The Watery Part of the World (3 page)

He could have come back at the Tape Recorders with all this but Woodrow did not much mess with them. Oh, he'd sit for them but he wouldn't answer the questions like they wanted him to because seemed to Woodrow they had the answers already, that the questions were swole up with the answer, like a snake had swallowed a frog.
Tell us what it has been like for your family living here all these years the only blacks on the island. How have you kept up with your heritage? Do you think the gains of the civil rights movement have reached you here on this island? How have these gains affected your day-to-day existence?

Woodrow said the only thing affecting his day-to-day existence was where them fish was hiding.

The story of the three of them on this island, to Woodrow's mind, was just that: three people on an island. You could even leave off the island part, though the Tape Recorders, why would they do that? They wanted to turn it into something else again: something they wanted to believe in, something about how lost
the three of them were across the water, all cut off from the rest of the world and turned peculiar because of it.

Seemed to Woodrow they weren't all that interested in Maggie's telling her side of the story because she'd up and start in on something inside of her, which the Tape Recorders, excepting that little Liz who tended just to let you talk, weren't interested at all in what somebody felt. Also, Maggie when it came down to it did not give a squat for history. She lived up in the right along through now.

Well, no, Woodrow took that one back. He believed it was Boyd she thought about nearly all the time, not Boyd as he was now, across the sound, but Boyd back when she had him, Boyd when he got off the boat and come asking Woodrow to teach him to fish, young Boyd, green smiley innocent Boyd.

It drove the Tape Recorders crazy how Woodrow would not act the way they needed him to, say the things they wanted him to say. They were all the time trying to get him to act like he hadn't ever been off island at all. He played along even though he'd spent more time off island than either of the white women sisters. Two years at the Coast Guard base up at Bayside, four years in the Norfolk shipyards. There he took up welding and he did decent at it. Now his children reached right up the East Coast to Troy, New York, like stops on a train: Morehead City, Elizabeth City, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philly, Brooklyn, all the way up to Kingston and Troy. He'd even taken that train a few times. Sarah lived to visit her babies, usually in the fall when the heat and bugs still lingered on the island and the storms rolled in sometimes two in the same moon. Woodrow
went with her a couple of times. They took the train went up behind everything, back of people's houses, back of factories, where you could see the ungussied part of the world—the porches sagging with beat-up furniture and washing machines, the yards chewed up by mean old fenced-in dogs, the piles of rusting engine parts and junk cars behind the warehouses and businesses. He liked this view better than what people put on for a show. But he got so he hated leaving the island. He did it twice, then let her go on ahead. Woodrow hadn't lost anything on that backyard train.

Sarah was all the time talking about moving. Retiring, she called it. But what was it to retire from? He had come home a good welder but what was it to weld on this island? Can't weld conch, kelp, fishbone. Woodrow made a little money selling crabs and flounder, but it won't nothing he could retire from. Woodrow answered Sarah's talk about retiring by not answering, which back then seemed like the decent way to respond. No sense trotting out a lot of words. She knew damn well how he was after so many years together. If he did not want to do something she wanted him to do, well, he didn't spend words telling her what she knew already by the way he'd walk out to visit with his pigs.

He ought to have talked to Sarah about all this retiring, though. Stabbing the hardest now, hurting the most was all he did not do for her, things he never got around to giving her.

Too busy waiting on them white women sisters, Crawl and them would claim. Sarah never said as much but she was surely thinking it. She had given up talking to him about Maggie and
Whaley. Woodrow told himself she'd accepted it, the way it had to be if they were going to stay on this island, the price of living right down across the creek where both of them were born.
But why do we have to pay?
he sometimes imagined Sarah saying to him when he was out on the water and there was nothing biting, and he had flat quiet time to himself while he drifted, waiting on the O'Malleys to show with the mail.

Everybody got to pay, he'd of said to Sarah.

To live where they were born and raised up at? To stay right where they belong?

She had that fire in her voice. Every question raised up in time to her eyebrows, the lift of her left shoulder. But at least she was in the boat with him. Good God, woman, come close lay your uppity attitude on my lap let's stretch out across the bottom of this boat.

Everybody pay. He'd say it over as if saying it over made it true.

Let me ask you Woodrow Thornton how Whaley's sour self's paying to live where she was born? She's going to come out here tomorrow meet the mail and catch your supper, let you stay home and nap?

She pays. You would not want that woman's suffering.

If I could suffer up out of this sun, in the shade, I'd surely trade.

Don't go saying you'd take on somebody else's mess you don't even know what it is.

All I'm saying, how hard could it be? She's a selfish, stuck-up, putting-on-airs, all-the-time-bragging-about-her-great-great-great-great-granddaddy-done-killed-somebody-famous mess.

She pays. Her and Maggie both.

I never said Maggie. That girl owes, what it is. All the sinning she done in her life, she'll be paying on into the next one, and in a place going to finally maybe make her appreciate this island she spent years complaining about.

Hey now, said Woodrow. He hated to hear anyone talk bad about Maggie. True that much of her pain was of her own making but she wasn't alone in that. Right then, bringing his Sarah into the flat afternoon quiet, wasn't he making himself miserable? Couldn't he remember the good times, those afternoons when Crawl and the older sisters took care of the younger ones and he and Sarah sneaked off to the summer kitchen for some slow all afternoon loving? And later when it was just them on this island, all their children moved on, and the two of them would sit on the porch in silence for hours of a Sunday afternoon, the wind the only thing stopped by to see them all day and both of them just fine with that, with each other, with only each other?

He ought to have brought
that
Sarah in the boat with him to keep him company. But instead he stirred up all this unfinished business, got her to talking about the things she liked to talk about, give his same old side of it for the hundredth time, tried to tell himself it was final, he had the last word.

Which, talking down to a dead person, the one you loved most in this world, wrapping it up when they didn't have a chance to defend, well—he'd've felt a whole lot of worse about it if it had
worked. But it did not do a damn bit of good. Mostly only made him feel worse.

Still, he had these talks with her, every day. Sometimes all day long. Ever since he left her alone that day when Wilma came through.

He'd gone across to Meherrituck on an errand for Whaley. She was wanting him to meet the mailman at the store around four o'clock. She knew he'd been fishing the ditch up behind Blue Harbor, knew it wasn't too far out of his way. She also knew he would not want to kill time in Meherrituck, where people treated him mostly bad, made jokes behind his back on account of the O'Malleys when they met him for the mail sometimes would pass him a Sweet to smoke and a High Life to sip on, get him talking about the sisters, went right back to tell it all over Meherrituck how he was getting something off Miss Maggie and Miss Whaley liked to watch. He'd heard that. It had got back to him. From his house down by the inlet he could see across to Meherrituck and the winking lights of Blue Harbor and the lighthouse tossing its milky beam around but Woodrow hadn't lost anything over there. Neither him nor the sisters crossed over unless one got bad sick. Whaley knew he did not want to go across that day. She knew he would not want to kill time over there, knew that to Woodrow Meherrituck had got just as bad as the mainland with all the ferries unloading the tourists and the natives getting it in their heads they were some rich somebodies.

Oh, he could of said no to Whaley that day. He'd told her no
before. He felt the storm coming, saw it in all the telling signs: way his stock behaved, scratching around in the yard all skittery, refusing to eat, squealing and whinnying at the way the wind died then rose, died and rose. He saw it in the shading of the clouds, black and fast and backlit by the last leaking away of any sun that day. When he tried to tell Whaley it was a storm coming and he did not want to leave Sarah, she said to him, Take Sarah with you, do her good to get off island, surely y'all got people over there to visit.

This got away with Woodrow. Seemed like she was wanting him to take Sarah off the island so she and Maggie could have it to themselves, like they was wanting some white-only time on that island where his people had lived going back more than a hundred years, not so long as hers, true, but long enough so with only the four of them left it was by God his and Sarah's island much as it was theirs.

Before he left, he made them promise to check on Sarah should it start to blow (
if
he said, though he knew by then
when
was the word he needed) and he got up early that day as always and loaded up coolers to keep his catch cold while he killed time on ain't-lost-nothing-over-to-Meherrituck. Sarah even came down to the dock to see him off, which she never did, but Woodrow tried to act like it was just another day out on the water. As soon as he was out on the water he felt the storm rising. He had seen seven or eight hours where he could of turned around, gone back. He spent that time wavering. Ain't looking good, I'm going back, he'd think, but then he'd remember Whaley's attempt to get Sarah in the
boat with him, and say, Hell with that woman and her whites-only-for-a-day island. She needs some color in her world.

He'd been over to Meherrituck for a while when it started to really blow. Wind and water made up his mind for him—you ain't going nowhere now, Woodrow Thornton, you had your chance. He sat up in the community store with O'Malley Senior and his sons, listening to the island come down around them, all night long the pop and crash of things picked up by the wind, the curl and rip of scissored-off strips of tin roofs, the store gone to shadow in the candlelight, everybody drinking something to take their mind off the wind, though it just made worse what fear they felt, the liquor and the wine and the beer.

Woodrow left soon as the seas died down enough to where he could cross, throttled wide open over there, hull batted wave to wave. He lost: cooler full of fish, spare gas tank, a net, rod-and-reel, waders, all of it tossed overboard, a sacrifice, sea can have all that if she just lets me find my Sarah alive and well.

Someone was waiting for him down at the dock. Wouldn't anyone meet him but his bride, and Woodrow at the sight of the figure on the dock cussed himself for tearing ass over across the inlet, sacrificing his worldly goods for nothing. Then he grew close enough to spot Maggie. He recognized her before he could make out the color of her skin; it was the way she stood, which he remembered from all the times he'd seen her standing similar, waiting on him to bring Boyd back from a day's fishing. Arms crossed over her chest, holding her heart, protecting it. He thought at first, well, wind done
knocked out the power and the light, mixed her up. She'd lost her place in time, come down to wait on Boyd, who at that point had been gone a good many years. Woodrow'd seen people take a little vacation from good God-given sense after a particularly big blow.

Then he got a little closer and saw the look on her face and he changed his mind. It's Whaley, he thought. Most people would put their money on Maggie to be the first to go. She'd courted nearly everything you can court to shave some years off—she smoked roll-your-owns for years, drank whenever she could get her hands on some liquor, loved nothing more than lying out stitchless under the noontime sun. But Woodrow always thought it'd be Whaley because in the end, though she lived better, ate better, worked harder than her sister, she cut herself off from people, she didn't know nothing about how to love, she couldn't even listen. Death comes quicker to those who don't know how to listen. He worried about Crawl. His own son didn't know how to hear another man's pain. Get too busy thinking about your own mess, that'll kill you deader than hell. You got nobody to sustain you, you're going to go quick, and it's going to hurt too, knowing you left nobody in your wake. He thought about Whaley lying there on her deathbed knowing after she's gone all that's left is some same-old stories in a book about an island nobody cares to hear about.

Well, least she went easy, quick. Best she didn't linger, because if she did, Woodrow'd have to sit with her, at least help take care of her, and he'd be telling some lies even bringing around food to sustain her one more hour, because he couldn't out-and-out say he
would miss her if she was gone. He could say the out-and-out opposite. Better he didn't have to get himself mixed up in a big last lie.

When he cut the engine and nosed the skiff up alongside the dock and got close enough to toss Maggie the line, he saw the blood on her dress and noticed her shivering. Everything froze: line in his hands, coiled, ready to throw. Skiff took its own course, bow nosing around in a half circle. Maggie stared into the shallows but not like she'd lost something down there. She had a little bit of sleeve in her mouth. Her chin was quivering and she was chewing that little bit of sleeve. Woodrow knew then it wasn't Whaley.