The Wanderer

by Sharon Creech

  Some of the pots we pulled up were empty, and all that remained of the bait was a perfectly intact snow-white herring skeleton.

  “Where’d it go?” I asked.

  “Sea fleas,” Frank said. “They’re everywhere, very wee, practically invisible. They love our bait. If you fell overboard and weren’t picked up until the next day, those sea fleas would eat you right up, and your skeleton would sink to the bottom!”

  Cody lifted me up and hung me over the side. “Want to try it?” he said.

  “Not funny, Cody,” I said. I didn’t much like the idea of sea fleas nibbling me down to my bones.

  One female lobster was carrying eggs—millions of orange grains (roe, Frank called them) clustered all over the underside of her tail, right up to the head.

  “That sweetheart goes back,” Frank said, tossing her overboard. “To continue the cycle.”

  And I had this strange feeling, thinking about how a lobster is saved by being tossed in the ocean, but if I were tossed in the ocean that would be the end of me.

  Last night I called home. My mother asked me about two million questions: “How do you feel? Have you been seasick? Are you warm? Are you safe? Are you scared? Are you lonely?” Finally, my dad took the phone and said, “What an adventure! What an incredible adventure!”

  I’d been feeling fine until I talked with them. My mother made me uneasy, as if she were expecting something awful to go wrong. I kept telling her everything was fine and she shouldn’t worry, but when it came time to say good-bye, I could hardly say it. It seemed too final. So I had to say, “Good-bye for now,” and I kept saying “for now,” until she repeated it, and then I felt better.

  My mother also said she’d called Bompie to tell him we were coming, and “he sounded all fuzzed up.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “He didn’t seem to know who I was at first, and he kept calling me Margaret.”

  “Margaret? Who is that?”

  “Grandma. My mother. His wife. He had me very worried, but then he snapped out of it and he said he was fine, he was just kidding, and he was very excited about your visit.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “That’s good, right?”

  “That’s good,” she agreed.

  CHAPTER 16

  STRANDED

  We are doing a whole lot more stopping than sailing on this trip. It’s as if Uncle Dock doesn’t really want to get under way. I think there’s something funny about all this stopping. Maybe there’s something seriously wrong with this boat and only Uncle Dock knows it.

  Today I asked Uncle Dock if he knew what had happened to Sophie’s parents.

  “Nothing,” he said. “They’re back in Kentucky—”

  “Not those parents,” I said. “Her real parents.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Do you know what happened to them?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  “You gonna tell me?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Not a pretty story,” he said.

  CHAPTER 17

  TRADITION

  Yesterday, Frank’s wife told me, “You’re a brave soul to be sailing!” and “You’re a brave soul to be with all of those men!” She asked me if they actually let me do any of the sailing.

  “It’s a struggle,” I said. “They don’t really want to—”

  “I figured that you’d just be doing the cooking and cleaning.”

  “No way!” I said. “That’s Cody’s job!”

  It isn’t really Cody’s job. We’re all supposed to take turns, although Brian usually gets out of it, and Cody does like doing it more than the rest of us. When Frank and his wife visited us on The Wanderer and saw Cody doing dishes and mopping the floor, Frank said, “You’ll make a great wife,” and he kept calling Cody “Mr. Mom.”

  Cody didn’t seem bothered. He made a joke out of it. “Mr. Mom at your service!” he said, bringing them some cheese and crackers, and “Watch it—Mr. Mom needs to mop under your feet!”

  I wish I had Cody’s natural sense of humor in times like that. I get really antsy when people seem surprised that I can use a power tool or go up a mast or use fiberglass or when they expect me to be the cook. I usually say something snotty and rude back, but I ought to be more like Cody. If you just laugh about it, people drop it.

  Yesterday, after we went clamming, Frank turned to me and said, “You’ve got a lot of frying to do!”

  I said, “No, I don’t! I’m not the only person on board who can cook, you know.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  I think I hurt his feelings by snapping like that, and I felt bad because he’s been so nice to us. I ought to learn to keep my mouth shut sometimes.

  I’m going to talk about clamming now. I hope I’m not being too boring with all this, but I want to write it down and remember it all. You could forget things, forget so many details of your life, and then if someone ever wanted to know what you’d thought or what you’d felt, you might not remember, or maybe you’d be sick or gone or something and you couldn’t tell them and they’d never know. It would be as if those tiny nibbling sea fleas had eaten up all the substance of your life.

  I once asked how Bompie remembered all his stories, and my mother said, “It’s like a picture in his head.”

  “But what if the picture got erased?” I said.

  “Now, how’s that going to happen?” she said.

  At low tide, we all went clamming with Frank’s seventy-nine-year-old father. We looked for air bubbles in the sand and then started digging, but there was so much seaweed covering the holes, and lots of water, so we couldn’t see in the hole once we’d started digging. And the land is mostly rocks and the clams live deep, so the digging wasn’t easy.

  It’s an odd thing, seeing those air bubbles and realizing that something is alive down there, under the sand. I felt peculiar, as if I’d rake up not a clam, but a person.

  Brian and Uncle Stew decided that clam digging was no fun after the first twenty minutes. They complained about their jeans getting muddy, and they didn’t like to bend over. “All this digging for one measly clam?” Uncle Stew said.

  Frank’s father chattered as he worked. “I was born on this island, just like my parents before me, and I’ve lived here my whole life, with my twelve brothers and sisters, and all our kids. I clam nearly every day, and I like to putz in the garden, too, and I hunt deer when I get the chance. Life is good. Real good.”

  And I could see how it would be good, how you could stay with your whole big family and everyone would know each other and take care of each other.

  I feel as if I can’t get enough of life on Grand Manan, and in the midst of learning about Grand Manan, I’ve learned some things about my uncles, too. It’s amazing what you pick up while you’re standing around clamming or hauling lobster pots.

  I discovered that ever since they were kids, Mo, Dock, and Stew wanted to sail across the ocean. They talked about it and planned it and dreamed about it.

  “Did you ever think you’d really do it?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Uncle Mo said.

  “What are you talking about?” Uncle Stew said. “Of course you thought we’d do it. We all thought we’d do it.”

  “I didn’t,” Mo said.

  “But you said—you kept saying—you made us think up all those names for the boat and you kept showing us that atlas, and—”

  “It was just a game,” Mo said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “A game? A game?” Stew spluttered.

  “I thought we’d do it,” Uncle Dock said quietly. “I knew we’d do it.”

  I asked them if my mother was part of their plans when they were young. “Did she want to go, too?”

  “Who?” Uncle Stew said. “Claire? Is that who you’re talking about?”

  “Of course it’s Claire she’s talking about,” Uncle Dock said. “She wants to know what Claire was like when she was young.”
/>   “Oh,” Uncle Stew said. “No, Claire didn’t want anything to do with us. She thought we were snotty and disgusting.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Uncle Dock said. “Claire and I always got along just fine.”

  I also found out that Uncle Mo’s name is short for Moses, but that he got beat up too much when he was a kid (“Think about it,” he said. “Would you like to be called Moses?”) and so he shortened it to Mo, which sounded “more butch,” and he’s stuck with it ever since.

  And Uncle Dock’s real name is Jonah!

  “So how’d you go from Jonah to Dock?” I asked him.

  “Ever since I was a kid,” he said, “I loved boats, but one day an old sailor told me that Jonah was not a good name for a sailor to have, because the Jonah in the Bible was bad luck for his companions at sea. You know that story, right? About how Jonah made God mad, so God sent this huge storm—”

  “And that’s when Jonah got swallowed by the whale,” Brian added.

  “Yep, yep, yep. So that old sailor said Jonah wasn’t a good name for me, and he started calling me Dock because I hung around the docks all day.”

  Brian leaned over and said to me, “But he’s still really a Jonah, so do you think that means bad luck for us?”

  “Brian,” I said, “sometimes you can keep your thoughts in your own head.”

  Then I got to worrying that one of us might make God mad and he’d send a storm, and that really seemed to worry me, way out of all proportion, so I started thinking about names instead. I wondered whether you had to be what your name suggested, and how different names suggest different things—like how Brian seems like a Brian, and Cody seems like a Cody, and I wondered if I seemed like a Sophie, and what exactly was a Sophie anyway?

  And then I started thinking about Bompie and although I know Bompie is only a nickname, I realized I have no idea what his real name is. I’m going to go ask someone right now.

  CHAPTER 18

  BOMPIE AND THE TRAIN

  Today when I was grumbling about being stuck on Grand Manan, Sophie said, “Here’s what Bompie told me. It’s not where you’re going that’s important—it’s how you get there.”

  “Well, we’re not getting anywhere, are we?” I said.

  “Sure we are!” she said. “We’re on this amazing island. We’ve been lobstering and we’re going clamming. This is part of the trip! We are wanderers!”

  I can’t figure her out. She can take the smallest thing—like a lobster pot, for instance, and get right up close to it and have a million questions about it and then she wants to draw it and touch it and smell it, and you’d think she’d been locked up in a cage her whole life and had just been let out and was discovering all these amazing things in the world.

  To tell you the truth, I didn’t think lobsters or lobster pots were all that amazing until Sophie got so excited about them. She kept going on and on about how she might be a lobster fisherman or maybe she’d build boats. You listen to her talk and then you start thinking maybe that would be a neat life.

  And then you listen to Brian, who says it would be an awful life in the winter and what if you didn’t catch anything or what if you built a boat and it sank?

  I get mixed up in my head when I listen to the two of them.

  I am starting to think something else, too. I think Sophie’s afraid of the water. It’s just a feeling I have.

  Brian’s still badgering Sophie. When we were clamming, she said that when she’d once been clamming with Bompie, they’d found the clams with their toes, not with a rake. So Brian says, “That’s a lie. You never went clamming with Bompie.”

  “Did so,” Sophie said.

  “Did not,” Brian said.

  “Did so,” Sophie said.

  We got to use a phone last night. That was weird. Dad called Mom and barked at her a bit before handing the phone over to me. In her little voice, she said, “Cody? Cody, honey? You can change your mind if you want. You can come home.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” I said. I didn’t intend it to sound mean, but I think that’s how she took it because she started sniffling. “Look, Mom,” I said. “It’s fine. We’re all fine. Dad sleeps a lot, so he’s not on my case so much lately.”

  That wasn’t exactly the truth, but she doesn’t like to hear the truth. I keep wondering why my dad invited me on this trip in the first place. He could have come on his own and he’d have a whole month or more away from me. No aggravation!

  Here’s one good thing about being stranded on land right now: no blah-blah-blah lessons from Brian.

  But Sophie did tell us another Bompie story when we were out clamming. It went like this:

  When Bompie was about my age, he lived near the Ohio River, at a place where the river was very deep and a mile wide. Running across the river was a train track, and it was only for trains and there were warnings all over the place about how people shouldn’t step one foot on it because there was no way to get off if a train was coming.

  One day Bompie wanted to get across that river. He wanted to get over to the other side real bad. It was windy and rainy and he didn’t want to walk two miles down to the pedestrian bridge. So he started across the train tracks.

  You should hear Sophie tell this story. You feel as if you’re there with Bompie, looking down at that river, with the wind blowing in your face and the rain slithering down the back of your neck and inside your shirt.

  So Bompie is walk, walk, walking across this bridge and he gets to the middle, and guess what he hears? Well, I guessed what he was going to hear the minute Sophie said that he was going to walk on that train track. He heard the train. Sophie described that train rumbling off in the distance, and you could feel the vibrations on the track and see Bompie looking back, knowing that train was going to come looming around the bend any minute.

  He was in the middle of the bridge. He started to run toward the far side, telling himself “Giddy-up, giddy-up!” but the rocks on the side of the tracks were slippery and he was having a hard time keeping his balance and he couldn’t giddy-up. And the rumbling got louder and louder and he could feel those vibrations and then there it was, the big black engine bursting around that bend and aiming for that trestle bridge.

  Bompie knew he wasn’t going to make it to the other side in time. He crawled up on the ledge and squeezed through the steel supports and dangled over the side of the bridge. The water was a long, long, long way down, swirling and brown and muddy.

  And the train, loud and rumbling, came surging toward him, and he let go and down, down, down he fell into the swirling water.

  Sophie stopped then and looked at each of us.

  “Well?” we all asked. “Well? What happened next?”

  “Oh, it was a terrible struggle,” Sophie said. “Bompie was upside down in that deep muddy swirling river. He figured his time was up.”

  “Well?” we asked. “And then what?”

  So she told how Bompie finally spluttered to the surface, and he was so happy to see the sky that he lay there floating on his back, crying and laughing all at the same time, and the current was sweeping him down the river, and he floated there and watched the train go by and finally he turned over and swam like a madman, he swam and swam and swam, and he made it to shore.

  And when he got home, his father gave him a whipping for getting his clothes wet and muddy, and his mother gave him some apple pie.

  When she finished telling this story, Brian said, “I thought you said Bompie grew up in England.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Sophie said. “I said he was born in England. He left there when he was very young. Five, I think.”

  “Huh!” Brian said.

  “Don’t you know anything about your own grandfather?” Sophie said.

  CHAPTER 19

  WOOD ISLAND

  I’m all mixed up about the days.

  And mercy! Bompie’s name is Ulysses! Although everyone in the family calls him Bompie, apparently some of his friends call hi
m by his real name. It’s hard for me to imagine that. Ulysses?

  We’re still on Grand Manan, and sometimes I am longing, longing to get under way again, and I am longing to see Bompie (Ulysses!), but at other times, I get hypnotized by this island and the life here and forget that time is passing or that I’ve ever lived anywhere else or have anywhere else to go.

  Yesterday, Cody and I met a tall, lanky woman and her German shepherd. She showed us her cabin, tucked in a scrub of trees. It was very small, one room, with no water or electricity.

  “Built it myself,” she said.

  “You mean everything?” I asked. “You mean you dug the foundation and you hammered it all together—how’d you do that? And the roof? And the windows?”

  “Steady on,” she said. “Too many questions.”

  I wanted to be that woman. I could see myself living out there in that cabin with my dog. In the daytime, I’d go lobstering and clamming.

  “You don’t get lonely out here?” I asked.

  “Lonely? Ha! Lonely? Not by a long shot. I’ve got my dog, and when I want to see people I just walk down to the harbor. When I want real quiet, I go on over to Wood Island.”

  Wood Island, she told us, is about a twenty-minute dinghy trip from Seal Cove. “The few houses there were abandoned,” she said, “and now there’s only a couple hermits over there, and ghosts—”

  “Ghosts?” Cody said. “You mean like real ghosts?” He seemed very intrigued by this.

  “Hm,” she said. “What exactly is a real ghost?”

  One of the ghosts, she said, is an old man who roams around in a black raincoat and a black hat; and the other is a woman and her baby who float around singing spooky songs.

  “Why are they there?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” the woman said.

  “I mean why are those ghosts in that place and not, say, here?”