Well, September is here, the island school is back in session and our high school students have left to return to campuses off-island. Many of our seasonal residents have returned to their year-round homes all over the country. We’ve cut the cafe back to off-season hours–open Friday, Saturday, Sunday–and I spent many of my freed-up hours this past week catching up on paperwork, making chocolate and squeezing in a little writing. After the emotional upheaval the island underwent last week, I think we were all very glad that Lynn and Seth had the brilliant foresight to throw a huge post-Labor Day party a couple days ago. It’s an annual thing they do: pig roast/potluck, an island-wide In the Can tournament, and a live band.
This year, the pig was a 200-pounder from an off-island farm (brought over on Seth’s boat, Scalawag, as Lynn feels that having a pig on her fishing boat is bad luck). As soon as the pig hits the shore, master off-island roasters Barney and Boo take over: an all night open-air cooking marathon in Kennedy’s field. By 4:00pm the next day, the boathouse is bursting with delectable side-dishes and desserts from the homes of some of the best island cooks, the band (this year it was Flash in the Pan, a 40-person steel drum ensemble from Blue Hill) is warming up, the In the Can courts are ready to go, and the pig is being sliced and carried over to the boat house on steaming platters that are emptied as soon as they’re set down.
Though it seems everyone, along with their potluck dishes, brought a bag stuffed with foul weather gear, the threat of Hannah coming up the coast held off until all the food was gone, the band had packed up and a the In the Can trophy was passed to this year’s champions.
And then it rained. All night it rained; a deluge that washed out park roads and driveways all over the island. The next morning, the road in the village was littered with rocks the size of softballs, the bog by Moores Harbor overflowed, cutting a white-water stream that gushed into the guzzle, and water flowed in torrents down the rocks up to Black Dinah.
While Steve worked the counter in the cafe, I hung up my apron, escaped through the back door and pushed my way through the huckleberry and baby spruce that hides the little trail up the mountain. Earlier this spring, just before the hecticness of summer set in, I found a sheaf of captain’s journals in the woods here. The journals we’re hidden in the leg of a bed frame buried under a century of forest detritus in a patch of woods between the Black Dinah trail and Wes Bingham’s property. I had wanted the bed frame for a pea trellis, but the forest wasn’t ready to give it up–which is just as well, as the early onslaught of summer business foiled my garden plans. It also prevented me from digging into those journals, which have been sitting, unread, in the cedar chest in our guest bedroom. But the night’s rain–the likes of which, according to lobsterman Bert Bingham (who was in for a doughnut earlier in the morning), hasn’t been seen on the island in all of his 70 years–got me thinking that perhaps all that water had coaxed the bed frame out of the earth. Not that I’m in the market for a pea trellis at this point, but after finding those journals, I was curious about the bed frame itself–and the story it had to tell.
I veered off the trail just past the boardwalks over the flooded bog, and made my way up the heavily wooded rise to the old stone wall that separates Wes Bingham’s land from the rest of the forest. Down the back side of this knoll, is a little brook that winds through the base of the miniature valley where I had found the frame. It was as I’d hoped; the brook–now a torrent of foamy white water–had cut through the soft, peat-lined banks of the valley, carving out the packed earth that held my bed frame prisoner. It was too early for the water to have receded, so I pulled off my shoes, rolled up my jeans and waded in. The peat was soft under my bare feet, but quickly gave way to sludgy silt, and I sunk down to my ankles as I made my way toward the frame. Most of it was under water, cloudy with silt and peat, but I could still tell that the brook had done a fine job of excavating where the winter frost heaves had failed. Beneath the swirls of foamy water I could barely make out the blurry lines of the light painted iron frame. Hoping to succeed where I had failed in the spring, I shored myself up against a tree trunk, and prepared to pull the frame up out of the muck. I bent over, reached under the water, grabbed hold and gave a good tug. But just as in the spring, the spruce roots held fast, and instead, the frame gave way with a muted snap, and I fell back hard against the tree trunk grasping a short section of the frame in my hand.
Or at least that’s what I thought it was. But as I regained my balance and actually looked at what I had pulled up out of the water, I realized it was something very, very different. Instead, what I held tight in my hand, broken off from it’s anchor below, was the soft-white, slender forearm of a human skeleton, it’s bony fingers still clutching the butt-end of a rusty revolver.
