She’d never had a man admit to feeling something for her he could not articulate. She’d never had a man admit to needing her, though surely men had; Joseph needed her to be the daughter of a famous man, the wife of a governor. Her father needed her to make him feel as if he wasn’t a total failure. She’d confused these needs with devotion, and only Whaley, in his fumbling but sincere way, could make her understand how she could be needed for nothing at all, and everything.
Thereafter she spent more time with her Whaley and her children. Only the portrait remained from her life off island. For years she’d avoided the sight of it, though she knew it was there, silted with grime and dirt, dimmed by smoke from the poorly drafting chimney. I found it in the dunes after a nor’easter, she told her children. But Mother it looks like you it’s your eyes your nose, they said when they were still young enough to say unchecked what came into their heads. Before she gave up trying to educate them about the ways of a world she had come to renounce and turned them into a team of proggers. Fan out and scour. Don’t come home empty-handed. Silly babies, of course that is not me.
It was only an innocent question, the child had every right to ask it, the resemblance was still there even if Theo did not feel as if she even inhabited the same body as the woman above the hearth, though for weeks afterward she felt a niggling guilt. She’d meant to discuss with Whaley what to tell the children about her past, and his, but there were fish to catch and clean, a garden to tend to, old ornery Nora to retrieve from the marsh and milk of a morning. Had she ever managed five minutes free of pressing chore or needy child to discuss such a thing, Whaley was not good at discussing such. After all, she’d known the man over a year before he had spoken of his wife and children.
Some old island salt who claimed to have once walked across the inlet during a hard freeze said in her presence that the island stayed put but was always leaving. Every grain of sand underfoot different from the ground his father stood upon. And what of her? Her humors were the same, but the molecules that made up her scarred body were nearly all new. Why bring up the past? She understood, stinging from the innocent query of a child, that the portrait would only haunt her household. She’d taught her children not to put stock in tales of ghosts and haints their friends loved to tell in the dunes at night, passed down from their parents and beyond, some of them set in the fens and moors of another windswept island. Why hang a portrait of a ghost above the hearth?
But before she could put her mind to the task of disposing of the portrait—for it was not so simple a task as throwing it in the inlet, too much blood had been shed for it to be discarded among the dunes—her energy was taken up with the living.
The day that Whaley brought home Hezekiah Thornton was hot and windless. Theo remembered the conditions always as they seemed summoned by the vitriol of the words that passed between them. It was the worst fight they ever had, and the last one.
Hezekiah was dark, thin, and slightly stooped. He stood in the yard with his hands clasped in front of him as if he’d been towed to the house with a rope.
“This is Hezekiah,” said Whaley. “He’ll be helping us out with some chores.”
Hezekiah half-nodded when Theo glanced his way. He would not look Theo in the eye. They stood sweating in the merciless midmorning heat. Whaley brushed past her, disappeared inside the house.
“Where do you come from, Hezekiah?”
“Over across the sound, up around Somerset.”
“Oh yes,” she said, pretending to know the place he mentioned.
“Pardon me,” she said. Then, turning for the door, she invited him up on the porch, out of the sun. Another half nod.
Inside she found Whaley calmly eating his dinner.
“Who is that man?”
“Hezekiah. Like I said, he’ll be helping out for a time.”
“The children are perfectly capable of helping out.”
“You seem bound to keep them in school all day.”
“We cannot afford to keep that man.”
“He doesn’t appear to eat much.”
“Where’s he going to stay?”
“Shed for now. We’ll build him a cabin directly.”
“Where’d he come from?”
“I’d wager Africa.”
She was pouring water from a pitcher into a mug to take to Hezekiah. She slopped a good mugful on the floor as she slammed the pitcher on the table and turned to Whaley.
“You did not buy that man?”
Whaley chewed, swallowed. “How many slaves did the governor own?”
She knew the number: nearly three hundred, counting those who worked the rice farms, the various houses, the governor’s mansion.
“That has nothing to do with this man.”
“It’s got something to do with you, though. Let’s suppose I wanted to support my wife in the manner in which she was formerly accustomed.”
“I’m not your wife. And that man is not our slave.”
“You’ve not heard me call him such.”
“He’s standing out there like he expects to be horsewhipped for looking me in the eye.”
“I believe you might have scared him. Truth be told, you scare me sometimes.”
“You get rid of that man, Whaley. Take him back where you got him. Or I will take my children and leave here.”
“Leave?”
“Don’t doubt me.”
“Oh, I don’t. Just, where are you going to go? Home to Charleston? Back up to New York? Your daddy’s likely dead, and as for the governor, I’d wager he’s found himself another wife. I believe you might be standing in the only place left for you. Unless you and your portrait are still thinking this is only temporary.”
Whaley went back to his plate. She saw no use arguing with a hungry man. She tried to remember the last time she and Whaley had quarreled. Some years ago, when he’d asked her to spend more time at home, confessed he needed her, though he could not say what he needed her for. She’d acquiesced then, but she would not do so now. She poured another mug of water and took it out to Hezekiah, who was waiting in the sun where she’d left him. She handed him the water and told him she’d bring him something to eat, and for the rest of the day she ignored her husband, who worked with Hezekiah on fixing up the shed.
That night she sat up for hours in the parlor, thinking of things to say to Whaley, shaping her argument against his owning another person. Chief among her reasons was one so obvious, so irrefutable she felt silly saying it: after all they’d been through, all they’d sacrificed in their lifetimes, the things that had been wrenched from them—home, family, children, whole lives—how could he possibly put someone else through the slightest anguish, and for profit?
Worry addled her wounds. She felt the scars across her body, remembering the day and a half she lay bleeding in the bottom of the stolen boat, or what Whaley’d told her about it: her blood mixing with the wash in the bottom, Whaley afraid to bail the blood out for fear of drawing sharks, his attempts to hug the shore should the boat start taking on water, his fear that Daniels had alerted his charges up and down the banks to be on the lookout for them, that land was no less safe than sea.
Whaley woke her. He was stoking the fire. Pink light winging in off the ocean. She roused herself from her thin sleep, in the rocking chair, her muscles stiff and creaky from an awkward night’s slumber.
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” she said when he did not speak or look at her.
“I packed something already,” he said. “You get to bed.”
“Whaley,” she said to him when she saw he was moving toward the door, without a kiss or even a look her way.
He stopped. She hesitated, as if waiting for something other than herself to usher in the apology. But what had she to apologize for? He was the one who ought to know better than to try to pay money for human life.
“Yes?” he asked.
“You’re taking him with you?”
“No. He’ll be at work on his shed.”
“He’ll need breakfast then? I’ll see to it,” she said, glad to have something to say, something practical, a statement of fact. But when the door eased shut, her worry returned, and she tried to understand this paltry exchange of words as a start, if not exactly a triumph. She could talk sense into him. He’d listen to her, surely.
Meanwhile she went about fixing breakfast for Hezekiah. She found him sawing logs in the sideyard.
“I’ve got your breakfast ready.”
The blade eased to a stop in the log. He stood, holding it awkwardly, shielding the sun with his free hand so that he might look vaguely in her general direction.
“It’s on the table.”
“I’m obliged if you can bring me a bit of bread,” he said.
“Nonsense. There are cakes and some jam and eggs and side meat.”
“I won’t be needing all that.”
“Mr. Whaley told me before he left to come and get you when it’s ready.”
For the next ten minutes she uttered hundreds of words in negotiation to Hezekiah’s dozens. He did not want to accept her food. He’d just take a slice of bread, a little side meat, thank you. She wouldn’t hear of it. The food would go to waste, she said. She could feed it to her children, he said. They get plenty to eat, she said. He smiled over her shoulder and she turned to see the children watching their standoff from the back porch. She shooed them inside and followed them to the kitchen where she made up a plate and had Alex take it out to Hezekiah.
All day long she listened to his work—sawing, chopping, hammering—while thinking of arguments against his presence in their backyard. She’d expected Whaley home after lunch. Usually when it was this hot the good fishing was over by noon. Of all the days for him to dawdle. Likely he was off helping someone else, when she needed him here at home. She grew more anxious by the minute, not because she missed him but because she was eager to have it out with him while her arguments were still fiery and fresh.
When the children came home from school, she sent them out to play, as she was beginning to get worried, and did not need them afoot in her kitchen as she fixed supper. The sun dropped over the sound, and the wind kicked up a little, lightly, from the southeast. Nothing to worry about. He’d ridden out far worse weather.
The next morning she paced the parlor, accompanied by Hezekiah’s incessant hammering. There was no school that day, so she sent the children out to help Hezekiah, too distracted to worry about whether they’d be a bother. Midday and no sign of Whaley. She laid out the noon meal and told Phillip to feed his brother and sister and take a plate to Hezekiah and hurried down to the inlet, where she spent the afternoon at the dock, waiting for the boats to come in, asking everyone if they might have seen her husband out on the water. Maybe he’s across over to Bath, several of the men suggested, which annoyed her, as she’d not abandoned her work to solicit speculation from men who did not even bother to stop unloading their catch or swabbing their skiffs to answer her query, deliberately phrased so as to require a yes or a no. Simple enough, yet these men either evaded the question or suggested in the aversion of their deep-set eyes, in perpetual squint from years of sound-mirrored sunlight, knowledge of certain catastrophe.
Walking back through the village, she was besieged by disastrous possibilities: he’d slipped, hit his head, drowned. The boat had capsized in a squall and the chum had drawn sharks. His heart had given way, the sun and heat had stricken him lock-limbed, speechless, and parched. Once past the church she timed her footsteps to Hezekiah’s hammering. Occasionally he would stop, but the pounding continued, taken over by her pulse. If Whaley did not return, would a similar rhythm keep her attuned, in step, moving forward? Many was the time she might have given herself over to despair or ennui, endless the hours when she fought away the sleepwalk of the touched, only to tether her movements to Whaley’s coming and going, his devotion to quotidian ritual. At the time she had not considered what sort of love this was. But now that he was gone it seemed far more than survival, this measured cadence they’d managed to share.
At the top of the rise she saw the ribs of roofline, Hezekiah silhouetted against the afternoon sun, her three children cheerful factotums at his feet.
“You may go,” she told him after sending the children down island to hunt for turtle eggs.
“Go where?”
“You’re free.”
Hezekiah was standing on a low rung of a ladder, which required her to shade her eyes to see his face.
He said, “Mr. Whaley never bought me.”
Her confusion must have registered in her shaded eyes, for he did not bother to climb down before he began to explain his presence in her life. Like all the other island blacks, he had been brought over to lighter ships. Now that the trade had moved north to ports with easier access, he and several others were being sold down at the dock when Whaley happened to have come in off the water.
“He paid the man cash money, but as soon as we were back up off the inlet he told me I could go on back to where I come from. Last place I lived before they brought me over here was Somerset, up by Columbia. I didn’t have anybody back across over there so I asked him to give me some work, said I’d work off what I owed him. But he said no, said if I was going to work I was going to get paid for my work. He said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing at all. Somebody else owes you and yours, and I wish I could live long enough to see you compensated for your suffering.’”
Only the last word registered, and she found herself repeating it silently as she swallowed and tried not to believe that he’d planned this. But it was too convenient, his bringing home Hezekiah, then disappearing. And insulting to both Hezekiah and herself. Leading this poor man to believe that his actions were motivated by a moral compass. And not trusting that she could make do, in his absence, with the children.
The most egregious insult of all was to himself. What right had he, who had survived so much and managed to regain some goodness and decency in his life, to taint the sanctity of his soul?
For the next few days the anger she felt toward Whaley alternated with shame for allowing herself to believe him capable of such cruelty. Hours plagued with constant and multiple irritations: Hezekiah’s hammering (she finally asked him to go down to the sound and fish for their supper, just for an hour’s quiet), her children’s questions (where is daddy when is he coming home did he come home last night), the lies she delivered in answer to their questions (your father had business across the sound he’ll be back soon) and—the most intolerable annoyance, the one that kept her from more than a quarter hour of sleep, that needled her day and night—the fear that he had returned to his other family, that he’d booked passage on some British-bound ship, leaving her here to deal with a situation that, she scarcely wanted to admit, was after all her creation. It wasn’t as if he’d have ever started a family had they stayed in that place now called after the head of a horse, the two island wards wed on a wet dune in a ceremony attended only by sand crab and tern, after which they’d set about filling their ramshackle lean-to with unfortunate offspring certain to suffer from their parents’ afflictions, her deliciously comical delusions of grandeur (daughter of a vice president, wife of a governor) and his eccentric and uncivilized dress and behavior. No, this life, this island, even if she were honest, these children (for she was finally the one who gave herself to him, who decided to indulge the misconceptions of the islanders who thought them married and perform wifely duties that no man would refuse)—all of what they shared was her doing. Maybe he never wanted it. He was just too good to let her die. But just because he had saved her life did not mean he loved her.
She took to talking to him aloud. At first the children asked her who she was talking to, but after a day or two they began to cower. Phillip, eleven years old then, seemed to sense his ascension to some new authority. He kept the younger ones fed and bathed and made sure they did not acknowledge their mother when she said aloud to long gone Whaley, You ought never have killed tha
t dog or Do you really think she’ll want you back after all these years?
On the fourth morning she looked out of the window in the summer kitchen and saw Hezekiah strolling into the yard carrying a pail of water. She was at his side, her arms freckled with flour, in seconds.
She told him he was welcome to stay in the shed until he found other lodgings, but that there wasn’t any way she could pay him.
“Whaley never thought of that, did he?”
“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”
“Call me Theodosia,” she said, not kindly. She did not want to be shrill with him, but he was a part of the plan.
“Where did he go?” she said.
“Where did who go?”
“You’ll have to fend for yourself. Did he expect you to stay around forever making sure we don’t starve? Is this his idea of what freedom is?”
Hezekiah stood stiffly before her, still holding the pail of water.
“I will not have it,” she said. “Think of the position he’s left us both in. I am unable to compensate you, which makes my dependence on your help criminal, an affront to God’s laws, and though he paid you and purportedly set you free, he expected you to remain here, in service to us.”
“I believe I’d be more comfortable calling you Miss Whaley,” he said, but it was clear that he was trying not to say something else.
“As if that is who I am,” she said. “Ever was.”
He said nothing. They stood there in the high sun, sweating. The part of her that noticed and pitied his obvious discomfort was a sliver compared to her anger, which made her ancient wounds ache as if Whaley, by abandoning her, by tricking this poor man with false promises of freedom, had unleashed Daniels’s dog again.
Finally Hezekiah said, “I didn’t have nothing to do with him leaving out of here. He never said a word to me about it or any of his private business. I told you the truth. He said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing.’ He said he hoped he lived long enough—”
“I have work to do,” she said, and returned to the summer kitchen.
This wasn’t an excuse. She had twice as much work to do now that the burden of feeding and sheltering her children fell upon her only, for employing the assistance of Whaley’s replacement was unthinkable to her. She’d not ask Hezekiah for a thing, just to spite Whaley’s scheme. She chopped wood and set nets and cleaned fish and weeded the garden and scrubbed the floors and as she worked she was plagued by a recurring image of Whaley’s return to his real wife. She saw him loping up a long lane in the English countryside, saw him turn hesitantly into the courtyard of a tidy cottage with a roof of abundant thatch. A stainedaproned woman feeding chickens glanced up at him warily and without recognition. He called her name. Sarah? Abigail? Only the name changed in the scene, which repeated itself incessantly, moving from yard to the parlor where the faithful loving wife fed her prodigal husband and then into the bedchamber where Theo could not bring herself to turn away from the details of their intimacy. To block this nightmare, Theo tried to conjure her own return to The Oaks, but she could only make it as far as the infernal and malarial swamps, which steamed with wintry fog.
The Watery Part of the World Page 14
