The Wanderer

by Sharon Creech

  “Honey, you sure have a lot of questions!” she said. But you could tell she was thinking because she was nodding her head and tilting it this way and that. Finally she said, “Those ghosts are coming back to a place they once lived. Maybe they forgot something.”

  I liked this idea, that the ghosts might come back to check on something they’d left behind.

  Today, Cody and I took off in the dinghy in search of the ghosts and hermits. The fog was thick as smoke, so by the time we were four hundred feet out of the breakwall, we were out of sight of land altogether. We took with us a few items for emergency survival: a compass, a flashlight, three cans of pop, and half a bag of candy. We drank the pop on the way over and ate the candy within five minutes of landing on Wood Island.

  There are no roads on Wood Island, only paths that lead from deserted house to deserted house. We found a church, though, which was cleanly swept and dusted, with fresh wildflowers and candles at the altar.

  “Maybe the ghosts come here and tidy it up,” Cody said.

  I knelt down and said a little prayer for Bompie and for my parents and for my boat family and our journey across the ocean.

  Cody said, “What’d you pray for?” and when I told him, he knelt down and closed his eyes, and I think he said a little prayer, too.

  In one deserted house Cody discovered a bead necklace that was gnarled and broken.

  “For you,” Cody said, gallantly presenting me with the tangled string and loose beads. “Maybe you can restring it?”

  And when he put the beads in my hand, they were warm, and I felt as if there were other people in the house with us, maybe they were ghosts, and I wondered what had happened to them, and was this all that was left of their lives?

  On we went, hoping to find a ghost or a hermit, but the only people we saw were two men building a house across the path from the church. One of them called out to us. “I guess your clothes won’t be drying too well in this weather, will they?”

  “Huh?” Cody said. “What do you mean?”

  “On your boat,” he said, “back in the harbor—all your clothes strung up on the lifelines. Too much fog for clothes to be drying, eh?”

  “How did you know that was our boat and our clothes?” Cody asked.

  They laughed. “Not too many strangers around these parts, nope.”

  Cody thought they were being nosy, but I liked it that they’d noticed we were there. We weren’t invisible.

  We headed for the center of the island, deep in moss and rotted leaves and trees. It was like walking through snow. Our feet sank in the mushy carpeting, and every once in a while we broke through to muddy swampiness underneath.

  It was all so quiet and peaceful. There was open sky, with no power lines or phone lines or fluorescent streetlights. We heard only birds, with no sounds of cars or lawn mowers blaring. I started picturing myself living on the island. I could fix up one of those cabins and I’d live there with my dog, and maybe all the people who used to live there would come back, one by one, and fill up their houses and their lives all over again.

  Shortly before sunset, we left Wood Island. The fog was much thicker, and we could barely see twenty feet in front of the bow of the dinghy. I couldn’t imagine how we’d ever find our way back, and I had a sudden panicky feeling, as if the fog was choking me.

  “Breathe deeply!” Cody said. “Don’t worry—I’ve got the compass! Commander Compass at your service!” He switched places with me. “You row, I’ll guide,” he said. “Head a little left—no, not that way, your right, my left—okay now straight on, giddy-up, steady, you’re veering, okay a little more right—no, your left, my right—”

  All I saw was fog, fog, fog. Fog shrinks the ocean. You feel as if you are in a tiny sphere of mist and water.

  “Steady on, we’re okay, we’re right on course,” Cody said. “Onward!”

  I rowed harder and harder and faster and faster to keep us from disappearing. On we went, on and on through the fog, until at last Cody shouted, “Ahoy! Fortress!”

  And there we were, back at the mouth of the breakwall. Safe. Cody knows some things, after all.

  When we reached the dock, Uncle Mo and Brian and Uncle Stew were with a fisherman on his boat, ready to go out to find us.

  “Where the heck have you knuckleheads been?” Uncle Mo demanded.

  “On Wood Island, exactly where we said we’d be,” Cody said.

  “This man says he was out there and he didn’t see hide nor hair of you. Isn’t that right?”

  The man nodded. “Yup, that’s right. I been out there all day and you weren’t there.”

  “We were,” Cody said. “We were exploring.”

  Apparently the fisherman had told Uncle Mo about the four-knot current that runs between Grand Manan and Wood Island, and he’d pulled out a chart and showed Uncle Mo how we’d be drifting far below Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, freezing, starving, and about to be run over by a freighter.

  “Well, we weren’t,” Cody said. “We weren’t lost and we weren’t drifting or freezing or starving or run over by a freighter.”

  “But you could’ve been,” Uncle Mo said.

  “But we weren’t,” Cody said.

  Now I’ve been sitting here thinking. I wonder how easily it could have all gone wrong, and what if we had drifted out into the Bay of Fundy, and what if, what if, what if …?

  And I wonder why I didn’t worry about these things beforehand. Maybe it was because I didn’t know about the four-knot current and I didn’t know about the bad things that could happen. I wondered if it was better to know about the bad things in advance and worry about them, or whether it was better not to know, so that you could enjoy yourself.

  My brain is tossing these thoughts back and forth and making me antsy. I’m not going to think about them anymore.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE LITTLE KID

  Sophie loves to explore, so we’ve been poking around and even got rid of Brian long enough to row over to Wood Island. When we were in an abandoned house, she wanted to pick up every little thing she saw, as if every little piece of rubbish was a treasure or a clue. “Who do you think owned this?” she said, and “Why do you think they left?”

  She poked at the walls and said, “I could live here. If I had to.”

  Later, when we were exploring the middle of the island, I felt as if ghosts were hovering around us. The woman ghost and the baby ghost were following us through the woods, and I kept asking Sophie if she saw them, but she didn’t.

  She said, “I don’t believe in ghosts. I think they’re all in your mind.”

  On we went along the mossy path. I got brave. “Sophie,” I said, “can I ask you something about your parents?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “What really happened to them?”

  She didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, didn’t even skip a beat. It was as if she and Uncle Dock had rehearsed the same answer. She said, “Nothing happened to them. They’re back in Kentucky—”

  “Not them,” I said. “Your other—”

  “My parents are back in Kentucky,” she said. “You want to race to that rock up there?” and she took off running.

  What is up with her?

  When we got to the other side of the rock, she started talking about this little kid she knows. She said this little kid had lived a lot of places.

  “How many?” I said.

  “A lot, a lot, a lot. Some not-so-nice places.”

  “Where were the little kid’s parents?”

  “Somewhere else. So the little kid had to live with other people. They didn’t really want the little kid. The little kid was always in the way. You want to race all the way over there? To that scrabbly tree?”

  When we got back my father was having a humongous fit about how irresponsible we’d been and how we could have been dragged out into the ocean and all that jazz. He doesn’t give me credit for beans. I was getting really ticked, but then Sophie tugged at my arm and wh
ispered, “At least he was worried about you.”

  “He sure has a funny way of showing it,” I said. “All that yelling and all.”

  And Brian asked me about a million questions. He wanted to know where we went and how we got there and what we saw and why we didn’t tell him we were going and were we scared coming back and what if we’d gotten lost and about a thousand other questions like that.

  I almost felt bad that we hadn’t invited him, but then he said that he was going to make up lists of what each person was doing each day so that someone would know each person’s whereabouts.

  “And why would we want to know that?” I asked him.

  “Because!” he said. “Because we ought to know where everybody is, don’t you think? In case someone got lost or hurt or something. Then if they didn’t come back, somebody would know they were missing and somebody would know where they were supposed to be and somebody—”

  “You’re such a worrier,” I said.

  “But he’s got a point,” Sophie said. She turned to Brian. “It’s a good idea, Brian.”

  Brian turned about seventeen shades of red and shambled off looking mighty pleased with himself.

  “Geez, Sophie,” I said. “You think that nerd-brain had a good idea?”

  “If he wants to know where everybody is, then he must care what happens to everybody. We must matter to him.” And then she turned around and went over to the railing and stared out at the water, and I felt about as sad as I’ve ever felt in my whole life.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE BAPTISM

  The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolls and rolls and calls to me. Come in, it says, come in.

  Uncle Dock is forecasting tomorrow or the next day as the Day of Departure. “Just a few more things to fix,” he says. I feel torn, as if something is pushing and pulling. I could stay forever on Grand Manan, but the sea is calling me.

  This morning, Cody, Brian, and I went to a boat-building place, where the man who owns it let us nose around. He works mostly in fiberglass, hand-laying everything, even the gel coat. He even makes his own dinghies, and his work is so fine. I thought I knew something about fiberglass from building Buddy the Bilge Box, but I hardly know potatoes.

  “Look at this,” Brian felt obliged to mention. “Not a bubble in sight.”

  “Well, he’s been doing it longer than I have,” I said.

  The man showed me some tricks, like how to use rollers to apply the resin and gel coat, and how to use plastic wrap on small areas so the layers underneath stay smooth.

  “That’s what you should’ve done with Buddy the Bilge Box,” Brian said.

  “I didn’t know about that then, did I?” I said. Brian was starting to bug me.

  “You don’t like me, do you?” Brian asked.

  That made me feel awful. “I never said that.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t. No one does.” He stood there like a limp puppet, all clumsy arms and legs.

  Cody was taking this all in, listening but not saying anything.

  “I have no idea why nobody likes me,” Brian said.

  I was hoping he wasn’t going to ask me to give him some reasons, when Cody piped up.

  “Well,” Cody said, “it might have something to do with all those lists you make and how you’re always telling everybody what to do and how you always act like you have the answers to every single little atom of a thing and—”

  Brian folded his arms tightly across his chest. “I wasn’t talking to you,” he said. “I don’t care what you think,” and he turned and left the building, striding along in his jerky, stumbling way.

  “Well, he asked for it,” Cody said.

  Uncle Dock made us all go to the baptism for Frank’s grandson later in the day. Brian stayed as far away from me and Cody as he could get. I didn’t want to go at all; my heart was not in it, but I’d never been to a baptism before, and by the time it was over, my eyes were bugging out of my head.

  People in robes, sort of like graduation robes, walked into the water, waist deep, with a pastor. The pastor dunked them, sploosh, backward, full body, into the cold, cold water. It looked as if the pastor was holding them down, and what if they couldn’t breathe, what if he held them down too long?

  All the while the people were being dunked, the bystanders were singing “Amazing Grace,” and that song made me freeze up completely. Where had I heard that song before? At a funeral? My throat was all clogged, as if there was something stuck in it, like a big sock. Everything got blurry and woozy, and Uncle Dock said, “Sophie? Sophie? You’d better sit. Put your head down—”

  On the way over to Frank’s house for the baptism feast, Brian broke his silence to inform us that the reason for the dunking was that the water would cleanse them of all their sins and they could start fresh, as whole new clean people. I kept thinking and thinking about that, and what I saw in my head was this very dirty person being dipped and then whoosh out he came all white and clean, like an angel. I saw this over and over and I started getting dizzy and woozy again.

  “Here,” Uncle Dock said. “Eat some of this. Maybe you haven’t eaten enough today”—and he offered me some seafood chowder and fried scallops and lobster salad sandwiches and potato salad and two kinds of cheesecake and carrot cake and banana bread. I ate what I could but then I threw it all up.

  “Maybe you’ve got the flu,” Uncle Dock said, and he took me back to the boat.

  I slept a bit and then woke up when Brian and Cody came in.

  Brian said, “I hope that wasn’t our last supper.”

  “Shut up!” Cody shouted. “You’re such a wet blanket. Why do you always expect the worst? What are you trying to do, jinx our voyage?”

  “I’d feel a whole lot better if the crew on this boat actually knew what they were doing,” Brian sneered.

  “Well, you’re part of the crew, you knuckleheaded doofus—”

  “I’m not a knuckleheaded doofus—you are!”

  Our boat family is getting touchy and nervous. We’re all ready to be under way, but we’re also starting to think of the problems we might encounter. Thinking too much is not good. We should just go!

  CHAPTER 22

  BOMPIE AND THE PASTOR

  I am losing my brains. We’re still here, still on Grand Manan, and now we have to fix a bunch more things on The Wanderer. Is this boat seaworthy or not?

  Yesterday, I came across Uncle Dock and his friend Frank, huddled by the shore, talking. When they saw me, Uncle Dock said to Frank, “Shh. Enough of that.” He waved his hand in the air, as if he were swishing flies. “What’s up, Cody?” Whatever they’d been talking about, they didn’t want me to hear.

  Here’s something else weird: when I came back to the boat tonight and went below deck, my father was lying on his bunk crying. Crying! The tears were streaming down his face.

  “Something wrong?” I asked him.

  He didn’t even wipe his face. He just said, “No. Nothing wrong. Everything’s just usual.” That’s all he said.

  I have never, ever, ever, ever in my whole entire life, seen my father cry. Once when I was about eight and I came home crying because I’d fallen off my bike, he said, “Stop it! You don’t have to cry about it!” And when I didn’t stop crying, he went berserk. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” He whipped off his belt and waved it at me. “You want something to cry about? I’ll give you something to—”

  My mother came tiptoeing in the back door and when she saw that belt, she tried to grab it, but my father is a strong man and he snapped it back and hit her with it, right on her bare arm. Then he threw the belt on the floor and stormed outside.

  I don’t cry in front of him anymore.

  Sophie told her Bompie-gets-baptized story. It went like this:

  Bompie was a teenager and he’d never been baptized and his mother thought he really really really needed to be baptized and so she arranged with the local pastor to do the baptism in the Ohio River.

  Bompie and the pastor
did not get along very well because Bompie had been dating the pastor’s daughter and brought her home late too many times. Bompie was not exactly thrilled at the idea that this pastor was going to dunk him in the river.

  Comes the day and Bompie goes down to the river with his family, and there’s the pastor smiling a big phony smile at Bompie, and comes the time for Bompie to get dunked, and the pastor slams Bompie down into the muddy swirling water and holds him there. And holds him there. And holds him there some more. And Bompie is running out of breath so he starts kicking the pastor and then he bites the pastor’s hand, which is covering Bompie’s mouth.

  And the pastor let out a shout and Bompie got to the surface.

  “Well?” Brian said. “What did Bompie’s father do?”

  Sophie said, “Why, he gave Bompie a whipping for biting the pastor.”

  “And his mother?” I said. “Did she give Bompie some apple pie?”

  “Why, I believe she did,” Sophie said.

  My father cried again today.

  “Anything wrong?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s usual.”

  I just remembered something else about Sophie telling the Bompie baptism story yesterday. When she was finished, Brian said, “So, Dad, you ever heard that story before?”

  “No,” Uncle Stew said, “can’t say that I have.”

  Brian looked smug, as if he’d just swallowed a watermelon. Uncle Dock said, “I haven’t either—”

  “So!” Brian said.

  Uncle Dock interrupted. “But that one about the train and the river—that one rang a bell, yep. I believe I might’ve heard that one before.”

  I thought Brian was going to choke on his phantom watermelon.

  Uncle Stew said, “Well, I haven’t heard it. Haven’t heard any of them—”

  “Maybe you forgot,” Uncle Dock said.

  “I don’t forget anything!”