The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [61]
When the children came home from school, she sent them out to play, as she was beginning to get worried, and did not need them afoot in her kitchen as she fixed supper. The sun dropped over the sound, and the wind kicked up a little, lightly, from the southeast. Nothing to worry about. He’d ridden out far worse weather.
The next morning she paced the parlor, accompanied by Hezekiah’s incessant hammering. There was no school that day, so she sent the children out to help Hezekiah, too distracted to worry about whether they’d be a bother. Midday and no sign of Whaley. She laid out the noon meal and told Phillip to feed his brother and sister and take a plate to Hezekiah and hurried down to the inlet, where she spent the afternoon at the dock, waiting for the boats to come in, asking everyone if they might have seen her husband out on the water. Maybe he’s across over to Bath, several of the men suggested, which annoyed her, as she’d not abandoned her work to solicit speculation from men who did not even bother to stop unloading their catch or swabbing their skiffs to answer her query, deliberately phrased so as to require a yes or a no. Simple enough, yet these men either evaded the question or suggested in the aversion of their deep-set eyes, in perpetual squint from years of sound-mirrored sunlight, knowledge of certain catastrophe.
Walking back through the village, she was besieged by disastrous possibilities: he’d slipped, hit his head, drowned. The boat had capsized in a squall and the chum had drawn sharks. His heart had given way, the sun and heat had stricken him lock-limbed, speechless, and parched. Once past the church she timed her footsteps to Hezekiah’s hammering. Occasionally he would stop, but the pounding continued, taken over by her pulse. If Whaley did not return, would a similar rhythm keep her attuned, in step, moving forward? Many was the time she might have given herself over to despair or ennui, endless the hours when she fought away the sleepwalk of the touched, only to tether her movements to Whaley’s coming and going, his devotion to quotidian ritual. At the time she had not considered what sort of love this was. But now that he was gone it seemed far more than survival, this measured cadence they’d managed to share.
At the top of the rise she saw the ribs of roofline, Hezekiah silhouetted against the afternoon sun, her three children cheerful factotums at his feet.
“You may go,” she told him after sending the children down island to hunt for turtle eggs.
“Go where?”
“You’re free.”
Hezekiah was standing on a low rung of a ladder, which required her to shade her eyes to see his face.
He said, “Mr. Whaley never bought me.”
Her confusion must have registered in her shaded eyes, for he did not bother to climb down before he began to explain his presence in her life. Like all the other island blacks, he had been brought over to lighter ships. Now that the trade had moved north to ports with easier access, he and several others were being sold down at the dock when Whaley happened to have come in off the water.
“He paid the man cash money, but as soon as we were back up off the inlet he told me I could go on back to where I come from. Last place I lived before they brought me over here was Somerset, up by Columbia. I didn’t have anybody back across over there so I asked him to give me some work, said I’d work off what I owed him. But he said no, said if I was going to work I was going to get paid for my work. He said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing at all. Somebody else owes you and yours, and I wish I could live long enough to see you compensated for your suffering.’