The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

Author:Michael Parker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary, Historical, Adult
ISBN: 9781565126824
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

V

TEODOSIA BURR ALSTON

Yaupon Island, North Carolina

THE FIRST THING SHE saw when Whaley brought her home to the cottage he’d built while she was recuperating with a widow down island was the portrait. In a gesture Theo might have found mocking had she not owed him her life, he’d hung it dead center of the front room above the fireplace. It had been damaged in the crossing, its canvas torn in the high right corner, the colors bleeding and fading from exposure to the sun, its frame stained with her blood. Later, she would learn that he’d used the painting to shelter her from the sun, that she lay bleeding in the bottom of the leaking skiff, an inch of bloody water washing her wounds with salt, and anyone who might have come upon them hugging the sound-side shore of the banks, moving slowly southward, weaving in and out of the marshes, would have pondered the absurdity of this haggard boatman rowing his cargo of portrait.

She said, hobbling into the house, “I’d think you’d rather not have to stare at that countless times every day of your life.”

“You would think?” He was busy stowing the items the island ladies had donated—old dresses, a bonnet, a tablecloth, rags, really, but she was glad to have them—into a lidless wobbly chest.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You said, I’d think. Would think. Never you mind the thinking about what goes where. It ain’t much choice, is it, since we don’t have nothing and got nowhere to put our nothing.”

She knew by his grammar that she’d angered him. He knew she preferred he not speak to her as he would a barmaid.

She said, “I’m sorry, Whaley.”

He said he knew she was sorry. He said in the way people say, “I know you’re sorry,” which makes you understand how pitiful you would be to them were they in the mind to pity you. He lit a fire, went out. She sat in the one crude chair he’d built and did not look at the portrait. Instead she studied her body. She’d spent hours since the moment she’d come to in the widow Royall’s cottage observing the scars and bruises across her arms, legs, and neck, for they kept fresh the debt she owed Whaley. Another reminder was the throbbing in her bones when the sky turned dark and a storm whipped across the island, a new sensation since her injury. Lingering pain she accepted without question, for it was so vastly preferable to the things she’d wasted time worrying about in her other life. She remembered once at DeBordieu an afternoon of incessant worrying over whether Joseph’s family might take offense if she did not come down to dinner that evening.

Now the weight of what she had done hung over everything. He’d hardly looked at her when fetching her from the widow Royall, who, like every other woman on the island who had come to take turns sitting with her and helping dress her wounds and attending selflessly and often brusquely to her condition, assumed they were married.

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