But he couldn’t be hiding all day down island. They would be wanting their mail. Henry would pole out and the O’Neals would tie him up if they won’t in a hurry and pass him a Miller’s High Life. They liked to get him talking about the sisters. He knew they went right back to tell it all over Ocracoke and said how he was getting something off Miss Maggie and Miss Whaley liked to watch, he’d heard that, it got back to him. Brung back on the wind maybe. From his house down by the inlet you could see across to Ocracoke the winking lights of Silver Lake and the lighthouse tossing its milky beam around but neither Henry nor the sisters crossed over unless one got bad sick. The O’Neals brought groceries and supplies which Henry mostly paid for with his catch, Whaley being too tight to part with what money left the sisters from their daddy who even the Tape Recorders knew to have gotten filthy off a load of Irish whisky washed ashore on Sheep Island in the twenties. Whaley when she paid him at all was so ill mouthed about it Henry stopped asking. Sarah used to collect on it and because she knew Sarah was not scared of her, Whaley always paid her what she owed. Henry wasn’t scared of neither of them but it seemed like with only three of them on the island and him keeping the two of them alive he could leave off acting the nigger and one way to do that was not go knocking on Whaley’s door asking for anything he didn’t leave over there the night before. Sometimes Maggie would pay him in dribbly change and yellow-smelling dollars she stole and hid God knows where on her person, but it wasn’t enough to make much of a difference.
Across the water Crawl wrote claiming it was 1980. He says you’re seventy-five this year, Henry, Maggie said to him one night on the steps of the church. Miss Whaley sitting in her lawn chair had her flyers to go through, she wasn’t listening. When she had her newspapers spread out across her lap on the church steps where the three of them would sit just like people in town will linger after supper to watch traffic and call out to neighbor women strolling babies, she was just not there. Would a two-storied green bus come chugging across the creek, she wouldn’t have lifted her head to grace the sight with her reading glasses. Henry thought at first she was loosening her grip, preparing to go off island by teaching herself what to expect to pay for a pound of butter across the water in 1980. But after four or five years he figured the flyers were part of what kept her here. She’d spit the prices out like fruit seed. She’d get ill at a bunch of innocent bananas for costing highway robbery, she would read her prices like Maggie would read the letters to the editor, taking sides and arguing with every one of them, My Land the way people live in this world, she’d say every night when it got too dark to read, and she folded up her newspaper like the Coast Guard taught Henry to fold a flag, that careful, that slow, like a color guard was standing at attention waiting on her to finish.
Crawl don’t know nothing about how old I am, Henry said to the water.
Old enough to know better, said Maggie. She tugged at his shoelace while her sister studied the paper above them. Henry always sat on the second to bottom step and Miss Maggie’d start out on the top step and slide down even with him as the evening settled, though her sister would rustle prices to try to halt her.
Too old to change, what it is, said Miss Whaley.
Henry swatted the back of his neck loud, but he didn’t come away with any bloody mosquito because it was a sea breeze and there wasn’t any bite. His head was getting ready to switch around and stare out Miss Whaley over her paper and he backslapped himself to keep still. The slap rang out like a hammering. Miss Whaley cleared her old throat. Miss Maggie to cover up got on with Crawl’s letter, but Henry didn’t listen anymore. In his head he started his own letter to the sisters, one he knew he’d never ever send them even if he could write. Y’all ought not to have done me like y’all done me, he wrote in the first line, and that was as far as he got.
That night he lay talking to Sarah in the dark. He told her what Miss Whaley said and he discussed it. How come she talking about me not changing when it’s her sitting up in her throne reading out her numbers on and on. Why you let that white woman hurt you so, Henry, he heard Sarah say. He heard her words like he heard the surf frothing on the banks, making its claim and then receding, taking it back, offering more words. A conversation. Sarah used to say to him, You the strongest man I ever met, you can work all day and all night if you care to and not make a noise about it to nobody. I seen you sit outside shucking corn in a nor’easter and you ain’t scared of anybody who’d pull a knife on you. How come you let what people say get away with you so much? And Henry never answered, though he knew how bad people could hurt him with what they said. He just hurt. He’d been knowing that. Maybe that was why he stayed on this island so long after everybody left and there wasn’t anyone to hurt him anymore but Miss Maggie who was too sweetly dizzy in the head to hurt much and Miss Whaley who he thought he knew every which way she had of hurting him but she was good for coming up with a new one. Henry just hurt. Sometimes it didn’t take anybody saying anything to him to his face, he’d remember what one of the men he used to fish with said to him sixty years before when they were boys swimming naked in the inlet and he’d be out in his skiff all by himself and he’d want to put his head down in his lap and let all the crabs and oysters and mackerel and blues and tuna go on about their business. He didn’t care about reeling in a thing. Hurt nearly bad enough to let everybody starve.
Henry had been this way ever since he was born on this island that the wind was taking away as he lay there not sleeping. Wondering how old he really was, he thought of the island as it used to be when he was a boy, the two stores stocking shoelaces and bolts of colored cloth, the old hospital and the post office with over fifty boxes in the walls, little glass windows Henry would peek through and pretend he was looking right inside something mysterious — the innards of some complicated machine, some smart so-and-so’s brain — like he was being offered a sneak at the way things worked in this life. And then the wind took that life away before he could put what he saw to any good use, and then the wind took Sarah and now what it was was him and the sisters holding out for the final storm to take them off island.
Because sleep would not come to Henry he got up and pulled on his waders and packed himself some bologna biscuits and a can of syrupy peaches like he liked and he boiled up last night’s coffee and poured it in his thermos and took his flashlight out to search the weeds in front of the house for the stub of a Sweet he might have thought he’d finished one day when he was cigar flush. The beam sent sandcrabs sideways into their holes and Henry let the light play over the marsh wishing he could follow them down underneath the island where the wind could not get to them. Y’all be around way after I’m gone, he said to the crabs. Y’all wait, y’all still be here when this house is nothing but some rusty nails in the sand. He imagined his crabs crouched just belowground, ready to spring right back out once he switched his light off and give up on trying to find something to smoke himself awake good, imagined their big pop eyes staring right at him now, maybe their ears poked up listening to this sad old man out talking to the island like it cared to listen. He imagined the crabs calling to each other, hole to hole, old Henry Thornton won’t never change.
What does it mean to change, Henry wondered as he cranked his outboard and throttled slow through the inlet toward the sound. What do I want over there across the water in nineteen hundred and eighty bad enough to give up whatever it is they’re wanting me to give up? He’d spent the late sixties in Norfolk and all around him everybody was carrying on, army off fighting someplace he’d never heard of before or since, white boys growing their hair out and putting all kinds of mess down their throats, black people, his own children, trying to act all African, bushing their hair out and taking new names. Then crazies popping out the windows of tall buildings shooting presidents and preachers and the whole country catching afire. Henry brought Sarah home to stay. She tried to tell him wasn’t anywhere safe left in this world, but Henry said he favored wind over flame, he’d rather be bl
own out to sea than die choking inside some highsky building with a brick lawn and blue lights streaking the night instead of the sleepy sweep of the lighthouse which he’d long ago learned to set his breath to.
Checking on the first of his crab pots, Henry told himself that Whaley said all that mess about him too old to change but was really talking about herself. Her sister, too. What had the two of them done to change but choose to remain on this island where there weren’t any bananas on sale, nor nineteen-cent-a-pound fryers, buy one, get half off the other? He knew Sarah, had she lived, would have left him sooner or later, would have given up trying to talk him off island and gotten fed up with Whaley’s ill mouth and Miss Maggie drunkstumbling across the creek to interrupt her Al Green tapes with a whole bunch of Where’s Henry at, I need to ask Henry something, call Henry for me. Henry let the rope slide slowly through his hands, watched the empty pot disappear into the deep and cut the engine. He knew he would have let Sarah go, would have stayed on just like he was doing, providing for the sisters, getting hurt over not much of nothing, spending half his days just waiting on that wind — the last one, the big one that would take the three of them out of this life where everybody was waiting on you to change.
Henry knew this, too: if he went first, like they claimed men were likely to do, the sisters would have to leave. No way they could stay without him. Whaley could hurt him with her meanness, Miss Maggie could keep right on trying to get him to slip his hands somewhere they’d as soon not be, but neither of them could get on for more than a week without him. Without Henry there wasn’t any island. Hell, I am that island, Henry said. Sarah when she passed cut me right in half. There’s a side of me sits and smokes me a Sweet and just plain hurts, there’s another part of me keeps the three of us and this island from blowing away.
Peering back on his island, Henry saw sudden movement behind the smudgy glass of the windows in the post office, a commotion he understood to be his big old secret come to him after all these years to let him know he knew something after all about this life. He fiddled with the locks on the windows, opened them right up and stuck his hand inside and wiggled his fingers around in that secret inside. It felt like something familiar, warm, his toes in wet sand or the slick of bait as he hooked a line. This life ain’t blowed away right yet. I can sit right here in the sound and let the wind take me wherever and still make a change. He could lie back and eat a bologna biscuit and talk to Sarah and let the change come on ahead, let the skiff drift right across the sound to Morehead where he’d call Crawl and tell him, Crawl, you ain’t won, don’t think you changed me, I’m just here because the wind brung me over here and I let it. He could sit outside Crawl’s yard and mend nets for the boys who still pulled things out of the sea, and he could think while he mended about the sisters and about how he’d saved them. Made them change. He could sit outside on Crawl’s porch and smoke on a Sweet and close his eyes and know he’d go before the sisters but that he would not leave them on that island because here he was taking the island with him, right across the water, him and the wind. He could close his eyes and see the sisters sitting right up front at his funeral, sea-salty tears raining down on the Sunday dresses they had not worn for years. Hoarse preacher shouting out some Bible and Sarah whispering right over him how she could surely forgive Henry for not taking her off island before it was time for him to change. All eleven of his children and their children and the babies of his grandbabies looking up at the casket where Henry had laid down one day halfway through his crab pots, let the wind take him off island. Inside that casket Henry was sipping peach syrup and wishing he had one last Sweet. The sun was high and it was a mean sun. The church was crowded and so hot the air-conditioning was sweating and coughing like some sick somebody. Preacher called out a hymn. Let it be Sarah’s smooth-as-liver singer sending me off sweetly. The sun and the water blended in brightness, the casket drifted, the wind picked up, the whole church rose up in song. Then came a lady in white passing out fans only to the ones who were moaning: sisters, hurting like Henry hurt, but thankful to be spared the wind.
Go Ugly Early
THE BRUNETTE SAID, “I prefer a man who can hold his liquor,” so I turned my attention to the dirty blonde. She was big-hipped and slightly breasted, but her eyes were the blue-green of bottle glass and I liked the slinky way she swayed on her barstool.
“Hey, slobberpuss,” she said to me.
“Oh, so you mind also that I’ve had a couple?”
“Do we feel discriminated against?” She was patting me on the head with her voice. “Are we just about to file a lawsuit?”
“We are in a bar. It’s not like Quaker meeting.”
“Oh, so like what did I expect? Do I understand that to be your point?” Her tone rose, shrilly.
“I’d say you and me are about even,” I told her.
The brunette rolled her eyes and chewed her straw, searching the bar for me a few drinks ago. Hannibal could have just as easily come up against those Alps, said to his elephants, Fuck it, boys, let’s don’t and say we did. Would that Hitler had only found a little encouragement for his mediocre watercolors. All I’m saying is, history is nothing but a record of near misses, of last-minute left turns. Wars and religious intolerance and a source of potable water might have led people to settle in a cesspool like Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is where — in a happy-hour hotel lounge — I met my green-eyed Jessica, but I would wager large that the majority of settlers ran out of gas, steam, or money going north, south, east, or west.
“In what sense are we equals?” asked Jessica.
“Now who’s toasted? I said even, not equals.”
“Only slightly less offensive,” said the brunette. Her name was Annie. Over the years she became a ghostly presence in a casually snapped photograph of Our First Night, sometimes a tourist passing blurry in the background, caught unaware in a frame of our nascent courtship, other times Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, the attraction that drew us together. I suppose Jessica took the former view and I, mostly, the latter, as it was Annie, lithe and tall and wet-lipped, who drew me to that corner of the bar in the first place. Less of a head start at McCool’s Public House down the street and my Jessica might be the one whose last name, thirty years down the rocky road, we might sit around the dinner table struggling to remember.
“In what sense are we even?” Jess asked me.
I thought of the old Churchill anecdote, about the woman at the dinner party who, disgusted by Churchill’s inebriation, said, “Mr. Churchill, you’re drunk,” to whom he reputedly replied, “Yes, madam, but in the morning I will be sober, while you will still be ugly.” I am not proud to report that this was what I was thinking, nor do I now believe it. Jessica is not ugly at all, I never would have married her if I’d thought so, though next to Annie and in the unreliable light of a couple whiskys and more than a couple Natural Lights, she did, I have to admit (and this is a record of honesty, as you will see I spare nothing here, especially as relates to my own failings) pale considerably.
I did not say what I was thinking that first night, of course. Nor did I answer her question, really. What I meant by it was, you seem as lonely and desperate as me, sweet thing. I meant, let’s skip the sparring and call the round.
“Even Steven,” I said with much drunken swagger.
Annie looked around me to catch Jess’s eye, and they shared a laugh, which I recognized to be squarely at my expense.
“He’s so articulate,” said Annie, as if glibness were what she and Jess had come there to find. Of course I disliked her for rejecting me. I was about to suggest she adopt a strategy employed by some of my then friends: “Go ugly early, beat the rush” was their motto when they ventured, as we often did back then, to the dive bars and discos of DC and environs, in search of some short-lived companionship. Holding out for perfection would wrinkle and embitter her, not only that night back in 1977 but for the rest of her days. Sure, she was beautiful, but like most aloof beauties, she had an
aura of detachment that made her seem not only unattainable but unpleasant.
Jess was more my style, though I can’t say I was 100 percent certain that Jess was the one I wanted to spend my life with. To know beyond doubt — especially something that calls upon the notoriously fickle faculties of emotion — is more than highly suspect to me. I confessed to her my reservations — I could not have gone through with it had I not at least alerted her to the question in my mind — but I don’t really think she heard me, and if she had similar doubts she did not admit to them. Something must have occurred to allow me to move forward. I remember thinking, Well, how could you be sure? We’re talking life sentence here. Anyone who tells you they’re completely sure is either of limited intelligence or lying.
We settled in Gaithersburg, Jess and I. I found a job writing press releases for the EPA and Jessica starting teaching eighth-grade science. We had two boys. They’re both in college now. I don’t watch them too closely when they’re home on break, for frankly I don’t want to know what they’re up to nights. I know how we were, how I was, and it makes me glad I have sons instead of daughters. Sean and Frankie are good kids, we raised them to take responsibility for their own actions, and neither of them to my knowledge has ever been arrested, a claim I could not myself make at that tender age, but it really doesn’t matter how well rounded and polite and self-assured they seem, does it? No doubt they pile into cars and cruise the dance clubs in search of willing females. No doubt they have their own slogans along the lines of “Go ugly early.” (Perhaps that phrase is still in circulation.) Sometimes I grow despondent when I consider the great divide between thought and action, between word and intent. The way boys think of girls, the way we treat them before we accept the fact that we need them hugely: I do not like to think of my sons in that light.
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