The Watery Part of the World (20 page)

Better off for everyone to keep up the lies. Her boys were good boys. Hezekiah took to them and they to him. They fished with him and he taught them carpentry, a particular skill of his, and both of them married island girls and built houses in the village and took to the sea like their father. Amanda Jane was a bit more trouble to Theo. She was an idler and a dawdler, and if you asked her to do something once you'd be better off telling her again and then a third time to grow on, but she eventually met and married a boy from Elizabeth City, though within years she was back at the island with three towheaded babies, having shed her husband back up on the banks of the Pasquotank for reasons that Theo never completely understood. Not that she asked that many questions. She'd not prepared the girl for life off island.

Even though she told him at least once a week since Whaley's disappearance that he was free to leave, Hezekiah stayed on in the shed, though he added rooms and a summer kitchen and, five years after he showed up on her doorstep, married a sullen
young girl named Violet. Her family had been around since the port was thriving, her father had been brought in to lighter ships, though Theo only knew this by hearsay; she knew nothing of the lives of the other island blacks, who lived off by themselves across the creek.

Theo knew she would not be welcome at the wedding but she spent the day baking pies, which she had Amanda Jane carry back to Hezekiah's house as soon as the couple returned to their new home.

“Hezekiah said tell you thanks,” said Amanda Jane when Theo quizzed her about her errand. It bothered her deeply how Violet resisted her attempts at friendship. She knew it bothered Hezekiah as well, for there was a desperation behind it that all three of them recognized as having nothing to do Hezekiah and his new bride, with the here and now on this island. She was trying to rectify some past sin. Joseph and his hundreds of slaves.

Violet never took to her. It was difficult for Theo, seeing Violet coming and going, working alongside her sometimes in the garden plot they shared, having her every offering rebuffed or ignored, but she came to accept Violet's attitude as her just due for all those years of taking for granted the women and men who waited on her day and night.

Storms hit the island, one after the other. A hurricane opened a new inlet up the banks. Pea Island they called it. Ships took to docking at Manteo. Trade fell off; people began to trickle away. One stormy autumn the church was washed away in a nor'easter
but rebuilt on the highest point of the island, its steeple visible a mile out to sea on clear days, pointing everyone who came to the island toward God in heaven.

The injuries Theo had suffered at the hand of Daniels's mongrel turned her limbs arthritic and it grew harder for her to stand. She sat on the porch entertaining memories. Since she could remember, even as a small child, the moment just before she fell asleep had been characterized by an extreme and even painful wakefulness. Never had she been one to drift off; like a terror came this intense few seconds wherein she felt so vividly alive it made her body ache, her heart fearful. Was this a nightly harbinger of the clarity rumored to precede death? She longed for such lucidity, for the memories had begun to collide and confuse. Some days she'd lost her first child with Whaley to swamp fever. Others, her presence on this island was due to her rule as empress of Mexico. After Jefferson sent an army to depose her, she'd been sentenced, like Napoleon Bonaparte, to imprisonment on a remote island.

One moment, however, remained untainted and clear. Out one afternoon to milk her errant cow, wading into the water, the sound sucking her under, Daniels holding her there while the tide washed from her the hopeful fantasy that Whaley had returned to his wife and children. Thereafter she knew without doubt that Daniels had come for him, that he would one day come for her. She'd readied herself that night, though she'd tried to buy time by hiding the portrait behind the bureau. The space above the
hearth she avoided looking at as vigilantly as she had when it was filled with the likeness of her, for the ghost of that portrait—a rectangle against which the whitewashed walls had darkened with soot—terrified her nearly as much as the portrait.

Fifteen years passed, then twenty. Perhaps he was dead, Daniels. No, she would know if he were dead. She would feel it as she had felt, finally, that day she'd gone after Nora, Whaley's death. Her father, her legal rightful husband, Joseph—if they had passed on to some other sphere (and surely her father had by now, likely Joseph as well), she had felt nothing of it. She could not even summon shame over the nothingness she felt about the man who had groomed her to be the most highly educated and socially adept lady in America. Stray phrases of Latin and occasional snatches of Beethoven notwithstanding, that part of her life had been eclipsed by the long wait for Daniels to come for her at last.

One of the boys or Amanda Jane came by daily to check on her, but it was Hezekiah, living right behind her, upon whom she depended the most. He'd given up fishing for carpentry and most days was just out back of the house carrying on with his hammering and sawing. Two or three times a day he'd come to the back door and peer through the baggy screen down the hallway to where she sat in the parlor. More often than not he'd find her dozing. If she were awake and heard him she'd say one of two things:

“How many times do I have to ask you to come round front?”

Or: “Is that my coffin you're slapping together out there?”

Sometimes Violet would send Hezekiah over with something she'd baked or some leftover from their table as it was clear that Theo rarely bothered to eat unless someone brought her something by. Theo would always ask Hezekiah in to sit. No ma'am got to get back over to the house, he'd say. One day she would not take his no.

“Sit a bit. Please?”

It was winter, clouds hugging the coast to where she could not see thirty feet. She heard the sea but all that was visible was the final roll of water on sand, the part that delivered and took away.

“Right much a mess out there today,” said Hezekiah.

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.

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.