The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [14]
Whaley smiled. “Progging for them is more a festivity. Especially if spirits happens to wash up. I’ve seen them feed liquor to an eight-year-old boy just for their amusement.”
“I don’t think they’re all bad over here, Mr. Whaley.”
“Call me Whaley.”
“I will not. What would you call me—Alston?”
“I’d call you Burr,” he said. He watched for her reaction.
She said, finally, “So you believe I’m who I say I am?”
“Why not? Everybody’s got to have a father. He’s good as any, I reckon.”
Oh, but he was far better. Even in light of the misery they’d both suffered in the last few years—the duel, the treason charges, his exile and onerous return to New York—she felt blessed to have such a loving and honorable father. How deeply misunderstood he was now, how wide the discrepancy between his public persona and the father he’d been to her, eternally supportive and giving. She needed the world to see those papers.
“If they were all bad, these people,” she said, “they would never have shared their food with me.”
He seemed to look right through the layers of rags she wore, spy the jutting hipbones, the taut skin stretched over the ladder rungs of her ribcage. “Fed you like a princess, did they?”
“It’s just that I don’t believe people are either all good or all bad.”
“I’d wager you keep better company than I do.”
“You ought not to assume because my former station was a high one—”
He interrupted. “High? Daughter of the vice president? No, miss, I never would of said ‘high.’”
“Let me finish, please,” she said, smiling. She’d not smiled since before her son got sick. She told herself it had nothing to do with this man, everything to do with a limit to misery—a point crossed, after which the mind and heart seeks to vent its displeasure by becoming unexpectedly, blissfully surprised. “There are plenty of perfectly venal people in the circles among which I previously moved,” she said, thinking of the man her father challenged to a duel only after the slander had turned personal and, she suspected, involved not only her father’s honor but her own.
“Don’t doubt you there,” he said. “But you contradicted yourself. You said there isn’t any of them all bad, then you said some of them is perfectly venal. I don’t recall the exact meaning of that word but I’m going to venture it don’t mean virtuous.”
“I may well have contradicted myself,” she said. “It’s hard to think straight when you’ve eaten your fill for the first time in months. They say hunger makes you crazy, but I feel I had more clarity when I was in want than now, with this fire, this stew, this bread.”
“A charming excuse,” said Whaley. “Though I happen to agree with you: ain’t no one all bad or all good. Daniels himself saved the likes of you. Which makes him a little less a villain.”
This seemed a good place to ask again why he too was thought to be touched when he was obviously quite rational, even intelligent in his own way. But when she asked, he said, “You’ll be wanting to bed down now. Take the tick in the corner there,” he said, pointing to a bundle of moss and pine straw beneath what seemed to be a piece of sail.
“I will not take your bed.”
“Nonsense. I’m not the one’s been sleeping in the mud for the past three nights. I’ve got a blanket, I’ll pull up here by the fire.”
She nodded and stretched out on the bed. The pine needles felt as soft and luxurious as the finest goose down, but it was some time before she slept. Barring the couples who’d harbored her, she’d never slept so close to any man, much less a stranger. Joseph had his own rooms, and came to her in the night, and not every night. Whaley was close enough to touch. She could see his silhouette in the dying light of the fire. Could hear him breathing. She tried turning on her side, facing away from him, but that did not quell the mix of trepidation and excitement she felt.
But fatigue and relief not to be sleeping in wet sand, her skin raked by live-oak boughs shaken by steady wind, took over at some point in the night.
When she blinked open her eyes,