The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  She did not say what they were both thinking. Their father’s old ditty: Wind before rain, soon fine again. Other way around, get out of town.

  There wasn’t much talking during supper. The radio spoke to them from a corner of the kitchen, Elizabeth City station with its reporting pitched to Knotts Island, Little River, and the Northern Banks. Morehead City station was only high whistling, as if the wind itself had taken over the studio and was broadcasting itself out to all those poor fools wanting the radio to tell them something they didn’t already know. If Whaley thought at all about Woodrow it was to think, He’s on his way home now, he and Sarah settling into their after-supper routine, whatever that was. All these years living just across the creek from the two of them and Whaley had no earthly idea what they did nights. She knew one thing, though, which comforted her: Sarah loved her radio, had it on from the time she got up in the morning, every time Whaley was by there she heard it blasting her gospel music, all the hand clapping and the Jesus shouting and the swelling organ chords. Sarah would have the radio on, in case Woodrow had not come back. She’d know anyway, with or without the radio, that a storm had hit. She’d know what to do.

  Right out of the blue she said to no one—to herself, to the radio playing a song asking her did she know the way to San Jose—“What do Woodrow and Sarah do at night?”

  The problem with her outburst was: Maggie in the room.

  It took a minute for Maggie to get over the shock, visible in her wide eyes (actually she looked a little terrified), after which a smile took over her face, then gave just as quickly away to a familiar smirk.

  “Must be the drop in pressure,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Making you all of a sudden curious about other people for once in your life.”

  “I’m plenty curious, just not nosy. I’m not a gossip.”

  “To answer your question,” said Maggie, uncharacteristically ignoring this jab, “seeing as how they are the only couple on this island, I’d wager that whatever they do, it’s way more fun than reading aloud grocery store prices.”

  “You would be thinking that.”

  “And you wouldn’t.”

  Whaley figured she’d ignore a jab as well, though it wasn’t easy.

  “Lord, they’ve got, what, ten or eleven children? Woodrow’s every bit as old as we are. I don’t think it’s on their minds every night.”

  She wouldn’t have been talking to Maggie at all—especially not about this—if she hadn’t been feeling guilty about that dress. It was revolting, her speculating about Woodrow and Sarah’s private business. But somehow it brought Sarah into the room with them, out of the rain and wind, safe, sheltered. Woodrow too. She thought of him every time the wind rushed up to drown out the radio, every time some debris tapped against the side of the clapboard.

  Maggie crossed her arms beneath her chest and sat there studying her. “Well, we ought to go check on Sarah. She ought not to be down there by herself in all this.”

  She was half out of her chair when Whaley shot up and nearly shouted, “Stay here, I’ll go, you wash up now.”

  Maggie lowered herself onto the chair. “You’re acting strange, Theo,” she said. She never called her sister by her given name. She never really called her anything at all, but if she had to get her attention she’d say Whaley first, or Linda.

  Whaley was in the mudroom, pulling on their father’s peeling oiler, still dripping from Maggie’s earlier outing, and then she was out the door.

  What she found first was a stillness so total her mind and body were put to rest: there would be no danger tonight. But as soon as she got out on the beach road, headed down the hill to Woodrow’s, the gusts came. She staggered into them like a drunk. The yucca rustled in the breeze and Whaley thought of how adjustable to the elements was everything on this island. Even, maybe, her sister, who she’d always thought of as fragile, weak, lazy-willed. Yet she’d survived. She was here still. She’d been here nearly as long as Whaley. To remain, she had to be stronger than Whaley gave her credit for.

  As she neared Woodrow’s the rain was sideways, and down in the bottom, where Woodrow’s great-great-great-grandfather had chosen to rebuild his house after a storm came through and blew away both Hezekiah’s shed and Theodosia’s home place, the water had begun to pool. She felt it lap her ankles. She sloshed right through it, for even though she had years of evidence to the contrary—quite a few deaths to boot—Whaley feared the wind more than the water. She could climb up to the balcony of the church, could climb even higher, up the steeple if the water rose that high. The water would not wash away the church, which had stood there now for over 120 years. But the wind could take it all away.

  Even though she meant to fetch Sarah and bring her back to the house, where the three of them could weather the storm together, and Sarah could be closer to the church in case the water rose, Whaley stole up on the porch as lightly as a cat. She told herself she didn’t want to scare Sarah, for who else besides her husband would come clomping up on her porch boards in the middle of a storm. She had never been down here to see Sarah. She’d always been here to see Woodrow and she always treaded lightly on the porch so as not to call attention to the fact that she was a white woman come to order around a black man.

  She was about to knock when she heard that music. Loud as it’d be if the band were playing in her kitchen. Whaley figured the sound could not go any higher. She could have heard it up the hill to the house had not the wind been roaring and seething.

  Sarah came into view. She stood on the threshold of that kitchen Woodrow’d tacked on to keep Sarah from having to tote everything up from the summer kitchen. She was holding her Bible and her lips were moving and she was swaying a little, to the music obviously, though when she came closer, into the lamplight, Whaley saw the look on her face, pure fear, no sign of the comfort she ought to draw from songs praising his only Son our Lord, from the leather book she clutched hard to her breast.

  Before she could even think, Whaley was tiptoeing off the porch. The wet wind nearly blew her back up on it, for she’d lost her wits, forgotten how to walk in a storm. You have to act drunk to negotiate a sixty-mile-an-hour gust. Forget your bones, flow loose in the hips, fluid, let the wind move through you. The rain, well, it hadn’t bothered her on the way down but on the way back up the hill, every isolated drop stung like truth.

  In the yard the island lit white with lightning, a quarter second’s clarity: things were forever after changed. She heard a pop, the house went dark, thunder followed. By the time she managed to push open the door that fought her off as if the house knew what she’d done, Maggie had the candles lit, was fussing with their grandfather’s old whale oil lamp, converted now to kerosene.

  Maggie stopped her wick-twisting to ask with a look where in the world was Sarah.

  “She didn’t want to come. Said she was fine where she was.”

  Maggie said, “Whaley?”

  “Oh, we’re back to Whaley now? What, Mag? I went down there, I asked her, I can’t order her, she doesn’t belong to us. She’s got her pride, that girl.”

  Maggie said, “It’s just, Woodrow—”

  “Woodrow obviously has nothing to do with whether she’s got the sense to save herself.”

  But Woodrow, of course, had everything to do with why Whaley lied. The truth is she never let herself admit her reason for leaving Sarah alone. For years when she thought of why, she pushed why quickly out of her mind. She knew it had to do with Woodrow but it was only now that Woodrow was gone, that the island was abandoned, that she and Maggie had been sent across the sound to die, that Whaley could admit to little Liz and the readers of the Norfolk newspaper and the whole world what she only vaguely felt that night in the storm: Sarah, sooner or later, was going to take Woodrow away. If Woodrow left, they’d all have to leave.

  “If anything happens to Sarah,” said Maggie, “I’d say Woodrow’s going to have something to do with it.”

  �
�Nothing’s going to happen. She knows where to go if the water starts to rise.”

  “I ought to go down there and talk to her.”

  “Nonsense, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “That she hates me and would rather drown than take my advice? I reckon it’s you she loves.”

  “We get on all right.”

  “Oh yeah, Mag. She loved it when you spread sin all over her backyard, shacking up in her summer kitchen with your high school boy.”

  Maggie fell silent. She was like the storm outside—any lull was bound to be followed by fury.

  “I guess I’ll be having that incident thrown back in my face until I die, won’t I?”

  “No, Mag. Just happens to pertain to the subject of how Sarah hates me but loves you.”

  “Everything in your mind pertains,” said Maggie.

  “What in the world’s that mean?”

  Another four seconds of calm. Whaley held her breath.

  “Just that it must be very comforting to have everything all tidy and settled. Knowing you’re right, having all the evidence of everybody else’s wrongness—it must be nice.”

  Whaley could not show it, but these words stung more than those gale-force-wind-driven raindrops. She did not want to talk anymore—in fact, she wanted very much to be alone—but she knew she needed to distract Maggie from the plight of poor all-alone Sarah. So she engaged her sister in a protracted and repetitive argument, the subject of which was the same subject they’d been arguing about for nearly sixty-odd years: who was right.

  Sometimes, when Whaley sat listening to her sister tell her stories to the Tape Recorders, it occurred to her that there was more than one island. Three, actually—Woodrow’s island, Maggie’s, her own. The Tape Recorders never could get Sarah to talk to them, which Whaley secretly appreciated, for there was no telling what sort of fourth island might have emerged had Sarah got to tell her side of it. But the thought that there were three islands was not at all pleasing to Whaley. She tended not to recognize but the one, her own, for the others seemed to her soggy and vulnerable places, no more secure than driftwood tossed about by the waves.

  The argument was not winnable or even decipherable after all, for it degenerated into a splinter argument about the way Maggie misbehaved thirty or so odd years ago. Even Whaley wasn’t sure she had the facts so straight any more, though she did not say that to Maggie. Twice Maggie, insulted, got up to go leave the room, but she realized she would be alone in an increasingly threatening storm, and besides, fighting made the time pass. They argued. The radio, packed with batteries, had long since given over to whistling, and even if it had been working it would have told them things they’d been knowing, as by the time word of any storm got on the air on the mainland stations it had already hit the island and was likely out to sea by then.

  Around five in the morning Whaley went to the back door to check on things. She saw the water then.

  What she should have done was come right back inside. But instead she stood there, hesitating, trying to decide was it too late to run down there and fetch Sarah. Her being gone so long’s what brought Maggie into it. Whaley heard her gasp when she saw the surge coming up past the clothesline, almost to the house.

  “Good God Almighty,” she said. “We’ve got to get Sarah.”

  “It’s too late, Mag. We got to get to the church.”

  “If it’s up in the yard here it’s bad high down there in the bottom. We’ve got to get her.”

  “You go down there now, you’ll get sucked right out in the sound.”

  Maggie went inside. In a second here she came again, the slicker half on, an arm in, one out.

  Whaley had to grab her. Maggie fought back, the two of them struggling out in the rain then. “You will die if you go down there,” Whaley said. “Sarah had her chance. Now you get your head on and come with me up to the church.”

  Whaley held her sister until she went limp. Let Whaley grab her hand and lead her like Woodrow’s old mule, Pilothouse, back into the house where Whaley grabbed some food and then the portrait off the wall, which she wrapped in a blanket and carried with her right up the hill to the church, through the rising surge, alive with boards from buildings down island washed away already, the other crazy things a flood will float right by you: an ironing board, somebody’s bait buckets, a crutch. It was just light out. Water lapped the church steps. In ten minutes it had risen to float the purple pew cushions. They made their way from the pulpit through the cold water up to the balcony steps. It would have been plenty safe there, the water had never risen that high, but Whaley wanted to see what the storm had done so she kept climbing up the ladder to the belfry. There, in the cramped space aside the bell, she wedged herself up toward the window and saw Woodrow’s half-flattened house.

  Not the water but the wind. That flimsy kitchen Woodrow had tacked on out of boards washed up on the beach, some rusty tin he traded the O’Malleys for—she’d told him from the start how it would not withstand even a moderate blow. Woodrow, stubborn Woodrow, well, no—he would not listen to any of that. Won’t nothing wrong with that kitchen, he claimed. Just because material wasn’t store-bought did not mean squat. In fact, it made it much better, for most of this mess had survived the sea, the sun, which made it even stronger, more likely to withstand all God sent to test it.

  It’s not the materials, Woodrow, she tried to tell him, it’s that you’re a waterman, no builder. His great-great-great-granddaddy Hezekiah was a skilled builder but most of his handiwork was long washed away, and after he passed, the Thornton men went back to the water. The houses on the island that had survived were all built by the same family—the Pender men, geniuses at constructing a dwelling uniquely suited to the limitations of sand, low water table, relentless wind, rising water. The rest of Woodrow’s house had been constructed by Arthur Pender Jr. But when she told him this he said only, I don’t know any not-dead Penders and besides I’m a little short to be hiring myself an arch-itect.

  Now she had her proof that he ought to have listened to her, not strayed into areas where he had no expertise, but it did not make her feel any better. Soon as the water went down they’d go check on Sarah, but God help her she had the good sense to stay away from that kitchen.

  Which God knows she did not. Which Maggie discovered herself because Whaley could not bring herself to go down there. It was midmorning when the wind quit whipping at the stained glass and the quiet rose up into the balcony like something you’re supposed to experience in church, a deep calm that entered you like breath, like air sweet and pure ushered down from heaven. Then the sunlight kaleidoscoping those windows, which she’d always found wasteful—she remembered when they were brought over in a crate from Norfolk, how the so-called stained-glass artisan who she figured for a crook took forever to assemble them in front of an audience of half the island who treated his show as if it was the Sistine Chapel getting a touch-up. Now the light slanted down through the glass and the colors collided in twirling prisms above the ruined pews and for a few seconds Whaley was taken away from the utter mess of the church and no doubt the entire island, which would likely not be the same as long as she lived there.

  She struggled up from her slump against the back wall of the balcony where she’d been sort of sleeping. Maggie was gone. Whaley pulled herself up to the window, saw her sister picking her way down the hill, negotiating the ravished island. Detritus everywhere and most of it belonging to those who’d already given up, left for the mainland. What got away with Whaley was the notion that she was going to have to clean up after them.

  There was no scream, no Maggie running back up the hill, but Whaley knew Sarah was dead because her sister did not seem any changed. She wore the same dazed expression on her face, took the same tentative gait, as if she’d spent the last twenty-four hours on rough seas and was struggling to get her land legs back. It was as if she had known already, before she went down there, what she’d fin
d.

  Plus, no Sarah in tow.

  Whaley met her on the steps.

  “Well?”

  “She’s in the kitchen. All I saw was her legs.”

  “Did you even check to see was she still breathing?”

  “I felt of her leg. She’s been dead. Go check yourself since you don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you,” said Whaley softly. She felt nauseated, but she couldn’t say even then that she realized her hand in all this. More the shock of having a country of four dwindle down suddenly to three. She had a thought she wished she’d never had, but she had it: about how three is always a cumbersome number. Shifting alliances, two against one.

  “I don’t understand why she didn’t just come with you. I mean, I never figured Sarah for outright wanting to die.”

  Whaley said, “Just because she stayed behind doesn’t mean she chose to die. She might not of thought the storm would amount to anything.”

  Whaley remembered the look on Sarah’s face, the Bible in her hands, her pacing up and down that hall. She remembered that awful loud praise-him-on-high music. She could hear it now in her head as if someone had put her inside the radio.

  Whaley said, “I have to sit down now.”

  Maggie said, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Whaley said, “I don’t have the right to feel bad?” She meant to say “sad.” She flushed and a wash of nausea came over her and this time she really did feel bad, terribly bad.

  “No love lost between y’all’s all I’m saying.”

  It helped the nausea to have something to get indignant about. She was thankful to her sister just then for drawing her into an argument.

  “Don’t you go getting self-righteous about her dying,” said Whaley. “We might not have got on so great but she’s dead and poor Woodrow and poor Crawl and all them others to have lost their mama this way.”

  “This way? Seems like a good way to me. I’d just soon get clobbered in the head by something the wind shook loose as drown or, worse yet, waste away in some hospital.”