The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [0]
ALSO BY MICHAEL PARKER
Hello Down There
The Geographical Cure
Towns Without Rivers
Virginia Lovers
If You Want Me to Stay
Don’t Make Me Stop Now
THE WATERY PART of the WORLD
a novel by
MICHAEL PARKER
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2011 by Michael Parker.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.
Portions of this novel were previously published, in a different form, in Five Points,
New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize anthology.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and
insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either
are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parker, Michael, [date]
The watery part of the world : a novel/by Michael Parker.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56512-682-4
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Fiction.
3. Freedmen—Fiction. 4. Outer Banks (N.C.)—Fiction. 5. North
Carolina—History—1775–1865—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.A683W38 2011
813'.54—dc22 2010037684
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
FOR KATHY PORIES
THE WATERY PART of the WORLD
I
THEODOSIA BURR ALSTON
Nag’s Head, North Carolina
THE DAY WHALEY CAME for her she had spent among the live oaks, huddling and shivering in the squalls of frigid rain. The low tight trees provided tolerable canopy, yet eventually the driving rain came at her sideways. No protection from its furious winds. The coast brought out the worst in rain. What a few miles inland would have been restorative, replenishing, here seemed unutterably desperate. The hues, or, rather, hue, of the landscape exacerbated the loneliness, for everything turned the dun color of wet sand. Even the dull green of the live-oak leaves. Especially the roiling ocean.
Hours in the wet sand. She knew she needed to rouse herself and stroll the beach, for that was where they would be searching for her, the party her father would have sent to rescue her, but she could not summon the strength to abandon her paltry shelter. Her shivering turned the supplications she repeated into stutter. But her father heard. Late in the day he came to sit with her. He covered her in blankets, pulled dry wood from a satchel. He made her a cup of tea. Cakes and fresh strawberries. Don’t speak, child, he said when she tried to form syllables unbroken by shiver, tried to tell him how she had come to be abandoned on this island: how the ship she’d boarded in Charleston to visit him in New York hit high wind and rough water off the Outer Banks of North Carolina; how she’d left her maidservant retching below deck and made her way topside to find even the captain ashen and unsettled; how, through the wind-slanted rain, Theo had spied a blinking, had pointed to the ship and they’d made for it, only it wasn’t a ship but a lantern tied to the head of a nag by thieves luring ships to the shallows; how, when Theo was brought above deck by the men who boarded the ship and presented to their leader, Daniels, she had refused to let go of the portrait she had brought along to present to her father upon his return from exile in Europe; how the woman in the portrait had spoken to her and how she had spoken back to the woman, who was no longer a reasonable likeness of her but her protector and savior; how she had screamed her name, her father’s name, what stray phrases entered her head: I do not love my husband the governor I am the empress of Mexico not a ship at all but the head of a nag; how Daniels, disturbed by her outburst, had deemed her “touched by God,” and spared her life. How this was the moment Theodosia Burr Alston died, and the woman who spent her days scouring the beaches for the glint of a bottle, a sheet