The Rattled Bones(41)

“So how could no one from the mainland dissent? Your research doesn’t include even one document that defended the rights of islanders to stay on Malaga.” It was their home, where generations buried their dead.

“I’m certain many people objected, but their voices didn’t make headlines. The summer residents—the people so invested in clearing the island—had more money and power than all the families on the peninsula put together.” He pulls back his brush, looks to me. “And think about it. If you’re sold a picture of what progress looks like—a shiny new hotel on the private Malaga shores, and this hotel will bring jobs for furniture builders, housekeepers, maintenance workers—well, that all sounds appealing. The hotel would be crammed with foreign visitors hungry for the freshest seafood. It would have been a pretty easy sell to get most people on the mainland to support that iteration of progress.”

“They just had to clear the obstacles in their way.” People. Families. Generations.

“Exactly. And what better way to dehumanize people than science? Eugenics boasted scientific evidence that proved poverty and degeneracy were heredity. We’re talking about a time when the government legally sanctioned sterilization to stave off the spread of birth defects, immorality, poverty. Consider the particular racial makeup of Malaga residents during a time when interracial marriages were illegal by state law—these were all signs of depravity to many people back then. People who had more political and economic power than the islanders.”

“People who had all the power.” My strainer catches something. A shard. “Sam. I think I found something.”

He sets down his brush, comes to my side. “Pottery.”

It’s a sliver of brownish-red glaze, the kind of earthenware Gram uses for floral vases. One-gallon jugs that once held milk, rum, syrups. I shake free the loose bits of dirt around the finger-length shard. Sam pulls tweezers and a plastic Baggie from his messenger bag.

He plucks the chip with the tweezers, rubs the remaining clay away with his thumb and forefinger. One side is dull gray, the interior of the pottery. The other, red and shiny—the glazed exterior. “See there.” He points to a blue printed curve, the remains of a circle.

“The maker’s mark.”

“What remains of it.” Sam examines the pottery, bringing it close to his eyes. “This could be an early piece, Rilla. As early as the Civil War. You can tell by the glazing.” He drops the broken pottery into the small bag and seals it. He scrolls something across the bag’s top edge.

As Sam documents, I remember my mother gathering up the fragments of stoneware that washed up on our shore. Those broken bits of pots from the Water People were so precious to her. She collected them. Are they still in the house somewhere? Has Gram kept them?

“This is a great find, Rilla. I’ll send it to the university for analysis, but there might be more if we’re lucky.” He nods to the dirt, and I shape out another clump of earth, add it to my sifter. But my mind is elsewhere.

The Water People. I shake the dirt in my sifter until there are only small, jittery rocks popping across the screen. I sit back on my heels, my breath so shallow, my heart racing. My mother looked for them when we’d walked the shore. But now I wonder if it was the Water People at all, or if it was one person. A Water Girl.

“I’m not gonna lie. Things like eugenics make me ashamed of the field of science. But that’s why it’s important to tell this story. It’s been buried too long.”

The girl. My mother. The Water People. Have our stories always been connected?

“This find could tell us something about the economic practices of the islanders, depending on where it was made. How the residents traded, bartered. We know the islanders were fishermen, but they were craftsmen, too. There was one particularly talented carpenter who worked on the mainland; another was a master mason. One islander was a pastor, or a deacon—we’re not sure which—and he would provide sermons off-island.”

Did my mother hear that same song? Come here, come here.

Is that what drew her to the deep on her last night at Fairtide?

“The people here never asked for handouts from the state.” Sam presses a long, plain wooden marker into the ground where I discovered the pottery. “The islanders were a self-sustaining fishing community and weren’t dependent on taxpayer support, so while they weren’t wealthy, they did have a system of economy.”

My dear, my dear. What are the words my mother called to the Water People while Gram held her? Did she talk to the Water People, or sing to them?

Did she repeat their song over the waves?

“Rilla?”

“Yeah? I’m here.”

“The only form of welfare they ever received was that school, and no one out here asked for it.”

I press my mind into the now. “Isn’t education a basic obligation of the state?” I sink my trowel into the earth, feel the way it slivers its path through dense clay and small pebbles. I pull back another scoop, add it to my strainer. Sam watches the excavated bit of earth as it sifts, excited to see what will spill free.

“Yes, well. The governor twisted the gift, called it charity and used it as a tool to show mainland taxpayers that their hard-earned money was supporting the ‘shiftless’?”—he uses air quotes—“life of the islanders. The Malaga Island people had lived on this island for nearly a hundred years. The shell heaps out here tell us that they dug for mussels and ate what they caught in the sea. We have writing samples of the children, showing they were literate.” He scoffs. “Most of them had better penmanship than me.” He watches my strainer come up empty and he can’t hide his disappointment. “They were totally self-reliant. They’d survived almost everything. Slavery in the south, impossibly bitter winters.”