The Watery Part of the World (17 page)

“What was he doing on that island?”

“Daniels isn't one to explain a lot about his past.”

“You two have that in common then.”

What annoyed her most was not what he had left out—she hadn't exactly told him everything about herself either—but what he had led her to believe: that he too was touched, if not by God then by Daniels, God of these banks.

“We have more in common than I care to admit.”

She could feel the heat of his shame, how bright it still burned.

“I figure he got chased there and somehow survived, or else—and this is more likely—the bastard ran afoul of whoever took him on as crew, got tossed overboard, or left behind to die. Myself, I was a thief, I had no problem killing an entire crew in order to get my hands on a few hundred dragoons. But kill a man because he was hungry? I couldn't stand for it.

“My uncle was a drunk and a middling sailor. Daniels knew the islands. He'd been asea since he was ten years old, pirating to hear him tell it for nearly that long. That and his famous grand-daddy's only thing I ever heard him tell about his past. Long as we kept Clarence full of liquor, he'd never even notice Daniels was still around.”

“You came back here with him?”

“He knew he'd of died that night or starved to death on that
island had I not saved his hide. I never meant to spend the brunt of my life in the company of Daniels. I never meant to abandon my family for these pitiful dunes. But I guess at a certain point—around the time I run into Daniels—I had already started to realize I couldn't very well go back and pretend to be these young'un's daddy again. Or that woman's husband. Not after all I'd done.

“By the time we got back up here it'd been somehow decided: he'd set me up with my own boat. He claimed to have three ships at his ready. Turned out he had a barely seaworthy one and a half. He didn't lie about one thing, though—he said he'd take care of me for saving his life, and that he did.”

“So what happened between you then?”

“We made a lot of money together, for one thing. I had a house in his compound, a couple of women I called wives—weren't no more than girls, really. Eventually Daniels did set me up with my own ship. What it come to was, you know how they say you can choose your own death? I never believed it. I'm not much when it comes to fearing any God, but I do believe when it's time to go you're gone. You don't get to sit around deciding which door to take. Only it seemed to me, all that time on a ship with my uncle, watching him drink himself to death, he was going to die drunk sure as he'd lived every day of his life past the age of ten with liquor sloshing in his belly. And he didn't have to die like that. He could of chose not to. Name your poison, they tell you. Well, you can also name the medicine to take that'll cure you.”

She nodded sympathetically but still had to stifle a smirk. Was
he suggesting that, since he stopped thieving, he would be allowed to die a not-thief? It did not seem her place to point out the ridiculousness of his point, yet when she looked up, his eyes were on her and he seemed to read her thoughts.

“You're wondering how it is I think I can live with all the wrong I done? I guess most men like me think they're going to go down accountable for it no matter, no sense in fighting what has turned out to be your nature. I could easily accept that what I did those years with Daniels is my true nature. Or I could start doing some good or at least quit doing evil.”

That his admission, his sincere desire to change his life for the better would turn her stomach was nearly as distressing to her as the notion that she was only a part of his atonement. It was not love; it was rehabilitation. The old Old Whaley would have unleashed the dog and let him devour her; the newly reformed Whaley would stand above until she was maimed, then pull the dog off in order to right his wrongs. Not love but something akin to business, a transaction rendered on a payment long overdue.

“You've not told me what happened between you two.”

“I stopped robbing ships. I left my house in the compound, left those girls I called wives. I told Daniels he could take my share of it, told him I was tired. He thought it was God behind it all. I believe he fears any god could lay claim on you—or that picture of you—but not a god I could turn to in order to deliver me from my thieving ways. That God he's got nothing but hate for.”

“And he left you alone?”

“So long's I stayed to myself, on his island. He said he'd see to it I'd never starve, but I told him I didn't want his help. Said I'd make do somehow. Fine, he said, only one thing: if you try to leave the island I'll kill you.”

“But you saved his life,” she said.

“And I stopped doing evil and he hated me for it. He could tolerate watching me turn myself into the village hermit, but returning to my family, going back to the life I'd left—he could not allow that.”

“You give the man a great deal of credit,” said Theo, “by assuming that your reformation would make him feel guilty about his own immorality.”

“That's a generous way to look on it,” said Whaley. “I suppose it's not that complicated. He's superstitious, what it is. All I know is, only way he could cut me loose was to turn me into a island eccentric, tell his people to steer clear of me, let me alone, ignore me. That way he could keep on controlling me but give me the illusion of freedom.”

“Well, you're free of him now,” she said.

“I'll never be free of him.”

Whaley rose from the corner of the room, struggled up out of his dejected slump, as if telling his story had made him feel only worse. She wanted him beside her and she said so, but he left the room without any sign he'd heard her.

They lived together as man and woman sharing shelter and some meals, going their separate ways each morning and keeping
separate counsel, revealing only those parts of themselves that pertained to the business of survival: firewood, seed for the garden, could he maybe find her some tallow for new candles? In their stolid exchanges, Theo imagined at least the beginnings of an intimacy between them, something shared, the two of them against the wind and tide, inviolable elements that made life on this island a daily and vigilant calculation. She wished for more. Joseph was a blur to her now. Since they had arrived here on Yaupon, that life was even more murky. Even her son, Aaron, whose death had seemed so insurmountable, was only a vestige of grief. She could not even remember his voice. Even, finally, her father. There was no washed-ashore bottle stuffed with parchment lined with his loopy scrawl arranging a rescue. Should some party arrive to retrieve her, her scars would have rendered her unrecognizable. If not the scars, her limp, the blotchy complexion of her neck where the widow Royall had sewn the skin back crudely. Her once regal posture, weakened by years now of constant wind. Like the tree the island was named for, she bent to survive.

At least she no longer resembled the woman in the portrait. Not that she ever looked above the hearth, though her little cottage, built for the two of them, grew as grand to her as Richmond Hill, as adored. She did not like to stray far from it. One day after supper she was down island cutting palmetto fronds for a new broom. Climbing a dune she came upon Whaley washing himself in the surf. She'd not seen him since breakfast. His back was lit by the last brilliant glow of the sun. What compelled her to stop and
stare was not governed by thought. All those years in her youth spent in assiduous study, her father training her to be the smartest woman in America. No Latin came into her head to guide her, no quotes from posthumous philosophers. Sturdy Whaley in the sun-glistening surf; he was her husband and she was his wife.

That night she lay awake in the bedroom, restless under a thin nightgown, muscles taut, skin nearly feverish. Every drop of blood in her body pooling below her waist. She closed her eyes, she opened her eyes, same image preventing her from sleep: Whaley's sunlit back, surf breaking over his shoulders. Every time she decided to throw back the blanket and go to him, the thought that he might be repulsed by her scarred body kept her imprisoned in the bed. In time she heard his sleep-breathing, light snores, the pallet rustling as he shifted. She would just sit by him and watch him sleep. The fire was down to ember. Maybe she would just lie alongside him for a minute. He smelled of woodsmoke and faintly of saltwater. One minute she was watching light from the dying fire tint his skin and the next she was kissing his neck and saying how sorry she was to have taken advantage of his kindness and put his life in peril.

“Hush,” he said, pulling her closer, searching out bare skin beneath her night clothes. And she smiled. Her father had not raised her to smile at a man commanding her not to speak. Fleetingly she thought, my father is dead now, and then she did not think of him again that night, and she thought of him less and less during the years that followed.

Phillip came first. He came out screaming and huge, with Whaley's blue eyes and his father's distrust of stillness. Dear God, you were only the slightest part of my moral education, I scarcely know how to appeal to your eternal mercy, but please let this child live. Never again will I waste time craving peaches. She promised to treasure these people who took her in half-dead, hard women to whom she owed her life. About their lives she knew nothing at all, for they were not warm or convivial, did not waste time with gossip or empty ceremony, yet in their brusque way they were the kindest people she'd known, for they helped each other out without prejudice or condition. After Phillip was born, they had her up in a couple of days, canning, helping to mend Whaley's nets. He needs your help now, they said, and she was waiting for him nights when he came in off the water.

A year later there was a girl, Amanda Jane, and finally another boy: she named him Alexander, after her father's nemesis, as if to ward off the weight of the past, though she did not admit such to Whaley. He was good to the children, though he spent so much of his time away, fishing, working on his boats, or hiring himself out to others. As the children grew older she had more time to devote to others, and she worked hard to become one of those women she'd admired when she'd first arrived, silent and bent to the task at hand, pleasant enough but also stoic, held back. So convinced was Theo that this was the way one ought to live life, that she became zealous about her new direction. She was the first to arrive at the house of an islander in need, the last to leave.

“You'd be best to spend more time at home,” Whaley said to her one day. “The children need you.”

“They get on fine.”

“I need you then,” he said.

“For what?”

He looked at her funny. She'd surprised herself, saying this, but now that it was said she thought she might as well pursue it.

“Why do you need me, Whaley? What do you need me for?”

He looked at her sideways, slyly, reminding her of those mornings she first spent in his hovel, when they delighted in their shared status, wards of the State of Daniels.

“Nothing in particular. Everything you do around here, somebody else could do. Chores and all. But what I need you for ain't particular.”

“You're not making any sense.”

“Dammit, I can't put it into any sense. I can't say how, exactly. I just know I do. You want me to make something up or you want me to leave words out of it?”

She'd never had a man admit to feeling something for her he could not articulate. She'd never had a man admit to needing her, though surely men had; Joseph needed her to be the daughter of a famous man, the wife of a governor. Her father needed her to make him feel as if he wasn't a total failure. She'd confused these needs with devotion, and only Whaley, in his fumbling but sincere way, could make her understand how she could be needed for nothing at all, and everything.

Thereafter she spent more time with her Whaley and her children. Only the portrait remained from her life off island. For years she'd avoided the sight of it, though she knew it was there, silted with grime and dirt, dimmed by smoke from the poorly drafting chimney. I found it in the dunes after a nor'easter, she told her children. But Mother it looks like you it's your eyes your nose, they said when they were still young enough to say unchecked what came into their heads. Before she gave up trying to educate them about the ways of a world she had come to renounce and turned them into a team of proggers. Fan out and scour. Don't come home empty-handed. Silly babies, of course that is not me.

It was only an innocent question, the child had every right to ask it, the resemblance was still there even if Theo did not feel as if she even inhabited the same body as the woman above the hearth, though for weeks afterward she felt a niggling guilt. She'd meant to discuss with Whaley what to tell the children about her past, and his, but there were fish to catch and clean, a garden to tend to, old ornery Nora to retrieve from the marsh and milk of a morning. Had she ever managed five minutes free of pressing chore or needy child to discuss such a thing, Whaley was not good at discussing such. After all, she'd known the man over a year before he had spoken of his wife and children.

Some old island salt who claimed to have once walked across the inlet during a hard freeze said in her presence that the island stayed put but was always leaving. Every grain of sand underfoot different from the ground his father stood upon. And what of
her? Her humors were the same, but the molecules that made up her scarred body were nearly all new. Why bring up the past? She understood, stinging from the innocent query of a child, that the portrait would only haunt her household. She'd taught her children not to put stock in tales of ghosts and haints their friends loved to tell in the dunes at night, passed down from their parents and beyond, some of them set in the fens and moors of another windswept island. Why hang a portrait of a ghost above the hearth?