The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [20]
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Whaley. “You ought not to say anything when nothing is what you know.”
“If I know nothing, it’s because you tell me nothing.”
“Everything that goes on in the world is not your affair. Your husband is not the governor here.”
“Fine,” she said. “If you can point me the way to his compound, I’ll go alone. I know it’s up past the big dunes, on the sound side. Certainly his lodgings will befit his station. I’m sure I’ll be able to recognize it.”
“You go up there alone, you might as well slit your wrists right here and now.” He withdrew the knife he kept sheathed at his waist, extended it to her.
Theo ignored the knife he offered, looked him in the eye. “You’re not telling me something.”
“What I already told you, you’ve not listened to.”
She feigned anger, but she knew he was right. She hadn’t paid much attention to his threats because she was too obsessed with recovering her father’s papers. All she had to do was smuggle them off the island, get them in the right hands, and her father’s reputation would be restored, for how tender and noble he was in those missives, how courageous and devoted a statesman and citizen did his journals reveal him to be. All the accusations against him would be exposed as slander; his plan for Mexico and the western provinces would be understood as advantageous to the common American good, much less threatening than French and Spanish dominion. And even if she were never rescued from this island, even if she spent the rest of her days the ward of a deranged pirate, pummeled by relentless, sand-laced wind, she would join her father as empress of his sovereign land.
That day the progging was fruitless; she brought home only items passed over by others: rotten timbers, strips of sail, rusted iron rings from busted-up barrels. Whaley looked at the things she dragged over the dunes and went back to plucking feathers from a tern, too busy to even pass judgment.
That night, while he snored softly a few feet away, she realized she would likely be dead now were it not for Whaley. Therefore it seemed only logical to put her trust fully in the notion that Whaley had been sent to protect her. Not by God, whose mercy was too celestial to concern itself with the assignment of earthly sentinels, but by her father, whose Aristotlean idea of love—a single soul inhabiting two bodies—had gotten Theo through many a night before she had even arrived on this island.
The next morning, as they sat drinking tea by the fire, breakfasting silently as was their habit, she said, “There’s nothing left to find on the beach. I’m going to his compound today.”
“You’d be better off walking into the ocean during a storm.”
“I can swim.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said.
She grabbed her ratty shawl and made a show of wrapping herself tightly against the elements, as if his resistance was also the cause of the wet gusts outside, the low clouds hugging the dunes. Spitting rain and high lonely call of gulls. Something in their song she decided had only to do with survival, for what would they sing about on such a gray day, in such a forbidding seascape, but sustenance? Their cry for food became, as she trudged through the thick wet sand, her own lament: Why did I leave? She had feigned fearlessness but now, alone, on her way to Daniels’s compound, she remembered poor Eleanor’s last hour, how long it had taken for them to bring her topside, how many of Daniels’s men, in the interim, had disappeared below deck. Eleanor had appeared relieved when Daniels had finally ordered her flung overboard, as if every breath after what she had endured at their hands was eternal. Just let me go to my reward, I’d rather open my mouth to the salty water and swallow, dear God let me go. She was naked and bloody and hugged her ruined clothes to her chest and in her shame she did not look at Theo, not that Theo was at that moment capable of seeing her. How, then, could she remember so clearly Eleanor’s last minute? In memory