The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [27]
Not long after Boyd arrived, word got around that he’d been born on island, that his father had drowned one day checking his pots up on the Albemarle when the wind blew up and the swells ranged all the way up the Alligator River. After the body washed up in Mann’s Harbor two or three weeks later, Boyd’s mama took him and his brother and sister across the sound to Harker’s Island to stay with kin, then disappeared into the continent. Kept on going west, devoured by all that vast and dangerous acreage. Maggie was more than a little scared of it herself, which is why she’d never left. Maggie’d heard about the way people nowadays just kept on moving. It wasn’t a war going on, but people sure were acting like it, like they were being chased, like wherever they were from had been taken over by the enemy. Pecking around like hens, sniffing out someplace safer, cleaner, wealthier, more jobs, less wind, more culture. People? Seemed to Maggie they wanted only everything. Wanted it yesterday morning at the crack. Though Maggie could understand the notion of something better down the road. She imagined she’d be the same if she took herself off island, always peering down the highway or out the window at the looming woods, wondering if there was another man, a better job, more money, less bugs or heat or snow. Because she understood the lure of Always Elsewhere, she was scared to death of leaving her island. She would not even let herself imagine letting any one desire drive her but the need for that crusty cake of sun and salty sea on her naked skin as she basked in the ocean. Maggie needed tiny shells stuck to her skin when she got undressed for bed. She needed these shells to rain down on the floorboards nights when she undressed, little bedtime chimes.
Much as she loved her island, Maggie was suspicious when people came from the mainland to settle there. More often than not they were running from something or someone. Boyd came to the island to fish, or so he claimed. He went straight to Woodrow to learn how. Back then, Woodrow had Crawl crewing for him. He’d bought a boat from the O’Malleys and contracted out to sell them most of what he caught. No one on the island would allow it, but Woodrow was the best waterman around. He could always come up with some fish. Whaley said he was lucky, but it wasn’t luck because there wasn’t any such thing to Maggie’s mind and besides she’d had this conversation with Woodrow once and he said he didn’t believe in luck either. He claimed the whereabouts of fish in the sea was a process of elimination, a strict adherence to the tiniest subtleties of wind and tide.
Why would Woodrow take on Boyd when he already had Crawl crewing for him? Years later when she got around to asking, Woodrow said, Black man couldn’t say no to a white boy no matter what a yes might cost him.
Maggie used to believe that the quiet sinewy strength her sister admired in Woodrow was maybe just years of having to go round agreeing with white people. Instead of resilience, it was suppressed indignation. Her sister looked at Woodrow and saw pride, but she didn’t respect it because she did not think it was hard fought for. It was far easier for Whaley to pretend Woodrow was a fine upstanding colored man, exemplary among his race, than to stop and consider who he really was.
Whaley never did see what Maggie learned too late: Woodrow had his jellyfish tentacles spread out every which way, feeling the world in ways most people would not dare. This did not mean he was fragile or weak. Maggie and Whaley would have died every day for years if not for Woodrow, who made it possible for them to live on the island long after every living thing but the mosquitoes called it quits. What he was, Maggie came to understand, was particularly sensitive. He could feel the approach of a storm some claimed by snuggling his bare toes