The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  A week after Whaley disappeared she went out to milk the cow. Nora, as was her habit, had strayed with several other cows into the soundside marsh, where she grazed for hours, neither budging nor bothering to lift her head in response to Theo’s call. Theo lifted her skirts and picked carefully through the oyster and clam shells lining the shore. Soon the bottom was hard packed and ridged by the current, and her feet, exhausted from a hard half day’s work, felt as if they were being caressed by the slow pull of the tide, which was just beginning to rise. She stopped, stood still for a minute. The day was warm but the sun’s disappearance darkened the waters as thick clouds streamed lazy and low. The thought of what she might look like to anyone happening along ashore nearly made her smile. Her mind cleared and the water washed away all her pain. No scars on her legs and arms and neck, no weather-triggered aches, no worry about how to feed her children, what to do about Hezekiah. She dropped her skirt and moved forward slowly, letting the water work its magic. What a treasure is this blankness, only sun and warm water and the rasp of the grasses in the intermittent wind. But she needed milk. With Whaley gone, the day was so much fuller, which was the way she struggled to make sense of his absence, as an annoyance, for this was easier than giving way to grief. The mounting catalog of all that she must accomplish before noon made her sigh at her laziness and trudge awkwardly ahead, calling out to Nora, the water fighting back, thick and resistant, until she stepped from firm sand into a patch of soft mud. When she stopped sinking the water rose to her waist. A foot in front of her a clump of sea oats sprouted, but as she leaned forward to pull herself out of the mire she lost her balance and pitched face-first into the water. The effort it took to right herself sucked her under a good half foot. Nora and her companions stood nearby, grazing with the unhurried and implacable dignity of cattle. Simply breathing soaked Theo’s forehead with sweat. The chambers of her heart constricted. She’d heard of this happening to island boys, the tide rising, a death so slow and patient. She’d rather the sword of the pirate, the feral attack of a watchdog. Who was going to save her this time? Since she had gone years without regular prayer or thoughts in the general direction of heaven except to sometimes mumble a plea for rain to save her garden, or a request for a storm to divert its path, calling upon God to rescue her with his touch would only damn her.

  The tide rose to her rib cage. Thinking of her children orphaned, both parents disappearing within days, brought tears. Her high cries for help had turned thin and hoarse by the time Nora and her companions, repelled by her yelling, lumbered out of the water onto shore and disappeared over a dune. More clouds blew in, no longer delightfully slow and white. Graying, then black-hearted. Increasing wind whipped the water into a steady chop. She grew chilly, then freezing, the water up to her breasts. She tried to turn to face shore, but the simplest movement sucked her under farther. An eighth inch was a precious plenty. Shivering, reciting the names of her children, the things she loved about each—Phillip’s bossiness, Amanda Jane’s prissiness, Alexander’s eternal sweetness—she watched a barnacled bottle bearing a message from her father float idly by. She let it go. He was dead, or perhaps the emperor of Mexico. It hardly mattered now, the water at her shoulders.

  Then a frigate appeared so close she could see the muzzles of cannon from below deck portholes, dispatched two men in a dinghy. She saw them between waves, there and then gone, the truth and a lie, her blank present and her peopled past. The rower had his back to her; in the stern a man whose face, when she finally placed it, wrestled her to the floor in front of the fire, a wintry night in Whaley’s old lean-to. Daniels’s eyes, steel gray and unblinking. Then she understood, and what washed over her from the neck down was not seawater but shame. How could she ever have believed Daniels would leave them be? She sobbed Whaley’s name and those of her children, so dear to her, all she’d accomplished in this world, then closed her eyes to what might happen next.

  When she opened them the water was flat and sun-touched. Her shoulders were exposed to the sun, and then her breasts, and finally her elbows. Behind her she heard the sibilant disturbance of water by rhythmically orchestrated oar. When he was in front of her, Hezekiah extended the oar to her, but rather than grab it she said, “I need you to pull me out, I’ve not the strength to do it myself,” and after some hesitation, he drew the dinghy close enough behind her to hook his arms around her just below her bosom and hoist her into the boat.

  She lay there, exhausted, remembering her arrival on this island, similarly incapacitated at the bottom of a leaky boat, and when she could breathe again she cried out for Whaley.

  “We have to find him,” she told Hezekiah, “they’ve come to harm him, we’ve got to dispose of that portrait, it’s all my doing, as ever my thoughtlessness is to blame.”

  “Hush now,” Hezekiah said, but she could not stop talking, and when they reached shore she had told him everything: her father, the duel, Joseph, the head of the nag, Daniels sparing her, Whaley taking her in, her return to Daniels’s compound, the scars across her body. Hezekiah looked to shore and rowed while she talked. Bent to his task, he appeared burdened by the facts she imparted, though she knew he was listening. She knew that he heard her. He had come for her, after all.

  “Whaley sent you to find me,” she said.

  “No ma’am. The children came home from school and you never did come back. I seen you leave out this morning and I figured something happened. I borrowed this boat and I’m hoping whoever it belong to don’t discover it gone.”

  She said, “Will you help me find Whaley?”

  He’d helped her out of the boat and dragged it up under a wax myrtle where he’d found it, out of the way of the tide.

  “You need to get back and tend to those children.”

  “You’ll help me find him,” she said, careful to issue only statements.

  “Get yourself dry, get you some food and water in you,” he said, as if he were listing everything she needed to do before he would help her plan her search.

  But that night when she had calmed her children with a lie about where she’d been all day (she claimed she’d been checking her crab pots in the sound and fell in a hole), she sat up late by the fire, disturbed not by dream or nightmare but by a waking recurring image of Whaley’s hands, crudely hacked off below the wrist, fingers permanently curled as if clawing their way somewhere, left on the doorstep for anyone—her children, Hezekiah, passersby—to discover. In the morning her children filed into the parlor to find her ashen and awake in her chair.

  “Where did the woman go,” Alexander said, pointing to the blank space above the hearth where the portrait had been.

  “Never you mind,” said Theo. Sometime in the night she’d looked up to see the woman’s cold eye on her and in a fit she scarcely remembered by daylight she’d taken the portrait off its nail, wrapped it in a sheet, and slid it behind the wardrobe she’d asked Whaley to build for her. She sent the boys out for wood, asked Amanda Jane to fetch her some matches, then, when the fire was stoked, gathered her children in front of it. During the night she’d decided to tell them everything: Richmond Hill, Charleston, her father’s disgrace, his exile, the trip to New York, Daniels, her own exile as a woman touched by God. The dog mauling, their arrival on island. She’d even planned to tell them that she’d never married their father, that he had a family across the ocean, that she’d had another son. And that their father was a thief, however long retired. For even if she went this far, she would still be withholding the truth. She couldn’t very well tell them that their father had died because of her vanity, that she had sentenced him to death when she’d stolen that portrait, for who would they be in the world if burdened with this knowledge? How would they ever love themselves, and who would they find to love them if they had no love for themselves?

  She said none of this. She said what she’d wanted her father to say to her after her own mother’s death. “Your father was very proud of all of you. If you ever doubt this, or doubt h
is love, you need only to ask me and I’ll remind you of how much you meant to him.”

  Then she made breakfast and told them to go outside and see if Hezekiah had chores for them. When they were gone and the house was quiet she washed the dishes, which is what any other woman on this island would do if she’d lost her husband. She wasn’t alone; she had her family, and the islanders would take care of her, so long as they believed her husband had died at sea. But what if his handless corpse washed up down island, bloated and bobbing in the marsh? She found herself wishing sharks had found the body, crabs had picked it apart by now.

  What a thing to wish for. Yet it did not torment her, her need to keep secret at all costs the true story of how she arrived on this island. Whaley, after all, had his own secrets; surely others on the island were equally careful in presenting to the world some expurgated version of their lives. More was at stake than her integrity; the truth would damn her children, for she had come to know these islanders well, and she suspected that, according to their arcane but rigid ethical code, her husband’s crimes—ransacking ships, stealing cargo, kidnapping, maybe even murder—would be far more tolerable than her own. But vanity, ego, pride—if elsewhere these were trifling infractions, here they would doom her and her children after her.

  Thereafter she concentrated every waking moment on appearing to the island as the widow Whaley. She monitored every word out of her mouth, suppressing her erstwhile occasional lapses into fustian diction for sentences so simply blunt they sounded to her like shovel thrusts, ax blows. Ceaseless toil without complaint was her salvation. She shocked herself sometimes in how little she allowed herself to express the slightest pleasure. Her children brought her joy in the very fact of their survival rather than in the qualities and values by which her first child Aaron would have been judged: fine manners, intellectual curiosity, sophistication. The boys she raised to work hard and provide for their families; Amanda Jane she schooled in keeping house.

  As her children grew up, she kept an eye out for any behavior the slightest bit effete or entitled, but they acted always as if they were in every way of this island. Wind blew away any pretense or affectation, any indulgence she’d failed to squelch. If you were to survive life on this island you had to understand the positive and even recuperative applications of wind. But what if it came back, her former frivolity, in her children’s offspring? What if it skipped a generation, or two? She thought of a great-grandchild cultivating, say, her love of Chopin. This was not an unpleasant thought, so long as Theo was not around to witness it. She would not be; already she’d lived miraculously long, given her two near misses with death. She only wanted to live long enough then to see her children settled. Of course she would not mind outliving her lies—it might be her only chance at impunity if there was indeed a life after this one—but she expected to take her secrets with her, for what good would it do her children to know, so long after the fact, who she really was.

  Better off for everyone to keep up the lies. Her boys were good boys. Hezekiah took to them and they to him. They fished with him and he taught them carpentry, a particular skill of his, and both of them married island girls and built houses in the village and took to the sea like their father. Amanda Jane was a bit more trouble to Theo. She was an idler and a dawdler, and if you asked her to do something once you’d be better off telling her again and then a third time to grow on, but she eventually met and married a boy from Elizabeth City, though within years she was back at the island with three towheaded babies, having shed her husband back up on the banks of the Pasquotank for reasons that Theo never completely understood. Not that she asked that many questions. She’d not prepared the girl for life off island.

  Even though she told him at least once a week since Whaley’s disappearance that he was free to leave, Hezekiah stayed on in the shed, though he added rooms and a summer kitchen and, five years after he showed up on her doorstep, married a sullen young girl named Violet. Her family had been around since the port was thriving, her father had been brought in to lighter ships, though Theo only knew this by hearsay; she knew nothing of the lives of the other island blacks, who lived off by themselves across the creek.

  Theo knew she would not be welcome at the wedding but she spent the day baking pies, which she had Amanda Jane carry back to Hezekiah’s house as soon as the couple returned to their new home.

  “Hezekiah said tell you thanks,” said Amanda Jane when Theo quizzed her about her errand. It bothered her deeply how Violet resisted her attempts at friendship. She knew it bothered Hezekiah as well, for there was a desperation behind it that all three of them recognized as having nothing to do Hezekiah and his new bride, with the here and now on this island. She was trying to rectify some past sin. Joseph and his hundreds of slaves.

  Violet never took to her. It was difficult for Theo, seeing Violet coming and going, working alongside her sometimes in the garden plot they shared, having her every offering rebuffed or ignored, but she came to accept Violet’s attitude as her just due for all those years of taking for granted the women and men who waited on her day and night.

  Storms hit the island, one after the other. A hurricane opened a new inlet up the banks. Pea Island they called it. Ships took to docking at Manteo. Trade fell off; people began to trickle away. One stormy autumn the church was washed away in a nor’easter but rebuilt on the highest point of the island, its steeple visible a mile out to sea on clear days, pointing everyone who came to the island toward God in heaven.

  The injuries Theo had suffered at the hand of Daniels’s mongrel turned her limbs arthritic and it grew harder for her to stand. She sat on the porch entertaining memories. Since she could remember, even as a small child, the moment just before she fell asleep had been characterized by an extreme and even painful wakefulness. Never had she been one to drift off; like a terror came this intense few seconds wherein she felt so vividly alive it made her body ache, her heart fearful. Was this a nightly harbinger of the clarity rumored to precede death? She longed for such lucidity, for the memories had begun to collide and confuse. Some days she’d lost her first child with Whaley to swamp fever. Others, her presence on this island was due to her rule as empress of Mexico. After Jefferson sent an army to depose her, she’d been sentenced, like Napoleon Bonaparte, to imprisonment on a remote island.

  One moment, however, remained untainted and clear. Out one afternoon to milk her errant cow, wading into the water, the sound sucking her under, Daniels holding her there while the tide washed from her the hopeful fantasy that Whaley had returned to his wife and children. Thereafter she knew without doubt that Daniels had come for him, that he would one day come for her. She’d readied herself that night, though she’d tried to buy time by hiding the portrait behind the bureau. The space above the hearth she avoided looking at as vigilantly as she had when it was filled with the likeness of her, for the ghost of that portrait—a rectangle against which the whitewashed walls had darkened with soot—terrified her nearly as much as the portrait.

  Fifteen years passed, then twenty. Perhaps he was dead, Daniels. No, she would know if he were dead. She would feel it as she had felt, finally, that day she’d gone after Nora, Whaley’s death. Her father, her legal rightful husband, Joseph—if they had passed on to some other sphere (and surely her father had by now, likely Joseph as well), she had felt nothing of it. She could not even summon shame over the nothingness she felt about the man who had groomed her to be the most highly educated and socially adept lady in America. Stray phrases of Latin and occasional snatches of Beethoven notwithstanding, that part of her life had been eclipsed by the long wait for Daniels to come for her at last.

  One of the boys or Amanda Jane came by daily to check on her, but it was Hezekiah, living right behind her, upon whom she depended the most. He’d given up fishing for carpentry and most days was just out back of the house carrying on with his hammering and sawing. Two or three times a day he’d come to the back door and peer through the baggy screen down t
he hallway to where she sat in the parlor. More often than not he’d find her dozing. If she were awake and heard him she’d say one of two things:

  “How many times do I have to ask you to come round front?”

  Or: “Is that my coffin you’re slapping together out there?”

  Sometimes Violet would send Hezekiah over with something she’d baked or some leftover from their table as it was clear that Theo rarely bothered to eat unless someone brought her something by. Theo would always ask Hezekiah in to sit. No ma’am got to get back over to the house, he’d say. One day she would not take his no.

  “Sit a bit. Please?”

  It was winter, clouds hugging the coast to where she could not see thirty feet. She heard the sea but all that was visible was the final roll of water on sand, the part that delivered and took away.

  “Right much a mess out there today,” said Hezekiah.