by Lauren Wolk
And I decided that this was my birthday, whether the calendar said it was or not.
The next day, Quinn was well enough to get out of bed and walk by himself, strong and straight again, so I took him outside for air and a look around.
The remnants of the Shearwater had washed up all along the Cuttyhunk rocks and beaches, and a fair bit on our little island, too, including a belaying pin that Quinn now plucked out of the tangle at the wrack line.
“She was not a bad ship,” he said. “Not at all.” He handed me the pin. “Here,” he said. “This should make a fine peg for a hat or two.”
I took the pin and rolled it against my palm.
“I’m sorry that I wasn’t that brother of yours,” he said. “But my own sister will be glad to see me home.”
He wasn’t trying to be cruel. And it wasn’t cruel, really, this truth. That he was not my brother. That he had a sister who wasn’t me.
In fact, I was glad to know something not everyone did: that there are better bonds than blood.
Before Quinn left, Osh gave him some too-big clothes to tide him over until he got home.
Miss Maggie gave him money for the fare to the north shore. “I’m sure you’d do the same for me,” she said.
And I gave him the little spyglass I’d carried with me all the while I’d waited for the Shearwater to come back. “It’s not such a good one,” I said, “but it’s the best one I have.”
Quinn shook Osh’s hand and Miss Maggie’s. And then he hugged me to him, stepped back smiling, and across to Cuttyhunk he went, bound for the ferry to the mainland, and away.
Mouse mistook my toe for a mole crab, and I used the excuse to duck away and off down the beach to sit by myself for a while.
Miss Maggie went inside, and I hoped she would clear away any signs of Quinn and his stay.
Osh spent some time in the garden, though it was as tidy as a Quaker quilt, and then came to sit beside me.
I didn’t have anything worth saying, so I said nothing at all for quite some time.
Osh was quiet, too, waiting.
Eventually, though, a single question insisted that I ask it.
“How do I find Jason now?”
Osh rubbed a smudge of paint off the back of his hand. He’d made a fresh supply and was painting again, which was the thing that finally convinced me we’d seen the last of Mr. Kendall.
I thought Osh might start talking about wild-goose chases or the perils of the wider world, but he surprised me.
“Don’t you understand, Crow?” he said, his voice so sad, so tender, that I couldn’t breathe. “You’re the one worth finding.”
Chapter 40
It took us a while to locate the other bundle of treasure, since the storm had dragged it some distance and torn away the buoy that had marked where we’d left it. But I was an able diver and found it one morning in August when the light was just so, the water calm and clear, the lobster trap we’d stashed it in just deep enough that I thought my eardrums might burst as I laced a rope through its slats and struck out for the surface.
Osh, waiting above in the skiff, grabbed the rope and hauled me aboard where I gasped and kicked like a sea robin on a hook.
“Remember,” he said as he tied it fast again. “It’s the buoy with the extra-long stem.”
We agreed to pull it frequently to check on the treasure and to convince anyone watching that it was a true lobster trap and nothing more.
“We won’t leave it here through another big storm, though, will we?” I asked.
Osh shrugged his usual shrug. “I suppose not,” he said. “But it’s really up to you.”
And he meant it. I knew that. And I felt taller at the thought.
“Then maybe I’ll see if it’s meant to be mine,” I said.
“And give it away, like you said before?”
“But without such a lot of fuss and mystery.”
Osh nodded. “Like sending a baby to sea in a skiff,” he said.
I nodded. “Or coming here under a blue sail.”
While the treasure stayed safely under the sea, I stayed with Osh and Miss Maggie on the Elizabeths and learned how the stars changed with the seasons, and how we did, too.
Jason never did come there to find me.
I thought about writing to Mrs. Pelham, to ask if he’d been back to see her. To ask if she’d told him about me.
But I didn’t.
I was afraid he might have chosen to let sleeping dogs lie.
But I wasn’t a dog, sleeping or otherwise, and I still hoped I’d cross his path someday.
Some of the treasure I kept, in case Jason ever did come to find me. Half of it, at least, was his.
And a little of it I held back for me and Osh and Miss Maggie, for when we might really need it.
Some I sent to Miss Evelyn, for the lepers in Carville, Louisiana, along with a necklace just for her. I asked her not to tell anyone where it had come from. To spend the treasure quietly, bit by bit.
With Miss Maggie’s help, I wrapped pieces of it in newsprint, tucked them into plain little boxes with no return address, and sent them off to orphanages far and wide.
“You aren’t worried that whoever opens these will simply keep what’s inside?” Miss Maggie asked as we packed up the treasure in small portions and sealed the boxes tight.
I shrugged. “What would you do if you opened one of these and knew how much food it would buy for those babies?”
“Crow!” Miss Maggie said, her eyebrows high. “You have to ask?”
“Of course not,” I said. “And I figure anyone taking care of babies in an orphanage is probably a lot like you.”
And if they weren’t, there wasn’t a thing I could do about that.
At some point during those long, golden years, Osh told me that he’d given me another name when I was new to him.
“Besides Crow?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Besides Crow in your other language?” I asked.
He nodded again.
“What was it?”
“What is it, you mean.”
I thought back and back. “Was. Is. Will be,” I answered. “It doesn’t much matter, since I’m here now. And I have a name.” I smiled at him.
“You don’t want to know what it is?”
I made a face. “Of course I do, Osh.”
So he told me.
It was another of his foreign, musical words, and I vowed to learn how to say this one properly.
“What does it mean?” I asked him.
“Whatever you want it to mean,” he said. “I told you a long time ago: What you do is who you are.”
I thought back over all I’d done since I’d spied that first fire on Penikese and let it touch a wick inside me.
And I decided that I knew what it meant, that name.
When I said “daughter,” he smiled and put his open hand on my head.
“Just like Osh,” I said, “means father.’”
A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK
Writing is, for me, the finest possible adventure. All I need is a guide and a place to start. The adventure I took in Beyond the Bright Sea began with a young islander named Crow. She simply appeared in my imagination one day, and I spent a few weeks watching her and imagining where she had come from and where she might go next. I knew she would make an incredible guide the minute she introduced me to Osh and their home. And that’s when I began to write. The rest came as it came.
I had a wonderful time creating Crow’s home on a fictional island off Cuttyhunk. It, and the sea itself, made a magical setting and a strong character, too, interacting with Crow and Osh right from the very beginning. I am a sea person, living on Cape Cod, and am in love with the islands off its shores, so I was able to combine things I know very well with other thing
s I learned by reading about island life in the 1920s. The result is a mixture of fact and fiction: a reflection of that place and time, but not an exact replica.
Likewise, Captain Kidd was a real pirate, and there’s evidence that he did bury treasure near the Elizabeths and really did fill Mercy Raymond’s apron with treasure when she helped him resupply his ship off Block Island, though none has ever turned up on Penikese (as far as I know).
But all of the other characters in the book—and, especially, the story itself—came completely from my imagination. Miss Maggie showed up nearly at the beginning, and I was pleased to meet her. The same is true of Mouse. I love them both very much. And they fit quite naturally into my blend of real and imagined life on Cuttyhunk.
I’ve been to some of the other Elizabeths—which also include Nonamesset, Uncatena, Weepecket, Gull, Naushon, Pasque, and Nashawena—so I know them firsthand, but I did a lot of research to learn what they were like nearly a century ago.
Some believe that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest after reading the journals of Bartholomew Gosnold, who first visited the Elizabeths in 1602, and that the island in the play is actually based on Cuttyhunk, not Bermuda or Roanoke Island.
Cuttyhunk was, and still is, a wild and isolated place whose shores have many times been littered with the cargo of hundreds of ships wrecked in the Graveyard.
But in the early 1900s, Cuttyhunk was also a summer haven for the wealthy. Famous for its bass fishing, Cuttyhunk attracted businessmen who used carrier pigeons to communicate with their city offices. Whoever caught the biggest striped bass each year was called the “High Hook.” Most fished from bass stands on the Cuttyhunk rocks, but the best fishing by boat was around Sow and Pigs Reef, better known simply as the Pigs, named because people thought the rocks looked like a mother pig with her babies. The area is no playground, though. The strong winds, rocks, currents, surf, and fog make it the site of hundreds of shipwrecks, which is why it is known as the Graveyard.
But there is no place in the Elizabeths as serious as the island of Penikese. Learning about that place and its people broke my heart and made me ache for Crow as she struggled, through a confusion of fear and hope, to find her roots.
Like the other islands, the Penikese in this book is a mixture of fact and fiction. At various times in its history, the island was a school of natural history and a turkey farm, among other things, before it became a colony to isolate smallpox patients and then to quarantine people with Hansen’s disease, then known as leprosy. Nearly all “lepers” in the United States came from other parts of the world, including Japan, China, Cape Verde, Tobago, Turkey, Russia, and other countries, but any of them living in Massachusetts in 1905 were sent to live together on Penikese, in isolation, as far as possible from everyone else. They were even confined to “the other side” of the island where their cottages and the hospital—and the cemetery—faced Buzzards Bay to the west. None of them was allowed on the side of the island closest to Cuttyhunk.
The residents of the other Elizabeths were so afraid of the Penikese patients that nannies would scare naughty children by threatening that the lepers would escape and “come get them” if they didn’t behave. Only one child was ever actually born in the leper colony on Penikese, and he was quickly sent away to the mainland.
Under the care of a very dedicated and kind doctor and his small staff, the patients were able to spend their best days keeping busy with gardening and other simple pleasures, but fourteen of them died and were buried in the island’s small cemetery, leaving behind daffodils and irises that still bloom on “the other side” to this day.
In 1921, after sixteen years of operation, the state closed the colony and transferred its thirteen surviving patients to the federal leprosy hospital in Carville, Louisiana.
A few years after that, the island became a bird “sanctuary,” though the game birds and rabbits raised there were shipped to other areas for hunting.
In 1926, when the state gave up trying to sell the buildings and other materials left when the leper colony closed, they burned and dynamited all that remained.
Between 1945 and 1973, no one lived on Penikese, but people still traveled there to hunt, fish, and camp. Penikese later became the site of a school for “troubled boys,” which closed after thirty-eight years. Today, it is a residential treatment center for young men fighting addiction.
For me, however, Penikese was and always will be where Crow began her life and where so many others ended theirs.
Like the other islands in this book, Penikese was one thing for those who chose to be there, but something very different for those who had no choice.
Writing this book reminded me that happiness is a matter of being where—and who—we want to be.
Osh and Miss Maggie—even Mouse—and especially Crow understand this truth. For them, an island is the best kind of home. Even better because they are together.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to many people for their contributions and support as I wrote Beyond the Bright Sea. I am especially indebted to my family—my mother, Mimi McConnell; my sons, Ryland and Cameron; my husband, Richard, and the family he brought with him; my sisters, Suzanne and Cally; and Denise and Ashley Wolk—and in particular my father, Ronald Wolk, who put me at the tiller of a Sunfish when I was quite young and pointed me out to sea without any instructions except to “be careful” and never to underestimate the ocean. The Atlantic taught me everything else I needed to know, and I’ve been in love with it ever since.
Thanks, as well, to the Bass River Revisionists, a group of splendid writers, friends, muses, and critics who always help me see more clearly what my work needs. Among them, Deirdre Callanan, Susan Berlin, Maureen Leveroni, and Julie Lariviere deserve roses for the care and insight with which they read and responded to an early draft. I thank Patty Creighton, too, for her thoughtful reading and for sharing my work with her husband, Jack, a fisherman whose knowledge of the Graveyard and other waters around the Elizabeth Islands helped me know them, too. I count Connie Rudman and Todd Basch as two other fine readers, and I am indebted to young Zoë Reese Gameros, who read a draft—twice—and shared her reaction with me in a most gracious and helpful way.
My colleagues at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod—Bob Nash, Amy Neill, and Meg McNamara—have been very supportive of my other career, even when I’ve had trouble keeping all the balls in the air, and for that I am in their debt. My other colleagues, at Penguin Young Readers, are a likewise stellar group. Julie Strauss-Gabel is the kind of editor all writers want: smart, strong, and devoted to words and the power they wield. Her team is the best in the business, and I am grateful for all the expert and devoted people in editorial, design, marketing, publicity, and sales who worked tirelessly to bridge the gap between Beyond the Bright Sea and its readers. My amazing agent, Jodi Reamer, is a powerhouse whom I am delighted to have in my corner. She and her associates at Writers House are simply a dream team.
Teachers and librarians like Christopher Brown at Philadelphia Free Library and Literacy Specialist Matt Halpern deserve all our thanks for working so hard to celebrate books and to put them in the hands of young readers. Christopher Rose, Vicky Titcomb, “Totsie” McGonagle, Sara Hines, and thousands of other booksellers across the country and the world are heroes, too. They understand that literature and all arts represent the best of our achievements and the greatest hope for a bright future.
Finally, I would like to thank the doctors and other healers who dedicated themselves to the care of patients with Hansen’s disease who were sent to live and, in many cases, die on Penikese. I am grateful as well to the many people who preserved the history of the Elizabeth Islands—recording everything from the kinds of flowers that grew there to the wildlife and the shipwrecks and the habits of the island people—especially I. Thomas Buckley for his thorough and careful book Penikese: Island of Hope. I loved writing Beyond the Bright Sea, and I am t
hrilled at the idea that so many wonderful people are behind it. Thank you.
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