The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  Beers appearing on the salt-strewn counter before her, half-eaten and abandoned cheeseburger steak pushed away and heaped with cigarette butts from the smokers who’d pushed in close to engage her in wild trash talk, then, when she declared loudly after four or five bottles of sweaty beer what she would not do to get her hands on some sweet homemade wine, invited her over to some old boy’s body shop where he had him a little something set up. Sweet as mother’s milk was this wine of his. She remembered sort of thinking as she gathered her father’s oiler around her shoulders and stumbled to the bathroom that this was it, dividing line; if she went for the wine she would lose everything she’d worked for, she’d never get him back, her life would be over. But then, she’d never had a chance. Never even had a plan. Come across with a trunk filled with seashells and photographs and eat hamburger steak? The thought of it shamed her into leaving the grill, three drunk fishermen in tow. When they arrived at the body shop, home of sweet-as-mother’s-milk wine, the day grew dimmer, the memories disassociated. More men standing around wide doors wheeled open to expose the bays where dented cars sat ignored. Someone handed her a tumbler, the wine sweet as threatened. Glen Campbell on the radio. He was a lineman for the county. A crowd of men coming and going, Maggie the only girl and not a girl, a grown woman too old to be laughing and grabbing cigarettes out the mouths of smelly fishermen in off the water on a day grown too hot to fish. She’d let slip back at the grill that she was over from the banks and nearly all the men had family somewhere up the chain or had fled the banks themselves, a whole lot of Do you know I bet you know, though she did not bring herself to tell them she rarely got off her island except a few times a year to Meherrituck. She did not mention Boyd for the longest time. When she did, not one of the men claimed to know him. She thought this odd, given the fact that the Promise Land was filled with transplants from the banks and everyone knew everyone and there weren’t but a dozen families over there anyway, someone was bound to know him, Y’all lying to me, she said as she began to suck the wine down like it was going to get her what she wanted, who she wanted, Y’all do too know Boyd, and someone asked her what he was to her and she smiled and said, Friend, slyly, and someone else said, What you doing getting friendly with a boy, try a grown damn man on for size and then there was some dancing and soon she found herself sandwiched between two men obviously eager to see her in the so-called office of the body shop which featured for furniture a sprung-cushioned seat torn from a bus, its Naugahyde ripped and patched with duct tape, the coiled springs visible between the worn cushion and uncomfortable as hell when they pushed her down atop it and began their zipper music which she drowned out with screams which they tried to silence by filling her mouth with their flesh.

  She did what she had to do: used teeth to get out from under them. Remembering the taste of blood, metallic, sharp, she threw up over the side of the boat, Sarah holding her shoulders, stroking her hair as she heaved, offering her water when her stomach was way empty, when she had nothing left inside her except shame, fear, and worse, the memory of what happened next.

  Tearing crazy drunk and disheleved through the streets of the Promise Land, screaming his name. Everywhere children and dogs. Her dress torn, her eye blackening, and a little blood staining her cheeks. Who knew where her suitcase was? She could not remember running from the body shop, how she managed to elude four drunk men, three or four more in the work bays; she could only surmise they let her go out of fear. She could imagine, later, that they had nothing at all to fear, for all they had to say, what they surely would have said had she managed to end up in the police station to press charges against instead of the opposite, She wanted it, hell, she asked for it, she knew what the story was once we left out of the grill, she promised us all a slice, on and on in the impudent imagery of men talking about sex, slices, pieces, pokes, lays, all their idiotic words for things they didn’t understand.

  And someone—a stunned mailman—told her where he lived. What he did not tell her was that he had moved in with his sister and her family. She found out quickly enough, knocking the door nearly down, crying out for her Boyd. The door slivered open and a woman holding a sleeping child, who favored Boyd in the set of the eyes and the slope of the nose, took one look at her face and shut and bolted the door. Which did not make Maggie go away as desired. Made her bang louder, call his name in a register so low and wild with want and need that it set dogs to howling, touched off a siren even. Which drew closer. Which stopped in the street in front of her.

  At the police station she went slack. The wine began to wear off and she slipped into a near catatonic state. Soon and swift came the shame. There was one boy policeman who talked to her sweetly enough to get the name of Woodrow out of her, and then Crawl. He wrote it down on a sheet of paper and went away to confer with his higher-ups and in a few minutes came back to the cell where they said they were holding her for her protection (for when she told them what had happened at the body shop they went a little easier on her, treated her a bit differently than when she was simply drunk, disorderly, disrupting the peace of the Promise Land) and said to her, “Captain says this is some nigger.”

  “Captain ought to know there’s another name for them.”

  “You sure now, ma’am?”

  Maggie looked up at the boy. He seemed younger and very far away.

  “Sure about another name?”

  “Sure you wanting us to call this fellow?”

  “Fellow is an improvement. He’s a man. It’s his daddy brung me over here, and if I know Crawl, it’s his daddy will come and get me out of this goddamn oven.”

  “You need to be watching your language,” said the boy policeman.

  “Y’all need to be arresting those drunks that tried to kill me.”

  “Hey now,” he said in a voice she assumed he felt was soothing. “No one tried to kill you.”

  “You were there?”

  The boy looked at his sharply shined police-boy shoes. “I’ll call this man if you sure you want me to.”

  “It’s call him or stay here. I imagine we’d both prefer you call him.”

  For the couple hours it took Woodrow to arrive, she lay sweating and shaking on the bunk. She asked for water but no one tended to her. Shaking, retching, nearly dying of thirst, she realized that the moment she gave them Crawl’s name they assumed she really did go down to the body shop with the idea of, as her escorts said as they held her down on the bus-seat sofa, fucking the lot of them six ways to Sunday, for what woman innocent of such charges would call a nigger to come pick her up out of jail?

  She imagined they treated Woodrow even worse when he arrived. She knew they subjected him to all kinds of questions, treated him as if he were her pimp. She knew also, though not from anything he said for he said nothing to her about it, ever—she knew that the things they said to him got away with him, hurt him, deeply.

  BACK ON THE ISLAND in the slow wretched weeks after her return, what got away with her the worst, what kept her eyes to the ground and her cheeks streaked with dampness, was not anger at the men who’d had their drunken way with her, or the thought of what Boyd felt when he came in off the water that day to hear from his sister about the crazy old woman liked to beat her door down calling his name. What she’d done to Woodrow—Sarah too—came in time to cause her mind to switch back and forth between two opposite notions: thereafter she would never venture farther from home than the post office (for it was easy to blame for the terror that seized her that day at the lunch counter not the way she had of thwarting over and again some slim shot at contentment, but instead the wider world, the vast and un-confined lie that had seduced so many before her starting with the first white child born on these shores) or, more terrifying but maybe more what she deserved, she needed to leave again, and this time for good.

  Woodrow’d been sweet enough to carry her across. Sarah’d stroked her wet forehead as she heaved over the side of the boat. Now neither of them could quite raise their gaze higher
than her waist when she encountered them on the lane. She could not bear this eye-avert for the rest of her life.

  But instead of Maggie having to leave, everyone else left. What it came down to was the three of them sitting on the steps of the church trying to figure out what in the world’s a blow-dryer. Sarah dead and gone, Crawl nearly given up on ever getting his daddy away from his white women. Even the Tape Recorders skipping a season now, Dr. Levinson too old to go without power and light for the three days or else sick of the mosquitoes, or maybe he was sick of hearing Whaley tell the same old stories. Maggie never thought she’d miss the Tape Recorders, but when they did not come that year she thought, Hell, now that everybody’s gone and most of them dead, now that it was only the three of them left of this island, she might could tell the real story of her life.

  But no one was interested in this story. Least not Whaley, who pieced it together from folks coming and going across the sound. Maggie sure didn’t volunteer it, though in some ways she did not have to say a word. She’d disappeared for two days, Whaley knew Woodrow to be over in Morehead fetching Sarah, she knew Boyd lived over in the Promise Land, she wasn’t so dumb at math that she couldn’t add. She liked numbers, her prices, what things cost. Plus all she had to do was look at Maggie to know the whole sordid story.

  Maggie went about trying to forget again, tried all the things she’d tried and failed before: prayer, work, endless hours in the after-supper surf. The village was overrun by ghosts. Sometimes Maggie would wander down to the schoolhouse and find her seat on the third row, sit and listen to teaching sentences until the room and finally the entire island filled with all those who’d fled after the storms came battering. Mostly, though, she just accepted the way things were now. Tourists came over now of a weekend, O’Malley Senior had started up a damn near business ferrying them round-trip from Blue Harbor. They brought cameras and took pictures of the two old white women too stubborn to leave and their colored protector. They asked questions, silly and maybe even a little mean, How y’all stand these mosquitoes, how come you stayed when everybody else fled this godforsaken place? The undertow of their curiosity seemed to Maggie judgmental if not contemptuous. She and Whaley and Woodrow were becoming a kind of freak show, one of those quaint stories about human resilience Maggie sometimes read aloud from the Norfolk paper. They smiled, waved, stood for the pictures, but underneath pasted smiles lurked the ways they got away with each other. Only three of them left on this island. Why could they not put it aside?

  That lovely night on the steps of the church with Woodrow and Whaley, it came to her why. Had to do with the Tape Recorders, she decided. Which story to tell them, whose story told it best? Once, little Liz got Maggie started on the subject of men, love, what it was like living your whole life where the pickings were so slim that some took up with cousins and others—her sister being one—went without. Maggie was just about to tell it then, the real story of this island, the only one that mattered: that boy’s beautifully muscled and sun-browned back as he lifted his pots onto the dock when he came in off the water, the afternoons in the summer kitchen, his pleading with her to leave her island and what happened when she sort of halfway tried.

  She kept quiet, though, for her sister’s sake. Whaley had her story. It had to do with weather, wind, water, quaint customs, recipes, yaupon tea. Mostly it had to with history, by which her sister meant their great-great-great-grandmother, Theodosia, daughter of a famous murderer. That was Whaley’s idea of a story to tell. She went right on and told it too. And Maggie stopped short of filling a tape with how bad she hurt over some boy years ago, even though sitting that night on the church steps, Maggie knew her story explained life on this island better than anything out of Whaley’s mouth. God bless Whaley’s soul. She had her own hurts, surely. She’d never put them down on tape, though. And if Maggie was to tell her side of it, it would by God last, would linger forever across time like the pink cloudy sky shrouding the rising sun of a morning, which is why she’d never tell it. To hell with it. It was already out there, whipping Whaley’s newspaper, in the wind.

  V

  TEODOSIA BURR ALSTON

  Yaupon Island, North Carolina

  THE FIRST THING SHE saw when Whaley brought her home to the cottage he’d built while she was recuperating with a widow down island was the portrait. In a gesture Theo might have found mocking had she not owed him her life, he’d hung it dead center of the front room above the fireplace. It had been damaged in the crossing, its canvas torn in the high right corner, the colors bleeding and fading from exposure to the sun, its frame stained with her blood. Later, she would learn that he’d used the painting to shelter her from the sun, that she lay bleeding in the bottom of the leaking skiff, an inch of bloody water washing her wounds with salt, and anyone who might have come upon them hugging the sound-side shore of the banks, moving slowly southward, weaving in and out of the marshes, would have pondered the absurdity of this haggard boatman rowing his cargo of portrait.

  She said, hobbling into the house, “I’d think you’d rather not have to stare at that countless times every day of your life.”

  “You would think?” He was busy stowing the items the island ladies had donated—old dresses, a bonnet, a tablecloth, rags, really, but she was glad to have them—into a lidless wobbly chest.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You said, I’d think. Would think. Never you mind the thinking about what goes where. It ain’t much choice, is it, since we don’t have nothing and got nowhere to put our nothing.”

  She knew by his grammar that she’d angered him. He knew she preferred he not speak to her as he would a barmaid.

  She said, “I’m sorry, Whaley.”

  He said he knew she was sorry. He said in the way people say, “I know you’re sorry,” which makes you understand how pitiful you would be to them were they in the mind to pity you. He lit a fire, went out. She sat in the one crude chair he’d built and did not look at the portrait. Instead she studied her body. She’d spent hours since the moment she’d come to in the widow Royall’s cottage observing the scars and bruises across her arms, legs, and neck, for they kept fresh the debt she owed Whaley. Another reminder was the throbbing in her bones when the sky turned dark and a storm whipped across the island, a new sensation since her injury. Lingering pain she accepted without question, for it was so vastly preferable to the things she’d wasted time worrying about in her other life. She remembered once at DeBordieu an afternoon of incessant worrying over whether Joseph’s family might take offense if she did not come down to dinner that evening.

  Now the weight of what she had done hung over everything. He’d hardly looked at her when fetching her from the widow Royall, who, like every other woman on the island who had come to take turns sitting with her and helping dress her wounds and attending selflessly and often brusquely to her condition, assumed they were married. “Yonder your husband comes,” she’d said when she’d spotted Whaley making his way up the lane to her cottage. “He’s a sturdy one,” she’d added, hint of a smile so slight in her choice of the word “sturdy” that Theo did not know whether to appear appreciative or embarrassed.

  So too did every exchange she’d had with Whaley that day seem fraught with ambiguity. She was relieved when he went out, but as soon as he was gone she wished for his return. He was gone all day. She set about stowing her few hand-me-downs in the single bedroom that appeared obviously lived in—his clothes on the floor, a blanket on the tick, a conch shell filled with whale oil and a stringy wick on the table—picked at a bit of supper from some salted mullet and biscuits he’d left for her by the fire and waited up for him in bed. But when he came in, well after dark, he stayed in the parlor.

  She caught him undressed to the waist as he lay down on a pallet of rags by the fire.

  “They think we’re married,” she said. “Every last one of them referred to me as Missus Whaley. So you might as well sleep in the bedroom. Alongside me. Because we’re married a
nd that’s what married couples do.”

  She’d not planned on behaving so boldly, though she knew whatever she sacrificed would not come close to equaling what she owed him. That was one way, an obvious way, she might make amends. What surprised her was how she felt no shame, inviting this man to her bed. In the months she’d been away from him, he’d changed greatly. The Old Whaley nickname no longer fit, for he looked younger than she assumed he was, just shy of forty. His beard was graying but it was cropped, his hair had been trimmed, and the muscle he’d put on while building the cottage bunched across his back and shoulders.

  She did not think, until after she made her offer, of her own body, of how distasteful she might appear to him. But what he said next pushed the thought out of her mind.

  “I believe I know what married folk do. I’ve been married this past going on eighteen years.”

  “You’re married?”

  “Four children too, God willing they prosper still.”

  “But why did you not tell me before?”

  “You never tried to be my wife before.”

  Now the shame arrived. She wanted to retreat to her bed, but she hurt too much to move. Sometimes her injuries burned wildly and anew, pain triggered by guilt over what she’d done—her vanity, her selfish prideful clinging to her past—and how it had dragged Whaley away from the life he’d managed to cobble together after whatever catastrophe he’d endured had deposited him on Nag’s Head, left him to Daniels’s charge. Even though she felt wrong asking—it really wasn’t any of her concern, despite the fact that their new community thought them married—she wanted more than ever to know everything about him. She wanted to know the names of his children, their ages, who they favored. But she could see by the way he stood that they would not be talking about such things.

  She said instead: “Why are we stopping here, Whaley? We’re only a couple islands south of him. I know because I made the widow Royall point it out on a map. Less than a half day’s sail in a good wind. It’s unsafe, stopping here. Why did you not just leave me here and keep on to the mainland?”