The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [47]
She knew she was damned either way: tell her and suffer her silent indignation, don’t and pay big later on. She chose down-the-road but it was just piling on another layer of anxious.
She sat up front. Woodrow smoked his cigar. Thirty minutes into the two-hour crossing the sound churned up and the boat slapped at the chop. She wore her daddy’s old oiler over a not-quite-Sunday dress. It kept her dry, but inside the heavy rubber slicker she was boiling in the humid summer morning.
She didn’t even try talking to Woodrow in the boat. But she didn’t need to talk to him. Agreeing to carry her across could only mean he approved of what she was up to. This is what she told herself anyway. He wanted her to be with Boyd, Woodrow cared for her, and for Boyd—she’d been knowing that, despite Boyd’s all the time claiming Woodrow hated him, treated him like some dumb green white boy. Boyd didn’t know Woodrow like she did. Woodrow would have said no to Boyd right off had he not cared for him, despite the fact that it was a little harder for Woodrow to go around turning down requests from white folks wanting to learn how to fish. Woodrow would have found a way or would have shamed him so bad out on the water—dumped him over in a turn or had the poor boy pulling his back out wrenching up pots the wrong way—that Boyd would have quit on Woodrow. Woodrow was surely one of the best watermen on the banks, but he wasn’t the only one. Boyd could have found another tutor and Woodrow could have sent him off to find one.
Obviously he wanted them to be together. Maggie decided he liked having them back of his house in the summer kitchen. Up in the bow, taking the spray head-on, Maggie smiled at the thought of the summer kitchen once again housing rambunctious love. Out of her head and up into who knows where went the knowledge gained during her time on this earth. Crossing the sound she was ageless, whatever age you were when you were about to regain love lost to you. No numbers affixed to it. No words for it either. Just fine spray, a fountain of it, and sun on her cheeks, one of those little windows in time when she felt so slackly warmly comfortable in her body that it hardly existed.
Never damn mind that when Woodrow motored up the waterway to where he docked, she was wet, salt-crusty, smelly. Never mind Crawl, there to meet him, shocked if not outright scornful at the sight of her. Never mind she had no real plan for finding Boyd, didn’t know where he lived, didn’t even know if seeing him was better than somehow being seen by someone who knew who she was and would pass along news of her triumphant crossing.
Crawl helped his daddy tie up the boat. Didn’t no more than nod at her, then Woodrow joined him on the dock, and they were walking away when she called out, “Wait once.”
Crawl kept right on walking. But Woodrow stopped and turned back.
“Y’all know where the Promise Land’s at?”
Crawl pointed the way. Ten blocks of small shingled cottages back of Arondell Street, hard by the railroad tracks. Some of the cottages were brought over on barges from Diamond City when the villagers fled Shackleford Banks, leaving it a ghost town after a bad hurricane at the turn of the century. The natives dispersed into the mainland, a colony lost. Signs of their former life—upturned dinghys, crab pots, gill nets—clogging their sandy cocklespurred yards. Looked to her like a banker didn’t know what to do with grass. Four out of five had just let their grass die or raked over it, one. She read this as a sign they missed home. All of them pining to return, knocked back across the sound by storms, hunger, poverty, only to end up on this patch of crabgrass and cocklespur.
No, Maggie told herself, she was seeing the mainland through Whaley’s eyes. Whaley with her fear of anywhere off island would