Anna's Crossing

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  A hand reached out and doffed his hat off his head. “You sure do keep turning up where you don’t belong, don’t you, boy?”

  It was the first mate with the jowly cheeks, Mr. Pocock.

  Felix’s arms went up to protect his head in case Mr. Pocock tried to box his ears the way Squinty-Eye did, but the first mate was already turning away. “Get on down below.”

  Felix snatched his hat from the ground and jammed it on his head, wondering how serious the first mate was about him going below. As if the ghastly cat knew what he was thinking, her hackles grew high and she started to snarl. She was making ready to pounce on him and claw his eyes out. Felix never trusted cats; they did that kind of thing. He scurried across the deck to head down the companionway. About halfway down the stairs was Catrina, sitting on a step. She patted the place next to her so that Felix would join her.

  Catrina was being too nice, so Felix should have known that something bad was about to happen. Then he noticed a flask tucked by her side.

  “Want some?”

  Felix grabbed the flask and gulped down a mouthful of what he thought was warm water, but it was dark and bitter tasting. He coughed and coughed, then gagged.

  A bell went off in his head. He recognized that particular flask. It belonged to the droopy-eyed first mate, Mr. Pocock. He handed the flask back to Catrina. She had stopped being friendly and looked straight at him, except for that turned in eye, and snapped, “Don’t even think about telling. You drank from it too.”

  She had him. He couldn’t tell on her, or else he’d be in as much trouble as she would. So he took another sip. Then another. Soon, he grew sleepy and went to bed without supper, worrying his mother.

  In the middle of the night, Catrina complained about her aching stomach. She meowed and howled and turned in her hammock, clinging to her side.

  Someone yelled out, “Quit it, Catrina. I can’t sleep.” But if Catrina couldn’t sleep, then nobody could sleep, so too bad for her and too bad for everyone else. Maria just let Catrina carry on caterwauling while she rubbed her stomach.

  Felix didn’t sleep well either. He felt like someone had pulled all his teeth out with a pair of rusty pliers.

  By morning, Catrina was in bad shape. She lay on her mother’s sleeping shelf, pale and quiet. Anna cut up some tack for her, and added a little salted cabbage, which she knew Catrina was fond of. She left the plate by her shelf with a towel across it and went to get some chores done.

  “Felix,” Anna whispered, “would you read to Catrina or tell her a story? I want to take Maria upstairs for a moment to get some fresh air.” She gazed over at the two of them, a worried look on her face. Maria was cradling Catrina in her arms, bone-white and frightened. She was stroking her daughter’s hair, and murmuring to her, neither of which the sick child seemed to feel or hear. Christian was crouched beside the sleeping shelf, the Bible in his lap. “The suffering on her parents’ faces is enough to break your heart.”

  It scared Felix to see Catrina just lying on her bed, saying nothing. It was embarrassing but tears just exploded out of his face. “I hate her but I don’t want her to die.”

  Anna wrapped her arms around him. “Then pray for her to get well. And be a good friend to her right now.”

  They walked over to Catrina and Anna put her hand on Maria’s shoulder. “Come with me. We’ll go upstairs for a bit of fresh air.”

  “I can’t leave her.”

  “Just for a few minutes. Felix volunteered to stay with her.”

  Christian rose to his feet. “I’ll go with you.” He put a big hand on Felix’s head. “Thank you, son.” They walked side by side down the middle of the lower deck, around the barrel that held the screw jack, and climbed the stairs to the ship’s upper deck. To Felix, Maria and Christian seemed suddenly so very old. Overnight, they had turned into old people.

  Like his mother had.

  Felix dropped his head, shamed. Now he understood the power of sorrowing and grief.

  He kneeled down beside Catrina and listened for her shallow breathing. Be a good friend, Anna had said. “Catrina, I’m going to give you some solid-gold advice. For free, even though you got me whiskified yesterday.”

  Catrina mumbled something he couldn’t understand.

  “When you talk to people, you squinch your lazy eye kind of shut or you put your hand on your face to cover it. If you don’t want people to look at your eye, you just do this.”

  One eye opened. Then another. She watched him suspiciously.

  “Keep your head straight and look at me sideways.”

  She did it.

  “See? You aren’t cockeyed anymore. Your eye is straight as an arrow now.”

  Throughout the day, Catrina didn’t get better but she didn’t get worse. And Felix noticed she was watching people sideways.

  August 30th, 1737

  Two days without any water. Then three.

  Anna’s hands were raw and cracked open, her mouth dry like cotton, her lips peeling, her belly sour. The salted meat they ate only made it worse. She yearned for cool water to soothe her parched throat, a warm bath, clothes not stiff with salt.

  Doubts plagued her. Had they made a terrible mistake? Had she misunderstood God’s leading? Yet she couldn’t stop thinking of those tragic souls in the slave ship. She felt embarrassed over how sheltered and blinded she had been to the terrible plight of the lost and forgotten. It was right to share the water.

  And yet to die slowly by dehydration was also a terrible plight. Two Mennonite toddlers had already died of sickness, aggravated by dehydration.

  Over and over, she sent up her request:

  Lord, hear our prayer. We need rain like the Israelites needed manna.

  She wondered if perhaps she had not been praying properly. Surely if she was doing it right, God would heed her. But God did not.

  “Anna, come quick.”

  She half-turned to see Felix waving to her from the bow of the ship where the animals were penned. He was in the pen with the goat and her kid, who was curled into a ball. Anna climbed into the pen and crouched beside the kid, talking to it, her voice soft and low. Poor baby was not more than a few weeks into this hard world. She picked its little head up and laid it in her lap, coddling the kid as if it were a child. The kid moaned: a pitiful, suffering noise. “Don’t you go giving up now. They’re going to need you in the New World. You’ll have green grass and a still pond. All the grass you want to eat. All the water you need.” She saw the kid’s eyes sink, its body went quiet, and she knew it was dead.

  As Anna sat next to the dead kid, right there in the animal pen, she pulled up her knees and cried.

  Except she had no tears.

  She wrapped the little kid in an old sheet and waited until dark to take it upstairs to send over the railing for burial. When she turned around from the railing, she found Bairn standing stock-still in front of her, a cold look in his eyes. “Where is yer God now, Anna?”

  “God wouldn’t bring us here if He didn’t plan to sustain us. And to deliver us.”

  “You’ve put all yer trust in a God who dinnae care whether yer thirsty or not.”

  “You’re trusting God by relating it to circumstances. Trust is much more than circumstances. Much, much more.”

  He took a step toward her. “The sky was red tonight. That means no rain on the horizon. Yer hopin’ for somethin’ that isn’t going to happen.”

  “You don’t . . .” She drew in a deep breath, her chest shuddering. “You don’t understand about hope. About trust.” What could she say to make him understand? “Even when there’s not a spot of light in the east, you’re still sure the sun will rise.”

  His eyes met hers and they were no longer cold. “Hope works like that for the sun, but other things aren’t as sure as the sunrise.”

  She was helpless to argue given the dryness of her mouth. “Bairn, when I am most confused and unsure of the morrow, I remember something our bishop always quoted from the Bible: ‘Be still
and know that I am God.’”

  At that, a grimace twisted his features, as if she had said something that hurt him. He took another step forward, grabbed her hand, and thrust a flask in it. “Take this water and drink it down.” He swung around and walked off toward the forecastle.

  Watching him, her heart felt as if it might burst. She looked down at his flask in her hands, touched beyond words by his unexpected tenderness. And to think she once thought that tall, fine man to be incapable of compassion and caring.

  She looked up at the stars—so bright she felt she could reach out and touch them. She prayed, pleaded, begged for rain.

  Then she went below deck, straight to Catrina, and made her take sips from Bairn’s flask of water. Catrina swallowed as much as she could and then shook her head.

  Anna gazed around the deck—at Peter and Lizzie with her swollen belly, at Josef and Barbara and their twin toddlers, at Maria and Christian and their stair-step daughters, at Dorothea and Felix, at the others. They were so much a part of her, as much a part of her as her hands, her heart, her soul. She squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t bear to think of losing this little church, of losing any of them. Her throat felt so raw that her sigh hurt coming out. But it hurt even more to hold it in.

  There were just a few teaspoons of water left in the bottom of the flask. Anna went to her rose, her withering, suffering rose, and thought of her grandmother’s words. “If the rose survives, our people survive.” She breathed, ran her tongue over her dry lips at the sight of those precious drops of water. And then she poured those few teaspoons into the dirt of her rose.

  She dreaded the morrow.

  Bairn lay awake in the heat of his room half the night. His only thought was of Anna. He hoped she had taken his flask and drank it for herself, but knowing her as he did, he was fairly confident she’d given it to someone in greater need. Such an infuriating female! He couldn’t find a way to help her and he could see the toll a lack of water was taking on her. Dark smudges colored the skin beneath her eyes, cracked lips, her voice barely rose above a whisper.

  She had been so confident that the Almighty would provide. Even desperately thirsty, her eyes were shining and her face was glowing. She had no doubts. And in a strange way, he had hoped she would be right. But dash it all! She’d made him hope. Made him believe.

  And look at where things were now. For the entire ship.

  After Bairn had discovered the brackish water in the barrel in the lower decks, he had checked the other water barrels and found they had also turned brackish. He wondered if Mr. Pocock had actually supervised the filling of the barrels at Drake’s Leet, or if his gouty toe had sent him to off to a pub for some liquid pain relief.

  Captain Stedman had begun emergency consultations in the Great Cabin with Mr. Pocock and Bairn and ordered the seamen to be put on severe water rationing. In the back of Bairn’s mind, he had thought he would be able to get water to the passengers before the situation turned desperate. Now it was desperate. He couldn’t help them, even if he disobeyed the captain. There simply was no water to spare. Sixty passengers were on the sick list, some wee ones had already died.

  A cold tremor rocked him to his very bones.

  Why had this happened? Why would the Almighty punish someone like Anna, whose only crime was that her heart was broken at the sight of the slave ship?

  “Be still and know that I am God,” she had told him.

  How many times had he heard those very words from his father?

  I do know that You are God! That was the whole problem. The whole point! He was a God who wouldn’t speak and wouldn’t listen and wouldn’t act.

  And certainly wouldn’t send rain when it was desperately needed.

  18

  September 4th, 1737

  Anna woke in the night to a strange sound. A light pattering sound on the deck that grew steadier. Rain. It was raining! She crawled out of her hammock and peered out the cannon portal. Rain was coming down—glorious rain!

  Others stirred, hearing the rain. They made their way up the companionway and pushed open the hatch to reach the waist of the ship. Felix was first on the deck and shouted for joy, lifting his face to the sky, as rainwater streamed down his face. The smell in the air was as good as a clean sheet just off the line, better than a cake in the oven, sweeter than pulled candy at Christmas. Sweet water. Oh Lord, sweet, good, cool water.

  Passengers and sailors cheered and shouted like children, whooping and stomping. Anna stood in the center of them, smiling with happiness. Some passengers went back down to the lower deck to bring up cups and buckets and casks, anything that could catch rain. They held them up in the air, filling them with that good, clean water. She went over to the railing to watch the rain hit the surface of the sea.

  Without any notion that he was nearby, she suddenly saw Bairn. He strode toward her and swept her up in his arms, and before she knew what was happening, he kissed her.

  She was so happy about the water, so exhausted and happy, that she kissed him back. The commotion went on nearby, and though she didn’t think it was more than a moment or two, it was a kiss. Her first. He let her down and released her, and her fingers flew to her lips, shocked at herself, shocked at him. Then he vanished into the crowd, and she was swept up into the celebration. They shook hands all around and slapped one another’s shoulders until they were raw.

  She filled a wooden bucket and took water down to Catrina for Maria to spoon-feed to her, and Felix took Dorothea two cups, one in each hand, spilling as he walked down the deck. Spilling drops of water! And praising God for every drop.

  Christian held his cup in the air and everyone quieted down. “Thanks be to God, the giver of all good things.” He upended the cup, letting it drizzle down his face and darken his shirt in streaks. “This is the most wonderful water I’ve tasted in all my life. Drink your fill!”

  They drank and drank that water, like it had come straight from heaven. Indeed, she thought, watching all those people reveling, it did.

  Anna filled two buckets to take down to the animals and poured the water into their dry troughs. Around her, Christian and Josef and a few other men were gathering empty casks from the lower deck to take upstairs to capture every drop of rainwater they could before the storm passed by. The noise went on around her, and for a minute, she was alone, watching the animals lap up the water with their parched, scratchy tongues.

  Her thoughts floated up the companionway ladder, to Bairn’s kiss. She felt embarrassed at the liberty Bairn had taken. At what she had given him.

  It meant nothing. No more than if she’d been holding a puppy or a lamb in her arms; when the rain had finally come, she’d have kissed them too. She would need to talk to him, and tell him what the kiss meant to her. It was nothing more than happiness over the rainwater.

  It wasn’t right, what she’d done. To be friendly with an outsider, to kiss the way they’d kissed. She couldn’t think of Bairn in terms of right and wrong anymore, of friend or stranger. She could only think of him with her heart, not her head. At some point during this long journey, he had become something more to her.

  She should spend the morning doing washing that had gone waiting, so she rose to her feet. As she turned around, she nearly ran right into Georg Schultz. She gasped and put her hands to her face.

  His beard rose on the sides, like he was grinning underneath it. “What’s the matter? Do I make you . . . nervous?”

  “You make me—”

  “Anna!” Felix shouted down the lower deck to her. “Maria! Come quick!”

  Maria walked out from behind the privacy screen where the chamber pots were kept. “Hans Felix Bauer, what have you gone and done now?”

  “It’s Catrina! She’s up!” He pointed toward the sleeping shelf and there she was, sitting upright, dangling her feet over the side.

  Maria and Anna rushed to Catrina’s side, taking turns hugging and kissing her.

  Another thing to thank God for—Felix’s interru
ption. Georg Schultz was quickly forgotten as everyone crowded around Catrina, happy to see her well, with color in her cheeks.

  Rain. Glorious rain. Anna would never look at a raindrop again without remembering that first pattering sound of relief as she lay in the lower deck of the Charming Nancy. What a beautiful sound, that of rain on the roof. Heaven sent.

  September 7th, 1737

  Every morning since the rain first started, Anna had awakened with the feeling of Christmas, just happy to have all that good water available. Better than gold, it was. Catrina recovered quickly and was back to pestering Felix again. The only lingering effect of her grave illness was how oddly she looked at people. Sideways.

  All day, all night, for three straight days, it had rained. It wasn’t a storm that would blow itself out within a day, it wasn’t a hurricane, it was a gentle, steady rain. And with the rain came a prosperous wind. The Charming Nancy started to make quick progress. Felix overheard the captain say that if this fair wind kept up, they were but ten days out from America. Only ten more days!

  And if that were true, then Lizzie’s baby would be born in America, with a midwife. Not with Anna, who had no idea about birthing babies.

  The only thing that nettled Anna was her momentary lapse of judgment in which she let Bairn kiss her. At least no one had seen them in the dark of night. Other than the Lord.

  As for that certain seaman, she would just turn from her wicked ways and be sure never to place herself in a situation like that again.

  She spent much too much time wondering what Bairn must think of her, of them. It changed things, made her look at her people differently as she tried to see them through his eyes. Did he still feel they were no different than anyone else? More importantly, did he believe that God had sent the rain, just in time?