The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [3]
But Whaley would as soon drag up something happened to her great-great-great-grandmother than to root around in what across the sound had gotten up to 1970. Woodrow only knew this because his oldest boy, Crawl, wrote and said so. Woodrow didn’t think in year-of-our-Lords. He thought: wind, tide, moon, blues running, hog killing, oyster harvesting, when to plant his ornery sand garden. He didn’t have a thing against numbers but now that Sarah was gone what really was the point of keeping a count? Crawl wanted him to know, though. He kept reminding him, as if it meant the same on the island as it did off. One night the three of them were sitting on the steps of the church listening to Whaley read aloud the grocery store ads, and Maggie read Woodrow Crawl’s letter. Crawl claimed he’d given up fishing menhaden out of Morehead to run a club up near Lenoxville. Said in his letter he’d purchased this spinning ball for the club, had it shipped down from Baltimore, said the insurance on the ball was more than what Woodrow spent in a year. Woodrow didn’t doubt that. He did not trade in paper or coin unless he was over to Meherrituck to stock up on store-bought for him and the sisters. He didn’t see what a spinning ball or insurance for it was doing in a letter Crawl wrote to him. Didn’t he have anything else to allow? Or was this what people wrote letters about, talked about, across the sound in 1970?
Maggie read aloud how Crawl said he’d spent all he’d saved up fishing menhaden on the inside and outside decor of his club and it was, if he said so himself, looking mighty fine. Y’all have to come up and see it, Daddy, all the High Life you can drink on the house.
Who did Crawl mean, y’all? Surely not the white women who he knew were reading his letter aloud on the church steps to his illiterate daddy. Woodrow tried to imagine the three of them stepping into Crawl’s club. Miss Maggie would not even notice all the black heads switching around to stare her out when she walked up in there—she’d be at the bar about the time it took for Woodrow to get in the door good—but Miss Whaley would rather swear on the grave of her famous ancestor than go in any club, much less a colored one with a spinning ball, insured or not.
Crawl closed like always, telling his daddy he needed to think about leaving the island and moving in with him and his Vanessa and all them kids over in Morehead and Maggie like always left that part out though Woodrow could tell what was not read, he could hear it in her sucked-in breath, could see the unread words tightening her eyes up under those reading glasses.
She did read, this time, about how Crawl claimed he was coming across in a couple weeks, bringing the young’uns. Told Woodrow he better get to work, catch them some croaker to fry. But Crawl liked to claim he was coming over there and then get busy with something else, inside and outside club decor, whatever it was people got busy with across over in 1970.
Then the letter was over but not over because all three of them knew what was left out. They always waited a moment or two in silence after the letter, like they were observing the words not read aloud, which did not make a damn bit of sense to Woodrow since they were the ones leaving it out. This time he could not listen to their silence. He jumped right in after the Your Son, Crawl, said, “Write Crawl tell him send us over one of them balls, we’ll put it in the church, hang it up above the old organ, reckon that’s what you do with one of them.”
Now what made him say such a thing? Why should he be the one acting all embarrassed because they did not want to tell him