The Watery Part of the World Read Online Free

Kingston and Troy. He’d even taken that train a few times. Sarah lived to visit her babies, usually in the fall when the heat and bugs still lingered on the island and the storms rolled in sometimes two in the same moon. Woodrowwent with her a couple of times. They took the train went up behind everything, back of people’s houses, back of factories, where you could see the ungussied part of the world—the porches sagging with beat-up furniture and washing machines, the yards chewed up by mean old fenced-in dogs, the piles of rusting engine parts and junk cars behind the warehouses and businesses. He liked this view better than what people put on for a show. But he got so he hated leaving the island. He did it twice, then let her go on ahead. Woodrow hadn’t lost anything on that backyard train.
    Sarah was all the time talking about moving. Retiring, she called it. But what was it to retire from? He had come home a good welder but what was it to weld on this island? Can’t weld conch, kelp, fishbone. Woodrow made a little money selling crabs and flounder, but it won’t nothing he could retire from. Woodrow answered Sarah’s talk about retiring by not answering, which back then seemed like the decent way to respond. No sense trotting out a lot of words. She knew damn well how he was after so many years together. If he did not want to do something she wanted him to do, well, he didn’t spend words telling her what she knew already by the way he’d walk out to visit with his pigs.
    He ought to have talked to Sarah about all this retiring, though. Stabbing the hardest now, hurting the most was all he did not do for her, things he never got around to giving her.
    Too busy waiting on them white women sisters, Crawl and them would claim. Sarah never said as much but she was surely thinking it. She had given up talking to him about Maggie andWhaley. Woodrow told himself she’d accepted it, the way it had to be if they were going to stay on this island, the price of living right down across the creek where both of them were born.
But why do we have to pay?
he sometimes imagined Sarah saying to him when he was out on the water and there was nothing biting, and he had flat quiet time to himself while he drifted, waiting on the O’Malleys to show with the mail.
    Everybody got to pay, he’d of said to Sarah.
    To live where they were born and raised up at? To stay right where they belong?
    She had that fire in her voice. Every question raised up in time to her eyebrows, the lift of her left shoulder. But at least she was in the boat with him. Good God, woman, come close lay your uppity attitude on my lap let’s stretch out across the bottom of this boat.
    Everybody pay. He’d say it over as if saying it over made it true.
    Let me ask you Woodrow Thornton how Whaley’s sour self’s paying to live where she was born? She’s going to come out here tomorrow meet the mail and catch your supper, let you stay home and nap?
    She pays. You would not want that woman’s suffering.
    If I could suffer up out of this sun, in the shade, I’d surely trade.
    Don’t go saying you’d take on somebody else’s mess you don’t even know what it is.
    All I’m saying, how hard could it be? She’s a selfish, stuck-up, putting-on-airs, all-the-time-bragging-about-her-great-great-great-great-granddaddy-done-killed-somebody-famous mess.
    She pays. Her and Maggie both.
    I never said Maggie. That girl owes, what it is. All the sinning she done in her life, she’ll be paying on into the next one, and in a place going to finally maybe make her appreciate this island she spent years complaining about.
    Hey now, said Woodrow. He hated to hear anyone talk bad about Maggie. True that much of her pain was of her own making but she wasn’t alone in that. Right then, bringing his Sarah into the flat afternoon quiet, wasn’t he making himself miserable? Couldn’t