by Lauren Wolk
I held it high as I waded through the incoming tide. Then I followed the lane up toward town, turning off at the path to Miss Maggie’s.
There were two policemen in her kitchen, one old and short, the other young and tall. Both were clean shaven. They wore identical uniforms with lots of pockets and buttons and belts. They both carried pistols.
“Who’s this?” the tall one asked when I stepped through the open door to find them there.
“This,” she said, “is Crow. The reason Mr. Sloan is alive. Crow, these are Officers Kelly”—she gestured at the tall one—“and Reardon.”
“Hello,” I said.
They nodded to me and turned back to Mr. Sloan, who was sitting at the kitchen table looking younger and happier after a night’s sleep.
I stood in the corner and listened as he finished telling them what he’d told us the night before.
And Miss Maggie described the holes all over the island.
And then I told them how even the floors in the cottages had been pulled up.
“Crow here thinks he was looking for treasure,” Mr. Sloan said.
Officer Kelly snorted. “I think somebody’s been reading too many adventure stories,” he said.
But he had not seen the crown that had come up on an anchor fluke. Or the giant silver buckle. Or my little gold ring in the cinnamon box.
Mr. Sloan said, “I agree, it sounds far-fetched, but why else would he be digging up an island? And one in the waters where pirates used to sail?”
Which drew a thoughtful look from Officer Reardon. “Pirate treasure?” he said. “Out on Penikese?”
Mr. Sloan shrugged. “That man kept me prisoner while he spent a lot of time and effort digging up that island. What for, otherwise?”
When the officers asked Mr. Sloan to describe the man who’d so mistreated him, he did, pretty well; but I handed Miss Maggie the scroll from Osh, and she, after unrolling it, handed it to them.
“The spittin’ image,” Mr. Sloan said when he saw the portrait that Osh had sketched. “Right down to that look in his eye. Mean, he was.”
“Did you make this?” Officer Reardon asked me.
I laughed at the idea. “No, that was Osh.”
They looked at me sternly. “Osh,” I said.
“He’s an artist,” Miss Maggie said. “He sailed us to Penikese that day and saw the man, too.”
Officer Kelly rolled up the sketch.
Officer Reardon closed his little notebook and tucked it in his pocket. “We’ll do what we can to find him,” he said, “but he’s had a good head start and could be anywhere by now.”
Mr. Sloan sighed. “Far from here, I hope, though I’d like him caught. Will you take me to the mainland with you?”
They would, they said.
“Thank you, Miss Crow,” Mr. Sloan said as he left. “And you, Miss Maggie. And please thank Mr. Osh as well.”
And off he went, an officer on either side of him, bound for Woods Hole and other birds in other places.
“So sad to think you might be theirs,” Miss Maggie said when I told her what the little feather on my cheek might mean. We were in her garden, planting more corn and beans that would continue to bear after the crops we’d planted in May were done. “Their first child was sent away into a lonely life. I suppose it makes sense that they decided to send their second child to something better, maybe.” She shook her head. “But to sea? Alone? So small?”
I felt fierce about this, that they had done me no harm, and I wanted to give her just one answer to all three questions: They had no choice.
“Perhaps they felt they had no other choice,” Miss Maggie said, and I loved her for it. “But it breaks my heart to think of them tying you into that old skiff and pushing you out onto the tide. Carving a headstone for an empty grave to convince people that their baby had died.”
“If they hadn’t, someone might have come looking for me. And sent me to the orphanage in New Bedford, like Jason.”
She nodded. “Perhaps.” She handed me a tray of bean sprouts and pointed to an empty row. “Start these over there.”
While I planted the young beans, I tried to imagine life in that orphanage. I tried to imagine Jason there, all alone, for years. No one brave enough or kind enough to touch him.
“I want to find my brother,” I said.
Miss Maggie looked up from her work. “You think you’ll be able to find him after all this time? He’s probably”—she thought about it—“nearly twenty years old by now. Long since on his own.”
“But maybe still in New Bedford,” I said. “The orphanage might know where. Why not try to find him?”
She wiped a wisp of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “He may have found his own way. He may be happy with his life the way it is.”
I shrugged. “Why wouldn’t he be even happier if he knew about me?”
She kept her eyes on what she was doing. “I don’t know,” she said again. “But if you’re set on this, I’ll help. If you want.”
“And Osh, too,” I said.
“Of course.” She folded the dirt over a trough of seeds and stood up, dusting off her hands. “There’s no going without him.”
Chapter 20
"I haven’t left the islands since I got here,” Osh said, “and I don’t plan to now.”
He’d caught a striper for our supper and another for Miss Maggie. He had scaled and cleaned them, sliced the cheeks from ours, and was wrapping hers in brown paper.
“But we won’t be gone for long,” I said. “Just a few hours.”
“That’s an eight-mile crossing,” he said, tying the package up in white string. “Nine, into the harbor. Who knows how far by foot to the orphanage. And then a long trip back. It’s a day at least. More if the weather turns.”
He stowed the paper and string, shoved some driftwood into the stove, and blew on the lazy coals until they glowed.
“But that’s not so long,” I said. “A day. Why can’t we go, even if it does take a day?”
“I have chores. And you do, too, and your lessons, besides, which you have been neglecting.”
Odd, coming from Osh, who left my schooling to me.
He put an iron pan on the stove, added butter and spring onions, and, after a bit, tossed in the bass cheeks. The smell, the sizzle, brought Mouse running.
Osh gave her a bit of raw belly meat instead. She rolled onto her back and gripped the meat in both paws as she ate it.
“If you had a brother somewhere and might be able to find him, wouldn’t you go looking?” I asked.
Osh went still. Only the knife in his hand trembled a little.
When he moved, it was to tend the cheeks in the pan before they burned.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
I fetched a plate for us to share. Forks. Salt and pepper. Cistern water in a single mug. The last of a loaf of molasses bread.
He slid the cheeks onto the plate and poured the butter and onions on top.
We sat down. Ate. It was wonderful. I told Osh so.
“Things are usually better when you don’t mess with them too much,” he said.
We finished the meal, cleaned up, went outside together. Mouse, too.
Osh handed me a bushel basket and, armed with a pitchfork, began to harvest seaweed from the wrack line.
When the basket was full, we each took a handle and lugged it up to the high rocks where we spread it to wait for rain. When it was washed and dried, we’d hoe it into the garden, food for our food.
Osh began on a second basket while I thought about whether I was brave enough to cross to New Bedford alone. I was a good sailor, but I knew that even a skiff could be a lot to handle in a strong wind, crosscurrents, shipping lanes.
If I went
, I would have to take the ferry.
“I haven’t been to New Bedford since before I came here,” Osh said, as if he could read my mind. “And I have no desire to go back there. Ever. Full of whale stink. Everything too fast. Too crowded.” He ripped an old conch shell off a hank of dead man’s fingers and tossed it aside. “I’m sorry, Crow, but I just can’t go there.”
I didn’t want to cause Osh grief. But I did not see why I had to choose between him and a brother who might be just nine miles away.
“If Miss Maggie goes with me, can I go?” I said.
“And how will you pay for the passage?”
This, as nothing else, gave me pause. Everything that belonged to Osh belonged to me as well. The money he earned from cutting ice or trapping lobsters or painting his pictures went for things we couldn’t grow ourselves. But if I ever needed anything from the mainland, he sent for it with no fuss at all: pencils for my lessons, a new pair of winter boots when I outgrew the last, a new book now and then, medicine that Miss Maggie could not concoct on her own.
“Will you not pay for my passage?” I asked him in a small voice.
Osh stuck his pitchfork in the sand and ran his hands through his hair. He looked at me steadily, his mouth tight. “If you insist on going, I will give you the fare,” he said. He paused. “And tell Miss Maggie thank you for taking my place.”
When I went looking for her, I found Miss Maggie coming up the lane from the post office, on her way home.
“Not tomorrow,” she said when I asked if she would go to New Bedford with me. “Cinders has come up lame and I need to stay with her. But maybe in a few days, when she’s better, if Osh will go with us.”
But I knew he would not.
And I didn’t want to wait a few days.
“Maybe in a few days then,” I said, turning back toward home. “I hope Cinders feels better.”
As I walked past the bass stands and across the low channel to our beach, I decided that I would take the ferry to New Bedford alone.
I was twelve years old.
I could sail a skiff, wrangle a lobster, save a birdman from starving to death.
Surely I could ride a ferry to the city and back again.
“There’s weather coming,” Osh said when I woke the next morning. “You may have a wet crossing home from the city.” I walked outside and blinked at the blue sky, sheer yellow sunlight, small breeze.
Osh was usually right about the weather, but not always.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. And I’ll tell Miss Maggie to bring a rain bonnet, just in case,” I said, taking the bowl of oatmeal he offered. He had crumbled some crisp bacon on top, which was unusual. So was the mug of coffee he set next to me at the table. I usually had to beg him for a cup.
When he poured in some cream, I was more surprised, still.
“I’ll fix you a pocket lunch,” he said, which he’d done before, when I went to help Miss Maggie find her sheep scattered wide across the island. An apple for one pocket. A roll stuffed with cheese and jerky for another, my body warming it into softness as I worked.
“Thank you,” I said as I bent to my breakfast, sad about deceiving him. Better that, though, than pushing him to go to New Bedford with me.
Nobody strands himself on an island unless he’s finished with the mainland.
An hour later, I waited on the sand while the ferry passengers crossed the long boardwalk from the pier to dry ground. Lots of people had come for a holiday, a good shore dinner, and then home by dark. Ladies in white dresses. Men in summer suits.
I watched them parade off the boardwalk and up the lane. Some of them looked at me curiously. One woman even said hello. And then they were gone, and the boardwalk free for those of us outward bound.
I followed a few other islanders along the boardwalk toward the steamship. I knew them and they knew me, but no one said very much.
At the gangway, the mate took my money, same as theirs. To him, I was just a skinny kid. I smiled on my way forward to the bow.
The breeze was strengthening as we pulled away from the pier. In the distance, mare’s tails swept out of nowhere across the sky. They were often the first sign of a storm, the frayed hem of cloud heavy with weather. But they were a long way off, and the sky overhead was still a spotless blue as we steamed west.
At some point, I realized I was in unfamiliar waters, closer to the continent than the islands. Traveling by steam instead of by sail was odd, too. We went straight, regardless of the wind, at a steady speed, cutting through the waves instead of riding them, with but one purpose: to get there. Which suited me fine that morning. I was anxious to reach the city.
But, as it turned out, I discovered something before we ever made land.
As we neared the mouth of New Bedford Harbor, a schooner flying a long green streamer off its mainmast, its sails plump, its bow rising and dipping, came out through the channel toward us. We gave way a little, as all engine ships must to those under sail, but we passed close by, and I could see the sailors clearly. They were lined up at the rail, filling themselves with the sight of the home they might not see again for weeks. Maybe months.
One of them looked like me.
He was near the bow of his ship, I in the bow of the ferry, and for a long moment we were directly across from each other, staring.
“Jason?” I called, but there was wind, and I could tell that he hadn’t heard me. He cupped a hand behind one ear and leaned over the rail as far as he could, and I yelled again, more loudly, “Jason!”
But I still couldn’t be sure that he’d heard me.
Without unlocking my eyes from his, I moved toward the stern, and he did the same as the two boats passed alongside each other, so for a minute—no more—we stayed as close as we could. And then, from the stern of the ferry, I stood and watched him in the stern of the schooner, the distance between us lengthening, and I waved.
The sailor who looked like me waved back, but so did all the others lined up along the stern, nothing more than friendly.
And then the ferry steamed into the harbor, the schooner tacked away, and the sailor was just a man.
“The Shearwater,” I said aloud, so I would remember the name of that schooner and know it when it returned.
I didn’t move from that spot until I could no longer see the ship at all.
Perhaps he was nothing to me. A stranger by now busy with the rigging, all of his thoughts tuned to the sea. How he looked, nothing more than a coincidence. How he looked, nothing more than something I wanted to see.
Or perhaps he was still standing by the rail of the Shearwater, wondering about me. Perhaps even, like me, filled with an odd warmth that didn’t weaken as he sailed away.
Chapter 21
When the ferry tied up at the dock, I was tempted to stay on board and wait for the return trip. The sight of that sailor who looked so much like me might be a better answer than anything I would find in New Bedford. But the answer I wanted and the one I needed were two different things. I would do what I had come to do.
Now that I had reached the city, though, I was no longer so eager for it.
Osh had been right. Even before I stepped foot onshore, I was startled by the place. It reeked of whale and waste. All along the dock, there were vast pens of barrels covered with seaweed and hundreds of bales of cotton waiting for the mills. Men everywhere, of every color, stripped to the waist, labored in the sun. Horses worked alongside engines alongside people alongside a harbor afloat with trash and oil. In the distance, factories smoked their pipes. Past the docks: tall buildings and long straight streets. Miss Maggie had told me about automobiles, and I had seen some pictures of them, but the ones I saw here—their fumes and rumble, the blare of their horns—amazed me. I didn’t see a tree anywhere.
“You comin’?” a deckhand called to me, and I realized I was the only passenger s
till aboard.
“I am,” I said, hurrying past him and down the gangway onto the dock, where I stopped short.
Nothing so far had alarmed me as much as the sight of a black dog, boils riding its back like a second spine, a rat as big as Mouse clenched in its teeth. No one else gave it a second look.
I didn’t know where I was going, so I simply went. I hurried to catch up with the other islanders who had come for business of their own.
“Hey,” I called to one of them, a farmer, Mr. Cook.
He turned. “Off on another grand adventure, are you, Crow? Saving the bird keeper wasn’t enough for you?”
“Do you know where the orphanage is?” I asked him.
“Ain’t no orphanage in New Bedford,” he said. “Not anymore.”
And I cursed myself for thinking I could do this without any planning whatsoever. The city felt like a fortress, huge and unfriendly. And I had never felt so small.
“But where it was—that’s still there,” he said, and I took hope.
“What do you mean?”
“Brought my mother here when she took sick. To the hospital. And just by there is the old building used to be the orphanage. Part of St. Luke’s now.” He pointed away from the docks. “Go on up Union, left on County, right on Allen. And be quick, Crow. It’s a long walk. And there’s but one ferry back to Cuttyhunk today.”
It felt odd to be wearing shoes in June, but I was glad to have them since the streets were sharp with bits of glass and metal, filthy with dust and dreck. Everyone walked so quickly here, nobody saying much to anyone else, all around them a cloud of commotion. The windows of the shops were full of things I couldn’t imagine ever having, and the reflection of the passersby and the street full of cars made those glimpses of another life seem distant and insubstantial, like dreams.
I watched for County, crossed Union to get to it, dodging cars and trucks that honked at me, watched for Allen, crossed again, more carefully, and took it straight up, block after block, looking for St. Luke’s.