The Watery Part of the World (11 page)

It wasn't that she was a bad person; it was that there was something bad wrong with her. Sometimes she felt like the wind blew
right through her. The strangest things made her cry—the yellow suds ebbing around some storm wrack, a dead snake, the first few bars of a song overheard from someone's window as she passed by at night—but let someone she'd known all her life swell up with a tumor and she paid it no more mind than a mosquito bite. Her sister was always calling her selfish, but that was too easy. She cared about other people so much that she wanted to see inside them, to think their same thoughts. She just did not care to sit for hours in their stuffy parlors, talking about couldn't that new preacher hear their stomachs growling, why were his sermons so long?

Boyd, by comparison, was noble and believed in people's goodness. He wasn't so good he was boring, but he was a fine thing in this world and she got quickly to where it seemed just wrong to think she could have him.

Doubt kept at her, a whining bug in her ear even when she tried not to consider it. Still, when they were lying in bed, or walking along the island in the after supper settling down of day, talking their playful, idle talk, everything went away. Then there was only the two of them, standing alone and indomitable in the slight spray from the surf.

One Sunday six months after Boyd arrived on the island, he announced he was taking his boat across to Morehead that weekend to attend his cousin's baby's christening. This was the first time he'd left the island and would be the longest they'd been apart.

“Your cousin's baby?” she said. A breeze batted the curtains
she'd sewn for the summer kitchen, where they lay sweaty and entwined.

“Yep.”

“Sounds kind of distant to me.”

“Y'all don't have cousins who have babies over here?”

“I doubt I'd cross the creek to go to their christening if I did.”

“You don't want me to go,” he said.

“Go on across,” she said in such a sulky voice that Boyd laughed.

“Why don't you come with me?”

“What, as your date?”

“Yes, as my date.”

It was her turn to laugh at the thought of tagging along behind him through a gauntlet of family, like some schoolgirl he'd met in the parking lot of Dairy Queen.

“What's so funny?”

“I don't think your cousin's baby's christening would care to be upstaged by you showing up with the likes of me.”

“Why, is there something wrong with you?”

He meant it as a joke, she knew, but how could she take it as such, knowing that there was something wrong with everyone, sure, it was what made people worth speaking to, but at that moment even more than usual there seemed something
bad
wrong with her. Her sister knew it. She treated her like she was fragile, always had. Only Woodrow treated her normal, though Woodrow, who knew what he was thinking? Maybe his treating her normal
was just his way of making an exception for her foolishness. She'd turned away from Boyd at the mention of the christening, and his hand lay heavy across her rib cage, and the weight of it seemed so constricting that she blinked back tears of pain. Then she went silly to stop herself from crying.

“I'm a leopard,” she said.

“You're a
who
?” Boyd said, his last word wavy with laughter.

“Leopard. I escaped from a leopard colony.”

This got away with him enough to derail the subject of her going across with him, but not for long. All week long he kept after her. All week, at his side or alone, she worried about his leaving, and was visited by dreams, waking or in fitful sleep, of a ghost she thought she'd long ago shed.

Growing up, she and Whaley had spent hours playing a game they called Dare, a version of hide-and-go-seek based in historical fact, island lore, myth, and the endless fascination they had for stories featuring female adventurers. After horrid fights erupted over who would get to play Virginia Dare herself—Whaley always claimed her right because she knew the history better, or “the Truth” as she called it, notwithstanding the fact that the story of Virginia Dare and her lost colony was considered America's longest-running mystery), while Maggie's claim seemed irrefutable in its simplicity: she was better at
being
Virginia, she could scamper up dunes barefoot to search the horizon for her grandfather's ships come to rescue them, she wasn't afraid of the forest like her sister, she would gladly get dirty and wet and brave bug
bite and even jellyfish sting—their mother intervened, demanding they take turns.

The difference in the way Maggie and Whaley understood the world was exemplified not only in how they played Virginia but in what they felt the story was
about.
Whaley's version was pitched to people like the Tape Recorders who were all about some stuff happened four hundred years before they were born. So proud even at that age, so convinced of her superior mind, so free from doubt and resistant to the possibility that life was lived mostly in the vague border between right and wrong, certain that the island they happened to have been born on was the only place on the globe for her to live, Whaley's Virginia was always up in someone's face (well, Maggie's face, seeing as how she was the only other one playing the game), lecturing about how she was the first white girl born in the United States of America and her grandfather John White was the true father of this country and to heck with Jamestown and as for the Pilgrims, walking around the woods with buckles on their shoes, they dressed like a nun if you asked her and invented the most good-for-nothing laziest holiday ever where all you do is sit around and eat, what a waste of time. This was just the start of all Whaley's Virginia had to allow. Whaley's colony never got around to ever getting lost, because see, she didn't believe they ever did get lost. She believed the ones who came back for them didn't look all that hard. She believed she was blood kin to Virginia Dare, that there was not one drop of anything but white blood in her either, all that hogwash about
the colonists fleeing the island on account of storms and going across and mixing with Indians, that made no sense, who would ever leave the island? Just because of some wind? Maybe a little storm surge?

The world according to Whaley, unchanged in the decades since they had last played Dare: why in the world would anyone see the world differently than she did?

Maggie's Virginia was not big on words. Her Dare played outdoors. Hours spent lying in the sand, digging in the tidepools for sand fiddlers, wandering the low wind-stunted forests. If at first Virginia loved her life by the ocean, enjoyed pining away for the return of her grandfather and the rest of her colony, the longer they stayed away, the less she missed them. Her fellow colonists began to seem timid to her. She had been born here; she was different. They struck her as too easily pleased. This New World was to her a humongous loaf of bread, hers for the feasting, yet the rest of them were content to nibble like mice on the crust she would just as soon tear away and leave on her plate like a ravished bone. She wanted off island.

She began slipping into the forest. Just feet away from their stockade the scrub dropped away and wide paths appeared, spacious meadows with sluggish, murmuring creeks, moss-dripping cypresses, deep shadows pierced with soft yellow light. Daily she wandered with no particular destination. Friendly Indians took her in, taught her things: how to dam a creek with branches, chase fish into a pool where they could be easily spared. They gave her
corn to plant, and beans and squash and pumpkins. They loaned her a hoe made from the vertebra of a bear. They taught her to grate nutmeg with a conch shell, how to track deer through the woods to find salt licks. She came to know polecat and muskrat, learned to spot a moccasin dripping from live oak amid a tress of Spanish moss. Rattlers are more poisonous on the hottest days, her new friends taught her; the severed tail of an alligator will wiggle right on for hours.

Virginia came dragging Maggie off island with her all hours of the day during that week before Boyd went across. So distracted was she by Virginia's bold and exotic adventures she felt some part of her was already in motion, as if she had spent the day out on the water and was feeling still the pitch and roll. But the part of her that wanted to leave behind everything was fearful of the place people never come back from. If she said as much to Boyd, he would say, I came back across, but he'd only been born over here, not raised, he'd not known it long enough to become it. Woodrow had gone across too and come back, Boyd might claim, but there again he would be right in fact and wrong in Truth, for Woodrow Thornton hadn't ever left this island even when he was up at Bayside welding for the Coast Guard those two years during some world war, even when Sarah had him staying with some of her people up in Norfolk one winter. Maggie knew what slant of light Woodrow saw against his lid when he blinked his eyes, she knew it was sea breeze he breathed. Much time as he'd spent out on the water, Woodrow's heart had never once left the island.

Instead of explaining it all to Boyd—how could he understand a grown woman giving herself over to waking dreams of a girl weeding a garden with a bear's backbone—she just pouted. The grown-up part of her understood he'd be back over in three days time; smothering him, she knew, was going to backfire big-time. But there was Virginia coaxing her into ghostwoods, and the notion of all that land, all those people bunched up in knots all across it … Maggie shut down when she thought about it. Have a good time, she said, though not in a way either of them knew her to mean.

She watched his boat slide out across the inlet, which was glassy and greenish that day, slick as it gets, and without even going home, or back to the summer kitchen, she made her way to Harvey Lockerman's house and bought a pint of that white liquor he made every winter. Boyd's the one who left. He might have said he wanted her to come along, but once she got over there and people started talking their nasty gossip, he'd wished he'd left her back over on that island.

Several men were crowded into Harvey's root cellar, passing pints and smoking and smelling like the catch of the day. She paid her money and took her pint and went back to the summer kitchen and opened all the windows and sipped the white, which smelled of yeast but tasted of turpentine. By the third stout patch she sloshed into her jelly glass, a curious molecular reorganization took place in her heart, rendering all her flaws and mistakes noble and altruistic and all the misery she felt the fault of Boyd
for leaving, her sister for treating her like a slattern, the island for being stuck hours out in the ocean.

Another drink and she was blaming her great-great-grandfather who sired a family here on the island and kept secret his other family across the ocean. And her own daddy, who got rich off a shipment of whiskey that washed up on Sheep Island during Prohibition and spent the rest of his days drunk off what he did not sell. She liked to think—she
enjoyed
thinking—that what Whaley called her sorry streak came directly from this side of the family, with their ruddy Irish coloring and their love of singing even though not one of them had ever been known to read a note.

Wherever it came from, it had needed to be got out of her system. She could get it out by herself, but it would go a lot quicker if she had some company. She went back up the road to Locker-man's. The party had moved from the root cellar to the backyard. Harvey's wife and his wife's sister had joined the men but were sipping instead of slashing, and when Maggie came striding up the lawn, her steps deliberate and counted out so as not to let on how drunk she was already, the women traded glances Maggie could decipher even through her fog. When she took a seat, they slipped off inside the house.

It was late afternoon before it was even lunchtime and then it was dusk and the mosquitoes blew up from the marsh and had at her bare arms until she was nearly welted. A boy she knew from school, a Railey who had moved off island but was over visiting
Harvey, told her he had something inside the house would help soothe those bites.

She knew what that something was but followed him inside anyway, filed right past the women who were listening to the radio in the kitchen and stopped talking to stare her out as she stumbled on the threshhold.

She pushed him away after he'd kissed her down to the floor of the front porch. She said, “I'm hungry, I'm going home.” Of course he followed her halfway up to the house, trying to talk her into some more of his bug-bite remedies. She treated him like she treated the bugs who maybe because of the liquor were on her like they'd never been before, swarming her, bleeding her leechlike.

Whaley was off somewhere, thank God. Maggie went to the kitchen and started making some oatmeal, about the only thing she could find that did not require a lot of knifing. She was slurping it up at the kitchen table when Whaley came in from the store. She could tell from the way Whaley did not look at her that she knew at least some of it.

Whaley made a noisy fuss of putting up groceries. Then she leaned against the counter, her arms tightly crossed, and said, “Least you waited till your boy was off island.”

“He drinks himself, so what?”

“I'm not talking about the drinking, though God knows you ought to leave it alone too.”

Maggie decided to ignore the “too.” “When was the last time you saw me drunk?”

“I don't keep count of your actions, but if you want credit for acting like you ought to act, you'll not get it from me.”

“That's a simple way of seeing it,” said Maggie. “And a god-damn self-righteous way too.”

Whaley said, “You know I'm right.”

Maggie said, “Oh do I. You always are.”

Whaley unfolded her arms, wet a rag, and swiped furiously at the countertop. “I don't have to listen to this mess.”

“Did it ever occur to you that some people don't feel the same things you do? You think something awful's got to happen for somebody to feel sad. Somebody's got to die, or lose a child, or there's got to be a fire or a flood. Even then you don't hardly let somebody grieve before you claim they're wallowing. Well, guess what? It don't work like that. Some people can't control how they feel. They just feel bad for no reason and they deal with it best they can and it would be mighty Christian of you to show some support.”