. But he smoothed his vest and administered as fine an oath as any of them had ever heard.
He asked Jacob and Dorothea if they loved each other. They said yes. He asked if they loved each other enough to live through the good days and the gales, the doldrums and the freshening breezes. They said yes.
Then he asked, “Does each of you promise to help the other find the Drinkin’ Gourd when he’s thirsty or lost?”
And they said yes, as though they understood exactly what he meant.
“All right, then, by the power vested in me by the sea god Neptune, the real god Christ, and the dragons on this here vest, I now say you’re man and wife.”
Dorothea let out the loudest scream yet.
But there was one more matter. A couple needed a last name. Jacob and Dorothea had tried Hilyard, Rains, and Bigelow, and decided those names were already worn proudly by others. So they said they were going to take a first name as their last name: Nancy.
“Boats get named for people.” Isaac laughed. “Not the other way ’round.”
“They’re takin’ the name of a lady, not a boat,” said Sam. “Seems to me a man ought to be able to call himself whatever he wants so long as there’s honor in it, and there’s honor in Miz Nancy, for all she’s done.”
Nancy was touched and yet a touch embarrassed. “My mother always had a little name for me, and it might sound better. She called me Nance.”
Jacob and Dorothea tried on the name and declared it the best they had heard. Then Dorothea screamed again, and Nancy ordered the men outside. “This is a female time. Just stand by and wait.”
A half hour later, the forecastle door swung open, Nancy cried out that it was a boy with all his fingers and toes, and the forecastle door slammed shut.
“A free citizen of the open sea,” exulted Sam Hilyard, pulling a bottle of brandy from a sea chest. “To the father.”
Jacob drank, and looked into the eyes of each of them, as though he understood the significance of a simple fact—if a man drank with you, he took you as an equal. He swallowed, then passed the brandy to Isaac, who honored him further by not wiping the neck of the bottle before drinking.
In the cabin, Nancy took the child and bathed it in warm water. Her hands were shaking and she felt giddy from the excitement. But she willed herself to be calm, a force of confident experience.
“You can’t let a man see a baby all covered with cheese and afterbirth. He’d never understand.”
“Is he beautiful?”
“The most beautiful baby that ever was.” She wrapped the child up tight in several layers of blanket and gave him to his mother.
“He sure cryin’ a lot.”
“He wants your breast, dear. Give him your breast.”
“Can I see his eyes?”
“Give him your breast first,” Nancy urged gently, and she guided the tiny face toward the nipple. “Let his mouth find it, and he’ll do the rest.”
Dorothea made a soft, almost passionate sound. “It feel strange… nice.”
“It’s supposed to,” said Nancy. “It’s what God wanted.”
Dorothea watched for a time, her face a mask of calm. Then the little sloop struck a wave and rolled, first to starboard, then to port. When she righted herself, the look of calm had
left Dorothea’s face. She seemed again filled with the fright that a good birth was meant to relieve.
“What’s wrong?” asked Nancy.
“His eyes. What color his eyes?”
“Why, they’ve been mostly closed, but brown, I imagine. That’s if they have any color at all.”
Dorothea looked down at the tiny coffee-colored face. “I gots to know.” She pushed him from her breast, ignoring his hungry squawk, and pulled back one of his eyelids.
On the deck, Jacob nervously plucked the brandy bottle from Isaac and took another long drink. “I gots to see him.”
Sam had heard about niggers and drink, and he wanted nothing to spoil this day. So he took the axe from Jacob’s belt and held it up as though it were the sword of an Arthurian knight. “Jake, where you’re goin’, there’ll be tall trees, whales to flense, and maybe—if you’re as good a carpenter as your wife says—things to build. Receive this from me as the first tool in a new life.”
Jacob studied it as if for the first time. “ ’Tain’t as good as a hammer or a saw, but it’s somethin’, and no white man never give me nothin’ afore.”
Soon Nancy let him in to see the child, and if anything could equal the expansiveness of the sea around them, it was the pride of a new father about to see his son.
Nancy closed the door and came to the helm.
“Samuel Isaac Nance,” said Sam. “It’s a grand day.”
“I smell brandy,” said Nancy. “I’d appreciate a taste.”
Isaac took a sip for himself and handed the bottle to Nancy. “There somethin’ wrong?”
The forecastle door smashed open and Jacob lurched out, as if trying to escape. He came toward them, then turned and hurried forward, shaking his head, looking at the sky in an attitude of unendurable pain.
Finally he cried out one word: “Blue.”
“What?” said Sam.
“They blue.”
“What’s blue?”
“His eyes is blue. He ain’t my baby.”
“All babies’ eyes are blue when they’re born,” said Nancy.
“He ain’t my baby.”
vii.
The Nancy put in at Annapolis Royal, which was still known, on some charts, as Port Royal.
The organization that would later assist runaways in Canada was still in its infancy, but Nancy Drake Rains knew the identities of sympathetic families, and she left the Nances with a Presbyterian couple named Frederick and Alice Campbell, whose home was within the shadow of the old French fortress.
The Campbells promised that the Negroes would be treated well. Since each of them knew a trade, there would be work for them, and an enclave of other runaways to join. But sometime during the night, Jacob took his axe and slipped away.
Dorothea was inconsolable. Alice Campbell urged her to think of the child, but Dorothea’s milk stopped flowing. The old woman, who had never had a child of her own, fed little Sam milk from a bottle and wondered at the blue of this Negro baby’s eyes.
But there was no wonder in it. Dorothea had been one of her master’s most desirable possessions, light-skinned and fine featured, a house slave unbowed by heavy work. And beyond that, she had intelligence. She knew that a master would not sell a slave who made him happy. So, when her master came to her, she made him happy, in hope that she and Jacob could remain together….
Unlike his ancestor, Jack, Sam Hilyard left Port Royal with a sense of ineffable sadness. There was no redemption in life, no forgiveness. The joy they felt at Samuel Isaac’s birth had faded in Jacob’s despair.
“So old Jacob’s gone off on his own to follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.” Isaac stood the helm on a bright southbound day.
“Maybe he’ll come back.” Nancy touched the blisters she had earned hauling tarred line, a small physical pain to distract from her heartsickness. “I hope he comes back.”
“He might.” Isaac laughed. “Where’s a nigger gonna find another high-yeller woman in Nova Scotia, anyway?”
“You’re a crude man.”
“A plain-speaker.”
“He’ll come back because he loves her,” said Sam. “He’ll see that she done it because she loved him.”
“For a lonely man, you speak well of love,” said Nancy.
“It’s the loneliness makes you appreciate it.”
Sam had done what Hannah asked. Now he was free to do as he wished. He had much to tell Nancy, a legacy to give her, whether she wanted it or not. He had traveled to this moment over many years. But still he hesitated, because nobody ever reached the North Star. They simply beat on, sloops thumping over the waves.
“Did you love someone once?” Nancy asked him.
“More than one… more than once.” Sam smoothed his hands over the ancient vest and went into his cabin.
“I love women,” announced Isaac. “All kinds.”
“I think you love something else, Mr. Hilyard. ‘Lust’ is the most polite word for it.”
“The world could do with a little more lust. It might take everyone’s mind off all this do-goodin’.”
Nancy found herself amused by Isaac’s honesty, her first amusement since the blue-eyed birth. “You do good rather well, for a man who professes so little interest in it. Perhaps I shall ask you to do more good, on another voyage.”
“Perhaps I’ll do it… if the fish ain’t bitin’.”
viii.
Sam plotted his course as though dropping a plumb line from Nova Scotia onto the sand at Provincetown, and he guided his little sloop straight and steady for two days of clear weather. But on the second afternoon, high, thin clouds came striping across the blue.
The mackerel sky, Sam knew, swam in the current of a changing wind. And by the following morning, the mackerel had become a raging serpent of a northeaster.
On Cape Cod, tight-lipped women watched the wind rip sheets of rain across the dunes and prayed for their men at sea. Hard-eyed masters went down to the harbors to secure their vessels against the tide. And sharp-eyed scavengers walked the back shore, watching for salvage thrown up by the storm.
In the Hilyard house, there was quiet. After a prayer, which Mary led and Will did not sing, the family went about its rainy-day business as though none of their number were in mortal danger. They had lost one son to the sea. They knew that worry would not save the other from the fate that God had designed. Best to keep busy.
In her house at Barnstable, Hannah watched the rain wear at the window while her great-grandsons played checkers by the fire. From their nervous talk, she knew that double jumps were not what concerned them. They had lost a father to the sea, but they lacked the stoicism of a fisherman’s family. They were too young for that, and Hannah was too old to lie to them.
The wind that shook the Cape Cod houses and thrashed the stands of pitch pine blew like a breeze compared to the living gale that consumed the sea. In the center of the storm, there was neither time nor place… only sensation.
The head throbbed from the roar, the skin stung from needle pricks of rain, the stomach churned with each sickening rise and precipitous drop and vomitous roll of the sea. Liquid cold seeped through every crevice between oilskin and flesh, filling the boots and soaking the body and dulling the brain to distraction. And where there was only sensation, thought retreated to the barriers of instinct.
For six hours, instinct held the Nancy before a wind that pounded her ever southward, allowing her no more control than a bottle cast over the side. But a mariner who had not merely lived fourscore and seven, but spent most of it at sea, was the kind who might pilot that bottle.
Sam lashed himself to the helm and watched the compass. Isaac and Nancy tied lifelines to the mast and watched for the beams of light that meant safety or disaster. If, in that time, Sam thought to reveal his truth to his granddaughter, he did not act upon it. There was too much else to do.
An hour after dark, as best they could tell, the Nancy came down on the tip of the Cape.
Isaac saw the Race Poin
t light flash off the starboard bow.
“How far?” shouted Sam.
“A mile sou’west.”
“Sou’west?” Sam turned to Nancy, “Look for Highland! And pray you see it afore you hear breakers!”
“Can you hear breakers over this wind?”
“Hear ’em or hit ’em.”
“Long Point just showed for a bit,” Isaac hollered.
“Port or starboard?”
“Starboard.”
“Damn.” Sam Hilyard’s instincts had failed him.
Race Point to port and Long Point right after—that had been his plan, to come at the bay with room to spare, swing around Long Point, and into the lee of the Provincetown shore. But the lights told him he was northeast of the Cape, coming down on the back shore before a following wind.
“I see it!” cried Nancy.
The rock-steady beam of Highland Light appeared through the storm three miles to the south. That meant the Nancy was straight on the Peaked Hill Bar.
Then, like a pair of evil spirits greeting each other some where beyond the bow, the roar of the wind met the thundering surf.
Nancy remembered the rest as a dreamer recalls small pieces of a sleeping story.
When the sloop struck, the shock threw her to the deck and a sea as black as the grave poured over her. Then a loop of rope was passed around her waist.
At the helm, Sam was shouting about principles and honor… and comeuppance.
He raves, she thought. His words rushed like water bursting an ancient dam.
The mast was down, the sail blown off, the sloop breaking apart in the surf, and yet Sam’s voice screamed above it. “You’ve saved me again, Nancy, just as—”
A crashing sea lifted Nancy over the side, and she grabbed madly for a line to pull herself aboard. Then she felt the pressure around her waist, holding her against the tons of cascading water, holding her in this world when the ocean would take her to the next.
As the wave receded, Isaac dragged on the line that tethered her to him, lifting her back to the canted deck.
“… I let slaves die, little children and all, just to own a damnable book, just to get comeuppance on the Bigelows.”
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