The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [11]
“Sick,” said Woodrow in a way that made Maggie kneel and moan.
She sat with him for a good hour not speaking. He could hear her sniffling. Sometimes she said something but words did not work or count in this space or else their meaning was lost to Woodrow. He knew she would stay until he told her to go so he told her he wanted to be alone with Sarah. Before she left she told him how Sarah was holding a pair of scissors in her hand whenever she found her.
“Found her?” said Woodrow, but he lacked even the energy to punish Maggie, even as he pictured Sarah lying up under the debris in what once was his kitchen, the piece of tin that had sliced her neck still atop of her, her head wedged whichways upside the cook stove.
Woodrow looked up at her. “Say what?”
She said, “A pair of scissors.”
Woodrow nodded, went back to not looking at her, hoping she’d go away and when she did he got up and covered Sarah in a clean blanket Maggie’d brought for him and went down to his house. He found his lanterns and lit them and by their light he scoured the wreckage of the kitchen until he discovered beneath the crimped tin a pair of bloody scissors.
What in the world? What was she fixing to cut in the middle of a storm? The thought of those scissors from the moment Maggie mentioned them until he flung them into the inlet liked to drove Woodrow crazy. He wanted to know everything about his wife in her last hour and he had his story down tight. In his story there never were any scissors.
The next day Whaley showed up in the church just as he and Maggie were getting Sarah ready to take across the water to bury. He just had to load her up in the boat. She’d asked him long ago not to bury her on this island. They’d fought about it. He kept after her on this in a way he never would have about anything else because he had already staked out a plot for the both of them up behind the church. He wasn’t about to let her leave him in death. Might as well leave him now, he told her. But she wouldn’t budge. And Woodrow had never once figured on her dying before him. She was fifteen years younger, for one, and two, women just lived longer. He could count on three fingers the husbands had outlived wives on this island which was hard on everybody but hardest on the men who worked the sea.
Whaley said to him, “I’m so sorry, Woodrow.” She stood back from him a good ways, though it might well have been the smell that stopped her rather than respect for the dead or his grieving.
“Sorry’s about the word I’d use,” Woodrow said. He had not spoken since he’d told Maggie to leave him alone. His words came out a slurry whisper.
If she heard him she didn’t allow it. She said, “It wasn’t anything I could do. We’d of lost another one, going down there to get her.”
“I know, Miss Whaley,” Woodrow said. “Wind wants you, can’t do nothing to stop it.”
He looked up at her. She was staring at the floorboards. He saw her bottom lip tighten.
“Least y’all could of done is get her out of the way of the water,” he said.
“We all will meet our time,” said Whaley.
Woodrow said, “Ain’t no sense helping the time come.”
“It was not like that, Woodrow Thornton.”
Woodrow started to tell her he knew his name, she didn’t need to be using it in full, but instead he said he needed to be burying his wife, not standing around chitchatting, she and Maggie’d have to make do for a few days.
“Of course,” said Whaley. “You take as long as you want over there, we’ve got plenty to do around here.” Then she launched into a list of chores and kept right on listing until Woodrow turned around left them there alone in that church once so white and clean with its steeple pointing everyone