The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

She looked up at him, terrified suddenly that her every thought was obvious, transparent.

  “Never mind that,” he said. “He spared my life as well. I got here same way you did. Against my will.”

  “He boarded your ship?”

  “Something like that.”

  Whaley studied her in the flickering light. She looked him in the eye, something she hadn’t done to anyone since she’d arrived on the island. She needed to look the part. That meant no eye contact, appropriate body language—hunched back, drooped shoulders, a shuffling, sideways gait. Once a lady came to Richmond Hill to teach her how to walk, how to eat, how to converse. Her father paid the woman, though he swore he didn’t—she found the account in his ledger. He said the woman came because she felt sorry for Theo, having lost her mother, who was supposed to teach her these things. But charity made Theo feel worse. She was relieved when she’d discovered the woman’s name in the ledger. Thereafter she approached the lessons with a little more energy and interest. And now the lessons were truly paying off, for everything she had been taught she simply reversed.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like he’s got you under guard either,” she said, conscious of how liberating it was to be so rudely intrusive, now that she had so little to lose.

  “They say he knows every pony on this island, every milk cow, every chicken. All these people are his spies. You think they volunteered to board you? Poor as they are? This island ain’t good for growing nothing. Daniels supplies them with stock and the grain to feed it. He pays off the governor too. Not that the government’s got dominion on these islands.”

  If there were no rule, no government, surely she had been forgotten. To distract herself from this thought, she asked another intrusive question.

  “What was your trade before you were captured?”

  “I was at sea.”

  “Ah,” she said, looking above her. “I might have guessed carpentry, given the excellence of this structure.”

  “You make do with what the water washes up over here.”

  “I don’t suppose the rest of them suffer someone like yourself taking the choice items.”

  Whaley smiled. “Progging for them is more a festivity. Especially if spirits happens to wash up. I’ve seen them feed liquor to an eight-year-old boy just for their amusement.”

  “I don’t think they’re all bad over here, Mr. Whaley.”

  “Call me Whaley.”

  “I will not. What would you call me—Alston?”

  “I’d call you Burr,” he said. He watched for her reaction.

  She said, finally, “So you believe I’m who I say I am?”

  “Why not? Everybody’s got to have a father. He’s good as any, I reckon.”

  Oh, but he was far better. Even in light of the misery they’d both suffered in the last few years—the duel, the treason charges, his exile and onerous return to New York—she felt blessed to have such a loving and honorable father. How deeply misunderstood he was now, how wide the discrepancy between his public persona and the father he’d been to her, eternally supportive and giving. She needed the world to see those papers.

  “If they were all bad, these people,” she said, “they would never have shared their food with me.”

  He seemed to look right through the layers of rags she wore, spy the jutting hipbones, the taut skin stretched over the ladder rungs of her ribcage. “Fed you like a princess, did they?”

  “It’s just that I don’t believe people are either all good or all bad.”

  “I’d wager you keep better company than I do.”

  “You ought not to assume because my former station was a high one—”

  He interrupted. “High? Daughter of the vice president? No, miss, I never would of said ‘high.’”

  “Let me finish, please,” she said, smiling. She’d not smiled since before her son got sick. She told herself it had nothing to do with this man, everything to do with a limit to misery—a point crossed, after which the mind and heart seeks to vent its displeasure by becoming unexpectedly, blissfully surprised. “There are plenty of perfectly venal people in the circles among which I previously moved,” she said, thinking of the man her father challenged to a duel only after the slander had turned personal and, she suspected, involved not only her father’s honor but her own.

  “Don’t doubt you there,” he said. “But you contradicted yourself. You said there isn’t any of them all bad, then you said some of them is perfectly venal. I don’t recall the exact meaning of that word but I’m going to venture it don’t mean virtuous.”

  “I may well have contradicted myself,” she said. “It’s hard to think straight when you’ve eaten your fill for the first time in months. They say hunger makes you crazy, but I feel I had more clarity when I was in want than now, with this fire, this stew, this bread.”

  “A charming excuse,” said Whaley. “Though I happen to agree with you: ain’t no one all bad or all good. Daniels himself saved the likes of you. Which makes him a little less a villain.”

  This seemed a good place to ask again why he too was thought to be touched when he was obviously quite rational, even intelligent in his own way. But when she asked, he said, “You’ll be wanting to bed down now. Take the tick in the corner there,” he said, pointing to a bundle of moss and pine straw beneath what seemed to be a piece of sail.

  “I will not take your bed.”

  “Nonsense. I’m not the one’s been sleeping in the mud for the past three nights. I’ve got a blanket, I’ll pull up here by the fire.”

  She nodded and stretched out on the bed. The pine needles felt as soft and luxurious as the finest goose down, but it was some time before she slept. Barring the couples who’d harbored her, she’d never slept so close to any man, much less a stranger. Joseph had his own rooms, and came to her in the night, and not every night. Whaley was close enough to touch. She could see his silhouette in the dying light of the fire. Could hear him breathing. She tried turning on her side, facing away from him, but that did not quell the mix of trepidation and excitement she felt.

  But fatigue and relief not to be sleeping in wet sand, her skin raked by live-oak boughs shaken by steady wind, took over at some point in the night.

  When she blinked open her eyes, Whaley was gone, but the fire had been revived, and there was a kettle boiling, a can of loose tea and a mug laid out on a stool cobbled crudely from progged planks. For the first time since she’d arrived on the island she slept later than her host. She made a cup of tea and sipped until Whaley returned with a load of wet twigs and, in a pail, two small fish.

  “I reckon you’re used to fish.”

  “I confess I would kill for a peach.”

  “Seems a trifle to murder over. Surely there’s something you crave more.”

  She thought about it. For years her foremost desire was for the return of the bliss she’d felt when she’d been the mistress of Richmond Hill. And then she’d lost her son, which turned her want of a fine house and famous dinner guests childish and vain. Though he was alive still, coming for her surely, she’d lost her father after the duel and the Mexico scheme. But his glory could easily be restored. He suffered only from the usual male vanities. Envy. Pride. The failings of good men the world over. She had only a problem with his greed.

  “My father made a deal with my husband,” she said into the fire.

  “Pardon?”

  “A financial arrangement. For my hand. I can’t say I was not given to the idea of marriage, or that there were not qualities in Joseph I admired, but my father was in trouble. He has always lived as if he were rich. He is not wise in business. We were going to lose Richmond Hill—the estate we used to own on the Hudson—and my father agreed to allow Joseph my hand if he would help out with the mortgage.”

  “A dowry,” said Whaley in a way that made it clear he thought there was nothing terribly unusual there.

  “No, not a dowry. An arrangement. A dowry is a onetime payment. This was not that. I have a bad
habit of sneaking looks at people’s ledgers. I saw the payments to my father, and they continued for some years after we were married. In fact, they continued far longer than the initial arrangement called for, as I finally confronted Joseph about it, and he told me that he’d continued to keep my father afloat out of pity.”

  “He lost the house anyway?”

  “Yes,” she said, turning to Whaley, who had cleaned the fish and was rolling them in meal to fry for breakfast. “But there were motivations, I am certain, other than financial ones. Political clout in the Southern colonies, where my father’s enlightened stance on slavery doubtless cost him the presidency.”

  “Power changes a man. Even if they’re not claiming to have heard women in pictures talking or moving their eyes, they lose touch with the rest of the world.”

  Feeling her face grow warm, she put down her tea, moved back from the fire. What angered her the most about his comment was the way he could have been either talking to himself, about someone else—Daniels, obviously—or listening, and understanding, all too well.

  “If you’re going to talk about my father, you could at least call him by name,” she said.

  “What your daddy’s done or ain’t done don’t concern me nor anyone else on this island. You need to get used to that, or you’ll drive yourself mad.”

  Whaley laughed at his joke so loudly that she nearly smiled herself. And of course he was right. Her father’s illustrious career wasn’t even news here, for the news, when it came, was months late and had no effect on the lives of the islanders. She wondered if, in fact, her father meant nothing to the rest of the country—wondered if she hadn’t imagined the stares as she sat in the Alston family pew of the St. James Episcopal Church in Charleston, or exaggerated the threat of shameful treatment that led her to choose, despite Joseph’s protestations, to travel to her reunion with her father by sea instead of overland, which would have taken less than a week, opposed to the two weeks it would have taken her had there not been a light tied to the head of a nag. The thought of six days cooped up in a coach with strangers who would just know by looking at her who she was had led her to choose the ocean.

  That she associated the ocean with indifference amused her now that her life—and the lives of everyone on this island—was so dependent upon what the sea delivered. Whaley’s lodgings might be aesthetically lacking, but its roof kept the both of them dry and warm.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll try not to drive myself mad. In the mean time, you’ll help me build my manor?”

  “Imagine I could lend a hand from time to time.”

  “And that portrait? You’ll help me get it back?” She saw no need to mention the papers, for how could she trust this man she’d just met? Such a treasure might cause a good man to change direction. As he said, power changes a man.

  When she looked up at him, his affable demeanor had darkened.

  “Might as well take a knife to both our throats.”

  “I want it back.”

  “If that portrait went missing he’d search ever inch of this island until he turned it up. He’d catch you, and he’d kill you.”

  “It’s all I’ve got from before.”

  Whaley handed over her breakfast.

  “You got lots from before.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Way more important than paint on a canvas.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t trust myself to remember. Not here, not as hard as it is to live.”

  “That only makes a memory stronger,” he said.

  Again she sensed some untold story. It was in his delivery at times, his sudden demonstrative surges, so noticeably impassioned given his phlegmatic demeanor. But now was not the time to press. It would take time, talking him into helping her get to her father’s papers. And it wasn’t as if she did not understand the danger. She had witnessed Daniels at what, for all she knew, might have been a routine Tuesday on the job, and it was as bloody and deeply evil a day as she’d ever hoped to witness. She stiffened at the thought of it and despite her attempts to push the memory away, it was as Whaley said: something about the island only made stronger that moment on the ship, when the door to her berth gave way and she tried hard to take her eyes off the woman in the portrait she thrust in front of her like a shield. But that woman would not break her stare, would not let her look away as her sweet French maidservant Eleanor, inches away, became two people, two sets of legs, one set unskirted from waist to knees, another bare from buttocks to boot tops. Theo did not look; she was not allowed to move her eyes from the gaze of the woman in the painting and still she could see everything, the man jerking atop Eleanor as he slapped her face and pried open her mouth to spit into it. Two sets of hands trying to pull the portrait from her arms. Her strength godly and omnipotent so long as she did not break the gaze. Finally three men pushed the two of them—herself and the woman in the portrait—topside.

  Daniels had stood calmly among the carnage on deck. He was bare to the waist and there was an epaulet of blood on his shoulder.

  “She won’t let go her picture,” said one of the men.

  “Did you not try cutting off her arms?”

  “We figured you’d want a taste first.”

  The bloody-shouldered leader reached out to her. She said to the woman in the portrait, I am the daughter of Aaron Burr.

  “What’d she say?” one of the men behind her whispered.

  “Said she’s Aaron Burr’s daughter,” said the leader.

  “The one what killed that fellow in a duel?”

  The leader put a bloody hand on her shoulder. He said as he drew his sword that he did not care if she was the queen of bloody England.

  She smiled at the woman in the portrait who said, Stay with me, Theo. I will not let them harm you.

  I will stay with you, she said. Past the woman, beyond the gray horizon, a blue line of hills arose and in the middle distance the lushly treed forest lining the bank across the Hudson came slowly into focus. Smoke rose from the chimneys of Richmond Hill. Under a canopy of linden trees in the garden, she dined with her father.

  I brought you this gift, she said to him. I’ve come home to be with you now. Never again will we be parted. She extended the portrait to her father.

  “Let her go,” said Daniels. A creaking as his sword found refuge in its leather sheath. She felt the fingers on her shoulder loosen and fall away.

  “Go where?” said a voice behind.

  “Take her ashore,” he said. “She’s our burden now. We cannot touch her because she has already been touched. By God.”

  God’s touch might not save her a second time. Whaley seemed to know the man and his ways; she ought to put her trust in Whaley, not Richmond Hill or morning mist along the banks of the Hudson, not the sweetness of peaches or Chopin’s nocturnes. Whaley was real. At this moment he was talking to her, in fact.

  “Best get to progging,” he was saying. He’d wrapped her some biscuits and a little leftover croaker in a cloth for her lunch.

  She hesitated in the doorway to thank him, but when she did, finally, say the words, he waved her away. “Helps me too,” he said.

  “I don’t see how. Now you’re taking care of two. Twice as hard.”

  “Twice the rewards,” he said, then he dropped his eyes in shyness. “We best not tarry now. Wasting good light.”

  She spent the day alone, scouring the coastline, pushing farther up the island away from the crowds. The farther she traveled, of course, the more distance there was to lug home whatever she found. So she made piles in the high dunes, lumber and some cookware—two pewter mugs, a lone piece of china—a strip of sail that would do nicely for a blanket, a few bottles she could use to fetch water. Within days she was lusting after not peaches but nails. Had the wind through the sea oats promised to bring her anything she wanted, she would have asked, hours before, for chocolate, books, Chopin. Now it was nails, a couple of hinges for her door, an ax, a saw, a hammer.

  A week or so after Whaley br
ought her into his hut, he lay sleeping on the bed. That night as always he offered her the tick, but she would not hear of it, not that her refusal ever dissuaded him from going through the exchange the next night. Whaley’s sleep-breath rose to a not-quite snore and rain pelted the piecemeal roof above her head, but what kept her awake was the thought of Whaley offering nightly his bed, the predictability of it, its link in a chain of daily occurrences she previously would have deemed quotidian. Ritual was just as important in her former milieu but it was understood so differently, as a pattern of society, a set of preordained rules observed by those who truly understood how life should be lived.

  Civilization depended upon adherence to such a pattern, and perhaps for that reason she had always resented it. Joseph had his next-day clothes laid out for him by his manservant by ten the night before. His family always decamped for DeBordieu Island on the first of May. Four o’clock came and tea was served, dinner at seven thirty sharp.

  Why not go to DeBordieu early this year, she asked Joseph, whose patience with such suggestions made her feel all the more fragile. Smile at her every word, humor her at all costs.

  On this island there was nothing static or plodding about routine. Survival was predicated on things being the same: the sea yielding food and delivering materials adaptable to your daily needs, the wind steady enough to keep the bugs away but not strong enough to cause the destruction of which it was so easily capable.

  This is what Theo was thinking, lying by the fire, inches away from Whaley, so close she could smell his sleep-breath, when the door blew open.

  Whaley rose so quickly she saw only his blanket, flung across the room. Then he was standing by the fire, gripping a piece of wood the length and thickness of an ax handle. She looked beyond him to see Daniels’s face, lit only by the remnant glow of fire in the hearth. He looked her over once before his eyes sought out Whaley in the smoky gloom. He seemed unconcerned about the makeshift weapon, as if he knew it would not be used on him.

  Theo kept her eyes on Whaley. “It’s my father come at last,” she said, and curtsied low, her skirts rustling the tick. “Home to Richmond Hill. Oh, how they’ve missed me, especially the Missus Astor.”