by Lauren Wolk
I was out of my bed and running before Osh was properly awake. I heard him call my name as I struggled to unlock the door and then pulled it open, the wind pushing it back against the wall, rocking me where I stood.
“Shipwreck!” I called back to him and ran out into the rain and wind, across the beach and straight into the rising channel, so swift now that I nearly lost myself, but then regained my footing and staggered, waist deep, toward Cuttyhunk.
“Crow!” I heard Osh yell behind me, but I kept on, the wind shoving me off balance, the current tugging at my legs, and my nightshirt heavy with water.
Onto the beach I scrambled, gaining speed as I ran past the bass stands and up the lane.
The higher I climbed, the harder the wind tried to take me, the sharper the rain against my face. And then the lifesavers atop Lookout Hill fired another rocket into the wet sky, and I whirled in its light to see where the ship had foundered.
There, back beyond our island, a ship under full sail had come to grief in the storm.
I knew what happened when a ship wrecked. I’d seen it many times. Snatched from their own beds, the lifesavers had by now scrambled for their boats and launched them into the heavy surf, oars churning against the waves, harder and harder until they reached the men drowning in the storm or clinging to their listing ship, its mast snapped short, its sails in tatters.
And then they’d haul the survivors aboard the surfboats and strike out again for shore, this time to a spot below where I was now, down along where the bass stands marked the end of Cuttyhunk. They would come ashore where we lived, just by our tiny island.
From Lookout Hill behind me, another rocket shot skyward, bleaching the night, and I saw the ship more clearly as the sea began to take it under.
It was too small to be a brig or a bark. Too big for a sloop.
I ran.
I ran half blinded by the rain and wind, my feet aching as they pounded the rocky path, down and down to the shore again and along it to the landing place where the surfboats would come.
Osh was there already, as I’d known he would be, waiting to grab me up and shake me. “Don’t do that again!” he yelled against the wind. “Don’t go into this kind of sea again ever. Do you understand me?”
“It’s a schooner!” I cried, pointing east.
And then Miss Maggie came to join us, her hair wild in the storm, her poncho swinging like a church bell, and other islanders came, too, all of them ready to help with those who were hurt or beyond helping, until there were perhaps twenty of us huddled together in the storm.
Miss Maggie wrapped me up in her arms, her poncho snug around me. “I think it’s a schooner,” I told her.
She laid her cheek against my forehead and said, “I hope it’s not.”
And I knew what she meant.
I could swim. Like a seal, I could swim. But most sailors—oddly, stupidly—could not.
And I didn’t know if a man knocked overboard, stunned, could hope to survive in a big sea, regardless. But I had seen men rescued from worse storms than this. From waters so cold that ice formed on the blades of the oars as the surfmen raced to save them. From wrecks far out on Sow and Pigs Reef, in currents that crossed and tangled to suck the drowning sailors under and spin the surfboats like tops.
Surely every sailor out there would survive a summer nor’easter. Surely no one would die in a storm like this.
Chapter 36
Out of the darkness, the first of the surfboats came at last, the waves thrusting it toward the shore, and we ran into the water to guide it onto the rocky beach.
We helped the weary surfmen and then their passengers, who crouched wide-eyed and shivering in the cradle of the hull.
Most of them were steady enough on their own, needing just a hand to climb out onto the shore despite the bully-wind and the rocking of the boats.
“What’s the name of your ship?” I yelled into the wind.
One of them said, “The Shearwater.”
And I was horrified that I’d hoped for her to come back through the Graveyard when she might have been safely at sea far from here.
I looked across the waves and took heart as another surfboat came out of the darkness.
When it grounded itself on the shore, Osh helped pull it higher up, and I waited as more survivors stumbled out.
None of them looked like me.
I waited, pacing, rain blind.
And then a third boat came surging out of the darkness and onto the sand.
These last sailors had not fared so well.
As I watched, the surfmen lifted the first of them from the boat—a tourniquet on his thigh, his clothes bloody despite the rain and sea—and carried him to a cart waiting on the lane to the village.
Osh and another surfman lifted a second sailor out of the belly of the boat and laid him on a waiting stretcher.
He didn’t move.
I pushed my way closer as Osh took one end of the stretcher, the surfman the other, and they headed toward another waiting cart.
Lying on it, his lips blue, his eyes closed, was the young man I’d seen leaving New Bedford Harbor.
“Is he dead?” I cried, Miss Maggie at my side.
“No, not dead,” one of the lifesavers said. “Just out cold. Hit on the head and nearly drowned.”
Not dead. Not dead. “We’ll take him,” I said. “Osh, we’ll take him, won’t we?”
Osh stopped. We all stood there in the rain, the surfmen panting. “Is this him?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He looked from me to the sailor to me again.
“We’ll take him,” Osh said. “Until the storm is over at least, we’ll take him.”
“He needs a hospital.” This from a surfman named Mr. Canning, a sailmaker by trade but a surfman, like all of them, with no name but that when a ship wrecked in these waters.
Miss Maggie said, “He can’t go to a hospital until the storm is over and the ferries are running.” At the doubt on his face, she said, “I know what to do as well as anyone on the islands.” Which was true. She did. “And if he needs more than I can give him, we’ll take him to the mainland as soon as we can.”
“Let’s get him settled then,” Mr. Canning said, waving at one of his mates to board again, and we put the stretcher across the benches and dragged the boat into the water and climbed in, too, so they could row us the short stretch home and up onto our beach all strewn with weed and flotsam.
“Gently now,” Miss Maggie said, and they carried him across the sand and into the cottage.
“Put him in my bed,” I told them.
“Down first,” Miss Maggie ordered. “On the floor. Straight and flat as you can.”
I lit a lamp and watched as, bit by bit, they carefully worked the stretcher from under him and hauled it outside, water streaming off it, off us, and the wind rearranging things as if ghosts were in the house, too, making mischief.
Mouse paced on the mantel, tail twitching, eyes wide.
Then the surfmen returned to their boat without a word and disappeared into the rain, their work done, the sailors saved.
“Fetch some water and some towels and a clean nightshirt,” Miss Maggie said, without taking her eyes off the sailor’s face. She probed gently through his hair until she found where he’d been hurt. Her hand came away bloody, despite the drenching sea and rain. “And tear something into strips for bandaging his head.”
Osh and I did her bidding, quick as we could, and stood watching as she poured the clean water through his hair, washing away sand and strands of sea lettuce, and sponging the salt off his face, a pool forming around him as if he lay in his own private sea.
Osh knelt and carefully dried the man’s face and then gently pressed the water from his hair, the towel coming away red, and then held his head a little off the floor s
o Miss Maggie could wrap it in strips of cloth that had once been a bedsheet.
To Osh, she said, “Help me get him out of these wet things.” And I turned away, shivering, surprised to realize that I was in my nightshirt still, drenched myself, my own hair full of sand and salt.
When they began to pull off his heavy clothes, I went out into the night and let the rain wash me clean, tipping my head back, the wind so strong I could hardly breathe, and said, “Don’t let him die.”
But the wind answered with its customary howl, which I could not translate, the rain was busy with its endless plunge, and the clouds were in a hurry to be somewhere else.
“Crow!” Miss Maggie called from the door. “Come in here.” She left a blanket by the door and went away.
I pulled my wet nightshirt over my head and tossed it aside, wrapping the blanket around me, before I, too, went in and shut the door.
The sailor was now lying in my bed beneath a soft blanket, his breathing slow and steady.
“Why won’t he wake up?” I asked.
“He can’t,” she said. “He’s not ready, after that knock on the head. He needs rest, and plenty of it, if he’s to get well.”
“If?”
“Don’t do that, Crow,” she said. “He’s a healthy young man, and the surfmen pulled him up out of the sea before it could drown him. And they brought him to shore in record time. And now he has us to look after him.” She reached out to push the wet hair off my face. “Let’s feel nothing but lucky,” she said. “All right?”
Osh handed me a towel and a fresh nightshirt. “I’m going to take Miss Maggie home,” he said, locking the window by his bed.
“You’re leaving?”
“I need some things from home if I’m to care for him properly,” she said.
Osh handed Miss Maggie her poncho and put on his own. “We’ll be back soon,” he said. “You take my bed, Crow.”
“You think I’ll sleep after this?” I said.
“Try,” he said. “It will be morning before you know it.”
I stared at the face of the sailor lying so still in my bed.
“He looks like me, doesn’t he?” I said.
They both nodded, Miss Maggie smiling. “He does,” she said. “Some.”
“A lot,” I protested. “Doesn’t he, Osh?”
“Some. I haven’t seen his eyes yet, but he does look like you.”
“Even Mrs. Pelham at the hospital said so,” I insisted.
“You’ll know soon enough,” he said. “One way or the other. But don’t decide who he is before he has a chance to tell you that himself. Now lock the door behind us.”
“You don’t think Kendall is out in this storm, do you?” Miss Maggie said.
“He got away before the storm came. I don’t know anything about the man except he’s a stupid, crazy, monstrous fool. I don’t know what to think.”
“You’ll be back soon?” I said.
“Soon as we can.” But then he took a closer look at my face and said, “Perhaps you should come with us.”
“But who will watch him?” I asked, nodding at the sailor in my bed.
“He’ll sleep for some time,” Osh said. “He won’t even know you’re here.”
“Just the same,” I said, and I think we both heard the Osh in my voice.
“Then lock the door and don’t open it again for anyone but me,” he said, running his hand over my tangled hair before he went to take Miss Maggie home.
After they left, I pulled on a clean nightshirt and spent a few minutes looking at Jason—no, Osh was right—at the sailor, the lantern light gilding his face, and then in the mirror and then at him again.
When he woke, he would tell me that I was right. That he was my brother. Maybe before morning. Maybe any moment now.
I badly wanted to see his eyes. To know that they could see me.
But I had waited this long. I could wait some more.
I left the lamp burning in case he woke in the night. And I lay not in Osh’s bed but on the floor alongside my own, unhappy that the rain on the roof, rapping its wet fingers on the windowpanes, made it impossible to hear him breathing.
But it made sleep easy, and in no time I drifted away.
I must have been very deeply asleep when a thump at the door woke me, suddenly, and I stumbled to my feet, dizzy and half blind with confusion, and realized that Osh was not in his bed but out in the storm.
It was only as I unlocked the door that I remembered.
And by then it was too late.
Before I could shove the bolt home again, the door slammed against me, knocking me to the floor, and Mr. Kendall barged through, the rain and wind with him, as if he were made of storm.
I scuttled out of reach and then gained my feet and backed away until I felt my bed behind me. The sailor was as I’d left him, completely unaware, and Mouse by his side, her eyes fixed on Mr. Kendall.
The windows were shut and locked. I knew I couldn’t escape through one of them as we had before. Nor could I leave the sailor and Mouse behind. My only choice was to face him.
“You’re too small to be so much trouble,” Mr. Kendall said. He shut the door and locked it again. “And too smart to think I’ll leave this time without what’s mine.”
He wiped his wet face with his hand and shook like a dog, rain and seawater flying off him, his eyes red. “Give it to me now and I’ll go away and never come back,” he said. “I promise.”
He took a step closer and stopped suddenly, his eyes on my bed. “What’s this?” he said, reaching for the lamp and holding it high. “Is he dead?”
“No,” I said. “Shipwrecked. And hurt.”
He returned his attention to me. “Where is it?” he said, coming closer.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Where is it?” he said more quietly, which was worse than if he’d screamed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have it.”
“Yes, you do,” he said, another step closer, “and if you think someone will come to save you, you’re wrong.” He smiled. “They aren’t going anywhere until I get what I came for.”
They. Osh. Miss Maggie. “What did you do?” I said.
He laughed again. “He lay down like a dog when I had her by the neck.”
I pictured Osh, bound and tied. Miss Maggie. As Mr. Sloan had been.
“You’re a terrible man,” I said. “And I won’t give you a thing. Not a thing!”
But then he turned the lantern flame up high.
“If you don’t,” he said, “everything will burn. Everything. Him included,” he said, nodding toward the bed. “And you, too.”
I would escape, I thought. I was small and fast and I would find a way out. Mouse, too. But not the sailor.
I waited, watching Mr. Kendall’s face, his empty eyes, and knew there was no hope for it.
Nothing mattered now except that flame.
“All right,” I said. “Put it down and I’ll tell you.”
“And send me off on some goose chase?” He turned the flame down. “You’ll show me,” he said. “And if it’s not there, we’ll come back here together and finish things.” He set the lantern aside. “Show me.”
Chapter 37
By now, the rain had begun to thin, but the wind was still a wild thing.
Mr. Kendall dragged me out of the cottage and then, when I pointed toward Cuttyhunk, across the channel, gripping my hair in his fist as I led him away from the shore and up the path.
I thought and I thought and I thought as I led him through the dark wind, trying to find a way to lead him somewhere else and not to Osh and Miss Maggie, not back to them, but I couldn’t think of a single thing to do except what I was doing now.
I didn’t care one bit about the treasure,
not anymore, not who touched it, not who took it, except that I did. I did. Because of the fist that held me like I was the beast, like I was the one who needed a bit in my teeth, this man, this bully who had come out of nowhere to hurt us.
Light was starting to seep through the cloud cover to the east, and he urged me on even while he pulled harder. “If you think you can take me into the village, think again,” he said close by my ear.
“No,” I said. “I’m not. It’s where they are.”
The path to Miss Maggie’s was like a little stream that we traveled too slowly for him, too quickly for me, the house up ahead dark, no sign of anyone. But I knew they were inside, bound and gagged, hurt maybe, and now I was the one to make haste until we were both almost running.
“There,” I said, pointing, and he followed me to the table under the hornbeam tree.
Broken branches lay on the ground like bones.
The tree itself swayed and twisted.
“Where?” he demanded.
I tipped my head farther back and looked high into the tree.
“Up there,” I said.
He stepped closer to the trunk, dragging me with him, and peered into the branches.
“I don’t see nothin’.”
“High up,” I said. “In a nest. Tied fast.”
“In a crow’s nest?” Mr. Kendall laughed out loud. “Smart and clever, too,” he said. “Maybe I should take you with me when I leave.”
I tried to pull away, but he held me tighter than ever. “Up you go,” he said, yanking me toward the tree.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t reach high enough unless I stand on that table there.”
He glanced at the table, knew he’d need to let me go if he were to drag it closer, picked me up instead and hoisted me into the lowest branches. “Get up there,” he growled, and I knew how it felt to be free and trapped at the same time, treed by a bear that would follow if he was hungry enough.
I couldn’t do it.