The Watery Part of the World (21 page)

It did not matter at first that his end of the island lacked a house, a dock, easy access to the channel, an acre of graze for what livestock the storm had not killed, fresh water, more shade than a scrawny wax myrtle. Acres of dune is all, some spindly sea oat, crabs crawling around like they had somewhere big to be at. Sarah's hand had made it—Woodrow did not take it as far as God, he'd as soon stop with Sarah—and Woodrow, in her honor, was going to make it his. He left off fishing to prog for whatever washed-up timber he might use to build a shack across over there.
But mostly he would make a little pile in the dunes of whatever the sea brought him, didn't really matter what, he wasn't what you call picky, and after he'd dragged a few pieces of waterlogged plywood to his pile, he'd lie back and watch the birds.

Hours Woodrow spent down there watching gulls, terns, pelicans, glide down the coast, light on a wave as if it were all of a sudden brought to a halt and turned sand dune. Woodrow envied a bird. He was a boy when the brothers flew their first plane up the banks at Kitty Hawk. There was some news that everyone on the island heard and had something to allow about, though only thing it had to do with any of them was that they might have caught some of the same wind had lifted that machine off the dune. Wasn't like any Lockerman or Midgette or Pollock or Whaley was going to go buying a ticket, flying up to New York for the weekend. Woodrow's mother thought it was devilish, this business of a man acting bird, disrupting God's own order. Sarah, too, put it down as foolishness. But Woodrow did not see a single thing wrong or ungodly concerning it. Afternoons lying across some sea-warped plywood on that slice of the island Sarah had made him, Woodrow flew so low above the water he'd wake to dampness above his lip, a moustache from the spray. He could not climb a dune without wanting so badly the breeze to lift him up and sweep him across the water.

He'd had these flying dreams before, back when he heard about the brothers' machines, when he figured he might as well dream. Not as if he'd ever climb his black ass up in a real airplane.
But now it didn't seem to be about bird or plane. More like he wanted off, wanted across; more like this slice of Sarah's could not hold him.

Another thing for Woodrow to not understand. He skimmed the waves and wiped the spray off his upper lip and said, I do not understand one bit of what has been delivered me. As for the sisters, he had no idea how they were getting on. Someone surely was seeing to them in his stead, lest they starve to death or sit bickering on the steps of the very church could have saved his Sarah's life, Whaley moaning about not having any grocery store ads to read aloud, Miss Maggie talking about where's Woodrow at, I need to see Woodrow, find Woodrow for me, not because she needed Woodrow, not because she had anything true or pure to relate to him or because she wanted to ask him how was he feeling was there anything she could do for him and God is my witness Woodrow Thornton I am sorry and so is my sister about what we let happen to your sweet Sarah, every waking moment I wish it was me the wind had took instead of her. No, it was more she needed him because she was tired of her sister. She needed something between her and Whaley. O'Malley could bring her over a big piece of plywood to put up on the church steps, serve the same purpose.

Sometimes he would come home past dusk mosquito-bit and hungry to find a stack of letters from Crawl and the rest of his children, but he did not need to know how to read or have them read out loud to him in order to know what was in them. He'd get
him a High Life he'd iced down that morning and sit out on the porch holding the cold can to his cheek and in the other he would hold those letters. Up from the creek the tree frog song would rise, spreading across the yard like fog and here come the lick right off those envelopes and there go the words, out into the marsh, same ones and sweet ones but same ones, over and over, Daddy how you doing, how you holding up, for a line or two before We got room, you don't need to bring a thing, come on over on the next ferry, or Crawl would be talking about I'll be over across tomorrow to get you, Daddy, you can help me out at the club.

Spinning ball, said Woodrow to the night crabs crawling. High Life.

One day he could not go back to that place Sarah had made for him. She would just have to not understand. He could not live off down there by himself. Well, she'd say, the white women make you feel more alone than the birds, but what it came down to was the three of them on this island that every one else had fled.

He went out on the water that morning, brought his catch to their front door. Whaley was as polite as she knew to be but clearly put out by his standing right there on her front threshold after thirty-odd years of coming around back. Seemed like to Woodrow she'd turned whiter in the face and way whiter in the hair. Maybe he was blacker from his days of lying back and smoking sweets and flying low over the breakers.

“I'll meet the mail boat,” he said.

“That O'Malley boy's been bringing it by occasionally,” she said.

Boy? thought Woodrow. O'Malley's nearly as old as she is.

“I'll meet him directly,” he said.

“Well, I know he'll be obliged not to have to make the extra trip over here,” she said, but he wasn't listening. He'd caught sight of that picture behind her, the one Maggie'd told him Whaley wrapped up and toted up the hill to the church during the storm. The one thing she'd saved; instead of Sarah, a picture of her ancestor roundly said to be a lunatic. Woodrow could count on his hands the times he'd looked at it. Certainly he'd never been invited in to stand around in the parlor and study it. The woman in the picture looked like she'd already left her body, but in her eyes was a sweet satisfaction of having finally understood something her great-great or whatever Whaley was to her would never fathom.

Whaley watched him staring. What, she said with every inch of her visible body; What, she asked, without saying squat.

“I reckon y'all favor some,” said Woodrow.

W
OODROW DIDN'T EVEN
bother building on again, just set his cookstove right up in what Sarah used to call the parlor, piped it into the chimney, lived in one room. Most nights he slept in his chair. He had everything he needed right alongside his chair where he sat evenings by the fire when it was too cold or raw to
sit out on the porch. He had everything he needed and yet his life was filled with lack. What went missing when Woodrow set up in the so-called parlor were all the things made his life more than just shuffling around his down-to-one-room widower's cottage, fetching dinner and the mail for his white women sisters, trying not to let anything anybody said or did or didn't say or do get away with him, doling his words out like coins the week before payday. The kind of life the Tape Recorders already had Woodrow living, no noticeable emotion unless you count indifference, no love, no hate, just hard work and evenings so quiet his voice box rusted shut. Finally Woodrow had become the type of person the Tape Recorders had been making him out to be since they'd come across with their tape machines and their questions stuffed already with the answers and those beekeeper hats they took to wearing to keep the bugs off of them.

One evening Woodrow crossed the creek to join his white women on the steps of the church. They saw him coming but acted like they never did. He climbed up the steps, sat and listened to Whaley read aloud her prices.

Maggie said, “Crawl wrote said you're going to be eighty this year, Woodrow.” She said this before she ever read the letter itself. Skimmed ahead to switch out the parts she couldn't bring herself to read, the parts where Crawl tried to talk some sense into his senile daddy, convince him that providing for two old fussy white women wasn't any of his. Whaley, sitting on the top stoop, had her flyers spread out and was not listening to a word of
Crawl's letter nor anything out the mouth of her sister. When she had her advertisements spread out across her lap on the church steps where the three of them would sit just like people in town will linger after supper to watch traffic and call out to neighbor women strolling babies, she was just not there. Had a two-storied green bus come chugging across the creek, she wouldn't have lifted her head to grace the sight with her reading glasses. Woodrow thought at first she was preparing to go off island by teaching herself what to expect to pay across over there for a pound of butter. But after a while he figured the flyers were part of what kept her here. She'd spit the prices out like fruit seed. She'd get ill at a bunch of innocent bananas for costing highway robbery, she would read her prices like Maggie would read the letters to the editor, taking sides and arguing with every one of them, My land the way people live in this world, she'd say every night when it got too dark to read and she folded up her newspaper like the Coast Guard taught Woodrow to fold a flag, that careful, that slow, like a color guard was standing at attention waiting on her to finish.

“Crawl don't know nothing about how old I am,” Woodrow said to the water, to the wind, to the sand fiddlers, to anyone or anything but the company he was keeping at that moment in time.

“Old enough to know better,” said Maggie.

“Too old to change,” said Whaley.

They weren't talking or even listening to each other, and down the road Woodrow might just decide they weren't really talking to him either, for what they said they could have easily said about
themselves, Woodrow figured when he let it settle and studied it. But at the time the words just spilled out of their mouths and hung there, and the white women, sisters, moved right on through time continuous, though Woodrow, to whom they had supposedly been speaking,
about whom
their comments were supposed to be describing, was stuck down on the birdshit southside.

“Why can I not just come across,” he said to Sarah that night as he lay talking to her in the dark. He told her what the sisters said and he listened to what she had to say back. Their conversation was surf on the beach, claiming ground and then receding, sea listening to the land, then offering more words, steady rhythm into the night.

How come you let what people say get away with you so much, said Sarah, and Woodrow never did answer because she knew how bad people could hurt him with their words. Woodrow just hurt. They'd both been knowing that. And here he was on this island with no one left to hurt him anymore but Maggie who was too sweetly dizzy in the head to hurt much and Whaley who Woodrow thought he knew every which way she had of hurting him but she was good for coming up with a new one.

Sarah had snipped him off his very own island but he could not stay across over there.

“Y'all ought not to have done me like y'all done me,” said Woodrow. I've seen dogs done better, he started to add, but what he said was more than he'd said in months. More, maybe, than he'd ever said to anyone in his life.

He got up and picked his way through the laid-out advertisements, down the steps of the church. The village he walked across to home that night looked just as it used to be when he was a boy, the two stores stocking shoelaces and bolts of colored cloth, the old hospital and the post office with over fifty boxes in the walls, little glass windows Woodrow would peek through and pretend he was looking right inside something mysterious—the innards of some complicated machine, some smart so-and-so's brain—like he was being offered a sneak at the way things worked in this life.

High above his head the church bell chimed out the hour like it used to when anyone on the island had anywhere to be at. Down by the dock island boys, squealing, seal-slick naked, splashed in the inlet. Whatever he said, it wasn't going to fill his lack or make him spread his mess out of his lone widower's room. He felt bad for saying it, for even though Maggie, who was eat up with guilt, born with it the way some children come into being with two extra toes, would like as not beat him across the creek to apologize, he'd not hear mention of it from Whaley one way or the other. She'd think him weak, though, for saying it out loud. All those years he'd known her he'd heard her only once say she was sorry, in the church that day Sarah laid across the altar kerchiefless and what Whaley really meant by sorry was It's awful what happened while you were gone, how the wind took Sarah, I feel for you. Not: I'm the one done this, Woodrow Thornton, as God is my witness will you ever forgive me?

Spite keeps that woman's motor running and that's all, Sarah used to say. Somebody cut the spite off and you might as well start sawing on her coffin. What he'd said—y'all ought not to have done me like y'all done me—was just shoveling coal at her spite. But if you don't say anything, Sarah said to him that night as he lay in bed talking to her, you stay her back-door nigger right on.

When she talked like this Woodrow hurt even harder for not taking her off island when she wanted to go. Last time they'd lived off island had been in Norfolk, in the nineteen and sixties. Everybody carrying on. Army off fighting someplace he'd never heard of, trying to beat somebody people told him never did do anything to any United States of America in the first place. White boys growing their hair long and putting all kinds of mess down their throats, women walking down daytime streets wearing an outfit you used to have to buy a dirty magazine to get a peek at, colored people, his own children even, bushing their hair out and taking new names made no sense to the sound. Crazies popping out the windows of tall buildings shooting presidents and preachers, mobs lighting cities on fire. We're going back across, said Woodrow, and when Sarah tried to tell him wasn't anywhere else safe left in this world, Woodrow said he favored wind over hellfire, said he'd rather let the wind or the water take him out than die choking in a high-sky tower with a brick lawn and blue lights streaking the night instead of the sleepy sweep of the lighthouse over on Meherrituck.