The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [63]
He said nothing. They stood there in the high sun, sweating. The part of her that noticed and pitied his obvious discomfort was a sliver compared to her anger, which made her ancient wounds ache as if Whaley, by abandoning her, by tricking this poor man with false promises of freedom, had unleashed Daniels’s dog again.
Finally Hezekiah said, “I didn’t have nothing to do with him leaving out of here. He never said a word to me about it or any of his private business. I told you the truth. He said, ‘You don’t owe me nothing.’ He said he hoped he lived long enough—”
“I have work to do,” she said, and returned to the summer kitchen.
This wasn’t an excuse. She had twice as much work to do now that the burden of feeding and sheltering her children fell upon her only, for employing the assistance of Whaley’s replacement was unthinkable to her. She’d not ask Hezekiah for a thing, just to spite Whaley’s scheme. She chopped wood and set nets and cleaned fish and weeded the garden and scrubbed the floors and as she worked she was plagued by a recurring image of Whaley’s return to his real wife. She saw him loping up a long lane in the English countryside, saw him turn hesitantly into the courtyard of a tidy cottage with a roof of abundant thatch. A stainedaproned woman feeding chickens glanced up at him warily and without recognition. He called her name. Sarah? Abigail? Only the name changed in the scene, which repeated itself incessantly, moving from yard to the parlor where the faithful loving wife fed her prodigal husband and then into the bedchamber where Theo could not bring herself to turn away from the details of their intimacy. To block this nightmare, Theo tried to conjure her own return to The Oaks, but she could only make it as far as the infernal and malarial swamps, which steamed with wintry fog.
A week after Whaley disappeared she went out to milk the cow. Nora, as was her habit, had strayed with several other cows into the soundside marsh, where she grazed for hours, neither budging nor bothering to lift her head in response to Theo’s call. Theo lifted her skirts and picked carefully through the oyster and clam shells lining the shore. Soon the bottom was hard packed and ridged by the current, and her feet, exhausted from a hard half day’s work, felt as if they were being caressed by the slow pull of the tide, which was just beginning to rise. She stopped, stood still for a minute. The day was warm but the sun’s disappearance darkened the waters as thick clouds streamed lazy and low. The thought of what she might look like to anyone happening along ashore nearly made her smile. Her mind cleared and the water washed away all her pain. No scars on her legs and arms and neck, no weather-triggered aches, no worry about how to feed her children, what to do about Hezekiah. She dropped her skirt and moved forward slowly, letting the water work its magic. What a treasure is this blankness, only sun and warm water and the rasp of the grasses in the intermittent wind. But she needed milk. With Whaley gone, the day was so much fuller, which was the way she struggled to make sense of his absence, as an annoyance, for this was easier than giving way to grief. The mounting catalog of all that she must accomplish before noon made her sigh at her laziness and trudge awkwardly ahead, calling out to Nora, the water fighting back, thick and resistant, until she stepped from firm sand into a patch of soft mud. When she stopped sinking the water rose to her waist. A foot in front of her a clump of sea oats sprouted, but as she leaned forward to pull herself out of the mire she lost her balance and pitched face-first into the water. The effort it took to right herself sucked her under a good half foot. Nora and her companions stood nearby, grazing with the unhurried and implacable dignity of cattle. Simply breathing soaked Theo’s forehead with sweat. The chambers of her heart constricted. She’d heard of this happening to island boys, the tide rising, a death so slow and patient. She’d rather the sword of the pirate, the feral attack