The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [58]
“Hush,” he said, pulling her closer, searching out bare skin beneath her night clothes. And she smiled. Her father had not raised her to smile at a man commanding her not to speak. Fleetingly she thought, my father is dead now, and then she did not think of him again that night, and she thought of him less and less during the years that followed.
Phillip came first. He came out screaming and huge, with Whaley’s blue eyes and his father’s distrust of stillness. Dear God, you were only the slightest part of my moral education, I scarcely know how to appeal to your eternal mercy, but please let this child live. Never again will I waste time craving peaches. She promised to treasure these people who took her in half-dead, hard women to whom she owed her life. About their lives she knew nothing at all, for they were not warm or convivial, did not waste time with gossip or empty ceremony, yet in their brusque way they were the kindest people she’d known, for they helped each other out without prejudice or condition. After Phillip was born, they had her up in a couple of days, canning, helping to mend Whaley’s nets. He needs your help now, they said, and she was waiting for him nights when he came in off the water.
A year later there was a girl, Amanda Jane, and finally another boy: she named him Alexander, after her father’s nemesis, as if to ward off the weight of the past, though she did not admit such to Whaley. He was good to the children, though he spent so much of his time away, fishing, working on his boats, or hiring himself out to others. As the children grew older she had more time to devote to others, and she worked hard to become one of those women she’d admired when she’d first arrived, silent and bent to the task at hand, pleasant enough but also stoic, held back. So convinced was Theo that this was the way one ought to live life, that she became zealous about her new direction. She was the first to arrive at the house of an islander in need, the last to leave.
“You’d be best to spend more time at home,” Whaley said to her one day. “The children need you.”
“They get on fine.”
“I need you then,” he said.
“For what?”
He looked at her funny. She’d surprised herself, saying this, but now that it was said she thought she might as well pursue it.
“Why do you need me, Whaley? What do you need me for?”
He looked at her sideways, slyly, reminding her of those mornings she first spent in his hovel, when they delighted in their shared status, wards of the State of Daniels.
“Nothing in particular. Everything you do around here, somebody else could do. Chores and all. But what I need you for ain’t particular.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Dammit, I can’t put it into any sense. I can’t say how, exactly. I just know I do. You want me to make something up or you want me to leave words out of it?”
She’d never had a man admit to feeling something for her he could not articulate. She’d never had a man admit to needing her, though surely men had; Joseph needed her to be the daughter of a famous man, the wife of a governor. Her father needed her to make him feel as if he wasn’t a total failure. She’d confused these needs with devotion, and only Whaley, in his fumbling but sincere way, could make her understand how she could be needed for nothing at all, and everything.
Thereafter she spent more time with her Whaley and her children. Only the portrait remained from her life off island. For years she’d avoided the sight of it, though she knew it was there, silted with grime and dirt, dimmed by smoke from the poorly drafting chimney. I found it in the dunes after a nor’easter, she told her children. But Mother it looks like you it’s your eyes your nose, they said when they were still young enough to say unchecked what came into their heads. Before she gave up trying to educate them about the ways of a world she had come to renounce and turned them into a team of proggers. Fan out and scour. Don’t come home empty-handed. Silly babies, of course that is not me.
It was only an innocent