The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [2]
“Come on then,” he said. “Let’s get you next to that fire.”
She shook her head no.
“You’ll die out here,” he said. She watched the wisps his words made. What was language but steam? Better not to speak at all than to waste precious breath in a dissipating cloud.
Old Whaley went away. Her father did not return. Only Theo and the wind, rain-laden, unrelenting, determined to take both her and island apart.
II
WOODROW THORNTON
Yaupon Island, North Carolina
AFTER SO MANY STORMS hit the island the people started to move away. Back pews and balcony of the church thinned so much the preacher asked the couple dozen of them still in attendance to spread out so it would look like he’d drawn a crowd. Weeks later the preacher himself went off island, hymnals he said he needed, and never came back. Woodrow watched those last to arrive leave first, and in time the descendents of families who had been around as long as the wild island ponies, rumored remnants of seventeenth-century Spanish explorers shipwrecked along the Outer Banks, packed it in for Salter Path, Beaufort, Elizabeth City, anyplace not stuck out here on this six square miles of sea oat and hummock afloat off the cocked hip of North Carolina.
Then Wilma blew through, taking with it the power and the light and Woodrow’s dear sweet Sarah, love of his days and mother of his eleven children. After Wilma it was only the three of them left: Woodrow Thornton on the sound side of the creek, Miss Whaley and Miss Maggie up what they’d called the hill. Sisters, though night and day different: Maggie with her dirty same old skirt and that T-shirt her boy lover had given her years earlier, her dead daddy’s old waders she wore to slosh across the creek nights when she came stumbling down to this place to hide out from her prissy sister, who in all the years Woodrow had been knowing her had always worn a plain brown dress down to her shins almost and hid her hair up in a bobby-pinned bun. Woodrow hated hearing those boots squishing his porch boards, though he could not blame Maggie wanting to get away from Whaley. He did a good amount of hiding out from her himself, stuck mostly to his side of the creek.
Those that Woodrow called the Tape Recorders, down from Raleigh twice a year with their questions and their tape machines, liked to point out to Woodrow what they thought he’d not taken note of: three breathing bodies left on this island and a Colored Town right on until the end. But that was the way it was and the way it was going to be and Woodrow had a sweet spread of close to four acres where he kept his stock and in the season ran an ornery little garden, eggplant, radish, turnips, squash, beans, okra, watermelon, anything what would not mind some sand. He and his people had long since got used to staying off by themselves, though since it was only the three of them left, Woodrow was all the time having to cross the creek up to where his white women lived.
Sisters, but Miss Maggie had got married and then unmarried and hated to be called by Midgette, her ex-husband’s name, so she went by her first, not that hardly anybody’d be inclined to call her anything but. She stayed like a child on up into her sixties, dressed so don’t-give-a-damn, like she struck out of a morning bone-naked and that ratty skirt and that nearly see-through, stretch-necked T-shirt dropped out of the sky and she scrambled into them only to keep the sun from getting up anywhere it might sting. She did not give a damn about a whole lot, clothes and what people thought she’d look like in or out of them either.
Lord God, her big sister cared. She cared about names, now. She clung to that family name of Whaley like the three of them clung to their island after the storms kept coming, though it was her first name, the one nobody ever called her for years and years—Theodosia—that really puffed her up. She’d tell anybody about her famous ancestor, daughter