The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [65]
But that night when she had calmed her children with a lie about where she’d been all day (she claimed she’d been checking her crab pots in the sound and fell in a hole), she sat up late by the fire, disturbed not by dream or nightmare but by a waking recurring image of Whaley’s hands, crudely hacked off below the wrist, fingers permanently curled as if clawing their way somewhere, left on the doorstep for anyone—her children, Hezekiah, passersby—to discover. In the morning her children filed into the parlor to find her ashen and awake in her chair.
“Where did the woman go,” Alexander said, pointing to the blank space above the hearth where the portrait had been.
“Never you mind,” said Theo. Sometime in the night she’d looked up to see the woman’s cold eye on her and in a fit she scarcely remembered by daylight she’d taken the portrait off its nail, wrapped it in a sheet, and slid it behind the wardrobe she’d asked Whaley to build for her. She sent the boys out for wood, asked Amanda Jane to fetch her some matches, then, when the fire was stoked, gathered her children in front of it. During the night she’d decided to tell them everything: Richmond Hill, Charleston, her father’s disgrace, his exile, the trip to New York, Daniels, her own exile as a woman touched by God. The dog mauling, their arrival on island. She’d even planned to tell them that she’d never married their father, that he had a family across the ocean, that she’d had another son. And that their father was a thief, however long retired. For even if she went this far, she would still be withholding the truth. She couldn’t very well tell them that their father had died because of her vanity, that she had sentenced him to death when she’d stolen that portrait, for who would they be in the world if burdened with this knowledge? How would they ever love themselves, and who would they find to love them if they had no love for themselves?
She said none of this. She said what she’d wanted her father to say to her after her own mother’s death. “Your father was very proud of all of you. If you ever doubt this, or doubt his love, you need only to ask me and I’ll remind you of how much you meant to him.”
Then she made breakfast and told them to go outside and see if Hezekiah had chores for them. When they were gone and the house was quiet she washed the dishes, which is what any other woman on this island would do if she’d lost her husband. She wasn’t alone; she had her family, and the islanders would take care of her, so long as they believed her husband had died at sea. But what if his handless corpse washed up down island, bloated and bobbing in the marsh? She found herself wishing sharks had found the body, crabs had picked it apart by now.
What a thing to wish for. Yet it did not torment her, her need to keep secret at all costs the true story of how she arrived on this island. Whaley, after all, had his own secrets; surely others on the island were equally careful in presenting to the world some expurgated version of their lives. More was at stake than her integrity; the truth would damn her children, for she had come to know these islanders well, and she suspected that, according to their arcane but rigid ethical code, her husband’s crimes—ransacking ships, stealing cargo, kidnapping, maybe even murder—would be far more tolerable than her own. But vanity, ego, pride—if elsewhere these were trifling infractions, here they would doom her and her children after her.
Thereafter she concentrated every waking moment on appearing to the island as the widow Whaley. She monitored every word out of her mouth, suppressing her erstwhile occasional lapses into fustian diction for sentences so simply blunt they sounded to her like shovel thrusts, ax blows. Ceaseless toil without complaint was her salvation. She shocked herself sometimes in how little she allowed herself to express the slightest pleasure. Her children brought her joy in the very fact of their survival rather than in the qualities and values by