The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [73]
Spite keeps that woman’s motor running and that’s all, Sarah used to say. Somebody cut the spite off and you might as well start sawing on her coffin. What he’d said—y’all ought not to have done me like y’all done me—was just shoveling coal at her spite. But if you don’t say anything, Sarah said to him that night as he lay in bed talking to her, you stay her back-door nigger right on.
When she talked like this Woodrow hurt even harder for not taking her off island when she wanted to go. Last time they’d lived off island had been in Norfolk, in the nineteen and sixties. Everybody carrying on. Army off fighting someplace he’d never heard of, trying to beat somebody people told him never did do anything to any United States of America in the first place. White boys growing their hair long and putting all kinds of mess down their throats, women walking down daytime streets wearing an outfit you used to have to buy a dirty magazine to get a peek at, colored people, his own children even, bushing their hair out and taking new names made no sense to the sound. Crazies popping out the windows of tall buildings shooting presidents and preachers, mobs lighting cities on fire. We’re going back across, said Woodrow, and when Sarah tried to tell him wasn’t anywhere else safe left in this world, Woodrow said he favored wind over hellfire, said he’d rather let the wind or the water take him out than die choking in a high-sky tower with a brick lawn and blue lights streaking the night instead of the sleepy sweep of the lighthouse over on Meherrituck.
“I reckon I better get to work,” Woodrow said to Sarah when sleep would not come to him and seemed like everything he said got away with her big time. To keep on arguing in your head nights with the one who showed you how to love. Now what was that? Was it still love? Was it miss? Habit? Seemed to Woodrow love was just as hard now that Sarah was dead and gone, and in some ways even harder, for who did he think he was fooling when he got up and pulled on his waders and packed himself some bologna biscuits and a can of syrupy peaches like he liked and boiled up last night’s coffee and poured it in his thermos and took his flashlight out to search the weeds in front of the house for the stub of a Sweet he might have thought he’d finished one day when he was cigar flush? Sarah knew what he was up to. When she was alive she had been no easier to fool than God in heaven and now she was up there looking down on his every move and seeing right through the walls of his heart to whatever hurt he was hiding. Will it ever get any easier, Woodrow said to the sand fiddlers he’d sent sideways into their holes with the beam of his flashlight. Woodrow let the light play over the marsh, wishing he could follow the crabs down underneath the island, though there was no escaping Sarah.
“Y’all be around way after I’m gone,” he said to the crabs. “Y’all wait, y’all still be here when this house is nothing but some rusty nails in the sand.” He imagined his crabs crouched just below ground, ready to spring right back out once he switched his light off and gave up on trying to find something to smoke himself awake good, imagined their big pop eyes staring right at him now, maybe their ears poked up listening to this sad old man out talking to the island like it cared to listen.
Woodrow cranked his outboard and throttled slow through the inlet toward the sound. The night was still and big, white-hot stars and huge moon. Sarah I just can’t sit up in that chair all night when there’s enough moon for me to find my pots. Woodrow talked out loud to her to hide the thought he had and hated and could not let loose: that, had she lived, she’d have left him, gone on across without him, fed up with Whaley’s mouth and Maggie’s stumbling across the creek in her dirty shirt to interrupt her radio with a whole bunch of Where’s Woodrow at? Worse than her leaving, that he’d have let her go, would have stayed on just like he was doing, providing for the sisters, getting hurt over not much of nothing, wasting