BEYOND THE BRIGHT SEA

chapter 3

Miss Maggie lived in a smart little house apart from most of the other year-rounders, though with all her animals she was not completely alone. One bad winter (though I don’t know that there was ever a good one), she brought the smallest pig into the house with her and, when spring came, had to drag him back to his pen. When a half dozen wild turkeys froze in the sassafras trees alongside her barn, she carried them inside, one by one, like big, ugly babies, wrapped them in flannel, stood them by the fire, and fed them hot whiskey and milk. Every last one survived, and they neither pecked nor harried her when the thaw was complete, but simply walked out her front door into the sunshine the next day.

Four of her rabbits did not fare so well. Though she rescued their frozen bodies from the hutch and fed them the same strong drink, they revived for just a while before dying once and for all, so she skinned them and made them into a mighty stew with carrots from her root cellar and bacon from her smokehouse.

“It was the best stew I ever made,” she said, “and I ate up every bit of it, but I was sorry for the way those poor rabbits died.”

Then she lined her coat with their pelts and was much the warmer for it.



Mouse had a fur coat, too, and I loved to bury my face in it. To listen to the rumble in her chest.

Like Osh and Miss Maggie, she was not afraid to let me touch her.

We called her Mouse because that’s what she said over and over again when she was hungry.

She settled for scraps of fish and a little of the jerky that Osh made from beef and blueberries. Or the fish heads that the Cuttyhunk men tossed back into the sea after cleaning their catch.

Sometimes she brought us a gift—once it was an eel that wriggled and rolled when she dropped it at my feet and that we all three ate in a stew—but usually she was too hungry to be proud of herself. All three of us were skinny. All three of us ate what we had, and we didn’t think about what we didn’t have.

Mouse was an obliging cat most of the time, but when Osh pinned her between his knees and trimmed her longest fur for his paintbrushes, she squirmed and yowled so pathetically that I mashed my hands over my ears and looked away.

“I’m not hurting her,” Osh said as he carefully cut what he needed. “It’ll grow back.”

“Why don’t you use your own hair?” I asked.

“I do,” he said. “But fur is better for some things.”

After he had harvested the bits that were longest—and farthest away from her claws—Osh spent a moment plowing through her remaining fur, yanking ticks as he found them. Some were as big as peas.

He gave them to me to smash on the rocks.

The first time I ever did that, small starbursts of Mouse’s blood remained, so from then on I set them adrift on the current instead.

When Osh released her, Mouse shot out of the house like her tail was on fire.

“Why don’t you just buy some brushes?” I asked.

Miss Maggie could order almost anything from the mainland, and she sometimes sent for things Osh couldn’t buy from the Cuttyhunk market.

“This is free,” he said, binding the fur to the tip of a brush handle. When he sculpted it to a point, such a brush would let him paint the pinfeathers of a young meadowlark or the petals of a wood lily.

But he never took one tuft of fur from Mouse when winter came.



I confess that I myself was often cold during those long winters on the island with Osh. Of course I wished for fresh apples and strawberries when the entire world was white and gray and the ground was iron hard, but mostly I wished for shipwreck wood that would mean warm hands and feet in January.

I never asked for the wrecks that granted those wishes, though. And since there was nothing I had done to cause such things and nothing I could do to stop them, I didn’t feel bad about salvaging what we could when ships came to grief in the waters off Cuttyhunk, so turbulent that they were known as the Graveyard.

You might think that we wished most fervently for gold or silver—and I have to admit that when I finally found some treasure of that sort I was glad, for many reasons—but we never found any cargo more precious than the blacksmith coal that we harvested from a ship after it foundered in an August storm. Every single one of the crew survived, which was cause enough for celebration, but we were happy, too, that the ship had wrecked in the shallows so that at low tide we islanders could walk out in our tall boots, pulling dinghies along behind, to load up as much coal as we could and ferry it back to shore. The tide brought more to us, littering the wrack line with chunks of it that we gathered like shell seekers who knew too much about frostbite.

We treasured that coal and used it sparingly so it would stretch into a second winter. Even in June, when the cold weather was a world away, I could sweeten any bad day by remembering that one amazing thing: Come winter, we would be warm.

No one who’s ever been as cold as a New England islander in February would care more about gold than coal.

But when I learned from Miss Maggie that coal squeezed by the weight of the world turned to diamonds, I looked at it differently and wondered what other rough and simple stuff held the promise of something rare.



Coal wasn’t the only treasure that turned up on the Elizabeths.

The ships that had wrecked in the Graveyard took plenty of cargo down with them, and not all of it was lumber or cotton or rum.

A few of the islanders had found real riches from time to time. A diamond necklace caught in a lobster trap. A gold ingot in the tines of a scallop rake. One man, pulling an anchor off Naushon, hooked an old crown that had been buried in the muck for a century. Another, clamming off Nashawena, found a huge silver belt buckle that he cleaned up and wore as proudly as the buccaneers who had once sailed these waters, some of them true pirates, though only one of them—Captain Kidd—had been known to hide loot or give it away instead of spending it.

He gifted a fortune to Mercy Raymond, on Block Island, just down the seaboard from us, filling her apron with gold and jewels simply because she’d been kind. And he buried more on Cherry Tree Field on Gardiners Island, not so far from Cuttyhunk, before Governor Bellomont sent it to England, proof that the captain was a thief, and not just of gold or silver.

Treasure comes in many forms, and Captain Kidd had prized them all.

Miss Maggie was happy with plain and simple, but she sometimes spiced my geography lessons with talk of gemstones caught and kept—and sometimes buried—by pirates like the wily William Kidd: African diamonds, Burmese rubies, Brazilian emeralds, all of them forged by the alchemy of the earth’s hot spots. So hard and resilient that they could last for centuries in the cold salt and sand of islands like ours.

Lots of people thought Captain Kidd might have buried loot on the Elizabeths, well within his stomping grounds, but no one who had gone digging for treasure out here had ever found any.

That did nothing to deter the mainlanders who came out by ferry in the warm weather to muck about on the shores of Cuttyhunk, hoping to find what Captain Kidd might have buried or what the currents had stripped from the shipwrecks slowly surrendering to rot in the Graveyard.

We liked to watch those mainlanders follow the receding tide out as far as it went, plunging long rods into the sand, hoping for the clunk of metal, sometimes digging up an old lantern or a rusty chain before being chased ashore by the incoming tide.

It never occurred to me, as I watched them search, that I would be the one to find the treasure they sought. Or that I would find it in a place where none of them would ever have dared to look.