CHAPTER EIGHT
After dinner, Gram disappears to her attic to paint and I head to bed. The sun sinks down the sky, trailing its pinks and oranges as I text Hattie:
Me: Found a sternman so you don’t need to bag chum
Hatt: Thank GOD!
Me: Hang tomorrow?
Hatt: Rodents of Unusual Size couldn’t keep me away
I smile, throw on Reed’s old Red Sox T-shirt, which is soft with age and wear. As I climb into bed, I grab the moleskin and pull at a piece of paper sticking out of the top. An inventory list written on a piece of University of Southern Maine stationery. My fingers trace the blue-and-gold seal at the top, how it’s proudly embossed on the page. I envy Sam, the way he carries his university with him. I imagined it would be that way for me at the University of Rhode Island. That the moment I was on campus, I would be home, my identity linked to my education, my future. But now I think that’s the Rilla Brae who may never get a chance to exist.
I focus on the simple list, written in Sam’s steady, neat hand. There are check boxes next to the names of tools, some having eleven marks next to their names. Eleven days. It seems like nothing, a hiccup of time, yet the last eleven days have filled with the unexpected and morphed into eleven lifetimes.
I’m careful with the pages of the binder as I turn to the photo of the two-room schoolhouse with its fresh white trim paint and sturdy lines. All of its windows straight, their panes unbroken. On the school’s front porch, thirteen children pose: small boys in smart vests, a young girl with a doll. No one looks like my girl from the shore, as if it’s even possible for her to live then and now. Under the photo is a notation about the missionaries from Massachusetts who made the school a reality. My heart buckles.
The school. The children. All gone now.
There’s another photo of the same children standing on a ridge, the open sky behind them. The features of the children on the right blur under the shade of a tree just beyond the photo’s frame. The children pose dutifully in their finest tiny sweaters, overalls, and dresses. The youngest girl still clings to her doll.
Were the islanders fearful of the photographer? Untrusting? Even now Mainers are a guarded lot. What must it have felt like to have a stranger bring the camera to the island? A person from the mainland carrying a huge and strange device that ignited a loud, smoky flash?
The next page is an official notice. That same photo of the children on the ridge is centered within the poster. Below the group, a declaration: IMMEDIATE ACTION TO REMOVE MALAGA ISLAND PEOPLE.
And there it is, their fate.
The eviction notice from the state of Maine.
Island residents forced from their homes.
My room begins to warm as if the heat is too high even as the window is open to an easterly wind that pushes the cool smell of salt and sea into my room. The heat fires on my neck and I can feel the redness rise from anger, from disbelief . . . but also, something more.
Breath.
Breath on my neck.
Then Reed is scrambling up the trellis, and I slip the binder under my pillow. I consider telling Reed I’m not feeling well, that I need a good night’s sleep, that I’m beat. But it’s Hattie who crawls through the window, and I jump up, meet her in the middle of my room.
“Hatt? Everything okay?”
“Totally. Just didn’t want to wait for tomorrow.”
I let out a huge sigh, for what, I don’t know. Maybe just relief that it’s Hattie and she is good and kind and I need good and kind.
I move to my bed. No, more like collapse onto it.
“Tough day at the office?” Hattie lies down next to me.
“Long day.”
“Tell me about your sternman. But only if he’s hot.”
I elbow her. “Dork.”
“Okay, I’ll settle for dependable.”
“I’ll know tomorrow. He’s from the desert, never fished. Can you imagine? I hired a total landlubber.”
“Careful, Rills. I’ve seen Deadliest Catch. I know how a crappy greenhorn can take down a crew.”
“Liar.” I elbow her again. “There’s zero chance you’ve watched Deadliest.”
“Not true. My uncle made me suffer through one episode and I wanted to stick needles in my eyes. And I’m telling you, there was a greenhorn who sucked. Everyone hated him. He was trouble.”
“I don’t think Sam will be trouble.”
Hattie twists to face me, props her head onto her elbow. “Sam, huh? What does this Sam look like?”
“He looks like a boy.”
“Ugh. Booooring. I want deets.”
“I have zero deets.”
“See? That’s the problem with you married ladies; you’ve forgotten how to ogle.”
“I’m not sure I was ever much of an ogler.”
“Then let me be your guide. Is he tall?”
“Yes.”
“Broad shoulders?”
“Yes.”
“Sexy, smoldering stare?”
“No clue.”
“Thin or bulky?”
“Medium.”
“Oh, I like medium. What’s his hair sitch? Blond, brown, black, red?”
“Black. Really black.” Like a waterfall. That’s what I’d thought of Sam’s hair when I first saw it loose. “And long. Like, to his shoulders long . . . not like eighties metal rocker long. It’s super silky and straight—”
Hattie barks a loud laugh.
“What?”
“Um, pay attention to this dude’s hair much?”
I groan. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Maybe so, but is he single?”
“No. He has eleven wives.”
“Only eleven?”
“So far.”
“Har-har.”
“I know what I know and that is”—I count on my fingers—“he’s from the desert, a fact that may make him useless on the ocean, but we’ll see; he’s a student at USM; he likes my gram’s biscuits; and he’s researching Malaga Island for his archeology department.”
Hattie goes to my bureau, pulls out a T-shirt, and strips down.
“You staying the night?”
“Of course.” Her head pops through the bright blue tee with a whale on the front, a souvenir from a tacky shell-filled gift shop on Cape Cod. “I told Reed tonight was my night.”
She must have really wanted to be here; talking to Reed has never been high on her list of favorite—or even tolerable—things to do. “Glad you two are managing my evening social calendar with such flair.”
Hattie climbs under the covers. I prop my pillow behind my head and knock the journal free.
“What’s this?” Hattie says, tapping at its edges. I’ve always liked that about Hattie. How she never grabs for anything, never assumes she has the right to share in a thing unless it’s offered.
“It’s a bunch of Sam’s research.”
“And you have Sam’s notes tucked under your pillow because you looooooove him?” She smiles her deliciously brilliant off-kilter smile.
“You are so hilarious! How did I not notice this until now?”
She waves me off. “Whatevs. Show me the goods.”
“It’s nothing. Just Sam’s notes.”
She squints. “Does Sam have a last name?”
“Probably.”
“Okay, you’ve hired a dude whose last name you don’t know to go out into the middle-of-nowhere ocean with you where there is exactly zero cell service and no one around to witness if he chops you up into little bits and tosses you overboard. Do I have this right?”
“Um, gruesome.”
“Gruesome or truesome?”
“Not truesome. He’s good people.”
“I need to know exactly how you know about him being good people.”
So I tell her. I tell her about my three visits to Malaga. I tell her about Sam and his archeological dig, our lunches on the island, Sam’s instalove for Gram’s biscuits.
I don’t tell her about the other reasons I’m drawn to Malaga. Or my random visions. Hattie doesn’t need to worry more. Or maybe I don’t tell her because saying the words would make my hallucinations too real.
“So this book is his research and he just gave it to you?”
“I’m only borrowing it. To learn more about the island.”
Hattie plops back on her pillow, stares at my ceiling. “Why?”
“Because it’s interesting.”
“Why would you want to dig any of that stuff up, Rills?”
“No pun intended?”
“It was punintentional.” She turns to face me. “But, Rills. That shit needs to stay in the past where it belongs. It was awful then, and it’s awful now. No amount of you knowing about it is going to change what happened.”
I sit straighter. “Wait. You know about Malaga?”
“ ’Course.”
“How do I not know this?”
“It’s not like I’d just go around chatting about it. It’s horrible what happened to the people out there. They were evicted from their homes, some locked up in an insane asylum.” Hattie stops, looks at me, her eyes searching for forgiveness. “Rills, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Hattie—like nearly everyone on Maine’s Mid Coast—knows my mother spent years in an asylum in Upstate New York. I would often picture her with scalp-short hair. So short that even lice didn’t want to live in it. Because that’s what they do in institutions, right? Cut off all your hair and put you in a white room where the only person who talks to you wears only white and hands you a tiny white paper cup with a tiny, bright red pill in its center. The dressed-in-all-white nurse removes the all-white cup and tells my mother to swallow the all-red pill and she does. And sometimes the pill makes her rock back and forth in a corner and sometimes it makes her stare out a window without being able to see anything at all.
This is, of course, pure fabrication by my runaway brain.
Gram and my dad both tried to convince me of her reality, how my mother went to the hospital after that particularly bad night when she walked into the water. Then voluntarily checked herself into a facility where she could take walks on sun-fed grass and talk to professionals that helped her quiet her demons. The rational side of me knows the woman who gave me to the world is in a good place, but it’s the small pushed-away part of me that thinks she must be in an ancient asylum, caught in restraints and medicated hazes. Because if she’s trapped in a place where she can’t think straight or talk out loud, then I forgive her for not coming back for me. But if her feet are free enough to feel the warm green grass push up between her toes each spring, how can I forgive her for all the seasons she stayed away?
“It’s okay.” My heart races. No, throbs. “You weren’t talking about my mom.”
“No.” Hattie’s voice is soft. “I’m talking about the islanders who were locked away so the state could take their land.”
I see the old woman, the worn lace high around her neck, the sun at her shoulders, the small bunches of herbs drying on the rafters of her crude porch. The children on the steps of the schoolhouse, the same kids on the ridge with only the wide, fresh sky behind them. I can’t see the islanders in an institution with its bleached, dying air.
“What do you mean locked away?”
“Come on, Rills. Why are we even talking about this? It’s awful.”
“I need to know.” I think of the girl, her baby. Are they connected to the island’s past? And how? “Please, Hattie. I’ll love you forever if you tell me what you know.”
“That’s a weak trade, Rills. You’re supposed to love me anyway, regardless.”
“I do. You know I do.”
“For reals?”
“Forever reals.”
Hattie slides up, sits with her back against the headboard, eats at the corner of her thumbnail. “You remember when my nana got sick?”
I do. It was only a few years ago. Hattie’s nan eventually died from the Alzheimer’s that had plagued her for years. Her nan had forgotten to turn off the stove one morning. Hattie lost her grandmother in that trailer fire, and her funeral was one of the hardest this peninsula has endured. Until recently.
Alice Barter was a lot of years older than Gram, but they were close. Her death hit Gram hard enough that she let weeds grow in her gardens. Gram disappeared into her attic studio for weeks then, Dad and I leaving tea and food outside her door that would mostly go untouched.
“Well, she wasn’t fully lucid in the end.”
“I remember.”
“Nan would talk about things from her past. Confuse me for my mom. All the normal horrifying confusion that comes with Alzheimer’s.”
I squeeze a small prayer to the universe that Gram will never suffer that fate.
“This one day I was helping her with chores around the house like I’d done a million times since she started getting sick, and then she told me how island graves were dug up and trucked to Maine’s School for the Feeble-Minded. At first I thought she was mixing up her story with a TV show—the way she would sometimes confuse an episode for reality.”
“She wasn’t?”
Hattie sighs. “Nope. She said, ‘No, Hattie. Malaga. You could throw a stone to that island from Rilla’s window.’ She sounded annoyed with me, like I should have made the connection. She said the people there were inbred and insane.”
“And that’s why they were institutionalized?”
“No. I mean, yes. That’s pretty much the official reason—even if it wasn’t true.”
“What was the truth?”
“The islanders were poor and biracial and the state wanted their land.”
“You’re sure this was Malaga?”
Hattie nods. “The next day I drove up to Pineland—that’s what they renamed the old state . . . ‘school’ ”—Hattie uses air quotes—“even though it was a mental institution and people were basically jailed there.”
“And?” I’m breathless.
“I saw the graves. Seventeen people from Malaga buried under five headstones, all marked with the same date: November, 1932. But, Rills, that was the date the state reburied the bodies, not when they actually died.”
“Hattie, you’re talking about mass graves.”
“I’m aware. Those gray stones were tucked in the back of that cemetery like the deceased were supposed to be forgotten.”
“What you’re saying is literally unbelievable.”
“I couldn’t believe it either. That’s why I made my mom go with me. She wouldn’t admit it, but I think she needed to know my nan was still lucid when she was talking about Malaga’s history, you know? That she still had her mind somewhere under all that sickness.”
“And she did?”
“She knew those bodies were buried together like they weren’t individual people. She knew they were from Malaga.”
“Jesus, Hattie.”
“A few days later, she told me she regretted it.”
“Regretted what?”
“Her exact words”—Hattie takes a deep breath, lets it free—“I’ll never forget them. She said she regretted ‘not having enough love in my heart.’ I think she was trying to tell me to live my life differently, without discrimination.”
Not having enough love in my heart. The words are heavy with a hurt that weighs me down even now. “I can’t believe you never told me.”
“How could I tell you that my nan had been part of all that hate? Maybe even someone who wanted an entire island community to be erased?”
“Of course.” My words, barely a whisper. It’s the same way I would go quiet when my teachers prepared for Mother’s Day Tea in elementary school, or when kids would come to my house and see my gram where a mom should be. Some things are just too hard to talk about.
“Like I said, Rills, who wants to dig that up? It happened and it was awful. Nothing we do can ever undo what happened.”
“But this is our home, Hattie. Our history.”
“That’s exactly why it should stay in the past.” She turns her head to face me. “Ever since we were kids, you’ve had one foot in another place, Rills. Your future, your college away, traveling. I always knew that would happen for you. Just like I knew it would never happen for me.”
“Hatt—”
“Let me finish.” She holds up her hand. “I have to live here, Rills. I’ll never live anywhere else. So I need to see the good and only the good.”
I get it. Hattie’s always joked about being a statistic, even though I know it kills her to think of herself that way. She’s got a barely present mom who had her when she was fourteen. Hattie’s mom lives off aid from the state, if you could call the life Hattie’s mom provides living. And Hattie’s so bound to her dependent mother, no matter how many times she forgets to buy food or pay the heating bill. No matter how many of Hattie’s dreams her mom has shattered.
“I’m here too, Hatt. Maybe even for good now.”
Her eyes go steely. “Don’t you ever let me hear you say that, Rilla Brae. If I have to boot you hard enough to get your too-smart-to-stay-here ass to Rhode Island, I will. I’m not above it and you know it.”
Hattie’s belief in me has never faltered. I wish she could have a future with more choices, but for all her wanting to leave our small peninsula, I know Hattie could never abandon her mom. And Hattie is the strongest person I know. “I’m so sorry you couldn’t tell me and that I wasn’t there for you. But I get it.”
“You do?”
“Of course.” Families. Love. Truth. All so complicated. “Would you go with me? To see the graves?”
Hattie’s face pales. “Aw, come on, Rills. Don’t ask me to do that.”
“I can go alone.”
“No. I’ll go if that’s what you really want. I just don’t see what good it will do.”
“It probably won’t do any good, but I have to see for myself.”
“Then I’ll be the Thelma to your Louise.”
I squeeze her hand. “I’ve missed you,” I tell her. I’ve missed my sister.
“Same.” She drops her head to the pillow, stares at my ceiling. “But you need to remember that all that matters is you, Rills. You and your future. Getting to college. Getting out of here.”
She’s right. And wrong, too. Because the truth of Malaga matters. The fate of Malaga residents isn’t just something that happened to innocent people. It was a tragedy inflicted on innocent people by other people—the families that still populate these shores. Maybe even my family.
“Sometimes I think hell isn’t a consequence, Rills. It’s not a place you go to if you mess up bad enough on earth. I think hell might be here. In our every day.”
She’s talking about her own life now, how she’s rarely seen her mother smile. And I know she’s ashamed that her mother has never worked a job. Hattie doesn’t know what it’s like to have pride in her family, and I think she’s never been able to conjure that pride in herself. Not after years of being told that she’s the reason their home life is crap. Hattie says it’s the alcohol that makes her mother say things like that, but I hear the fear that sits behind Hattie’s words. Like maybe she knows that’s how her mom really feels and cheap beer only loosens her tongue enough to say the truth.
“But tomorrow’s another day, right, Rills?”
“My dad always said tomorrows arrive lighter.”
“You’re lucky you got a dad like that.”
I pull her hand to my side. “I know, Hatt. You deserve better than what you got.”
“I got you, Rills. That’s enough.” She slinks down into the covers. “I need sleep. See you in the morning?”
“You getting up at five?”
“Um, that would be a hell no.”
I give a small laugh. “Figured. I’ll be quiet when I leave.” I place the moleskin on my shelf and turn out the light. “Thanks for coming over.”
“Thanks for being kickass.”
“Thanks for showing me how.”
Hattie’s body is warm next to mine, so close, but I can’t help how her story distances us in a new way. There’s a hunger in me to know what Alice Barter regretted in the last days of her life. I want to know the whole story of Malaga Island, everybody’s version. Even the version that’s the horrible truth.
“Good night, Hatt.”
“ ’Night, Rills.” Hattie rolls tighter against me, like we did when we were little. Back when Dad would slip us candy to eat in bed and we’d wake with Junior Mints and gummy worms stuck in our hair, Gram always there to wash and comb out the sugar.
I wait until Hattie’s breath rises and falls with sleep before I open Sam’s notebook again, read every article he’s collected. Hattie and her grandmother’s failing mind were right.
Eight of the forty Malaga residents were abducted and forcibly committed to the state institution. One, a healthy infant. Three of them children. One because he couldn’t identify a telephone, something he wouldn’t have seen in his seven years of island life. For that this young boy was labeled “feeble-minded” and ripped from Malaga and the sea and his family and taken to an isolated place, where he died forty-three years later. Six of the eight people who were committed died at the institution.
There’s a Harper’s Magazine article from the time: THE QUEER FOLK OF THE MAINE COAST—and recently, a website named for the island, its header: MALAGA ISLAND: A STORY BEST LEFT UNTOLD.
But I can’t imagine any story being better for being silenced.
Researchers claim that a few islanders built simple rafts after the notice of eviction was served. They floated their homes to more hospitable shores. But the islanders’ biracialism and extreme poverty made them different, and difference is all anyone would’ve been able to see then.
I doubt there were more tolerant shores to find.
My community is no longer a peninsula with a proud fishing history; we are a peninsula whose fishermen rose up against other fishermen. And our discrimination was not quiet.
In newspapers, local grange halls, and places of worship, men shouted for the removal of other men, women, children. Their hatred shouted all the way to the statehouse, landing in the governor’s office. The governor wanted to build a hotel on the island, and so the scourge campaign began.
It’s the words in a recent article from the Portland Press Herald that break me: “The governor ordered the eviction of the community, and officials institutionalized eight residents, some for failing to identify a telephone. . . . Noobody has lived on the island since.”
All that.
And nothing.
Nothing but loss.
I search the photos and articles for the girl with the brown skin and the white dress. The one who sang at the shore. The one who might know more about me than I know about myself.
But she is nowhere in these pages. A ghost.