by Lauren Wolk
They were connected.
I thought maybe they were connected.
But I didn’t know how.
Chapter 11
I had never written to anyone before and I wasn’t the one holding the pen now, but Miss Maggie told me that this was my letter to compose.
“How will we know where to send it?” I asked.
“That book in the library. By Dr. Eastman. He wrote it in Louisiana. Carville, Louisiana. How many leper colonies can there be in just one town?” she said. “This will find him, all right.”
The letter was mostly questions, which I asked while walking in circles around Miss Maggie’s kitchen table as she sat there, writing them down. I felt about ten feet tall.
Mouse had followed me to Miss Maggie’s and she now shadowed me as I walked my laps, which made me feel taller still.
These were my questions:
What was the first baby’s name? The one born right after the colony opened?
Where did they send him?
Who was his mother? Who was his father?
Was there another baby named Morgan who is now buried on Penikese?
By the same mother?
How did Morgan die?
Was there yet another baby that was sent away in a skiff?
Miss Maggie paused at this one. “If the doctor knew about such a thing, you can be sure he would have come looking for you,” she said.
“You told me he never answered your letter,” I said. “When I was a baby and you wanted to know where I had come from.”
“That’s true, he didn’t,” she said.
“But maybe he’ll answer you now.”
So she wrote down my last question, too, with a sigh. “I can just imagine him reading this and wondering why we’re asking such things,” she said.
I read back over the questions she’d written down and added two more. “Is the mother still alive? Is the father?”
My voice squeaked a little. Mouse gave me an odd look. She rubbed her jaw against my leg.
Miss Maggie got up from the table and fetched a slice of bacon for Mouse—who threw it into the air and wrestled it to the ground before dragging it out into the sunshine—and a ginger snap for me.
We sat quietly while I ate the snap as slowly as possible and let my thoughts settle.
There were so many possibilities. I might have a mother. And a father. And a brother. Or only two of these. Or one. Or none. And no way to know where to look next. Or whether to look at all.
The whole thing made my head hurt.
“I can’t think of any more questions right now,” I said. “Nothing that the doctor can answer.”
“Nor can I,” she said, handing me the pen. “Sign at the bottom.”
I took the pen.
“What do I write?” I asked.
“Your name,” she said with a laugh.
“What, just Crow?”
“Yes,” she said. “Crow.”
“And nothing else?”
She shrugged. “What else is there?”
But that was one of the things that might come back by return post. Another name. And suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to dig any deeper than I already had.
I spent the next week working hard. While Osh and I tended our garden, I imagined the letter riding the ferry to New Bedford. I pictured it on a truck bound for Boston while we mended our nets and chinked holes where winter had come through our walls. I had a harder time imagining the airplane that flew it south. I’d seen one or two high up over the islands and knew what they were, but I failed to understand how all that heavy machinery did not plunge to the ground, my little letter with it.
After the first week, I began to go down to the ferry dock to wait for the mail each morning.
I must have looked so hopeful and eager that the postmaster, Mr. Johnson, acted less cranky with me than he usually did. When he came down to the dock to collect the daily mail from the ferry, he said, with a brisk nod, “I will see it gets to you straightaway when it comes, and no delay whatsoever.” But he kept his distance when he said it.
And though I believed that he would deliver the letter when it came, I still sat on the rocks each day and watched the ferry come in, hoping it had brought me a reply.
Hoping, too, that it hadn’t.
Osh shook his head over the whole business. “What you do is who you are,” he said.
I knew he was right but I asked him, anyway, “And what if you were one thing and became another?”
He nodded. “I was,” he said. “I did.”
“So?”
“So that’s writ in stone. The rest in water.”
He was sitting in the shade of the house, painting a picture of storm clouds and a small boat beneath.
I teased Mouse down to the beach with a string and watched her chase it in circles until she keeled over.
“Silly cat,” I said as she came to her senses and rolled in the dry sand.
“If you’ve nothing to do,” Osh called, “you could gather some driftwood.”
That, and many other chores besides. The birds kept planting weeds in our garden, Miss Maggie wanted fresh straw in her rabbit hutch, and I had yet to pick the blue mussels that we’d be steaming for our supper.
As if he’d read my mind, Osh called, “Bring the mussels up in plenty of brine, and pull some spring onions, too.”
But the ferry would be in soon, and I figured I’d start with that.
The tide was mid-high, so I waded through the fast current and came out soaked on the other side, my clothes dripping nicely to cool the warm day. After every wet crossing, I would shake like a dog and wring out my clothes as best I could so they dried in ridges white with salt.
I didn’t care.
Osh didn’t care.
We were sea clean and sun dried, the two of us, and fine that way.
Miss Maggie didn’t approve. She made her own soap and insisted on giving me a bar from time to time, “to take the itch out.”
She was right—the sea did leave an itch when it dried—but the soap made me smell sweeter than I was. And Mouse liked me better salty.
“No letter for you, I’m afraid,” Mr. Johnson said as he came down the dock, the mailbag slung over one shoulder. “Maybe tomorrow.”
He made a detour around me and continued past.
“Well, if it does come and I’m not here, where will you take it?” Which brought him up short.
“If it’s addressed to you, it’s yours,” he said slowly. “But you have no proper address, Crow. I’ll give it to Miss Maggie. She can give it to you.”
And that’s what he did.
Sometimes, when there was a need, another ferry came in the afternoon, and on that day a second one did, bringing another bag of mail with a single letter in it: for me.
“Crow!” Miss Maggie called from atop a bass stand across from our island while I picked mussels off the rocks below.
“I’m down here!” I called back. “I’m coming around.”
I clambered over the rocks to where I could see her and she me.
“Your letter,” she said, holding it aloft.
I stood up straight.
“Did you open it?”
“Of course not!”
“Will you?”
“Of course not!” she said again, and headed back across the planks to firm ground while I went up to meet her, my pail of mussels sloshing as I went.
I sat next to her on a flat rock in the sun, far enough away so my wet clothes didn’t weep onto hers. She held out the envelope. I could see that it said Crow and Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, on it. And three pretty stamps. Red and blue stripes, and purple circles with numbers in them.
I didn’t care if I ever got another letter: This one would be enough.
Across the channel I could see Osh in the garden, pulling weeds.
I kept my eyes on him as she opened the envelope and unfolded the letter inside.
Chapter 12
Dear Crow,” Miss Maggie read.
Thank you very much for your letter. I have wondered, since leaving Penikese, whether there might be people like you who are curious not about the disease itself but rather about the people I treated. Often, I am asked to be a doctor and to speak as one. Rarely am I asked for the stories of the people who spent the last of their lives with me on that island, and of the people who came with me when we left.
Your questions concern both those who stayed behind and one nurse who made that long journey to this new home in the south.
I will answer them as best I can.
To start with: What was the first baby’s name? The one born right after the colony opened?
Unlike some of your questions, these are ones I can answer, but perhaps not to your satisfaction. The baby was born Jason Dias. He was a healthy boy, but his mother, Susanna, was not. Nor, I fear, was his father, Elvan, both of whom died on that island. What Jason is called now, I do not know. He was sent to an orphanage in New Bedford as soon as he was born, before his parents ever even held him, after which I had cause to visit him only three times: once each year until he was three. He showed no signs of disease, so I did not visit him again after that. And I never heard whether he became sick or was ever adopted. Healthy or not, he came from a place that caused most people to treat him poorly. But if he was adopted, he might well have a different name now than the one his mother gave him.
It pained me to have to tell her that he was at the orphanage still and growing up away from the other children, away from everyone, really, and would not talk at all. I tried to lie to her after I first visited the orphanage, but I am a poor liar, and she was very smart. She knew that life would not be easy for her son. But to know that he was never rocked to sleep or cradled in a woman’s arms was like poison to her, and I confess that it was a relief when I no longer had to tell her such things.
Miss Maggie looked up and sighed.
“What about the other baby,” I said. “What about Morgan?”
At which Miss Maggie resumed her reading, though she sounded weary with it.
The story of the baby Morgan is an odd one, she read. Yes, the same mother, Susanna, did carry another child, several years after Jason was born, but she was living in one of the little cottages and took care of herself quite well at the time, with her husband and my nurse, Miss Evelyn, to help her. It was only after the baby was born that I learned of the birth. It happened in the night, and by morning they had buried the child and would not speak of it except to say it had been stillborn but otherwise perfect, as far as they could tell. I could never understand why they had not come for me when the labor began or why they buried the baby so quickly, without a minister even. But grief has its own reasons. And theirs was profound.
Still, they said that perhaps Morgan was better off with God than alone in this world.
Again, Miss Maggie stopped reading. She looked into the distance without speaking for a while and then continued on.
After that, Susanna began to fail rapidly and died within a few months. She is buried on Penikese, her husband with her, though he lingered for another year after she passed.
There is, he wrote, one other person who has something to say about these things. The nurse. Miss Evelyn Morgan. She was on Penikese with us before coming along to Louisiana. She and Susanna were close friends. So close that Susanna chose the name Morgan for her second child. To honor her friend. More a sister, really.
Miss Evelyn was very excited to know that you were asking about Susanna.
I cannot tell you anything about a third child being sent away in a skiff (what a very unusual thing to ask). There was no third child, of that I am quite certain. But Miss Evelyn was anxious that you should write to her. Perhaps, she said, there is something else she can tell you to assuage your curiosity.
Mine, in fact, has been aroused not only by your questions but by your reasons for posing them.
If you feel inclined to share that information, please write again.
Until then, I remain,
And here he signed his name with a great flourish, and the 8th of June, 1925, and Carville, Louisiana.
“So,” Miss Maggie said, the letter still in her hand, her hand in her lap. “There was no third baby, Crow. Just Jason, who was sent away. And Morgan, who died at birth. You are not from Penikese.”
I felt surprisingly, astoundingly doubtful about such a conclusion. Afraid to believe it. And something more: reluctant to believe it. Almost . . . disappointed.
And I didn’t understand why I wasn’t happy instead.
I had never wanted to be from Penikese.
I had never wanted to be born to lepers.
And now I knew that I hadn’t been.
If I wanted to, I could climb to the top of Lookout Hill or into the pulpit at Sunday service or up onto the roof of the highest house and yell the news to anyone who would listen.
But I had come to think of my mother as a brave, sad, sick woman. Like Susanna. A woman I wish I’d known.
And for weeks now, whenever I had thought of that woman, I hadn’t seen her face. I had seen mine.
I would have to stop that now.
“Please don’t tell anyone on Cuttyhunk about this,” I said.
At which Miss Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Why not?”
“I’m not sure,” I said slowly.
I remembered how it had felt to stand outside the Penikese hospital and learn that some of the lepers had been from islands like Cape Verde and Tobago. That some of them had looked, as I did, like the color Osh made by mixing his rainbow of paints. That real people had lived here. Real people with names like Elvan and Susanna. Not mysteries. Not maybes. Real people. People like me.
But if I was one of those people, could I be an Elizabeth Islander, too?
Or did I have to choose?
“I know what the doctor wrote,” I said, looking up at her, “but don’t you think it’s still possible that I came from Penikese?”
Miss Maggie gave me a rueful smile. “I don’t see how,” she said. “Is it possible that you would prefer to be from there than from nowhere?”
Maybe. I had to confess: Maybe that was the truth of it. At least part of the truth.
“And why not tell people, regardless?” she asked.
I knew Miss Maggie wouldn’t like my answer. She thought that pride was a sin.
“If I wasn’t good enough for them before, I don’t think I want to be one of them now.”
“Oh, but that’s a hard thing to say, Crow. And you’re not a hard person.” She took me by the hand. “If you have a chance to be closer to people, you should take it. And it’s not that you weren’t good enough,” she said. “People are afraid of things they don’t understand.”
“But why am I hard to understand?” I asked. “They’re the ones who are hard to understand. Not me.”
“You’re not wrong,” Miss Maggie said. “But I can’t explain what someone else thinks.”
“Neither can I,” I said. “And I’d rather not twist my brain around trying.”
Chapter 13
I carried the letter in my teeth until I was back in the house so I could pass the heavy mussel pail back and forth between my hands.
“Should I start calling you Dog?” Osh asked when I came through the door.
I went straight to him with the letter, which he took from my teeth and held until I had cleaned my hands on a rag and took it back.
“It’s from the doctor,” I said, putting it on the table.
Osh poured the mussels and their brine into
a pot.
I went outside, pulled off my wet clothes, and pegged them on the line. The ones that had sun dried were stiff with salt, but I whipped them against the rocks, salt rising from them in clouds, and put them on.
Osh had left the letter on the table, unopened.
I knew that he wouldn’t have read it, even if he could, without asking first.
“Do you want to know what it says?”
He was scrubbing the beards off the mussels and didn’t look up from his work. “I suppose I do more than I don’t,” he said.
I read him the letter, working out the harder words easily because I’d already heard them from Miss Maggie, and then waited for him to say something.
“So you are not from Penikese.”
I put the letter back in its envelope. “That’s what Miss Maggie said, too, but I don’t know. I think maybe I am.”
Osh stopped what he was doing, wiped his hands dry, and came to sit with me at the table.
He looked at me intently.
“Why do you say that?”
I shrugged. “Miss Maggie thinks I just want to be from somewhere, anywhere, even a leper colony. But it’s not that.” I rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand. “I guess maybe I’ve thought about the possibility for so long that it feels true now. Except it’s more than that.” And more than I could put into words.
After a while, he sighed and wove his hands into a basket and said, “You have to be more patient, Crow. What you’re doing is confusing. Trying to figure out what’s most important to you. What matters. What doesn’t. It’s all very confusing, I know. Like standing in a hurricane. You have to find a way to step back a little, so you’re looking at the storm and not caught up inside it. Otherwise, you might run headlong into something worse.”
I thought about that. “Are you telling me to stop looking for my family?”
He closed his eyes. After a moment, he said, “No, Crow. But I do think you should look in as much as you’re looking out.”
I didn’t know what he meant. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
Osh stopped to choose his words. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “people know things. They don’t learn them. They don’t figure them out. They don’t discover them. They know them. And it doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say about it.”