Excerpt from The Prudent Mariner

Chapter 1
Liberty County, Georgia (1913)

She’s tired of being dressed up, of having to be ever on the lookout against soiling. The world seems entirely composed of things determined to soil her. It’s late summer but she’s wearing her Easter dress, for Father has told them they must look their very best. He’s given his daughters no choice but to come. Otherwise, he says, they’ll never be able to hold their heads up in this county again, much less marry. But Adele can’t bring herself to hold her head up. She keeps her gaze trained on the ground, and keeps her distance. She only lets herself look out of the corner of her eye.

Father, passing through town this morning on his way home, had already heard the news, or some version of the news, by the time he rode into the yard. He was often gone, to see to fevers, growths, broken bones, and deliveries, leaving everything in the hands of Riddley, the eldest of the six Glynn girls, and Nancy, who has raised them since Mother died. Nancy’s sternness is mostly show, unless you get on her bad side, which Adele never has. For all intents and purposes, she’s been Nancy’s baby since the day she was born. Nancy and her son Elijah live where they’ve always lived, in the cabin near the marsh. Elijah knows how everything works, how to fix it if it doesn’t, how to make do if he can’t. He’s well past thirty, with fine, long-fingered hands that belie all the work he does with them. People who don’t know him think he’s slow. Those who do know he’s plenty quick, just quiet.

Sometime earlier in the summer, perhaps as long ago as the spring, Riddley began to blush, to turn tongue-tied and snappish, whenever Elijah was around. He could well not have noticed, but in the churchyard and the dry goods store her sisters began to whisper, to intimate that Riddley had, for the first time, some sort of beau. No harm was meant, or if it was, it was a petty, harmless kind of harm, what one sister does to another out of the callousness of years spent in close company. And certainly no harm was ever meant for Elijah.

Why Adele said what else she said she isn’t sure, though it might have something to do with the fact that she has always felt picked on by Riddley, made to wear the most unflattering of hand-me-downs, and to do the most onerous of chores, ones normally set aside for darker hands than hers: pinching the heads off shrimp, scooping the deadman out of crabs, polishing the ever tarnishing silver. Riddley takes great pains to insure that Adele, the baby, will not be spoiled, though Nancy does the best she can. As everyone knows and no one will say, Riddley blames her youngest sister for their mother’s death in childbed, and above all for being pretty, two things about which Adele can do nothing.

But it was not only revenge that spurred Adele on. She’d felt as well the thrill of divulging a terrible secret, no matter it was one she’d invented. What pleasure in saying what ought never to be said, not only because it was unseemly and untrue, but because it was dangerous, though only yesterday had she come to understand exactly how, and to whom. Besides, the fact of the matter was, she was curious. She wanted to see what would happen. But she had only imagined Riddley’s embarrassment, or perhaps her mortification. Adele had never even come close to imagining this.

Surely anyone could see she was making it up! For who would ever kiss Riddley? Riddley the homely, the dour, the industrious. How could she have gotten so shorted on looks? It was as if she were never intended for anything but looking after others, a task for which looks are superfluous. Such an easy target for her five sisters, each one prettier than the last, culminating, everyone said so, in Adele, the fairest of them all. But no matter how preposterous Adele’s words, they had been believed, or in any case repeated. For the girls she whispered to had brothers and fathers, uncles and cousins, and despite the solemn oaths of secrecy, it was too immense a thing to keep quiet about. As Adele well knew, the words felt too good coming out of one’s mouth. As soon as she had said them they took on a life of their own and ran off, never looking back. Last night Nancy burst into the parlor, crying how Elijah had been taken from the back pasture by a group of men who claimed he’d attacked Riddley. What would ever make anyone think such a thing? Nancy said. And then, pleading to Riddley, You have to stop them.

Riddley, heat spreading from sternum to brow, looked first at Nancy, then at her sisters. One after the other her sisters looked away and would not meet her eyes, and she knew then that whatever had happened had something to do with them. She lifted a hand to her burning cheek. In one fell swoop she grasped how one thing must have led to another. Whatever it was her sisters had done, her skin told her it was still, at heart, her own doing, despite the fact that not until that very moment had she acknowledged, much less bewailed, her recent spate of blushing.

She stood, determined to ride after them and confess it was all her fault, for being so uncomely and unused to men, that Elijah had only been kind to her in the way he always had, with not a word or glance out of keeping. But then, catching sight of her reflection in the window, she knew she would do nothing of the kind. For decades she would ponder that decision, but at that moment she believed that even if she protested, whatever was going to happen would still happen. And hadn’t a woman, a white woman, been tarred and feathered a few years earlier outside Jesup, for consorting with a black man? Riddley will recall that incident again the next day, as she makes her way through the crowd, her presence and her silence taken as corroboration, though by then, of course, corroboration hardly matters.

Had Father been home, things might have ended differently. But he was gone to Riceboro to see to a riding accident, and Riddley was only a woman, and plain to boot. After her sisters had retired to their rooms and Nancy had at last headed home, Riddley went out onto the porch. All through the night she sat there, while down by the river, not three miles away at the McClure’s plantation, under a moon one day shy of full, they had done what they did to Elijah. Perhaps they had only meant to frighten him, but even to his own surprise his sense of justice lasted far longer than most. By the time he relinquished any final remnants of pride, they were no longer interested, or maybe they simply couldn’t understand him through the mess they’d made of his mouth. In the morning Mr. Sanderson rode out to tell Riddley she could breathe easy now, something she was, in fact, never again able to do. What Elijah thought of her when he was alive—not to mention the still greater mystery of what she herself thought of him—she never could fathom, but that he died hating her she was quite sure.

Marriage prospects having no doubt been endangered, Dr. Glynn will send his daughters, one after another, elsewhere—to the houses of distant cousins and maiden aunts, to study at the Normal College, to serve as an instructor of Comportment and Embroidery at the Aiken School for Young Ladies. The sisters will come home rarely, and stay briefly when they do. Beyond the obligatory Christmas and birthday cards, they’ll seldom have contact once they are married. And Riddley will never leave, nor marry, nor, it seems, recover, from what has been done in her name, in the name of her virtue. For how could she leave, how could she marry? Nancy fled as soon as she’d buried what was left of Elijah, and someone has to look after Father, someone has to run the house. Besides, any possible suitor—of which there are none—might have been among those who did what they did to Elijah, or the next day celebrated that it had been done. As Riddley moved through that crowd, through the murmurs and muffled gasps, the stares and averted eyes, she felt, even when a hat was tipped or a greeting offered, that she was being slowly flayed. Until, that is, she saw how utterly intact, in comparison, her own body was.

By mid-morning, people were already packing their picnic baskets and heading to the McClure’s. Now, hours later, there’s a crowd to rival the county fair. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a Saturday, in the lull between Independence and Labor Days, and clear weather, and the roads are good from ten days with no rain, though the heat is, as people like to say, infernal. Word has spread through the county and beyond, as seen by the newspaper reporters and photographers, the carriages and carts, wagons and buggies, and the few model T’s that have been arriving all day, from as far off as Brunswick and Waycross, Hazlehurst, Vidalia, and Statesboro. The police keep people orderly, and some colored boys keep the horses fed and watered. Hawkers crisscross the area, selling everything from boiled peanuts to divinity fudge, postcards to fans.

Adele, a nickel clutched in her fist and dust clogging her throat, enters the throng in search of something cool to drink. Her white frock clings in the late afternoon heat and her hair is heavy, the white bow like a weight on the back of her head. She wonders again if Riddley or, worse yet, Nancy, has learned what she said, something she’ll continue to wonder for more than half a century. After today, however, what happened will seldom be mentioned, and then only indirectly, and by accident, for this is a family story never told, much less passed down or elaborated on years later. Others, however, will speak and write of it for weeks to come, these events making the papers throughout the South and as far away as New York and Chicago, The Times and The Tribune, The Crisis and The Defender, though the accounts will in some cases vary so widely as to seem to concern different incidents altogether.

It’s a trifle cooler under the oaks, nearer the river with its slight breeze. Many boats are tied up at the dock. How fine it would be to go out on the water, or better yet, to swim, like those boys jumping in and whooping. She plucks her camisole away from her ribs. Lemonade, fresh lemonade, a hawker cries, and her mouth begins to water, for lemonade is her favorite. She heads in that direction. The next time he calls he’s moved behind her, or else she’s lost her bearings. She tries to spot him, but the crowd has thickened and she can’t see anything but the damp shirts of the men in front of her. They turn and say, Make way for the little lady, and jostle her forward, into a small clearing at the edge of the bluff.

She had no idea she’d come so close. A yard away, feet dangle at eye level, mud dried and clotted in the arch, and at the back of the heels. Or is it blood? And how completely limp both feet are. She doesn’t understand, then or ever, that his Achilles tendons have been cut. She sees no red, though doesn’t blood dry black rather than red? The torn cloth of his trousers ripples in the breeze, as if he’s shivering, and there, in that heat, Adele also shivers.

Her gaze rises to his hands, scraped and filthy, but still the same ones that have lifted her in and out of the saddle and the crooks of trees, repaired fencing and bridles and chairs, and handed her the wagon reins or the eggs from beneath her favorite hen. She lifts her eyes farther along his body and sees how a man’s neck is as flimsy as a doll’s, or a chicken’s, when it’s fresh broke and not yet bleeding, though maybe she can’t see the blood for the rope. Then she lifts her eyes to his face and in that first glance she thinks she’s wrong about the hands, that they can’t be Elijah’s, this can’t be where her words have come to rest. His eyes are blank, like the blind’s. There are marks on his face, and in the places where his ears were. And how entirely ears can be removed, leaving no trace of themselves but blood and flies.

They’ll be sold later, in nearby towns, along with fingers, toes, genitals, charred bits of bone, pickled in alcohol, in jars otherwise used for putting up quince chutney, pear preserves, gherkins, pole beans, and okra. Adele won’t know what she’s looking at when she first spots those pieces of him a few weeks from now, in Clarkton’s General Store. Beside the register will be the tall jar of hard candies, butterscotch, green apple, cherry, grape, the sun slanting in and turning them into smooth nuggets of colored glass, and beside that, tucked back a ways, will be another jar, smaller, stuffed full of shapes knotted and curled, dull yellow or brown in a murky liquid that the sunlight can’t quite penetrate. She’ll briefly take them for pig parts, chitlins maybe. They’ll keep almost turning into something she can recognize. She’ll think of creatures from the deepest parts of the ocean, ones that never surface, and gazing into that sealed sea she’ll be for a moment transfixed, much as her granddaughter Riddley will be, many years hence in the vet’s office, peering into the formaldehyde jars of dog intestine, dog fetus, cat lungs, rabbit heart. And then Adele will read the name on the lid, the label that says Souvenirs and, as if she’d toppled the jar over and Nancy were not gone without a word but there beside her, Adele will hear her scold her familiar scold, Now look what you’ve done.

Chapter 2
Given Names (1970)

Nearly six decades later a girl descended stairs to a dock. She was Adele’s granddaughter, Riddley Cross. From a bin outside the dockhouse she removed an orange life jacket. She slipped it on and fastened the clasps. She crossed the upper deck and squatted at the top of the steep ramp to the floating dock, gazing out over the water and marsh. Even in winter or bad weather she was often to be found here. She was only nine, but most people had already proven themselves to be, by and large, poor company in comparison to the river.

The tide was near low, the mudflats gleaming in the sun. It was the twenty-second of December, the shortest day of the year and the first day of winter, but the air was warm enough for swimming. The river, however, would not have been. The latest Riddley had ever swum was October, the earliest a March Easter, and that had been an accident, though not one she’d regretted. She had never regretted being in the river.

Riddley thought of all rivers as salt rivers, which flowed in both directions. She did not directly attribute the currents to the ocean, or to the moon for that matter, though she knew, of course, of the connection. But no one ever spoke of the tide as incoming from or outgoing to. Rather, the water seemed to move for no reason other than habit or momentum, the river a consequence of nothing but itself.

Twice a day the departing tide gnawed into the bluff. An outgoing tide was like someone slighted, who wants to take whatever you have away, whether or not she wants it for herself. Riddley, being quite accomplished at spite, knew it when she saw it. According to her mother Pauline, Riddley ought by now to have no nose to speak of, for all the times she’d cut it off.

Incoming, though, was another story. That was the time to ask for what might otherwise be denied. Her mother was more apt then to forgive transgressions, and likewise her father Sam’s temper lengthened almost visibly. For when the tide turned toward the land the people on the bluffs and docks, in the houses, crossing bridges and causeways, turned, unwittingly, with it, their bodies eased as steadily, even a trifle smugly, the water flowed in.

Children who lived along that bluff were put into the river early. A few, like Riddley, could swim before they could walk. She seemed, indeed, to have always been able to swim, or to have always believed that she could. As soon as she could crawl, she made a beeline for the river. She felt both a longing and a calm while near the water. When as an infant she would fuss, and could not be soothed by bottle or sugar teat or song, her nurse Ida Mae would take her down on the dock. The moment Riddley saw the river she would quiet, especially, Pauline claimed, if the water was rough.

Riddley had never had any fear of water, and, because of what she had been told about her birth, she had no fear of drowning. Nor did she know of anyone who had disappeared at sea, gotten thrown overboard, capsized, or sunk. There were mishaps and close calls—boats run aground or out of gas, caught in lightning storms and deluges, masts snapped and motors broken, people falling off bluffs and docks and decks—but though the water surrounded them, it did not take them in. Perhaps its danger was too blatant, or maybe it simply didn’t want them settling there, in body or spirit or someone else’s memory.

The only drowning Riddley had heard of in those parts had happened a very long time ago. Some said it had never happened at all, that it was just another of the countless local ghost stories. Yet how, Riddley wondered, or why, would anyone have thought to make up that particular one? The story went that a shipload of slaves, upon landing on one of the sea islands, had turned around and walked right back into the water. What had they heard or seen, to make them resolve at once what to do? Or had they planned it on the way over? She wondered as well if they had all agreed to it, or if some had to be pulled under, and held under, by the others. Why didn’t they even try to swim away? she had asked their maid Esther, pressing linens in the laundry room, the top button of her uniform undone for the heat. Now tell me, child, just where was there to go? Esther asked back, adding, with a grimace and a shake of her head, Plus being all chained together like that. Esther, Riddley knew by then, did not know how to swim.

Although Riddley could no longer remember where she’d first heard that story, it had stayed with her over the years. She had told it to others, though she told no one what had sometimes occurred when, while swimming, she opened her eyes underwater. At the time, she did not stop to wonder what led her to see such things in the first place, or whether others could as well, but she knew enough to know what she saw, and she also knew enough to keep silent. The drowned slaves were down there, a line of people stretching far beyond where the murky river allowed her to see. They were joined at the wrists and ankles like paper dolls. She always had to come up for air before she was done looking, and when she dove again, they were gone. She could still envision how the children swung between their parents’ hands, as she had once loved to do between Sam and Pauline, until they said, You’re too big for that, time to stand on your own two feet.

Riddley looked now at the rippling surface. There was no sign of the slaves, but she did not expect one. The muddiness of the water meant that you had to be in the river to see into the river, and even then you could not see very far, or at least not as far as she would have liked. And how long would it be until she could go in again? Her body missed it as it would’ve missed sleep, or food, or touch. In the spring she was always eager to swim long before Pauline would let her.

Just then she heard a spluttering hiss of exhalation, followed by a rush of air being drawn in. She jumped to her feet, scanning the river, looking for a break in the water, for circles widening around the place where the porpoise had surfaced. They came up the river often to shrimp and fish and pry crabs out of the mud. She heard the blow again and spotted them upriver, between her and Cougar Island. There were three or four, riding the outgoing tide, on the far side by the marsh.

She ran to the dockhouse, grabbed an oar and dashed down the ramp to the edge of the floating dock. She struck the dock planks with the handle once, and again, and then stomped her foot. Over and over she repeated this pattern, for it was said that porpoises would sometimes draw near to investigate a rhythmic sound. She had tried this many times but never had one approached the dock. She’d had better luck on the water, beating the sides of the bateau, which the sea island fishermen did, for the approaching porpoises herded the fish into the waiting nets. A few times porpoises had surfaced near her bateau, though she could never be sure if they had been attracted to her pounding, or if they had been there all along and just happened to come up right then.

Now, on the other side of the river, almost directly across from her, the porpoises surfaced in close succession. She pounded and stomped harder. A supposedly infallible way to summon the porpoises was a method sea island slaves had brought long ago from Africa. At low tide they waded into the water while beating drums. Riddley would have tried this from her own shore had the river bottom not dropped off so sharply, and the mud not been so soft, and had the drumming not also been rumored to draw sharks. But she intended one day to test it.

The porpoises surfaced again, much farther downriver. She rested the end of the oar on the dock. They were going where she would have liked to, under the power lines and alongside the shrimp boat dock, past marsh and bluffs and the last house at Oyster Point, across the mouths of other rivers and on into Moss Island Sound, between the shorelines of islands and keys and then into Indigo Sound, beyond which lay the Atlantic. It had been months since she had been on the water, months still until she would go again, but she could see the route from her dock to the ocean as clearly as if she were at that moment traversing it.

Two of the porpoises blew at almost the same time. “Spiracle,” she murmured. It was a term she much preferred to blowhole. Pauline said it came from the Latin for breathe, and also from the word for spirit, because people had once believed that the spirit resided in the breath. Where do they think it is now? Riddley had wanted to ask, but refrained. That was just the kind of question Pauline tended to talk about at great length, without ever really answering.