The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [68]
But she needed his help. He’d built himself several fine boats, at least one of them seaworthy enough to ferry her up to Nag’s Head.
He listened to her plan without comment or the slightest shift in posture or expression. When she was through he nodded so slightly she thought she might have imagined it.
“You’ll take me then?”
“No ma’am,” he said. “I’ll not.”
“And why not?”
“If that man was wanting some picture he’d have come for it long time ago. You delivering it and yourself too is not going to bring Mr. Whaley back here, nor put anybody’s mind to rest.”
“You speak so confidently of what you think I seek to gain. But the truth is, I’ve not even considered what might be gained. It’s more that a score has been long left unsettled. I am the one he ought to have come for, not my husband. My husband, though he may have in another life stolen freely from others, did not take anything from Daniels. I am the one who took that painting, and for no sound reason. I was after my father’s papers. I thought that if I held them in my possession I would be rescued and that, papers in hand, I would make my way to Washington and return my father to his early glory and promise.”
Hezekiah was silent. She knew him to sometimes let folks talk themselves out. She’d seen him do it with Alex, who Hezekiah had taken on as an apprentice carpenter, though of course they had to pretend that Hezekiah was working for Alex, as it would not do for a black man, free or not, to serve over a white man, even on the island. Alex always had a better way of doing things, was forever insisting on his own way (a trait she traced to her own father’s stubbornness, for surely he did not get this from Whaley), and she’d seen Hezekiah listen to Alex’s plans with a patience that allowed Alex to talk himself inevitably toward the realization that his plan was inferior.
She felt he was up to the same with her, slowly feeding her enough rope to entangle herself in both word and deed.
“You realize that there are other boats on this island.”
“Yes ma’am. Plenty of them. Most of them a might more sea-worthy than mine.”
“I will ask someone else.”
He nodded at this too. He let her words settle between them, long enough for her to drift into an anxious dread of what would happen if she turned up at Daniels’s compound. She tried to remind herself of how her father had always favored Thucydides over Herodotus and even her beloved Homer, for in the work of the latter two the divine presence of the gods was ever present on the battlefield. Thucydides, on the contrary, understood the events of the past to have been instigated by the choices and actions of mortals. His Peloponnesians marched into battle with confidence not in some divine protector whose will would decide whether an arrow might find their flesh but in the rightness of their own cause.
Her cause—restoring her father’s reputation—had twice led her to be mauled by vicious dogs. Had it not also cost Whaley his life and deprived her children of a father? So many years had passed without a thought of how deeply wrong she’d been to serve so valiantly as a foot soldier in her father’s army. Poor devoted Joseph had suffered and might be suffering still.
If there was justice those papers went down with the ship and had long since been devoured by salt.
“I know that I cannot make right the way it all happened,” she said at last.
“No ma’am,” said Hezekiah.
“All I wish,” she said, and then she did not need to say any more as the wish, like the wind filling the sails of a doldrumed vessel, grew so vibrant and vivid that there was no need to articulate it, for surely Hezekiah saw it too.