The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  “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?”

  He tensed. “I’ll not be beholding to that man for things I can pick up off the beach.”

  Before she could think, she pointed out how beholding they both were to that man.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Whaley. “You ought not to say anything when nothing is what you know.”

  “If I know nothing, it’s because you tell me nothing.”

  “Everything that goes on in the world is not your affair. Your husband is not the governor here.”

  “Fine,” she said. “If you can point me the way to his compound, I’ll go alone. I know it’s up past the big dunes, on the sound side. Certainly his lodgings will befit his station. I’m sure I’ll be able to recognize it.”

  “You go up there alone, you might as well slit your wrists right here and now.” He withdrew the knife he kept sheathed at his waist, extended it to her.

  Theo ignored the knife he offered, looked him in the eye. “You’re not telling me something.”

  “What I already told you, you’ve not listened to.”

  She feigned anger, but she knew he was right. She hadn’t paid much attention to his threats because she was too obsessed with recovering her father’s papers. All she had to do was smuggle them off the island, get them in the right hands, and her father’s reputation would be restored, for how tender and noble he was in those missives, how courageous and devoted a statesman and citizen did his journals reveal him to be. All the accusations against him would be exposed as slander; his plan for Mexico and the western provinces would be understood as advantageous to the common American good, much less threatening than French and Spanish dominion. And even if she were never rescued from this island, even if she spent the rest of her days the ward of a deranged pirate, pummeled by relentless, sand-laced wind, she would join her father as empress of his sovereign land.

  That day the progging was fruitless; she brought home only items passed over by others: rotten timbers, strips of sail, rusted iron rings from busted-up barrels. Whaley looked at the things she dragged over the dunes and went back to plucking feathers from a tern, too busy to even pass judgment.

  That night, while he snored softly a few feet away, she realized she would likely be dead now were it not for Whaley. Therefore it seemed only logical to put her trust fully in the notion that Whaley had been sent to protect her. Not by God, whose mercy was too celestial to concern itself with the assignment of earthly sentinels, but by her father, whose Aristotlean idea of love—a single soul inhabiting two bodies—had gotten Theo through many a night before she had even arrived on this island.

  The next morning, as they sat drinking tea by the fire, breakfasting silently as was their habit, she said, “There’s nothing left to find on the beach. I’m going to his compound today.”

  “You’d be better off walking into the ocean during a storm.”

  “I can swim.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said.

  She grabbed her ratty shawl and made a show of wrapping herself tightly against the elements, as if his resistance was also the cause of the wet gusts outside, the low clouds hugging the dunes. Spitting rain and high lonely call of gulls. Something in their song she decided had only to do with survival, for what would they sing about on such a gray day, in such a forbidding seascape, but sustenance? Their cry for food became, as she trudged through the thick wet sand, her own lament: Why did I leave? She had feigned fearlessness but now, alone, on her way to Daniels’s compound, she remembered poor Eleanor’s last hour, how long it had taken for them to bring her topside, how many of Daniels’s men, in the interim, had disappeared below deck. Eleanor had appeared relieved when Daniels had finally ordered her flung overboard, as if every breath after what she had endured at their hands was eternal. Just let me go to my reward, I’d rather open my mouth to the salty water and swallow, dear God let me go. She was naked and bloody and hugged her ruined clothes to her chest and in her shame she did not look at Theo, not that Theo was at that moment capable of seeing her. How, then, could she remember so clearly Eleanor’s last minute? In memory she had taken leave of her senses, but perhaps she had feigned that as well? Enough to fool Daniels once, and she had fooled him again when he’d appeared in Whaley’s hut, but what would happen if it were just the two of them, if, in private, he studied her closely enough to know that no God had touched her, that if she were touched by anything it was devotion to her father and his cause?

  The wind increased as she neared his compound, which was a good hour’s walk from Whaley’s hut. It stood on a rise, fortified by a stockade; smoke rose from the chimneys of the half-dozen houses built on high stilts above the sand. She took shelter in a nearby wood for another hour, her shivering induced as much from fear as cold. The gate to the compound was open but in the time she spent hesitating she saw not a living soul. Occasionally a dog barked and overhead the gulls kept up their song, but here it sounded less desperate, as if they’d been sated, as if they had fed off the obvious spoils gathered by Daniels and his men. And why shouldn’t she too take what he had offered? If anyone approached her, all she had to do was string along a narrative of opulent nights at Richmond Hill. Leave the poor touched soul alone. Even if she were caught searching for her father’s papers, she would be pardoned, for she wasn’t in her right mind, and had she not already achieved impunity?

  Breathing deeply, Theo picked her way out of the woods and into the stockade. One house, obviously Daniels’s, stood a story higher than the others and was twice as wide, regally shingled in shaggy dark shake. At the far edge of the compound, past a well and a shelter beneath which the ribs of several half-finished skiffs sat on scaffolding, she saw a vast pile of lumber. Splintered remains of shipwreckage. Someone else’s heartbreak, soon to be her salvation. But only as cover: the real bounty lay in the grandest of these modest, weather-beaten shacks.

  The words that came in a steady rush as she moved past the lumber toward Daniels’s lodgings were not the words in her head, though both streams honored her father, the articulated one nonsensically, the unspoken one meant to convince her that the risk was for good reason. When I have those papers in hand, he will come for me. This is what she timed her steps to when midway across the yard she saw only a low brown streak and then she was in the sand, kicking at the animal with the leg not lodged between its teeth and then Whaley was beating the dog off with a piece of lumber and the dog was limping off bloody and snarling.

  A throbbing in her left leg beneath the knee. With each breath it hurt more. Blood soaked the shawl he’d ripped from her shoulders to staunch the wound.

  “I didn’t see it,” she said.

  “You weren’t looking.”

  “You followed me?”

  “Just happened to be over here on my own business.”

  She thanked him and he grunted, as if to say, don’t thank me, don’t even acknowledge me.

  It wasn’t until he trudged through the sand to the pile of salvaged wood, grabbed a couple long poles, found a section of dry-rotted sail, fashioned a makeshift sling to take her home that she settled enough to ponder his arrival. She understood then: he loved her. Why else would he have followed? As he dragged her do
wn island, she thought of how ignorant she had been of the signs. Her back to him, nauseous and sweating from her wounds, she collected and cataloged those signs in a manner so consciously calculated others would have thought her manipulative. But even before she arrived on this island, Theo had entertained a broader view on this subject, about which she had devoted many hours of contemplation while courting Joseph. Taking some small advantage of a man in love with you was, to her mind, allowable if not exactly noble. What was love, in its incipient flush, but delirium, temporary leave-taking, derangement of sense and emotion? What had it to do with another human being, their unique traits, attributes, qualities? It seemed to Theo that those afflicted might as well be under the influence of spirits. Certainly they weren’t experiencing any reality she participated in.

  Therefore, using the situation to its advantage was not exactly manipulating Whaley, only his heightened and patently distrustful state of mind. The state was ephemeral; when he dropped back down to lowly earth, when he hurt again, was able to feel things dictated by cause and effect rather than some chimerical disengagement with reality, she would adopt a different set of rules.

  Back at the shack, he helped her inside, stoked the fire, fetched her water, washed and dressed her wounds. For the next week she lay recuperating from her bite, which Whaley kept plastered with a poultice of mud, hornet’s nest, and unidentifiable herbs procured from an island widow known for her remedies. The pain grew worse and the poultice smelled foul and itched worse than any of the thousand bug bites she’d encountered on this island; her fever continued for a day and a half, but discomfort only exacerbated her scheming. She found herself energized by purpose, now that she no longer had to worry about survival, which was ensured by two things: Whaley’s feelings for her and whatever he was hiding from her about Daniels. She thought again of Daniels’s visit. So assiduously did she reconstruct it as she lay recuperating, almost always alone, Whaley out foraging for food or firewood, that nearly every detail felt different. To begin with, she was not scared. What was there to fear from a man who burst in on them in the middle of the night and then offered building materials? She’d sneaked looks at Daniels, noted the way he looked at Whaley, the way he looked at her. Flames reflected in his fierce blue eyes. In memory there was light enough to study him, to see what she needed to see, though a part of her surely realized that the fire was down to coals when he arrived, and that, had she bothered to look up at him instead of cowering on the floor, she would have seen only a profile in shadow.