Beyond the Bright Sea

by Lauren Wolk

  A pair of dolphins traveled along with us for a bit, sleek and smiling, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything as beautiful.

  Not so long before, the lighthouse keeper on Cuttyhunk had used dolphin fat to fuel his beacon, and I could not remember that without shrinking.

  When this pair cut away for open water, they leaped in tandem, again and again, like colts in a blue meadow.

  Penikese looked small at first, not much bigger up close. The near shore, all rocks below a bluff, gave us no good place to land, so we sailed around to the harbor where it was easier.

  Along that coast there was a skiff tied up at a pier and the remnants of ruined buildings—cellar holes and such—and when we climbed up from the beach we could see knee-high stone walls that straggled across the moors like old scars. Rabbit trails. A dirt lane that seemed to lead nowhere. But no sign of the bird keeper.

  “Probably off somewhere making sure the rabbits are making more rabbits,” I said.

  Which drew a puzzled look from Osh, a laugh from Miss Maggie.

  “Never mind about the rabbits,” she said. “His boat is here, so he is, too. We’ll see him soon enough. Nowhere much to go on this island except round and round.”

  She was right. From where we stood, we could see most of the island except where it dipped into swales or hid behind low hills and boulders.

  “They lived on the other side of the island,” Miss Maggie said. “On the other side of that hill,” which rose up as if even the island itself had meant to keep the sick in their own, lonely place.

  I felt twice as heavy as I had moments before. But I picked up one foot and then the other and led the way in that direction along the remnants of the old lane where pasture grass now struggled to grow.

  There wasn’t a single living tree on the island, just cedar skeletons and patches of green-gray shrubs. Mostly, the island was a hilly moor of sharp grass and wildflowers stretching from shore to shore like a lumpy quilt.

  “Woadwaxen,” Osh suddenly said, coming to a stop.

  It sounded like neither English nor his other, private tongue. But I knew it to be part of his third language—the one he used when making paints.

  “For yellow,” he said, pointing.

  This was something we did together, on Cuttyhunk and the other islands where we sailed sometimes in search of petals we could boil into dyes and mix into paints. He had taught me which plants made which colors and how to mix them to make more, and I loved being his assistant in both the kitchen and the field. He would utter something simple, like “aster,” or something odd, like “Calopogon,” and I would go, much like a setter after a duck, to fetch it for his basket.

  I did that now, cutting off the lane to gather some woadwaxen for his yellow. It was a tough thing that didn’t want to go with me, but I pinched off a number of new blooms and tucked them in my pockets. They wouldn’t yield much, but sometimes Osh painted a single yellow flower in a pale green marsh, and it was all the better for being just one.

  I stayed in the rough, walking parallel to the road for a bit, in hopes of finding a teaberry to chew on. Instead, I found myself hobbled by a soft spot that buried my right foot. Had I been running, I would have been hurt.

  Miss Maggie came to help me up. “Maybe an old stump well,” she said.

  “If it is, where’s the tree that lived here?”

  “Gone to a fire, I suppose.” She looked about. “See there? All that old wood in the heather? The last of what grew here. This island was all trees, once.”

  I could see other sandy spots ahead where nothing grew. When I tested them, the ground was soft there, too. I imagined the cedars that were now cut and dried and split into house shingles.

  “Odd that the holes are still soft after all this time,” I said.

  Miss Maggie frowned. “Sand will do that to the ground,” she said, though dubiously.

  Osh had gone ahead without us along the road, and we hurried to catch up.

  “Pimpernel,” he said, pointing. And again I left the lane to fill my pockets, more careful now about where I stepped.

  When we reached the top of the highest hill, we found a brick reservoir and a big curved boulder where we sat to rest. From there, we could see a couple of kettle ponds in the distance and a row of buildings on a wind-scoured bluff overlooking Buzzards Bay. In the middle, a big structure. On either side, plain cottages facing the water.

  “That’s where they lived,” Miss Maggie said quietly, and we soon headed down the hill toward them.

  As we approached the cottages, we found the remnants of a garden, but everything in it had gone wild. A thatch of blackberry bushes. And mounds of earth, as if someone had been digging for potatoes or carrots, though I didn’t see anything like that growing here. And a bit farther along, at the end of the row of cottages, a black spot on the ground where a fire had been, some bones in the ash, some feathers, the gleam of grease. A cooking fire, I thought. Someone had cooked a bird here. And I had seen his fire.

  “This is the leprosarium,” Miss Maggie said as she led us to the steps of the big building among the cottages. “The hospital where they treated the lepers.”

  Osh and I stood and stared. “I wonder how many lepers lived here.”

  “Not so many,” Miss Maggie said.

  “How do you know?”

  She looked a little abashed. “I went to the library.”

  She knew how I felt about the library and she shared my displeasure. Years earlier, when they first discovered that she was borrowing books for our lessons, they gave her the books outright rather than put them back on their shelves . . . and they told her that she could no longer check out books if they were meant for my hands.

  Of course she continued to take out books, without telling the librarian that they were meant for me, and I was tempted to kiss every page of them for good measure before she returned them. “What nonsense,” she said again and again. “What utter hogwash.”

  But the library had a good collection for such a small town, and I was not sorry that Miss Maggie had gone looking.

  “Most of the lepers came to America already sick,” she said. “From Russia, some of them. Japan. Turkey. Tobago. China. And Cape Verde. Other places.”

  I knew about Cape Cod. It was our mainland to the north. But I had never heard of Cape Verde.

  I turned to her. “Where’s Cape Verde?” I asked.

  She looked steadily at the hospital. “Islands off Senegal.”

  “Where’s Senegal?”

  “Africa,” she said.

  “What about Tobago?”

  “Another island. Off the coast of Venezuela.”

  “Where’s Venezuela?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Crow, we’ll have a geography lesson when we get home,” she said.

  “Where’s Venezuela?” I repeated.

  “South America.”

  I looked at my arms. They were the same color Osh made by mixing purple and yellow, blue and orange, red and green.

  I wondered what people on those other islands looked like.

  Maybe I was a real islander after all. Just not an Elizabeth Islander. Except I was here, on the Elizabeths, regardless of where else I might belong.

  “Lots of people come here from other places, right?” I said.

  “What, here? Penikese? I just told you they did, Crow.”

  “I didn’t mean just here,” I said.

  Osh started up the stairs.

  “Should we really go in there?” Miss Maggie asked.

  Osh kept on. “Why did we come here if not to go in?”

  But Miss Maggie and I waited where we were while Osh crossed the porch and knocked on the door.

  No one answered, even when Osh knocked again, harder.

  He tried the door but it was locked. “Who locks his door wh
en he’s the only one living on an island?” He peered through a porch window alongside the door and then returned to the yard, shrugging.

  “Maybe he didn’t hear you,” I said, climbing the porch steps.

  “No one’s there, Crow,” Miss Maggie said.

  But I knocked hard, regardless. And that was when I heard a thump inside. A heavy noise from above, I thought, like something had fallen.

  I raised my fist to knock again but just then, from around the line of cottages, came a man.

  He was carrying a shovel in one hand, a long gun in the other.

  Chapter 10

  The man stopped dead at the sight of us, his gun coming up and then, just as quickly, sagging again.

  We must have presented an odd picture: big Osh, Miss Maggie, and me.

  “What are you all doing there?” he said loudly, coming forward quickly now. He talked with an accent I didn’t know. Not a foreigner, exactly, but not from around here, either.

  He was a big man, bigger even than Osh, with a square head and a flat, ruddy face. Neither young nor old, dressed in land colors, head to toe.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I’m Maggie, this is Daniel, and this is Crow,” Miss Maggie said, smiling hard as I joined them. “We were out sailing, from Cuttyhunk, and thought we’d have a look around. You don’t mind, do you?”

  The keeper did not return her smile. “I certainly do, and so do the birds,” he said. “And I’d rather they didn’t.” He glanced up at the hospital and suddenly turned away, talking as he walked. “Come see here,” he said, beckoning.

  We followed him to the edge of the bluff above the rocky beach.

  “Cormorants,” he said, pointing toward the big black birds perched on the rocks below. “Herring gulls. Terns. Pipers. Plovers. Yellowlegs. I’m the custodian. The gamekeeper. No hunting allowed here.”

  “Do we look like hunters?” Miss Maggie asked.

  “There are all kinds of hunters,” he said.

  “Why do you have a gun, then,” I asked, “if there’s no hunting here?”

  “Big gulls eat the eggs of little gulls,” he said. “Too many geese and I thin out the flock.”

  “And roast them?” I asked, remembering the fire.

  He didn’t answer.

  “And why do you have a shovel?” I asked.

  He frowned. “They should have named you Badger,” he said.

  Osh said, “Hey,” and took a step toward the man, at which Miss Maggie grabbed him by the arm, me by the hand, and said, “Well, if you don’t mind us having a walk around, we’ll be very careful not to disturb the birds.”

  The bird keeper shook his head. “Plover eggs in the sand look like stones,” he said. “Too late, after you’ve already stepped on one.”

  Miss Maggie nodded. “Yes, but no good mother will let us near her eggs.”

  And the words were out of my mouth before I felt them coming: “Was there ever a baby here?”

  Miss Maggie squeezed my hand.

  The bird keeper glared at me. “A baby what?”

  “A baby. A baby person. When there were lepers here.”

  He took a step back, which made no sense.

  “I have nothin’ to do with that,” he said too loudly. “They’ve been gone for years and soon everything they left behind will be burned. Should burn the graveyard, too, if you ask me, if dirt and bones would burn.”

  And I was the one now, who stepped back and then, turning, walked a bit away.

  Osh followed.

  Miss Maggie said, “We’ll be careful of the birds.”

  “See that you do,” he said, climbing the hospital steps. “And don’t go poking about where y’all don’t belong. I’ll expect you off this island in short order. And with nothing but what you had when you come.”

  I thought of the flowers plumping out my pockets and was glad they couldn’t speak, but I didn’t imagine they would sell me down the river even if they could. Not to this man.

  He unlocked the door and turned, looking both nervous and mean, which was odd, I thought. “This here is state land, you know. Not a playground.”

  He went through and shut the door too hard.

  I heard him lock it.

  And that was that.

  “What a cold man,” Miss Maggie said.

  “Hiding something,” Osh said.

  “He talked funny,” I said.

  “Not funny,” Miss Maggie said thoughtfully. “He’s from somewhere south.”

  “I thought you said he was from Maine?”

  She nodded. “I thought he was. I guess not.”

  I turned toward the nearest cottage. “I want a look inside there,” I said. But as I turned to glance back at the hospital, I saw the bird keeper watching us from the window. “Maybe let’s walk a while first, though.”

  Across the island we went, single file, along a trail that meandered over the rolling moor, through the beach plum and sea heather, toward the northernmost point of the island.

  Along here, again, were bare spots in the ground cover. Just random things. I pointed them out.

  “The man carries a shovel,” Osh said. “He’s digging for something.”

  “Or burying,” Miss Maggie said. “Maybe carrion. So the buzzards don’t come.”

  “What’s carrion?” I asked.

  “Dead animals. Dead anything.”

  “Must be a lot of dead anything on this island,” I said.

  And we were upon the leper graveyard before we knew it.

  Around the edge was a picket fence.

  We opened the gate and went quietly in among the little headstones and metal medallions, all in rows.

  To one side there was a wooden marker with a lamb carved on it and a single word: MORGAN.

  “Is a lamb buried here?” I asked.

  Miss Maggie came closer. When I looked up at her, I found her eyes not on the marker but on me.

  “That means there’s a baby buried here,” she said. “Named Morgan. But that can’t be.”

  I knelt down and ran my fingers over the carving. “Why not?”

  “There was a baby born here right after the colony started, but they sent him off to the mainland, to an orphanage. He would be a man by now.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The library had some notes the doctor published. Dr. Eastman. They said nothing about another baby. Just that one little boy, who didn’t die on Penikese.”

  “Then what baby is buried here?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

  I climbed to my feet and brushed the dead grass off my knees.

  “Can we find out?” I asked.

  “Crow, it’s clearly not you buried there. Why do you want to know?”

  “Can we find out?” I asked again.

  Miss Maggie sighed. “I suppose we can try,” she said.

  Osh didn’t say a thing. He stared at the lamb on the marker, at me, at the sea. And when he turned to leave the graveyard, we followed.

  We cut across the island to get back to the harbor, twisting and turning down the rabbit trails, until we reached the bluff overlooking the dock where we’d landed.

  From there, I could see a long line of bare spots all along the edge of the bluff. They looked like big round footprints, as if a giant horse had galloped along there.

  “Look,” I said, pointing.

  “More and more,” Miss Maggie said. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  Osh said, “Digging, not burying.”

  “But what’s he digging for?” Miss Maggie said. “Too dry there for clams.”

  “Same thing all the other fools dig for,” Osh said.

  I knew what he meant: the mainlanders with their rods and shovels, hoping for p
irate gold or shipwreck treasure.

  “Hmm,” Miss Maggie mused. “He didn’t strike me as a fool on a lark.”

  “Mean,” Osh said. “And nervous to have us here.”

  I remembered the thump I’d heard inside the hospital just before the bird keeper came around the corner with his gun. I couldn’t imagine what had made that sound, but I agreed with Osh: The man had seemed nervous.

  “And eager to have us go,” Miss Maggie said.

  I pictured the bird keeper digging up the whole island, one plug at a time, while the terns and the plovers swooped around his head, fearful for their eggs.

  And I thought of the ruby ring in the cinnamon box on my windowsill.

  “He must have reason to think there’s something here,” Osh said.

  “Or just bored to tears,” Miss Maggie said. “The wind alone would drive some people mad.”

  “I don’t think he’s that kind of mad,” I said. “I think he’s the angry kind of mad.”

  “He hasn’t found what he’s looking for,” Osh said. “And he’s not here for the birds.”

  At which Miss Maggie continued on toward the skiff. “We’ll have our picnic and we’ll go,” she said. “And when we’re home we’ll do some digging of our own.”

  “I wanted to see the cottages,” I said.

  “Some other day,” she replied. “We’ll come back soon. Won’t we Osh?”

  To which he did not reply.

  I was tempted to let the whole thing go after that.

  Maybe Miss Maggie was right and I wasn’t a leper, whether I’d come from Penikese or not. So why worry about it?

  Maybe Osh was right: Even if I proved I wasn’t from Penikese, the other islanders might still treat me like I was a frightening oddity—for any number of reasons. Or none at all.

  But maybe my heart was right when it recognized that sad island. Those weary old cottages. That little graveyard with its picket fence and its headstones and its lamb. And, most of all, that frayed and tattered letter stuck to my chest like a scar.