The Rattled Bones(19)

“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.”