Don't Make Me Stop Now (7 page)

One year the tiny white girl pulled Henry aside, said, That lady's digging dirt all the way around your family tree, Mister Henry, serves her right if you want to return the favor. Wanting Henry to tell it on a tape machine, Miss Whaley almost getting married three times and then falling all over Miss Maggie's, her own sister's, husband, the no-fishingest man ever born on island and some said a thief. Henry could have taped that and more. He could have had Miss Whaley showing her white ass in some book right alongside Al Louie's black-aproned ass. But he just gave that little girl a smile and
said, I don't no more hear her than the wind after seventy-some years on this island and last six with just us three.

The Tape Recorders were all the time trying to get Henry to act like he hadn't ever been off island much at all. He played them like they wanted, even though he'd spent two years at the Coast Guard base up in Weeksville and six years in the Norfolk shipyards. There he took up welding and did decent at it. Now his children reached right up the East Coast to Troy, New York, like stops on a train. Morehead, Elizabeth City, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philly, Newark, Brooklyn, up all the way to Kingston and Troy. He'd took that train many times when Sarah was alive. She loved it off island. All the time talking about moving, retiring she called it. But what was there to retire from? Wasn't any after to sit down from on this island. Henry came back to the island a damn good welder but what was it to weld? Can't weld conch shell, seaweed, fishbone. He bought some pigs and chickens off his brother and later on two milk cows from the O'Neals and got by selling crabs and flounder to O'Neal who turned right around, sold to the wholesalers in Hatteras for what Henry knew was some serious profit.

Two storms before Bertha, the one that opened up a new inlet down on the southern tip of the island, Sarah bled to death on the kitchen floor. Henry had got caught over in
Ocracoke on errands for the sisters and what it was was the wind. Henry'd tacked the kitchen on himself out of washed up timber mostly and some he'd traded the O'Neals for, which wasn't much better grade than what the tide brung up. And Henry's hand-hammered kitchen falling, slashing a hole in his Sarah's forehead. Sarah lying on the floor in the rain, her blood running the brown boards black. Before he left he'd asked the sisters, y'all check up on Sarah while I'm gone. Sarah wasn't nearly as friendly with them as Henry. Maybe because they were women and it had got down to four of them, three women and one man to run man things. Sarah did not stomach Miss Whaley's attitude and as for Miss Maggie's mess when she took a drink and came right up close enough to Henry to blink cross-eyed (maybe because at that particular nearness he won't even black just blurry), well, Sarah knew it. She studied everything but didn't say one word to Henry about it even though he knew when she knew something, he could read her just like he could the wind and the sound and the sky. If Henry wasn't there to drag her across the creek nights she'd have stayed home singing those gospel songs Crawl's wife taped her off the radio. They had the lights then and Sarah favored this Al Green she said had a voice smooth as liver. Maybe she was singing her Al Green right up until Henry's kitchen came down on her and do you
know the timber he cobbled that kitchen out of blew right off island? Ocean brung it to him, wind took it away. And left Sarah lying out on the floor holding a pair of scissors in her hand, what for? What was she fixing to cut? The sight of those scissors drove Henry crazy. He pried them out of her fist and flung them into the inlet and tried not to look at her head whichways upside the stove.

She wouldn't let me go after her, Miss Maggie told Henry talking about Whaley, which Whaley herself was big enough to admit. Why lose two to save one? she said. Sarah bled to death and it turned up big-skied sunny like it will do after a storm to make you feel worse and the sun dried the blood on the floorboards until it looked like paint. Toting the wood down island is how he discovered the new inlet. And in his mind it was Sarah cut the island in two. Sheared right through the marshland with her sewing scissors. Low tide he'd walk over to the good-for-nothing-but-birdshit southside. He'd crouch and smoke him an El Reeso Sweet if he could get one off the O'Neals. Wasn't one thing over there worth seeing but he knew Sarah was wanting him where the sisters weren't.

But he couldn't be hiding all day down island. They would be wanting their mail. Henry would pole out and the O'Neals would tie him up if they won't in a hurry and pass him a Miller's High Life. They liked to get him talking about the sisters.
He knew they went right back to tell it all over Ocracoke and said how he was getting something off Miss Maggie and Miss Whaley liked to watch, he'd heard that, it got back to him. Brung back on the wind maybe. From his house down by the inlet you could see across to Ocracoke the winking lights of Silver Lake and the lighthouse tossing its milky beam around but neither Henry nor the sisters crossed over unless one got bad sick. The O'Neals brought groceries and supplies which Henry mostly paid for with his catch, Whaley being too tight to part with what money left the sisters from their daddy who even the Tape Recorders knew to have gotten filthy off a load of Irish whisky washed ashore on Sheep Island in the twenties. Whaley when she paid him at all was so ill mouthed about it Henry stopped asking. Sarah used to collect on it and because she knew Sarah was not scared of her, Whaley always paid her what she owed. Henry wasn't scared of neither of them but it seemed like with only three of them on the island and him keeping the two of them alive he could leave off acting the nigger and one way to do that was not go knocking on Whaley's door asking for anything he didn't leave over there the night before. Sometimes Maggie would pay him in dribbly change and yellow-smelling dollars she stole and hid God knows where on her person, but it wasn't enough to make much of a difference.

Across the water Crawl wrote claiming it was 1980. He says you're seventy-five this year, Henry, Maggie said to him one night on the steps of the church. Miss Whaley sitting in her lawn chair had her flyers to go through, she wasn't listening. When she had her newspapers spread out across her lap on the church steps where the three of them would sit just like people in town will linger after supper to watch traffic and call out to neighbor women strolling babies, she was just not there. Would a two-storied green bus come chugging across the creek, she wouldn't have lifted her head to grace the sight with her reading glasses. Henry thought at first she was loosening her grip, preparing to go off island by teaching herself what to expect to pay for a pound of butter across the water in 1980. But after four or five years he figured the flyers were part of what kept her here. She'd spit the prices out like fruit seed. She'd get ill at a bunch of innocent bananas for costing highway robbery, she would read her prices like Maggie would read the letters to the editor, taking sides and arguing with every one of them, My Land the way people live in this world, she'd say every night when it got too dark to read, and she folded up her newspaper like the Coast Guard taught Henry to fold a flag, that careful, that slow, like a color guard was standing at attention waiting on her to finish.

Crawl don't know nothing about how old I am, Henry said to the water.

Old enough to know better, said Maggie. She tugged at his shoelace while her sister studied the paper above them. Henry always sat on the second to bottom step and Miss Maggie'd start out on the top step and slide down even with him as the evening settled, though her sister would rustle prices to try to halt her.

Too old to change, what it is, said Miss Whaley.

Henry swatted the back of his neck loud, but he didn't come away with any bloody mosquito because it was a sea breeze and there wasn't any bite. His head was getting ready to switch around and stare out Miss Whaley over her paper and he backslapped himself to keep still. The slap rang out like a hammering. Miss Whaley cleared her old throat. Miss Maggie to cover up got on with Crawl's letter, but Henry didn't listen anymore. In his head he started his own letter to the sisters, one he knew he'd never ever send them even if he could write. Y'all ought not to have done me like y'all done me, he wrote in the first line, and that was as far as he got.

That night he lay talking to Sarah in the dark. He told her what Miss Whaley said and he discussed it. How come she talking about me not changing when it's her sitting up in her throne reading out her numbers on and on. Why you let that white woman hurt you so, Henry, he heard Sarah say. He heard her words like he heard the surf frothing on the banks, making its claim and then receding, taking it back, offering
more words. A conversation. Sarah used to say to him, You the strongest man I ever met, you can work all day and all night if you care to and not make a noise about it to nobody. I seen you sit outside shucking corn in a nor'easter and you ain't scared of anybody who'd pull a knife on you. How come you let what people say get away with you so much? And Henry never answered, though he knew how bad people could hurt him with what they said. He just hurt. He'd been knowing that. Maybe that was why he stayed on this island so long after everybody left and there wasn't anyone to hurt him anymore but Miss Maggie who was too sweetly dizzy in the head to hurt much and Miss Whaley who he thought he knew every which way she had of hurting him but she was good for coming up with a new one. Henry just hurt. Sometimes it didn't take anybody saying anything to him to his face, he'd remember what one of the men he used to fish with said to him sixty years before when they were boys swimming naked in the inlet and he'd be out in his skiff all by himself and he'd want to put his head down in his lap and let all the crabs and oysters and mackerel and blues and tuna go on about their business. He didn't care about reeling in a thing. Hurt nearly bad enough to let everybody starve.

Henry had been this way ever since he was born on this island that the wind was taking away as he lay there not sleep
ing. Wondering how old he really was, he thought of the island as it used to be when he was a boy, the two stores stocking shoelaces and bolts of colored cloth, the old hospital and the post office with over fifty boxes in the walls, little glass windows Henry would peek through and pretend he was looking right inside something mysterious — the innards of some complicated machine, some smart so-and-so's brain — like he was being offered a sneak at the way things worked in this life. And then the wind took that life away before he could put what he saw to any good use, and then the wind took Sarah and now what it was was him and the sisters holding out for the final storm to take them off island.

Because sleep would not come to Henry he got up and pulled on his waders and packed himself some bologna biscuits and a can of syrupy peaches like he liked and he boiled up last night's coffee and poured it in his thermos and took his flashlight out to search the weeds in front of the house for the stub of a Sweet he might have thought he'd finished one day when he was cigar flush. The beam sent sandcrabs sideways into their holes and Henry let the light play over the marsh wishing he could follow them down underneath the island where the wind could not get to them. Y'all be around way after I'm gone, he said to the crabs. Y'all wait, y'all still be here when this house is nothing but some rusty nails in
the sand. He imagined his crabs crouched just belowground, ready to spring right back out once he switched his light off and give up on trying to find something to smoke himself awake good, imagined their big pop eyes staring right at him now, maybe their ears poked up listening to this sad old man out talking to the island like it cared to listen. He imagined the crabs calling to each other, hole to hole, old Henry Thornton won't never change.

What does it mean to change, Henry wondered as he cranked his outboard and throttled slow through the inlet toward the sound. What do I want over there across the water in nineteen hundred and eighty bad enough to give up whatever it is they're wanting me to give up? He'd spent the late sixties in Norfolk and all around him everybody was carrying on, army off fighting someplace he'd never heard of before or since, white boys growing their hair out and putting all kinds of mess down their throats, black people, his own children, trying to act all African, bushing their hair out and taking new names. Then crazies popping out the windows of tall buildings shooting presidents and preachers and the whole country catching afire. Henry brought Sarah home to stay. She tried to tell him wasn't anywhere safe left in this world, but Henry said he favored wind over flame, he'd rather be blown out to sea than die choking inside some highsky building with a brick lawn and blue lights streaking the night
instead of the sleepy sweep of the lighthouse which he'd long ago learned to set his breath to.

Checking on the first of his crab pots, Henry told himself that Whaley said all that mess about him too old to change but was really talking about herself. Her sister, too. What had the two of them done to change but choose to remain on this island where there weren't any bananas on sale, nor nineteen-cent-a-pound fryers, buy one, get half off the other? He knew Sarah, had she lived, would have left him sooner or later, would have given up trying to talk him off island and gotten fed up with Whaley's ill mouth and Miss Maggie drunkstumbling across the creek to interrupt her Al Green tapes with a whole bunch of Where's Henry at, I need to ask Henry something, call Henry for me. Henry let the rope slide slowly through his hands, watched the empty pot disappear into the deep and cut the engine. He knew he would have let Sarah go, would have stayed on just like he was doing, providing for the sisters, getting hurt over not much of nothing, spending half his days just waiting on that wind — the last one, the big one that would take the three of them out of this life where everybody was waiting on you to change.

Henry knew this, too: if he went first, like they claimed men were likely to do, the sisters would have to leave. No way they could stay without him. Whaley could hurt him with her meanness, Miss Maggie could keep right on trying to get
him to slip his hands somewhere they'd as soon not be, but neither of them could get on for more than a week without him. Without Henry there wasn't any island. Hell, I am that island, Henry said. Sarah when she passed cut me right in half. There's a side of me sits and smokes me a Sweet and just plain hurts, there's another part of me keeps the three of us and this island from blowing away.