by Lauren Wolk
Miss Maggie was the only one on Cuttyhunk who did not seem to be afraid of me.
I was often sick as a baby and still too often sick as a child, and Miss Maggie was the only one to cross to our island with bread and soup and one of the potions she brewed from rose hips and nettle leaf. Hers was the only hand that had ever touched me, if I didn’t count Osh or those who came before him, though I always did.
Despite all her hard work, her hands were as smooth as the inside of an oyster shell. When I asked her why, she frowned and told me that they were soft from the lanolin in the sheep’s wool she sheared from her flock—or picked from the sheep that died in the rough—and spun into yarn. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t strong,” she said, as if I had doubted it.
When she put those hands on my hot forehead, I thought of sea lavender and April. But she hardly ever smiled, and when she talked everything came out with a hint of thunder in it. A little scolding, no matter what I’d done or hadn’t done.
“You’ll eat this soup and every spoonful,” she’d growl. “You hear me?”
And I did eat every spoonful: No one else on Cuttyhunk made better soup than Miss Maggie did, with vegetables that came from the finest garden on the islands. She started her seedlings in hotbeds as soon as the sun was stronger than the snow and planted them out after the last thaw in a vast garden, rich with manure and sea muck: potatoes, celery, beans, cabbage, horseradish, snap peas, barley, melons, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and turnips.
If she spoke rough to me, she said softer things to her cows. And although they ate the same oats as all the other Cuttyhunk cows, hers gave the best milk on the island, so her butter was the best, too. And she made her hens so happy with marigolds and barley that they laid like troupers and hatched out more chicks than any on the Elizabeth Islands. With the flour and oil she got from trading eggs, Miss Maggie baked bread that made me happier than if I’d had cake, which I tasted only once in a blue moon. I was almost glad to be sick if it meant her bread and soup.
“She does make good soup,” Osh always said before she arrived and after she left. “But soup is just one thing.”
Her bravery was another thing.
“Don’t you worry that you’ll get sick, too?” I’d ask her as I lay in bed, my head aching.
“I’ve been sick before,” she’d say. “And I’ll be sick again, with or without your help.”
I liked that about Miss Maggie. How simple she made things seem.
Chapter 3
Miss Maggie lived in a smart little house apart from most of the other year-rounders, though with all her animals she was not completely alone. One bad winter (though I don’t know that there was ever a good one), she brought the smallest pig into the house with her and, when spring came, had to drag him back to his pen. When a half dozen wild turkeys froze in the sassafras trees alongside her barn, she carried them inside, one by one, like big, ugly babies, wrapped them in flannel, stood them by the fire, and fed them hot whiskey and milk. Every last one survived, and they neither pecked nor harried her when the thaw was complete, but simply walked out her front door into the sunshine the next day.
Four of her rabbits did not fare so well. Though she rescued their frozen bodies from the hutch and fed them the same strong drink, they revived for just a while before dying once and for all, so she skinned them and made them into a mighty stew with carrots from her root cellar and bacon from her smokehouse.
“It was the best stew I ever made,” she said, “and I ate up every bit of it, but I was sorry for the way those poor rabbits died.”
Then she lined her coat with their pelts and was much the warmer for it.
Mouse had a fur coat, too, and I loved to bury my face in it. To listen to the rumble in her chest.
Like Osh and Miss Maggie, she was not afraid to let me touch her.
We called her Mouse because that’s what she said over and over again when she was hungry.
She settled for scraps of fish and a little of the jerky that Osh made from beef and blueberries. Or the fish heads that the Cuttyhunk men tossed back into the sea after cleaning their catch.
Sometimes she brought us a gift—once it was an eel that wriggled and rolled when she dropped it at my feet and that we all three ate in a stew—but usually she was too hungry to be proud of herself. All three of us were skinny. All three of us ate what we had, and we didn’t think about what we didn’t have.
Mouse was an obliging cat most of the time, but when Osh pinned her between his knees and trimmed her longest fur for his paintbrushes, she squirmed and yowled so pathetically that I mashed my hands over my ears and looked away.
“I’m not hurting her,” Osh said as he carefully cut what he needed. “It’ll grow back.”
“Why don’t you use your own hair?” I asked.
“I do,” he said. “But fur is better for some things.”
After he had harvested the bits that were longest—and farthest away from her claws—Osh spent a moment plowing through her remaining fur, yanking ticks as he found them. Some were as big as peas.
He gave them to me to smash on the rocks.
The first time I ever did that, small starbursts of Mouse’s blood remained, so from then on I set them adrift on the current instead.
When Osh released her, Mouse shot out of the house like her tail was on fire.
“Why don’t you just buy some brushes?” I asked.
Miss Maggie could order almost anything from the mainland, and she sometimes sent for things Osh couldn’t buy from the Cuttyhunk market.
“This is free,” he said, binding the fur to the tip of a brush handle. When he sculpted it to a point, such a brush would let him paint the pinfeathers of a young meadowlark or the petals of a wood lily.
But he never took one tuft of fur from Mouse when winter came.
I confess that I myself was often cold during those long winters on the island with Osh. Of course I wished for fresh apples and strawberries when the entire world was white and gray and the ground was iron hard, but mostly I wished for shipwreck wood that would mean warm hands and feet in January.
I never asked for the wrecks that granted those wishes, though. And since there was nothing I had done to cause such things and nothing I could do to stop them, I didn’t feel bad about salvaging what we could when ships came to grief in the waters off Cuttyhunk, so turbulent that they were known as the Graveyard.
You might think that we wished most fervently for gold or silver—and I have to admit that when I finally found some treasure of that sort I was glad, for many reasons—but we never found any cargo more precious than the blacksmith coal that we harvested from a ship after it foundered in an August storm. Every single one of the crew survived, which was cause enough for celebration, but we were happy, too, that the ship had wrecked in the shallows so that at low tide we islanders could walk out in our tall boots, pulling dinghies along behind, to load up as much coal as we could and ferry it back to shore. The tide brought more to us, littering the wrack line with chunks of it that we gathered like shell seekers who knew too much about frostbite.
We treasured that coal and used it sparingly so it would stretch into a second winter. Even in June, when the cold weather was a world away, I could sweeten any bad day by remembering that one amazing thing: Come winter, we would be warm.
No one who’s ever been as cold as a New England islander in February would care more about gold than coal.
But when I learned from Miss Maggie that coal squeezed by the weight of the world turned to diamonds, I looked at it differently and wondered what other rough and simple stuff held the promise of something rare.
Coal wasn’t the only treasure that turned up on the Elizabeths.
The ships that had wrecked in the Graveyard took plenty of cargo down with them, and not all of it was lumber or cotton or rum.
A few of the
islanders had found real riches from time to time. A diamond necklace caught in a lobster trap. A gold ingot in the tines of a scallop rake. One man, pulling an anchor off Naushon, hooked an old crown that had been buried in the muck for a century. Another, clamming off Nashawena, found a huge silver belt buckle that he cleaned up and wore as proudly as the buccaneers who had once sailed these waters, some of them true pirates, though only one of them—Captain Kidd—had been known to hide loot or give it away instead of spending it.
He gifted a fortune to Mercy Raymond, on Block Island, just down the seaboard from us, filling her apron with gold and jewels simply because she’d been kind. And he buried more on Cherry Tree Field on Gardiners Island, not so far from Cuttyhunk, before Governor Bellomont sent it to England, proof that the captain was a thief, and not just of gold or silver.
Treasure comes in many forms, and Captain Kidd had prized them all.
Miss Maggie was happy with plain and simple, but she sometimes spiced my geography lessons with talk of gemstones caught and kept—and sometimes buried—by pirates like the wily William Kidd: African diamonds, Burmese rubies, Brazilian emeralds, all of them forged by the alchemy of the earth’s hot spots. So hard and resilient that they could last for centuries in the cold salt and sand of islands like ours.
Lots of people thought Captain Kidd might have buried loot on the Elizabeths, well within his stomping grounds, but no one who had gone digging for treasure out here had ever found any.
That did nothing to deter the mainlanders who came out by ferry in the warm weather to muck about on the shores of Cuttyhunk, hoping to find what Captain Kidd might have buried or what the currents had stripped from the shipwrecks slowly surrendering to rot in the Graveyard.
We liked to watch those mainlanders follow the receding tide out as far as it went, plunging long rods into the sand, hoping for the clunk of metal, sometimes digging up an old lantern or a rusty chain before being chased ashore by the incoming tide.
It never occurred to me, as I watched them search, that I would be the one to find the treasure they sought. Or that I would find it in a place where none of them would ever have dared to look.
Chapter 4
Before Miss Maggie explained why the other islanders were afraid of me, I’d sometimes wondered why people would shake her by the hand but wave at me, instead.
I’d always figured it was because I was little. With a name like Crow. And so different from them, besides, like the calico lobsters that turned up in traps very rarely and always with great to-do.
As I got older, I realized that there was more to it than that.
When I asked Osh about it, he shrugged and talked in circles, as if I’d asked why women don’t have beards.
But then, one day, as I came up to the cottage with a pail full of steamers, I overheard him arguing with Miss Maggie and knew it had something to do with me. So I listened, of course.
“It’s foolish,” he said. “The way they treat her. Like she’s made of poison.”
“Yes, it is,” Miss Maggie said, her voice as sharp as a razor clam. “But it would be better if she understood why, even so.”
Osh said, “She’s still too young,” which sounded odd, coming from the man who had taught me to bait a hook when I was four.
“Well, she’s going to have to find out sooner or later.”
“Later is fine.”
“I don’t think so.” Miss Maggie sounded like she was digging in her heels. “And I don’t like not telling her something she has every right to know.”
At which point I ducked through the cottage door and asked them what that “something” was.
Osh wouldn’t look at me.
Miss Maggie said, “You shouldn’t eavesdrop on other people, Crow.”
Osh said, “This is her house, Maggie.”
“What do I have every right to know?” I said.
Miss Maggie looked even more serious than usual. “Where you came from,” she said.
Which was a very surprising thing for her to say.
“You know where I came from?” I said in a small voice.
“No,” Osh said, before Miss Maggie could utter another word. “We don’t. You could have come from a hundred places around here. But this is where you came to. And this is where you are.”
Which didn’t explain why the islanders were afraid of me.
“People think I’m made of poison?” I said.
Osh sighed through his teeth. “They don’t,” he said. “But—”
“Penikese,” Miss Maggie blurted. “They think you came from Penikese.”
I didn’t like the look on Osh’s face.
Penikese was a small island a little distance to the west of the other Elizabeths.
Nobody from Cuttyhunk ever went there.
And nobody from Penikese ever came to Cuttyhunk, either.
“It’s where sick people used to go,” Miss Maggie said. And now she looked too much like Osh did. Part scared. Part sorry we weren’t all out digging clams or picking mussels or any of a thousand other things that weren’t nearly as hard as this was. “There was a hospital there, Crow. Until a couple of years ago. That’s all.”
I thought about that. “Was the hospital there when I was a baby?”
Miss Maggie nodded. “Penikese was an island for sick people.”
“And I get sick a lot,” I said. “Is that why people are afraid of me? Because I get sick a lot?”
Osh nodded. “But that’s only because you’re small,” he said. “I’m sure that’s only because you’re small. Some people have to work their way through all kinds of sickness before they’re strong.”
“And I’m one of those people?” I said doubtfully.
Osh bent down to look me straight in the eye. “I’m sure of it,” he said.
I turned to Miss Maggie. She hesitated. And then she nodded, too. “That is true,” she said. “Some people start off more susceptible. More . . . vulnerable. Weaker.”
“But I’m not,” I said. Just the day before, I had helped Osh carry home a bushel of blue crabs all the way from the toe of West End Pond.
“No,” Osh said. “You’re not. Not like you were. Which is why it’s so foolish for people to think you might spread something.” I remember how he put his hand on my shoulder. “Unless it’s something good.”
But as I lay in bed that night, listening to the sea on the rocks and the northbound wind, I wondered what kind of sickness those people had had. The ones on Penikese. The ones who had been sent to a little island hospital to live far away from everyone else. Where maybe I myself had been born.
And I didn’t want to be from Penikese.
I didn’t want to be from a colony of sick people.
I wanted to be from a family with a very good explanation for why they had sent me to sea in an old boat unlikely to float for very long.
But I could not think of what that explanation might be, no matter how hard I tried.
Not long after Miss Maggie told me the truth about Penikese, she decided it was time for me to go to the little island school with the few other children on the Elizabeths.
“Why?” Osh said. “She’s fine here. She reads all the time, and we’re teaching her everything else she needs to know. Leave her be.”
“She should be with people her own age,” Miss Maggie argued.
“You mean the ones who’ve never been allowed to play with her?”
“She’s fine!” Miss Maggie said. “Anybody can see that just by looking at her.”
“They won’t see how fine she is,” he said. “Or if they do, they’ll start to think she should be somewhere better than here, with someone other than me.”
At which Miss Maggie had scoffed. “As if there were such a place, or such a person,” she said. “As if I would let that happen, regardless.”
&
nbsp; And she would not let it go.
Until finally he sighed and said, “You’ll see,” in a voice like November.
So one day that fall, when the sky was the color of forget-me-nots and the sea wanted to play, I reluctantly crossed over to Cuttyhunk with Miss Maggie and followed her up the steps of the schoolhouse, through the door, and straight into the kind of confusion that opened my eyes wide, and then made me want to shut them again, even if I couldn’t.
“Look,” said a boy near the door, scrambling to his feet. “It’s the leper.”
I remember looking behind me, to see where “the leper” was, and seeing only Miss Maggie, who grew taller right before my eyes.
“You don’t know that,” she said to the boy, who had fled to the front of the schoolroom.
The master, Mr. Henderson, came a step closer to us but stopped a fair distance away.
“No, we don’t know that,” he said. “But we don’t know otherwise, neither.”
“You’re a fool,” she said to him in a voice that was equal parts angry and sad.
“Maggie, I’m just trying to keep the other children safe,” he said.
“And what if she looked like them? What then?”
He considered me for a long moment. “That has nothing to do with it.”
Which added another layer to the confusion that had struck me dumb.
I remember walking back down the steps with Miss Maggie. Looking over my shoulder to see Mr. Henderson wiping the latch with spirits before he closed the door.
“What’s a leper?” I said as we turned toward home.
“Someone with leprosy,” she said, stomping down the lane toward the bass stands and, beyond them, Osh, waiting for our return. “Which is what those poor people had. The ones who lived on Penikese, in the hospital.”