The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [12]
He took Sarah to Morehead, buried her there. The preacher preached himself sweaty and the choir lifted the curtains in soaring take-me-home-Jesus song and someone had to douse the trash burner from the kettle steaming atop it, so hot did it get up in that church. Woodrow stayed for as short a time as he could get away with, told Crawl he had to get back across the water.
Crawl started in with his You-don’t-got-to-look-after-them-no-more-Daddy, especially-not-now. Woodrow just loaded up his boat, hugged his grandbabies, the ones who’d let him get his arms around them, allowed Crawl’s wife to wrap him up some leftovers, took off across the sound.
III
THEODOSIA BURR ALSTON
Nag’s Head, North Carolina
IT WASN’T THE SUN that awakened her from her shivering slumber but the cries of proggers. Moments after a storm receded the beach would fill with natives. Progging, they called it, and ingenious were they at discovering functions for objects the intended purpose of which, on this strip of sea oat and hummock and dune, was rendered useless soon as it washed ashore. An island of second chances. She’d come not to judge those who made their way pillaging the losses of others but to admire them, for of the eight trunks she’d watched her husband’s slaves load into the hold of the ship when she’d left Charleston, seven and three-quarters held frill.
Progging she was allowed to participate in. At least no one stopped her. To Theo this ritual seemed the most important social occasion here, more important than church or school, though what she knew of this island was akin, she realized, to what a field hand knew of South Carolina society.
Somehow she managed to rouse herself and join the throngs on the beach. A whale had washed up and a line of boys were put to work sawing off blubber with double-handled band saws. Nearby a fire raged, a cauldron set up on a tripod to boil the blubber down to oil. The sun washed the surf and exposed miles of coastline littered with debris. Groups of bankers attacked this debris. Ants swarming food. She knew she was too late to find anything of importance, but she picked through the leftovers, searching for and finding a few pieces of lumber to take back to her stand of live oaks.
She would build a lean-to of her own. Touched as she was, she did not want to be beholding, even to Old Whaley, who came up behind her as she was hauling a waterlogged door over the dune.
“Made it through, did you?”
When she did not answer he grabbed the part of the door she’d been dragging. She was surprised by his strength: the door floated upward, its considerable weight evaporating.
“Good for you, then. And now you’ve set about building your mansion?”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You don’t need to thank me,” he said. “I left you out here to die. You got no cause to thank me or anyone else on this island.”
“Daniels,” she said. “I suppose I should thank him for sparing my life.”
Old Whaley laughed. “You put the fear in him. A God-fearing murderer. Now that’s something to marvel at. I know for a fact that it was the portrait. He told it all up and down the island, how he saw the girl in the painting move her eyes. Said he heard her speak back to you. He’d just soon run a knife in anybody’s belly as listen to them. Come to find out he’s scared of a little bit of paint. Well, it makes more sense than him fearing a snake, I guess. But I know for a fact he kept the painting.”
She’d brought it along to give to her father, along with five boxes of his papers, both personal and professional, to which he had entrusted her during his exile. Those papers contained his essence. They would restore his unfairly tarnished reputation. If Daniels kept the portrait, surely he recognized the value of what those tin boxes held.
“He kept it?”
“They say it hangs over his fireplace.”
“Can you take me to his house?”
Whaley had been holding his end of the door effortlessly as they talked. Her request made him drop it in the sand.
“You’ll be wanting