The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [69]
Now her cheeks were dry. Beside her she heard Hezekiah fidgeting. He had his chores. She had some of her own.
“I’ve kept you, Hezekiah, from your loved ones.”
He’d been watching her closely. During her long silence, she could feel his steady, vigilant gaze. He seemed to see something different in her, or at least she imagined so, for instead of nodding his head in agreement, he shook his head no, which, she realized, he did not have to do. Her gratefulness was disproportionate to the slightness of the gesture, for anyone else might not have even noticed the nod. She would have liked to have thanked him, and for the next few months, until Violet found her crumpled dead under the clothesline, a basket of wet sheets on the ground beside her, she kept trying to find a way to thank him for that afternoon when he talked her out of empty and egotistical sacrifice without saying a word. But the time was never right. Had the moment arrived, he would have been embarrassed. Still, she felt it so strongly that the morning she walked out to hang the clothes on the line, it had become that one thing left on earth for her to do.
VI
WOODROW THORNTON
Yaupon Island, North Carolina
TOTING DEBRIS FROM HIS kitchen down island the day he got back across from burying Sarah’s how Woodrow discovered the new inlet. In his mind it was Sarah cut the island in two. Sheared right through the marsh, snipped with the thick of the bigger blade the tangly roots of the myrtles, dredged five fathom of sand with her sewing scissors.
It had to be a reason for his sweet girl to die holding in her hand some scissors. Sarah had a reason for everything she did, and she expected Woodrow also to know always why, to think what he wanted before he did what he did. But Woodrow did not always know why. Hell, some days he just did what he did and did not expect squat to come from it. Not knowing why never got away with him like it did Sarah. There lay the difference in the God they prayed to, or the one Sarah actually prayed to and the one Woodrow started out praying to before some other side thought snagged him and left him feeling all the more a hopeless sinner. Sarah’s praying left her knowing why: God’s will, that’s why. Even if it was something seemed like to Woodrow so simple—four people left on this island and how come they couldn’t just look after each other—even if it made not a bit of sense, it wasn’t to Sarah a mystery as it was the direct opposite, a fact, the way God made it.
So every morning Woodrow rose early and walked down to that good-for-nothing-but-birdshit southside, trying to figure out why she’d died holding those scissors. Took longer than it ought to—a couple days—for Woodrow, crouching in the marsh shooing mosquitoes with an El Reeso he’d got off them O’Malley’s, to see what he ought to have known the moment he came up on the inlet: Sarah was wanting Woodrow where the sisters were not. Now she’d given him his own island, somewhere for him to hide out and not be bothered by the beck and call of two old white ladies had let her bleed to death on the floor of his tacked-on kitchen.
It did not matter at first that his end of the island lacked a house, a dock, easy access to the channel, an acre of graze for what livestock the storm had not killed, fresh water, more shade than a scrawny wax myrtle. Acres of dune is all, some spindly sea oat, crabs crawling around like they had somewhere big to be at. Sarah’s hand had made it—Woodrow did not take it as far as God, he’d as soon stop with Sarah—and Woodrow, in her honor, was going to make it his. He left off fishing to prog for whatever washed-up timber he might use