The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  Theo did not respond. Weather was not what she wanted to talk about. For weeks she’d been waking in the night to feel Daniels in the house. She heard his boots on the floorboards in the kitchen. The smell of his rum breath would linger in the hallway.

  “There’s but one thing on this earth left for me to do,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Hezekiah, nodding. His words were not pitched in the interrogative, but in agreement, as if by agreeing he would not have to hear what that one thing was. His presence since Whaley’s disappearance had brought such rewards: even though their exchanges were rote and terse to the point of curtness, quick and simple exchanges concerned wholly with wind, tide, crops, chores, he had become as dependable as the houses he framed, which were known the island over for their sturdiness in the harshest blows. Yet they were not, could never be, close enough to confess to each other any intimacies, and even last unfinished business would likely seem to him too personal.

  But she needed his help. He’d built himself several fine boats, at least one of them seaworthy enough to ferry her up to Nag’s Head.

  He listened to her plan without comment or the slightest shift in posture or expression. When she was through he nodded so slightly she thought she might have imagined it.

  “You’ll take me then?”

  “No ma’am,” he said. “I’ll not.”

  “And why not?”

  “If that man was wanting some picture he’d have come for it long time ago. You delivering it and yourself too is not going to bring Mr. Whaley back here, nor put anybody’s mind to rest.”

  “You speak so confidently of what you think I seek to gain. But the truth is, I’ve not even considered what might be gained. It’s more that a score has been long left unsettled. I am the one he ought to have come for, not my husband. My husband, though he may have in another life stolen freely from others, did not take anything from Daniels. I am the one who took that painting, and for no sound reason. I was after my father’s papers. I thought that if I held them in my possession I would be rescued and that, papers in hand, I would make my way to Washington and return my father to his early glory and promise.”

  Hezekiah was silent. She knew him to sometimes let folks talk themselves out. She’d seen him do it with Alex, who Hezekiah had taken on as an apprentice carpenter, though of course they had to pretend that Hezekiah was working for Alex, as it would not do for a black man, free or not, to serve over a white man, even on the island. Alex always had a better way of doing things, was forever insisting on his own way (a trait she traced to her own father’s stubbornness, for surely he did not get this from Whaley), and she’d seen Hezekiah listen to Alex’s plans with a patience that allowed Alex to talk himself inevitably toward the realization that his plan was inferior.

  She felt he was up to the same with her, slowly feeding her enough rope to entangle herself in both word and deed.

  “You realize that there are other boats on this island.”

  “Yes ma’am. Plenty of them. Most of them a might more sea-worthy than mine.”

  “I will ask someone else.”

  He nodded at this too. He let her words settle between them, long enough for her to drift into an anxious dread of what would happen if she turned up at Daniels’s compound. She tried to remind herself of how her father had always favored Thucydides over Herodotus and even her beloved Homer, for in the work of the latter two the divine presence of the gods was ever present on the battlefield. Thucydides, on the contrary, understood the events of the past to have been instigated by the choices and actions of mortals. His Peloponnesians marched into battle with confidence not in some divine protector whose will would decide whether an arrow might find their flesh but in the rightness of their own cause.

  Her cause—restoring her father’s reputation—had twice led her to be mauled by vicious dogs. Had it not also cost Whaley his life and deprived her children of a father? So many years had passed without a thought of how deeply wrong she’d been to serve so valiantly as a foot soldier in her father’s army. Poor devoted Joseph had suffered and might be suffering still.

  If there was justice those papers went down with the ship and had long since been devoured by salt.

  “I know that I cannot make right the way it all happened,” she said at last.

  “No ma’am,” said Hezekiah.

  “All I wish,” she said, and then she did not need to say any more as the wish, like the wind filling the sails of a doldrumed vessel, grew so vibrant and vivid that there was no need to articulate it, for surely Hezekiah saw it too. She was in the water, in the sound, but the tide was not rising and she was not stuck in mud but firmly footed and in control of the net she cast. What it brought back was bountiful: all the sorrows she’d caused others, and those she had caused herself, reined in and dragged ashore and packed tight and taken not back—I cannot make right the way it all happened—but away. For her to deal with. The weight hers alone to bear.

  Now her cheeks were dry. Beside her she heard Hezekiah fidgeting. He had his chores. She had some of her own.

  “I’ve kept you, Hezekiah, from your loved ones.”

  He’d been watching her closely. During her long silence, she could feel his steady, vigilant gaze. He seemed to see something different in her, or at least she imagined so, for instead of nodding his head in agreement, he shook his head no, which, she realized, he did not have to do. Her gratefulness was disproportionate to the slightness of the gesture, for anyone else might not have even noticed the nod. She would have liked to have thanked him, and for the next few months, until Violet found her crumpled dead under the clothesline, a basket of wet sheets on the ground beside her, she kept trying to find a way to thank him for that afternoon when he talked her out of empty and egotistical sacrifice without saying a word. But the time was never right. Had the moment arrived, he would have been embarrassed. Still, she felt it so strongly that the morning she walked out to hang the clothes on the line, it had become that one thing left on earth for her to do.

  VI

  WOODROW THORNTON

  Yaupon Island, North Carolina

  TOTING DEBRIS FROM HIS kitchen down island the day he got back across from burying Sarah’s how Woodrow discovered the new inlet. In his mind it was Sarah cut the island in two. Sheared right through the marsh, snipped with the thick of the bigger blade the tangly roots of the myrtles, dredged five fathom of sand with her sewing scissors.

  It had to be a reason for his sweet girl to die holding in her hand some scissors. Sarah had a reason for everything she did, and she expected Woodrow also to know always why, to think what he wanted before he did what he did. But Woodrow did not always know why. Hell, some days he just did what he did and did not expect squat to come from it. Not knowing why never got away with him like it did Sarah. There lay the difference in the God they prayed to, or the one Sarah actually prayed to and the one Woodrow started out praying to before some other side thought snagged him and left him feeling all the more a hopeless sinner. Sarah’s praying left her knowing why: God’s will, that’s why. Even if it was something seemed like to Woodrow so simple—four people left on this island and how come they couldn’t just look after each other—even if it made not a bit of sense, it wasn’t to Sarah a mystery as it was the direct opposite, a fact, the way God made it.

  So every morning Woodrow rose early and walked down to that good-for-nothing-but-birdshit southside, trying to figure out why she’d died holding those scissors. Took longer than it ought to—a couple days—for Woodrow, crouching in the marsh shooing mosquitoes with an El Reeso he’d got off them O’Malley’s, to see what he ought to have known the moment he came up on the inlet: Sarah was wanting Woodrow where the sisters were not. Now she’d given him his own island, somewhere for him to hide out and not be bothered by the beck and call of two old white ladies had let her bleed to death on the floor of his tacked-on kitchen.

  It did not matter at first that his end of the island lacked a house, a
dock, easy access to the channel, an acre of graze for what livestock the storm had not killed, fresh water, more shade than a scrawny wax myrtle. Acres of dune is all, some spindly sea oat, crabs crawling around like they had somewhere big to be at. Sarah’s hand had made it—Woodrow did not take it as far as God, he’d as soon stop with Sarah—and Woodrow, in her honor, was going to make it his. He left off fishing to prog for whatever washed-up timber he might use to build a shack across over there. But mostly he would make a little pile in the dunes of whatever the sea brought him, didn’t really matter what, he wasn’t what you call picky, and after he’d dragged a few pieces of waterlogged plywood to his pile, he’d lie back and watch the birds.

  Hours Woodrow spent down there watching gulls, terns, pelicans, glide down the coast, light on a wave as if it were all of a sudden brought to a halt and turned sand dune. Woodrow envied a bird. He was a boy when the brothers flew their first plane up the banks at Kitty Hawk. There was some news that everyone on the island heard and had something to allow about, though only thing it had to do with any of them was that they might have caught some of the same wind had lifted that machine off the dune. Wasn’t like any Lockerman or Midgette or Pollock or Whaley was going to go buying a ticket, flying up to New York for the weekend. Woodrow’s mother thought it was devilish, this business of a man acting bird, disrupting God’s own order. Sarah, too, put it down as foolishness. But Woodrow did not see a single thing wrong or ungodly concerning it. Afternoons lying across some sea-warped plywood on that slice of the island Sarah had made him, Woodrow flew so low above the water he’d wake to dampness above his lip, a moustache from the spray. He could not climb a dune without wanting so badly the breeze to lift him up and sweep him across the water.

  He’d had these flying dreams before, back when he heard about the brothers’ machines, when he figured he might as well dream. Not as if he’d ever climb his black ass up in a real airplane. But now it didn’t seem to be about bird or plane. More like he wanted off, wanted across; more like this slice of Sarah’s could not hold him.

  Another thing for Woodrow to not understand. He skimmed the waves and wiped the spray off his upper lip and said, I do not understand one bit of what has been delivered me. As for the sisters, he had no idea how they were getting on. Someone surely was seeing to them in his stead, lest they starve to death or sit bickering on the steps of the very church could have saved his Sarah’s life, Whaley moaning about not having any grocery store ads to read aloud, Miss Maggie talking about where’s Woodrow at, I need to see Woodrow, find Woodrow for me, not because she needed Woodrow, not because she had anything true or pure to relate to him or because she wanted to ask him how was he feeling was there anything she could do for him and God is my witness Woodrow Thornton I am sorry and so is my sister about what we let happen to your sweet Sarah, every waking moment I wish it was me the wind had took instead of her. No, it was more she needed him because she was tired of her sister. She needed something between her and Whaley. O’Malley could bring her over a big piece of plywood to put up on the church steps, serve the same purpose.

  Sometimes he would come home past dusk mosquito-bit and hungry to find a stack of letters from Crawl and the rest of his children, but he did not need to know how to read or have them read out loud to him in order to know what was in them. He’d get him a High Life he’d iced down that morning and sit out on the porch holding the cold can to his cheek and in the other he would hold those letters. Up from the creek the tree frog song would rise, spreading across the yard like fog and here come the lick right off those envelopes and there go the words, out into the marsh, same ones and sweet ones but same ones, over and over, Daddy how you doing, how you holding up, for a line or two before We got room, you don’t need to bring a thing, come on over on the next ferry, or Crawl would be talking about I’ll be over across tomorrow to get you, Daddy, you can help me out at the club.

  Spinning ball, said Woodrow to the night crabs crawling. High Life.

  One day he could not go back to that place Sarah had made for him. She would just have to not understand. He could not live off down there by himself. Well, she’d say, the white women make you feel more alone than the birds, but what it came down to was the three of them on this island that every one else had fled.

  He went out on the water that morning, brought his catch to their front door. Whaley was as polite as she knew to be but clearly put out by his standing right there on her front threshold after thirty-odd years of coming around back. Seemed like to Woodrow she’d turned whiter in the face and way whiter in the hair. Maybe he was blacker from his days of lying back and smoking sweets and flying low over the breakers.

  “I’ll meet the mail boat,” he said.

  “That O’Malley boy’s been bringing it by occasionally,” she said.

  Boy? thought Woodrow. O’Malley’s nearly as old as she is.

  “I’ll meet him directly,” he said.

  “Well, I know he’ll be obliged not to have to make the extra trip over here,” she said, but he wasn’t listening. He’d caught sight of that picture behind her, the one Maggie’d told him Whaley wrapped up and toted up the hill to the church during the storm. The one thing she’d saved; instead of Sarah, a picture of her ancestor roundly said to be a lunatic. Woodrow could count on his hands the times he’d looked at it. Certainly he’d never been invited in to stand around in the parlor and study it. The woman in the picture looked like she’d already left her body, but in her eyes was a sweet satisfaction of having finally understood something her great-great or whatever Whaley was to her would never fathom.

  Whaley watched him staring. What, she said with every inch of her visible body; What, she asked, without saying squat.

  “I reckon y’all favor some,” said Woodrow.

  WOODROW DIDN’T EVEN bother building on again, just set his cookstove right up in what Sarah used to call the parlor, piped it into the chimney, lived in one room. Most nights he slept in his chair. He had everything he needed right alongside his chair where he sat evenings by the fire when it was too cold or raw to sit out on the porch. He had everything he needed and yet his life was filled with lack. What went missing when Woodrow set up in the so-called parlor were all the things made his life more than just shuffling around his down-to-one-room widower’s cottage, fetching dinner and the mail for his white women sisters, trying not to let anything anybody said or did or didn’t say or do get away with him, doling his words out like coins the week before payday. The kind of life the Tape Recorders already had Woodrow living, no noticeable emotion unless you count indifference, no love, no hate, just hard work and evenings so quiet his voice box rusted shut. Finally Woodrow had become the type of person the Tape Recorders had been making him out to be since they’d come across with their tape machines and their questions stuffed already with the answers and those beekeeper hats they took to wearing to keep the bugs off of them.

  One evening Woodrow crossed the creek to join his white women on the steps of the church. They saw him coming but acted like they never did. He climbed up the steps, sat and listened to Whaley read aloud her prices.

  Maggie said, “Crawl wrote said you’re going to be eighty this year, Woodrow.” She said this before she ever read the letter itself. Skimmed ahead to switch out the parts she couldn’t bring herself to read, the parts where Crawl tried to talk some sense into his senile daddy, convince him that providing for two old fussy white women wasn’t any of his. Whaley, sitting on the top stoop, had her flyers spread out and was not listening to a word of Crawl’s letter nor anything out the mouth of her sister. When she had her advertisements spread out across her lap on the church steps where the three of them would sit just like people in town will linger after supper to watch traffic and call out to neighbor women strolling babies, she was just not there. Had a two-storied green bus come chugging across the creek, she wouldn’t have lifted her head to grace the sight with her reading glasses. Woodrow thought at first she was preparing to g
o off island by teaching herself what to expect to pay across over there for a pound of butter. But after a while he figured the flyers were part of what kept her here. She’d spit the prices out like fruit seed. She’d get ill at a bunch of innocent bananas for costing highway robbery, she would read her prices like Maggie would read the letters to the editor, taking sides and arguing with every one of them, My land the way people live in this world, she’d say every night when it got too dark to read and she folded up her newspaper like the Coast Guard taught Woodrow to fold a flag, that careful, that slow, like a color guard was standing at attention waiting on her to finish.

  “Crawl don’t know nothing about how old I am,” Woodrow said to the water, to the wind, to the sand fiddlers, to anyone or anything but the company he was keeping at that moment in time.

  “Old enough to know better,” said Maggie.

  “Too old to change,” said Whaley.

  They weren’t talking or even listening to each other, and down the road Woodrow might just decide they weren’t really talking to him either, for what they said they could have easily said about themselves, Woodrow figured when he let it settle and studied it. But at the time the words just spilled out of their mouths and hung there, and the white women, sisters, moved right on through time continuous, though Woodrow, to whom they had supposedly been speaking, about whom their comments were supposed to be describing, was stuck down on the birdshit southside.

  “Why can I not just come across,” he said to Sarah that night as he lay talking to her in the dark. He told her what the sisters said and he listened to what she had to say back. Their conversation was surf on the beach, claiming ground and then receding, sea listening to the land, then offering more words, steady rhythm into the night.

  How come you let what people say get away with you so much, said Sarah, and Woodrow never did answer because she knew how bad people could hurt him with their words. Woodrow just hurt. They’d both been knowing that. And here he was on this island with no one left to hurt him anymore but Maggie who was too sweetly dizzy in the head to hurt much and Whaley who Woodrow thought he knew every which way she had of hurting him but she was good for coming up with a new one.