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to the schoolhouse and find her seat on the third row, sit and listen to teaching sentences until the room and finally the entire island filled with all those who’d fled after the storms came battering. Mostly, though, she just accepted the way things were now. Tourists came over now of a weekend, O’Malley Senior had started up a damn near business ferrying them round-trip from Blue Harbor. They brought cameras and took pictures of the two old white women too stubborn to leave and their colored protector. They asked questions, silly and maybe even a little mean, How y’all stand these mosquitoes, how come you stayed when everybody else fled this godforsaken place? The undertow of their curiosity seemed to Maggie judgmental if not contemptuous. She and Whaley and Woodrow were becoming a kind of freak show, one of those quaint stories about human resilience Maggie sometimes read aloud from the Norfolk paper. They smiled, waved, stood for the pictures, but underneath pasted smiles lurked the ways they got away with each other. Only three of them left on this island. Why could they not put it aside?

That lovely night on the steps of the church with Woodrow and Whaley, it came to her why. Had to do with the Tape Recorders, she decided. Which story to tell them, whose story told it best? Once, little Liz got Maggie started on the subject of men, love, what it was like living your whole life where the pickings were so slim that some took up with cousins and others—her sister being one—went without. Maggie was just about to tell it then, the real story of this island, the only one that mattered: that boy’s beautifully muscled and sun-browned back as he lifted his pots onto the dock when he came in off the water, the afternoons in the summer kitchen, his pleading with her to leave her island and what happened when she sort of halfway tried.

She kept quiet, though, for her sister’s sake. Whaley had her story. It had to do with weather, wind, water, quaint customs, recipes, yaupon tea. Mostly it had to with history, by which her sister meant their great-great-great-grandmother, Theodosia, daughter of a famous murderer. That was Whaley’s idea of a story to tell. She went right on and told it too. And Maggie stopped short of filling a tape with how bad she hurt over some boy years ago, even though sitting that night on the church steps, Maggie knew her story explained life on this island better than anything out of Whaley’s mouth. God bless Whaley’s soul. She had her own hurts, surely. She’d never put them down on tape, though. And if Maggie was to tell her side of it, it would by God last, would linger forever across time like the pink cloudy sky shrouding the rising sun of a morning, which is why she’d never tell it. To hell with it. It was already out there, whipping Whaley’s newspaper, in the wind.

V

TEODOSIA BURR ALSTON

Yaupon Island, North Carolina

THE FIRST THING SHE saw when Whaley brought her home to the cottage he’d built while she was recuperating with a widow down island was the portrait. In a gesture Theo might have found mocking had she not owed him her life, he’d hung it dead center of the front room above the fireplace. It had been damaged in the crossing, its canvas torn in the high right corner, the colors bleeding and fading from exposure to the sun, its frame stained with her blood. Later, she would learn that he’d used the painting to shelter her from the sun, that she lay bleeding in the bottom of the leaking skiff, an inch of bloody water washing her wounds with salt, and anyone who might have come upon them hugging the sound-side shore of the banks, moving slowly southward, weaving in and out of the marshes, would have pondered the absurdity of this haggard boatman rowing his cargo of portrait.

She said, hobbling into the house, “I’d think you’d rather not have to stare at that countless times every day of your life.”

“You would think?” He was busy stowing the items the island ladies had donated—old dresses, a bonnet, a tablecloth, rags, really, but she was glad to have them—into a lidless wobbly