The Watery Part of the World (25 page)

The argument was not winnable or even decipherable after all, for it degenerated into a splinter argument about the way Maggie misbehaved thirty or so odd years ago. Even Whaley wasn't sure she had the facts so straight any more, though she did not say that to Maggie. Twice Maggie, insulted, got up to go leave the room, but she realized she would be alone in an increasingly threatening storm, and besides, fighting made the time pass. They argued. The radio, packed with batteries, had long since given over to whistling, and even if it had been working it would have told them things they'd
been
knowing, as by the time word of any storm got on the air on the mainland stations it had already hit the island and was likely out to sea by then.

Around five in the morning Whaley went to the back door to check on things. She saw the water then.

What she should have done was come right back inside. But instead she stood there, hesitating, trying to decide was it too late to run down there and fetch Sarah. Her being gone so long's what brought Maggie into it. Whaley heard her gasp when she saw the surge coming up past the clothesline, almost to the house.

“Good God Almighty,” she said. “We've got to get Sarah.”

“It's too late, Mag. We got to get to the church.”

“If it's up in the yard here it's bad high down there in the bottom. We've got to get her.”

“You go down there now, you'll get sucked right out in the sound.”

Maggie went inside. In a second here she came again, the slicker half on, an arm in, one out.

Whaley had to grab her. Maggie fought back, the two of them struggling out in the rain then. “You will die if you go down there,” Whaley said. “Sarah had her chance. Now you get your head on and come with me up to the church.”

Whaley held her sister until she went limp. Let Whaley grab her hand and lead her like Woodrow's old mule, Pilothouse, back into the house where Whaley grabbed some food and then the portrait off the wall, which she wrapped in a blanket and carried with her right up the hill to the church, through the rising surge, alive with boards from buildings down island washed away already, the other crazy things a flood will float right by you: an ironing board, somebody's bait buckets, a crutch. It was just light out. Water lapped the church steps. In ten minutes it had risen to float the purple pew cushions. They made their way from the pulpit through the cold water up to the balcony steps. It would have been plenty safe there, the water had never risen that high, but Whaley wanted to see what the storm had done so she kept climbing up the ladder to the belfry. There, in the cramped space aside the bell, she wedged herself up toward the window and saw Woodrow's half-flattened house.

Not the water but the wind. That flimsy kitchen Woodrow had tacked on out of boards washed up on the beach, some rusty
tin he traded the O'Malleys for—she'd told him from the start how it would not withstand even a moderate blow. Woodrow, stubborn Woodrow, well, no—he would not listen to any of that. Won't nothing wrong with that kitchen, he claimed. Just because material wasn't store-bought did not mean squat. In fact, it made it much better, for most of this mess had survived the sea, the sun, which made it even stronger, more likely to withstand all God sent to test it.

It's not the materials, Woodrow, she tried to tell him, it's that you're a waterman, no builder. His great-great-great-granddaddy Hezekiah was a skilled builder but most of his handiwork was long washed away, and after he passed, the Thornton men went back to the water. The houses on the island that had survived were all built by the same family—the Pender men, geniuses at constructing a dwelling uniquely suited to the limitations of sand, low water table, relentless wind, rising water. The rest of Woodrow's house had been constructed by Arthur Pender Jr. But when she told him this he said only, I don't know any not-dead Penders and besides I'm a little short to be hiring myself an arch-itect.

Now she had her proof that he ought to have listened to her, not strayed into areas where he had no expertise, but it did not make her feel any better. Soon as the water went down they'd go check on Sarah, but God help her she had the good sense to stay away from that kitchen.

Which God knows she did not. Which Maggie discovered herself because Whaley could not bring herself to go down there.
It was midmorning when the wind quit whipping at the stained glass and the quiet rose up into the balcony like something you're supposed to experience in church, a deep calm that entered you like breath, like air sweet and pure ushered down from heaven. Then the sunlight kaleidoscoping those windows, which she'd always found wasteful—she remembered when they were brought over in a crate from Norfolk, how the so-called stained-glass artisan who she figured for a crook took forever to assemble them in front of an audience of half the island who treated his show as if it was the Sistine Chapel getting a touch-up. Now the light slanted down through the glass and the colors collided in twirling prisms above the ruined pews and for a few seconds Whaley was taken away from the utter mess of the church and no doubt the entire island, which would likely not be the same as long as she lived there.

She struggled up from her slump against the back wall of the balcony where she'd been sort of sleeping. Maggie was gone. Whaley pulled herself up to the window, saw her sister picking her way down the hill, negotiating the ravished island. Detritus everywhere and most of it belonging to those who'd already given up, left for the mainland. What got away with Whaley was the notion that she was going to have to clean up after them.

There was no scream, no Maggie running back up the hill, but Whaley knew Sarah was dead because her sister did not seem any changed. She wore the same dazed expression on her face, took the same tentative gait, as if she'd spent the last twenty-four hours
on rough seas and was struggling to get her land legs back. It was as if she had known already, before she went down there, what she'd find.

Plus, no Sarah in tow.

Whaley met her on the steps.

“Well?”

“She's in the kitchen. All I saw was her legs.”

“Did you even check to see was she still breathing?”

“I felt of her leg. She's
been
dead. Go check yourself since you don't believe me.”

“I believe you,” said Whaley softly. She felt nauseated, but she couldn't say even then that she realized her hand in all this. More the shock of having a country of four dwindle down suddenly to three. She had a thought she wished she'd never had, but she had it: about how three is always a cumbersome number. Shifting alliances, two against one.

“I don't understand why she didn't just come with you. I mean, I never figured Sarah for outright wanting to die.”

Whaley said, “Just because she stayed behind doesn't mean she chose to die. She might not of thought the storm would amount to anything.”

Whaley remembered the look on Sarah's face, the Bible in her hands, her pacing up and down that hall. She remembered that awful loud praise-him-on-high music. She could hear it now in her head as if someone had put her inside the radio.

Whaley said, “I have to sit down now.”

Maggie said, “What's wrong with you?”

Whaley said, “I don't have the right to feel bad?” She meant to say “sad.” She flushed and a wash of nausea came over her and this time she really did feel bad, terribly bad.

“No love lost between y'all's all I'm saying.”

It helped the nausea to have something to get indignant about. She was thankful to her sister just then for drawing her into an argument.

“Don't you go getting self-righteous about her dying,” said Whaley. “We might not have got on so great but she's dead and poor Woodrow and poor Crawl and all them others to have lost their mama this way.”

“This way? Seems like a good way to me. I'd just soon get clobbered in the head by something the wind shook loose as drown or, worse yet, waste away in some hospital.”

“We don't get to choose, sister.”

Maggie sat down beside her on the soggy pew.

“We hardly ever get to choose. Oh, they're plenty of choices. Just look at the paper, you'll see they got all kinds of choices. But none of them are the right ones.”

Maggie said, “We need to get you to bed.”

“Take me home, Mag. I want to go home.”

Maggie tucked her sister in upstairs and trudged back up the hill to the church to fetch the portrait. But as soon as it was propped up on the sea chest at the foot of her bed like she asked, Whaley found she could not look at it. Something in the woman's
eyes, something haughty and defiant, that she felt she shared. It shamed her to think about how she'd gone on once, and on tape too, about the kinship she felt with this woman, when what she ought to have been talking about was the first days she could remember on this island in the house so pretty painted white with all the green grass like a carpet and the white sand. Ducks would light on the water so many they looked like an island. Decorations for woman's hats out of the plumage. Babe Ruth came, asked to meet Al Louie. My little sister and I we loved so dearly those cats.

When she woke it was dark. Light rain falling on the tin roof. For a full blissful minute she forgot everything—the storm, her lie, Sarah, the church—and the darkness she mistook for predawn of a new day. But then it all came rushing home to her and the black shadows of her bedroom turned sinister.

There was no power, no light—in fact, the power and the light would never return, though she did not know until weeks of darkness that the storm had severed the cable. Fine by Whaley, really, that the island moved backward in time.

Maggie sat at the kitchen table, the kerosene lamp dicing a circle of wavering light from the gloom.

“You let me sleep too long.”

Maggie got up and began to run water in a pail. There was mud on the floor, mudstains six inches up the cabinets, staining the legs of the table. The smell was rank and would only grow worse.

“I had things to do.”

An iciness in her voice. She would not look Whaley's way, much less meet her eyes. As if Whaley had been off on a drunk, had done something to bring unfathomable shame to the house.

“You've not been to bed?”

“I had things to do,” she said again. The water rose in the bucket. Maggie looked out the window as it began to spill over the lip, and Whaley just resisted the urge to tell her not to waste water, especially not now of all times.

“What things?”

Maggie sighed—or was it a gasp? A cynical snort?

“Sarah's body? I just couldn't leave it there for him to find.”

“Where is it?”

“In the church, laid out on the altar. He's up there with her.”

“He's back?”

“I said he's with her.”

Whaley scooted her chair back in the mud. As she was rising Maggie turned on her. “Where are you going?”

“I've got to go to him.”

“You leave him be. He wants to be alone with her.”

“He'll need help preparing the body.”

“I cleaned her up best I could with what I had. She bled to death? The roof collapsed and a piece of tin sliced her neck and she lay up under that rubble bleeding to death while we were safe and dry up in our white-people-only church?”

The way her sister turned statements of fact into questions terrified Whaley. As if these things were unbelievable, as if it would take forever to accept that they had a hand in these things, it would take amazing strength not to deny it all.

“She was certainly welcome in that church and you know it. Don't go changing what happened.”

“I don't know what happened. All I know is she's dead and we're alive and we ought to have gone down there and dragged her black ass up the hill.”

“What are you talking about? If you'd of gone down the hill when you wanted to, we would have lost two. I told you then and I will tell Woodrow to his face: ain't no sense in a person dying to save someone who didn't have sense enough to get out of the way of a storm like that one. You need to change what happened to feel better, fine. But you keep it to yourself.”

When Whaley rose again the chair shot back onto the floor. But instead of the snap she expected there was only a thud, for everything was muffled with mud now.

“I'm telling you Whaley,” said Maggie, “leave Woodrow alone with her.”

Whaley thought: she has the power now. She knows something and she'll hold it over me just like I held Boyd over her only what I did is worse than her falling in love, however foolishly. Still, the idea that Maggie was going to make her pay, that she would dole out oblique accusations for the rest of their life together, made Whaley want to scream.

But instead she breathed big through her mouth to avoid the stench and said, “How did you get the body up the hill?”

“Put it in a tarp and dragged. Why?”

“Why didn't you just wake me up?”

“Seems like you had some things you were needing to sleep off.”

Whaley thought of confronting her but did not have the energy. She would win this the way she'd won everything else: by being implacable.

But it was hard, harder than anything she'd ever done, especially when she laid eyes on Woodrow, saw how he was taking it. She waited, as Maggie suggested, for a few hours, left Woodrow alone with his bride. She even let Maggie go up there and help Woodrow clean the body up for burial. Woodrow claimed she wanted to be buried on the mainland, near Crawl; there wasn't any way to get word to the family save Woodrow taking the skiff back over to Meherrituck, getting on the phone, which he wasn't about to do and Whaley wasn't about to offer to do for him. He would just have to show up across the water with his dead wife. That was the way it used to be, before phones and all. Sometimes people went off island and died and you didn't hear about it for a year or so. Of course to Whaley's mind, once you went off island you were in a way already dead.