The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  Woodrow said, more to himself than to her, “Seen him the other day.”

  She waited for more, though she knew that was all. She asked a question, he supplied an answer. She got used to it over the years, mostly because she had to—there were only three of them left on the island, finally, and here’s how it is with three: two against one. She spent many the year feeling closer to Woodrow than she did her own sister. She wanted to know his insides, wanted to know what he felt about things. How he got through the days in that head of his, poling his skiff out to meet the mail boat, fishing for their supper, smoking his cigars, listening to Whaley read out her prices, what was he thinking? She’d never got so worked up about what was in a man’s head. Tell the truth, she didn’t care to hear what was in most of them’s heads. She’d been with quite a few who couldn’t tell her, not because they didn’t want to or didn’t know how—likely scenarios both—but because there won’t nothing up there but blood and cotton balls.

  “Where?” she asked.

  He went on with his hosing down.

  “He fish off Shackleford sometime.”

  Maggie felt her face stretching, hard red brick. One little bit of information and she felt as vibrantly alive as those first few weeks they spent together.

  “Will you carry me across?” she said.

  Woodrow came closer to a stare than she ever remembered.

  “I need to see him.”

  “Lay eyes on him? Or see him see him?”

  Another first: he’d never asked her questions so personal and, for him, direct. She knew exactly what he meant by see him see him. She knew Woodrow was remembering the noises coming out of his summer kitchen back when she used to meet Boyd there after the boats came in. She knew what he did not want any part of.

  She said, “Lay eyes. Just talk.”

  Woodrow was back to what Whaley thought of as cigar store Indian Woodrow. But she knew he was thinking, processing, feeling. She wondered was he thinking, old Maggie can’t take not having her way. Still, something told her that Woodrow was on her side. He might not have suffered in the same way she had (and he might even agree with Whaley that ninety percent of Maggie’s suffering was of her own stubborn making), but she trusted him finally to understand her need to just lay eyes on him, talk to him.

  What she wanted most of all was for Boyd to look inside her head like it was one of those ant farms a teacher brought onto the island once and see, as if through smudgy glass, her thoughts tunneling around each other. They every one had his name on them.

  And he would know, just by looking at her, just by the sight of her climbing onto the dock, that he was right: they could not be on the island, and she could not be there without him.

  “Will you take me, Woodrow?”

  “What you gone tell Whaley?” he asked after the time it took him to light a cigar stub in a little wind.

  She knew then that he’d do it, but only if she could come up with some reason to satisfy her sister. Woodrow sold Whaley fish, he odd-jobbed around the house, he had dealings with her that, fickle and ornery and hateful as she could be, she’d just as soon take and transfer to someone else, though it’d be pure spite to do so, for she knew good and well that Woodrow dealt as honestly as anyone up and down the banks.

  “Female trouble,” said Maggie.

  “Doctor comes to Meherrituck, you know that, every third Tuesday.”

  “Can’t wait,” she said, clutching at her stomach.

  Woodrow shook his head at her lie.

  “What?” she said.

  “She’s a woman too. How you think you can fool her with that?”

  “She’d near about rather hear me talk about Boyd than go on about my private parts.”

  Woodrow said, “Me and her both.”

  Maggie laughed a little, encouraged by his smart mouth.

  “So?”

  “I got to go back over there to get Sarah next week.”

  She felt her breath go shallow. “Woodrow, I mean, I’m asking a favor I know, but Sarah, she …”

  “Sarah won’t say nothing to you about nothing you do.”

  “I’m not worried about her saying anything.”

  Woodrow waited for her to tell him what she was worried about, which made it harder for her to do so.

  “She doesn’t much care for me, I know.”

  “Sarah cares for everybody the same,” he said. “Except her family. She takes care of her babies. They come first to her, them and God.”

  “I just worry that, you know, she’ll think …”

  “Whatever she thinks, you won’t hear about it. She ain’t gone say nothing to you, Miss Maggie.”

  “I swear I wish you’d call me Maggie.”

  “I swear I wish a lot of things,” said Woodrow.

  Maggie wished a lot of things herself. This she had in common with Woodrow but not her sister, who was all the time saying she did not wish for what the Lord had not yet provided. One thing Maggie knew Whaley wished for, though, was for her little sister to act right, which was to say, act like she did. Well, no matter how hard she tried, this island was not going to let Maggie act right to suit her sister.

  It was a risk, going across. Maggie thought of Virginia, safe one day at her home here on the banks, the next thing anybody knew the lot of them, all her kith and kin, lost and presumed dead. Not unlike Maggie’s great-great-great-grandmother, her ship boarded out from Diamond Shoals by thieves, everyone aboard murdered but her. Because she was not right in the head, they spared her life? One not-right-in-the-head woman gets herself and her whole colony lost, another gets saved. Well, Maggie couldn’t sit around studying the fates of the dead for clues to what she would do. All she’d be able to come up with was a contradiction, and she’d die bitter and alone trying to decide which story to trust.

  When Whaley was up at the post office Maggie packed a bag and hid it behind the shed, an ancient cardboard suitcase with leather flaking off the handle and gathered pockets along the sides for God knows what, she had never seen anyone use the thing, since she had a working memory it had sat up under the gable in the attic. Rainy days she and Whaley had filled it with baby clothes and wash cloths and paraded around the attic as if disembarking from the train. What wayfarer had brought it there and why had he left it behind? Surely it belonged to no kin of hers.

  The pockets she filled with sharks’ teeth and sand dollars. Between her two good dresses and her Boyd’s T-shirt she layered pictures of all her brothers and sisters taken at a backyard oyster roast when her father was still living, a picture of the house itself, all spruced up with sod on the lawn and flowers in the window boxes, another of the village taken from the front steps of the church just before the Ash Wednesday storm of ’62. She had to slip these out of picture frames, which left empty glass for Whaley to find, so she hid them in the sea trunk in the spare bedroom and prayed her sister did not notice before she left. Toting the suitcase out to the shed, she cringed at its contents: pictures and shells, some underwear, a certificate she’d received for four years’ perfect attendance Grades 3 through 7. Things a child would take when running away from home.

  She’d have told Whaley if she thought Whaley would find some way to react other than hateful. Female trouble? Her sister wouldn’t have pried. It was true that, as she said to Woodrow, Whaley’d nearly rather hear her go on about Boyd than to have to listen to her get gritty-specific about her insides. But she didn’t want to even not hear her sister respond. Whaley would know she was lying and yet she’d not call out her lie and this was every bit as bad as her pitching a fit. Hell, it would be worse. Maggie didn’t want to hear it, she figured why should I put up with anything from Whaley, it’s my life, my time, not like I’m punching a clock for her.

  She knew she was damned either way: tell her and suffer her silent indignation, don’t and pay big later on. She chose down-the-road but it was just piling on another layer of anxious.

  She sat up front. Woodrow smoked his cigar. Thirty
minutes into the two-hour crossing the sound churned up and the boat slapped at the chop. She wore her daddy’s old oiler over a not-quite-Sunday dress. It kept her dry, but inside the heavy rubber slicker she was boiling in the humid summer morning.

  She didn’t even try talking to Woodrow in the boat. But she didn’t need to talk to him. Agreeing to carry her across could only mean he approved of what she was up to. This is what she told herself anyway. He wanted her to be with Boyd, Woodrow cared for her, and for Boyd—she’d been knowing that, despite Boyd’s all the time claiming Woodrow hated him, treated him like some dumb green white boy. Boyd didn’t know Woodrow like she did. Woodrow would have said no to Boyd right off had he not cared for him, despite the fact that it was a little harder for Woodrow to go around turning down requests from white folks wanting to learn how to fish. Woodrow would have found a way or would have shamed him so bad out on the water—dumped him over in a turn or had the poor boy pulling his back out wrenching up pots the wrong way—that Boyd would have quit on Woodrow. Woodrow was surely one of the best watermen on the banks, but he wasn’t the only one. Boyd could have found another tutor and Woodrow could have sent him off to find one.

  Obviously he wanted them to be together. Maggie decided he liked having them back of his house in the summer kitchen. Up in the bow, taking the spray head-on, Maggie smiled at the thought of the summer kitchen once again housing rambunctious love. Out of her head and up into who knows where went the knowledge gained during her time on this earth. Crossing the sound she was ageless, whatever age you were when you were about to regain love lost to you. No numbers affixed to it. No words for it either. Just fine spray, a fountain of it, and sun on her cheeks, one of those little windows in time when she felt so slackly warmly comfortable in her body that it hardly existed.

  Never damn mind that when Woodrow motored up the waterway to where he docked, she was wet, salt-crusty, smelly. Never mind Crawl, there to meet him, shocked if not outright scornful at the sight of her. Never mind she had no real plan for finding Boyd, didn’t know where he lived, didn’t even know if seeing him was better than somehow being seen by someone who knew who she was and would pass along news of her triumphant crossing.

  Crawl helped his daddy tie up the boat. Didn’t no more than nod at her, then Woodrow joined him on the dock, and they were walking away when she called out, “Wait once.”

  Crawl kept right on walking. But Woodrow stopped and turned back.

  “Y’all know where the Promise Land’s at?”

  Crawl pointed the way. Ten blocks of small shingled cottages back of Arondell Street, hard by the railroad tracks. Some of the cottages were brought over on barges from Diamond City when the villagers fled Shackleford Banks, leaving it a ghost town after a bad hurricane at the turn of the century. The natives dispersed into the mainland, a colony lost. Signs of their former life—upturned dinghys, crab pots, gill nets—clogging their sandy cocklespurred yards. Looked to her like a banker didn’t know what to do with grass. Four out of five had just let their grass die or raked over it, one. She read this as a sign they missed home. All of them pining to return, knocked back across the sound by storms, hunger, poverty, only to end up on this patch of crabgrass and cocklespur.

  No, Maggie told herself, she was seeing the mainland through Whaley’s eyes. Whaley with her fear of anywhere off island would sharpen her words and slash away at this place until there was nothing left of it but stubble.

  Early afternoon and she saw no one out in the white-hot sun. The men were at work on road crews or at the canneries. The women, she figured, were cleaning house or cooking or tending to the children. She was starving. She’d borrowed a few dollars—well, ten—from the jar where Whaley kept the cash she saved. On a corner stood a grill, filling the neighborhood with the smoke of fried meat.

  Inside a line of men sat at the counter drinking sweaty cans of beer, not their first, judging from slump of the shoulders. Most of them swiveled slightly on their creaky stools as if they needed to feel the sway of water beneath them even on land. She hesitated in the doorway, her arm about out of her shoulder socket from lugging her suitcase through the streets, the huge floor fan pushing her hair, dress, smell of sweat and salt right back outside.

  The men studied her with hard red faces until, because she failed to blink, they turned away. Maggie wasn’t used to not knowing soul one. She remembered the last time she’d been off island for any significant length of time—years ago, she was in her late twenties, already ancient to be unmarried, a spinster. She’d traveled with a girl she’d grown up with, Cleo Austin, to Elizabeth City to visit Cleo’s cousins, who lived in a three-storied seemed like to Maggie mansion overlooking an arm of the Pasquotank River. They stayed a week. Days they’d wander in and out of the stores, looking at dresses and toys and cookware and even farm implements and tools in the mercantile and feed stores, and every night they attended dances in a bandstand by the river or went to church or strolled up and down the esplanade. She’d met a boy who wanted to marry her—he’d claimed so the third time she’d danced with him—but he was red-haired and scrawny and his last name was Sheep and his first name was Myron and he was her age and lived right on with his mama and unmarried sister and even though she could not claim any more independence, she knew from looking at the way he hitched his pants well up over his hips and the fat tortured knot of his tie that she’d be marrying his mother and sister and that they would find her (and she them) intolerably lazy and dull.

  A buck-toothed boy wearing a dirty apron and a pencil stub behind his big ear was in front of her with his little pad. It had been years since she’d been in a restaurant. She had nearly forgotten how it worked.

  She nodded at the man on the stool next to her.

  “What he’s having, I guess,” she said.

  The boy blinked and slid his nervous eyes to her neighbor’s plate, then looked at her with his open, pimply face.

  “Looks good enough to eat,” she added.

  “Cheeseburger steak,” he nearly yelled, printing it out slowly in big blocks across his pad. He was gone, the swinging kitchen doors batting up a breeze as she forgot to tell him, Bring me some sweet tea.

  Five minutes later a replica of the plate next door arrived in the boy’s shaky hands. She made him nervous, plainly. He’d gone away and bent down beneath the counter but was back with a sweat-beading bottle of beer.

  “I didn’t order that,” she said.

  The boy shrugged a bony shoulder at the man next to her.

  “What he’s having. That’s what you said.”

  “I meant food.”

  He stared, dejected, at the beer. “But it’s done been opened.”

  Maggie sighed. “I reckon between the two of us we can find someone to drink it.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll make me pay for it out of my wages and—”

  “I’ll pay for it, shug. Bring me some sweet tea.”

  He shot off without a word. The steak was so tough and tasteless she smothered her plate in ketchup. Chewing, Maggie felt her eyes watering, her throat closing. What in the world was she doing across over here, eating a hamburger steak like she had a clue? The horror she felt then was crippling, a seizing so much worse than nausea or backache, for such things passed but this futility stretched itself thinly out across time continuous, it remained in her blood like something handed her by God, a part of her, unshakeable, nothing to do but muddle through it. Only a few things had she found would make it fade. One was a bask in her sun-warmed surf. Another was leaving off whatever she was doing and going down to the docks to see if she could find Woodrow, for Woodrow, even when he was in his most removed of moods, taught her some things. It wasn’t what she naively used to call his quiet dignity, for Woodrow was not perfect, he had his faults, blind spots, resentments, hurts. No, it wasn’t his strong silence but something more complicated she had no name for.

  Woodrow was with his family now. She wasn’t about to go snooping around Colored Town asking
directions to Crawl’s, where Sarah would treat her like a stray cat.

  Everything caught up with her then: the sneaking away, the useless suitcase, the sun reflecting off the water, hot salty wind. Sweat streaked down her sides, dampening her dress. Her throat was rusted shut. Where was that boy with her sweet tea? She felt the men staring, heard the stools creek as they swiveled her way.

  One sip of beer to tide her over until her tea came. She curled her hand around the bottle, shocked by its iciness against the oppressive air of the diner.

  And then it was the next afternoon, and Maggie held her head in her hands, staring at a fish hook floating balefully in an inch of water in the bottom of the boat, which rocked wildly, setting off a lurch in her stomach, as Woodrow helped Sarah onto the seat beside her. Maggie could not lift her head. Snippets of the last twenty-four hours arrived out of sequence and truncated by thunderous pain in her forehead, lobe, stomach, pride, what little dignity she’d ever had. Sarah, scrunched tight on the seat beside her, felt towering and rigid compared to Maggie’s doleful slump. Somewhere in the middle of the sound, out of sight of both mainland and island she both dreaded and longed for, she would collapse from shame into Sarah’s lap. Sarah would hold her shoulders, stroke her dirty white-lady hair. Would not say a word. Would let her cry and babble and even drool onto her skirt while the piecemeal images took slow root in a murky sequence.