The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [71]
He went out on the water that morning, brought his catch to their front door. Whaley was as polite as she knew to be but clearly put out by his standing right there on her front threshold after thirty-odd years of coming around back. Seemed like to Woodrow she’d turned whiter in the face and way whiter in the hair. Maybe he was blacker from his days of lying back and smoking sweets and flying low over the breakers.
“I’ll meet the mail boat,” he said.
“That O’Malley boy’s been bringing it by occasionally,” she said.
Boy? thought Woodrow. O’Malley’s nearly as old as she is.
“I’ll meet him directly,” he said.
“Well, I know he’ll be obliged not to have to make the extra trip over here,” she said, but he wasn’t listening. He’d caught sight of that picture behind her, the one Maggie’d told him Whaley wrapped up and toted up the hill to the church during the storm. The one thing she’d saved; instead of Sarah, a picture of her ancestor roundly said to be a lunatic. Woodrow could count on his hands the times he’d looked at it. Certainly he’d never been invited in to stand around in the parlor and study it. The woman in the picture looked like she’d already left her body, but in her eyes was a sweet satisfaction of having finally understood something her great-great or whatever Whaley was to her would never fathom.
Whaley watched him staring. What, she said with every inch of her visible body; What, she asked, without saying squat.
“I reckon y’all favor some,” said Woodrow.
WOODROW DIDN’T EVEN bother building on again, just set his cookstove right up in what Sarah used to call the parlor, piped it into the chimney, lived in one room. Most nights he slept in his chair. He had everything he needed right alongside his chair where he sat evenings by the fire when it was too cold or raw to sit out on the porch. He had everything he needed and yet his life was filled with lack. What went missing when Woodrow set up in the so-called parlor were all the things made his life more than just shuffling around his down-to-one-room widower’s cottage, fetching dinner and the mail for his white women sisters, trying not to let anything anybody said or did or didn’t say or do get away with him, doling his words out like coins the week before payday. The kind of life the Tape Recorders already had Woodrow living, no noticeable emotion unless you count indifference, no love, no hate, just hard work and evenings so quiet his voice box rusted shut. Finally Woodrow had become the type of person the Tape Recorders had been making him out to be since they’d come across with their tape machines and their questions stuffed already with the answers and those beekeeper hats they took to wearing to keep the bugs off of them.
One evening Woodrow crossed the creek to join his white women on the steps of the church. They saw him coming but acted like they never did. He climbed up the steps, sat and listened to Whaley read aloud her prices.
Maggie said, “Crawl wrote said you’re going to be eighty this year, Woodrow.” She said this before she ever read the letter itself. Skimmed ahead to switch out the parts she couldn’t bring herself to read, the parts where Crawl tried to talk some sense into his senile daddy, convince him that providing for two old fussy white women wasn’t any of his. Whaley, sitting on the top stoop, had her flyers spread out and was not listening to a word of Crawl’s letter nor anything out the mouth of her sister. When she had her advertisements spread out across her lap on the church steps where the three of them would sit just like people in town will linger after supper to watch traffic and call out to neighbor women strolling babies, she was just not there. Had a two-storied green bus come chugging across the creek, she wouldn’t have lifted her head to grace the sight with her reading glasses. Woodrow thought at first she was preparing to go off island by teaching herself what to expect to pay across over there for a pound of butter.