The Watery Part of the World (24 page)

Her daddy and other old-timers used to claim that if you saw a pig with a straw in its mouth, a bad storm was on its way. Whaley avoided going anywhere near Woodrow and Sarah's where the only pigs on the island might be sucking on straws.

Back on the sound side of the island the day was calm, near windless. She put it out of her mind, tried to get some work done. But along about noon Maggie came in from God knows where and said, “It's curious out there.”

Whaley, unable to resist, said, “How so?”

“No mosquitoes,” said Maggie.

“Wind changed,” said Whaley, her tone a shrug, a don't-you-know-anything edge to her words.

“It's fixing to blow,” said Maggie. “Where's Woodrow?”

Whaley did not think it time to tell Maggie about the dress. She didn't think that time would come, in fact. She said Woodrow was where he was always this time of the morning, out on the water. But she went a little further, though she did try to stop herself from lying. She said, “He mentioned something about needing to go to the store this afternoon.”

“He'll change his mind,” said Maggie. “If anyone can sniff out some weather, it's Woodrow.”

This got away with Whaley, Maggie's innocent yet wholly accurate statement. More the bit about Woodrow changing his mind, maybe. Whaley didn't want Woodrow to change his mind. She wanted the wind to shift, the storm to turn and head up the coast or stall out before it ever reached land, she wanted Woodrow to meet the ferry, she wanted her dress to wear when the Tape Recorders showed up with their cameras this time. One thing she did not want was her sister knowing the reason she'd sent Woodrow over there.

But now, years later, knowing what she knew, Whaley often wondered why Woodrow went. He could have said no. He wasn't her slave (though once Dr. Levinson had taken her aside and told her that Woodrow's great-great-great-grandfather Hezekiah Thornton had in fact been sold to her great-great-great-grandfather, a fact she saw no sense in ever repeating to Woodrow or Maggie either, as she surely would have told it).
No
was definitely a word in Woodrow's vocabulary, though she'd hardly ever heard him utter it outright. When he did not want to do something it did not get done. If it was something Whaley deemed doing, she'd ask him again. (Ask, not tell; she always asked, said Would you?, said Please.) If he did not do it, she'd ask-not-tell a third time. If he did not get round to it the third time, she'd leave off and either do it herself or find something else to stew about.

Woodrow must have known well before she did how bad it was
going to blow. Yet he went. Maybe he wanted some time off island himself. He'd spent years away, all because of Sarah. But knowing Woodrow like she did, she had to wonder why he allowed Sarah to take him off island for all those years. She knew he loved this island, hated being away from it, even for a night. Must have been love, though if that was what love did—make you court misery in order to make someone else happy—she did not want any part of it.

Whaley went about her business that morning, which was indoors. She scarcely looked out the window. What could she do about the weather? If it was going to blow, it was going to blow, only thing she could do was clean the yard and porch of anything the wind might pick up and, if it got bad enough and hit at high tide and there was a surge, head for the church, which not only crowned the highest point of the island but had a balcony built more with high water in mind than overflowing crowds come to worship a merciful God.

Midafternoon it started to rain. Lightly at first, an intermittent drizzle, but within an hour it was heavy and wind-sheeted. Maggie came in from wherever she'd been, wearing an ancient, peeling slicker the Life Saving station had issued their father, her hair soaked, her face wide with questions she did not let herself ask.

She did not say what they were both thinking. Their father's old ditty: Wind before rain, soon fine again. Other way around, get out of town.

There wasn't much talking during supper. The radio spoke to
them from a corner of the kitchen, Elizabeth City station with its reporting pitched to Knotts Island, Little River, and the Northern Banks. Morehead City station was only high whistling, as if the wind itself had taken over the studio and was broadcasting itself out to all those poor fools wanting the radio to tell them something they didn't already know. If Whaley thought at all about Woodrow it was to think, He's on his way home now, he and Sarah settling into their after-supper routine, whatever that was. All these years living just across the creek from the two of them and Whaley had no earthly idea what they did nights. She knew one thing, though, which comforted her: Sarah loved her radio, had it on from the time she got up in the morning, every time Whaley was by there she heard it blasting her gospel music, all the hand clapping and the Jesus shouting and the swelling organ chords. Sarah would have the radio on, in case Woodrow had not come back. She'd know anyway, with or without the radio, that a storm had hit. She'd know what to do.

Right out of the blue she said to no one—to herself, to the radio playing a song asking her did she know the way to San Jose—“What do Woodrow and Sarah do at night?”

The problem with her outburst was: Maggie in the room.

It took a minute for Maggie to get over the shock, visible in her wide eyes (actually she looked a little terrified), after which a smile took over her face, then gave just as quickly away to a familiar smirk.

“Must be the drop in pressure,” she said.

“What?”

“Making you all of a sudden curious about other people for once in your life.”

“I'm plenty curious, just not nosy. I'm not a gossip.”

“To answer your question,” said Maggie, uncharacteristically ignoring this jab, “seeing as how they are the only couple on this island, I'd wager that whatever they do, it's way more fun than reading aloud grocery store prices.”

“You
would
be thinking that.”

“And you
wouldn't.
”

Whaley figured she'd ignore a jab as well, though it wasn't easy.

“Lord, they've got, what, ten or eleven children? Woodrow's every bit as old as we are. I don't think it's on their minds every night.”

She wouldn't have been talking to Maggie at all—especially not about this—if she hadn't been feeling guilty about that dress. It was revolting, her speculating about Woodrow and Sarah's private business. But somehow it brought Sarah into the room with them, out of the rain and wind, safe, sheltered. Woodrow too. She thought of him every time the wind rushed up to drown out the radio, every time some debris tapped against the side of the clapboard.

Maggie crossed her arms beneath her chest and sat there studying her. “Well, we ought to go check on Sarah. She ought not to be down there by herself in all this.”

She was half out of her chair when Whaley shot up and nearly shouted, “Stay here, I'll go, you wash up now.”

Maggie lowered herself onto the chair. “You're acting strange, Theo,” she said. She never called her sister by her given name. She never really called her anything at all, but if she had to get her attention she'd say Whaley first, or Linda.

Whaley was in the mudroom, pulling on their father's peeling oiler, still dripping from Maggie's earlier outing, and then she was out the door.

What she found first was a stillness so total her mind and body were put to rest: there would be no danger tonight. But as soon as she got out on the beach road, headed down the hill to Woodrow's, the gusts came. She staggered into them like a drunk. The yucca rustled in the breeze and Whaley thought of how adjustable to the elements was everything on this island. Even, maybe, her sister, who she'd always thought of as fragile, weak, lazy-willed. Yet she'd survived. She was here still. She'd been here nearly as long as Whaley. To remain, she had to be stronger than Whaley gave her credit for.

As she neared Woodrow's the rain was sideways, and down in the bottom, where Woodrow's great-great-great-grandfather had chosen to rebuild his house after a storm came through and blew away both Hezekiah's shed and Theodosia's home place, the water had begun to pool. She felt it lap her ankles. She sloshed right through it, for even though she had years of evidence to the
contrary—quite a few deaths to boot—Whaley feared the wind more than the water. She could climb up to the balcony of the church, could climb even higher, up the steeple if the water rose that high. The water would not wash away the church, which had stood there now for over 120 years. But the wind could take it all away.

Even though she meant to fetch Sarah and bring her back to the house, where the three of them could weather the storm together, and Sarah could be closer to the church in case the water rose, Whaley stole up on the porch as lightly as a cat. She told herself she didn't want to scare Sarah, for who else besides her husband would come clomping up on her porch boards in the middle of a storm. She had never been down here to see Sarah. She'd always been here to see Woodrow and she always treaded lightly on the porch so as not to call attention to the fact that she was a white woman come to order around a black man.

She was about to knock when she heard that music. Loud as it'd be if the band were playing in her kitchen. Whaley figured the sound could not go any higher. She could have heard it up the hill to the house had not the wind been roaring and seething.

Sarah came into view. She stood on the threshold of that kitchen Woodrow'd tacked on to keep Sarah from having to tote everything up from the summer kitchen. She was holding her Bible and her lips were moving and she was swaying a little, to the music obviously, though when she came closer, into the lamplight,
Whaley saw the look on her face, pure fear, no sign of the comfort she ought to draw from songs praising his only Son our Lord, from the leather book she clutched hard to her breast.

Before she could even think, Whaley was tiptoeing off the porch. The wet wind nearly blew her back up on it, for she'd lost her wits, forgotten how to walk in a storm. You have to act drunk to negotiate a sixty-mile-an-hour gust. Forget your bones, flow loose in the hips, fluid, let the wind move through you. The rain, well, it hadn't bothered her on the way down but on the way back up the hill, every isolated drop stung like truth.

In the yard the island lit white with lightning, a quarter second's clarity: things were forever after changed. She heard a pop, the house went dark, thunder followed. By the time she managed to push open the door that fought her off as if the house knew what she'd done, Maggie had the candles lit, was fussing with their grandfather's old whale oil lamp, converted now to kerosene.

Maggie stopped her wick-twisting to ask with a look where in the world was Sarah.

“She didn't want to come. Said she was fine where she was.”

Maggie said, “Whaley?”

“Oh, we're back to Whaley now? What, Mag? I went down there, I asked her, I can't order her, she doesn't belong to us. She's got her pride, that girl.”

Maggie said, “It's just, Woodrow—”

“Woodrow obviously has nothing to do with whether she's got the sense to save herself.”

But Woodrow, of course, had everything to do with why Whaley lied. The truth is she never let herself admit her reason for leaving Sarah alone. For years when she thought of why, she pushed why quickly out of her mind. She knew it had to do with Woodrow but it was only now that Woodrow was gone, that the island was abandoned, that she and Maggie had been sent across the sound to die, that Whaley could admit to little Liz and the readers of the Norfolk newspaper and the whole world what she only vaguely felt that night in the storm: Sarah, sooner or later, was going to take Woodrow away. If Woodrow left, they'd all have to leave.

“If anything happens to Sarah,” said Maggie, “I'd say Woodrow's going to have something to do with it.”

“Nothing's going to happen. She knows where to go if the water starts to rise.”

“I ought to go down there and talk to her.”

“Nonsense, you're not going anywhere.”

“I'm just saying—”

“That she hates me and would rather drown than take my advice? I reckon it's you she loves.”

“We get on all right.”

“Oh yeah, Mag. She loved it when you spread sin all over her backyard, shacking up in her summer kitchen with your high school boy.”

Maggie fell silent. She was like the storm outside—any lull was bound to be followed by fury.

“I guess I'll be having that incident thrown back in my face until I die, won't I?”

“No, Mag. Just happens to pertain to the subject of how Sarah hates me but loves you.”

“Everything in your mind
per
tains,” said Maggie.

“What in the world's that mean?”

Another four seconds of calm. Whaley held her breath.

“Just that it must be very comforting to have everything all tidy and settled. Knowing you're right, having all the evidence of everybody else's wrongness—it must be nice.”

Whaley could not show it, but these words stung more than those gale-force-wind-driven raindrops. She did not want to talk anymore—in fact, she wanted very much to be alone—but she knew she needed to distract Maggie from the plight of poor all-alone Sarah. So she engaged her sister in a protracted and repetitive argument, the subject of which was the same subject they'd been arguing about for nearly sixty-odd years: who was right.

Sometimes, when Whaley sat listening to her sister tell her stories to the Tape Recorders, it occurred to her that there was more than one island. Three, actually—Woodrow's island, Maggie's, her own. The Tape Recorders never could get Sarah to talk to them, which Whaley secretly appreciated, for there was no telling what sort of fourth island might have emerged had Sarah got to tell her side of it. But the thought that there were three islands was not at all pleasing to Whaley. She tended not to recognize but the one,
her own, for the others seemed to her soggy and vulnerable places, no more secure than driftwood tossed about by the waves.