She was seated in the prow, a paddle in the water, waiting for him. When she saw him she looked up and gestured, with a tiny authoritative movement, that he should take his place behind her.
“Won’t it sink?” J demanded.
Again she made that small gesture.
J assumed that she could swim, and reminded himself that they were alongside the dock and the ship which had brought him from England was moored at the quayside, within hailing distance. He put his little traveling satchel in the boat and then stepped in himself. At once it rocked and nearly overturned.
J dropped to his knees, and found that the canoe steadied immediately. Before him was a paddle. He drew it out, careful not to move too fast, and put it in the water, on the same side as hers.
She glanced over her shoulder, her child’s face serious, and shook her head. J transferred his paddle to the other side and was rewarded by a grave nod. Then she leaned forward and dug the blade of her paddle into the lapping river water, and they moved slowly away from the wooden pier.
At first J could see nothing, but all his other senses were fully alert. He felt the canoe moving smoothly and easily on the water, the current of the river and the ebb of the tide together drawing them out to sea. He sensed the immensity of the water around them, a great desert of water, and their canoe moving among it like a sleek, dark fish. He could smell the land ahead of them: the salt mud, rank tidewash weed and rotting driftwood; and from Jamestown, falling away behind them, the homely smell of woodsmoke and the rancid stink of the household waste which they tipped at the water’s edge for the tide to take away.
Slowly the sky lightened and J could see the girl’s outline, kneeling in the canoe ahead of him. She bowed forward, digging her paddle into the inky black water. J tried to copy her motion and the canoe suddenly skidded as he got the stroke right. She did not turn her head, she was absorbed in her own task of weaving air and water together.
He could hear the birds stirring in the woods on either side of the river. A thousand single calls and coos and cries were building to a cacophony of sound that drifted over the glassy water toward them. There must be hundreds of thousands of birds in the wood to make such a sweep of sound, and then the river birds started to wake. J heard a clatter of quacking and a huge flight of ducks took off from the bank on his left and headed toward the brightening sky. Gulls were swirling and calling overhead, and then the whole world suddenly went dark as a flock of pigeons, innumerable birds, fled across the sky, blocking the light for minutes and filling the whole shadowy world with the creaking of their wings and the rush of their passage.
J had a sense of a virgin world: a place where man was a stranger, an interloper, who had not left a mark, a world where vast flocks and herds of animals and birds moved, obeying their natural order, and nothing could prevent them. It was a new world, another Eden, a paradise for a plant collector. For the first time in years, for the first time since Jane’s death, J had a powerful sense of hope, of the possibilities before him. If men could make their home in this new land they could make a country like a paradise, rich and easy. Perhaps even he could make a home here. Perhaps he and the children could make a new home here and the old life at Lambeth, London, and the old losses of Lambeth, could be left far behind.
They paddled for an hour to cross the wide river and reach the other bank. Then they turned and followed the south bank eastward, toward the sea. Even though the ebbing tide was taking them downriver they had to paddle to hold the canoe on course, and J’s shoulders and arm muscles were tight with strain after the first hour, but the girl still moved fluidly and easily, as if the delicate feathering of the paddle and the deep digging movement to push the boat forward were nothing to her.
As they drew closer to the bank J saw the virgin woods coming down to the water’s edge and brightly colored birds flitting from trees to water and back again. Every now and then there was a clearing in the woods and the bare earth of a plowed field. Sometimes there were black men and white men planting side by side, and they raised their heads to watch the canoe go by. J waved, but the girl stared straight ahead as if she were a little statue, with no curiosity about her fellow men at all.
The sun came up, a pale yellow sun swimming in cloud. The mist was burned off the river and the stinging moths came out and formed a cloud around J’s red, sweaty face. He puffed them off his lips but he could not spare a hand from the paddle to swat them away. He shook his head irritably and the canoe made a little wobble in the water.
At that movement she glanced back and saw him, hot, flushed, irritable, and with one smooth stroke she turned the canoe and plunged toward the shade of an inlet.
The trees closed around them, over their heads, around their backs, they were hidden in a world of green. The girl ran the canoe up on a sandbank and stepped out. She slipped off her servant’s smock, folded it carefully and stowed it in the canoe. Then she pointed commandingly at him.
J took off his jacket, then she pointed at his boots.
“I’ll keep my boots on,” J said.
She shook her head. Pointed to the vast reach of water, closed her eyes and mimed a man plunging downward, dragged under by the weight of his boots.
“Oh,” J said. “All right then.”
He sat on the wet sand and pulled off his boots, stood before her in his stockings, breeches and shirt. She gestured at the rest of his clothes.
J smiled, shook his head. “I’ll keep them on…”
She tugged at his shirt with an impatient little hand, and produced from the canoe, with a flourish, a little buckskin skirt, like her own.
“Indian breeches?” J asked.
She nodded.
“I cannot dress like a savage,” J said reasonably.
She pointed to the dugout canoe, to herself, to the distance they had come and the distance they were to go. Her meaning was clear. You are traveling like one of the Powhatan, with one of the Powhatan. Why not be comfortable?
“I’ll get bitten,” J protested. He made little pinchers of his thumb and finger and pinched at the skin of his forearm, showed her the tiny irritating swellings on the skin of his face.
The girl nodded and produced the jar of grease she had used in the forest the day before, held her own smooth arm for his inspection, turned her little unmarked face toward him.
J looked around him in embarrassment. But the woods were loud only with birdsong and impervious to his shame. There was no one within ten miles in any direction.
“Oh, all right,” he said awkwardly.
He stripped off his breeches, grateful for his long shirt tails which hid his nakedness from her. She held out the buckskin skirt. J struggled to put it on, under his shirt. She stepped lightly around to his back, pulled the shirt out of the way and tied the strings of the apron for him. The soft leather nestled against him like another skin. The air was cool on his legs. J felt white and ungainly, a bleached leviathan beside her slight brown body; but he also felt comfortable for the first time since he had arrived in this painfully humid country.
She gestured that he should take off his shirt. J shucked it over his head and then she presented him with the jar of grease. With a sense of nothing left to lose, J put his fingers into the pot and smoothed it all over his face, his neck and his chest. It smelled dreadful and felt as sticky as honey.
She gave a tiny trill of laughter, and he looked down and saw his white skin streaked with red. She held out her bare arm to show him the comparison. Against her treacle-colored skin the grease showed only as a darker brown, but J was striped white and red.