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“There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t sit still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.”

-Robert Service

Notes

Need more details of landscape, sea, and marsh esp.

household is father, Tambo and his wife, plus Kobayashi.

Plots - The british captain from Charletown is also the landowner of th etrees, McPhail. He comes after the family about the tree stumps, which he sees as his, being used for their profit, and also that they make the pirate ships that raid mcphail’s ships more seaworth, insult to injury. Add moral complexity for the kids, is papa a bad person? Is the McPhail a bad person? Or is it all just wrong and now can own the trees?

I own them fair and square. She thought this over a for miniute. “No, you don’t. You forced out the Ediston and the tk, and the tk. You overwhelmed them with force and marched them out.” “Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s quite right, I did.” He smiled quizically at her. “And that’s wrong. Every bit as wrong was what you say papa did.” “No my child it’s not.” “Then why is wrong when capitan Ratham overwhelms one of your ships and takes it from you.”Woah!" He jerked the reins tight, and the horses nearly reared as the wagon can lurching to a stop. He said nothing, but turned and stared at her for a long time. She felt his eyes memorizing her features the way she had studied the pictures hir bool. then smilled aagain, shook the reins loos and resumed their journey, staring off into space and ignoring her the remainder of the way into Charlestown.

They eta waring from Ratham that McPhail is coming for them. How does the storm fit in? No good guys, no bad guys. her father helps both ratham and mcphail. Warns mcphail of the storm, helps bring his ship int to he esuary to shelther, they take the wagon to chareston.

Overplot:

Opening in the stumps

Then Tambo and Gullah

Idyllic farming corn and rice, making gum and tar for the ships. autumn cool, swimming and playing at the beach in the wrecked ship.

Ratham arrives to careen the ship

warns of mcphail

McPhail part one arrives to arrest the father, talks his way out of it because the shortm

guides Mcphails ship into the estuary they take shelpter

McPhail part two

Still arrests the father, takes him to charlestown.

Birdie goes with

Lulu and henri hide with the others, they escape by sea.

get to Ratham, they meet up with a third

Ships proceed to blockade charlestown.

Ratham helps the father escape, family escapes to sea, heads south toward the Caribean.

Prologue

They were two. Blood covered the bed. Even the midwife was whimpering and pitiful by the end. “A night and day,” she said. And they were born, one the night, one the day.

People remarked on this for a long while afterward, though no one knew which was born in the night, which the day save the midwife. Nor would anyone have been able to tell you what difference it might have made. Still, the story followed them. It followed them like the whispers that had always followed the family. The whispers were a wind, one that blew them sometimes where they wanted, sometimes not. Seafaring people must live with that.

The whispering wind followed them out of the town where they spent their winters, across the sea, running the easterlies to the mouth of a river, the wide open flood plain where they spent their summers on the shore, amongst the great pines. But the whispers came with their neighbors working the cod offshore. It came on shore like the August winds that whistled the pines. A whisper that blew harder every year, as if a storm were gathering.

Their father spent all summer, a cold summer, sitting in the evenings, outside the tent, stroking his thick black beard and studying the wind and waves. There are storms worse than the sea he said.

That year, when the last the southerlies blew out and before the northerlies turned fierce and cold, they loaded the small boat and slipped out of the old story.

They kept to the coast, giving wide berth to the places men gathered. When they came upon the marshy lowlands of London, they put in for a time. The twins had no memory of London, but the mention of it would made their father turn quiet.

When the winds blew favorably again they left, hugging the coast until there was no coast left. And they were gone again. To a new world where people said the soldiers were fewer, the winds warmer, the possibilities wider.

By the time they arrived all the twins had left was a memory of trees. The deep darkness of the forest floor where they would lie, staring up at the trees, the branches reaching like thick fingers to scratch at the light of the sky above.

Autumn

Wood and salt. Wooden salt. Crusted on the mast near her head were white patterns that looked like the drawings of snowflakes in Papa’s book, wrapped in walrus leather and stored somewhere in the small hold below her. She did not know where. Neither did her sister. Neither did her brother. It was a mystery they worked on nearly every day they were at sea.

The wood creaked, some of the salt blew loose. The water slapping the hull told her the waves were small. Her hammock, strung between mizzen mast and taffrail, swayed hardly at all. She lay without moving, trying to feel the boat as her father had taught her. She closed her eyes again. The boat was lifting and rolling slightly. They were moving with the current, in a light swell. At this latitude, this time of year, that would be south. The sail snapped like a whipped wet towel. That meant the wind was light. She listened again to the sound of the water, it pulsed, rushing by the boat in surges, quiet, then loud. The boat was moving fast enough that the wind probably wasn’t light she reasoned. That meant they were tk, otherwise the sail wouldn’t have snapped.

“We’re running south, riding a southerly swell, the wind is 6 knots” She announced from the hammock. She heard her sister groan. Her father chuckled. “Close. We’re not tk, more a broad reach. I just fell off and let the sail flap to wake you two up.”

Birdie smiled in her hammock. She stretched, lifting her arm out to feel the air. It was still cool, though wet and heavy. The sodden heat would come even earlier today, as it had every day for the last week. They would make winter camp the next day, maybe the day after Birdie reasoned. She pulled her head up out of the hammock to scan the deck.

The tk was 39 feet from her bow sprite to rear rail where Lulu’s hammock was tied. There were two masts, one just fore of midship and another in the cockpit at the rear. Her father was vague about her origins, though as Birdie understood it, she was built in a place called France, sailed into Danish waters where she ran aground. Her cargo was offloaded and she was abandoned to the waves. That was not Poseidon’s plan though. The tides had pulled her back out to sea. And her father, who happened to be on watch on another merchant ship had spied her. Sensing his chance, he’d woken two companions, sailed along side her and the three trimmed sails of their vessel and jumped ship for the new one.

One of those companions, Tamba, a tall, powerfully man with skin so black it was almost blue, was walking after now toward Birdie. She hopped out of the hammock, her feet landing on the smoothly worn oak planking of the deck with a light thud.

They sail in the next day, father tells a story of some kind, a gannet dives at the boat to add some drama. they reach edisto, sam and charlie, the cousins come out from Charles twon. Tamba and tk and cuthie, he gets introduced, they set up camp, play on the dunes, find the arkhangelsk, make tar, go inland to get chicle, hunt and fish and swim. Then north to Charles town, then the storm. The death of Sam and then the family heads north again.

Winter

Among the Stumps

She was named Linnea for her father’s friend in the old country, but her mother called her Lulu from the day she was born.

Like her twin sister She’d been easing mainsheets and tightening lines since she could walk, crossed an ocean before she’d seen five north winters, and survived the burning sun and flaming fevers of the Carolina swamps to reach her eighth year. Her skin was brown from long days in the sun. She was thin, but strong. Her body all bone and taut ropy muscle. Her hair was brown bleached to blond by the summer sun.

She licked her lip, pulling the beads of sweat into her mouth and savoring the salty flavor. You are the sea, you sweat the sea all day every day.

Lulu hopped from stump to stump. Crouching down, her knees bent like coiled springs and then sprong, she exploded toward the next stump, landed, teetered, stopped there. There were plenty of stumps. The whole forest was gone.

“Cut em down for the Guvner’s mansion,” her father had grumbled earlier in the boat. In the bow Tamba rotated his powerful upper body, careful not to let his weight move side to side, and smiled knowingly at her. “Rice lulu. They cut em down for rice. They sell the timber to the city.” Tamba smiled again, rolling his eyes toward the sky. They both knew her father, who was standing in the stern of the boat, pushing them through the marsh with the long pine pole, could not see Tamba’s rolled eyes beneath his hat. But the both waited and heard him grumble again, stop rolling your eyes at me Tamba. They all laughed. “The rice will give us food, we won’t have to buy it.”

Lulu heard her father grunt. Tamba turned around again the boat slid silently along the edge of the marsh, where a thin line of trees still stood, offering some shade from the already brutal mid morning sun.

The water ran out right before the line of great oaks started. There were clumps of prickly, fan-leaved palmetto trees growing beneath the oaks. The muddy bank of the marsh quickly gave way to the dark coloured clay, mixed with sand and hundreds of years of leafy hummus. This was the soil, rich in nutrients that would grow rice. “For a time at least,” her father had said as he dragged the small pirogue up onto the muddy clay bank, next to stand of palmetto and tied the pirogue to a tree. But you take away the pine and it all goes, nothing will hold this soil."

“Rice will hold the soil.” Tamba stood under the shade of an oak, arms crossed, nearly invisible in the darkness of the shade.

“You know this?”

“My people know this.”

Her father shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it then.” He climbed up the bank and reached down to lift Lulu up as well. “I tell you what won’t hold it. Potatoes. Turnips. I’ve seen that.”

“Turnips?”

“Like a potato, thin skin, waxy, but bitter.”

“Ah, like you.”

Her father smiled at Tamba. “I am not bitter.”

“No, not you.” Tamba shook his head slowly, a sly look crossed his eyes, “But you are waxy. Skin like tallow. So white.”

Her father laughed. They walked through the oak and palmetto forest toward the bright clearing ahead. Lulu decided that, while she loved her father and looked to him for many things, Tamba was probably the better farmer. But it puzzled her a little why they cared, since neither of them farmed. Her father hated farming and made no secret of it, though he was happy to live by farmers. The Geechee were good farmers. But most of them were not free. A few like Tamba were. But he too was no farmer.

Tamba and her father were still arguing as they stepped into the clearing. “Mind the gators Lu,” her father called over his shoulder. “And the snakes. Fresh cuts and all.”

Stirring up the forest stirred up the animals of the forest. The plant eaters lost their homes, the insects lost their homes. The animals that ate the insects lost their food. Only the animals at the very top stood any chance. The snake might get the homeless mouse, but eagle got the snake. Nothing got the alligator though. Nothing ever got the alligator. Her father always said not to fear the alligator, but to respect it. Give it a wide berth and do what you can to make sure it doesn’t see you as meat. She sat down on stump and wondered what made you look or not look like meat.

Tamba and her father walked out into the field, leaving her at the tree line. They stopped every so often to dig at the roots of the stumps with their sharpened staves, marking choice stumps as they went.

Three hours later the sun was directly overhead. Lulu could just barely see her father on the far side of what had once been a forest of broom pine. Slash pine the sailors called it. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was gone. No more tufts of green above to filter the harsh clean light of day, no more long thin needles to whistle in the wind when the onshore breezes started. It was a dead still afternoon. The world highlighted in a glare that made it difficult to see. It was hot, humid. The air felt like a wet wool blanket wrapped around you. Lulu decided she would not like to be a rice plant or anything else that tried to get along in this place. She liked it better back at camp. By the sea, in the wind. What was life without wind?

She jumped to another stump and looked down. It had her father’s mark on it. A square inside a diamond. “Two squares really,” he had once told her and her sister, “one is just rotated 90 degrees. It’s easier to draw than four interlocking circles, which is what I used before.”

Lulu shielded her eyes from the sun and lifted a gourd of water to her mouth. It was bitter and hot, but it coated her throat for a moment and kept her tongue from feeling so swollen. She was hot and bored. She wished she’d stayed with her sister and her mother, tending the kiln fires. Looking after Henri or even cleaning and drying fish would better than this stillness and heat. Anything to escape this relentless sun. At least at the beach, at camp, there was a breeze.

Lulu wore a straw hat that a woman had given her the year before when a ship had come to careen on the beach where her family spent the summers making tar. Despite repeated soakings, stretchings and pullings, it was too small for her now. “At least your head is growing,” her sister, who was nearly a head taller, teased. Lulu wanted to punch her in the mouth, but instead she took of her hat, hit her sister over the head with it, stuck out her tongue, bared her teeth and growled at her. Then she ran before Birdie could retaliate. Sometimes it was intolerable to have a twin. Usually though these moments were just that, moments. And then they were gone as quickly as she felt them, though she was not above drawing them out for a while to get at her sister, who rarely seemed to feel this way.

Sometimes Lulu needed to get away, to be alone, so she had come today with her father and Tamba out into the scorching midday sun to find stumps for the winter’s drying time. Her father made carvings in each stump, a square within a diamond, the beginning of wisdom he told her when she asked what it meant.

Others would mark their stumps with their own marks and then all of them and their wives and children would come out together every night for a week, maybe two for this field, thought Lulu as she glanced around at the vastness of the clearing. They’d come for a week on either side of the full moon, to work in what light could be had, digging stumps and hauling then back to the beach, to the dunes just beyond camp where they would be piled in great heaps and lie there drying like great white bones bleaching in the sand until they were so weathered they were gray and then in spring, before the heat got too bad, the kilns would be built and lit and the great dry stumps chopped and piled in.

Lulu and Birdie and Henri and two other families worth of children, their cousins and friends, would gather moss and dry grass to feed the slow heat of the kilns. As the wood burned the dark pitch drained down to the bottom of the kiln and dripped into barrels set below the catch it. This was the Arkhangelsk tar. The archangel tar that kept the ships afloat, the rigging tight, the sailors safe and bought Lulu and Birdie and Henri a place in the world, clothes to wear, food to eat and sometimes even peppermint treats or dolls or new ribbons for her hair. These stumps were the reason Lulu’s life was possible.

But that didn’t make the day any cooler or her patience any greater.

Birdie sat in the shade of the last sago palm. It was the edge of camp. After the palm was the beach. She watched the ocean from the top ridge of the dune, squinting in the bright light of the midday sun. Birdie’s real name was tk, after her mother’s sister, who was down at the shoreline, pulling in a fishing net with Birdie’s own mother. Birdie had helped them cast out the net and secure it to their buoys earlier in the morning. Now she was waiting. Waiting for her brother to play, waiting for her sister to return, her cousins to be done with their chores. She glance up the beach toward their camp but there was no sign of Charles or Samuel. She sighed and plucked at a sea oat, slowly breaking up the stem.

Down the beach she would see the single mast of the Arkhangelsk. She was a 22ft Bermuda sloop that had been taken by the Whydah and put ashore with a small crew to careen and re-tar. Unfortunately for the Ave Marie, as she was known at the time, her hull was too worm eaten and split even for the quality of tar Birdie’s family was know for.

The captain of the Ave Marie had disagreed. While the rest of his crew shrugged and went off hunting the wild boar that were forever rooting in the jack pines, the captain stewed, drinking all afternoon until finally he’d strode into camp shouting for her father, who eventually appeared. There was a good bit of quarreling in several languages until at some point Birdie remembered the captain drew his sword and her father had gone very quiet. Her mother had pulled all the children inside the thatched hut that was their summer home, but Birdie had found a crack in the palm fronds and watched as her father walked very slowly forward until he had placed his neck against the captain’s sword, a move that had been so unexpected that the captain did not appear to know what to do. He stammered something Birdie could not hear, though she heard her father’s voice quite clearly, I know how I will die and it is not by your hand. The captain had dropped his sword, spun on his heell and marched right out of camp in the direction of Charles town.

A few hours later the crew of six returned from the woods with a wild boar so huge they staggered under the weight of the pole it was slung out on. Birdie’s father had informed them of their captains departure, the news of which they barely acknowledged, bent as they were to the task at hand, namely butchering and roasting the boar. There’d been a great feast in camp that night, with music and dancing that didn’t stop until long after Birdie was asleep. The crew had stayed on for a quarter of a moon, until the rum ran out and they too headed off down the road in the direction of Charles town.

Birdie had been worried that the angry captain might return. For several nights she refused to sleep outside until her mother finally coaxed the problem out of her. “Sweet girl, you don’t need to worry,” her mother had said, “he’s gone.”

And indeed he never came back. The Ave Marie had been left where she was when the family departed for their winter camp in the south. When they came back this year they found a storm had pushed the ship high above the tideline, and filled her hull nearly full of sand. She listed considerably to port, but was plenty straight enough to climb about what was left of her decks and bones.

She had been commandeered by Birdie, along with Lulu, Henri and their cousins from up the beach, Charles and Samuel, and Tamba and Kadiatu’s boy Cuffee. They’d spent the summer in her, every free moment they had, sailing the sands of the island, re-christening her the Arkhangelsk. Birdie was captain. They had voted, as free sailors did, and she had been elected, and only voted out once, when Lulu called a new vote after Birdie had ordered all the boys over the side to raid an enemy ship for the hundredth time, holding Lulu back. But Lulu’s term as captain had lasted only a few days before Henri called a vote that put Birdie back in charge, and set the boys, along with Lulu, over the side to attack the forts and towns of the coasts they sailed.

Lulu hadn’t been able to see her father or Tamba for at least an hour. They were resting in the shade on the far side of the clearing she guessed. Which meant another hour before they’d be back.

When they finally did return, both were pouring sweat and no longer bickering about farming or anything else. They drank the gourd of water and sat a while in the shade in silence. Lulu sensed that asking anything at that moment would only have earned her grunts. After a few minutes her father motioned with his head and Lulu set off, back through the trees to the pirogue.

Her father ruffled her hair as he stepped over her in the boat. He pushed them out again, following the trail through the reeds, back to the deeper waters of the marsh, toward the river, which would lead them back to beach where Lulu and her family currently had their camp. In two more moons they’d head south, down to Savannah for a moon or two, depending on how much work their father found in the shipyards, how many clothes her mother could make or repair for the townswomen. Lulu and her sister would go to school. The thought of it even now filled her with a burning anger that made the backs of her ears itch. She tried to focus on the little black snails, which had climbed ever so slowly up as the tide had come in while they were ashore, which meant the tide was with them to return, but the thought of school kept intruding, pushing the snails down into the water. She hated school because she had to wear a dress. She hated town because she had to wear a dress. All of the spring and all of the summer and all of the fall she wore the clothes of the Edistow, a deerskin skirt that reached midway down her shins and was fringed with shells Lulu was extremely proud of and forever changing when new shells washed ashore. Unlike her sister she often wore a cotton shirt if she was going to be in the sun all day, but she had not today. Her long blond hair was pulled back in a single braid that reached nearly to her waist and had shells woven into it. She looked, aside from her slightly lighter skin, like everyone else on the island they called home.

The Edistow have lived here for hundreds of years, probably more, her father said. There were few of them left, but enough still that her family traded with them and helped them harvest rice in the fall. Fine clothes her father had boasted not long after he built on the circular pole structures he’d seen in their camp and taken to wearing a deerskin loincloth, which made for no end of jeering from sailors, though few of them would say anything to his face. Why mama he said when she blushed at his attire, they’ve lived here longer than us, I expect they know what’s best to wear.

They might know best Lulu thought, but he did look a little ridiculous with his thick black beard and hairy chest and then the little flap a deerskin which reached right above his knees and looked, no matter how long it might have been, too small on his rather large body. At nearly six feet their father towered over almost everyone on the island, save her uncle who was about the same height.

Lulu liked it better when he wore his sailing britches, as he had today, which was how he looked in her earliest memories and how she preferred he look all the time. Lulu looked back at him now, pushing them slowly along, still sweating, eyes fixed on some point in the distance. Lulu loved her father, but often felt lost around him. He could be stern, or even cross with her or Birdie or Henri, at times, but more often he just seemed to be elsewhere, lost in depths of thought no one, not even her mother seemed to be able to plumb, though he often returned from wherever this place was quickly with startling bursts of temper.

Mama had a patience her father did not. And she still wore the calico dresses and skirts Lulu barely remembered from the old country, a different river, a different marsh, a different shoreline with the cold smell of wet mud and salt brine, the barnacle crusted rocks that had cut her feet tile they bled. She could still feel them sometimes when she starred into the fire in the evenings or when she watched the stars at night, lying under her sheets in the soft cradle of sand. She did not miss it exactly. She did not remember enough to miss it. But she did think of it sometimes on the edge of sleep, she’d hold it in her thoughts, turn the memories over and around, looking for details she’d missed in all the times before. Though it had been a long time since she’d found a new detail she didn’t already hold in her memory, still she did it most every night, letting those old visions usher her into sleep on the hot summer nights when the mosquitoes dove at her all night long, even through the smoke of the smudge fires her father tended all night long.

Lulu could feel the water pulling them now, partly the tide of the marsh, partly the current of the river it was drawing them to the sea. The boat rocked slightly as her father laid the pole down and took up the paddle he used to steer. She looked back and he was sitting, smiling now as they drew nearer to home. Stern and distant though he might sometimes be, her father was almost always smiling when his face was turned toward the sea and the wind was on his cheek.

The shadows of the moss dangled like fingers form the oak trees when the pirogue finally nosed onto the sandy shore of the island, not more than half a mile from their home. She hopped off the side into the water and waded ashore. She glanced back at her father who nodded once and she needed no further encouragement, taking off down the path that led back to camp.

Lulu rounded the corner at full speed, through the tall field of sea oats that formed the southern border of their camp, bursting out of the grass like a lion. She smelled the warm sweetness of fish stew. Her mother was stirring a kettle over the fire. Her sister and Henri came running from the other side of camp, calling her to come to the dunes, but she was hungry. She ran over and hugged her mother, who pulled the stray hairs from her face, tucked them back behind her ears and scooped her up a bowl of stew with a piece of cold fried bread. Lulu slurped at the hot stew, earning her a frown from her mother.

“Did you mark stumps?” Birdie watched her eat.

“Papa did.” She took another bite of bread. “Squares.” Her sister did not seem to care. Birdie had never liked stumping.

“Mama gave us a pot for the kitchen in the Arkhangelsk.”

Lulu stopped chewing. “Really?” A smile came over Birdie’s face, all she could do was nod faster than Lulu had ever seen a head move before. “It’s the best” blurted Henri.

“I started to carve spoons for it they aren’t done yet but do you want to see?” Birdie was already pulling on her arm, dragging her away from the fire.

Birdie was always making things for them to play with, she’d fixed the wheel, carved a pole for the flag, made a tk, and was always helping Papa repair the fishing nets. Sometimes Lulu hated the way Birdie was so good at making things, but mostly she loved to use the things when they were finished. She scooped up some sand and wiped her bowl out. She dumped it all at the edge of the fire and handed the bowl back to Mama. “Going to the ship,” she blurted as the three of them ran out of camp.

They slowed when they reached the dunes, they all knew from experience that running in the dunes was a waste of effort. “How come Mama gave us the pot?” Lulu had been trying to come up with reasons for a gift in her absence ever since Birdie had said it, but she had come up empty.

“Mama said we could use it if we her left alone.”

“Were you bad?”

Birdie nodded at Henri, who scowled. “Was not!”

Henri was only four, but was, as their father said, clever as a Lynx and innocent as the doves. Henri had a way of twinkling his eyes when he smiled such that adults were immediately less angry at whatever had attracted their attention in the first place. It did not, naturally, work on Lulu or Birdie, though they both secretly and not so secretly, admired this ability of Henri’s. In fact Lulu and Birdie had practiced this twinkle for hours, Lulu thought they were pretty good at it. But it never seemed to come off right when they tried it on adults.

Despite his twinkle, Henri never got away with anything. He was too naturally mischievous and yet sneaky. If something was amiss in camp, some prank played, some calamity caused, Mama always came looking for “my little brown imp.” The only other possible culprit was their cousin Charles, but he was a year younger, actually quite sneaky, and lived a quarter mile down the beach with their aunt and uncle, which generally absolved him.

They crested the last dune and from the top the Arkhangelsk came into view, lying as she always did in a gully just beyond the beach, listing slightly to port, her mast pointing nearly due north, marking time nearly as well as the sundial her father kept in this tent. The three ran down the slope of the last dune in great bounding leaps, sinking deep into the soft sand and leaping out again great whooping war cries rising from their lips.

Lulu ducked under the crumbing beam of the tk, following birdie down into the hold where the new pot sat on their makeshift stove. It was a world of black and white, dark shadows punctuated by bleach white light streaming in the occasional holes in the deck. The damp sand under the shadows was a cool luxury after the heat of the swamp. Lulu sat down and Birdie passed her the pot. She felt it cool and smooth in the darkness. She ran her finger along the lip feeling the nicks where Mama’s metal tongs had banged it. She passed it back to Birdie who put it on the stove. They all went out to gather crab shells and seaweed for a stew.

It was nearly dark by the time they walked back to camp. Their father had spread out the coals of the fire on the side of the dune just behind the pole lodge which the only really used for sleeping when the weather forced them indoors. Her father buried the coals under a few inches of sand to give them a bit for warmth for it still turned plenty cold by early morning. Lulu brought out her blanket and lay down in the sand pulling it over her.

She lay for along time whispering with Birdie about plans for the next day, watching the thing sliver of moon drag it’s light across the shifting ripple of the sea.

Fire

Birdie woke early, before first light. She sat up and looked off toward the sea. She saw the silouete of her father down by the shore, his back to her. His hand wen up and pulled down to his head with a movement so sharp and sudden she felt as if the starlight itself bent down to him. She watched at he turned to each direction, and then back to the center where he stood still, facing east.

She lay back in the sand and stared up at the stars. They began to fade as the pre dawn blue crept up from the edge of the world, turning black to blue to pink to orange and then they were gone. A new day. A groan escaped her. It was going to be a long, hot day made even hotter by the fires. IT was time to start making tar, a task Birdie loathed, though truthfully there weren’t any tasks she didn’t loath. She wanted to spend all day at the Arkhangelsk, with the new pot, with her sister, even her brother, even her cousins and her brother combined would be better than fetching wood and dried reeds all day and feeding them into ovens.

Her father came walking up from the ocean, swinging his arms and stretching his back. He saw that she was awake and plopped down in the sand next to her. His beard was still wet and droplet of salt water sprayed her as he sat down. They did not say anything, the just sat together and watched the dawn paint the sky in front of them.

Birdie’s people were sea gypsies, Alban, was what her father called himself. Got lost on our way to the old valuta grounds her father would say, chuckling. Birdie still wasn’t quite sure what this meant. He never elaborated. He was a man of few words, comfortable with silence and he expected everyone else to be comfortable with it as well, especially his. The low landers, as he called anyone who wasn’t of the sea, which made no sense to Birdie, but did apparently to at least to her father, talk to hear something, talk about what they don’t even know until their half way through talking about it, he said. I know I am the only one of my people you have to judge by, but we are not that way. If there is something to say, say it. But mark your words Birdie, pay attention to them, think on them, choose them well, find the best ones you can and don’t speak until you have found them. The low landers think they can learn by talking, by asking questions, but you must listen first. Listen and watch the world around you. If you have a question, ask it first of yourself, see what answers you can come to and once you have those ask someone else and see what answers they have. This is how you learn.

Her father sat silent now beside her. She wondered where he was. Was he here, next to her? Was he on some other shore? As if reading her mind he turned to her and smiled. It will be good day, he said in a whisper. And then he rose and walked down and ducked into the hut. Lulu sat up. I was dreaming of pine trees. Birdie glanced at her. She too had dreamed of pines. She wondered if they both were thinking of burning stumps or if there was something more. Birdie still remembered the northern forests, or thought she did, or perhaps her parents stories had worked their way into her head until they became her memories and dreams too, lodged there as if she had seen them with her own eyes and now she dreamed of her imagined memories, layers and layers of story peeling back to reveal at the end… what?

She stood up. I’m going to get some food. She skipped down the slope, feet squeaking in the dry sand. Memories of cold salt air, oceans crossings, fog and pines, where it was always cool, and soft breezes blew did not help her here, in this land of swelter and storm and slow burning kilns. What she wouldn’t give for a cool dry breeze stirring the pines of some rocky northern shore.

She stood up and wiggled her feet, letting them sink into the sand up to her ankles. She stood, rooted like a sago, feeling the first warm orange rays, savoring the brief moments when it seems like perhaps it would not be murderously hot by mid morning. Then she uprooted herself and walked down the slope toward the thatched hut into which her father had disappeared only moments earlier. Inside it was dark, she blinked as her eyes adjusted to reveal the thin slivers of light from the windows, the rathers, hung with dried fish and herbs, roots and tubers she and Lilah had dug weeks before. Plants Tamba had shown them that he and his people had learned from the Edisto. There was plenty to eat in the mashes and pine forests if you knew where to look. Still the hutt smelled as it always did, of the sea and fish. There was fishy smell inside that rarely left since most of what the family ate came from the sea, fish, clams, mussels, oysters as bit as Birdie’s head, seaweed and tk, tk and tk, there was always a bit of the sea in the stew pot. This morning it smelled of dried fish and onions. Her mother smiled at her, asked about her dreams while she ladled the leftover stew into Birdie’s bowl, a coconut shell sanded and polished smooth, carved with a scene of mermaid rising from a clam shell, something her father had seen in London. It was in fact the one and only story of London he had ever told her.

She took her bowl and stepped out into the shade of the porch her father had built. She sat on a stump and ate. The more she ate the hungrier she felt and before long whe went back inside for anoter bowl. That’s my firl said her father, ladeling another bowl for her. Lilah stepped in fater her . Henri still pretended to sleep in the far corner of the hut where he slept with his mother. He was still very much a Mama’s boy, probably always would be Birdie figured.

“Today we start the kilns.” Her father glanced that them.

“Yes papa,” they mumbled between gulps of stew. The bolted a soon as they were done, walking together down to the shore to wash their bowls in the surf and sand.

Birdie stopped at the shore. Lulu knlt and let the rushing water of the wave fill her bowl and pull the bit of fish at the bottom back out the sea. Birdie watched but she made no move to wash her own bowl. She stared out at the sea where she though she saw something white on the horizen, someting that might be a topsail coming into view.

“Lou, what is that?”

Lulu stood up, she was shorter than Birdie by half a head, but she saw it too. “Sail?”

They looked at each other and smiled. A way out of tending the klins. Birdie quickly washed her bowl and they turned and ran back up to camp. Laughing and shouting sail. Her father turned and squinted out at the sea. He hmmmed and went inside, returning with the spyglass. He trained it on the speck still wavering at the horizen.

“Topsail, moving southeast.” He handed Birdie the glass and she climbed up the nearest dune to get a better look. Southeast was no good, that meant it was headed away from them, but that made no sense, they should have spotted it earlier if it was coming out of Charles town. They’ve have seen it well and clear when she rounded cape and turned north, headed for London or tk or tk. The only boats that ever headed southeast were… she glanced over at her father. He was watching her, closely, she could see him smile, she watched him watch her figure it out. Raiders. It was a coasting ship that had drifted too close and, probably unbeknowst to its captain and crew, had been spotted. Word would spread south. Not from their camp, her father never passed on sea gossip as he called it, it was one of the reasons raiders came to their shore in peace, but this one obviously wasn’t, which ruined Birdie’s hopes of something to do other than feeding kilns. She walked back over to her father and passed the glass to Lulu.

“We’ll wait a bit on the fires. We’ve nothing to trade. And it seems they don’t need to careen. We don’t want to send up any smoke, might be taken as a signal and we’ve nothing to say.”

Birdie nodded. She screwed up her courage inside and said quickly before she lost her nerve, “Papa, can Lulu and I play at the Arkhangelsk until you need us?”

Her father looked at her darkly, but then he smiled. “What gave you the idea that there was ever a time when I did not need you? I always need you Birdie, at my side, we are joined at the hip. He clasped a huge hand on her shoulder and pulled her tight against his left and attempted to take a step forward, swinging her along with him. She laughed and tried to pull away, but his grip was strong, she remained pinned against his leg and he took another, stiff-legged step, swinging her along again. He walked her like that, laughing as they went all the way over to where Lulu stood oblivious to the both of them, watching the sail through the glass.”She’s tacking toward us."

Her father stopped and took the glass from her.

“Hey.”

He stared for a while. “Indeed she is. Okay girls, you may play, I will fetch you when it’s time.”

Lulu and Birdie tore down the slope and through camp, startling the still half asleep Henri, sitting by the fire, groggily spooning fish stew in his mouth. To the Arkhangelsk they cried as they race past him. Henri looked up, but they did not wait.

Eventually they realized he was not coming, he and samuel and charles and gone off hunting in the woods. They sometimes managed to bring back a rabbit, or a partiage or woodcock, but usually the returned empty handed with hard to believe stories of their nearly amzing feats. Lulu and Birdie usually just nodded and went on with whatever they were doing, though henri was ndid not otherwise tend ot exagerate or make up stories, which always made Birdie wonder if at least the stories he told might actually be true. Especially the stories about Tamba’s people living deep in the woods.

Tamba was about her fathers age she guessed, perhaps a few years older, the hair at his temples was whiter than her father’s, thugh he had no beard to it was hard to say what color it miht have been, her fathers tended closer to silver every time she looked closely at it. Tama and his wive lived deeper in the woods, ten minutes further up the river and then a good walk from the shore. We are not water people he told Birdie when she ased him why they did not live near the beach. We come from jungles hotter than this he smiled. His arms were strong under the shite cotton shirt he always wore. This Engilish was stiff around the edges, acquired from many sources, including her father, who had aquired his from many different people. Birdie liked hearing Tamba tell stories though because his voice and the way he pronounced them made English words sound more beautiful, more thoughtful, more important than when other people talked.

Her father nodded when she told him this once. “Tamba is like us. He is the Alban of his place. Highlanders always speak less. We put more thought into what we are going to say.”

Birdie wasn’t so sure any of them would qualify as highlanders, living as they did, so low, near to the sea. Even Tamba, though he claimed not to be water people, lived by and survived mainly from the water that was ever-present around all of them.

Tamba’s skin was near black. Light seemed to disappear when it landed on him. She noticed that he used this to his advantage, sometimes to disappear into shadow, sometimes by wearing a white shirt that provided such a contrast he was impossible not to see, a shadow fleshed out into the light. She noticed too that he used clothes in a way that most people did not, they were not simply things that hung over his frame to keep the sun off, they were tools that helped him navigate the world.

And Birdie new that it was harder for Tamba to navigate the world than it was for her. Many Africans were slaves, and those like Tamba who were not, who had arrived here free men aboard ships they helped to sail were always in danger of becoming slaves. “Englishmen are devils, the worst kind of devils, the dumbest devils, so dumb they don’t even know they are devils. Dumbest lot of humans I ever had the misfortune to be among,” her father had said once in her hearing. Tamba had nodded with a sad smile Birdie still remembered. It was a smile of defeat, a smile one had when everything else has already been tried and still one was defeated, a smile that protects against a hurt too large to look at otherwise.

“We should burn that lot of them,” she’d burst out with it so fast she startled even herself.

Her father and Tamba had turned to look at her and her face grew red under their gaze, but then Tamba had grunted and glanced at her father. “That’s one we haven’t tried. Yet.”

Her father smiled at her. “A wonderful idea my darling freeman, but, but, we’ve other business here this go round. Besides,” his eyes twinkled impishly, “they’ll get theirs. Satisfying as it would be for us to be the ones to hand it to them,” he glanced at Tamba and said softly, “and gods it would be satisfying, that is not our path on this turn.”

She could tell Tamba did not agree, but held his tongue. She wondered if he were afraid to contradict her father. But that was silly, Tamba called out her father whenever he needed to and half his father’s grand plans began in these sessions with Tamba.

Birdie pushed the canoe up onto the shore and used her pole to vault out of the stern of the boat, over the water nd land on the shore. She dragged the boat up and tied it off to a Willow that tk tkt tk more details on willow. She walked the path to Tamba and tk’s house. Their house was on stilts of cypress, thatched like hers, but better and more substantially made. Tamba and his family were not travelers, they did not move camps like Birdie’s family, though she had once overheard her father trying to convince Tamba to come with them when they went to their winter camp.

Cuthie was swinging on the vine at the edge of the clearing as Birdie approached. He called out to her as he leaped off the limb and swung out wide over the racks of drying meat and lines of linens hanging in the noonday sun. His white teeth gleamed in the light and made his smile seem like it was a thousand times brighter than her own. She laughed and ran across the compound, jumping at his legs as he passed over her. She scrambled up the tree to the limb he’d leapt from. The branches of the TK were worn smooth from Tamba’s hands and hers and Lulu’s and Henri’s and Samuel’; and Charles’s and countless other children who’d made the same climb to leap from the rope swing that Tamba had built. The tk nuts around the branch were she stood were gone already. She climbed up one branch higher, where the bark was still rough, fewer hands and feet had tread and she picked a tk nut. Tamba was still swinging, slower now, ever closer to equilibrium.

When his swing had lost it’s momentum he lowered himself hand over fist until he reached the end of the line and then he dropped to the forest floor. The line was just long enough, with a heavy knot at the end, that he could throw it up and over the branch where Birdie stood.

She waited while he climbed back up and joined her on the limb. She handed him a nut and took the rope. She kept her eyes on his as she casually fell backward gripping the rope. Still, she knew her eyes betrayed her as she left the branch, no matter how many times she did it there was a jolt of fear that went shooting up her spine when all her weight settled onto the line, there was a lot ridding on that instant, it was the instant where you found out if the line would hold, if the branch would still bear your weight and then it was gone and you were with it, chasing the arc of an invisible pendulum out over the clearing Cuthie’s family called home.

Birdie looked down on the garden, the corn still only knee-high, not yet supporting the threading tendrils of bean plants. tk look up food crops of coastal carolina pre-contact.

It was mid afternoon by the time Papa rounded them up and set them aout grathering grass and small sticks of oak and walnut. He had a mixture of woods and rasses an sizes that was entirely within his own head, though Lulu and Birdie and even Henri had long since learned which thing they needed more of just by glancing at the pipes, which the kep tseperate. Grass, then oak, then Walnut. Papa claimed to build by heat, but that seemed completely crazy to Lulu since the kilns really had only one temperature – really, insanely hot.

They all sweated. Sweated gathering wood in the stagnant air of the hammuckss around the marsh, sweated paddling the boats back to camp in the fierce noonday sun, sweated piling the sticks beside the fire. If they were fast they were allowed to run down to the sea and jump in between runs, but even the ocean was no great relief on such days when the shallows were nearly as warm as the air around them and they had not time to make their way out to the cool depths. It was Lulu’s least favorite part of the year, making the Arkhangelsk tar, but she knew it was also the most important part of the year. She often thought the only thing that would make it worse would be having to tan hides while tending the kilns. She never complained about working the kilns or gathering wood though. She did however, complain plenty about tanning hides. Who didn’t? It was a smelling boring business rubbing brains all over a hide and scrapping the fur off. She did love the shoes her mother had learned to make though. No one wore shoes in the summer, but come winter it was cold enough to want them and nothing she had ever worn felt as nice as the shoes her mother had learned to sew out of deer skin. Tk had taught her and she had learned from a Edisto woman who’d helped Tamba and tk survive after they had washed up on the island just off the coast.

The storm had been an early one, Tamba and tk were on captain tk’s boat, bound for boston with a prize they’d taken off the coast of Florida when the storm came out of the south. Their captain tried to put in at Charles town, but they did not make it, the wind broke the mast and sent the boat over. Tamba and tk knew how to swim, the rest of the crew did not. Even so, they were lucky. They clung to piece of broken mast and managed to steer themselves in the heavy chop such that they madeit to shore. Tamba told of seeing a shark in the shallows on the way in, even it was so bewildered by the storm it showed no interest in them, merely passing by close enough to touch, though Tamba did not, before settling into their wake where it stayed until the water became too shallow for it.

Details on the day of lighting the kilns, games the kids play, treats they eat, the last bit of gum chichle. Then the fishing

When you drink or eat something you do not just drink the liquid or eat the flesh of the thing, you consume it’s spirit as well. Different things have different spirits. The spirit in the rum, it is not a good spirit. Some it comes to very strongly, it takes them and makes them do as it wishes, sends them nowhere but in search of more of itself. Others it visits and then leaves, it all depends. Some days it visits me and leave, some days it visits me and wants to stay even after I no longer want it, so I decided one day to let it in my no more. It is not the way of our people I do not think. I do not know, we did not have it back home. There was Vodka, but that was a think of the lowlanders. We did not drink it. It we knew had a strong spirit. For us there is the sea, it has the strong spirit of anything, I would rather stand on it’s shore for one minute and task it’s salt air than have a lifetime of rum. That is the spirit I want to spend my time with.

Her Papa was a quiet man, prone to grunts and nods in lieu of the sort of comforting, I heard you type of comments most people make. He was often absorbed in a task to the degree that he seemed utterly unaware of the world around him and yet sometimes Lulu would notice that he was also watching her, watching her sister and not in fact missing anything that was going on around him at all, that he was in fact more aware of what she was doing than she was. She would pause and think about this sometimes and try to focus herself more fully on what she was doing, if she sould not take in the whole world around her like her father she could at least, she reasoned, pay closer attention to what she was doing.

Thsi time of year that meant gathering grasses and helping tend the fires of the kilns. The family had three kilns which burned around the clock for weeks as the stumps slowly burned down and the sap dripped slowly down to fill the buckets below. It was a hot, dangerous time of boil liquids, burning fires and other hazards which Lulu dreaded. No one had ever been burned too badly, though her father had once scalded his hand badly enough that the skin had come off. He made sure that the children did not handle the sap until it had cooled to a less scaulding temperture.

The sago palm fronds clattered in the wind, a clicking ticking sound like the women’s shoes on the plank sidewalks of Charles town.

The boat was wooden, 12 feet from bow to stern, wood planked and sealed with the arckhanglsk tar, smooth shiny weathered wood with hardly a splinter in the boat. She ws rigged like a doah, triangular sail, mast near the bow, single ling coming back offf the boom and a tiller in the rear. She had a outrigger spar that would be lashed to the port or starboard gunwale via two blocks her father had attached with nails he’dpryed lookse from the arckhaglske. She would be a palfrom so stable their mother often used it to threw nets beyond the surfline, obut shoe could also be rigged for speed that would outrun every boat the had ever tried to match her. Lulyu had raced her in charles town harbor the winer efore winning by two lengths ten lengh over a very nice, but piirly rigged effort the tk governors siun had put together. He was a nice enough boy shed told Birdie, he ust doesnt know how to sail very well. Or build boats. Birdie had smiled. The took their prize opurse of two bit and bought peppermint sticks and licorish imported from lindon. Hand their got their mother a brush for her hair. Their faother stood outside the store, sittinng on a barrel, carding something in the shade, watching the world pass but has his knofe flicked seeming absently at the thing piece of oak in his hand. He smiled when they came running out to show him the comb. She’ll love that.

Their mother was a stong independent woman who keep their camp with a nearly military sense of neatness. She didn’t care a wit what the girls wore, but if they left a diry bowl lying a about she threaten them with a switch. This only very rarely happend to Birdie, the Lou had a defiant strek that foten set her up and kicked her about in whay she did not really understand. propelling her down paths she did not mean the woalk, great screaming matches with her sister, stomping and growling in theatrical ways that drove her mother to step in and threaten switching.

The kettle hung ove rhte fire from the trupod her pap had made from iron taken out of the arkhnglsk. Her father was not a smith, but he’ watched the man in Chrlestown enough to get ht ebasics. He come back the camp these year and built himself a small forge, and bellows out of sail cloth. So far he;s made two legs of iron for a fire tripod, the their was still a puece of willow, which was stong enough, though eventyually warped from the heard of the cials and had be replaced.

In the kittle was a bubbling stew full of fish and rice and seasoned with salt and herbs Lulyu hadhelped father from the creak edge the day before.

The sand was dug out, the six inch deep bit was lined with stone, but left caps on bothe swindward and landward sides so thta the windws would feed the firs enough oxygen even with the in burning almost entirely below the surace oft he sane. Sometime when her father or Tabe brough down a boar their father would dig another put and build a giant fire in it and let it durn down to a huge mountain of cials . Then he’d lay the board meant, wrapped in its down skin on the coals, burry the whole thing over night and then the next wmorning they’d dig it up and featst on meat so sweet and tender you never wanted to eat anythign else ever again. It would last them the better part of weeks, more if the weather was cool enough. They build a tootcellar in the dark shade of the hut, two feath cown in the sand, lined with planks of swap cypress ther papa had split, it kept food cool and fesh for quite some time. At night they banks the fire, but used the coals to keep the previous nights stew hot and in the morning the mother buit up the fire again and boil the stew and that wsas breakfast.

Sometimes he roasted fish, but mostly lulu loved stews, fish stew, venison stew, boar stew, even rabbit stew wasn’t have bad, espcially when the could trade with the Cherokee for ramps, which were lulu’s favoir food in the world, at once swwet and sharp;y bitter, they made everything delicsious, When he could her father stuffed the boars with ramps before buring them to cook overnight. The resulting meat was tend an swet and smealed of the earth and tasted, a little bit like heaven Tamba said.

He father pulled the sail in tight, the boat heaved away from them, but her father leaned back against he gunwale slightly until to reached a balance point that balanced speed and awkwardness, the boat lept across the waves and out beyond the surf line of the sand bar to smoother water. The wind was blowing offshore, a storm from the west would be here tomorrow her father said.

Her father spun the little boat into the wind, dropped the sail and walked toward the bow to get the net. Birdie sprang up and followed. They heaved the net over the side, letting the drift of the current carry them away from it, spreading it out. Once it was out her father used and oar to bring the boat about to where he wanted it and then he yanked the tk line , shooting the halyard and the sail back up. It caught the wind the minute it was up and tighted the lines of the net, pulling them and the net back toward shore. Birdie leaned over the gunwale and watch as fish swam by and were pulled into the net.

By the time the neared the surfline again the net was choked with fish. She helped her father pull it in, though it became so heavy that eventually her effort was of little use. Her father wrapped the line around the mast and pulled the net, chock full of writhing fish up against the hull, fell off the wind as the boat came into the break of the sand bar and then, timing it with a wave, surfed the craft expertly over the sand bar and into the more sheltered inner waters where he began to paddle it in the shore.

Hoisting the net, cleanign the fish and drying wonderedthem. more description of their time at sea, her father smoking, talking of the sea, the old country perhaps, some kind of tradition.

They had arrived early in the morning, the air still heald the wet chill of night, beads of dew shined on teh gunwales of the boat when Birdie came up to look at the coastline. Her father was on the bowsprit perched precariously, but riding the chop as if on a surfboard, glass to his eye, staring off at a horizon Birdie couldn’t see. She came forward to have a look and saw the sail her father wa s studying. He did not look away, but did say, “merchant, heading north. Boston. Maybe Providence. Riding low. Make a prize if anyone gets to her.”

“Will they?”

Her father brought down the glass, and looked down at her. “I don’t know. I only know who is where. Last I head Whydah Gally was up that way. Bellamy’d certainly take her, sitting low in the water like that. Not gold, but something out of Charles town.” He stared off at the ship, “but you never know. The sea decides.”

He jumped down the to the deck and rubbed her head. “It’s always cat and mouse. That’s why I stay out of it. Who are you rooting for?”

Birdie considered this for a moment, she wasn’t sure really. She didn’t like the merchant captains she’d met. She was pretty sure she didn’t care what happened to them, the way they treated their men they deserved whatever they got. Her father had once told her that there were good captains, he’d never met them but he’d heard stories. He also reminded her that even those ugly mean snorting fat men had wives and children somewhere who end up paupers in debtors prison or some other ill might befall them. Still, she thought of the men and women who sailed with her family, who flew the black flag and, while there were a few she did not like, for the most part they were kind, fair people. They had a code, way of living that was about more than the fortune the merchant men were always chasing.

Her father dropped bucket over the side and filled it up. He knelt and splashed some water on his face, rubbed his eyes and she walked over the handed him the linen that served as his towel. He washed his face every morning, rain or shine, shivering cold or blistering hear,, it did not mater. He father was a man of unbreakable, unbendable even, habits. Not many. But he always washed his face and he always sat and thought, every monring, nearly without exception. She’d seen him seated near the bow in six foot chop, wind howling down on them and he with his eyes closed, thinking.

He took the towel from her with a thanks and wiped the salt water out of his beard.

“I think I’d like the Whydah to take her,” she said.

He smiled. “I think I would too.”

It was well past midday before the glided into the marshes and up the river to Tamba, tk and Cuthie’s village. Tamba had waved them down in the marsh, coming out by canoe to guidethem in. Huge storms reshaped the mouth of the river and the marshes every year. Her family knew the river well last year, but that knowledge was dangerously out of date by now. If the wanted to make it to where the tk would be stored, they need someone who had been on the river all winter, knew it well. Tamba was that man. He took the tiller, the only man her father had every let take the tiller in Birdie’s time sailing with him, and guided them slowly up the seeming still water. They rode the incoming tide through the marsh, but then the river began to take over, the boat slowed, finally it stilled them completely. The wind was not in their favor so her father locked two sets of oars to each side of the boat and took a middle seat for himself, while Lulu and Birdie and Henri took the other oars. Birdie worked the starboard oar while Henri and Lulu worked the port side. Slowly the boat crept up the river. The deeper water looked black and still but their oars told a different story, battling the steady current of the river that wanted so badly to merge with the sea.

Why do you want it so badly river? Lulu wondered. What do you get out of it? You become salty. You become just another bit of water in the endlessness of the ocean, a drop, every drop once it’s own, not joined with others into something more, the sea. The sea. You want to be part of the sea. You are part of the sea, it’s a coming home after the long journey down the mountains to here.

The sea had personality, the sort of thing a single drop of water might lack. The sea was something more, a home, a joining together, but greater than the sum of it parts, it was greater than just about everything. Like the rest of her family, and any one who spent any length of time around it, Lulu prayed to sea every morning, greeted it palms out. Some welcome the sun as a god, others welcome the sun so they can once again see the sea.

arriving by ship meeting with Cuthie playing on the tree discovering the arkhanglsk

Sails

Lulu woke from a dream where she was gliding over the water, slow and smooth like a pelican, alone, her wing tips skimming the waves and watching the schools the fish dart from her shadow. And then she was in her usual body, lying on on a calico quilt on the sand, the sun already steaming the air around her, like a hidden kettle just coming to boil. She sat up and stretched and shook Birdie, who swatted at her.

“Come on, Birdie, lets play what we were playing last night.”

Birdie sat up groggy, rubbing her eyes gently as they had all learned to do in a world where you never knew when there might by a grain of sand on your hand. “What game again?”

“Remember?” Lulu held up the braided sweetgrass doll she’d slept with. Lulu like to curl in a ball under the blankets, no matter how hot it might be, and tuck her doll, no matter how scratchy or hard it might be, up against her chest. Her mother said she was a born cuddler.

“Oh right,” Birdie turned away and scanned the sand. Birdie had a habit of flinging her dolls away from her just before she fell asleep. She was not a doll cuddler like Lulu.

It was Lulu who saw the doll and scrambled out of bed to grab it for her sister. She looked up from the doll and saw her mother coming out of the hut to stir the fire. She was wearing the blue dress with impossibly tiny white and yellow flowers on it that Lulu loved. Her mother was always making what Lulu thought were the most fabulous dresses, but this one she’d made last winter and Lulu had helped sew some of the seams. This morning her long hair was braid twisted up into a coil at the top of her head. Lulu always noticed the whiteness of her neck when she wore her hair up.

Notes

She has dark hair, an easy smile. She laughs and dances when Papa plays the fiddle. Some string instrument. Sound, the book needs more sound. At night they need to play music and dance around the fire.

A solid green dress that is Birdie’s favorite and white linen dress that their Papa liked. He grabs her and pulls her into his lap.

How what of the cousins They live further up hte river with Cuthie I think, they come around sometimes, but there is a trail that that the kids take through the woods, or do they need the boat? I don’t know, let’s say they need the boat fthrough the marsh and then the trail? No the trail, no boat, the boat is Papa;s thing. So there’s a trail that leads back through the woods, firstone to cuthie’s how and one to their cousin’s house.

Autumn

Campfire Talk

After dinner the grownups sat afround the fire, Birdie pretended to be asleep, the san was cool on her the skin of her arm, the warmth of the fire . That would not make sense, it’s summer. That even a thunderstorm rolls in, cools off the land, the sunsets throught he clouds, the sound of the thunder was like drmming, a marshall, marching ound that advanced across the waves toward them. It was early, far to early for a big storm, those came later, at the end of summer, the first on was the sign it was time to move south, time to head to St Augustine for the winter. This was a thunderstorm from the south. A tk, Tamba called them. It brought a strange drop in temeprature as iff the storm were sucking something out of summer, giving it a viseral punch in the gut. No, as if summer were grathering herself up, taking a deeep breath, a momentary pause from her usual swelter to give them some reprieve.

Birdie noticed at adults felt it too. After a dinner of fish stew mopped up with bannock, her father pulled out his fiddle and Tamba joined in with some driftwood rasps he’d been working on. The Fiddle and percussion dueled and danced with each other in Birdie’s head, first her father leading then Tamba stepping to the front, stomping with his foot to add bass to his scratch and clack percussion.Mama stood up and began to slowly sway her hips, as if the music were pulling her about like a puppet. Auntie tk came back up from the beach and swung immediately into the dance, taking up her sister’s arm. Mama danced tk, her braid twisting back and forth, her feet light on the sand. The music found a patterm and the dancers hooked arms like the instruments and began to turn each other. Her uncle attempted to joun in, but neither would make room for him and he sat down again to smoke.

It wasn’t until Henri came rushing in that the sisters broke apart their dance and both reached down to each take one of Henri’s arms and they began to turn in the circle, Henri pushing them ever faster. Papa picked up on it, bringing his playing in line with the increasing speed of the dance until all of them were frantically spinning and finally spin apart, spilling into the sand. Papa pulled mama into his lap wrapped his arms around her and began to play again, gesturing to Lulu, your turn. Lulu and Birdie and Henri began their own dance.

It was late by the time fire died down and Papa traded his fiddle for his pipe. Henri was curled up against Mama, already asleep. Birdie lay next to Lulu, feeling the cool sand againster her arm, the head the fire on her back. She closed her eyes and began to drift toward sleep. In the background her parents and aunt and uncle and Tamba continued to talk in lower tones. Birdie drifted off to sleep but woke up at some point to hear her uncle still talking.

She drifted in and out of sleep still until she heard her uncle say with conviction in his voice, “I want to come with you this year when you leave.”

She woke up completely. She could almost picture the surprised on Papa’s face. It probably matched her own she thought.

“What about your wife and children?”

“I’ve built a boat.” Birdie’s eyes sprung open, he has?

“I want to sail up to Charles town, trade the furs I’ve been stockpiling and then use that money to get some supplies and take the boat south.”

"That boat of yours won’t make it. We’ll have to tar her this summer, re-mast her if we can.

“She’s my boat, I’ll see to it.”

Birdie tried to think of what her father would say, but he said nothing. She could hear the soft sigh of his exhale as he puffed on his pipe in silence.

“You think it’s a bad idea.”

Her father still said nothing.

“You’re worse than my wife,” her uncle said.

Her father snorted. “You could learn something from your wife…”

She heard tk stand up. “Maybe you could learn something from me. Maybe you could make some plans with someone else for once instead of keeping all your secrets to yourself.”

“Secrets?”

Birdie pretended to roll over in her sleep. Careful to neither open her eyes, nor squeeze them shut, she turned toward the fire so she could see them. Her uncle and her father hand never been the best of friends, but now it sounded very much like they were about to come to some kind of a head and Birdie planned to stop them. She could feel their eyes on her. She tried to relax her body and keep her breathing slow and even.

“I know you don’t want me to come south, I know you don’t want me to be part of your winter camp because that’s where you meet with all your sailing people.”

Her father laughed now. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know.” Your wife talks to mine.

Her father said nothing.

“You don’t deny it?”

“No. I don’t deny that there are people I know in St Augustine who sail. You have that much right.”

Birdie thought of her winter camp. It was much like their summer camp, though there were hardly any trees near the coast. No pines anyway. There were alligators. She spent her time fishing. Her father often worked on ships and did other jobs around town. She loved winter camp, but there was no one to play with and the idea that Samuel and Charles might come to it nearly made her jump up and cry out, yes, yes please come.

I’m not even sure we’re going this year.

What? Why not?

Her father shrugged, took another drag off his pipe. “Things are changing.”

“What things?”

“All things.”

Birdie risked a peek through the veil of eyelashes. She could see her father, he sat on his stump, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, staring into the fire.

“The British are coming.”

“The British are already here.”

“True. But more of them are coming. Many more. They’re headed for Nassau. They need to bring it in line or they’ll lose it forever. But they’ll get around to Charles town eventually. We’ll need to be gone before that.”

You’re just going to leave? You can’t just leave.

Sure I can.

But you’re known here, you have a life here, people need you here.

for once Birdie agreed with her Uncle, though the thought of the birish made her angry. She did not like the British. Their soldiers were always drunk, their sailors cruel and unwashed, dirty med who briught nothing but pain and misery to anwhere they went it seemed to here, as far as she had ever seen anyway. Once in Charles town the soldiers in the market had pokd the slave in the market with sticks, did the slave market exist yet?

Let the british come, do you really thing they can control everything, be everywhere?

They aren’t going to other with us, we’re not big enough to interest them.

They’re not going to bother with us beause they are not going to find us here. But do you really thing they would ignore the people who make it possible for their worst enemies to contineu sailing? Continue robbing their merchantmen? Stealing from her? Do you really thingk the Biritish crown is going to ignore that forever?

You’re a coward.

Birdie could hear the fire over the silence. She watched her father contemplate his reponse, she could see him staining to hold back whatever impulse his tmemper as sending him. He exhaled slowly. You have never been to see. Her father said quiely. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because you can walk proud on the land, that you hvae anyidea what the sea is capable of doing to you. Do not presume to understand courage when you have never been out of site of land. And do not return to my fire for a while. I do not wish to see you again. I will send one of the children for you when my anger has passed.

Her father walked off toaward the ocean. Birdie saw him in the moon light take off his deerskin skirt and run into the waves. Her father often swam at night she new. It was something he had doon since he was a small boy. It helps me sleep he had said to her once. The cold helps you sleep. Of course, the cold is not so strong here.

Her uncle sat on the log, looking around awkwardly. She could hear him muttering something to himself, but could not make out was it was. She rolled over and stared up at the sky.

The British. Coming to Charles town. She watched shooting stars and started to count them, but her eyes kept sliding shut. When she opened them again the sun was just cresting the sea.

Storm

It was late in the afternoon when she felt it. Lulu sat stright up in the hull of the Arkhangelsk and hit her head on a cross spar. Ow, she exclained and quickly followed it with, Birdie, do you smell that?

What? Birdie paused and sniffed. What?

The wind is different.

Birdie sniffed again, she put her nose to a crack and sniffed deeply.

What are you doing sister? asked Henri.

Lu says the wind smell different.

Henri too sniffed. He cocked his head to the side and studied Birdie or a minute, then turned and studied Lulu. He shrugged. I think it smells like the sea.

“Yes,” said Lulu, “but it smells like more like the sea.”

Henri stared. “What did you say?”

While her brother and sister did not notice it, at nearly the same moment that Lulu had hit her head, her father had also jerked upright out of a sound sleep in a hammock slug between to pieces of drfitwood. Mother, he shout leaping out of the hammock. “It’s time. Everything in the boat.”

Tk came running out of the hut and looked up at the sky. “Now? Are you sure?”

Papa stopped to sniff again when Lulu came around the corner at full speed and skidded to a halt in front of her father, “Papa, the air smells different, I think there’s a storm coming.”

He smiled at her and turned to their mother. “Yes, mama, I am sure.”

What about tk uncle?

Her father glanced out at sea. “I’m sure he’ll stay in Charles town.”

“You’re sure.”

Her father looked at the ground. “No, I am not sure. I am sure the docks will tell him to stay. Whether he will listen…”

“Greer, the boy is with him.”

“There’s nothing we can do.”

I am going to tell tk sister’s name"

“There isn’t time.”

Lulu’s mother glared at him.

“What good would it do Arabella? She’d worry and make herself sick and still not be able to do anything.”

Lulu’s mother continued to glared at him, but did not argue. Finally she sighed. Lulu get your brother and sister and then all of you come back here and start helping me pack while your father gets tk boat name."

“Yes mama.”

details of breaking camp, packing everything up. Then moving up the river, past the marshes to the sheltered higher ground. Meeting up with the indians. Playing wiht the kids. The storm hits. The terror.

They had stipped the hug and broken it down completely before the wind ever increased in speek, long before the hoizen turned black.

It wasn’t until the sun was setting that they say the line of clouds, so dark and far off they nearly blended with the sea below them. Her father ran up the dunes wiht the spyglass and studied the horizon.

It came ashore as if angry, but no angy, what we see as rage is just the sea god reshaping. Ittakes tremndous foce to reshape the coastline Think what effort it would take to move this sandbar ten feet to the left. And the horricane is the seas way of moving entire islands, making cures in barrier islands to get into mangoves that haven’t had a flushing of the sea in years. It reshapes, it blows hard because it has much work to do and wants to do it in little time. There are two faces to the world, one is so slow and patient it’s tough to see it work. Tricle a stream down a bank of sand and it will soly cust deeper and deeper as it comes to rejoung the sea. Deerp and deeper until is reaches th sea. And everyone thinks that’s the end of the sory but it’s now. there are rivers in theoceans, the anmials rid them, the first follow tthem, water is always in motiion, that is it’s fundamental quality it is never at rest. It is still the echo of the collision that formed the moon.

Hwo does the father have all these wide ranging views, because he has sailed, met people from around the world, ben eposed to believes beyond those he grew up with, shapped new ones, from those he started with, abandoned those that made no sense, kept those that ddid, tweaked them to fit whatever new information he might have gained.

The slow process happen around us so subtly we hardly notice them. We see the meium process, the ones that move at our speed. We see the tides change every day, twice a day. Once a day, ti depends, but it is regular, cyuling, like the moon, we see things at out seep.

The storm came on so strong it seemed to suck everything toward it. The wind blow out to see for a a while, then sudden it switched and began to come back like the storm had inhaled what the land had to offer and was no ready to speak. It spoke in rythm and rymme. Rising like music Lulu had heard once coming from a big house in London twon, It grew beating wvaves across the mrsh in front of them like drum tolling throught the night, it played the strees like a strong, beating its bowacrost the fronds of palms, between the neeldes of hjack pine, it rasped the reeds with a blast that nocked them flat, pinned them down to a single note that was washed over and drown out by the oncoming waves. And then everything seems to screch and wail in some kind of climax as the storm began its work of rearranging. Lulu, Birdie and Henri unddled with the mother under the shelter of the boat, but it tocked and began to move too. Her father ducked outside and added more line and went to check on Tamba and tk in their boat.when he returned they were with him. That’s the last time anyone of foign to be able to walk out there without a line her father said ad the moved over to leave more room for Tabe and his family.

Tk sister names was in the stern huddled up, her arms wrapped around Charles, rocking back and forth, sobby queitly and Lulu guessed, praying. Lulyu knew if she went outside the wind would blow her away. Literally move her across the ground with more power and she had to resist it. It would shape her, i would put her wherever she wanted, she knew it and yet a part of her still watned to duck out under the gunwale and Feel it, feel her own helplessness in the face of the storm, measure herself agains this great rearranging force, to feel physically as insignificant as she sometimes felt in her head. This thing was big. she was so small in the face of it, and she could outwit it, could dodge it, could surviv it using only what she had about here. It was a feeling at once of power and fear mingled together.

Even her father could not step out into it now. Even he would sue a line of for somereason her had to go out and then suddenly, when it seemed it could get no worse, it stopped. And eery quiet calm descended upon them. The wind dropped to noting more than a windy day at the beach. Her father was out in and instant securing lines, moving branches and debris that was washing ashore.

An aligaror appoaches the boat. The ancient eye starred at them her father picked up his gun and pointed it at the create, but did not fire. For gd sakes shoot it tk sister name.

No. If I have too I will, biut righ now I don’t have too.

The single eye regarded them. Lulu felt the fear wash over her like a storm sopped wave and she realized that though she was shivering from the wind and water that soaked, here, she felt a fot flash of fear was over her and she was swetting. She tapped her father’s leg but could not find words. He stroked her hed and looked at her kindly, as if she were scared of the storm. Still she could not find the make her mouth form the words. finally in a whisper she said, “aligator”

Her father had his postol out and pointing in the darkness so fast everyone jumped. What is Tamba screamed ove rthe whining howl of the saves. Her father pointed. The gator eased itself further in and but kept irs eye on all of them.

As scared as she was Lulu could not help thinking that that it looked every bit as scared as she did. Excpe it had giant teeth. Then again she thought, her father had a cun. A bunch of creatures thrown together, all afraind of the wind and sea and water. Maybe this was how the storm wanted to mover her, maybe id di not want to blow her thourhg the pines so much as put her under a boat with a scared aligaotr. It contineued to stare as her, and it seemed to her, only her. She stared right back, the fear faded some. One can only be truly terrified for so long, one adjusts, terriffied becomes normal. Until more terror comes to up the ante somehow and it didn’t

She thought she might be losing her mind until she heard Tamba say, “It’s watching her.”

Her father answered just load enough to be heard over the storm, “She’s edible size.”

“Maybe” said Tamba. “Maybe it’s just scared and curious.”

“You’re feeling charitable.”

“You’re the one who hasn’t shot it.”

“If I shoot it we’ll all be deaf. We need our ears for the storm.”

Tamba nodded, lulu could see the dglint of Tambas eye in the darkness as he nodded. They were all only eyes. The storm had sucked the light out of the evening. It was dark as early night and yet it could not have even been sunsut. it was impossible to know.

The afternoon sun was gone. The Wind began to roll ashore in gusts ar first, spitting cand off the tops of the dunes, whiping it into the aire and then letting it ettle again, some kind of dance between wind and done, one that ducked the dunes dipped the dunes, back, away from the sea, and then lifted them again in some kind of dance, light and bluri at the edges, stingin the skin of any create that might cut between them might be so bold as to cut between then. Very quickly though the dance became to fast to follow, the wind no longer let the sand dip, prefering the whirl it endlessly across the sandy shore dance floor. the sea because to instrde, waves moved higher as if draw by a tide, but it was not a tide it was wind, moved water over thousands of miles, piling it up here in th sahllows of the coastal water where it rose and surge forward., washing the frontal dunes first, then rising high enough to whipe out their camp, what was left, that the had not backed up was list, nothing more then the stones for the limns, though Birdie was sad to see them gone, pished out over the marsh. her father said perhaps they would find them, bu again, but Lyuly could not see how, the dunes were moving like soldier marching befor ethe wind, further bck buring reeds and sloughs and certainly and stones that folled down below them.

The sy was dark, there was not trace of sun and it was impossible to tell the time, though Lulu thought it must be lat evening, her stomach gnaed at her sides , the water had made it all the way across the marsh, They’d see fish through helplessly across the reeds, left floudering when the storm surge pulled back, btu then it came again, more and more surging until it did not teceed anymore, but was simply the new leven of the sea.

The island they had chosen to make their stand was ten, perhaps twelve feet above the water line and now the water was threatening to rise hight enough to wash them off it. It was too late to move, the turned their boats over and her father started a small fire under one of them using the cials he had brought from came/ He kept it low, letting each twig burn to coals before allding more.

Just enough to light toches later, if we need them he said to Birdie, who helped him stack twigs near the stern of the over turned boat. The wind was starting to blow sand up on the windward side of the overturned boat. Her father and Taba used their shuvels to pile up more and seal off the bow and windward side, making a reasonable windtight, perhaps even water tight barrier. They would know more about that when the rain began i.

The all climed in, her father placed the stove pip in trought the sand to vent the fire. It was still smokey and hot under the boat, but it was bette rthan being out in the spitting sand and rain. Lulu sat down byt hte interance and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. Her omother and sister sat on the other side of the entrance tunnel, Birdie in tk’s lap. Her aunt and charles were back toward the stern with tk Tamba’s wife. H, Henri crawled in and paused on hands and knees loock around. He laced at lulyu but went to his mama, taking a seat on her other leg, opposite Birdie. You cant sit like this all night she said, but we can fuddle for a little while.

Her father and Tamba were still outside, she could hear them shouting to each other, trying to be heard as the wind increased aroun the. She coud hear the his of wind blown sand hittin ght full above her head. TLight flickered at the tunnel crawlspace and seconds later the sky clapped in the thunderous roat that shock the cround so hard the little mountain Lulu had been idling shaping wiht ther hands of dry sand, flattened out noticably. It was only as it sank down again that Lyuluy realized she’d been sooping up sand and letting it run out of her hand like her mother’s prize timer that always hung high in the rathers, out of reach even of Birdie and Lulu. No one used the glass timer but Papa and Mama. he used it to navigate some times, though her had not in a long time. I know these waters well enough.

Then segue to the aligator at the door. First her father and Tamba come in, then the sad and curious aligator, then the brunt of the store the flashing sky, the calm of the key, the other side of the brunt, and the end of the night. Waking the next day, their hime cone, the whole cur of the shoreline different. And then the piece of tthe boat that they dind fishing the next day.

They bury him on land. The little boy, puffy and white, down. Chunks of flesh missing. Crabs eating them. They brun them in pyre, the sparks reach up like mingling wiht the stars, the after life, the next time around, etc.

Scene of lulu and Bridie sailing with their father. The boat is a small coastal cruiser, junk rigged perhaps, or liek a dhak from the aftrican, Tamba and her father build the boat, cata maran single outrigger, oah rigged, triangular inverted sail, fast, stable, next to no draw, can handle some open water, but good at navigating inlet and marshes and rivers. Big enough to hold a descent catch, but also fast and capable to runnig good in from a ship to shore under the cover of sarkness. Her father helps unload ships that sail that come in the beginning. The firls see their father take the boat out at night. Meet the sail. He helps bring treasue and men ashore. Load it into wagons and smuggle it into Charles twon. guns and run. Lulu and Birdie get to help , this is their fist time. perhaps, something similar to ricing camp disaster? does that fir or do they simply see it happen and her father tells the story abroudn the fire.

Need to get wise old Tamba in camp and telling stories. Not necessaryly all african stories. He;s sailed widely, all around the world and knows stories from nearly every culture. He becomes a way to get out of the rut of any one point of view. He tells tails I can borrow from the myths of many cultures. Thwich means I can’t be accursed the approation, or at least not any one appropriation. If you steal from everyone everyon will be mad. Might as well I suupose. What’s the harm. If you’re going to go, go all the way.

so Tamba comes to the fire and starts to tell stories, her father tries to get him to stop but the fgirls, and the reader begin eto put things together, the swimming at night, the sailing at night, the sails on the horizen, Tabna’s stories of beinging goods into the harbor. Then her father asks for a story aout tk, something to get the kids away from being curious about whta all he does besides making tar.

What does he do, he helpos get the goods ashore and brings water out to the boats when the need it. dried fish, he’s paid in whatever the boat has, somethimes rich fabrics their mother makes into fine dresses f, sometimes rum, which her father sells to the taverns in charlestown. Perhaps there’s ascene where they all go to charles town to trade the rum for money and the kids get to go to the traders, scene at the slave market. That could be a rough one. need to find out when slavery reeally took off, when the slave market opened. woiuld it have been their in 1705? If not then some seen of blacks being treated poorly and the family’s rage. Maybe her father buys someone, a child perhaps, a man and a child. Her father hauls them back out to camp and sets them free. They help out and then they go to join a crew.

Tamba asks them their names, asks if they can sail. They buy someone that can and set them free.

Glossary

Taffrail rail round the stern of a ship