The Watery Part of the World Read Online Free Page B

storm rising. He had seen seven or eight hours where he could of turned around, gone back. He spent that time wavering. Ain’t looking good, I’m going back, he’d think, but then he’d remember Whaley’s attempt to get Sarah in theboat with him, and say, Hell with that woman and her whites-only-for-a-day island. She needs some color in her world.
    He’d been over to Meherrituck for a while when it started to really blow. Wind and water made up his mind for him—you ain’t going nowhere now, Woodrow Thornton, you had your chance. He sat up in the community store with O’Malley Senior and his sons, listening to the island come down around them, all night long the pop and crash of things picked up by the wind, the curl and rip of scissored-off strips of tin roofs, the store gone to shadow in the candlelight, everybody drinking something to take their mind off the wind, though it just made worse what fear they felt, the liquor and the wine and the beer.
    Woodrow left soon as the seas died down enough to where he could cross, throttled wide open over there, hull batted wave to wave. He lost: cooler full of fish, spare gas tank, a net, rod-and-reel, waders, all of it tossed overboard, a sacrifice, sea can have all that if she just lets me find my Sarah alive and well.
    Someone was waiting for him down at the dock. Wouldn’t anyone meet him but his bride, and Woodrow at the sight of the figure on the dock cussed himself for tearing ass over across the inlet, sacrificing his worldly goods for nothing. Then he grew close enough to spot Maggie. He recognized her before he could make out the color of her skin; it was the way she stood, which he remembered from all the times he’d seen her standing similar, waiting on him to bring Boyd back from a day’s fishing. Arms crossed over her chest, holding her heart, protecting it. He thought at first, well, wind doneknocked out the power and the light, mixed her up. She’d lost her place in time, come down to wait on Boyd, who at that point had been gone a good many years. Woodrow’d seen people take a little vacation from good God-given sense after a particularly big blow.
    Then he got a little closer and saw the look on her face and he changed his mind. It’s Whaley, he thought. Most people would put their money on Maggie to be the first to go. She’d courted nearly everything you can court to shave some years off—she smoked roll-your-owns for years, drank whenever she could get her hands on some liquor, loved nothing more than lying out stitchless under the noontime sun. But Woodrow always thought it’d be Whaley because in the end, though she lived better, ate better, worked harder than her sister, she cut herself off from people, she didn’t know nothing about how to love, she couldn’t even listen. Death comes quicker to those who don’t know how to listen. He worried about Crawl. His own son didn’t know how to hear another man’s pain. Get too busy thinking about your own mess, that’ll kill you deader than hell. You got nobody to sustain you, you’re going to go quick, and it’s going to hurt too, knowing you left nobody in your wake. He thought about Whaley lying there on her deathbed knowing after she’s gone all that’s left is some same-old stories in a book about an island nobody cares to hear about.
    Well, least she went easy, quick. Best she didn’t linger, because if she did, Woodrow’d have to sit with her, at least help take care of her, and he’d be telling some lies even bringing around food to sustain her one more hour, because he couldn’t out-and-out say hewould miss her if she was gone. He could say the out-and-out opposite. Better he didn’t have to get himself mixed up in a big last lie.
    When he cut the engine and nosed the skiff up alongside the dock and got close enough to toss Maggie the line, he saw the blood on her dress and