The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [85]
It’s not the materials, Woodrow, she tried to tell him, it’s that you’re a waterman, no builder. His great-great-great-granddaddy Hezekiah was a skilled builder but most of his handiwork was long washed away, and after he passed, the Thornton men went back to the water. The houses on the island that had survived were all built by the same family—the Pender men, geniuses at constructing a dwelling uniquely suited to the limitations of sand, low water table, relentless wind, rising water. The rest of Woodrow’s house had been constructed by Arthur Pender Jr. But when she told him this he said only, I don’t know any not-dead Penders and besides I’m a little short to be hiring myself an arch-itect.
Now she had her proof that he ought to have listened to her, not strayed into areas where he had no expertise, but it did not make her feel any better. Soon as the water went down they’d go check on Sarah, but God help her she had the good sense to stay away from that kitchen.
Which God knows she did not. Which Maggie discovered herself because Whaley could not bring herself to go down there. It was midmorning when the wind quit whipping at the stained glass and the quiet rose up into the balcony like something you’re supposed to experience in church, a deep calm that entered you like breath, like air sweet and pure ushered down from heaven. Then the sunlight kaleidoscoping those windows, which she’d always found wasteful—she remembered when they were brought over in a crate from Norfolk, how the so-called stained-glass artisan who she figured for a crook took forever to assemble them in front of an audience of half the island who treated his show as if it was the Sistine Chapel getting a touch-up. Now the light slanted down through the glass and the colors collided in twirling prisms above the ruined pews and for a few seconds Whaley was taken away from the utter mess of the church and no doubt the entire island, which would likely not be the same as long as she lived there.
She struggled up from her slump against the back wall of the balcony where she’d been sort of sleeping. Maggie was gone. Whaley pulled herself up to the window, saw her sister picking her way down the hill, negotiating the ravished island. Detritus everywhere and most of it belonging to those who’d already given up, left for the mainland. What got away with Whaley was the notion that she was going to have to clean up after them.
There was no scream, no Maggie running back up the hill, but Whaley knew Sarah was dead because her sister did not seem any changed. She wore the same dazed expression on her face, took the same tentative gait, as if she’d spent the last twenty-four hours on rough seas and was struggling to get her land legs back. It was as if she had known already, before she went down there, what she’d find.
Plus, no Sarah in tow.
Whaley met her on the steps.
“Well?”
“She’s in the kitchen. All I saw was her legs.”
“Did you even check to see was she still breathing?”
“I felt of her leg. She’s been dead. Go check yourself since you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you,” said Whaley softly. She felt nauseated, but she couldn’t say even then that she realized her hand in all this. More the shock of having a country of four dwindle down suddenly to three. She had a thought she wished she’d never had, but she had it: about how three is always a cumbersome number. Shifting alliances, two against one.
“I don’t understand why she didn’t just come with you. I mean, I never figured Sarah for outright wanting to die.”
Whaley said, “Just because she stayed behind doesn’t mean she chose to die. She might not of thought the storm would amount to anything.”
Whaley remembered the look on Sarah’s face, the Bible in her hands, her pacing up and down that hall. She remembered that awful loud praise-him-on-high music. She could hear it now in her head as if someone