The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [86]
Whaley said, “I have to sit down now.”
Maggie said, “What’s wrong with you?”
Whaley said, “I don’t have the right to feel bad?” She meant to say “sad.” She flushed and a wash of nausea came over her and this time she really did feel bad, terribly bad.
“No love lost between y’all’s all I’m saying.”
It helped the nausea to have something to get indignant about. She was thankful to her sister just then for drawing her into an argument.
“Don’t you go getting self-righteous about her dying,” said Whaley. “We might not have got on so great but she’s dead and poor Woodrow and poor Crawl and all them others to have lost their mama this way.”
“This way? Seems like a good way to me. I’d just soon get clobbered in the head by something the wind shook loose as drown or, worse yet, waste away in some hospital.”
“We don’t get to choose, sister.”
Maggie sat down beside her on the soggy pew.
“We hardly ever get to choose. Oh, they’re plenty of choices. Just look at the paper, you’ll see they got all kinds of choices. But none of them are the right ones.”
Maggie said, “We need to get you to bed.”
“Take me home, Mag. I want to go home.”
Maggie tucked her sister in upstairs and trudged back up the hill to the church to fetch the portrait. But as soon as it was propped up on the sea chest at the foot of her bed like she asked, Whaley found she could not look at it. Something in the woman’s eyes, something haughty and defiant, that she felt she shared. It shamed her to think about how she’d gone on once, and on tape too, about the kinship she felt with this woman, when what she ought to have been talking about was the first days she could remember on this island in the house so pretty painted white with all the green grass like a carpet and the white sand. Ducks would light on the water so many they looked like an island. Decorations for woman’s hats out of the plumage. Babe Ruth came, asked to meet Al Louie. My little sister and I we loved so dearly those cats.
When she woke it was dark. Light rain falling on the tin roof. For a full blissful minute she forgot everything—the storm, her lie, Sarah, the church—and the darkness she mistook for predawn of a new day. But then it all came rushing home to her and the black shadows of her bedroom turned sinister.
There was no power, no light—in fact, the power and the light would never return, though she did not know until weeks of darkness that the storm had severed the cable. Fine by Whaley, really, that the island moved backward in time.
Maggie sat at the kitchen table, the kerosene lamp dicing a circle of wavering light from the gloom.
“You let me sleep too long.”
Maggie got up and began to run water in a pail. There was mud on the floor, mudstains six inches up the cabinets, staining the legs of the table. The smell was rank and would only grow worse.
“I had things to do.”
An iciness in her voice. She would not look Whaley’s way, much less meet her eyes. As if Whaley had been off on a drunk, had done something to bring unfathomable shame to the house.
“You’ve not been to bed?”
“I had things to do,” she said again. The water rose in the bucket. Maggie looked out the window as it began to spill over the lip, and Whaley just resisted the urge to tell her not to waste water, especially not now of all times.
“What things?”
Maggie sighed—or was it a gasp? A cynical snort?
“Sarah’s body? I just couldn’t leave it there for him to find.”
“Where is it?”
“In the church, laid out on the altar. He’s up there with her.”
“He’s back?”
“I said he’s with her.”
Whaley scooted her chair back in the mud. As she was rising Maggie turned on her. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve got to go to him.”
“You leave him be. He wants to be alone with her.”
“He’ll need help preparing the body.”
“I cleaned her up best I could with what I had. She bled to death? The roof collapsed and a piece of tin sliced her neck and she lay up under that rubble bleeding to death while we were safe and dry up in our white-people-only church?”
The way her sister turned statements of fact