“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.
“I’m so sorry, Woodrow,” she said to him that afternoon in the church. He wouldn’t look at her, which wasn’t anything new. He mumbled something she didn’t catch, which Maggie obviously heard, for she looked to her sister for interpretation—sometimes Maggie understood Woodrow better because she followed him around like a toddler—and saw her sister wince. Later, when she asked what he’d said, Maggie had sighed and left the room. She never did get it out of her.
“It wasn’t anything I could do,” she said. “We would of lost another one, going down there to get her.”
Woodrow turned to her then, finally. He said, “I know, Miss Whaley. Wind wants to take you, can’t do nothing to stop it, can you?”
This made her feel worse, and though more words passed between them, and Woodrow went on to outright accuse her, when she said everybody’s time is going to come, of helping Sarah’s time come, she told herself that it was the wind.
And they did not speak of it again. Woodrow took Sarah across the water that very day, buried her in the churchyard where Crawl and them worshipped. He was back within a week. For a while they saw nothing of him. He spent his days off by himself, down south where the storm had chewed a new inlet in the island. She had no idea what he did down there. She spent a lot of time outdoors trying to catch sight of him, but if she saw him at all he was moving away quickly, over the dunes, in and out of hammocks, blurred by shimmering heat, an apparition.
Then one day he turned up with a sack of croaker he caught. First time since she’d known him he ever came to the front door. She hardly knew how to act. Her jaw muscles ached from smiling. They stood there for a long time without saying anything, Woodrow looking over her shoulder at what she finally figured out was the portrait of Theo. Before he left he allowed as how they favored some. She never did know what to make of that, though afterward she took to trying even harder never to look above the hearth.
The Tape Recorders came not long
after Sarah’s death, having read about it in the paper. They were all hot to talk about the New Dynamic. Maggie said to Whaley, “Don’t go talking to them about all that. Have some dignity.”
“You’re going to lecture me about dignity?”
“Go ahead and throw it in my face if you want, every bad thing I ever done. But look: I’m not about to go telling them things that Woodrow wouldn’t want them to know.”
“How do you know what Woodrow wants anybody to know or don’t?”
“I know he wouldn’t appreciate it, you talking about Sarah to them. He’s a private man. And listen: there’s only three of us now. Ain’t no black and white left as far as I’m concerned. We might be kin, but he’s as much a part of the family as we are, you ask me. If he wants to talk about his wife dying in the storm, let him talk about it. But if he doesn’t bring it up, that doesn’t give you the right to tell it.”
“You act like I’m going around gossiping. What these people are doing is important, Maggie. Without them the history of this island would be lost. No one else is going to tell it. And if we don’t tell it the way it happened, they’ll just make it up to suit them.”
“So you’re going to tell it the way it happened?”
Whaley reminded herself that her resolve was this island. Without it, even Woodrow would have given up long ago, followed Sarah to the mainland. All she had to do was act right.
Still, it was a victory for Maggie, for the Tape Recorders did ask, and she told them she’d rather not talk about Sarah’s death, it was too soon, too raw still, and even Dr. Levinson, who had a way of needling you until you told him things you didn’t even know you knew, left off then.
Slowly Woodrow came back to them. Nights when the breeze kept the mosquitoes away and some when it didn’t they’d sit together on the steps of the church. Whaley would read out her prices from the paper and they would discuss the ways the world had gotten away with them.
One night they were out on the steps. It was early spring and so clear the stars popped out before the sun went down. They’d had an early supper, had met up at the church; Whaley had a fat stack of prices to get through. Some of them were fixed to items she had no iota what they were talking about. A Weed Eater? A microwave?
That night, Woodrow had a letter from Crawl. Maggie read it aloud for him. Crawl claimed Woodrow was about to turn eighty. Whaley knew Woodrow was older than her but she did not figure him for eighty.
When Maggie finished reading the letter, Woodrow said, “Crawl don’t know nothing about how old I am.”
Maggie said, “Old enough to know better.”
Whaley said, “Too old to change.”
She wasn’t exactly joking, but she did not mean for him to take it so seriously. She saw immediately that what she’d said hurt him, for he made like a bug had bit his neck and slapped himself so hard she started. For the life of her she could not figure what got away with him so bad. They were all three too old to change, and what of it? What was the point in changing your life when it was nearly over and done with?
But Woodrow took it wrong. He sat there stewing. She could feel it coming off of him, a fog of resentment, even before he came out with it.
“Y’all ought not to have done me like y’all done me,” he said before he got up and picked his way down the stairs and headed down the lane home.
Well, he just didn’t understand her, that’s all. It wasn’t like she was criticizing him. The opposite: his ability to roll along with whatever the wind blew in was what she admired about him. It was what they shared, this unflappable bedrock strength. What had kept them together on this island all these years when everyone and everything—wind, water, bugs, sun, Army Corps of Engineers, Park Service, Other People—had conspired to push them off.
It was just the two of them left on the steps. Whaley said, “I believe I hurt Woodrow’s feelings.”
Maggie, characteristically taking any point of view but her sister’s, said, “I’d say you did.”
They spoke no more about it until they were back home, standing in the kitchen, getting ready for bed. Maggie had poured herself some milk. She had her hair down, and it was brown and gray and straggly and it looked a sight stringing all down the T-shirt she wore for a nightgown. Whaley kept hers up, had for years. It was unseemly, wearing your hair down at their age.
“Well, it was a compliment,” said Whaley. “He just took it wrong.”
Maggie put her milk down. She was facing the window over the sink and stared out it for a moment before she turned.
“A compliment?” she said. “How is that a compliment, being too old to change? You’d like to be told you’re too old to do anything?”
“We are old, Mag. It’s a fact.”
She started to add, Wearing your hair all stringy long and sleeping in some ratty T-shirt won’t change that. But she said nothing.
“Everybody likes to believe they can change.”
“Not everybody.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Everybody else.”
Whaley scooted a chair out from the kitchen table and sat. She said, “I really do not understand this, Maggie. I want to, though. I want you to explain it to me. What is it you want to change for? How do you want to change?”
“You’re asking me? Don’t ask me, it wasn’t my feelings you hurt. You didn’t tell me I’m too old to change, though I’m sure you believe it.”
“See, that’s what I want to know. You’re not listening. I’m seriously interested in how come y’all want everybody to think you can go around changing all the time.”
She was serious, she was interested. But like most questions she asked of her sister, she felt like she had the answer already, and she knew that she wasn’t going to change her mind. Still, she wanted to hear her sister’s side of it. She was generally curious about this idea of changing, why it meant so much to people like her sister.
“Let me ask you a question, Whaley. You think people are born one way and they die that way? That there’s never any chance they can become, I don’t know, different?”
Whaley pretended to give it some thought. “Yes.”
“So, just for instance let’s take you and me. You think you were born to do the right thing and I was born to fail?”
“That’s not fair and you know it,” Whaley lied.
“What’s not fair about it? When have you failed?”
“More times than I care to count.”
“Name one.”
Whaley thought about Sarah. It shocked her, this thought, for she never let herself entertain it. It was so buried, so wrapped up in justifications and rationalizations, the story so shifted, that she was nearly brought to tears by the way it so quickly surfaced.
“Okay,” she said, swallowing. “I knew you were going across to see him that day. I did nothing to stop you.”
“You knew? How?”
“Woodrow told me.” This was true: Woodrow did tell her, he was worried about his role in the whole affair, he knew or at least suspected there would be trouble over there. She knew how much Maggie trusted Woodrow and she hated to endanger that trust, but it was a far preferable failure to admit than the one that had, seconds earlier, nearly caused her to cry.
Maggie sipped her milk. She tried and failed to look unfazed.
After a pause she said, her bottom lip quivering, “Well, that doesn’t really count as much of a failure. I mean, it’s not really your job to go around stopping me from making a fool out of myself.”
Full-time job, Whaley thought. She said, “I should have done something.”
“Why?”
“I hated to see you hurt like that. I could have done something to help.”
“You can’t stop me from hurting. You surely can’t stop Woodrow from hurting. If you could, well, wouldn’t you be using your power to try and get us to change how we are?”
Whaley was silent. She wished she’d never admitted to this failure, for it was a lie. It wasn’t a failure, and she knew
there was nothing she could do to stop her sister from hurting.
“There you are then,” said Maggie. “If you believe you can change me—or Woodrow or whoever—you must believe in the notion of change.”
Maggie drank off the rest of her milk, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand like a child, and sailed up to bed.
Whaley reached over, turned down the wick on the lamp, sat in the hard darkness. She felt exposed and a little maligned by what Maggie said, and it did not seem fair to her, for she wasn’t the one who’d gone across and made a fool of herself. Why should she feel bad? She’d let Maggie turn her words around, she’d failed to express herself. That was her only failure. She did not explain that you couldn’t get rid of the wrongest parts of you; you just had to say no to them. So no, you weren’t really changing, you were just triumphing over weakness.
She thought that this was something Woodrow knew through and through, though he let himself hurt, she’d seen him do it. He wasn’t fragile like Maggie, but things people said got away with him, like they had today. Simple innocent remark about his age. Well, she meant it, she wasn’t going to take it back, but on the other hand she did not mean for it to hurt like it did. Maggie and Woodrow were both so sensitive. She’d never ever meant this word in the positive way some used it—to describe a person who felt and cared deeply, intelligently, like Theodosia. She meant it as a criticism, a sign of weakness.
None of this would have mattered had they been three people living anywhere else, but that night she felt it all on her shoulders, the weight of this island, its fate. She felt their survival depended not so much upon Woodrow and what he did for them—bringing in food, meeting the mail boat, slaughtering hogs, fixing broke things—but in her ability not to go sulking when someone flung a certain random combination of words her way. This island was not words. It wasn’t feelings, for Pete’s sake. It was sand, wind, sea oat, wax myrtle, water bush, red cedar, live oak, yaupon. It was peat, marl, loam and slough, hammock, marsh, and dune after dune. It was sound on one side and sea on the other and a ribbon of sand between, running right out toward the Gulf Stream, the crust of a continent defying the overwash and daring a wind to take it away.
The Watery Part of the World Page 20