Chapter 6 - The Clean ManifestThe cottage on Tybee Island had been built in 1938 out of salt-treated heart pine and salvaged ship timbers, with a broad screened porch that faced east toward the open Atlantic.
It did not belong to the Harlow Maritime Group. It did not belong to DH Holdings. It had belonged to my maternal grandmother, who had left it to me in a handwritten holographic will that Arthur Vance had spent three weeks trying to invalidate during my second year of marriage because Derek wanted the ocean frontage for a condominium syndicate.
I sat on the porch swing, a heavy wooden bench hung from the rafters by galvanized chains that were already developing that fine, powdery white bloom of coastal zinc.
It was May.
The salt marshes behind the island were a brilliant, violent green, the new spartina grass pushing up through the black mud of the low tide. Across the sound, a single container ship—a blue-hulled vessel belonging to the Maersk line—was moving slowly out toward the sea buoy, its wake spreading across the calm gray water like a pair of silver wings.
Beside me, in a bassinet woven from sweetgrass by the Gullah women who sold baskets under the market arches in Savannah, my daughter was sleeping.
Her name was Clara.
Not for Derek’s great-aunt with the silver-plated spoons, but for Clara Barton, the woman who had walked onto the battlefields with clean bandages and a ledger to record the names of the missing.
She had Derek’s dark, almost black hair, but her eyes, when she opened them three weeks ago in the delivery room at St. Joseph’s, were the pale, clear gray of my father’s people from the mountains above Dahlonega.
On the wicker table beside the swing lay three documents.
The first was a certified copy of the final decree of divorce, entered by the Chatham County Superior Court on April twelfth. It was twelve pages long, printed on standard legal parchment, and bore the signature of Judge Robert Mercer. Under the terms of the settlement, Derek had surrendered all residual rights in our marital property, had waived all parental claims in exchange for the federal prosecutors agreeing not to seek the death penalty under the chemical weapons statutes, and was currently serving forty-two years at the federal correctional complex in Pollock, Louisiana.
He would be eighty-one years old before he was eligible to see a parole board.
The second document was an official notification from the Maritime Administration. The receiver’s report had been accepted without exception; the core assets of Harlow Shipping had been sold at public auction to an international terminal operator from Rotterdam for seventy-four million dollars. Every creditor had been paid one hundred cents on the dollar, the EPA remediation fund had been fully endowed, and the remaining surplus—four point six million dollars—had been placed in an irrevocable educational trust for the child sleeping three feet from my knees.
The third document was a simple, single-page letter on personal stationery from an address on Gaston Street.
I picked it up.
The handwriting was better than it had been in the boardroom seven months ago. The tremors had subsided somewhat, though the stroke of the pen still showed a slight, rhythmic waver on the capital letters, like the track of a small boat crossing an inlet chop.
Renee,
The house is too large. I have sold it to the Savannah College of Art and Design. They are turning the ground floor into a library for the preservation department, which I suspect would have irritated my late husband even more than it irritated Derek.
I have moved to an apartment near Forsyth Park. It has three rooms, no garden, and the trees keep the dust from the street off the windows.
I do not expect you to bring the child to see me. I know what was in the soup, Renee. I know because I tasted it, and because every morning when I try to hold a coffee cup, my fingers remember what my son thought of the people who loved him.
If you ever decide that she should know that she has a grandmother who survived him, I will be on the bench by the fountain at ten o'clock on Thursdays. If you do not, I will understand that the ledger has been balanced, and that some debts cannot be discharged in this life.
Constance.
I held the paper between my thumb and forefinger, feeling the heavy, expensive cotton weave of the Crane’s stationery Derek had always insisted we order from New York.
A warm, steady breeze came off the Atlantic, carrying the clean, sharp smell of ozone, sea salt, and drying kelp. It rustled the corners of the divorce decree. It lifted a stray lock of dark hair from Clara’s forehead.
She stirred, her tiny fists—no larger than hickory nuts—reaching upward into the warm air, searching for something to grasp.
I set the letter down on the wicker table, reached into the bassinet, and let her fingers close around my index finger. Her grip was astonishingly strong, tight and warm, the skin of her palm soft as wet silk against my calloused knuckle.
"Ten o'clock," I said to the empty porch. "On Thursdays."
I didn't tear the letter. I didn't file it away in a manila folder with a date stamp and an exhibit label.
I picked up a smooth, gray ballast stone I had found on the beach that morning—a piece of English flint that had crossed the Atlantic two hundred years ago in the bottom of a sailing vessel, dropped into the mud of the Savannah River when the ship took on cotton, and washed up on the Tybee sandbar by the spring storms—and set it squarely in the center of Constance’s letter to keep it from blowing out into the marsh.
May you like
The Maersk ship cleared the channel markers, its horn sounding once—a deep, resonant bass note that vibrated through the floorboards of the porch, rolling across the breakers, across the dunes, across the low, green salt marshes, and dying away into the clean, open sea.
I leaned back against the cushions of the swing, closed my eyes, and listened to my daughter breathe.
