by Lauren Wolk
He looked away. “I ended up here because my country was not really my country. It was just where I lived. Where some of us were less than others. Where it was sport, to hurt us.”
I waited as quietly as I could. Osh never talked about his life before the island.
“And in the face of that . . . mindless, heartless, stupid rage, I could not protect the people I loved. I begged them to come with me, but they wouldn’t. So when I left everything I hated, I also left everything I loved, Crow. Which split me into pieces, like wood for the fire. And I did go into a fire for a while.” He sighed. “I had no English when I came to this country. I had no place to live. So I worked in factories, making machines. For so long that I felt like a machine myself. It was either that or starve. But eventually, I chose starve. I chose a boat with a blue sail. So small. And clean. And quiet. I remember knowing—in that way I’m talking about—that it would take me to another life.”
He smiled at me. “And it did. And not much later, you came here, the same way.”
“But not because of what I knew,” I said. “I was just a baby.”
“No, that’s true. Something else brought you here, but you know it. Whatever you might call it.” He looked me in the eye. “You can learn things from other people, and you can learn things by keeping your eyes open. But you can learn things from your own self, too. From what your gut tells you. If you pay attention to it,” he said.
“But I thought you wanted me to stop being so curious.”
Osh sighed deeply. “I did,” he said. “But what I want is the smallest part of this. I just don’t like to think about you out there in the world by yourself.”
“Then don’t,” I said, reaching across the table to put my little hand on his big ones. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Dear Miss Evelyn, I wrote later that night on a piece of the special paper Osh used for his paintings. It was thick and beautiful, and I was careful to write slowly and as clearly as I could.
Dr. Eastman told me that I could write to you with more questions about Penikese and the babies who were born there: Jason and Morgan.
I stopped to lick the dry point of my pencil.
I was tempted to write my story, how I had washed ashore in an old skiff, a ruined letter and a ruby ring tucked into my swaddling.
But if Miss Evelyn had any answers for me, she already knew my story. If she didn’t, I saw no point in telling her my own private history.
Without telling my story in plain language, I didn’t know how to ask the next bit, so I just followed the pencil where it led.
My questions are just words, I wrote. I wonder if they mean anything to you.
I stopped again and read back what I’d written. If the paper had not been so dear, I would have ripped it up and started again. Instead, I wrote a list of the words that might open any number of old doors:
Baby, I wrote.
Skiff
Ring
Little feather
Lambs
I thought about the letter in the cinnamon box.
Bright sea, I wrote.
And came up short.
Eight words. Just eight. Almost not worth sending.
I’m sorry if I sound foolish, I wrote. It’s possible that I really am foolish. Thank you.
And then, taking my cue from Dr. Eastman, I signed the letter:
I remain, Crow.
I didn’t understand how I could remain anything except Crow, but the letter was done, so I folded it up and set it aside for the morning. Miss Maggie would know how to post it.
“This will cost you,” she said, holding up an envelope. “This and the postage.”
I nodded. “Chicken coop?”
“Muck it out and load in fresh straw,” she said. “Put the muck in a barrow and cart it out behind the barn. And then come on in for lunch when you’re done.”
I would have done the chore for nothing. For payment for my lessons. For payment for my lunch. But Miss Maggie would never take any pay for those things.
Osh insisted on thanking her with paintings, which she hung all around her house. Above her mantelpiece was a meadow full of sheep. Between her kitchen windows, a skiff riding the current through the Narrows.
The chickens liked me, as long as I didn’t bring Mouse along. She didn’t mean any harm, but the hens were a ferocious bunch and they always greeted her arrival with a lot of running to and fro, squawking loud enough to wake the dead, and feathers flying.
“Stay out here,” I told her. She obliged me by flopping down in the sun and licking the back of one paw, which was her way of saying, “Fine. Chickens smell, anyway.”
It was pretty smelly in there, and dusty, so I pulled my shirt up over my nose while I worked.
By the time I was done, I was sweaty and stuck all over with straw and feathers.
I spent a moment at Miss Maggie’s cistern, dusting myself off and sluicing rainwater over my head, before I met her at her door. She handed me a rag. “You seem to be dripping wet most of the time now,” she said. “Dry off before you come inside.”
Which I did, and quickly, too, at the smell of chowder on the stove.
She set out two bowls for us, a teacup for Mouse by the door, and biscuits fresh from the oven. They were crisp on the outside, soft and steaming on the inside.
Nothing better than to dredge a hunk of hot biscuit through chowder thick with clams and potatoes.
We ate in silence until Miss Maggie tipped her head toward the letter lying on her sideboard.
“For that nurse?”
I nodded. “I hope you don’t mind that I wrote it on my own.”
Miss Maggie snorted like Cinders did when she got a gnat up her nose. “What teacher would mind when a student doesn’t need her anymore?”
“Oh, that’s not it at all,” I said. “I need to learn lots of things.”
“But how to write a letter is no longer one of them.” She added some pepper to her chowder and offered me the mill.
“Do you want to read it?” I asked.
“Is that an invitation?”
I nodded. “There are things I haven’t told you yet,” I said. “But I’d rather wait until after you’ve read it.”
I watched her open the letter. She raised one eyebrow as she read. Then both.
“This may be the shortest letter I’ve ever read,” she said. “And the most cryptic.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Mysterious,” she replied. “Puzzling.”
I imagined that Miss Evelyn in Louisiana might have the same reaction, so I said, “What do you make of it, then?”
Miss Maggie pursed her lips and read the letter through a second time.
“Well,” she finally said. “I know why baby is on the list. And skiff, too. But why the rest? Like ring? And bright sea?”
So I told her about the ring and the ruined letter that had come with me in the skiff. “I would have told you sooner, but I only just learned about them myself, before we went to Penikese.”
Miss Maggie nodded. “I’m glad you trust me with your secrets,” she said. “And I’ll keep them.”
She ladled some more chowder into my bowl and topped it with a second biscuit. “Now eat up,” she said. “There’s not nearly enough meat on those bones of yours.”
Mouse had finished all of her chowder except for a cube of potato and a coin of carrot, which Miss Maggie saved for the pigs. “As if a morsel of vegetable would kill you,” she muttered.
When Miss Maggie turned her back, I slipped Mouse a bit of pork belly from my bowl. She gobbled it down and chased a damselfly out the open door into the yard.
“You’ll post this yourself, Crow,” Miss Maggie said, tucking my letter into an envelope.
Something I’d never done before. But I seemed to be doing a lot of
things for the first time lately. And they’d come out all right, so far.
The post office wasn’t much bigger than Miss Maggie’s chicken coop but smelled far better, despite Mr. Johnson’s cigar.
When he saw Miss Maggie come through the door ahead of me, he said, “Well, good afternoon, Maggie. What can I—” but stopped and said nothing more when I came in behind her and stepped up to the counter.
“I’d like to post another letter,” I said, holding it out to him.
He didn’t take it.
“Maggie,” he said, “they sanitized the Penikese mail before they sent it off island. With formaldehyde. And I haven’t got any of that.”
“This is not Penikese,” she said. “Crow has lived here for years now. Are you really going to act this way? With God watching?”
“Now that’s not fair, Maggie,” he said, “when I’ve never been anything but decent to you.”
“As if that has anything to do with it,” she said. “It’s Crow who wants to post the letter, not me.”
I looked into Mr. Johnson’s old blue eyes and said, “I would like to send this to Carville, Louisiana, please.”
I set it on the counter.
After a moment, he said, “By airmail again, as before?”
I glanced at Miss Maggie, who nodded briskly.
“Else we’ll grow old waiting for a reply,” she said.
She paid him for the postage.
And we both watched as he managed to stick on the stamps without touching the envelope.
As we left, I turned back in time to see him shovel my letter into a mail sack, his hand wrapped in newsprint.
And I almost laughed. But I didn’t.
Chapter 14
I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if I hadn’t found that little spyglass in the sand. The one I had used for years, searching for whatever I could find.
Since we’d been to Penikese, I hadn’t looked to the sea for clues about my past, but on most evenings I still spent an hour atop one hill or another, watching the day go down. And I still carried the spyglass in my pocket, mostly out of habit, partly to be ready in case the wider world decided to show me something new.
It had been just a day since I’d sent the letter to Miss Evelyn, and I was not expecting any reply for a while. Nor was I as anxious as I had been while waiting for the doctor’s answer.
I was learning that some things take time, and worrying wouldn’t change that.
The day had been soft and fair, and the evening was pink and gold to the west, a dusky blue over the sea.
I wasn’t eager for anything more than that.
But when I climbed Lookout Hill, I saw a flash of something white out by Penikese. It had caught what was left of the sun, just for a moment, and then faded.
Through my spyglass, I saw a small sailboat rounding the near point on Penikese, coming from the harbor, a single person at the tiller. As I watched, it headed out into Buzzards Bay, toward the mainland.
I thought it must be the bird keeper. But why would he be heading out into darkness?
When I got home again, wet to my waist, I stripped off all my clothes, pegged them on the line, and spent a moment at one of the rainwater sinks in the near rocks, splashing myself clean for bed.
I dried myself with a towel off the line, so stiff it could have stood up in a breeze. Then I unpegged a fresh nightshirt and shook the stiff out of it and slipped it on.
The glow from the windows was my best welcome.
Osh, mixing paints inside, glanced up and said, “About time you came home.”
I sat at the table and patted my knee until Mouse jumped up and told me about her day, turning and turning until she’d settled into my lap.
We watched Osh grinding petals into pulp.
“I saw someone sailing away from Penikese,” I said, knuckling Mouse behind her ears.
Osh added a bit of water to the mortar and worked the mash some more.
“The birdman?”
I shrugged. “Who else?”
“We went there. Perhaps he had other visitors.”
“Maybe.”
“Though it’s odd they’d be going out in the dark.”
“Yes.”
Nothing for a while but the muted tock of the pestle in the mortar and Mouse’s purring.
“I don’t think the bird keeper was alone when we went over there,” I said. “I heard something in the leper hospital, just before he came around the corner.” Again, that small, elusive moment rose through everything that had happened since then, like a bubble in a pot on its way to the boil.
“What did you hear?”
I closed my eyes. “A thump. Like something fell over.”
Osh scooped the pulp into a small jar. Orange.
“Maybe he has a cat and it jumped off a bed when we knocked,” he said.
I didn’t think so. It would have been a very big cat to make such a thump.
I gathered Mouse in my arms, stood up, and dropped her.
She landed with a thump not nearly loud enough.
“Mouse,” she said.
But she leaped right back up into my lap the moment I sat down again.
“If it was a cat, it was a tiger,” I said.
“Buildings make their own noises sometimes.”
I knew that was true, but . . . “I’d like to go back out there,” I said.
Osh glanced my way. “Of course you would.”
“We could make it a proper foraging trip,” I said. “Come back with a whole bag of woadwaxen.”
“Tomorrow we pull traps,” he said. The mainlanders were coming over in numbers now and would be looking for lobster tails to bait their hooks.
“For how long?”
“The morning. I expect rain in the afternoon.” Osh was known for such predictions, most of which came true. “And I don’t see the point of sailing back there because of a thump you think you heard.”
“A thump I did hear,” I said. “And a chance to go into the cottages, maybe.”
He shook his head. “I don’t see the point of that, either. What do you expect to find?”
I watched him wipe out the mortar and fill it with the woadwaxen I’d collected on Penikese. “I don’t know,” I said.
Which, oddly, drew a nod. “We’ll sail to the harbor when we have time,” Osh said. “But if the birdman’s boat is there, we’ll sail straight back.”
“But—”
“Straight back,” he said. “No sense in pestering a man with a gun.”
In the morning, we sailed out to pull our lobster pots. Osh turned into the wind at each float so the skiff went into irons, its sails limp and luffing, and then tethered us to the buoy and hauled the pot up, hand over hand, and into the boat so I could reach in and grab the lobster while it clacked its claws and arched its back, flapping its tail madly.
I’d been pinched in the process, more often than I liked, so I’d learned some tricks over the years. It had been a while since a lobster had last caught me in its claws.
After I emptied each pot, Osh baited it with a fish head and tossed it out again.
And we sailed to the next float, checked it for the mark that meant it was one of ours, and repeated the process.
In the early days, I had worried that someone else would take our lobsters, but Osh said that the Elizabeths were like the Wild West, where stealing a horse meant hanging.
“No one poaches,” he said. “Not here. If a float has my mark, the trap below has my lobster. And no funny business.”
I liked the idea that no one would steal another person’s livelihood, even though they could do it in the dark of night, unseen. Even though lobsters could not tell tales.
It was a code we lived by, and I respected that, but I confess that I found it odd how the
same people who followed these unwritten rules sometimes ignored the ones spelled out in their sacred pages.
Chapter 15
By the time we sailed through the Narrows and into the harbor, we had twelve big lobsters in a bushel basket fitted with a lid.
Osh pulled up the centerboard as we came into shore alongside the fish pier.
I lowered the sail and scrambled out of the skiff, towing it into the shallows, where Osh stepped out and hoisted the dripping basket onto his shoulder.
I pulled the skiff higher onto the sand and tied it to a post. Then I followed Osh up the pier lane toward the grocery.
I expected to find some islanders on the porch, sharing news and gossip, and maybe even a few summer people come to start the season early. I often saw them at the grocery, packing picnic baskets with bottles of cold soda pop and thick sandwiches. The ladies in pretty dresses and straw hats. The men in dark trousers, white jackets, and fedoras.
But there were no summer people on the porch when we arrived. Just Mr. Benson, who was one of the many Cuttyhunk pilots who guided ships coming through the Graveyard.
As Osh climbed the steps to the porch, Mr. Benson said, “Daniel.”
Osh said, “Benson.”
I stayed in the yard, on the other side of the porch rail, out of habit. “Morning, Crow,” Mr. Benson said. He was sitting in one of the rockers, packing his pipe with tobacco from a pouch.
“Good morning, Mr. Benson.”
Osh left the lobsters on the porch and went inside to settle up with Mr. Higgins, the grocer. He usually took his pay in trade: flour, coffee, spice, dried beans, and canned goods; or put it on account for a day when we needed more than lobsters would buy.
“I hear you been to Penikese,” Mr. Benson said. He looked at me curiously. “And writing letters to the doctor that used to be there.”
I wasn’t sure I liked people knowing my business. I hated the thought of the islanders talking about me as if I were news.