by Jess Rinker
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For Dad, who first introduced me to the magic of Ocracoke
and
for Joe, my true treasure
1
X Marks the Spot
September 1996
I press the tip of the blade against the soft skin of my finger.
“I, Savannah Mae Dare, solemnly swear…”
“Is that a knife?” my older sister, Frankie, interrupts me for the third time. I sigh. The first was to ask why we had to go to Springer’s Point Preserve, the big nature park near our house. The second was why we had to go where it was a hundred degrees to sit under a giant live oak with fire ants in the sand. I reminded her we live in North Carolina. On an island. It’s all giant oaks and fire ants and sand, not air-conditioning and iced drinks and fluffy pillows.
Somewhere overhead a seagull cries. It’s so hot, even in the shade. But I don’t dare complain because I want to finish our pledges, and get changed out of the ugly navy-blue dress that makes me look like a sailor. Not that I’d mind looking like a real sailor, just not one in an ugly blue dress. Mom said this was the best one to wear for Grandpa’s funeral, so I didn’t argue. But enough is enough.
“Yes, Frankie. It’s a knife. Now be quiet.” I start over. “I, Savannah Mae Dare, solemnly swear to be one of the three appointed guardians of…”
“I’m not pricking my finger for this,” Frankie interrupts me for the fourth time, and crosses her arms. “You always want blood. You wanted us to prick our fingers when you made us swear not to tell Mom and Dad about trying to get the lighthouse ghost on camera. Which we never did, might I remind you.”
“This is different.” Leave it to Frankie to bring that up. Mom didn’t make her wear a dress today. She’s wearing black pants and a button-down shirt. She always gets her own way because she’s the oldest. Although if I had to guess, I bet she’s sweating way more than me right now.
“You get weirder every day, Sav,” she says.
“Don’t be a baby. It doesn’t hurt.”
“Do you know how much bacteria is on that thing?” She presses her lips together, hides her fingers under her arms, and shakes her head. “Nope. Not happening. And you’re not pricking Jolene’s finger either.”
Our youngest sister, Jolene, looks at both of us with raised eyebrows, waiting to see which one of us will decide her fate. She’s wearing a frilly pink princess costume that makes her very light blond hair look whiter than ever. She’s six and gets away with more than Frankie and I put together.
“This is different because you need to think like a pirate.” I poke my own finger with the blade before Frankie can stop me, and I finish my pledge as fast as I can: “… swear to be one of the three appointed guardians, for as long as I may live, in accordance with the Dare family legend.”
“I’m pretty sure not all pirates signed things in blood,” Frankie says.
“Only the coolest ones.” Grinning, I hold up my finger so Frankie can get a good long look at my bravery.
“Ewwwww!” Jolene squeals. “You’re bleeding! Don’t get it on my dress!” She moves her knees away from me but sticks out her hand. “Now do mine.” She holds her finger still with her other hand and squeezes her eyes tight.
“See?” I say. “Even the first grader can do it.” I try to take Jolene’s hand, but Frankie slaps my hand away. Sand flies everywhere. She always has to be so dramatic.
“Dad will kill you if you do that. Actually, Dad will kill me if you do that.” Frankie grabs the knife and folds it closed.
“Hey! That’s mine! Grandpa gave it to me!” I try to pull it back out of her hand but Frankie’s thirteen and stronger.
“You’ll get it back later,” Frankie says as she sticks it in her pocket. “We’re not pricking our fingers.”
“Who put you in charge?” I ask.
“Dad, when he said, ‘Frankie, since you’re the biggest and the smartest, you’re in charge. Don’t let your little sisters cut themselves with rusty army knives.’”
“He didn’t say that,” Jolene says, giggling.
“It’s from the navy, anyway,” I mumble. Our grandpa was a hero in the navy, not the army. How could she forget that?
Frankie rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Dad put me in charge.”
“How do you expect to be a right and true guardian if you can’t even give your finger a tiny prick?”
“By using my brain,” Frankie says, mocking my voice and pointing to her head. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand since you don’t have one.”
I scramble to go after her, sending sand and leaves everywhere, but Jolene yells, “Y’all! We’ve got work to do! We have to stick together!”
She’s right. I sit back down, grip a handful of sand, and let it slide through my palm. Grandpa always said we were stronger when we worked together. But it’s hard sometimes with an athletic, popular older sister and a beauty queen baby sister. Only Grandpa understood me—he was the middle of three boys—and he was the only one I could talk to. All last year he walked with me to school and we’d talk about everything, but over the summer he got sick. And now he’s gone.
I push my toes deep into the sand while my sisters examine the map and swat at mosquitoes starting to whine around us, circling our ears like they’re trying to find a way in. Gulls continue to cry overhead. Waves crash onto the tiny beach at the end of the park, a constant hushhh hushhh we usually get so used to we don’t hear it anymore. But the ocean always sounds louder at sunset and sunrise.
How pale and strange Grandpa had looked at the funeral. I try to shake the image out of my head. I’d rather think about Grandpa the way he was when he was alive. Grandpa loved history and maps. Way before I was born, he helped make maps for the navy and after that for people who treasure hunted like he did. He’d been all around the world, but loved Ocracoke the best. And he loved Springer’s Point and used to take the three of us walking here all the time. He said there was magic here. Even though he’d been all over, his favorite stories were about the pirates, and about how Blackbeard died here.
“Blackbeard was misunderstood too,” Grandpa had said, one afternoon after I’d gotten into an argument with a girl named Kate at school. We were best friends until she called me a weird show-off for knowing so many countries on the globe. And I pushed her into a garbage can.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked.
“Don’t get me wrong. He was a pirate like all the rest. But mostly he got his reputation from acting dangerous and scary. People assumed he was a murderer and he let them believe it.”
“Then they’d be so afraid of him he could rob them easier?”
“That’s right.” Grandpa looked at me seriously. “But you’re not a pirate, Savvy. You don’t need this reputation; it’s not who you really are. What do you think about a parley with Kate? Even pirates sometimes called a truce.”
“She called me ‘chicken legs.’”
“Okay, maybe you
’re not ready for a parley. How else could you have handled it?”
Personally I thought pushing her into the garbage can was a pretty good solution. But I understood Grandpa’s point. He gave me a big squeeze and we walked the beach to look for shells and gold coins. We only ever found shells.
But I know the coins are out there somewhere. I’ll find them for Grandpa.
“Savannah?” Frankie waves her hand in front of my face.
Blotchy light through the gnarly oaks and dangling moss reminds me it’s getting late.
“Sav, wrap this up. We have to be home before the party or Dad’s going to come looking,” Frankie says like she’s reading my mind.
“Or worse,” I say, “send Peter to find us.” Peter’s our cousin and always has his nose in our business. He’s a total snitch. I can’t count how many times he’s told on us to his parents and gotten us in trouble. I’m actually surprised he didn’t see us sneaking away after Grandpa’s funeral. Peter does not need to know about this. Grandpa didn’t say his map was for all the cousins. Just us.
“Exactly,” Frankie says. “So are we done?”
“You have to say your vows first. I did mine.”
“Okay, but no blood.”
“Fine. No blood.”
I smooth Grandpa’s map out between us, flick off a couple of ants, and let it slide that my sisters aren’t going to prick their fingers. “Go ahead, Jolene,” I say.
She raises her right hand like the Scouts. “Jolene Lee Dare promises to guard the map forever.”
“Close enough,” I say. “Frances?”
“Do not call me that.”
“You have to use your full name or it’s null and void.”
“What’s ‘null and void’?” Jolene asks.
“Means it doesn’t count,” I say, leaning toward my big sister. “Frances.”
“I, Frances Elaine Dare, promise to be one of the three appointed guardians according to the Dare family legend.”
“Perfect,” I say, and gently roll Grandpa’s map and stick it in the tube. When he got sick he told me it would be ours after he was gone. As much as I always loved looking at all the landmarks and Grandpa’s cool handwriting on it, I didn’t want to believe the day would ever come when that would happen. But it did. Last Wednesday, Grandpa passed away in his sleep. Dad said it was the best way, that Grandpa had no pain. Even though we did.
I know Grandpa would be proud of me for taking such good care of his map from here on out. I slide the tube in my backpack, and we all stand up and brush off the sand.
I put a hand on each of my sisters’ shoulders. “We are now the official guardians of Cornelius Franklin Dare’s Ocracoke Island map,” I say. “The one and only way to find Blackbeard the Pirate’s treasure.”
2
Captain of the Kids’ Table
When we come out of the park, we slip our shoes back on and walk home fast. It’s not a long walk, but Mom and Dad are getting ready for a party to celebrate Grandpa’s life and we want to be back before they realize we’ve been gone. If we had our skateboards we could move quicker, but for some reason Mom banned skateboards from the church.
We pass the old lighthouse and when our house is in sight, we see many extra bikes and a few cars parked out front. Most people walk or bike around the island. But we have some family and friends from the mainland who brought their cars over on the ferry. I run a stick down the iron fence that lines our property, which makes a soothing tapatapatapatapatapa sound, and then shove the stick upright in the sand by the porch.
A man wearing a green hat with a yellow anchor pushes out our front door and nearly plows over Jolene as he comes down the steps. He looks surprised to see us, but quickly smiles and tips his hat. “Excuse me, lassies. I’m late for an appointment, but wanted to pay my respects to your family.”
“Thank you,” Frankie answers for all three of us. The man doesn’t wait for any more response and just about jogs down the street.
“Who was that?” I ask. Frankie shrugs.
“He was at the church talking to Uncle Randy.” Jolene jumps up each step with two feet.
“Maybe he was a friend of Grandpa’s,” Frankie says.
There’s a wreath of flowers and a huge photo of Grandpa when he was younger and dressed in his US navy uniform by the front door. It was set up at the funeral, too, with an American flag folded up in a glass case. I didn’t really look at it before but pause now. Grandpa’s name and the dates 1910–1996 are written across the bottom. He used to brag that he’d make it to one hundred and be the oldest person in Ocracoke Village. I stare at it for a little while and think, You almost made it, Grandpa, until Frankie all but pushes me into the house.
Our parents, and our aunts and uncles and neighbors who came, are all too busy standing around the dining room table eating nasty deviled eggs to even notice us barge in on their conversation.
“Don’t you remember when he sailed out of the Dry Tortugas and came home with a plank of wood, declaring it to be a piece of history?” someone says. “And then the park service came knocking on his door a week later for removing it?”
Peter’s parents, Uncle Randy and Aunt Della, are laughing so hard it looks like they might choke on an egg. One aunt I didn’t even know before this morning, who came all the way from Atlanta, says, “He thought everything was treasure! What a nut, that old man! I mean, to give him credit, he found a lot of interesting things, but who actually thinks Blackbeard’s treasure is real?”
“No one does, it’s all folklore for the tourists,” someone else says. “The man got confused in his later years.”
“I think Cornelius was born confused.”
And everyone laughs at Grandpa.
Except Mom and Dad. Probably because Grandpa was Dad’s dad and we’ve been living with him since I was born. No one even came to visit him other than Uncle Randy and Aunt Della. It feels like he’s more our family than everyone else’s. And Grandpa was not confused. He knew more about Blackbeard than anyone. If he said there’s a treasure, there’s a treasure.
Jolene whispers, “Don’t they know about the Dare family legend?”
I don’t have the heart to tell her I made that part up.
Mom raises an eyebrow when she finally sees us. It’s like her eyebrow is asking us where we’ve been, why we’re late, and why we’re covered in sand, again, but this is one of those times that we know we’re not getting in trouble. I don’t have any time to change out of this awful dress, though, because she points to the food. The three of us grab plates because we know what’s good for us. Don’t mess with Mom’s eyebrow.
“Why are they making fun of Grandpa?” Jolene whispers, as Frankie piles dried-out baked ziti on Jolene’s plate. The pastor’s wife brought that. She brings it to every funeral.
And wedding.
And any potluck of any kind.
“They’re not making fun of Grandpa,” Frankie says, trying to comfort Jolene. But she looks at me because we both know the adults are joking but not joking in the way that adults do when they don’t want to sound mean, but are being mean. She hands Jolene a fork and says, “Go sit.”
Jolene spills half of her ziti as she walks to the little kids’ table Dad set up for the younger cousins. Our dog, Py, short for “Pirate,” cleans up after her as she goes. At the table, there’s one more empty chair between her and another of our cousins, Peter’s younger brother, Will, who’s three and always throwing his food. There’s no way I’m sitting there. I’m eleven. Way too old for that nonsense.
“I don’t see what they find so funny,” I whisper to Frankie as we fill our plates. “Grandpa found some of the most amazing treasures, and they all know it. He even has things at the historical society. Real artifacts from real shipwrecks.” I pluck every single shrimp—twenty-three—from the serving platter and put them on my plate.
“Not everyone thinks it’s all treasure,” Frankie says. She puts four of my shrimps back. And then she helps herself to a
disgusting-looking pasta salad. Anything with the word “salad” should be outlawed from family gatherings. That one’s from Aunt Della, Peter’s mom. She always uses those gross green olives with the strange little red things in them. I’m pretty sure they’re bits of earlobe.
“Yuck. Don’t eat that!” I try to swipe one off her plate.
“Mind your own food,” she says.
“I’m trying to save your life,” I say.
“Do you even know what that black line is on your shrimp?” she asks, grinning.
I stick my tongue out at her and then pop a shrimp into my mouth. Not as disgusting as earlobe salad.
I grab one more shrimp from the platter to make up for the one I ate and we both walk over to the dining table. Frankie sits down near Peter’s oldest brother, Robbie, who’s sixteen and can drive. He’s the oldest of all the cousins. We hardly see him. And even Peter gets to sit at the dining table now that he just turned twelve. When I try to join them Dad says, “Sorry, kiddo, one more year on deck.”
“Come on, Dad,” I start to argue, but he looks so sad and tired. Plus there’s a portrait of Grandpa behind him on the wall. I feel like it’s staring at me. Grandma painted it when they were first married. Grandpa’s a lot younger in the painting, and looks a lot like Dad when he smiles, but I can still picture Grandpa’s expression, that way he’d tell me to “lower my sails,” meaning calm down, without saying a word. A lot like Mom, actually. I wonder if he taught it to her. But since Grandpa’s not here to give me that look, I have to stop myself from arguing with Dad.
“Thank you, Savvy,” he says.
When I sit down at the kids’ table I grumble, ignoring everything Grandpa used to tell me about trying to get along with others. “None of you better spill anything on me or I’m making you walk the plank,” I announce.
Cheeks full of ziti, Jolene nods and salutes as if to confirm my status on this ship. She does that a lot when she thinks I’m getting too bossy. The rest of the cousins look at each other and then go back to eating. Will throws a pea at my face. If I have one more year at the kids’ table, I’m going to have to start acting more like a pirate.
