The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [81]
“He’ll change his mind,” said Maggie. “If anyone can sniff out some weather, it’s Woodrow.”
This got away with Whaley, Maggie’s innocent yet wholly accurate statement. More the bit about Woodrow changing his mind, maybe. Whaley didn’t want Woodrow to change his mind. She wanted the wind to shift, the storm to turn and head up the coast or stall out before it ever reached land, she wanted Woodrow to meet the ferry, she wanted her dress to wear when the Tape Recorders showed up with their cameras this time. One thing she did not want was her sister knowing the reason she’d sent Woodrow over there.
But now, years later, knowing what she knew, Whaley often wondered why Woodrow went. He could have said no. He wasn’t her slave (though once Dr. Levinson had taken her aside and told her that Woodrow’s great-great-great-grandfather Hezekiah Thornton had in fact been sold to her great-great-great-grandfather, a fact she saw no sense in ever repeating to Woodrow or Maggie either, as she surely would have told it). No was definitely a word in Woodrow’s vocabulary, though she’d hardly ever heard him utter it outright. When he did not want to do something it did not get done. If it was something Whaley deemed doing, she’d ask him again. (Ask, not tell; she always asked, said Would you?, said Please.) If he did not do it, she’d ask-not-tell a third time. If he did not get round to it the third time, she’d leave off and either do it herself or find something else to stew about.
Woodrow must have known well before she did how bad it was going to blow. Yet he went. Maybe he wanted some time off island himself. He’d spent years away, all because of Sarah. But knowing Woodrow like she did, she had to wonder why he allowed Sarah to take him off island for all those years. She knew he loved this island, hated being away from it, even for a night. Must have been love, though if that was what love did—make you court misery in order to make someone else happy—she did not want any part of it.
Whaley went about her business that morning, which was indoors. She scarcely looked out the window. What could she do about the weather? If it was going to blow, it was going to blow, only thing she could do was clean the yard and porch of anything the wind might pick up and, if it got bad enough and hit at high tide and there was a surge, head for the church, which not only crowned the highest point of the island but had a balcony built more with high water in mind than overflowing crowds come to worship a merciful God.
Midafternoon it started to rain. Lightly at first, an intermittent drizzle, but within an hour it was heavy and wind-sheeted. Maggie came in from wherever she’d been, wearing an ancient, peeling slicker the Life Saving station had issued their father, her hair soaked, her face wide with questions she did not let herself ask.
She did not say what they were both thinking. Their father’s old ditty: Wind before rain, soon fine again. Other way around, get out of town.
There wasn’t much talking during supper. The radio spoke to them from a corner of the kitchen, Elizabeth City station with its reporting pitched to Knotts Island, Little River, and the Northern Banks. Morehead City station was only high whistling, as if the wind itself had taken over the studio and was broadcasting itself out to all those poor fools wanting the radio to tell them something they didn’t already know. If Whaley thought at all about Woodrow it was to think, He’s on his way home now, he and Sarah settling into their after-supper routine, whatever that was. All these years living just across the creek from the two of them and Whaley had no earthly idea what they did nights. She knew one thing, though, which comforted her: Sarah loved her radio, had it on from the time she got up in the morning, every time Whaley was by there she heard it blasting her gospel music, all the hand clapping and the Jesus shouting and the swelling organ chords.