The Vanishing Point

by Mary Sharratt

  "Are you well now?" he asked. Then he ventured, "Are you hungry? There's a fish I caught today."

  The girl raised herself on her elbows. When she opened her mouth, blood spilled out, staining the front of her dress. He reached to help her, but she warded off his hands. Unwinding the kerchief from her neck, she used it to wipe the blood.

  "May," she murmured before gazing up at him with shame-filled eyes. Still holding the kerchief to her mouth, she scrambled to her feet.

  "You did bite your tongue." How strange it was to be speaking to another human after two years of solitude.

  "The boat," she said. "I fear it must be gone." She started off unsteadily toward the river. Sniffing the air, the dogs trailed at her feet.

  "Wait," he called out. "You do not look well." It took him only three long paces to catch up with her. "Rest you here." He pointed to a tree stump where she could sit. "I will look for the boat."

  Running hard down the path, he whistled for his dogs to join him. If only it were possible to outrun the heaviness that plagued him, the desolation crushing him. Just when he thought he had learned to master his grief, that girl had come out of nowhere, that broken girl falling into convulsions at his feet. When he reached the dock, he found her trunk but no sign of the boat. He shouted and raced down the bank, craning his neck to see as far downriver as he could. The waterway was empty.

  His own boats were long gone. He had given the best boat to young Finn, who had promised to post his letter to May's family. The others had been stolen. He counted the things the fleeing servants had robbed from him. His dead father's silver, boots, and signet ring. Father's good clothes and the few pewter plates. He had been left with nothing but three graves, his dogs, and the empty house.

  How could he take this girl back to the land of the living? Making an Indian dugout canoe entailed a week's labor at the very least. First he would have to cut down a suitable tree, hack the log to the right length, then burn out the inside. Building any other kind of boat would take twice as long. Besides, he lacked the nails.

  The way overland would be slow and cumbersome. It was fifteen miles to the Banhams', and he had no horse. A patient scout could pick his way through the forest, it was true, but not with a frail girl and certainly not with her baggage. Her trunk was a huge piece of carpentry, massive walnut from the look of it. He wondered whether he would be able to lift it on his own. What would a girl like that have to transport? May's box had not been half as big. Defeated, he sat on the chest. The heaviness bore down on him. Once his father had told him of a collapsing tin mine, boulders crushing men's lungs, forcing the very breath from their shattered bodies.

  His dogs barked and stood at attention. A few paces away, the girl watched him in silence, kneading her bloodstained kerchief.

  "The boat is gone," she said.

  He nodded.

  "My trunk." Gingerly approaching him, she grabbed the iron ring on one end and he took hold of the other. For a girl so small, she was strong. Between them, they heaved the chest up the overgrown path to the house. Gabriel didn't know whether to curse the devil or cry out to God. What would he do now that this girl had come? What would he do?

  11. The Whole Cloth Unraveled

  Gabriel

  GABRIEL HAD NEVER CHOSEN to be a planter. His father had chosen for him, had made him work twelve-hour days, sweating in the fields beside the indentured servants. Nathan Washbrook had ruled his life with shouts, threats, and blows. He had whipped the boundsmen until welts laced their backs. "A man must show he is master," his father had told him. "If he doesn't, the servants will get the upper hand. There must always be a master."

  When Gabriel was five, his mother died, bitten by a copperhead snake in her own garden. His father had never cared to remarry. They had lived in Anne Arundel Town until Nathan, consumed by his envy of the rich planters, decreed that they would be planters, too. He promised Gabriel what a fine life they would lead, waxed on about the wealth they would enjoy. Despite his temper, his father could be jovial—or more precisely, he could be like Jove, as pompous and grandiose as the Roman god whose image adorned his rum flask. Deceived by Paul Banham, who sold him the backcountry land, he paid too much for it. Surveyor that he was, he should have known better. The summer Gabriel turned fifteen, they had come to live in this wilderness. The first year, Gabriel and the seven Irish boundsmen had done nothing but chop down trees, to clear the land and build with their own untrained hands the rough hovel his father called the plantation house. Though Gabriel worked as hard as the servants, and though his hands were as callused and scarred as theirs, the Irishmen held themselves apart from him. They spoke their own incomprehensible language, sang their doleful songs, pretended to smile at Gabriel's father while cursing him as a tyrant under their breath.

  His father had never joined in the labor but merely supervised, carped, cajoled. The plantation house consisted of a main room, a storage room, and a drafty attic, where the servants had slept until they built a shack of their own. They had transported the furniture upriver in a shallop boat. No one but Father was allowed to sit in the carved chair with the back and armrests. His father found a twelve-year-old mulatto wench named Adele Desvarieux to keep house for them, had bought her cheap after her previous master had cast her away on account of the savage bite she inflicted on him. For a mere girl, she was fearsome. Once, after a whipping, she left a pile of chicken bones on Nathan's bed, spilling the blood on his fine cambric shirts. She purportedly possessed voodoo magic and warned the men that if any of them tried to touch her, she would curse them and cause their pintles to shrivel to the size of gooseberries. She slept with a kitchen knife and a curious cloth doll in her arms. Gabriel thought she could have spared herself the trouble, for he wasn't the least bit taken by her, and his father, for all his other faults, did not lust after young girls.

  The first year, with the tree-felling and building, they planted no tobacco but lived on corn mush and whatever fish they caught in the river. Each Sunday Adele slaughtered a capon. The summer Gabriel turned sixteen, their first tobacco crop failed. Banham came gloating, offering false sympathy and farming advice. Banham brought his three tittering daughters, paraded them before Gabriel, then declared he would marry them off only to established planters with sufficient means. Gabriel had not cared a whit for those spoiled girls.

  "Not all who would be planters succeed," Banham had told them grandly, sipping from the claret he had brought upriver, ostensibly as a neighborly gift for the Washbrooks, though he drank most of it himself in front of them that day, he in his doublet of Spanish leather. It was common knowledge that half the freehold tobacco planters failed, had to give up their land to the debt collectors and work as tenant farmers for gentlemen like Banham. Gabriel's father was convinced that Banham was biding his time until they were ruined and had to sell back the land to him at a fraction of what they had paid for it.

  After Banham and his entourage had sailed back downriver, his father had taken Gabriel aside. "It is time, my son, to get you a wife."

  The year he turned seventeen, the tobacco crop had been a moderate success, allowing his father to send eight hogsheads of it across the ocean to buy a bride, the daughter of some distant cousin. He had not allowed Gabriel to read the letter from May's father privately but had insisted on reading it aloud in front of the servants while his son struggled not to squirm.

  "By all rights, you should be well pleased," his father informed him. "Daniel Powers assures me his daughter is comely and healthy. No pockmarks on her face."

  Looking back, Gabriel wondered what would have happened had he refused the match, if he had told his father he wanted no part of it. He had made his peace with being alone and friendless. If he were bolder in temper, he would have told his father to marry May Powers himself. But Father had cared little for women. He seemed prey to none of those common lusts at all, though he favored one of the Irishmen, treated him almost as a son, in his way. He would give him choice pieces of meat, p
raise his cleverness and strength, then beat him over some transgression, real or imagined.

  Gabriel suspected that his father had thought that a daughter-in-law would be easy to dominate and that she would surely provide him with an heir. If Nathan Washbrook had failed with his own shy and faltering son, then he would succeed with the grandchild, whom he would mold like clay into the form of his choosing.

  But May was not demure in the least. When she and Gabriel first met in Anne Arundel Town, the look she gave him was frank and challenging. She was four years older and five inches taller than he was—the shining Englishwoman in her embroidered gown. Her beauty was enough to melt away his misgivings and yet, as dazzled as he was, he sensed she was hiding something from them all. She wore green, the unluckiest color for brides. It was as if she carried a shadow with her. She made no secret of the fact that she was no maid. He was the untried virgin in their bed, too ashamed to take off his nightshirt lest she see the scars from his father's whip. Yet he had striven to befriend her, to make himself a worthy husband. His memories of her, both tender and bitter, seared. Once he had caught her lifting her skirts to show the servant men her shapely ankles and strong calves. She laughed and jested with them, begged them to sing ballads and airs in their language. Then she asked them to tell her what the words meant. When Gabriel could bear no more of it, he stole into the woods and carved his name on the trees to prove that he still existed.

  Father ruled that plantation as if it were his kingdom. For as long as he lived there had been order, if not joy. There had been continuity. But when he died, the whole cloth unraveled. There was no patriarch, no master, no authority. Gabriel had never possessed an ounce of mastery, and then it had been too late to claim it. If he tried to give the servants orders, they laughed, knowing he wasn't man enough to reach for the whip. May had never listened to him anyway. Heavy with child, she blamed him for the humiliation of her body, the agony and tearing it would bring, though Gabriel wondered who the real father was. She ran off into the woods, crying for her sister back in England. Adele ran after her, pleading for her to watch out for snakes.

  After his father had died, Gabriel threw his old bullwhip in the forest. He hated the sight of it. May went into labor, screaming that she hated him, that he had murdered her. Then she clutched the sickly child in her arms, weeping over it. That was where his memory stopped. Patches remained. How the cow had died from eating some poisonous weed. How, to spite him, the Irishmen had stolen his father's signet ring, his dead mother's last silver cup, and the secret cache of sovereigns.

  They were all gone now—had died or run away. He was abandoned. In a way, it was a relief, a comfort, for in spirit and soul he had always been alone. Now at least it was a true life he lived, and not a lie. There was no more pretending to love the wife who betrayed him, and the father who had made his life a pit of obedience and toil. Yet he stayed in his father's house. Where else had he to go? A man alone with no hired men, no living kin, no wife—he could not be a planter. So Gabriel became a hunter. It was the simplest thing, the natural conclusion to what had happened. Wasn't hunting what he had always loved best? Roaming through the forest with his musket and dogs, no one to order him back to work. His skin grew dark, burned by the sun. He let his hair grow, forgot to shave. He hung a string of brilliant wild-turkey feathers over the mantelpiece. When storms knocked trees over the river, blocking the route to civilization, he exulted that no one would come here to disturb his hard-won peace. Solitude had finally made him master of this place. Only in this loneliness and grief had he come into his true powers.

  He planted no tobacco but spent days in the forest where the tree trunks bore his name. The Gabriel woods. Then it seemed that he had always lived this way. His father, May, Adele, and the Irishmen shrank to tiny motes. They receded to the land of distant dreams. He never went to the graves he had dug for his father, his wife, and her baby. The property was vast enough that he had no need to go there.

  And then she came. His dead wife's sister.

  12. The Bed of Skins

  Hannah

  HANNAH COULD HARDLY look at the young man who carried the other end of her trunk, bearing most of its weight as they trundled up the path. She found it hard to think of him as Gabriel, simply by his Christian name, as if he were familiar to her. Mr. Washbrook. That was what she would call him. Her sister's widower was stranger to her than any soul she had ever met. Even Mr. Banham and his daughters had seemed less alien. She had half a mind to corner him, take him by the shoulders and shake him. How did my sister die? Did she suffer long? How did the infant die? The deaths in and of themselves were nothing out of the ordinary—new mothers and babies died in droves. But that May had died! It seemed impossible. May had been the strong one, the fearless one, the one who had always laughed. If she questioned him again, she would fall apart into nothingness. She would be lost.

  A break in the trees afforded her a view of a harvested maize field. Rotting tree stumps rose like warts among the brittle wasted stalks. Beyond this lay a fallow tobacco field, thick with weeds. The forest closed around the land like a living thing with a will of its own. Left to its own devices, the wilderness would soon reclaim the cleared land. Deer would eat next summer's corn. Snakes would make their home in the old tobacco barn. The plantation house would collapse into a pile of rotting wood. How quickly a home could disappear.

  They neared the house. A porch ran down the side, and under its roof, animal skins were pegged to the outside walls. Her eyes rested on one enormous pelt of thick black fur. With a shiver, she remembered the bear she had seen that morning. It was only eight hours ago or so, yet it seemed like days and weeks had passed since the morning boat ride, when she had been full of happy anticipation, thinking her sister still lived.

  Gabriel hefted the trunk over the threshold. "Come in," he said.

  Kneeling at the hearth, he added fuel to the dying fire until the flames leapt high, casting an unsteady glow. Hannah made out the sparse furnishings in the dim room. Two backless benches, one carved chair, a trestle table, a dresser, and a chest of drawers. Two curtained beds were pushed against the far wall. A ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling, and a door beside the hearth indicated there was another ground-floor room. Heaped in one corner lay a pile of animal skins. On the trestle table lay a gutted fish.

  "I was cleaning the fish when you came." He gestured toward one of the benches. "Sit down."

  She watched him rise, an iron skillet in his hand. A jar on the table contained some kind of fat with which he greased the pan. In went the fish. He rested the skillet on a grate in the hearth. The fat snapped and crackled, and soon the smell of frying fish filled the room. Outside, his dogs whined and scratched at the door, but he ignored them. Hannah turned to the only window, facing west and stained with sunset. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was back home with Joan.

  He hung another pot on a hook over the fire. It began to simmer with the homey scent of cabbage and onions. Hannah coughed from the smoke, which brought tears to her eyes. She began to weep again, just couldn't seem to stop. How kind he was, treating her as though she were a dignified guest and not some bawling stranger who had fallen in a fit, thrashing around like a madwoman.

  Once it had been May who knelt at the hearth and prepared the food. Hannah pressed her kerchief to her mouth and stifled a sob. Father's death, at least, she had been able to prepare for, but this was so unjust. How could her beautiful sister be dead?

  "Hannah." How curious her name sounded when he spoke it. "You grieve sorely, I know it. Grieving was nearly the end of me, too. First my father, then the baby, then her."

  Hannah lifted her head. "Was it a boy or a girl?"

  He was silent for a moment. "A girlchild. She only lived a few days. Your sister named her Hannah."

  She covered her face.

  "You mustn't," he said. "You'll drive yourself mad." His voice broke. "Come now. You must eat."

  She shook her head. "I don't thin
k I could."

  "You are thin as a starveling."

  She thought of May's rich and abundant body, her curves. What would May say if she saw her sniveling like this?

  "Here, Hannah." He placed a wooden trencher in her lap and handed her a spoon carved of horn and a dull knife.

  The fish was golden brown. Heaped around it was a thick stew of carrots, cabbage, and onions—the last vegetables from the autumn garden. He gave her a piece of dry cornbread and hovered near her until she cut a piece of the flaky white fish, speared it on her knife. The fish was tender in her mouth. This meal was better than the venison in Anne Arundel Town, better than the feast of pheasant, sweetmeats, and oysters served at the Gardiner Plantation. This was the finest food, made sweet by her hunger and her loss, made sweetest of all by the one who had cooked it for her. She stole glances at him when she thought he wouldn't notice. May's widower was the only family she had left. She sensed the cloud of sadness hanging over him. His grief locked into hers like a twin spoon.

  At least I do not mourn alone, she thought, cleaning her plate with cornbread.

  After the meal, Gabriel went out to feed the dogs. He returned with a bucket of water and one of sand. She watched him gather the trenchers, spoons and knives, skillet, and iron pot.

  "Let me do that." Hannah went to the table, where Gabriel poured the water into a wooden bowl. It seemed ages since she had last washed crockery and pans. Taking the rag from him, she went to work. First the trenchers, then the spoons and knives, then the skillet, which she scoured with sand to remove the last traces of grease. She filled the cooking pot with water and hung it over the flames again until the water was lukewarm. Then she tossed in the sand and scrubbed away. At home, Joan used to scour the pots with rushes.