The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [36]
She began slipping into the forest. Just feet away from their stockade the scrub dropped away and wide paths appeared, spacious meadows with sluggish, murmuring creeks, moss-dripping cypresses, deep shadows pierced with soft yellow light. Daily she wandered with no particular destination. Friendly Indians took her in, taught her things: how to dam a creek with branches, chase fish into a pool where they could be easily spared. They gave her corn to plant, and beans and squash and pumpkins. They loaned her a hoe made from the vertebra of a bear. They taught her to grate nutmeg with a conch shell, how to track deer through the woods to find salt licks. She came to know polecat and muskrat, learned to spot a moccasin dripping from live oak amid a tress of Spanish moss. Rattlers are more poisonous on the hottest days, her new friends taught her; the severed tail of an alligator will wiggle right on for hours.
Virginia came dragging Maggie off island with her all hours of the day during that week before Boyd went across. So distracted was she by Virginia’s bold and exotic adventures she felt some part of her was already in motion, as if she had spent the day out on the water and was feeling still the pitch and roll. But the part of her that wanted to leave behind everything was fearful of the place people never come back from. If she said as much to Boyd, he would say, I came back across, but he’d only been born over here, not raised, he’d not known it long enough to become it. Woodrow had gone across too and come back, Boyd might claim, but there again he would be right in fact and wrong in Truth, for Woodrow Thornton hadn’t ever left this island even when he was up at Bayside welding for the Coast Guard those two years during some world war, even when Sarah had him staying with some of her people up in Norfolk one winter. Maggie knew what slant of light Woodrow saw against his lid when he blinked his eyes, she knew it was sea breeze he breathed. Much time as he’d spent out on the water, Woodrow’s heart had never once left the island.
Instead of explaining it all to Boyd—how could he understand a grown woman giving herself over to waking dreams of a girl weeding a garden with a bear’s backbone—she just pouted. The grown-up part of her understood he’d be back over in three days time; smothering him, she knew, was going to backfire big-time. But there was Virginia coaxing her into ghostwoods, and the notion of all that land, all those people bunched up in knots all across it … Maggie shut down when she thought about it. Have a good time, she said, though not in a way either of them knew her to mean.
She watched his boat slide out across the inlet, which was glassy and greenish that day, slick as it gets, and without even going home, or back to the summer kitchen, she made her way to Harvey Lockerman’s house and bought a pint of that white liquor he made every winter. Boyd’s the one who left. He might have said he wanted her to come along, but once she got over there and people started talking their nasty gossip, he’d wished he’d left her back over on that island.
Several men were crowded into Harvey’s root cellar, passing pints and smoking and smelling like the catch of the day. She paid her money and took her pint and went back to the summer kitchen and opened all the windows and sipped the white, which smelled of yeast but tasted