The Rattled Bones(79)

I can’t know if my great-grandfather discovered the bundle when he went out to sea the next morning. Or when he came home from the raid that night. I’ll likely never know how much my family knew of—or participated in—the attack on Malaga residents.

I’ll never know if Gram was legally adopted. I’m fully aware of the disappointing practice of record keeping in those days. I do know that Gram hasn’t lived a life of shame. She wasn’t locked away in an institution. She was lucky.

Lucky that the Murphys took her in, chose her. Lucky, like Sam. To find a home and a family. Our roots are as deep and proud as I’d always thought. Only different. Now our story is richer.

Gram breathes in and out, in and out, her lungs’ rhythm so delicate.

I’ll never know the story my great-grandparents had to conjure to raise Gram as their own. But their story is wrapped in my story. Gram is my family, and our family is so much more. I am so much more.

Gram opens her eyes, soft at first, and then a startled look comes over her.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Everything’s going to be okay.”





AFTER


Sam holds me as we sit on Fairtide’s wharf. We share one of Gram’s old wool blankets while we watch the University of Southern Maine researchers arrive for work on Malaga. The morning is cold for late August. Fall tugs at the leaves on the trees, its chilly breath already weaving a nip through the wind. Six boats arrived at the island the day after Sam and I witnessed the raid. Members of the university. The county coroner. Me and Sam. Many more reporters showed up but were banned from coming ashore.

Sam and I led the USM team to the burial site. Twenty-two people sifted at the place where Agnes was forgotten. The earth she was buried under had thickened with time, the winds kicking dirt over her as if to protect her for us.

When the head archeologist excavated the dirt around her skull, Sam and I were asked to leave. It was time for the police and officials and a murder investigation.

“Thank you for this discovery.” It was the professor. The lead archeologist. I forgot his name in the whirl of introductions, but I wouldn’t forget the round of bone I saw in the earth, the way Agnes’s skull was turned toward Fairtide, watching us. The way her jaw was open just a little. Enough to slip a Flame Freesia bloom through the space there. As if a song were still on her lips. I stood quickly then. I didn’t want to see anything more. Sam took me home, the only man to ever captain the Rilla Brae besides my father.

My dad used to say that he loved my mother unconditionally, even after she left both of us. They were bonded, he said. He brought me into the world with her and they would forever be attached, the way Agnes brought her child into the world. I understand it now, sitting with Sam. I helped to bring Agnes back to the world because she and I have always been forever connected.

It’s strange to be at the dock without Dad, without the Rilla Brae. She’s pulled from the water now, her season cut short by the University of Rhode Island’s orientation, which begins the day after tomorrow. My boat’s in dry dock, her fuel lines already prepped for winter storage. Hoopah promised to give her a new coat of bottom paint. She’ll be ready when I need her. And the pettiness of Old Man Benner’s threats seems like nothing in the wake of all that’s happened.

I wish my dad were here to see the work on Malaga unfold, to see me off to school. I wish for a lot of things that will never be. Maybe that’s just all part of getting on with the business of living, as Gram would say.

Sam convinced me and Gram to have our DNA tested by an online service. He’ll have access to the DNA they gather from Agnes once he returns to school, and he’s promised to tell me if they’re a match. I know they will be. I don’t need a lab to tell me where my grandmother came from, where our family’s roots are set deep.

I can feel the settledness of Agnes in my bones. Gram feels it too. She paints in the living room now, the oils and her cooking raising up competing smells. We are both proud to be descendants of Malaga, the hardworking community of people who should never be forgotten. We are glad the shame is lifting from this tragedy, that other Malaga Island descendants are using social media to come forth, to claim their heritage. Even people with family members who went to the state asylum, the ones labeled “feeble-minded.” The news of the body found on Malaga has reached far beyond Malaga and our peninsula. I’ve been messaging with other descendants. They are my family. The same DNA lives in our bones, and I’m proud to claim this new heritage. I think of the fiercely independent Eliza Griffin, the child who couldn’t identify a telephone, the old woman in her rocking chair. I carry them with me. In me.

I will likely never know the name of the man Agnes was married to. I can assume only that he was white because of his Irish ancestry, and the color of his skin was a trait he passed to Gram, something that helped her find safety in the aftermath of a brutal attack.

I hope Agnes will be buried on Malaga.

I hope all other island residents buried at the former Maine School for the Feeble-Minded can be returned to Malaga, put to rest under stones with individual names. The islanders buried their dead on Malaga so they would forever be part of the soil. I hope the state of Maine will finally do right by Malaga’s people, my people, and bring them home one day.

Agnes’s grave won’t say that she was a wife or a mother. The grave will probably not bear her name. These are things that Sam and I know because they are part of the most private thing we share together. And today, next to the water, with Agnes and Malaga and the history of the island in capable hands, that seems like enough.