The Watery Part of the World (6 page)

“She won't let go her picture,” said one of the men.

“Did you not try cutting off her arms?”

“We figured you'd want a taste first.”

The bloody-shouldered leader reached out to her. She said to the woman in the portrait,
I am the daughter of Aaron Burr.

“What'd she say?” one of the men behind her whispered.

“Said she's Aaron Burr's daughter,” said the leader.

“The one what killed that fellow in a duel?”

The leader put a bloody hand on her shoulder. He said as he drew his sword that he did not care if she was the queen of bloody England.

She smiled at the woman in the portrait who said, Stay with me, Theo. I will not let them harm you.

I will stay with you,
she said. Past the woman, beyond the gray horizon, a blue line of hills arose and in the middle distance the lushly treed forest lining the bank across the Hudson came slowly
into focus. Smoke rose from the chimneys of Richmond Hill. Under a canopy of linden trees in the garden, she dined with her father.

I brought you this gift,
she said to him.
I've come home to be with you now. Never again will we be parted.
She extended the portrait to her father.

“Let her go,” said Daniels. A creaking as his sword found refuge in its leather sheath. She felt the fingers on her shoulder loosen and fall away.

“Go where?” said a voice behind.

“Take her ashore,” he said. “She's our burden now. We cannot touch her because she has already been touched. By God.”

God's touch might not save her a second time. Whaley seemed to know the man and his ways; she ought to put her trust in Whaley, not Richmond Hill or morning mist along the banks of the Hudson, not the sweetness of peaches or Chopin's nocturnes. Whaley was real. At this moment he was talking to her, in fact.

“Best get to progging,” he was saying. He'd wrapped her some biscuits and a little leftover croaker in a cloth for her lunch.

She hesitated in the doorway to thank him, but when she did, finally, say the words, he waved her away. “Helps me too,” he said.

“I don't see how. Now you're taking care of two. Twice as hard.”

“Twice the rewards,” he said, then he dropped his eyes in shyness. “We best not tarry now. Wasting good light.”

She spent the day alone, scouring the coastline, pushing farther up the island away from the crowds. The farther she traveled, of course, the more distance there was to lug home whatever she found. So she made piles in the high dunes, lumber and some cookware—two pewter mugs, a lone piece of china—a strip of sail that would do nicely for a blanket, a few bottles she could use to fetch water. Within days she was lusting after not peaches but nails. Had the wind through the sea oats promised to bring her anything she wanted, she would have asked, hours before, for chocolate, books, Chopin. Now it was nails, a couple of hinges for her door, an ax, a saw, a hammer.

A week or so after Whaley brought her into his hut, he lay sleeping on the bed. That night as always he offered her the tick, but she would not hear of it, not that her refusal ever dissuaded him from going through the exchange the next night. Whaley's sleep-breath rose to a not-quite snore and rain pelted the piecemeal roof above her head, but what kept her awake was the thought of Whaley offering nightly his bed, the predictability of it, its link in a chain of daily occurrences she previously would have deemed quotidian. Ritual was just as important in her former milieu but it was understood so differently, as a pattern of society, a set of preordained rules observed by those who truly understood how life should be lived.

Civilization depended upon adherence to such a pattern, and perhaps for that reason she had always resented it. Joseph had his
next-day clothes laid out for him by his manservant by ten the night before. His family always decamped for DeBordieu Island on the first of May. Four o'clock came and tea was served, dinner at seven thirty sharp.

Why not go to DeBordieu early this year, she asked Joseph, whose patience with such suggestions made her feel all the more fragile. Smile at her every word, humor her at all costs.

On this island there was nothing static or plodding about routine. Survival was predicated on things being the same: the sea yielding food and delivering materials adaptable to your daily needs, the wind steady enough to keep the bugs away but not strong enough to cause the destruction of which it was so easily capable.

This is what Theo was thinking, lying by the fire, inches away from Whaley, so close she could smell his sleep-breath, when the door blew open.

Whaley rose so quickly she saw only his blanket, flung across the room. Then he was standing by the fire, gripping a piece of wood the length and thickness of an ax handle. She looked beyond him to see Daniels's face, lit only by the remnant glow of fire in the hearth. He looked her over once before his eyes sought out Whaley in the smoky gloom. He seemed unconcerned about the makeshift weapon, as if he knew it would not be used on him.

Theo kept her eyes on Whaley. “It's my father come at last,” she said, and curtsied low, her skirts rustling the tick. “Home to Richmond Hill. Oh, how they've missed me, especially the Missus Astor.”

“Hush now,” said Whaley, and she knew by the fierceness of the tone that he knew she was putting on a show, and because he understood she kept it up, speaking lovingly of peaches, cream, pinafores, her favorite quilt, a lazy cat tinkling the piano keys, until Whaley, responding to something else in the room she could not see, raised his stick above her head and let loose a string of oaths, her cue to cower among her skirts on the floor.

She hid her head in her arms and could see nothing, though this did not keep her stomach from clinching nor calm her quickened breath.

“Least you've got good enough sense not to touch her.”

“She's already touched,” said Whaley. “Just taking my turn sheltering her.”

“Who asked you to take a turn?”

“Nobody asked. But everyone else on this island has done his share.”

“You're not everybody else. The rest of them contribute. You don't do a damn thing but feed your face and grow your beard.”

Whaley said nothing to this.

“What is that you're building across the dune?”

“She was sleeping beneath an oak. She'd of died had I not took her in.”

Theo heard a yawn so protracted she thought it exaggerated. Then Daniels said, “I believe I will have me a dram.”

“Afraid I'm out.”

“You ought to be more afraid. Man lets you live on his property
for nine years and you won't offer him a sociable drink when he stops in.”

More silence on Whaley's part. Theo worried her ragged breathing was thunderous, that Daniels would feel her fear and know she was not touched, that she heard and understood every nuance of this conversation even through her nearly hysterical fear that Whaley, by sheltering her, had committed himself to certain death.

“You touch her, you're dead.”

“I've never once even thought of it.”

“I never asked if you
thought
of it. Not the kind of thing a man gives a lot of thought to.”

“Some men might.”

“You're not one of them.”

Even through her fear, Theo understood from what was said that these men were more than passably acquainted, though it was impossible for her to concentrate on much more than breathing, and pretending that the intake and expulsion of air was something akin to a prayer:
Please don't let him kill Whaley. All I have.

“No one else wants to harbor her,” Daniels was saying. “The wives are all complaining. As if I'm not keeping them and their brood and their sorry husbands alive.”

“Ungrateful bunch,” said Whaley.

An intolerably long pause. “You'd think a man's tongue might get a little less sharp if he went months without speaking to another.”

“Or a might more sharp, depending on the man.”

“Still having that argument?”

“Which?”

“What kind of man you are?”

“I've near decided.”

“I'm sure you have. No mystery what side you put yourself on either. You want to build her a shelter, might as well do it right. Come up tomorrow, get what you need. We'll not be there, but you know your way around. Take a nail more than you need and I'll be back for more than a friendly dram.”

“When did I ever take even my fair share?” said Whaley, but the door had slammed shut before he opened his mouth to speak. She watched Whaley latch the door, cross the tiny room, and pull a jar from a pile of wood. He drank deeply from it. She could smell it from where she lay by the fire. She had not yet seen him drink. On this island she'd seen much harm done from men drinking in the dark. His drinking made her all the more tense, for he'd lied to Daniels about the whiskey and he seemed to be fueling something raw and fresh with each sip.

She huddled, still shaking a little, by the fire. So much had transpired in Daniels's visit that she did not understand, and yet she gleaned enough to know that there was something between these men, a vestige of a bond that, however tenuous or threatened by Whaley's taking her in, might well work to her advantage. Daniels invited Whaley to his compound. For supplies. And
she'd knelt by the fire convinced that Whaley was about to be beheaded, that Daniels had come for her, that someone on the island had testified to her sanity.

Though she knew this was not the time, she could not help herself, for it was this night that Theo first realized how much Whaley had begun to depend on her company.

“He acted like he knew you,” she said, watching him closely.

“Of course he knows me. Knows everybody on this island.”

“No, I mean he speaks to you as if he really knows you.”

Whaley stepped out of the weak light of the fire, back into the shadows of the room.

“You go to sleep,” he said.

This made her angry—she did not care to be talked to like a child—until she remembered that it was his house, that she was, essentially, a child. Defenseless, useless, a dependent who contributed next to nothing to the daily toil of surviving on the island. And he was upset, not himself. Still, it was not easy to sleep when someone ordered you to do so, and she lay there listening to him breathe and sip his drink until the light seeped in beneath the door and around the chimney and she could make out his shadow still slumped against the far wall.

She started the fire, fetched his fishing pole outside, found the leather pouch where he kept his captured crickets, slung it over her shoulder, trudged off to the sound, flat and still in the dawn quiet. She'd heard him say this was one of the best times of day to catch fish, but she'd only been fishing from a boat in the Hudson,
and she'd had someone else—an older cousin, a suitor—to bait the hook. It took a full twenty minutes to get the cricket to stay on the crude hook, and another thirty before she managed to pull in two small fish. She worked out the hook with great difficulty and put the fish in the cricket box and turned to go. This was when Whaley let out his low chortle, morning-congested but so sincere and delighted-sounding that she forgot all about the night they'd had.

He was standing atop the dune, drinking from their lone mug. “You fish like a madwoman,” he said.

“These fish must be partial to lunacy.”

“Right now they're partial to my crickets. Pull them out of that pouch before I don't have one last cricket to show for all my hours of cricket-trapping.”

“But they're dead,” she said. She was alongside him now and he reached into the pouch and pulled the fish out and crammed them unceremoniously in his pants pockets.

“Not quite yet,” he said. “Takes them a while.”

Back in the shack she insisted on cooking. Bemused, he allowed her to take over. She was making herself indispensable. She realized how reliant she was on his mercy.

Seated with a plate by the fire, Whaley studied his food and said, “You don't cook much for yourself do you?”

“I had servants,” she admitted.

“I knew your husband was a gentleman,” he said, “but what exactly is his trade?”

She chewed a bite of crusty fish, swallowed, amused at how bad her manners had become. She said, “He has several rice plantations.”

Whaley nodded.

“And tea as well.”

Another nod.

“And he is the chief commander of the South Carolina Militia.”

Whaley's eyes widened. “Military man?”

“By virtue of his being governor of South Carolina.”

Whaley's face showed such confusion—for he thought she was joking, wanted perhaps to believe she was joking, but was led on also by some shocking filament of truthfulness in her voice—that she laughed, rather crazily.

He laughed too.

“Governor, you say? That's good work if you can get it.”

“Oh no,” she said. “It's a dreadful job.”

“I imagine I could get used to it.”

“You'd be terrible at it,” she said.

He grinned. “And why is that?”

“You can't walk around the governor's palace with fish in your pocket.”

“And why not, if you're the governor? Who's going to tell you not to?”

“A host of people. And you all serve them, not the other way round.”

“You sound like you're well shy of that role,” he said.

“It's true,” she said. She felt only a twinge of guilt in her words, for she felt at that point that she could tell Whaley anything.

Yet as she rose to clean the dishes, she realized they had not said a word about Daniels's visit. The marked shift in his mood, from his late-night drunken melancholy to this morning's alacrity, made her suspicious.

That night as they sat by the fire she said, “So are you going to take him up on his offer for materials to build my manor house?”