The Watery Part of the World (22 page)

“I reckon I better get to work,” Woodrow said to Sarah when
sleep would not come to him and seemed like everything he said got away with her big time. To keep on arguing in your head nights with the one who showed you how to love. Now what was that? Was it still love? Was it miss? Habit? Seemed to Woodrow love was just as hard now that Sarah was dead and gone, and in some ways even harder, for who did he think he was fooling when he got up and pulled on his waders and packed himself some bologna biscuits and a can of syrupy peaches like he liked and boiled up last night's coffee and poured it in his thermos and took his flashlight out to search the weeds in front of the house for the stub of a Sweet he might have thought he'd finished one day when he was cigar flush? Sarah knew what he was up to. When she was alive she had been no easier to fool than God in heaven and now she was up there looking down on his every move and seeing right through the walls of his heart to whatever hurt he was hiding. Will it ever get any easier, Woodrow said to the sand fiddlers he'd sent sideways into their holes with the beam of his flashlight. Woodrow let the light play over the marsh, wishing he could follow the crabs down underneath the island, though there was no escaping Sarah.

“Y'all be around way after I'm gone,” he said to the crabs. “Y'all wait, y'all still be here when this house is nothing but some rusty nails in the sand.” He imagined his crabs crouched just below ground, ready to spring right back out once he switched his light off and gave up on trying to find something to smoke himself awake good, imagined their big pop eyes staring right at him now,
maybe their ears poked up listening to this sad old man out talking to the island like it cared to listen.

Woodrow cranked his outboard and throttled slow through the inlet toward the sound. The night was still and big, white-hot stars and huge moon. Sarah I just can't sit up in that chair all night when there's enough moon for me to find my pots. Woodrow talked out loud to her to hide the thought he had and hated and could not let loose: that, had she lived, she'd have left him, gone on across without him, fed up with Whaley's mouth and Maggie's stumbling across the creek in her dirty shirt to interrupt her radio with a whole bunch of Where's Woodrow at? Worse than her leaving, that he'd have let her go, would have stayed on just like he was doing, providing for the sisters, getting hurt over not much of nothing, wasting his last days waiting on that wind, the big one that would take the three of them off island.

Checking on the first of his pots, Woodrow let the rope slide slowly through his hands, lowered the empty pot into the deep, cut the engine. What was his hurry? He had a good four hours until it heated up out, and if the sisters needed him for something, well, hadn't they proven when he was down island lying back bird-watching that they could get on by themselves? If he went first, like they claimed likely for men, the sisters would have to leave. They might have managed those couple weeks while Woodrow sulked and cussed their cold hearts and tried to catch a ride with every wave-skittering bird, but if he up and left now, for good, wasn't any way the sisters could stay.

Peering back toward the island, Woodrow saw only a low dark line on the horizon, but when he lay back in the boat and lit a Sweet he saw sudden movement behind the smudgy glass of the window boxes in the old post office. Was it his big secret come to him after all these years? Would it let him know how come certain things would not aggravate most men in the least got away with him big-time and would it tell him what made him stay on the island tending to his white women sisters and why was it that love was harder now that Sarah was gone? Woodrow thought about how the Tape Recorders had wasted yards and yards of tape on the wrong questions, and he thought about making a list of those he would give a straight answer to, having finally figured out himself which questions were the ones to ask. He fiddled with the locks on the little glass post office boxes, opened one right up, stuck his hand in. Wiggling his fingers around in that secret inside felt familiar, warm, toes in wet sand, the slick of bait as he hooked a line. Woodrow smiled and puffed on his Sweet. He closed his eyes knowing he would not leave the sisters on the island because here he was taking the island with him, right across the sound, him and the wind.

Morehead City, North Carolina

WAITING IN HER ROOM
for little Liz to show up with her tape recorder, Whaley sat in her wingback under the portrait of her great-great-great-grandmother, thinking over what she was going to tell. This would be her last session with the Tape Recorders. There was a time she could not imagine not having another story to tell Dr. Levinson and little Liz, but now that she was stuck in what they were calling a nursing home (wasn't much nursing to it far as she could see, just uppity girls shoving people out into the halls or back into their rooms and a once a week doctor asking you rude questions about your bathroom habits and a whole lot of people a whole lot worse off than she'd
ever
be talking crazy talk and wetting themselves) across the sound from that island where she was born and planned on by God dying, she was all of a sudden tired of talking about it.

Life on the island, that is, which is what they were wanting to
know. Dr. Levinson and his team loved interviewing her best because she alone kept the old ways alive, if not in practice, then in memory. She understood and appreciated the past. Maggie liked to say she lived in it. Maggie claimed she wouldn't know the here and now if it up and crawled in bed with her. Leave it to Maggie to go talking about something crawling into bed with her.

Whaley never set out to become the official island historian. Just that the others were not fit for the job. Somebody points a tape recorder in your face and asks you to just tell a story, nine times out of nine that story's going to be about you. Whaley kept herself out of it. She told how they got by back then, how they made do.

Whaley got up and rang the buzzer for a gal to come bring her another chair so she and Liz could set up by the window overlooking the sound. At first they'd stuck her on the highway side of the building and she raised Cain, said she'd take over the dayroom, which had three windows featuring the waterway and nobody even bothering to look outside in favor of that television they kept on all day and night even though half of them in there were too deaf to hear it. But within a week, somebody over on the sound side passed. Maggie accused her of foul play, but Maggie too wanted a water-side room so she could sit and watch the sailboats and yachts streaming by all day long, open the windows and listen to the water lap the shore when they had a little wind.

Here they were, still sisters, all that was left of the island, sent to spend their last days on the mainland. Woodrow gone,
the island run by the Park Service, half the houses rented out to hippie-looking things, come to rough it for the summer. Back to the land, they declared. Most of them lasted a month or less. Mosquitoes got to them. She knew a dozen ways to ward off bugs but wasn't about to share them with any stranger trudging up the beach road pulling along a generator on a child's red wagon. She wouldn't even share her bug secrets with Liz or Dr. Levinson; do, they'd turn around and put it out there to the public, and the bugs were the only thing keeping people off the island now. Lack of electricity didn't seem to stop them, nor storms.

Little Liz would be wanting to talk about Woodrow and them, their so-called social dynamic. Whaley told her on the phone, Sure, honey, come on down, I'll tell you all about it, but when she mentioned to Maggie what Liz was after, Maggie turned sullen and cold and had kept it up for a full week now. Though they'd been known to go months coddling hurts, had even let some things fester for years without talking them over (Sarah's death, for one; Maggie's next-to-last trip off island, for another), lately they'd both been trying harder not to let things get away with them so bad. Part of it was just being so old, not having the energy to go around holding in hurt, real or imagined. Most of it, though, was that it was just the two of them now, and even though they were off island, across the water in a place she'd always said she'd as soon die as settle over here with all the others who turned tail and left over not much of nothing but a squall, they
were
the
island, only bit of it left, two old sisters so far from their cottage on the briny deep, precious close to their time to die.

Whaley thought the only way to keep the island alive was to tell about it: how it was. Maggie disagreed—said she'd rather sit in the dayroom watching
Dialing for Dollars
with the droolers than hear her sister expound on the Social Dynamic of Yaupon Island in Its Very Last Days, Home Only to Two Old White Women and a Black Gentleman. She said she'd stick her head in and say hey to little Liz, who wasn't so little anymore—it'd been ten, fifteen years since she showed up on the island toting Dr. Levinson's fancy recording equipment around, a tiny thing studying for some degree or another up at Chapel Hill. She was married now and had two or three children, and her husband let her pick right up and drive by herself down to Morehead to spend a couple days tape-recording an old lady in a nursing home. Whaley couldn't say she understood it over here, the way people acted. She couldn't say she liked it either. Morehead was loud and dusty and ugly as sin, laid out like it was along a road so busy they split it into two halves and run train tracks down the middle. The town was built back up off the water so there wasn't any breeze and the houses lining the sound were built so close you couldn't park a skiff between them. Across the water lay Bogue Banks, overrun with tourists for whom they'd ruined the island with tall hotels and a trashy boardwalk and something called putt-putt, a game you played with golfing sticks and balls and
two-story plastic alligators. Good God, the houses over there. People called them cottages, but wasn't any cottage to it. They looked like they'd sleep a third of Yaupon in its heyday, some of them. The doctor who came by to check on her claimed he owned one. Whaley asked did he stay over there all year long, doctor said, Tell you the truth Miss Whaley I don't get over there near as often as I'd like. Four or five times this summer is about it, he said. Rest of the time he stayed up in New Bern. Had him two houses not fifty miles apart.

Nights Whaley had to pull her curtains to block out all the twinkling lights of Atlantic Beach. Back home on the island she didn't even need any curtains.

Liz had asked her on the phone to write some things down, all she could remember. She best be buying the paper, Maggie said when she heard it. Maggie resented Whaley for her memory. Blamed her for paying attention. She was jealous, surely. She didn't have too much she wanted to remember.

That Boyd.
Though Whaley assumed her sister was long over him, it occurred to her more than once since they'd arrived in Morehead that Maggie might try to look the boy up. Though he was hardly a boy now—over fifty he'd be. She never brought it up, for it was one of those things they never had talked about.

That was a story should never be heard: how Maggie threw herself at a near boy, shamed herself and her family name and eventually the whole island when she went across the water looking for him. Whaley stayed mad at Woodrow for years, him and
Sarah both, though it was easy now to forgive Sarah for everything, considering what happened to her, Whaley's hand in it.

Which was what she was wanting to tell Liz. Telling it might make it easier to live with, though she realized she was a hypocrite for claiming so, as every time her sister tried to talk about that Boyd after he left her, Whaley'd cut her off. She felt bad for that. But in a way she had no choice but to tell what happened to Sarah. If little Liz really wanted to know about the social dynamic between the three of them, what happened when she sent Woodrow over to Meherrituck that day changed everything. Plus, she'd given Dr. Levinson and them everything else: the family trees, the accent, the odd sayings, the recipes for making candles and soap, how to cook loon and the correct way to string a net between dunes to trap morning robins, the famous personages who visited the island back in its heyday as a bird hunting paradise, including Babe Ruth and Grover Cleveland. She'd given them everything she had known about her great-great-great-grandmother Theodosia Burr Alston and Theodosia's famous traitor father, Aaron Burr, how the ship carrying Theodosia ran aground off Diamond Shoals and how her life was spared by Thaddeus Daniels, black-heartedest pirate of them all, because she appeared to be “touched by God.”

Once, with Dr. Levinson egging her on with his “fascinatings” and “interestings,” she'd even revealed how she'd sometimes thought of herself as the reincarnation of Theodosia's spirit. After all, she was the only one who had been named after her in
several generations. More curse than blessing, actually: it was such a cumbersome and antiquated name that for years, after her parents died, she went by her middle name Linda, though changing your name after the age of six months in a place so small was a frustrating endeavor. You really need new people in your life to change your name, and for many years new people were as rare on the island as fresh fruit. Most people just called her Miss Whaley. Prematurely, in fact—they started calling her that when she wasn't yet thirty—but she knew there was something stiff and self-righteous in her demeanor that encouraged them to treat her like a spinster.

But it wasn't just the name. Whatever she'd gone by, she'd still have felt the vestiges of some former and indomitable greatness. Theo, as she referred to her in front of the Tape Recorders, had dined with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, her father's enemy Hamilton; she'd entertained the highest social order in New York and Charleston, had served as official hostess for her husband, governor of South Carolina. She spoke French, played piano, and had been unique among the women of her time for studying Latin and Greek and reading ancient history. Whaley did not in general give a damn about high society or excess schooling—she was way more concerned with putting away enough beans and squash to get her and her dreamy sister through the winter—but there was this other part of her who had lived it all, balls and visits to the White House and fine dresses and expensive wines. As she told it all to Dr. Levinson she was slightly aware that she
was presenting as handed-down fact and lore things she had read in books special-ordered from off island, but this hardly seemed an infraction, as Dr. Levinson and little Liz responded so passionately to her confession that she decided in the moment to take them over to the house to see the portrait of Theo that hung over the mantel, which hung now over her bed in the nursing home. As she led them from church to house she told how Theo and her great-great-great-grandfather Claxton Whaley had broken into Thaddeus Daniels's compound near Nag's Head while the crook was out thieving and had stolen the portrait that hung over his mantel (according to local gossip, Daniels actually prayed to it, confessed his sins to it, was rumored to be driven mad by it), loaded the portrait into a skiff, and paddled south down to Yaupon, how after Theodosia's death of a stroke while she was hanging out the wash, her children found the painting hidden in their mother's bedroom, how it hung in Aunt Mandy's parlor, which was where Whaley first remembered seeing it as a young girl playing with Mandy's fat tabby cats.