CHAPTER SEVEN
The USM research boat is anchored on the lee side of the island, which sends up a small flicker of pride in me as I throw anchor and toss my pack aboard my skiff. By the time I’ve rowed to shore, Sam is on the craggy beach waiting for me.
“Hey.” He throws his greeting casually, like he expected me, which is unexpected. Sam extends his hands, nods toward my pack. I pitch it to him, and he catches it easily.
I tuck the oars inside my skiff and drag the open boat across the stretch of beach. The fiberglass scrapes over the sharp edges of the mussel shells and jagged rocks, sending up a dull roar that drowns out all other sound. I take a quick glance toward Fairtide Cottage. Home. Where I should want to be. Then Sam hands me my pack and I strap it across the span of my back. “You hungry?”
His face turns up in a smile. “How’d you know?”
“Forgot your lunch again?”
“Judge me not by my culinary incompetence.” He smiles in a way that tempts mine, pulls it into being. “Wanna eat up at the dig site?”
I do. So much. “Sure.”
We hike the island’s granite face. I see the photo again, so clear—the old woman in her rocking chair in front of her meager home. I try to orient the past in the present, but all traces of her and her house are gone. There’s only untamed nature on the island now, sea grass sprouting between cracks of the granite, an island growing wild over its secrets.
“I’m in the middle of a discovery.” Sam’s voice is high and happy, so much like a young child playing at the shore.
“What sort?” A physical ache of hunger tightens my stomach, so intent on knowing what Sam’s discovered.
“Come see.” He takes my wrist and tugs me closer to his worksite. My step quickens to match his gait, his excitement. I don’t even think Sam realizes he’s pulling me, so singular is his eagerness. He stops when we reach the excavated layers of earth. He lets go of my wrist, points to the far corner of the exposed dirt with its low, twine rope fence. “There.” A slice of wrought-iron metal peeks above ground. There’s a pattern etched deep into the metal. The detailed ironwork flows like the vine of a thick, creeping flower, scrolling and lifting in circles and sways. It is beautiful, even as its grooves are caked with the clinging clay soil.
“Is this not the coolest?”
“What is it?” It takes all my restraint not to jump inside the excavation site and claw away the earth with my bare hands. There’s so much urgency to discover the truth about the people who lived here, and I’m not surprised when the whispered song rises from my memory like a low-clinging fog: Come here, come here. My dear, my dear.
“Dunno.” Sam shrugs. “That’s the best part. It could be anything. Anything at all.”
It’s an elaborately flourished piece of metal. It was special to someone. Someone rowed it all the way out here, hauled it to the island’s peak.
Someone.
Someones.
A gust of wind rakes through the trees, bending the spruce boughs at their tips. It hits me all at once that Malaga really was inhabited, and not that long ago. Its residents left pieces of their lives behind, echoes of their existence. “You must have some theory, though? Maybe it was a gate”—but then I remember the crude structure the old woman called home—“though maybe too ornate for that?”
Sam watches the exposed black metal as if his stare can protect it. “I’m not a fan of speculating until I’m sure of a thing. I’m the same way with people.” He turns to me, lifts his eyes quickly to meet mine. “What I do know at this stage is that this object is a window to the past, Rilla. It’s remarkable because it’s here and we found it and it doesn’t need to be lost again. It has a singular story, a language, a poetry all its own.”
The iron grate poking from the earth is similar to the six-burner cast-iron stove Gram uses to cook our meals and heat our home. That stove is heavier than a steamship, and no one from Gram’s side of the family has dared moved it in more than a hundred years. I used to think our antiques made us look like we were poor, like we couldn’t afford a trip to the Home Depot appliances section. Now I like that I can find my great-great-grandfather’s woodworking expertise in the curves of our nineteenth-century dry-sink-turned-bookshelves. And my great-grandmother’s embroidery in our home-sewn flag from 1944, which hangs in our living room, wide as the wall. She sewed it the same year Sinclair and Thomas Murphy—Gram’s uncles—gave their lives on the beaches of Normandy. The red stripes are faded now, the blue square of stars almost purple from time bleeding its color. Still, the blue reminds me of that ocean in France when my great-uncles arrived with their guns and their bravery. And the red reminds me never to forget the color of the sea after too many lives had been lost in the surf. Sam’s words revisit: It has a singular story, a language, a poetry all its own. “You sound more like a poet than a scientist.”
“Can’t I be both? There’s so much beauty in our buried history. Pain, too. If you ask me, that’s the stuff of poets.”
I think of my dad, buried now but not forgotten. Grief grabs at my chest.
“It seems too simple”—Sam extends his hands, palms up, then down—“that our mere hands can unearth this small part of our collective past.” He squats before the site, turns his ear to the ground as if he can hear it whisper the story he seeks. As if excavation isn’t done with his tools, but with his every sense. I wonder if he hears the same pull of the girl’s lullaby: Come here, come here.
“That’s what all this is about. Bringing the forgotten back to life.” He stands now, traps his hair back with the snap of a band. “The people . . . you know. Their stories.”
I want to tell him about my father’s story, how I’m one of only two people who can keep it alive now, but I don’t. The way Sam honors his discovery makes me know this moment is for something bigger than us and our individual stories.
He gestures to a flat rock nearby. “I’ve got a long way to go here yet. This dig will go on for years and probably without me. But first, sustenance. Yes?” His energy is welcoming and safe, a world apart from Benner and his unapologetic sexism.
“Sustenance it is. You’re not the first person to make Gram’s biscuits a priority.”
“Biscuits? Ah, come on. You never said anything about biscuits. You really do need to work on your openers, Rilla Brae.” Sam takes a few loping strides and drops onto the ledge, settling into an easy cross-legged position. He pats the granite next to him, inviting me down. I sit and see Whaleback Ridge in the exact position of the old woman’s photo. This is near the spot where she gardened from her small porch, rocked in her tall chair. My curiosity burns. Did that ornate metal piece belong to her? What story does it hold?
I pull off my pack and sit opposite Sam. “I asked my gram about Malaga.” I unload the plastic containers, spread them out between us.
His eyes fire. “Should I get my notebook? She must know a ton.”
“Just the opposite.” I pop the top from the biscuit bowl, hand it to Sam.
Sam raises a biscuit to his nose, draws in its butter scent. “Heaven.” It is a murmur, as if he’s talking to himself.
I take a biscuit and it’s dense with cold, almost heavy in my hand. I set out the jar of jelly, place a spoon into its thick boysenberry center. “My gram didn’t know anything about the island.”
“Bummer, but not too much of a surprise, I guess.”
“How so?”
Sam looks out at the distant sea. “There’s a lot of shame surrounding what happened out here, Rilla. People aren’t in a hurry to claim the shameful things.”
I think of the old woman, the suspicion in her eyes. What happened to her?
“When I first arrived in town, I had to get my mail forwarded. The postmaster was making small talk, asking me what my summer would look like. When I told him about the university’s dig, he was very clear that I had no right dredging up the story of Malaga.”
Allen Hilton, the postmaster with his grizzled gray beard. He’s old but not old enough to know about Malaga firsthand. Eighty years is a long time. Anyone who might remember was only a kid then.
“When I told him I had a job to do, he warned me that the island was haunted.”
“Haunted?” A shiver crawls up the ladder of my spine. Haunted? I think of my vision of the tidal wave. The rocking chair. Is a ghost trying to make its secrets known?
He shrugs. “I think it was an attempt to scare me off. Or maybe it’s a way for him to make sense of the senseless—name it something impossible.”
Impossible.
“But I think this island holds more history than the university could ever uncover. And there are endless ways for secrets to slip out into the world.”
“You mean ghosts? You’re talking about ghosts now, right?” The girl singing at the shore. Her disappearing boat, the way her dress vaporized into the trees.
“I will say that I am by nature an unflinching optimist. This world has never once stopped reminding me that it holds infinite possibilities.” He takes a bite of biscuit, chews it down. “But ghosts? No. I’m a pragmatist and a scientist, if they are even separate things. I believe secrets can be recovered from the ground.” His gaze returns to the crisp blue field of ocean. “And people. I think secrets find their way out of people when the time is right.”
Did a ghost make the water rise in a tidal wave that claimed our lawn one second and was gone the next? Could a ghost have been in my room, rocking in the chair behind me? Is the girl singing to make her secrets known?
I wish I had the nerve—or the trust—to tell Sam about the girl I’ve seen on the island, her song that reached me under the weight of water. But my dad is gone and I don’t want to admit out loud that my loss has made my mind bend, possibly enough to resemble my mother’s. “You’ve never seen anything out here . . . you know, suspicious?”
Sam laughs a laugh that is so quick and full, it almost scares me. “Well, there was some questionable behavior displayed by a couple of mating harbor seals on the beach last week. Other than that, nothing I’d classify as otherworldly. I haven’t exactly had a hand reach out from the earth and grab me or anything.”
Chilled bumps blanket my skin. “Creepy much?”
He shrugs. “A hand from the ground is like Creepy 101. The universally worst ghost fear. Like, when you were a kid, did you look under your bed before going to sleep? Afraid something would grab at your ankles?”
I shake off the memory of the rocking chair, the ice cold trapped in the seat. Me, searching for a girl who may be haunting me on land, calling to me in the sea. “Most nights I was too scared to look under my bed, so I’d leap from my desk chair to my mattress.”
“Ha! Exactly. The brain is a powerful tool, Rilla Brae. And mine is weak. It’s pretty easy for me to project my worst fears onto a place, and I’d like to not do that while I’m out here, please and thank you.” He takes a bite of Gram’s biscuit and his face softens.
I pretend like my head isn’t crammed with questions and slather jam onto a biscuit half. I offer Sam the jelly when I’m finished.
Sam waves off the jar. “I’ve never been a big fan of condiments. I take my berries round and my bread plain.”
“My gram made it. Boysenberry. It’s wicked good.”
“Wicked good, huh?” I nod, and he laughs.
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just that using the words ‘wicked’ and ‘good’ next to each other like that is a contradiction in any other part of the world. You realize that, don’t you?”
“We’re not in another part of the world. We’re Downeast with some wicked good biscuits.”
He smiles and smooths the jelly onto the soft doughy middle of his roll. When he takes a bite, he chews slowly, almost intimately. Some part of me thinks I should look away, but I don’t.
He winks open one eye. “This, Rilla”—he holds up his jellied bit—“is a testament to embracing the unexpected. I had no idea I was starved for biscuits and homemade boysenberry jam, but I think it’s all I’ll ever want to eat for the rest of my life.” He takes another bite, and a slow, deep smile relaxes his features, closes his eyes. “Damn. This is amazing.”
“Even with the jelly?”
“I was talking about the jelly.”
“Gram’s specialty.”
“Is it weird that I’m in love with your grandmother?”
I smile. “There is literally nothing weirder.” Okay, not true lately. But still.
“I would like to marry her, please.”
“I don’t know about that. No man’s been good enough for her yet.” Gram never married my grandfather or even lived with him. She wanted to be a mother but never a wife, as scandalous as that notion was when she was pregnant with my mother. “I’m not sure she’d have you.”
He feigns being offended. “What? I’m a great catch. I mean, I’m riddled with baggage—same as anyone—but still, great catch.”
“I’ll be sure to let her know.”
“Please do. Put in a good word for me. And maybe ask her to bake up another batch of these rad biscuits.”
“Rad, huh?”
“So rad.”
“Are you trying to outdo my regional linguistic flair?”
He laughs. “Maybe add to it. Like, these biscuits are wicked rad.”
My smile deepens. “Work the sea and she’ll make them for you every day.” I look out toward home, hope Gram isn’t worried about me. I should have radioed in when I got to the island.
Sam reaches for another biscuit, and I pull a leaf of young goldenrod from its stalk. I bring it to my nose, trying to coax out the smell of honey the plant will produce weeks from now. Today it smells only of green. I slip the leaf between my palms, rub back and forth. The grinding is said to make good fortune rise. My father taught me how Maine’s indigenous people used the goldenrod seed for food, but I don’t know if this species is edible. But could it be a descendant of the old woman’s garden? A seed that has set roots with each spring? “I found some photos online. Of the island.”
“Yeah?”
“There was this one woman, an older woman by herself in a—”
“Rocking chair.”
“You know her?”
“I know the photo. There aren’t many photos that exist of the islanders. Believe me, I’ve studied them all.” He waves his hand. “You were going to say something about it and I interrupted you. I’m sorry.”
His apology surprises me. A boy who apologizes for interrupting a girl might be as rare as photos of the island. “She had a vegetable garden in front of her house, some raised beds.” I pluck another early goldenrod from its stem. “I was just thinking that if she grew herbs, this plant could be part of a kind of floral footprint she left behind.” It’s impossible not to think of Gram’s floral footprint at Fairtide, all her gardens, each with their own purpose. Each flower and vegetable telling its own story, thanks to the bees.
“Floral footprint, I like that.” Sam smiles wide. “The university has mapped out where each resident lived, where they kept their livestock, but we don’t know a lot about the gardens and I don’t know anything about plants. You?”
“Some.” If she grew herbs, maybe she was a healer. Something about this feels right. “Sam? Why did the islanders leave? What happened out here?”
Sam reaches in his backpack, pulls out a moleskin journal, its elastic straining from all the added pages. “What happened was the end.” He passes me the book. “This is the beginning, or as much as we know.”
I flip open the neat pages. Taped to the first page is a printed photo—a group of children, their youth nearly a hundred years old now. Some faces black, some white, some brown. The children are thin in the way of children then. I search the faces for my girl, but the kids are years younger than she appeared. The little ones wear the same wary look, shared across the squint of their eyes. None wear shoes. Their shirts are thin and worn and ill-fitting, slouching around the neck or rising too high at the arms. These children stand so close to one another in a line of seven, shoulder pressed against neighboring shoulder as if for protection.
Their faces are drawn in the way a hard life can wear at the softest of edges. Even childhood edges.
“These kids lived out here?”
“They did.”
Sam moves to my side as I read the names etched in eerie white ink against the aged black-and-white photo. I recognize some last names, families who still work this sea.
“The state sent census workers out here in the summer of 1931. That’s when most of these photos are from. That official visit is why we have a list of the residents’ names, ages, races.”
I tap my thumb against the grainy photo. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“What in particular?”
“How could there be so much diversity on this tiny island? Saying it’s an anomaly is an understatement.”
“Because Maine is ninety-five percent white?”
“Exactly.” I can’t take my eyes from the photo, the children with their backs to the sea.
“The island was an anomaly. It was settled by the descendants of Benjamin Darling, a black man who purchased Harbor Island in the late seventeen hundreds.”
Harbor Island sits just beyond Malaga, a sister in the sea. So many Maine maps name it Horse Island.
“Darling’s descendants moved to Malaga around 1860. Eventually some Abenaki people came to live here. Some Irish and Scottish fishermen too.”
“Ahead of its time.”
“At the wrong time.” Sam nudges his pencil at the corner of the moleskin. “It’s all in there. I’ve included copies of some newspaper articles written around the time the census workers arrived. Real yellow journalism stuff. Be prepared. And I’ve made notes about the island’s history in the margins.” He leans in, flips to a random page, nods at his scribbling. “See? There.”
Oral history has been lost due to enduring feelings of shame, embarrassment. Malaga remains a racially and culturally charged subject. Former governor publicly apologized to the Malaga descendants who’ve begun to come forward in recent years.
Then, a headline from the Bath Enterprise: NOT FIT FOR DOGS—POVERTY, IMMORTALITY AND DISEASE . . . IGNORANCE, SHIFTLESSNESS, FILTH AND HEATHENISM . . . A SHAMEFUL DISGRACE THAT SHOULD BE LOOKED AFTER AT ONCE.
In the margin, Sam has scribbled: eugenics used to sway public sentiment.
My grip on the journal tightens. I want to accept this loan. “You’re sure? You don’t need it for your work?”
“I have every photo, every word memorized.” He taps his pencil to his temple. “I keep them with me every day.”
“Only if you’re sure.”
“I’m more than sure.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s no trouble.”
I wish my dad were here more than ever. So we could talk about Malaga with this person from away who knows so much more than I do about our own backyard.
I flip the page and there’s the old woman, sitting in her rocker, daring the camera to steal her soul. Her gardens are tall with tomatoes, sprawling with running squash vines. And flowers, too. I see the small dark heads of marigolds companion-planted to keep the bugs off the tomatoes. And a blossom so familiar. A bloom no different from the Flame I found on my boat. The coincidence rakes my spine. “This one.” I point to the full hem of the woman’s dark skirt. “This is the photo I saw.”
Sam leans over my shoulder. “The matriarch.” It’s eerie how my skin flames with cool bumps. “I like to think the islanders came to her for everything: advice, comfort, wisdom.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
He shakes his head. “It was only eighty years ago. You’d think we’d have records for everyone on Malaga, but the islanders where solitary people, living off the grid for a reason. Census records tell us a lot, but no one’s been able to identify that woman. And the shame of what happened here has kept descendants from coming forward. Even now.”
What shame did this woman suffer?
“We might not know her name, but we know she was strong. All the islanders were.”
“Had to be.”
Sam nods. “Exactly. Think about how difficult it must have been to live out here then. Everything was harder. Fishing was harder; the winters were harder. Medicine, money, all harder to come by.”
“Maybe that stuff wasn’t important. At least not as important as their freedom—to live life on their own terms.”
“That’s the most fascinating part, Rilla. The islanders were strong-willed, enduring. Even if they looked poor to mainlanders, they chose to live their secluded life over anything the mainland could offer. Their poverty was nothing compared to their wealth of spirit. I’ve got mad respect for them.”
“So why did they leave?”
“They were forced off the island. The only reason we even have photos or any documentation at all is because of that census visit. Governor Plaisted wanted to assess the size of Malaga for development. When the newspapers started writing articles about the poverty of the Malaga community, well, that’s when things got bad. Poverty was considered a disease then, the poor afflicted with feeble brains. They were thought inferior, and the governor claimed they had no right to live on land that held so many developmental prospects.”
“So, what? Like eminent domain?”
“The state didn’t need it. Three weeks after his visit, the governor posted a notice of eviction. In the end, the islanders didn’t own the island, even though they’d been living in the area since the Civil War. None of the nearby towns wanted to be associated with Malaga after the press began a hate campaign against the so-called squatters. When no town claimed the island, the state took it.”
This all sounds impossible. The old woman must have known this hate was rising around her. Did she read the papers? Did the network of fishermen keep islanders informed of mainland news? “How did you learn about Malaga? I mean, how are you even here? How do you know all this stuff ?”
There’s a short silence that’s filled only with the lapping tide, the shouting gulls. Then, “I was twelve and living in Arizona’s southern desert when I found this old book in my parents’ shed.” Sam laughs, in a way that’s more sad than funny. “Kind of a survey on the states. I had to hold the spine just right so it wouldn’t crack and fall apart when I opened the book. It had a section on Maine and its fishermen—way back in the day, like the 1850s—and something about this coast felt like the last frontier to me. When I found that section about Maine’s islands . . . well, it kind of . . .” He trails off, lets the sea fill the quiet between us. “I guess you could say it showed me how big the world could be—you know, for me. If I let it be that big. That book’s the reason why I came to Maine for school, applied for this internship.”
“A book you read when you were twelve?”
He laughs. “Twelve-year-old boys are very impressionable.” He looks out toward the horizon though it’s clear he’s seeing something bigger than the sea. “I was . . . well, optimally impressionable at that age. I never stopped researching Maine’s maritime history, and when I came across Malaga’s story, I wanted to meet the people who never got a chance to be heard.”
I want that too. In this moment, it’s all I want. “It seems like a good thing to want.”
“Maybe, but there’s a reason why no one talks about this place.” He nods to the portfolio. “Read what’s in there and you’ll see. Sometimes it’s easier to keep secrets buried than to live with our truth.”
I don’t even realize my knuckles have drained white from gripping the moleskin until I look down. “I’ll read every word.”
“That reminds me.” Sam pops open the front pocket of his pack and pulls out a book. For a second I think it might be his old, cracked encyclopedia from the desert, but he passes me The World According to Garp. “For you. In case you want to revisit the Under Toad.” Sam’s smile is soft, like he knew full well I had no idea the Under Toad was born in a novel but he doesn’t want me to feel bad about it either.
I swallow down something that feels bigger than gratitude. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank John Irving. The man’s a master.”
“I feel bad I didn’t bring you anything.” Dad and Gram raised me to return kindness with multiplied kindness, and gift giving is no exception.
“You’re a funny one, Rilla Brae.”
“Funny how?”
“Funny because you can’t see that you’ve brought me biscuits and saved my very borrowed boat from utter destruction.”
These things are nothing. Dad called them “expected and necessary gestures of polite society.” He’d say it in a bad British accent and pretend at a pipe at his mouth.
“And you came here with your curiosity and conversation. Those are gifts I don’t even know how to pay you back for.”
Huh. I pull the books to my heart because I can’t find words to thank him for the Under Toad, for allowing my father to reach across death to find me in this way.
“I saw it at the used bookstore in town and thought of you. I would’ve bought you a fresh and clean and new copy, but . . . well, there’s zero pay in internship work.”
“Come work for me.” My offer surprises me, and doesn’t.
Sam lets out a quick laugh. “Work for you? You have treasure that needs excavating?”
“Sort of. Well, okay, no. I need a sternman for the summer. Someone to help me haul lobsters off the bottom.” I need someone to be me in the way that I helped my dad.
He laughs fully now. “I know nothing about lobstering. I almost lost my boat to the perils of the granite shore, if you recall.”
“I never said you could drive my boat.” I throw him a quick wink. “And it’s okay if you’re a newbie. I’ll teach you what you need to know. You bring a strong back and we’ll figure out the rest. We go out before the sun rises, so you’d have your afternoons free to come out here.”
“Done.”
“Done? Just like that?”
“Just like that. Hell, if I don’t jump at everything life offers me, what’s the point?”
His enthusiasm. I think that might be his real gift.
“Can you be here at six o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“Will you have biscuits?”
“Warm ones.”
“Then, Rilla Brae, you’ve got yourself a sternman. An incompetent one that hails from the dusty desert of Arizona, but a sternman nonetheless.” Sam stands and extends his hand. I stand across from him, and we shake on our promise, even if it feels like more.