The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  She began slipping into the forest. Just feet away from their stockade the scrub dropped away and wide paths appeared, spacious meadows with sluggish, murmuring creeks, moss-dripping cypresses, deep shadows pierced with soft yellow light. Daily she wandered with no particular destination. Friendly Indians took her in, taught her things: how to dam a creek with branches, chase fish into a pool where they could be easily spared. They gave her corn to plant, and beans and squash and pumpkins. They loaned her a hoe made from the vertebra of a bear. They taught her to grate nutmeg with a conch shell, how to track deer through the woods to find salt licks. She came to know polecat and muskrat, learned to spot a moccasin dripping from live oak amid a tress of Spanish moss. Rattlers are more poisonous on the hottest days, her new friends taught her; the severed tail of an alligator will wiggle right on for hours.

  Virginia came dragging Maggie off island with her all hours of the day during that week before Boyd went across. So distracted was she by Virginia’s bold and exotic adventures she felt some part of her was already in motion, as if she had spent the day out on the water and was feeling still the pitch and roll. But the part of her that wanted to leave behind everything was fearful of the place people never come back from. If she said as much to Boyd, he would say, I came back across, but he’d only been born over here, not raised, he’d not known it long enough to become it. Woodrow had gone across too and come back, Boyd might claim, but there again he would be right in fact and wrong in Truth, for Woodrow Thornton hadn’t ever left this island even when he was up at Bayside welding for the Coast Guard those two years during some world war, even when Sarah had him staying with some of her people up in Norfolk one winter. Maggie knew what slant of light Woodrow saw against his lid when he blinked his eyes, she knew it was sea breeze he breathed. Much time as he’d spent out on the water, Woodrow’s heart had never once left the island.

  Instead of explaining it all to Boyd—how could he understand a grown woman giving herself over to waking dreams of a girl weeding a garden with a bear’s backbone—she just pouted. The grown-up part of her understood he’d be back over in three days time; smothering him, she knew, was going to backfire big-time. But there was Virginia coaxing her into ghostwoods, and the notion of all that land, all those people bunched up in knots all across it … Maggie shut down when she thought about it. Have a good time, she said, though not in a way either of them knew her to mean.

  She watched his boat slide out across the inlet, which was glassy and greenish that day, slick as it gets, and without even going home, or back to the summer kitchen, she made her way to Harvey Lockerman’s house and bought a pint of that white liquor he made every winter. Boyd’s the one who left. He might have said he wanted her to come along, but once she got over there and people started talking their nasty gossip, he’d wished he’d left her back over on that island.

  Several men were crowded into Harvey’s root cellar, passing pints and smoking and smelling like the catch of the day. She paid her money and took her pint and went back to the summer kitchen and opened all the windows and sipped the white, which smelled of yeast but tasted of turpentine. By the third stout patch she sloshed into her jelly glass, a curious molecular reorganization took place in her heart, rendering all her flaws and mistakes noble and altruistic and all the misery she felt the fault of Boyd for leaving, her sister for treating her like a slattern, the island for being stuck hours out in the ocean.

  Another drink and she was blaming her great-great-grandfather who sired a family here on the island and kept secret his other family across the ocean. And her own daddy, who got rich off a shipment of whiskey that washed up on Sheep Island during Prohibition and spent the rest of his days drunk off what he did not sell. She liked to think—she enjoyed thinking—that what Whaley called her sorry streak came directly from this side of the family, with their ruddy Irish coloring and their love of singing even though not one of them had ever been known to read a note.

  Wherever it came from, it had needed to be got out of her system. She could get it out by herself, but it would go a lot quicker if she had some company. She went back up the road to Locker-man’s. The party had moved from the root cellar to the backyard. Harvey’s wife and his wife’s sister had joined the men but were sipping instead of slashing, and when Maggie came striding up the lawn, her steps deliberate and counted out so as not to let on how drunk she was already, the women traded glances Maggie could decipher even through her fog. When she took a seat, they slipped off inside the house.

  It was late afternoon before it was even lunchtime and then it was dusk and the mosquitoes blew up from the marsh and had at her bare arms until she was nearly welted. A boy she knew from school, a Railey who had moved off island but was over visiting Harvey, told her he had something inside the house would help soothe those bites.

  She knew what that something was but followed him inside anyway, filed right past the women who were listening to the radio in the kitchen and stopped talking to stare her out as she stumbled on the threshhold.

  She pushed him away after he’d kissed her down to the floor of the front porch. She said, “I’m hungry, I’m going home.” Of course he followed her halfway up to the house, trying to talk her into some more of his bug-bite remedies. She treated him like she treated the bugs who maybe because of the liquor were on her like they’d never been before, swarming her, bleeding her leechlike.

  Whaley was off somewhere, thank God. Maggie went to the kitchen and started making some oatmeal, about the only thing she could find that did not require a lot of knifing. She was slurping it up at the kitchen table when Whaley came in from the store. She could tell from the way Whaley did not look at her that she knew at least some of it.

  Whaley made a noisy fuss of putting up groceries. Then she leaned against the counter, her arms tightly crossed, and said, “Least you waited till your boy was off island.”

  “He drinks himself, so what?”

  “I’m not talking about the drinking, though God knows you ought to leave it alone too.”

  Maggie decided to ignore the “too.” “When was the last time you saw me drunk?”

  “I don’t keep count of your actions, but if you want credit for acting like you ought to act, you’ll not get it from me.”

  “That’s a simple way of seeing it,” said Maggie. “And a god-damn self-righteous way too.”

  Whaley said, “You know I’m right.”

  Maggie said, “Oh do I. You always are.”

  Whaley unfolded her arms, wet a rag, and swiped furiously at the countertop. “I don’t have to listen to this mess.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that some people don’t feel the same things you do? You think something awful’s got to happen for somebody to feel sad. Somebody’s got to die, or lose a child, or there’s got to be a fire or a flood. Even then you don’t hardly let somebody grieve before you claim they’re wallowing. Well, guess what? It don’t work like that. Some people can’t control how they feel. They just feel bad for no reason and they deal with it best they can and it would be mighty Christian of you to show some support.”

  Whaley squeezed the rag until water ran down her arm.

  “All I do is support you. While you screw some boy in plain daylight for all the children on the island to watch and run up and down telling everyone how they saw the two of you going at it in the dunes. I support you while you run off and get drunk and throw yourself all over Barry Railey, who’s got a wife and three young’uns up in Suffolk …”

  “Who said I threw myself at him? Mary Alice told you I threw myself at him?”

  “Don’t even go denying it. Mary Alice told me the whole story not a half hour ago.”

  “I don’t have to listen to your mess either,” said Maggie. She rose from the table, carried her bowl of oatmeal to the sink, sloshed water in it so wildly that a stream from the pump ricocheted off the basin and sprayed over her shoulder, onto the floor. Whaley was upside her, grabbing the bowl, gimme that, you�
��re not even fit to wash a dish, and Maggie was all over her sister then, slapping at her with wild loping swings, pushing her back upside the counter, both of them crying, Maggie’s hair streaming wet with tears and sweat and then she was outside, running down to the creek to Woodrow’s. Sarah was sitting on the porch listening to her gospel songs on the radio, Maggie could hear the sleek, sexy guitar chords chugging along underneath the swelling chorus praising God in heaven.

  In the summer kitchen she lay down across the bed she shared with Boyd and said his name. She wanted him with her and she prayed a sobbing prayer to God: Please bring him back to me I won’t ever run out on him I will be faithful and good to him and forgive me for what I did to my sister who I know loves me in some long-dry place in her heart. If you just bring him back, please God don’t let him leave me.

  He came back late that night to find her passed out in her clothes, the screen door carelessly ajar and the summer kitchen as-warm with mosquitoes. He lit a fire in the trash burner Woodrow had installed for Crawl and his bride and pulled down the storm boards on all the windows and lit one of the El Reeso Sweets he’d brought back for Woodrow. He stripped to his shorts and sat sweating and blowing smoke defensively around the room. He let her sleep. When she woke she was thirsty and her skin was ravaged by bites.

  He was lying beside her smoking.

  “Hey baby,” he said.

  She rolled right over on top of him and was out of her dress in seconds. Later, lying parched and eaten up with mosquito bites and remorse alongside him as he smoked, she wanted him to ask her to go across with him, so she could say yes, for she would have then, and she would have made him leave that very evening, before she could feel better and change her mind. But he didn’t ask. He seemed removed, distant, in a way she’d never seen him before. As if a part of him, his heart—the important part—had remained off island.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I messed up.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighed. “Can we open some of the windows now?”

  He got up and busied himself with the storm boards but did so reluctantly, as if cooping them up in the sticky heat with the mosquitoes she’d let in was part of her punishment.

  “You don’t want to tell me,” he said from across the room.

  She was holding a sock she’d dipped in water to her head and breathing hot and fast.

  “I just don’t like it when you’re gone,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Quit saying that. I know you’re sorry. I can tell by looking at you that you wish you hadn’t done it. Thing is, what did you do?”

  She reached for the water he’d brought in, drained the glass, stared defiantly at the emptiness as if willing it to refill.

  “Had a little too much to drink,” she said.

  “I can see that.”

  “Slapped the hell out of my sister.”

  “Well,” he said, “isn’t that something you’d do stone sober?”

  “Think about it all the time.”

  “I used to beat up and get beat up by my brothers every other day.”

  “Stops usually when you get into your twenties, though, doesn’t it?”

  They had a sad laugh over this. In the wake of the laughter she considered telling him about Barry Railey. Chances were he’d hear it, for if Mary Alice went and told Whaley down at the store, everyone had heard it by now. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t hear of it, and would it not be better this time if he didn’t know? Wasn’t it hard enough for him to come back to find her smelly and pathetic?

  “I’ve got to get up at the crack,” he said. “We better get to bed.”

  The next morning, after getting up with Boyd to accompany him down to his boat — hugging on him so long and hard he had to gently pry her fingers off his shoulders—she was struck with terror that everything seemed about to crumble. What she wanted more than anything was for him to reassure her that things were going to be okay. Boyd seemed both unnerved and flattered by her neediness. He was willing to nurse her back to normalcy, but she could tell he found the whole process unpleasant.

  When she got to the house Whaley was sitting on the porch with her coffee. She would not look at Maggie when Maggie took a seat beside her.

  “I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Okay what?”

  Maggie had no answer for this, though she understood the question.

  “I would tell you what happened with Barry Railey if I thought you wanted to hear it.”

  “Spare me,” said Whaley.

  “All right. I’ll spare you, but what you’re getting spared is the truth.”

  Whaley looked at her full-on for the first time that day. “You need a bath, Mag.”

  For the next week or so, Maggie was tentative and shy around both Whaley and Boyd. She spent hours weeding the garden and cooked dinner for Boyd every noon when he came in off the water, more to take her mind off things than at attempt to redress her wrongs, for Whaley’d just as soon let it go than speak of it again, though she’d never forget—Maggie knew her sins were tallied in that place where her sister kept score, a book of pages filled to the margins with black slants—nor, heaven forbid, forgive. She just had better things to do than listen to Maggie’s mess. What else was there to say about it in Whaley’s view but I’m right and you’re wrong?

  With her sister she knew where she stood. Boyd kept her guessing. Had she been asked, say by little Liz, who was known to ask her such, whether she liked a little mystery in a man, she’d surely have said, Oh hell yes, sign me up for the deep end, the more I knew them the more I need to be wanting to know about them, and it would have been true, for she’d never been with a man whose head and heart she didn’t have figured out in a flat week, not to mention other parts of their body it took less than a day to understand. Now, though, with Boyd—it felt like he was pulling away from her a little each day, not so dramatically that she could see it in his eyes or hear it in his voice or God forbid feel it in his touch but detectable still in a way that got away with her terribly just because it was so slight, like the way the island itself was drifting every day a little bit southward, though to stand on her porch or, she’d heard, to fly over it in an airplane, it looked the same as it always had, ever since she could remember, ever since Whaley used to take her by the hand and lead her down the lane to see their aunt Mandy, who would let them dress her cats up in rags she swore belonged to the famous daughter of the vice president of the United States of America. And the island looked the same as it did when the vice president’s daughter set foot on it, and yet it was a different island, or rather it was in a different place.

  That was how it was with Boyd. He was the same but in a slightly different place. Wind in the night had picked up and moved tiny parts of him, the equivalent of sand grains, atoms, molecules, droplets of water they claim humans are mostly made of.

  Maggie stood looking at him one afternoon as they mended nets in Woodrow’s backyard. He had his shirt off and she was admiring the ropey muscles that had strung up across his back and shoulders since he’d been out on the water. Well, that’s good, she thought. At least there’s more of him for the wind to take away. Might take a while longer than it would have when his rangy self first set foot on the dock.

  “I know all about that time with Barry Railey,” he said.

  She was stretching the net out, standing across the yard from him; there was some wind that day, and at first she thought the wind had picked up his words and twisted and mixed them, for he remained bent to his task until she did not respond. He looked up at her quickly, saw something in her eyes, dropped his own eyes to the net.

  “Whaley told you?”

  “Don’t matter who. Matters who didn’t.”

  “What you heard is a lie.”

  “Really?” He put down his end of the net, lit a cigarette, picked up his work again.

  “I didn’t throw myself at him if that’s what you heard.”

  “But you went off with
him?”

  “I was with him, yes. And I let him kiss me before I came to my senses and stopped him.”

  “What made you come to your senses, Mag?”

  Maggie looked across the island toward the ocean. More than anything she wanted her bask, the water on her shoulders, liquid heat and sea foam frothing around her.

  “You’re the one ran off to do God knows what across the sound. I don’t like it when you’re gone. It doesn’t feel right over here.”

  “I went to my cousin’s baby’s christening, Mag. I was gone three days. I asked you to go with me. Asked you more than once. I’m going to ask you again to come across with me, for good, but I’m not going to keep asking you over and over. We could never be over here. It just won’t work. You won’t let it. You’re scared of your sister. You don’t want anything to change. I have to stay in some black man’s outbuilding. You get to come across the creek when you want, and then you cross over and who knows why you act like you do over here, but you do, Mag. As long as we stay over here, you’re going to keep getting in the way of us.”

  The woods Virginia led her through were a damn lie, Maggie thought, like the forests she’d seen in kids books, the pictures alongside the teaching sentences. Where was the brush and scrub so thick you had to hack at it with a machete to clear a path? In Virginia’s forest the trees were high and far apart and friendly animals frolicked in deep blue shadow that flickered with sunlight through leaf canopy, and raccoons were sweet-eyed and never rabid, and snakes never hid beneath rocks but basked atop them like the tourists came to Meherrituck to burn their skin lying half-naked on the beach. This is the way Boyd would paint it over there too. A fat lie to get her across. What would keep her contained in Morehead or little Washington or wherever else over there he wanted them to settle? Even the islands had bridges to the mainland and all that coming and going, all those roads and intersections. He was dead wrong: she could never be what he needed her to be over there. She could never stay still.