BEYOND THE BRIGHT SEA

Chapter 2

Osh had built our cottage from whatever he could wrestle off the nearest shipwrecks that were slowly settling into the seabed, breaking up in storms, and otherwise disappearing, bit by bit.

The rest of the house was flotsam that had come to him, floating in on the tide, as I had, sometimes into our own little cove, sometimes on Cuttyhunk, where no one else wanted it.

He’d built the frame from long beams, the roof and walls from decking, the chimney from a vent pipe off a lost steamer, one window from a porthole. Our door was a piece of keel. Our hearth, a hatch lid. Our table a crow’s nest turned upside down.

Osh had salvaged, too, many things that had no purpose but to be dear to us. The finest of these, two figureheads—solemn women with long, flowing hair—stared at us from either side of our fireplace, never blinking. And a pair of sun-white whale ribs arched over our doorway, a tarnished ship’s bell hanging from their pinnacle.

And I’d found my share of baubles while searching the wrack line. Bits of sea glass among the mermaids’ purses and limpet shells. A brass money clip with an elephant pressed into its face, all of it a crusty green. A banjo clock that would never again keep time but had a tiny cupboard where I kept the other trinkets I’d found. Another thing I had in common with crows: our habit of prizing the poorest of riches.

When I asked him what he’d done with the skiff that had brought me ashore, Osh told me he’d busted it up for firewood and burned it to keep me warm that first winter. For a long time, before I knew better, I wondered why that—of all the wood he’d salvaged—had ended up in the fire rather than our home.

With the money he made from lobstering and cutting ice out of Wash Pond and selling his paintings to the summer people, Osh had bought nails, a hammer, and whatever else he lacked. He dug clay from the sound side of Cuttyhunk, sailed it around to our cove, and mixed it with wood ash and salt to make the c******g that sealed the cottage against draft and hard rain. And he did everything else he could to make it strong and snug.

When I was old enough, I helped him keep it that way.

But even as we worked together on this home we’d made, I could not stop thinking about who had made me. Who had looked at me, soft and fresh as a blossom, and decided to give me to the tide. And why.

I carried those questions around with me like a sack that got heavier as the years went by, even though I had become accustomed to the idea of it. Even though I was not unhappy with the life I had.

I just wanted to know. To understand. To put that sack down.



Some things I knew through and through.

Osh had told me many times—so often that it had become like a bedtime story—how he’d found me in an old skiff that had beached itself on the wrack line overnight. Had he not found me when he had, the incoming tide would have taken me back out again, to somewhere else. But he had wanted fish for his breakfast and had gone out to cast for a striper or two.

The skiff was barely seaworthy, but it had survived the trip to the island, even through the wild currents that wrecked much bigger boats.

What Osh expected to see when he came up to the little skiff I don’t know, but it could not have been a new baby, lashed to the bench with strips of dirty linen, inches above the water that had seeped into the hull.

Osh told me how I stopped cawing and lay silent as a mouse when a hawk-shadow comes—I blinking up at him and he down at me—that morning when we first met.

He lived alone in a place that was difficult even for a grown man, but he took me in first before deciding what else to do with me. And I stayed. He often told me how hard it was in those first days after I arrived. How he had traded lobsters for milk at the Cuttyhunk grocery, poured it in a little flask, and fashioned a n****e from a clam neck made to squirt seawater. I sucked salty milk from it, as if from the sea itself. He swaddled me in wind-softened sailcloth, washed me in a smooth sink in the rocks where rainwater collected. Tucked me up alongside him at night so we slept as one.

By the time Miss Maggie and the others found out about me, Osh had decided that I was his until someone else could prove otherwise.

Miss Maggie had tried for a while. Not, she said, to take me away. Only, she said, to make sure no one was searching for me. Perhaps, she said, my mother hadn’t been the one to send me to sea. Perhaps, she said, my mother was pacing the shores across Buzzards Bay, her breasts swollen with milk. So Miss Maggie bullied the postmaster until he sent word on his telegraph machine to ports from Narragansett to Chilmark, asking if anyone was looking for a newborn like me.

And she wrote letters, too, and sent them to places too small for a telegraph machine.

From some, she got no answer: Onset; Mattapoisett; even Penikese, though it was the closest.

And none of those who did respond knew of a missing baby.

But it didn’t really matter.

By the time the replies made their way into Miss Maggie’s hands, I’d already become Osh’s. And he had become mine.



It was a mystery why the skiff had washed up on our little island and not on Cuttyhunk where most treasure and flotsam came to rest. But I was glad that it had.

I couldn’t imagine that any of the other islanders would have fostered me had I drifted up on their piece of land. I thought it far more likely that they would have sent me off to the mainland, to some place without so much sea and sky. And that would have been a shame. Osh and I were surrounded by a wild world. And I preferred it that way.

Still, there were a few people on Cuttyhunk I liked well enough. And they seemed to like me in their odd way. But they never touched me. Never came close. Seemed content to know me from a distance. Which had been true from the very start all I’d ever known from them so I didn’t question it much until I was older and began to pull on the loose threads in my life.

When I did that and everything began to unravel, a seam opened up and let in some light, which helped me see my life more clearly, but it also made me want to close my eyes, sometimes, instead. Miss Maggie was the only one on Cuttyhunk who did not seem to be afraid of me.

I was often sick as a baby and still too often sick as a child, and Miss Maggie was the only one to cross to our island with bread and soup and one of the potions she brewed from rose hips and nettle leaf. Hers was the only hand that had ever touched me, if I didn’t count Osh or those who came before him, though I always did.

Despite all her hard work, her hands were as smooth as the inside of an oyster shell. When I asked her why, she frowned and told me that they were soft from the lanolin in the sheep’s wool she sheared from her flock—or picked from the sheep that died in the rough—and spun into yarn. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t strong,” she said, as if I had doubted it.

When she put those hands on my hot forehead, I thought of sea lavender and April. But she hardly ever smiled, and when she talked everything came out with a hint of thunder in it. A little scolding, no matter what I’d done or hadn’t done.

“You’ll eat this soup and every spoonful,” she’d growl. “You hear me?”

And I did eat every spoonful: No one else on Cuttyhunk made better soup than Miss Maggie did, with vegetables that came from the finest garden on the islands. She started her seedlings in hotbeds as soon as the sun was stronger than the snow and planted them out after the last thaw in a vast garden, rich with manure and sea muck: potatoes, celery, beans, cabbage, horseradish, snap peas, barley, melons, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and turnips.

If she spoke rough to me, she said softer things to her cows. And although they ate the same oats as all the other Cuttyhunk cows, hers gave the best milk on the island, so her butter was the best, too. And she made her hens so happy with marigolds and barley that they laid like troupers and hatched out more chicks than any on the Elizabeth Islands. With the flour and oil she got from trading eggs, Miss Maggie baked bread that made me happier than if I’d had cake, which I tasted only once in a blue moon. I was almost glad to be sick if it meant her bread and soup. “She does make good soup,” Osh always said before she arrived and after she left. “But soup is just one thing.”

Her bravery was another thing.

“Don’t you worry that you’ll get sick, too?” I’d ask her as I lay in bed, my head aching.

“I’ve been sick before,” she’d say. “And I’ll be sick again, with or without your help.”

I liked that about Miss Maggie. How simple she made things seem.