The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [72]
“Crawl don’t know nothing about how old I am,” Woodrow said to the water, to the wind, to the sand fiddlers, to anyone or anything but the company he was keeping at that moment in time.
“Old enough to know better,” said Maggie.
“Too old to change,” said Whaley.
They weren’t talking or even listening to each other, and down the road Woodrow might just decide they weren’t really talking to him either, for what they said they could have easily said about themselves, Woodrow figured when he let it settle and studied it. But at the time the words just spilled out of their mouths and hung there, and the white women, sisters, moved right on through time continuous, though Woodrow, to whom they had supposedly been speaking, about whom their comments were supposed to be describing, was stuck down on the birdshit southside.
“Why can I not just come across,” he said to Sarah that night as he lay talking to her in the dark. He told her what the sisters said and he listened to what she had to say back. Their conversation was surf on the beach, claiming ground and then receding, sea listening to the land, then offering more words, steady rhythm into the night.
How come you let what people say get away with you so much, said Sarah, and Woodrow never did answer because she knew how bad people could hurt him with their words. Woodrow just hurt. They’d both been knowing that. And here he was on this island with no one left to hurt him anymore but Maggie who was too sweetly dizzy in the head to hurt much and Whaley who Woodrow thought he knew every which way she had of hurting him but she was good for coming up with a new one.
Sarah had snipped him off his very own island but he could not stay across over there.
“Y’all ought not to have done me like y’all done me,” said Woodrow. I’ve seen dogs done better, he started to add, but what he said was more than he’d said in months. More, maybe, than he’d ever said to anyone in his life.
He got up and picked his way through the laid-out advertisements, down the steps of the church. The village he walked across to home that night looked just as it used to be when he was a boy, the two stores stocking shoelaces and bolts of colored cloth, the old hospital and the post office with over fifty boxes in the walls, little glass windows Woodrow would peek through and pretend he was looking right inside something mysterious—the innards of some complicated machine, some smart so-and-so’s brain—like he was being offered a sneak at the way things worked in this life.
High above his head the church bell chimed out the hour like it used to when anyone on the island had anywhere to be at. Down by the dock island boys, squealing, seal-slick naked, splashed in the inlet. Whatever he said, it wasn’t going to fill his lack or make him spread his mess out of his lone widower’s room. He felt bad for saying it, for even though Maggie, who was eat up with guilt, born with it the way some children come into being with two extra toes, would like as not beat him across the creek to apologize, he’d not hear mention of it from Whaley one way or the other. She’d think him weak, though, for saying it out loud. All those years he’d known her he’d heard her only once say she was sorry, in the church that day Sarah laid across the altar kerchiefless and what Whaley really meant by sorry was It’s awful what happened while you were gone, how the wind took Sarah, I feel for you. Not: I’m the one done this, Woodrow Thornton, as God is my witness