Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (25 page)

"I don't know what we'll do," she said. "I just don't know what we'll do."

"You'll come and live with us," said Turner.

Mrs. Hurd looked at him. Mr. Hurd looked at him.

"Of course," said Mrs. Buckminster. "We've got more rooms than we know what to do with."

Mrs. Hurd looked at Mr. Hurd, who looked down at the floor, his hands rigid on the pew beside them.

"We haven't ..."

"Just until you're back on your feet," said Mrs. Buckminster.

A long moment passed, almost long enough for another breathy sermon.

"Thank you," said Mr. Hurd, finally. "Just until we're back on our feet."

Willis punched Turner on the arm.

***

So high summer came to Phippsburg that year, and it promised to be the hottest anyone could remember—-just like every other summer. Together Turner and Willis spaded up a new garden in the yard behind Mrs. Cobb's, and they planted pole beans and snow peas and russet potatoes and a couple of rows of corn—which the deer and rabbits and every one of God's creatures living between the New Meadows and the Kennebec thought was just fine. They put new glass in the cupola, painted the fence Mrs. Cobb's grandfather had built, and then painted the porch. When they finished with that, they went down to Mr. Newton's store and bought some sunlight yellow and strawberry red paint to take care of the shutters and door.

Mr. Hurd helped paint until he began to clerk at Mr. Newton's grocery.

Turner and Willis got themselves hired on a lobster boat out of Bath, and even though, as Willis pointed out, Turner was a whole lot scrawnier than he was, Turner did heft his share of the traps and do his share of culling out the shorts. After the first two weeks, Turner was pegging lobster claws as fast as Willis and not getting pinched any more than anyone else.

The days were long, beginning before dawn when the sea was purple black, ending with the sunset when the sea was burning red. Turner was tired and sore most of the time, shivering in the morning and so hot in the afternoon that he and Willis worked sweating. "Probably there's better ways to earn money," said Willis most every morning, but even if there were, Turner wouldn't have taken another way, because hardly a day passed when the lobster boat didn't fool with a pod of whales as playful as kittens in the sun, showing off their dorsal fins, spraying the boat with their spouting, sometimes jumping full out of the water and grinning for all the world to see.

Watching them was when Turner got pinched the most.

Sometimes they would lay traps up the New Meadows, and they would sail past Malaga Island, going so close that Turner could stand by the rail and see the patch of violets planted by Lizzie's doorway. His heart stopped every time.

When Turner and Willis weren't lobstering, they were sleeping—even when they were trying to eat their supper. Mrs. Buckminster and Mrs. Hurd would try to keep them talking through the meal but would finally give up when the boys' yawns got longer than their sentences. They would stagger up the stairs to sleep.

And the eyes of whales would fill Turner's dreams.

***

One night, when the sea breeze remembered that autumn wasn't far away and so began to blow colder, Turner told Willis he wanted to take the tender out into the bay.

The next dawn, Willis was at the dock with him, loading in a jug, some cheese sandwiches, and some corn muffins, then casting him loose, waving him out into the incoming tide. Turner's arms felt strong against the long, smooth swells, so low they were not breaking, the sea the color of the inside of a mussel shell. He rowed down past Cox's Head, across the mouth of Atkins Bay, around Popham, keeping inshore along the line of tiny islands where the tide was weakest, and finally up and around Small Point Head and Bald Head and into the New Meadows. He let the last of the high tide carry him up the shoreline, the long swells growing ever smoother and lowering with the rising of the sun, until the tide gave its last gasp and settled down for a bit just as the tender tipped its nose onto the south point of Malaga Island, and Turner stepped onto it.

The sea breeze found him and twisted around him like a cat asking for a bowl of milk. It followed him up into the island and didn't stop its play even when Turner went up to the Eason place—the burned ruins already cleansed by the winter and starting to find their way back into woods. At the Tripp place the sea breeze scattered last fall's oak leaves inside the outline of foundation stones. At the graveyard, a few depressions, but otherwise the ground was filled with pine boughs the snow had brought down.

At the Griffin place, nothing. Nothing at all. He could have stood there like Darwin at the Galapagos and known that if he had come a thousand years earlier, everything would have been the same.

He sat down on the rocks and looked out.

When he had sat there long enough to see that the tide was beginning to empty out of the New Meadows, he rose and followed the shore of Malaga Island back to the tender. He got in and cast off, letting the tide take him out and away from the island, using the oars just enough to keep himself square to the swells. The island rocked gently as he moved farther and farther away from it, the chuckling of the water underneath the boat and the wooden creaking of the oarlocks an unrhythmic lullaby.

Rowing now and again so that he could feel the tautness of his muscles, Turner let the lowering tide carry him away from Malaga Island, down the New Meadows, and, some time past noon, out into open water, where the shoreline was a blue blur, the waves higher and longer, and the only company he had in the whole world was the sea breeze that followed him on out.

Mostly he drifted, though once he rowed inshore a ways to a spot where gulls were screeching and diving and trying to lift themselves back up into the air. But before he could reach them, they came out to him; suddenly, he was in the middle of a school of shimmering blue fish, all of them turning to their sides to feed and waving their silver fins up into the strange air. The sea was so smooth it looked sleepy, and the tender, even when Turner rowed as hard as he could, left no wake.

"Who's looking at things straight now?" he called out into the air.

"I suppose you think you are." He could almost hear her, just as if she were sitting in the boat with him on the lonely ocean. "What are you doing out here?"

"Looking for whales."

"That's a good thing to look for," she said. "I've seen some myself."

I guess.

"I have. They look at you like they know things."

"I know."

"Like they know things older than you could ever imagine."

"I know, Lizzie."

"They look at things straight."

"Are you looking at things straight now, Lizzie?"

Her laugh was in the boat. "Golly Moses," she said. "I always did."

Lizzie Bright.

And that was when Turner saw them: great mounds of water moving between him and the shoreline, following the coast. Above them, seagulls and black terns hovered and circled, screeching and cackling at each other, until suddenly the mounds erupted, and whales—two, four, five, seven, oh good Lord, nine—rose out of the water like easy behemoths. Turner hollered, waving his arms and standing up in the boat until it began to rock with the waves the whales made. He rowed toward them, in his excitement slipping the oars out of the locks, setting them back in, and slipping them out again, desperate to draw up alongside the whales, desperate to know what they knew.

The whales waited for him. Sometimes they went below the surface and came up again, but mostly they waited for him in his puny tender. The gulls circled them like feathered halos, until Turner shipped his oars and let the swells carry him.

He could not tell if the waves were drifting him closer to the whales or if the whales were swimming closer to him. In any case, soon he was so close that when he held out his hand over the water, all he had to do was reach down and he would touch the dark gray rubber of a whale's skin, stretched to a perfect tautness, smelling of the deep sea. He felt more than saw the size of the whales, and the deep knowing within them.

He turned from one to another, their sea-washed eyes open and watching, and then finally he leaned out. And he touched the cool, wet, perfect smoothness of whale.

Then he knew. Then he knew.

The knowledge in his father's eyes and in the whales' eyes.

The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul-saddening than when they are parted. Turner knew that everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.

And he had lost Malaga.

So he wept. With his hand still on the whale and the whale's eye on him, he wept. He wept for old Mrs. Hurd, and he wept for Mrs. Cobb, and he wept for his father, and he wept for Lizzie Bright. In the open sea, with the land blue in his eyes and the sea green in his hand, he wept. And all around him the swells grew still, and the sea breeze quieted, and the perfect sky above him vaulted like a painted dome. Beneath him he felt the currents eddying around the bodies of the whales, felt the tides and shifting water that they created as they passed him, one by one, until the sea closed over the eye of the one he was touching, and they had all lowered into the cool, wet, smooth sea—and they were gone.

And still Turner wept.

He wept until the sea breeze would have no more of it and bucked the swells up, frothed them at the top, and sent some of the spray over the stern. Turner took the oars without thought and kept the tender moving into the waves. Then, again without thought, he began to row slowly, rowing through the watchful ocean until the blue land changed to gray and then brown and green. Then he struck the shore and turned south, keeping outside the breakers and inland of the islands, until he found Pop ham and rowed up the shining waters of the Kennebec.

He had floated in the ocean with whales.

He had seen them and touched them.

They had seen him and touched him.

It was something to tell somebody, and for a moment he smiled at what Lizzie would say when she heard. "Of whales and of Malaga I sing," he said. Then he remembered that she would never hear anything in this world again. So he had no one to tell of this thing most beautiful and most wonderful.

The sun had almost decided to set by the time Turner reached the dock. The first stars weren't out yet, but they were close. The sea breeze had come up behind him and the swells had started to tumble over themselves just a bit, pushing the tender's stern along and letting it know that it was time to be safe abed.

Willis was waiting, and he waved and halloed as Turner rowed closer. Turner wondered how long he had been waiting there. A couple of hurricane lanterns stood at the end of the dock, and Turner figured Willis had been about to light them. He rowed hard the last stretch—he didn't want to show how tired he really was—but when Willis threw out the line and Turner could hardly tie the knot, he figured Willis would know And also he figured that was all right.

Willis's outstretched hand pulled him up onto the dock.

"You still don't know how to tie that hitch. You go far out?"

"I guess."

"Pretty calm. I suppose even someone from Boston could manage."

"You want me to break your nose again?"

"Be still and carry these up with me."

Turner picked up one of the lanterns and looked straight on up toward Phippsburg. A few lights were already glowing, and there was woodsmoke in the air against the chill. He could see the cupola of Mrs. Cobb's house, the glass reflecting the reddening sunset. And there was the first star.

"Willis," said Turner, and he told him about the whales.

This is a novel, and the characters and situations are fictional—though some names have been borrowed from the Malaga community. The backstory of Malaga, however, is a true one. If you were to take Route 1 north to Bath, then head east out to Phippsburg, and if you were to go down to the New Meadows shore, you would see Malaga Island still keeping its tiny self above the tide. For the most part, the people of Phippsburg had their way with it. Nothing remains of the Malaga Island settlement.

The island had galled the people of Phippsburg for a long time before the settlement was finally destroyed. When the shipbuilding business began to fail, Phippsburg did indeed turn to tourism as its next great hope, and tourists, they reasoned, do not come to a shore marked by hovels, and garbage heaps, and communities where rumors of interracial marriages and incest and alcoholism and thievery and idiocy were kept alive in hushed but exuberant tales.

And there was always the question of who was to provide for the people of the island, who were judged to be mere squatters. Phippsburg, seeking to avoid this expensive obligation, claimed that Harpswell, the town on the other side of the river, owned the island, but the people of Harpswell were not eager to lay claim to it either, given that such a claim would put forty-nine people on its pauper rolls.

Meanwhile, the people of Malaga got along as best they could in an isolated, poor community on the edge of the ocean. By the time of this story, they had been getting along for over a century and a quarter, since Benjamin Darling, a freed or possibly escaped slave, had settled there with Sarah Proverbs, his white wife. More slaves followed, and the Darlings had two sons. Those sons had fourteen children, and soon about fifty people—Portuguese, Irish, Scottish, African American, Native American, others not accepted in Phippsburg for whatever reason—were inhabiting the island, living by fishing, lobstering, farming, and working in town when allowed.

In 1905, the state of Maine took over the jurisdiction of Malaga Island to end the squabbling between the two towns. But the stories of Malaga only grew, and in 1911, Governor Frederick Plaistead came to see the island for himself-—he saw it from the perspective of Mr. Stonecrop, atop the granite ledges. "We ought not to have such things near our front door," he said, and suggested burning down the shacks. The next year, the Cumberland County sheriff ordered all the residents off the island, telling them they would have to be gone by July 1 of that year. (In this novel, this deadline comes in the fall.) The Tripp family did indeed float their house right off the island into the New Meadows, but eight of the islanders were taken to Pownal, to the Home for the Feeble-Minded, where they quickly died. One—a young girl—has no recorded name, so I have given her one.