The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [87]
“She was certainly welcome in that church and you know it. Don’t go changing what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened. All I know is she’s dead and we’re alive and we ought to have gone down there and dragged her black ass up the hill.”
“What are you talking about? If you’d of gone down the hill when you wanted to, we would have lost two. I told you then and I will tell Woodrow to his face: ain’t no sense in a person dying to save someone who didn’t have sense enough to get out of the way of a storm like that one. You need to change what happened to feel better, fine. But you keep it to yourself.”
When Whaley rose again the chair shot back onto the floor. But instead of the snap she expected there was only a thud, for everything was muffled with mud now.
“I’m telling you Whaley,” said Maggie, “leave Woodrow alone with her.”
Whaley thought: she has the power now. She knows something and she’ll hold it over me just like I held Boyd over her only what I did is worse than her falling in love, however foolishly. Still, the idea that Maggie was going to make her pay, that she would dole out oblique accusations for the rest of their life together, made Whaley want to scream.
But instead she breathed big through her mouth to avoid the stench and said, “How did you get the body up the hill?”
“Put it in a tarp and dragged. Why?”
“Why didn’t you just wake me up?”
“Seems like you had some things you were needing to sleep off.”
Whaley thought of confronting her but did not have the energy. She would win this the way she’d won everything else: by being implacable.
But it was hard, harder than anything she’d ever done, especially when she laid eyes on Woodrow, saw how he was taking it. She waited, as Maggie suggested, for a few hours, left Woodrow alone with his bride. She even let Maggie go up there and help Woodrow clean the body up for burial. Woodrow claimed she wanted to be buried on the mainland, near Crawl; there wasn’t any way to get word to the family save Woodrow taking the skiff back over to Meherrituck, getting on the phone, which he wasn’t about to do and Whaley wasn’t about to offer to do for him. He would just have to show up across the water with his dead wife. That was the way it used to be, before phones and all. Sometimes people went off island and died and you didn’t hear about it for a year or so. Of course to Whaley’s mind, once you went off island you were in a way already dead.
“I’m so sorry, Woodrow,” she said to him that afternoon in the church. He wouldn’t look at her, which wasn’t anything new. He mumbled something she didn’t catch, which Maggie obviously heard, for she looked to her sister for interpretation—sometimes Maggie understood Woodrow better because she followed him around like a toddler—and saw her sister wince. Later, when she asked what he’d said, Maggie had sighed and left the room. She never did get it out of her.
“It wasn’t anything I could do,” she said. “We would of lost another one, going down there to get her.”
Woodrow turned to her then, finally. He said, “I know, Miss Whaley. Wind wants to take you, can’t do nothing to stop it, can you?”
This made her feel worse, and though more words passed between them, and Woodrow went on to outright accuse her, when she said everybody’s time is going to come, of helping Sarah’s time come, she told herself that it was the wind.
And they did not speak of it again. Woodrow took Sarah across the water that very day, buried her in the churchyard where Crawl and them worshipped. He was back within a week. For a while they saw nothing of him. He spent his days off by himself, down south where the storm had chewed a new inlet in the island. She had no idea what he did down there. She spent a lot of time outdoors trying to catch sight of him, but if she saw him at all he was moving away quickly, over the dunes, in and out of hammocks, blurred by