BEYOND THE BRIGHT SEA

Chapter 4

Before Miss Maggie explained why the other islanders were afraid of me, I’d sometimes wondered why people would shake her by the hand but wave at me, instead.

I’d always figured it was because I was little. With a name like Crow. And so different from them, besides, like the calico lobsters that turned up in traps very rarely and always with great to-do.

As I got older, I realized that there was more to it than that.

When I asked Osh about it, he shrugged and talked in circles, as if I’d asked why women don’t have beards.

But then, one day, as I came up to the cottage with a pail full of steamers, I overheard him arguing with Miss Maggie and knew it had something to do with me. So I listened, of course.

“It’s foolish,” he said. “The way they treat her. Like she’s made of poison.”

“Yes, it is,” Miss Maggie said, her voice as sharp as a razor clam. “But it would be better if she understood why, even so.”

Osh said, “She’s still too young,” which sounded odd, coming from the man who had taught me to bait a hook when I was four.

“Well, she’s going to have to find out sooner or later.”

“Later is fine.”

“I don’t think so.” Miss Maggie sounded like she was digging in her heels. “And I don’t like not telling her something she has every right to know.”

At which point I ducked through the cottage door and asked them what that “something” was.

Osh wouldn’t look at me.

Miss Maggie said, “You shouldn’t eavesdrop on other people, Crow.”

Osh said, “This is her house, Maggie.”

“What do I have every right to know?” I said.

Miss Maggie looked even more serious than usual. “Where you came from,” she said.

Which was a very surprising thing for her to say.

“You know where I came from?” I said in a small voice.

“No,” Osh said, before Miss Maggie could utter another word. “We don’t. You could have come from a hundred places around here. But this is where you came to. And this is where you are.”

Which didn’t explain why the islanders were afraid of me.

“People think I’m made of poison?” I said.

Osh sighed through his teeth. “They don’t,” he said. “But—”

“Penikese,” Miss Maggie blurted. “They think you came from Penikese.”

I didn’t like the look on Osh’s face.

Penikese was a small island a little distance to the west of the other Elizabeths.

Nobody from Cuttyhunk ever went there.

And nobody from Penikese ever came to Cuttyhunk, either.

“It’s where sick people used to go,” Miss Maggie said. And now she looked too much like Osh did. Part scared. Part sorry we weren’t all out digging clams or picking mussels or any of a thousand other things that weren’t nearly as hard as this was. “There was a hospital there, Crow. Until a couple of years ago. That’s all.”

I thought about that. “Was the hospital there when I was a baby?”

Miss Maggie nodded. “Penikese was an island for sick people.”

“And I get sick a lot,” I said. “Is that why people are afraid of me? Because I get sick a lot?”

Osh nodded. “But that’s only because you’re small,” he said. “I’m sure that’s only because you’re small. Some people have to work their way through all kinds of sickness before they’re strong.”

“And I’m one of those people?” I said doubtfully.

Osh bent down to look me straight in the eye. “I’m sure of it,” he said.

I turned to Miss Maggie. She hesitated. And then she nodded, too. “That is true,” she said. “Some people start off more susceptible. More . . . vulnerable. Weaker.”

“But I’m not,” I said. Just the day before, I had helped Osh carry home a bushel of blue crabs all the way from the toe of West End Pond.

“No,” Osh said. “You’re not. Not like you were. Which is why it’s so foolish for people to think you might spread something.” I remember how he put his hand on my shoulder. “Unless it’s something good.”

But as I lay in bed that night, listening to the sea on the rocks and the northbound wind, I wondered what kind of sickness those people had had. The ones on Penikese. The ones who had been sent to a little island hospital to live far away from everyone else. Where maybe I myself had been born.

And I didn’t want to be from Penikese.

I didn’t want to be from a colony of sick people.

I wanted to be from a family with a very good explanation for why they had sent me to sea in an old boat unlikely to float for very long.

But I could not think of what that explanation might be, no matter how hard I tried.

Not long after Miss Maggie told me the truth about Penikese, she decided it was time for me to go to the little island school with the few other children on the Elizabeths.

“Why?” Osh said. “She’s fine here. She reads all the time, and we’re teaching her everything else she needs to know. Leave her be.”

“She should be with people her own age,” Miss Maggie argued.

“You mean the ones who’ve never been allowed to play with her?”

“She’s fine!” Miss Maggie said. “Anybody can see that just by looking at her.”

“They won’t see how fine she is,” he said. “Or if they do, they’ll start to think she should be somewhere better than here, with someone other than me.”

At which Miss Maggie had scoffed. “As if there were such a place, or such a person,” she said. “As if I would let that happen, regardless.”

And she would not let it go.

Until finally he sighed and said, “You’ll see,” in a voice like November.

So one day that fall, when the sky was the color of forget-me-nots and the sea wanted to play, I reluctantly crossed over to Cuttyhunk with Miss Maggie and followed her up the steps of the schoolhouse, through the door, and straight into the kind of confusion that opened my eyes wide, and then made me want to shut them again, even if I couldn’t.

“Look,” said a boy near the door, scrambling to his feet. “It’s the leper.”

I remember looking behind me, to see where “the leper” was, and seeing only Miss Maggie, who grew taller right before my eyes.

“You don’t know that,” she said to the boy, who had fled to the front of the schoolroom.

The master, Mr. Henderson, came a step closer to us but stopped a fair distance away.

“No, we don’t know that,” he said. “But we don’t know otherwise, neither.”

“You’re a fool,” she said to him in a voice that was equal parts angry and sad.

“Maggie, I’m just trying to keep the other children safe,” he said.

“And what if she looked like them? What then?”

He considered me for a long moment. “That has nothing to do with it.”

Which added another layer to the confusion that had struck me dumb.

I remember walking back down the steps with Miss Maggie. Looking over my shoulder to see Mr. Henderson wiping the latch with spirits before he closed the door.



“What’s a leper?” I said as we turned toward home.

“Someone with leprosy,” she said, stomping down the lane toward the bass stands and, beyond them, Osh, waiting for our return. “Which is what those poor people had. The ones who lived on Penikese, in the hospital.”

“Is that a bad disease?”

She nodded. “It is.”

“And that’s what people think I have?”

She stopped suddenly and sat me down in a patch of heather along the lane. “It’s very, very unlikely that you have it, Crow, but sometimes a person can have leprosy for years without knowing it.”

At which I felt hot and cold at the same time. Too big for my skin. Too small.

“Does that mean I’m going to die?” I sounded like someone else I’d just met for the first time.

“Of course not,” she said fiercely. “We don’t know that you came from Penikese. And even if you did, you almost certainly do not have leprosy, do you hear me?” She softened a little. “Besides, if you might be a leper, then I might be, too,” she said. “And Osh as well.”

Which made me feel both better and worse.

“Are people going to be afraid of me forever, then?” I said.

At which Miss Maggie did what she always did when I was worried.

She told me the truth.

“Not forever,” she said. “But some people let fear set its hook in them, so it’s hard to pull out.” She paused. “Leprosy is a terrible disease, Crow. It . . . deforms people. Ruins their bodies. Their skin. Turns their hands into claws.”

I looked at my good, fine legs. My smooth skin. My straight fingers.

“And sometimes it damages nerves so badly it’s impossible to feel pain.” She cleared her throat once. Twice.

“Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Not to feel pain?” I said.

But she shook her head. “There’s more than one kind of pain,” she said. “And if you don’t feel it, you can get hurt.”

“But it hurts when you do feel it, too,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “but feeling hurt and being hurt aren’t always the same thing.”

Which confused me even more.

So did the idea that I might be a leper.

“But I was just a new baby when I got here,” I said. “Osh told me so. Just hours old. How could I have gotten sick so fast?”

Miss Maggie looked me right in the eye. “I am almost completely sure that you are as healthy as a horse, Crow, but I won’t lie to you. Leprosy is spread by coughing. Sneezing. Touch. Even tears.” She took my hand. “It’s not possible to give birth without touch,” she said. “Or tears, sometimes.”

“But isn’t there a cure?” I asked.

Miss Maggie, the best healer on the Elizabeths, the one who always told me the truth, said, “No, I’m afraid not. Though the Bible says Jesus cured lepers.”

I thought about that. “Does it say how?”

“Sometimes: miracles,” Miss Maggie said. “Sometimes: faith.”