The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [54]
She said instead: “Why are we stopping here, Whaley? We’re only a couple islands south of him. I know because I made the widow Royall point it out on a map. Less than a half day’s sail in a good wind. It’s unsafe, stopping here. Why did you not just leave me here and keep on to the mainland?”
“Because I don’t fancy spending the rest of my life running. And because I damn near let you die already.”
“You saved my life.”
“After I turned that mongrel loose and watched a good half of the blood in your body stain the sand.”
“I don’t blame you for that. I put your life in great peril. And all for my father’s papers.”
“I don’t care to hear what it was you were hoping to find in his quarters. We’ve other things to think about now.”
“You think he’s looking for us?”
“I think he’ll never stop.
He’d moved into the light. Theo understood, looking at his body in the half-flickering light, that she was right—there were limits to love, and his had been reached that day. Yet he’d stayed here, waiting for her to recover from her wounds.
“I’m sorry to hear you’re married.”
He looked at her strangely. “It’s not something ought to make you feel sorry for a person, generally. Besides, you’re married yourself.”
“I think it unlikely that I am going to reunite with my husband,” she said. And she stood there waiting for him to make the same claim about his wife.
Instead, he said good night. For the next few weeks he worked in the yard building simultaneously a shed and a boat. He admitted he knew little about boatbuilding and so he hired himself out as an apprentice to the best boatbuilder on the island, learning what he could, bartering time for scrap lumber, borrowing tools to work on his boat by firelight. Theo spent the days fishing in the sound for supper, digging for clams, planting a garden, helping out island women with their chores in exchange for items she and Whaley had no means to procure. They could not have survived without the help of the islanders who never once questioned her arrival on this island so near death, never once asked how she happened to get attacked by a dog, or other obvious questions: where she came from, who she was running from.
Theo was amazed by Whaley’s pluck, the way he went about hammering together a new life on a new island. His ability to land anywhere and make do—she had never known that in a man. Her father certainly liked to think of himself as resilient, but there was something in her father’s ego that would turn any attempt at a comeback into an unqualified failure. Had turned: she thought of his Mexican Empire scheme. As for Joseph, he was the governor, but had anything happened to him, had they taken away his money and his land and his houses and his slaves, he’d starve within a week. He knew nothing of how hard it was just to live. Of course, neither did she until she mistook a lamp tied to a horse’s head for a ship’s beacon.
Whaley kept to himself. He was gone when she rose in the morning and often not home when she went to bed. He finished his boat and took it out on the water in the mornings, and in the afternoons he dug clams or cut cedar to sell as posts across over to Morehead. She grew gradually stronger and able to work in the garden of an afternoon, though she still limped even with her cane and felt sometimes, in public, the unflinching attention of island children, which made her feel disfigured. Aside from the women who sometimes stopped in to check on her she had no one to talk to save the cow Whaley procured from God knows where, she never asked. She named her Nora, after one of