The Watery Part of the World (16 page)

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.

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 and 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?”

“Because I don't fancy spending the rest of my life running. And because I damn near let you die already.”

“You saved my life.”

“After I turned that mongrel loose and watched a good half of the blood in your body stain the sand.”

“I don't blame you for that. I put your life in great peril. And all for my father's papers.”

“I don't care to hear what it was you were hoping to find in his quarters. We've other things to think about now.”

“You think he's looking for us?”

“I think he'll never stop.

He'd moved into the light. Theo understood, looking at his
body in the half-flickering light, that she was right—there were limits to love, and his had been reached that day. Yet he'd stayed here, waiting for her to recover from her wounds.

“I'm sorry to hear you're married.”

He looked at her strangely. “It's not something ought to make you feel sorry for a person, generally. Besides, you're married yourself.”

“I think it unlikely that I am going to reunite with my husband,” she said. And she stood there waiting for him to make the same claim about his wife.

Instead, he said good night. For the next few weeks he worked in the yard building simultaneously a shed and a boat. He admitted he knew little about boatbuilding and so he hired himself out as an apprentice to the best boatbuilder on the island, learning what he could, bartering time for scrap lumber, borrowing tools to work on his boat by firelight. Theo spent the days fishing in the sound for supper, digging for clams, planting a garden, helping out island women with their chores in exchange for items she and Whaley had no means to procure. They could not have survived without the help of the islanders who never once questioned her arrival on this island so near death, never once asked how she happened to get attacked by a dog, or other obvious questions: where she came from, who she was running from.

Theo was amazed by Whaley's pluck, the way he went about hammering together a new life on a new island. His ability to land anywhere and make do—she had never known that in a
man. Her father certainly liked to think of himself as resilient, but there was something in her father's ego that would turn any attempt at a comeback into an unqualified failure.
Had
turned: she thought of his Mexican Empire scheme. As for Joseph, he was the governor, but had anything happened to him, had they taken away his money and his land and his houses and his slaves, he'd starve within a week. He knew nothing of how hard it was just to live. Of course, neither did she until she mistook a lamp tied to a horse's head for a ship's beacon.

Whaley kept to himself. He was gone when she rose in the morning and often not home when she went to bed. He finished his boat and took it out on the water in the mornings, and in the afternoons he dug clams or cut cedar to sell as posts across over to Morehead. She grew gradually stronger and able to work in the garden of an afternoon, though she still limped even with her cane and felt sometimes, in public, the unflinching attention of island children, which made her feel disfigured. Aside from the women who sometimes stopped in to check on her she had no one to talk to save the cow Whaley procured from God knows where, she never asked. She named her Nora, after one of Joseph's sisters. To Nora she told stories of Richmond Hill. The night she alone entertained Chief William Brant Thayendanega, Mohawk leader of the Six Indian Nations. Nora seemed to have a passion for Horace, whose odes, recited while Theo milked her, had a curiously calming effect. Curious in part because they were so badly mangled. All she had to occupy her hours were memories
and yet a fog was blowing in off the sea, overtaking the priceless past she'd kept so vigilantly alive. Each day she lost a little more of herself.

One night she woke from sleep in a panic. A presence in the room. She felt it before she heard breathing. A dream in which she understood she was dreaming but could not manage to force herself awake. Her head on the pillow as heavy as an anvil. Her mangled appendages useless by her side. Daniels had come for her. He'd already dispensed with Whaley, all stealth and silent steel, a knife across the throat as Whaley slumbered in the front room, beneath that portrait Daniels had come to retrieve. She tried to form some words, not of supplication but an offering, Take me now, take the portrait too, though whatever propensities you have allowed it are patently false, it has no power and it never spoke to me, it was all a misguided act to fool you into thinking I was worth saving, it is only paint and a battered frame, technically amateurish and not even a very good likeness.

Then Whaley said, “I need you to wake up.”

The bones in her neck creaked as she raised her head from the tick. In a bluish light from the moon she saw him leaning against the wall, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

“I have something to tell you now,” he said.

She swallowed and nodded, her relief that he was alive mixed now with trepidation, for whatever he had to tell her was middle-of-the-night weighty.

“I've not been honest,” he said.

She waited. Her own breathing, shallow and ragged, drowned out his, though, anxious as she was, she knew there wasn't anything he could tell her about himself that would make her not care for him. Had he been hired by Jefferson to assassinate her father she would have come in time to his side of it. Yet the fact that there was something to make him cower, render him so dejected, bothered her, for it meant he wasn't perhaps as inviolable as she'd thought him.

“Ten, eleven years ago, I was in the West Indies with a crew out of Hull. We were ambushing supply ships running to the islands, Spanish galleons mostly. Daniels was down there too. He claimed to be the grandson of Teach. Blackbeard, they also call him. The math is off by a good half century, but when you get to know the man, you believe that part of his story more, for if Teach was as black of heart as he was of beard, Lord God the blackness at the core of Daniels.

“We'd put in at a place named Cortez's Cay. Laying out for a fleet of French ships headed for Martinique. I was second mate by title, but the captain, my mother's brother Clarence, was a day and night fall-down drunkard, so it was me mostly captaining that ship. We'd dropped anchor in a cove and set up camp awaiting the fleet to arrive. Second night on the island one of the crew caught something trying to steal our food. They brought him into the tent I shared with my uncle and the equally besotted first mate. He won't nothing but sunburnt leather and bone. Wild-haired, blackbearded like his so-called granddaddy. Uncle Clarence tried
to get him talking, but he just spat and swore until Clarence ordered his skinny arse hung and his dirty black throat cut.”