The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [66]
As her children grew up, she kept an eye out for any behavior the slightest bit effete or entitled, but they acted always as if they were in every way of this island. Wind blew away any pretense or affectation, any indulgence she’d failed to squelch. If you were to survive life on this island you had to understand the positive and even recuperative applications of wind. But what if it came back, her former frivolity, in her children’s offspring? What if it skipped a generation, or two? She thought of a great-grandchild cultivating, say, her love of Chopin. This was not an unpleasant thought, so long as Theo was not around to witness it. She would not be; already she’d lived miraculously long, given her two near misses with death. She only wanted to live long enough then to see her children settled. Of course she would not mind outliving her lies—it might be her only chance at impunity if there was indeed a life after this one—but she expected to take her secrets with her, for what good would it do her children to know, so long after the fact, who she really was.
Better off for everyone to keep up the lies. Her boys were good boys. Hezekiah took to them and they to him. They fished with him and he taught them carpentry, a particular skill of his, and both of them married island girls and built houses in the village and took to the sea like their father. Amanda Jane was a bit more trouble to Theo. She was an idler and a dawdler, and if you asked her to do something once you’d be better off telling her again and then a third time to grow on, but she eventually met and married a boy from Elizabeth City, though within years she was back at the island with three towheaded babies, having shed her husband back up on the banks of the Pasquotank for reasons that Theo never completely understood. Not that she asked that many questions. She’d not prepared the girl for life off island.
Even though she told him at least once a week since Whaley’s disappearance that he was free to leave, Hezekiah stayed on in the shed, though he added rooms and a summer kitchen and, five years after he showed up on her doorstep, married a sullen young girl named Violet. Her family had been around since the port was thriving, her father had been brought in to lighter ships, though Theo only knew this by hearsay; she knew nothing of the lives of the other island blacks, who lived off by themselves across the creek.
Theo knew she would not be welcome at the wedding but she spent the day baking pies, which she had Amanda Jane carry back to Hezekiah’s house as soon as the couple returned to their new home.
“Hezekiah said tell you thanks,” said Amanda Jane when Theo quizzed her about her errand. It bothered her deeply how Violet resisted her attempts at friendship. She knew it bothered Hezekiah as well, for there was a desperation behind it that all three of them recognized as having nothing to do Hezekiah and his new bride, with the here and now on this island. She was trying to rectify some past sin. Joseph and his hundreds of slaves.
Violet never took to her. It was difficult for Theo, seeing Violet coming and going, working alongside her sometimes in the garden plot they shared, having her every offering rebuffed or ignored, but she came to accept Violet’s attitude as her just due for all those years of taking for granted the women and men who waited on her day and night.
Storms hit the island, one after the other. A hurricane opened a new inlet up the banks. Pea Island they called it. Ships took to docking at Manteo. Trade fell off; people began to trickle away. One stormy autumn the church was washed away in a nor’easter but rebuilt on the highest point of the island, its steeple visible a mile out to sea on clear days, pointing everyone who came to the island toward God in heaven.
The injuries Theo had suffered at the hand of Daniels