The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [1]
She explained none of this to her father because he would not let her speak. Every time she tried he shushed her and drew the blanket tighter around her body. The fire caught and crackled as he fed it. Never before had she been so comforted by such an essential element as fire.
He said, finally: It’s a pity, the way the world treats its most vigilant servants. Both of us end up exiled from the things we love. Sent to some purgatory where we are doomed to hide who we really are.
She asked why.
Oh Theo, it’s not for me to answer why such hardships occur in the world.
No, why us? Why is this happening to us? What did we do to deserve this? For surely we provoked it?
You speak as if we’re such great sinners, he said. The fire was dying down. His voice was as cold and gray as the ocean twisting and crashing in the distance.
Father, she said, but he was gone, as was his fire, the warm mug of cinnamon-spiced tea.
In his place hovered the other island ward. Old Whaley, he was called. On his knees in the wet sand, one hand holding back a branch. She blinked, as if this would make him disappear. But he was even more present when she opened her eyes.
They watched each other. Rain dripped off their noses, their chins. Theo had seen him only a few times, always in the distance: moving over a dune, disappearing into a copse. He lived alone in a lean-to in a wood by the sound. A hermit, he sold his catch or traded it for sugar, coffee, his few store-bought needs. Mostly he survived on what he scavenged. He looked like it—rail thin, skin the ghastly gray-white of a fish belly. His beard was a tangle. Yet nothing could dampen his eyes, which were vivid blue beacons.
“Come with me now, miss,” said Whaley. She realized, staring at him, that he was a lot younger than most who called him Old Whaley.
Since he too was a ward, did that mean she had to keep up her pretense around him?
Just in case, she fell back on her failsafe silence.
Whaley shrugged. “You want to stay here? Out in this mess? It’s set in now.”
He raised his shoulders again, no shrug this time, but a respectful acknowledgment of the heavens—perhaps of the God whose touch damned and saved the both of them. Theo could only acknowledge the irony of God’s touch determining her fate. Her faith was Sabbath faith, and her lack of devotion if made known to even one other person or even fully admitted in her heart would have filled her great-grandfather Jonathan Edwards with ire and shame. God was the one thing lacking in her rigorously modern and masculine education, since her father, the son and grandson of preachers, had replaced the Calvinist dogma of his youth with freethinking Greeks and Romans after reading Mary Wollstonecraft and deciding his daughter should be educated as he had been, minus the scripture.
“It’ll not likely let up anytime soon,” said Old Whaley.
She looked past him at the screen of rain.
“I don’t have much but it’s dry.”
She spoke before she could stop herself. “Do you have a fire?”
He smiled. She saw his brown chiseled teeth and thought of food and of a place to stay for more than a few nights. For months they had moved her around the island, sheltered her in shacks and sound-side cottages. The families who had been ordered to take her in all but ignored her. Mostly she ate what would have been slopped in those households lucky enough to own a few pigs. If she was lucky, she got salt fish, biscuits, tack. Vegetables were dreamed. Fantasies of fresh ears of corn slick with hot butter, salt-studded. What a thing to dream, given all her thousand wants, yet there it was in front of her, slowly spinning, golden with promise as a rising sun.
“Yes. I have a fireplace.” He nodded and scooted out backward. Beyond the thin shelter of her live oak, he turned and waited. But she hesitated. She’d been talking to her father and blinked awake to find