Free Don't Make Me Stop Now by Michael Parker Page A

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 inthe 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 nightinstead 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