The whales waited for him. Sometimes they went below the surface and came up again, but mostly they waited for him in his puny tender. The gulls circled them like feathered halos, until Turner shipped his oars and let the swells carry him.
He could not tell if the waves were drifting him closer to the whales or if the whales were swimming closer to him. In any case, soon he was so close that when he held out his hand over the water, all he had to do was reach down and he would touch the dark gray rubber of a whale's skin, stretched to a perfect tautness, smelling of the deep sea. He felt more than saw the size of the whales, and the deep knowing within them.
He turned from one to another, their sea-washed eyes open and watching, and then finally he leaned out. And he touched the cool, wet, perfect smoothness of whale.
Then he knew. Then he knew.
The knowledge in his father's eyes and in the whales' eyes.
The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul-saddening than when they are parted. Turner knew that everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.
And he had lost Malaga.
So he wept. With his hand still on the whale and the whale's eye on him, he wept. He wept for old Mrs. Hurd, and he wept for Mrs. Cobb, and he wept for his father, and he wept for Lizzie Bright. In the open sea, with the land blue in his eyes and the sea green in his hand, he wept. And all around him the swells grew still, and the sea breeze quieted, and the perfect sky above him vaulted like a painted dome. Beneath him he felt the currents eddying around the bodies of the whales, felt the tides and shifting water that they created as they passed him, one by one, until the sea closed over the eye of the one he was touching, and they had all lowered into the cool, wet, smooth sea—and they were gone.
And still Turner wept.
He wept until the sea breeze would have no more of it and bucked the swells up, frothed them at the top, and sent some of the spray over the stern. Turner took the oars without thought and kept the tender moving into the waves. Then, again without thought, he began to row slowly, rowing through the watchful ocean until the blue land changed to gray and then brown and green. Then he struck the shore and turned south, keeping outside the breakers and inland of the islands, until he found Pop ham and rowed up the shining waters of the Kennebec.
He had floated in the ocean with whales.
He had seen them and touched them.
They had seen him and touched him.
It was something to tell somebody, and for a moment he smiled at what Lizzie would say when she heard. "Of whales and of Malaga I sing," he said. Then he remembered that she would never hear anything in this world again. So he had no one to tell of this thing most beautiful and most wonderful.
The sun had almost decided to set by the time Turner reached the dock. The first stars weren't out yet, but they were close. The sea breeze had come up behind him and the swells had started to tumble over themselves just a bit, pushing the tender's stern along and letting it know that it was time to be safe abed.
Willis was waiting, and he waved and halloed as Turner rowed closer. Turner wondered how long he had been waiting there. A couple of hurricane lanterns stood at the end of the dock, and Turner figured Willis had been about to light them. He rowed hard the last stretch—he didn't want to show how tired he really was—but when Willis threw out the line and Turner could hardly tie the knot, he figured Willis would know And also he figured that was all right.
Willis's outstretched hand pulled him up onto the dock.
"You still don't know how to tie that hitch. You go far out?"
"I guess."
"Pretty calm. I suppose even someone from Boston could manage."
"You want me to break your nose again?"
"Be still and carry these up with me."
Turner picked up one of the lanterns and looked straight on up toward Phippsburg. A few lights were already glowing, and there was woodsmoke in the air against the chill. He could see the cupola of Mrs. Cobb's house, the glass reflecting the reddening sunset. And there was the first star.
"Willis," said Turner, and he told him about the whales.
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Author's Note
This is a novel, and the characters and situations are fictional—though some names have been borrowed from the Malaga community. The backstory of Malaga, however, is a true one. If you were to take Route 1 north to Bath, then head east out to Phippsburg, and if you were to go down to the New Meadows shore, you would see Malaga Island still keeping its tiny self above the tide. For the most part, the people of Phippsburg had their way with it. Nothing remains of the Malaga Island settlement.
The island had galled the people of Phippsburg for a long time before the settlement was finally destroyed. When the shipbuilding business began to fail, Phippsburg did indeed turn to tourism as its next great hope, and tourists, they reasoned, do not come to a shore marked by hovels, and garbage heaps, and communities where rumors of interracial marriages and incest and alcoholism and thievery and idiocy were kept alive in hushed but exuberant tales.
And there was always the question of who was to provide for the people of the island, who were judged to be mere squatters. Phippsburg, seeking to avoid this expensive obligation, claimed that Harpswell, the town on the other side of the river, owned the island, but the people of Harpswell were not eager to lay claim to it either, given that such a claim would put forty-nine people on its pauper rolls.
Meanwhile, the people of Malaga got along as best they could in an isolated, poor community on the edge of the ocean. By the time of this story, they had been getting along for over a century and a quarter, since Benjamin Darling, a freed or possibly escaped slave, had settled there with Sarah Proverbs, his white wife. More slaves followed, and the Darlings had two sons. Those sons had fourteen children, and soon about fifty people—Portuguese, Irish, Scottish, African American, Native American, others not accepted in Phippsburg for whatever reason—were inhabiting the island, living by fishing, lobstering, farming, and working in town when allowed.
In 1905, the state of Maine took over the jurisdiction of Malaga Island to end the squabbling between the two towns. But the stories of Malaga only grew, and in 1911, Governor Frederick Plaistead came to see the island for himself-—he saw it from the perspective of Mr. Stonecrop, atop the granite ledges. "We ought not to have such things near our front door," he said, and suggested burning down the shacks. The next year, the Cumberland County sheriff ordered all the residents off the island, telling them they would have to be gone by July 1 of that year. (In this novel, this deadline comes in the fall.) The Tripp family did indeed float their house right off the island into the New Meadows, but eight of the islanders were taken to Pownal, to the Home for the Feeble-Minded, where they quickly died. One—a young girl—has no recorded name, so I have given her one.
After removing the islanders, the state of Maine destroyed the remaining houses. (I have conflated these two events in the novel.) All the graves were dug up and removed to five zinc-lined caskets buried by the Pownal asylum. White markers still stand by these.
Today, you may drive on past Phippsburg to the beaches at Popham that Turner rowed past. You may well see the First Congregational steeple as you drive by Phippsburg center. You will not see the hotels Mr. Stonecrop envisioned, because they were never built. And nothing rests on Malaga except for a few lobster traps stored there by fishermen.
But whales still swim in sight of the New Meadows.
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