The Watery Part of the World (2 page)

Those that Woodrow called the Tape Recorders, down from Raleigh twice a year with their questions and their tape machines, liked to point out to Woodrow what they thought he'd not taken note of: three breathing bodies left on this island and a Colored Town right on until the end. But that was the way it was and the way it was going to be and Woodrow had a sweet spread of close to four acres where he kept his stock and in the season ran an ornery little garden, eggplant, radish, turnips, squash, beans, okra, watermelon, anything what would not mind some sand. He and his people had long since got used to staying off by themselves, though since it was only the three of them left, Woodrow was all the time having to cross the creek up to where his white women lived.

Sisters, but Miss Maggie had got married and then unmarried and hated to be called by Midgette, her ex-husband's name, so
she went by her first, not that hardly anybody'd be inclined to call her anything but. She stayed like a child on up into her sixties, dressed so don't-give-a-damn, like she struck out of a morning bone-naked and that ratty skirt and that nearly see-through, stretch-necked T-shirt dropped out of the sky and she scrambled into them only to keep the sun from getting up anywhere it might sting. She did not give a damn about a whole lot, clothes and what people thought she'd look like in or out of them either.

Lord God, her big sister cared. She cared about names, now. She clung to that family name of Whaley like the three of them clung to their island after the storms kept coming, though it was her first name, the one nobody ever called her for years and years—Theodosia—that really puffed her up. She'd tell anybody about her famous ancestor, daughter of some famous white man shot some other famous white man. Sarah used to say, Me, I couldn't go claiming some cold killer, I believe I'd be leaving him out of my tree. That's all she got to claim I reckon, Woodrow'd say, not really defending her, but seeming like it to Sarah, surely. But Whaley, well—she'd been named after the daughter of this famous killer and above everything she cherished a picture of the woman hung over her fireplace.

But Whaley would as soon drag up something happened to her great-great-great-grandmother than to root around in what across the sound had gotten up to 1970. Woodrow only knew this because his oldest boy, Crawl, wrote and said so. Woodrow didn't think in year-of-our-Lords. He thought: wind, tide, moon, blues running,
hog killing, oyster harvesting, when to plant his ornery sand garden. He didn't have a thing against numbers but now that Sarah was gone what really was the point of keeping a count? Crawl wanted him to know, though. He kept reminding him, as if it meant the same on the island as it did off. One night the three of them were sitting on the steps of the church listening to Whaley read aloud the grocery store ads, and Maggie read Woodrow Crawl's letter. Crawl claimed he'd given up fishing menhaden out of Morehead to run a club up near Lenoxville. Said in his letter he'd purchased this spinning ball for the club, had it shipped down from Baltimore, said the insurance on the ball was more than what Woodrow spent in a year. Woodrow didn't doubt that. He did not trade in paper or coin unless he was over to Meherrituck to stock up on store-bought for him and the sisters. He didn't see what a spinning ball or insurance for it was doing in a letter Crawl wrote to him. Didn't he have anything else to allow? Or was this what people wrote letters about, talked about, across the sound in 1970?

Maggie read aloud how Crawl said he'd spent all he'd saved up fishing menhaden on the inside and outside decor of his club and it was, if he said so himself, looking mighty fine. Y'all have to come up and see it, Daddy, all the High Life you can drink on the house.

Who did Crawl mean,
y'all
? Surely not the white women who he knew were reading his letter aloud on the church steps to his illiterate daddy. Woodrow tried to imagine the three of them stepping into Crawl's club. Miss Maggie would not even notice all the
black heads switching around to stare her out when she walked up in there—she'd be at the bar about the time it took for Woodrow to get in the door good—but Miss Whaley would rather swear on the grave of her famous ancestor than go in any club, much less a colored one with a spinning ball, insured or not.

Crawl closed like always, telling his daddy he needed to think about leaving the island and moving in with him and his Vanessa and all them kids over in Morehead and Maggie like always left that part out though Woodrow could tell what was not read, he could hear it in her sucked-in breath, could see the unread words tightening her eyes up under those reading glasses.

She did read, this time, about how Crawl claimed he was coming across in a couple weeks, bringing the young'uns. Told Woodrow he better get to work, catch them some croaker to fry. But Crawl liked to claim he was coming over there and then get busy with something else, inside and outside club decor, whatever it was people got busy with across over in 1970.

Then the letter was over but not over because all three of them knew what was left out. They always waited a moment or two in silence after the letter, like they were observing the words not read aloud, which did not make a damn bit of sense to Woodrow since they were the ones leaving it out. This time he could not listen to their silence. He jumped right in after the Your Son, Crawl, said, “Write Crawl tell him send us over one of them balls, we'll put it in the church, hang it up above the old organ, reckon that's what you do with one of them.”

Now what made him say such a thing? Why should he be the one acting all embarrassed because they did not want to tell him straight out the words his son had written to him?

Miss Maggie said, “I have no earthly idea what Crawl's talking about!” But Miss Whaley pretended she knew. She acted like she knew all about everything because she read the Norfolk paper. Well, part of it. Really all she liked to read were the ads. Every morning Woodrow poled his skiff out to fish for dinner. Most days, good weather allowing, he stayed out to meet the O'Malley boys out of Meherrituck bringing in the mail off the Pine Island ferry. “Be sure you give me all them flyers,” he'd say every time, and the O'Malleys would hand him a bunch of grocery and dime store circulars sent over from the mainland advertising everything. Miss Whaley liked to call out the prices at night. “They got turkey breast twenty-nine cents a pound! Look at these chairs, I wouldn't have one of them in my shed and they're wanting thirty dollars a piece, not a pair, I wouldn't own one myself.”

All it took to make Woodrow wonder how come he stayed around after Wilma was to sit around on the church steps long enough to hear Whaley say such things three times a night about a two-week-old manager's special one hundred miles away up in Norfolk.

But most of the time he'd never wonder how come he stayed. He'd never go lusting after some spinning ball, dancing up under it, imagining how such a ball, lit by special bulbs, would glitter diamonds all up and down your partner. He'd never get lost in a vision of him twirling sweet Sarah in a waterspout of diamonds
because evenings he'd sit on his porch and stare out across the marsh to where night came rolling blue-black and final over the sound and he'd say no thank you to some ball, we got stars.

Not long after Crawl wrote about his club—couple weeks Woodrow reckoned—he showed up on the island. Had three of his boys with him. Woodrow hadn't seen him in a while. Crawl was wearing his hair springy long and had on wide-legged pants made out of looked like cardboard and zip-up ankle boots. Woodrow picked up the littlest of the grandbabies, knee baby also named Woodrow, had some dried salt around his eyes from where the crossing had beat tears out of him. Woodrow wiped away the salt and some snot with a rag, then took the boy inside and scrubbed at his face, trying to be Sarah and Woodrow all at once, pushing food on the boys, some three-day-old bread with butter which they carried around in their hands like they didn't know what to do with food not bought off a shelf in a store.

Everything was different now with Sarah gone. Nothing was easy.

Crawl sent the boys down to poke around the empty houses waiting on their owners to come back, sitting up on brickbat haunches like a dog will do you when you go off for a while. Woodrow and Crawl sat on the porch and Crawl pulled out a pint of Canadian.

Smooth as liver, he claimed. “Have a drink, Daddy.”

Woodrow took a pull though he favored a High Life. Crawl talked on about his club. Night Life was what he was calling it. He had some pictures of it. To Woodrow the club wasn't much
from the outside: cinder-block hut, oystershell parking lot, big old ditch out in front for drunks to get their ride stuck in. He showed some pictures of the inside that was dark and red and Woodrow said, “Un-hunh, okay, all right, I see, that's nice.” Seemed like he made sounds, not words. He'd look up from the pictures wanting his grandbabies to come back. He wanted to take them down to the inlet and let them jerk crabs out of the sound on a chicken liver tied to a string, but when finally he mentioned going after them Crawl said, “Naw, we got to get back across.”

“Y'all can't stay through? Plenty of room for all y'all.”

Crawl reached down, tugged at his boot zipper. To Woodrow, boots ought not to come with a zipper, but it was Crawl's feet, he could cover them however he wanted.

Crawl said, “I reckon those boys used to electricity.” Then he added, all of a sudden loud, “Besides, we didn't come over here to stay, we came over here to get you to come back with us.”

Woodrow couldn't see himself going anywhere with duded-up Crawl. He smiled and asked after Crawl's wife's people who he used to know a little when he lived in Morehead, where if you asked him everybody put too much notion into how long and wide and clean was the car somebody drove around town.

“Everybody's doing fine,” said Crawl. “But me and Violet and the boys, we worry about you over here all alone now.”

When Woodrow said he wasn't alone, seemed like Crawl'd been hiding in a blind with his gun cocked, waiting on these very words to fly out of Woodrow's mouth.

“You know you don't got to stay here looking after them sisters until they die or you one. Those women don't have no business staying over here anyway. Surely they got some kin somewhere will take them in.”

“Them two?” said Woodrow. He didn't know of any kin, or even any friends except little Liz who worked for Dr. Levinson running his tape machine and slapping mosquitoes off his neck and making sure he ate something. Anymore, little Liz was about the only person he knew who even checked in on them. She wrote letters that Whaley claimed were only to her but whenever Maggie snatched them out of her sister's hand and read them aloud they always asked after her and said something too about him, How's Woodrow, Tell Woodrow I'm going to bring him some peaches, even once, Give Woodrow my love, which made Maggie snicker and liked to got away with Whaley.

“All I'm saying is, it's not your job to look after them. Older they get worse it's going to be. Least now they can still walk down to the dock to meet the mail boat.”

“We ain't had mail in three years,” said Woodrow. “I been catching O'Malley and them out in the channel when they come back from meeting the ferry.”

Crawl shook his head at this, as if Woodrow wasn't out on the water most days anyway.

“Come on, Daddy, just pack a bag. You don't need much, I'll carry you back across over here any time you want to go, let's get in the boat.”

The boys were back by then, sitting on the steps, listening in. Woodrow got up and hugged little Woodrow so hard the boy went to squirm. When he embraced the older two he felt in their slack muscles the beginnings of that eye-cutting stage. They would not be coming back to the island to see him. Woodrow even wondered if they were not old enough for Crawl to run his daddy down in front of them. Look at your old granddaddy fussing after his white women, what for?

He sat out on the dock, finishing the pint of Canadian that Crawl had left him, watching the sun sink over the water and wondering what he'd be over there, off island, across the sound. Now who would he be over there? This he could not say but it wasn't what they all thought: scared to find out. There were some things he feared—he didn't think you could live and not be scared of something—say the Pamlico Sound, known to go from glassy to six-foot seas in an hour. Other people, their strange and unknowable motives, scared him. The lonely time that come up on him after Sarah died, swooped up close overhead like a vee of geese.

Fear of what they'd be if they left the island might have been what kept the sisters over here, though they had their other reasons, surely. Maggie would do right much what her big sister said when it came right down to it. Else, why was she still here? Why didn't she leave when that Boyd asked her to go away with him? If she would not leave then, she'd not be leaving this island.

Whaley, well: seems like she stayed for when the Tape Recorders
come over from Raleigh every spring. Every April, always the fat bearded one with his bird glasses called himself a doctor but would not look at Miss Maggie's bad toes and for the past ten years little Liz, who Woodrow liked.

Whaley lived to get that letter said the Tape Recorders were due to visit. A good month before they arrived she spent setting up the Salter place where they stayed, planning meals, fetching items from Meherrituck, which meant Woodrow was the one running himself ragged to prepare for their arrival, all Whaley's errands on top of his daily chores.

The moment they stepped off the boat Whaley'd switch into her high-tider talk, what the Tape Recorders loved to call an Old English brogue. They claimed Woodrow spoke it too, though how Woodrow could have come out talking like an Old English did not square with the story they liked to tell about how he'd come to be on this island in the first place. Said Woodrow's people were brought over back when the island did big business as a seaport. Seven hundred settlers and one hundred of them slaves. Ships too heavy with goods to cross the bar needed their cargoes transferred to smaller vessels to navigate the shallows. Lightering, they called it, and his people were the ones did the lightering. That was before the war come and the Confederates turned tail and abandoned the fort over on Meherrituck and that time it wasn't a storm forced everybody off island except the slaves and a single white woman named Ophelia Roberts, so fat she could not fit through the front door. Like as not Woodrow's people took
care of her until the war was over and only half the population of the island returned from the mainland, according to the Tape Recorders. Then it was a steady dwindling. Ships went north to Hatteras where a storm had opened up a new inlet. Woodrow heard all this from the Tape Recorders and yet he'd heard other stories contradicted their so-called facts. His own father had talked about his ancestor, a man named Hezekiah Thornton his daddy claimed come to the island a free man. Never did a lick of lightering in his days, according to Woodrow's daddy.