Beyond the Bright Sea

by Lauren Wolk

  “Is that a bad disease?”

  She nodded. “It is.”

  “And that’s what people think I have?”

  She stopped suddenly and sat me down in a patch of heather along the lane. “It’s very, very unlikely that you have it, Crow, but sometimes a person can have leprosy for years without knowing it.”

  At which I felt hot and cold at the same time. Too big for my skin. Too small.

  “Does that mean I’m going to die?” I sounded like someone else I’d just met for the first time.

  “Of course not,” she said fiercely. “We don’t know that you came from Penikese. And even if you did, you almost certainly do not have leprosy, do you hear me?” She softened a little. “Besides, if you might be a leper, then I might be, too,” she said. “And Osh as well.”

  Which made me feel both better and worse.

  “Are people going to be afraid of me forever, then?” I said.

  At which Miss Maggie did what she always did when I was worried.

  She told me the truth.

  “Not forever,” she said. “But some people let fear set its hook in them, so it’s hard to pull out.” She paused. “Leprosy is a terrible disease, Crow. It . . . deforms people. Ruins their bodies. Their skin. Turns their hands into claws.”

  I looked at my good, fine legs. My smooth skin. My straight fingers.

  “And sometimes it damages nerves so badly it’s impossible to feel pain.” She cleared her throat once. Twice.

  “Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Not to feel pain?” I said.

  But she shook her head. “There’s more than one kind of pain,” she said. “And if you don’t feel it, you can get hurt.”

  “But it hurts when you do feel it, too,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “but feeling hurt and being hurt aren’t always the same thing.”

  Which confused me even more.

  So did the idea that I might be a leper.

  “But I was just a new baby when I got here,” I said. “Osh told me so. Just hours old. How could I have gotten sick so fast?”

  Miss Maggie looked me right in the eye. “I am almost completely sure that you are as healthy as a horse, Crow, but I won’t lie to you. Leprosy is spread by coughing. Sneezing. Touch. Even tears.” She took my hand. “It’s not possible to give birth without touch,” she said. “Or tears, sometimes.”

  “But isn’t there a cure?” I asked.

  Miss Maggie, the best healer on the Elizabeths, the one who always told me the truth, said, “No, I’m afraid not. Though the Bible says Jesus cured lepers.”

  I thought about that. “Does it say how?”

  “Sometimes: miracles,” Miss Maggie said. “Sometimes: faith.”

  Chapter 5

  Osh didn’t say, “I told you so,” but he seemed quite pleased when I came home from school so soon after leaving.

  “Not much of a school anyway,” he said when he heard what had happened.

  And he was right.

  Sometimes there were only two or three other children on the islands, and Mr. Henderson, the schoolmaster, who was also a ship’s pilot, often left them alone while he climbed Lookout Hill to watch for ships that needed guiding through the Graveyard, where hundreds of ships had gone down.

  It was hard to imagine that he taught his students anything they couldn’t learn on their own.

  “You don’t need to go to school,” Osh told me. “Miss Maggie has already taught you your letters and numbers. If you’re hungry enough, you’ll learn to fish and farm. The rest is salt and pepper.”

  But I liked salt and pepper and I wanted to know more than I did.

  And I wanted answers to the questions that rose and ebbed and rose again, a tide of curiosity that was as much a part of my life as the sea.

  Questions like why I had a spot shaped like a feather on my cheek.

  “Because you do,” Miss Maggie told me one day as I helped her pull parsnips and carrots from her garden.

  When I persisted, she said that some people thought marks like mine were signs of wishes that hadn’t come true.

  “Whose wishes?” I asked.

  “Your mother’s,” she said gruffly, and then refused to say another word about it.

  When I asked her why my hair was curly, she said, “Because it is,” and then, when I pressed, she confessed that she didn’t know. “Perhaps it runs in your family,” she said.

  “But Osh doesn’t have curly hair,” I replied, without thinking first.

  And then I realized what I’d said and didn’t ask about my hair again.

  Mostly, my lessons with Miss Maggie were all business, and she especially had no answer to what I wanted to know most: like why someone had tied me into a leaky skiff and set me adrift on the outgoing tide.

  “Can’t we find the doctors who ran the hospital on Penikese and ask if I came from there?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I already wrote to the hospital when you were a baby, but no one ever answered,” she said. “I’m sure they would have replied if they’d known anything. And if they knew that someone on Penikese had sent a newborn baby out to sea, don’t you think they would have come looking for you?”

  To which I had no answer except to ask another question.

  “What about the lepers?”

  “What about them?”

  “Can’t we ask them about me?”

  “I don’t know where they went after Penikese, Crow.” She sighed. “Just somewhere south. And besides, if someone sent you away in secret, why would they say so now? And who else would know about it? A real, serious, important secret isn’t something you uncover without a lot of digging.”

  “So let’s start digging,” I said, though I was more eager now to know where I hadn’t come from than where I had. If I could prove I wasn’t from Penikese, people would have to stop treating me like a leper. Surely, then, they would shake my hand, too.

  “Why do you think they left Penikese?” I asked Miss Maggie.

  She shrugged. “It’s bad enough to be sick. Worse that people don’t want to have anything to do with you. Worse still to be locked away on a cold, bare island. I’m sure it was too hard to live out there, for the patients and the doctors, both. It made sense for them to go to a warmer place.”

  “So I’ll never be able to ask them?”

  “Ask them what?” she said.

  “Whether I came from Penikese?”

  “Never’s a long time,” she said. “Maybe we’ll find a way.”

  When I asked Osh, later that day, he said what he’d always said before: “This is your home. You don’t need another one.”

  “But I don’t want another home, Osh. I just want to know where I came from, and whether I might turn into a leper someday.”

  “And what will that change?” he said. “I won’t treat you any different. Miss Maggie won’t treat you any different.”

  “But if it turns out I’m not from Penikese, other people will treat me different,” I said, remembering the schoolmaster as he scoured the handle I’d touched. “They’ll have to.”

  Osh was not so sure. “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “But why wouldn’t they?”

  “Why does anyone do anything?” he said. He sounded tired. “Better to pay attention to your own self, and leave their business to them.”

  So I tried to do that.

  And I was, to my own surprise, largely successful. For a while.

  I worked hard to concentrate on what I knew for sure—about Osh and Miss Maggie and me.

  I knew that Osh was as much a castaway as I was, though he himself had done the casting. That he could paint a picture that was as real as what was real, only better. That he was stronger than two men. Maybe three. Maybe a thousand.

  I knew that Miss
Maggie was a castaway, too. Like Osh, by choice. She never said much about why she’d come to Cuttyhunk. Only that she’d been born on a farm, raised on a farm, married to a farmer somewhere far from the sea, and that she had lost it all.

  And I knew quite a bit about myself, too, though not everything.

  “Nobody knows everything,” Osh often said to me. “Especially when they’re young.”

  So I concentrated on that, too: learning what I could about the things right in front of me, like lobstering and shepherding and the constellations riding the night sky.

  I hiked up Lookout Hill, where a surfman kept post in a tiny station house, scanning the horizon with a long glass, watching for ships in trouble as they came through the Graveyard, where Vineyard Sound and Buzzards Bay met in a wild and dangerous dance. And I learned a lot about danger that way.

  I learned how to pull ticks from Miss Maggie’s flock and bathe the sheep in Wash Pond before the shearing. And I learned to shear by practicing on the lambs. Their pink and tender skin taught me how to be more careful than I’d ever been.

  I read a dozen new books, like The Secret Garden and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—books that rang bells in my heart—and I devoted myself to my lessons with Miss Maggie, who taught me things like why salt water boiled faster than fresh. Why the French had given us the Statue of Liberty. Why Mr. Lincoln’s face graced every penny.

  And for some time, the sack I carried felt lighter. Sometimes I even forgot that I was carrying it. But it felt, by now, like a part of me, and I found that I couldn’t put it aside. Not completely.

  Nor did I ever stop watching for signs that I might be on my way to ill.

  For a whole year, I didn’t see much: a winter cold. Poison ivy when I was careless about where I walked. Garden-variety aches and pains.

  But then, shortly after I turned eleven, I was the only one on the islands to come down with influenza.

  At least that’s what Miss Maggie said it was.

  “You shouldn’t come near me,” I said as I lay in bed, my bones sore, my lips so chapped they bled. “In case it’s not the flu.”

  “Oh, fiddle,” Miss Maggie said. “It’s flu, plain and simple.” And she took my temperature by kissing me lightly on the forehead, as if I were as clean and safe as a teakettle.

  But I was sure that neither she nor Osh told anyone else that I was sick again.

  And all three of us smiled more than usual on the day when I woke up well.

  Chapter 6

  Everything changed when I had been on the island for twelve years.

  I will never forget how small the first step toward that change was. How simple.

  The day was fair, the breeze like a song that’s easy to remember.

  And I was, on that day, in that moment, content to be under the spell of the sea and the islands and the here and now.

  Until Miss Maggie said, “I hear there’s going to be a bird sanctuary on Penikese soon. They’ve hired a bird keeper to live over there.”

  And my world shifted, just a little. In such a small way that I barely noticed.

  I was helping her weed her vegetable garden, something we did so often I had begun to think that the weeds were wizards.

  She pulled a dandelion just past its bloom, before its seeds could fly.

  “A bird keeper on Penikese?” I said. That sounded pretty far-fetched to me. “What kind of keeping do birds need?”

  I pictured him making supper for the gulls. Reading them bedtime stories.

  Miss Maggie said, “He’ll count them, record what kinds there are, whether they’re breeding, whether they’re sick. That kind of thing.”

  It sounded like an odd sort of job. Maybe it was done by an odd sort of person.

  “He’s going to live out there? With the birds?”

  “And the rabbits,” she said. “That’ll be part of his job, too, to make sure there are plenty of rabbits breeding out there.”

  Now I was sure she was pulling my leg.

  “I didn’t know rabbits needed help with that.”

  I thought she might twist my ear, but she surprised me by laughing.

  “Nor did I,” she said.

  “And he’s not afraid of getting leprosy?”

  Miss Maggie rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’m sure he is. They had to go all the way to Maine before they could find someone willing to take the job. But they sanitized the hospital, and it’s been years, for pity’s sake.”

  Not so long before, we’d watched from the top of a drumlin as they’d burned a row of tumbledown sheds. Places not worth sanitizing. Places easier to burn instead.

  The flames in the distance, still burning into the night, had made it seem as if the sea itself had caught fire.

  I didn’t understand how Penikese could suddenly become a bird sanctuary. If it was such a thing, I could not see how it had ever been anything else. Giving it a new name didn’t change much.

  I wondered what it would be on another day. Who would next need refuge there, and why.

  Which gave me something to think about while I helped Miss Maggie pull the rest of the dandelions before they went to seed.

  The world shifted again a few weeks later.

  Most days, no matter the weather, I climbed to the top of one of the Cuttyhunk drumlins and scanned the mainland across Buzzards Bay, wondering if another person might be standing on another hill over there, looking out toward me, wondering where I was.

  The wind, like the sea, was an always kind of thing, but on the hilltops it was even stronger than below, and I felt like a mast as I braced myself up there, my hair like a pennant.

  I carried with me a small spyglass I’d found in the sand. It had a little fog inside it and there were barnacle prints glued onto the glass, but I could still see more with it than without.

  Most of the time, I climbed in daylight and could see, in the distance, Sow and Pigs Reef where so many ships had foundered, the whirlpools that spun where the currents from east and west met, sometimes the spouts of whales.

  On clear, warm nights, especially when the moon showed me the way, I would make the climb in the dark. The lights on the mainland were as familiar to me as the constellations overhead.

  Until now I had seen nothing very curious.

  But on this particular night, there was another light I’d never seen before.

  It was a small yellow light that flickered out in Buzzards Bay, not too terribly far from Cuttyhunk. I could see it better through the glass, but not well enough to know what or where it was exactly.

  I decided that it could not be a ship’s lantern. I had seen those before. This was bigger and not as steady.

  There was no wood on tiny Gull Island, save for a little driftwood, and no people, either.

  I thought through the possibilities and decided that it was a fire on Penikese. A small one, in the open, perhaps on the beach.

  I heard Miss Maggie coming up behind me. She always made a little puffing sound when she climbed. Like a tiny steam engine.

  “Something amiss?” she said when she reached the top.

  It didn’t surprise me that Miss Maggie was out in the night. She had trouble sleeping, so she walked Cuttyhunk at all hours, visiting her sheep and cattle, which roamed the island freely everywhere except the gated places where most of the people lived.

  Miss Maggie and I often crossed paths on moonlit nights and sometimes stopped for a talk or a salt-and-pepper lesson about the stars or the weather.

  “There’s a fire out there,” I said, handing her the spyglass. “On Penikese, I think.”

  She looked in that direction, put the glass to her eye, and, after a bit, handed it back to me.

  “Probably the bird keeper,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen a bonfire out there before. Do you think it’s a signal?”

  “
He has a shortwave,” she said. “No need for a signal fire.”

  “But what if his radio’s broken and he’s out there starving to death?”

  “He has a boat,” she said.

  “But what if that’s broken, too?”

  Miss Maggie wasn’t fond of what-if games, but she humored me this time. “There’s plenty to eat out there if he knows anything about the land.”

  “What, the rabbits? The birds? Wouldn’t that be against the rules?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose it would.” She gave me a hard look. “Why so curious about a fire?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for that, except: “It’s just odd, that’s all.”

  Miss Maggie said, “Well, I know next to nothing about the Penikese bird keeper . . . and I have no idea if that’s his fire . . . or if it’s even coming from Penikese.”

  She turned to be on her way.

  “Maybe Osh will know,” I said.

  At which she shook her head. “Have you ever known him to care what happens out there?” she asked.

  And she was right.

  Osh was not much interested in anything beyond the places where he sailed and walked, none of them as far even as Penikese, which was not so very far from us, after all.

  I tried hard to do what Osh wanted—not to care where I’d come from—but I knew more about where he had come from than where I had, and that didn’t seem right.

  It made me feel too light, as if I were anchored by a different kind of gravity than other people.

  Miss Maggie had told me a thing or two about gravity . . . and about how Osh had suddenly appeared in the Elizabeths about a year before I had.

  “I saw his sail as he tacked up the coast,” she said of the day Osh arrived on our island. “Maybe from Newport or Narragansett or maybe from farther south. And I wondered about it because it was the only blue sail I’d ever seen.”

  We were putting out seedlings in her kitchen garden, and I nearly planted two tomatoes in the same hole together as she told me the story.

  “I walked down to the bass stands and watched as he crossed the bay and sailed straight up to your island without a lick of dithering. Just . . . there he was, pulling his skiff up on the beach below where your cottage is now. And then he threw his things above the wrack line—he didn’t have much—and looked around at the rocks and the bit of good land there. Pulled the mast and the sail off the skiff. Flipped the hull upside down. And picked up a big rock and bashed a great hole in the boat.”