The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [74]
Checking on the first of his pots, Woodrow let the rope slide slowly through his hands, lowered the empty pot into the deep, cut the engine. What was his hurry? He had a good four hours until it heated up out, and if the sisters needed him for something, well, hadn’t they proven when he was down island lying back bird-watching that they could get on by themselves? If he went first, like they claimed likely for men, the sisters would have to leave. They might have managed those couple weeks while Woodrow sulked and cussed their cold hearts and tried to catch a ride with every wave-skittering bird, but if he up and left now, for good, wasn’t any way the sisters could stay.
Peering back toward the island, Woodrow saw only a low dark line on the horizon, but when he lay back in the boat and lit a Sweet he saw sudden movement behind the smudgy glass of the window boxes in the old post office. Was it his big secret come to him after all these years? Would it let him know how come certain things would not aggravate most men in the least got away with him big-time and would it tell him what made him stay on the island tending to his white women sisters and why was it that love was harder now that Sarah was gone? Woodrow thought about how the Tape Recorders had wasted yards and yards of tape on the wrong questions, and he thought about making a list of those he would give a straight answer to, having finally figured out himself which questions were the ones to ask. He fiddled with the locks on the little glass post office boxes, opened one right up, stuck his hand in. Wiggling his fingers around in that secret inside felt familiar, warm, toes in wet sand, the slick of bait as he hooked a line. Woodrow smiled and puffed on his Sweet. He closed his eyes knowing he would not leave the sisters on the island because here he was taking the island with him, right across the sound, him and the wind.
VII
THEO WHALEY
Morehead City, North Carolina
WAITING IN HER ROOM for little Liz to show up with her tape recorder, Whaley sat in her wingback under the portrait of her great-great-great-grandmother, thinking over what she was going to tell. This would be her last session with the Tape Recorders. There was a time she could not imagine not having another story to tell Dr. Levinson and little Liz, but now that she was stuck in what they were calling a nursing home (wasn’t much nursing to it far as she could see, just uppity girls shoving people out into the halls or back into their rooms and a once a week doctor asking you rude questions about your bathroom habits and a whole lot of people a whole lot worse off than she’d ever be talking crazy talk and wetting themselves) across the sound from that island where she was born and planned on by God dying, she was all of a sudden tired of talking about it.
Life on the island, that is, which is what they were wanting to know. Dr. Levinson and his team loved interviewing her best because she alone kept the old ways alive, if not in practice, then in memory. She understood and appreciated the past. Maggie liked to say she lived in it. Maggie claimed she wouldn’t know the here and now if it up and crawled in bed with her. Leave it to Maggie to go talking about something crawling into bed with her.
Whaley never set out to become the official island historian. Just that the others were not fit for the job. Somebody points a tape recorder in your face and asks you to just tell a story, nine times out of nine that story’s going to be about you. Whaley kept herself out of it. She told how they got by back then, how they made do.
Whaley got up and rang the buzzer for a gal to come bring her another chair so she and Liz could set up by the window overlooking the sound. At first they’d stuck her on the highway side of the building and she raised Cain, said she’d take over the dayroom, which had three windows featuring the waterway and nobody even bothering to look outside in favor of that television they