The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  Not long after Crawl wrote about his club—couple weeks Woodrow reckoned—he showed up on the island. Had three of his boys with him. Woodrow hadn’t seen him in a while. Crawl was wearing his hair springy long and had on wide-legged pants made out of looked like cardboard and zip-up ankle boots. Woodrow picked up the littlest of the grandbabies, knee baby also named Woodrow, had some dried salt around his eyes from where the crossing had beat tears out of him. Woodrow wiped away the salt and some snot with a rag, then took the boy inside and scrubbed at his face, trying to be Sarah and Woodrow all at once, pushing food on the boys, some three-day-old bread with butter which they carried around in their hands like they didn’t know what to do with food not bought off a shelf in a store.

  Everything was different now with Sarah gone. Nothing was easy.

  Crawl sent the boys down to poke around the empty houses waiting on their owners to come back, sitting up on brickbat haunches like a dog will do you when you go off for a while. Woodrow and Crawl sat on the porch and Crawl pulled out a pint of Canadian.

  Smooth as liver, he claimed. “Have a drink, Daddy.”

  Woodrow took a pull though he favored a High Life. Crawl talked on about his club. Night Life was what he was calling it. He had some pictures of it. To Woodrow the club wasn’t much from the outside: cinder-block hut, oystershell parking lot, big old ditch out in front for drunks to get their ride stuck in. He showed some pictures of the inside that was dark and red and Woodrow said, “Un-hunh, okay, all right, I see, that’s nice.” Seemed like he made sounds, not words. He’d look up from the pictures wanting his grandbabies to come back. He wanted to take them down to the inlet and let them jerk crabs out of the sound on a chicken liver tied to a string, but when finally he mentioned going after them Crawl said, “Naw, we got to get back across.”

  “Y’all can’t stay through? Plenty of room for all y’all.”

  Crawl reached down, tugged at his boot zipper. To Woodrow, boots ought not to come with a zipper, but it was Crawl’s feet, he could cover them however he wanted.

  Crawl said, “I reckon those boys used to electricity.” Then he added, all of a sudden loud, “Besides, we didn’t come over here to stay, we came over here to get you to come back with us.”

  Woodrow couldn’t see himself going anywhere with duded-up Crawl. He smiled and asked after Crawl’s wife’s people who he used to know a little when he lived in Morehead, where if you asked him everybody put too much notion into how long and wide and clean was the car somebody drove around town.

  “Everybody’s doing fine,” said Crawl. “But me and Violet and the boys, we worry about you over here all alone now.”

  When Woodrow said he wasn’t alone, seemed like Crawl’d been hiding in a blind with his gun cocked, waiting on these very words to fly out of Woodrow’s mouth.

  “You know you don’t got to stay here looking after them sisters until they die or you one. Those women don’t have no business staying over here anyway. Surely they got some kin somewhere will take them in.”

  “Them two?” said Woodrow. He didn’t know of any kin, or even any friends except little Liz who worked for Dr. Levinson running his tape machine and slapping mosquitoes off his neck and making sure he ate something. Anymore, little Liz was about the only person he knew who even checked in on them. She wrote letters that Whaley claimed were only to her but whenever Maggie snatched them out of her sister’s hand and read them aloud they always asked after her and said something too about him, How’s Woodrow, Tell Woodrow I’m going to bring him some peaches, even once, Give Woodrow my love, which made Maggie snicker and liked to got away with Whaley.

  “All I’m saying is, it’s not your job to look after them. Older they get worse it’s going to be. Least now they can still walk down to the dock to meet the mail boat.”

  “We ain’t had mail in three years,” said Woodrow. “I been catching O’Malley and them out in the channel when they come back from meeting the ferry.”

  Crawl shook his head at this, as if Woodrow wasn’t out on the water most days anyway.

  “Come on, Daddy, just pack a bag. You don’t need much, I’ll carry you back across over here any time you want to go, let’s get in the boat.”

  The boys were back by then, sitting on the steps, listening in. Woodrow got up and hugged little Woodrow so hard the boy went to squirm. When he embraced the older two he felt in their slack muscles the beginnings of that eye-cutting stage. They would not be coming back to the island to see him. Woodrow even wondered if they were not old enough for Crawl to run his daddy down in front of them. Look at your old granddaddy fussing after his white women, what for?

  He sat out on the dock, finishing the pint of Canadian that Crawl had left him, watching the sun sink over the water and wondering what he’d be over there, off island, across the sound. Now who would he be over there? This he could not say but it wasn’t what they all thought: scared to find out. There were some things he feared—he didn’t think you could live and not be scared of something—say the Pamlico Sound, known to go from glassy to six-foot seas in an hour. Other people, their strange and unknowable motives, scared him. The lonely time that come up on him after Sarah died, swooped up close overhead like a vee of geese.

  Fear of what they’d be if they left the island might have been what kept the sisters over here, though they had their other reasons, surely. Maggie would do right much what her big sister said when it came right down to it. Else, why was she still here? Why didn’t she leave when that Boyd asked her to go away with him? If she would not leave then, she’d not be leaving this island.

  Whaley, well: seems like she stayed for when the Tape Recorders come over from Raleigh every spring. Every April, always the fat bearded one with his bird glasses called himself a doctor but would not look at Miss Maggie’s bad toes and for the past ten years little Liz, who Woodrow liked.

  Whaley lived to get that letter said the Tape Recorders were due to visit. A good month before they arrived she spent setting up the Salter place where they stayed, planning meals, fetching items from Meherrituck, which meant Woodrow was the one running himself ragged to prepare for their arrival, all Whaley’s errands on top of his daily chores.

  The moment they stepped off the boat Whaley’d switch into her high-tider talk, what the Tape Recorders loved to call an Old English brogue. They claimed Woodrow spoke it too, though how Woodrow could have come out talking like an Old English did not square with the story they liked to tell about how he’d come to be on this island in the first place. Said Woodrow’s people were brought over back when the island did big business as a seaport. Seven hundred settlers and one hundred of them slaves. Ships too heavy with goods to cross the bar needed their cargoes transferred to smaller vessels to navigate the shallows. Lightering, they called it, and his people were the ones did the lightering. That was before the war come and the Confederates turned tail and abandoned the fort over on Meherrituck and that time it wasn’t a storm forced everybody off island except the slaves and a single white woman named Ophelia Roberts, so fat she could not fit through the front door. Like as not Woodrow’s people took care of her until the war was over and only half the population of the island returned from the mainland, according to the Tape Recorders. Then it was a steady dwindling. Ships went north to Hatteras where a storm had opened up a new inlet. Woodrow heard all this from the Tape Recorders and yet he’d heard other stories contradicted their so-called facts. His own father had talked about his ancestor, a man named Hezekiah Thornton his daddy claimed come to the island a free man. Never did a lick of lightering in his days, according to Woodrow’s daddy.

  He could have come back at the Tape Recorders with all this but Woodrow did not much mess with them. Oh, he’d sit for them but he wouldn’t answer the questions like they wanted him to because seemed to Woodrow they had the answers already, that the questions were swole up with the answer, like a snake had swallowed a frog. Tell us what it has been like for your family living here all thes
e years the only blacks on the island. How have you kept up with your heritage? Do you think the gains of the civil rights movement have reached you here on this island? How have these gains affected your day-to-day existence?

  Woodrow said the only thing affecting his day-to-day existence was where them fish was hiding.

  The story of the three of them on this island, to Woodrow’s mind, was just that: three people on an island. You could even leave off the island part, though the Tape Recorders, why would they do that? They wanted to turn it into something else again: something they wanted to believe in, something about how lost the three of them were across the water, all cut off from the rest of the world and turned peculiar because of it.

  Seemed to Woodrow they weren’t all that interested in Maggie’s telling her side of the story because she’d up and start in on something inside of her, which the Tape Recorders, excepting that little Liz who tended just to let you talk, weren’t interested at all in what somebody felt. Also, Maggie when it came down to it did not give a squat for history. She lived up in the right along through now.

  Well, no, Woodrow took that one back. He believed it was Boyd she thought about nearly all the time, not Boyd as he was now, across the sound, but Boyd back when she had him, Boyd when he got off the boat and come asking Woodrow to teach him to fish, young Boyd, green smiley innocent Boyd.

  It drove the Tape Recorders crazy how Woodrow would not act the way they needed him to, say the things they wanted him to say. They were all the time trying to get him to act like he hadn’t ever been off island at all. He played along even though he’d spent more time off island than either of the white women sisters. Two years at the Coast Guard base up at Bayside, four years in the Norfolk shipyards. There he took up welding and he did decent at it. Now his children reached right up the East Coast to Troy, New York, like stops on a train: Morehead City, Elizabeth City, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philly, Brooklyn, all the way up to Kingston and Troy. He’d even taken that train a few times. Sarah lived to visit her babies, usually in the fall when the heat and bugs still lingered on the island and the storms rolled in sometimes two in the same moon. Woodrow went with her a couple of times. They took the train went up behind everything, back of people’s houses, back of factories, where you could see the ungussied part of the world—the porches sagging with beat-up furniture and washing machines, the yards chewed up by mean old fenced-in dogs, the piles of rusting engine parts and junk cars behind the warehouses and businesses. He liked this view better than what people put on for a show. But he got so he hated leaving the island. He did it twice, then let her go on ahead. Woodrow hadn’t lost anything on that backyard train.

  Sarah was all the time talking about moving. Retiring, she called it. But what was it to retire from? He had come home a good welder but what was it to weld on this island? Can’t weld conch, kelp, fishbone. Woodrow made a little money selling crabs and flounder, but it won’t nothing he could retire from. Woodrow answered Sarah’s talk about retiring by not answering, which back then seemed like the decent way to respond. No sense trotting out a lot of words. She knew damn well how he was after so many years together. If he did not want to do something she wanted him to do, well, he didn’t spend words telling her what she knew already by the way he’d walk out to visit with his pigs.

  He ought to have talked to Sarah about all this retiring, though. Stabbing the hardest now, hurting the most was all he did not do for her, things he never got around to giving her.

  Too busy waiting on them white women sisters, Crawl and them would claim. Sarah never said as much but she was surely thinking it. She had given up talking to him about Maggie and Whaley. Woodrow told himself she’d accepted it, the way it had to be if they were going to stay on this island, the price of living right down across the creek where both of them were born. But why do we have to pay? he sometimes imagined Sarah saying to him when he was out on the water and there was nothing biting, and he had flat quiet time to himself while he drifted, waiting on the O’Malleys to show with the mail.

  Everybody got to pay, he’d of said to Sarah.

  To live where they were born and raised up at? To stay right where they belong?

  She had that fire in her voice. Every question raised up in time to her eyebrows, the lift of her left shoulder. But at least she was in the boat with him. Good God, woman, come close lay your uppity attitude on my lap let’s stretch out across the bottom of this boat.

  Everybody pay. He’d say it over as if saying it over made it true.

  Let me ask you Woodrow Thornton how Whaley’s sour self’s paying to live where she was born? She’s going to come out here tomorrow meet the mail and catch your supper, let you stay home and nap?

  She pays. You would not want that woman’s suffering.

  If I could suffer up out of this sun, in the shade, I’d surely trade.

  Don’t go saying you’d take on somebody else’s mess you don’t even know what it is.

  All I’m saying, how hard could it be? She’s a selfish, stuck-up, putting-on-airs, all-the-time-bragging-about-her-great-great-great-great-granddaddy-done-killed-somebody-famous mess.

  She pays. Her and Maggie both.

  I never said Maggie. That girl owes, what it is. All the sinning she done in her life, she’ll be paying on into the next one, and in a place going to finally maybe make her appreciate this island she spent years complaining about.

  Hey now, said Woodrow. He hated to hear anyone talk bad about Maggie. True that much of her pain was of her own making but she wasn’t alone in that. Right then, bringing his Sarah into the flat afternoon quiet, wasn’t he making himself miserable? Couldn’t he remember the good times, those afternoons when Crawl and the older sisters took care of the younger ones and he and Sarah sneaked off to the summer kitchen for some slow all afternoon loving? And later when it was just them on this island, all their children moved on, and the two of them would sit on the porch in silence for hours of a Sunday afternoon, the wind the only thing stopped by to see them all day and both of them just fine with that, with each other, with only each other?

  He ought to have brought that Sarah in the boat with him to keep him company. But instead he stirred up all this unfinished business, got her to talking about the things she liked to talk about, give his same old side of it for the hundredth time, tried to tell himself it was final, he had the last word.

  Which, talking down to a dead person, the one you loved most in this world, wrapping it up when they didn’t have a chance to defend, well—he’d’ve felt a whole lot of worse about it if it had worked. But it did not do a damn bit of good. Mostly only made him feel worse.

  Still, he had these talks with her, every day. Sometimes all day long. Ever since he left her alone that day when Wilma came through.

  He’d gone across to Meherrituck on an errand for Whaley. She was wanting him to meet the mailman at the store around four o’clock. She knew he’d been fishing the ditch up behind Blue Harbor, knew it wasn’t too far out of his way. She also knew he would not want to kill time in Meherrituck, where people treated him mostly bad, made jokes behind his back on account of the O’Malleys when they met him for the mail sometimes would pass him a Sweet to smoke and a High Life to sip on, get him talking about the sisters, went right back to tell it all over Meherrituck how he was getting something off Miss Maggie and Miss Whaley liked to watch. He’d heard that. It had got back to him. From his house down by the inlet he could see across to Meherrituck and the winking lights of Blue Harbor and the lighthouse tossing its milky beam around but Woodrow hadn’t lost anything over there. Neither him nor the sisters crossed over unless one got bad sick. Whaley knew he did not want to go across that day. She knew he would not want to kill time over there, knew that to Woodrow Meherrituck had got just as bad as the mainland with all the ferries unloading the tourists and the natives getting it in their heads they were some rich somebodies.

  Oh, he could of said no to Whaley that day. He’d told her no before. He
felt the storm coming, saw it in all the telling signs: way his stock behaved, scratching around in the yard all skittery, refusing to eat, squealing and whinnying at the way the wind died then rose, died and rose. He saw it in the shading of the clouds, black and fast and backlit by the last leaking away of any sun that day. When he tried to tell Whaley it was a storm coming and he did not want to leave Sarah, she said to him, Take Sarah with you, do her good to get off island, surely y’all got people over there to visit.

  This got away with Woodrow. Seemed like she was wanting him to take Sarah off the island so she and Maggie could have it to themselves, like they was wanting some white-only time on that island where his people had lived going back more than a hundred years, not so long as hers, true, but long enough so with only the four of them left it was by God his and Sarah’s island much as it was theirs.

  Before he left, he made them promise to check on Sarah should it start to blow (if he said, though he knew by then when was the word he needed) and he got up early that day as always and loaded up coolers to keep his catch cold while he killed time on ain’t-lost-nothing-over-to-Meherrituck. Sarah even came down to the dock to see him off, which she never did, but Woodrow tried to act like it was just another day out on the water. As soon as he was out on the water he felt the storm rising. He had seen seven or eight hours where he could of turned around, gone back. He spent that time wavering. Ain’t looking good, I’m going back, he’d think, but then he’d remember Whaley’s attempt to get Sarah in the boat with him, and say, Hell with that woman and her whites-only-for-a-day island. She needs some color in her world.

  He’d been over to Meherrituck for a while when it started to really blow. Wind and water made up his mind for him—you ain’t going nowhere now, Woodrow Thornton, you had your chance. He sat up in the community store with O’Malley Senior and his sons, listening to the island come down around them, all night long the pop and crash of things picked up by the wind, the curl and rip of scissored-off strips of tin roofs, the store gone to shadow in the candlelight, everybody drinking something to take their mind off the wind, though it just made worse what fear they felt, the liquor and the wine and the beer.