Show Me a Sign Read online

  “She’s around here somewhere,” Thomas signs, waving his hand in every direction.

  Thomas used to help only in the spring with the big sheep shearing. But with George gone, he stays on year-round now.

  When Thomas was a slave, his last master granted his freedom. Mama is cordial to him in their brief interactions, when he carries wood or butchered meat to the kitchen door, but he isn’t invited into our home. Neither is our other hired hand, an Irishman, Eamon Reilly.

  In our town, the Irish are seen as inferior to the English but superior to freedmen. Papa pays those ideas no heed and stubbornly hires both when others will not. I used to be embarrassed when our neighbors commented on Papa’s radical notions. But George’s death has opened my eyes to new ways of thinking.

  “Might I follow you for a few minutes?” I ask Thomas.

  “I cannot stop my work,” he reminds me, “but you are welcome to join me.”

  In the distance, I locate Sally leaning against the railing of the paddock where we keep Bayard, a brown colt who will take orders from no one since George died. Is she not afraid of the sleek, volatile beast?

  Once the sheep are reunited in the pasture, we head for the barn. I notice that while Thomas is dressed in broadcloth and wool like Papa, he has a new pair of deerskin boots.

  “Is it strange for you to live among the Wampanoag?” I ask.

  “Not at all,” Thomas signs. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because you are not Wampanoag and they live differently from us,” I sign.

  “There are differences between Chilmark and Aquinnah,” Thomas signs. “But the Wampanoag are my people now.”

  “Why do you say Aquinnah instead of Gay Head?” I ask.

  “For the same reason I say Noepe instead of Martha’s Vineyard. All Wampanoag use the names of our ancestors to name our land,” Thomas signs.

  I remember Papa saying the Wampanoag don’t want their land divided into private parcels under the control of settlers, and that Chilmark was once a sachemship, a common land of the Wampanoag. I wonder what it was like then. Maybe they think that by using their ancestor’s names they can hold on to Wôpanâak, the Wampanoag language that has almost disappeared since we settled on the island.

  “But they are not your ancestors.” I make the sign for a tree with long branches to indicate ancestors.

  Thomas is scouring a table in the barn where a lamb was butchered. He rings blood from a sea sponge into a wooden bucket.

  “They are my ancestors, Mary,” Thomas explains. “My place is with the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe.”

  “But you don’t have Indian blood.”

  Thomas looks squarely at me while he dumps the water in a trough and puts down the bucket to sign. “The Wampanoag don’t see it the same way,” he explains. “It’s not just about blood. My wife, daughter, and I belong in the town of Aquinnah. We share the same beliefs and customs. We participate in ceremonies to honor the Great Being Moshup. We work hard to sustain our small community.”

  That doesn’t make sense to me. Some Indians have joined our society. They are our neighbors, but we are still different and separate.

  “What about Sally?” I ask. “She is half Indian and half black. Mama says that means she can’t lay claim to Wampanoag land.”

  “My daughter will inherit her mother’s lands. My history is also her legacy. A few in Aquinnah disapprove of my marriage to Helen, but Sally belongs fully to the Wampanoag Nation.”

  “But Mama is half French, which means I am a quarter French,” I sign to Thomas.

  He smiles without answering and goes back to work. I think he knows he set my mind spinning.

  Outside, Sally has entered Bayard’s paddock. She extends her hand to the agitated animal. He snorts and kicks up dust. Sally holds still. Bayard does not take the treat she offers. He rears up on his back legs. I hold my breath and count to twenty.

  Sally calmly slips under the fence, throws the dried corncob in the pen, and watches him eat. I release the air trapped in my chest. How can she be so unafraid?

  George was bold too. He could ride Bayard. And while he pitched hay or raked Bayard’s stall with Thomas, George would ask for accounts of his bondage, which he sometimes shared with me. It gave me nightmares to imagine children sold away from their parents, parted forever.

  I want to be brave like Sally and George. I tap Thomas’s shoulder. “What was your life like before you came to the island?”

  Thomas bends down and peers directly into my eyes. “When I was your age, I was a slave in the Colony of Maryland. I shall not recount to you the horrors of my passage to your country, nor the plantation life that shackled me and tore my family apart …,” he trails off, his signs seared in my mind.

  I lower my eyes while he stands and takes up a rake to clear the barn floor of dirty hay.

  Massachusetts abolished slavery within the state in 1783, before I was born, but still it is something the adults prefer not to discuss. There is one slave we honor, Sharper Michael, the only man who died on our shores during the War for Independence.

  Reverend Lee, who once owned a slave, preaches against men being bought and sold as property. Grown folk say the past was different. But Reverend Lee says slavery is against God. The laws changed, and his heart must have too.

  I raise my hand to get Thomas’s attention.

  “I’m sorry,” I sign. I can find no better words.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” he signs back. “The loss of a loved one is the hardest thing to bear.”

  He closes his fist on top of his heart, to demonstrate a pain I feel daily.

  “I want to go back and change what happened,” I sign.

  “Many people would like to turn back time,” Thomas signs. “We must move forward from where we stand. The sun rises every day, and time goes on.” Thomas makes the sign for “conversation” and the sign for “work.”

  I have kept him long enough. He has a list of chores to do for Papa, and Mama is expecting me at home. Sally approaches and looks at me nervously, asking with her eyes if I have told her papa that she approached Bayard. I shake my head to assure her I have not. She smiles.

  Looking up at the sun, I realize I’ve been gone for hours. I wave goodbye and trudge home.

  I find the sitting room empty.

  The smell of chicken soup and a wood fire wafts from the kitchen.

  I can detect Mama’s footsteps upstairs. When the house is alive with activity, I sense vibrations through the wooden floors. Otherwise the house feels silent.

  Silence. I’m sure that many hearing people, especially those who don’t know the deaf, imagine our lives are filled with silence. That’s not true. If my mind and heart are full of energy and fun, and I’m looking ahead with excitement, I don’t feel silent at all. I buzz like a bee in good times. Only in bad times, when I am numb and full of sadness, does everything turn silent. Like our house with just Mama and me in it.

  I climb the stairs slowly. Mama must hear me, but she doesn’t come out to welcome me home. I peek into the room. She is at her loom, her back to me. She has a skein of spun wool in her hand. Her head is bowed. Is she weaving or crying?

  I go downstairs. George’s bedroom is next to Mama and Papa’s and adjacent to the kitchen. I haven’t entered it since the accident. But I need to find the map to chart my course to the old marsh.

  Everything is where George left it eight months ago. There isn’t a trace of sand. Mama must dust his bedroom while I’m out.

  I am nervous as a bag of cats standing here, as if I should have asked permission to enter a room so familiar to me. I have not come here to steal anything, only to retrieve what’s mine.

  The first object that catches my eye is the conch shell that George used as a paperweight. I pick it up and a memory floods back.

  One August day when I was six years old, we swam for hours in the ocean with Papa. It was the day Papa taught me to float on my back. The water was warm on the surface and cold
underneath. Then we combed the beach for shells. Most of them had been pecked at by hungry gulls. But George found the large pink one, perfectly intact.

  Papa signed for George to hold it to his ear.

  George did, and his face lit up.

  “What do you hear?” Papa asked him.

  “The ocean!” George signed, making rolling waves with his hands and arms.

  Papa nodded.

  “How do you know, Papa?” I signed.

  “Mama and others have told me,” he explained. “If you travel from the island,” Papa told George, “take it with you. You’ll always hear our ocean.”

  George smiled. Then something changed in his expression. Tears came to his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him, not wanting the sunny day to be spoiled.

  “You,” he signed, pointing at me and Papa, “will never hear it.”

  “Fine,” Papa signed, reassuring him.

  Now I wonder if it was fine. Then I think of our history since Jonathan Lambert arrived. Papa was right. We are fine as we were made.

  As I caress the shell, I wonder, Does it still make the sound of the ocean without George’s ear to hear it, or is the sea magic gone?

  I put down the shell and cross the room to the chest of drawers. Instead of the map, I find a small box with an owl pellet. We found two pellets at the base of an oak tree last year. I thought they were dung.

  “Mary, look,” George signed, holding them in his hand.

  I took a closer look and noticed that the outside of the pellets was furry. I pet them gently, still a bit disgusted by their strong smell.

  George laughed in his quick, relaxed way.

  “Owls eat small prey and then regurgitate them,” he signed, finger-spelling many of the words. He was never a natural signer.

  When he made the sign for “vomit,” I pulled my hand away. “Vile,” I signed.

  He laughed again and signaled for me to follow him back to our house, where he put the basin from his bedroom on the kitchen table and sent me out for fresh water.

  When I returned, he filled the bowl and put in one owl pellet. The water quickly turned brown. I leaned in closely. Mama stopped what she was doing to come and see what we were up to.

  George loosened the pellet gently, then laid a cloth on the table. He placed small white objects that emerged from the pellet on the cloth. They were thin and curved like small teeth. He set down more and arranged them. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, until he unearthed a very small skull. I watched with fascination as he assembled a mouse’s skeleton! Mama clasped her hands together with delight, and George looked proud. Nature is infinitely mysterious. I wanted to understand how owls knew to create the pellets. I looked in George’s schoolbooks for more details, but I could find none.

  George’s books! Could he have tucked the map inside for safekeeping?

  On a small shelf beside his bed are books that were never returned to Parson Thaxton. It is not like Mama to keep someone else’s property. Perhaps she couldn’t bear to part with anything left in George’s room and Papa paid to replace them.

  I pick up a book of legends and flip through the pages. Nothing. Then a book of Latin grammar. Still nothing. When I open a book about local geography, the map falls out.

  I unfold it and touch the lines. Lines that George drew. My mind conjures up his warmth and light. I try to hold on to the moment, but it fades.

  Nancy and I had wanted a map of Chilmark. Not the kind cartographers make, but a map with all the places that are important to us. George counted drawing among his many talents, so he made it for us. He even included figures of me and Nancy walking on the high road and Smithy down by the Atlantic Ocean.

  I touch the homes of families and friends we frequently visit, Ezra Brewer’s house, the Allen farm, select apple trees, Mr. Pye’s shop bellowing smoke, and the field where Mr. Butler’s oxen wandered when he left his gate open one night.

  It is a map of memories.

  George was always adding new touches. The most recent was Sarah Hillman running from the schoolyard to the fresh spring with angry hornets chasing her. George was working on Thomas carrying a bale of hay when the accident happened.

  A salty tear drops onto the map and stains the ocean.

  I look closely at the path Nancy instructed me to follow tomorrow. It’s somewhere I rarely venture. Littlewoods Lane can be treacherous. The tall marsh grass hides small sinkholes. George marked them with skulls and crossbones.

  These details were not dramatic touches. We have great respect for the power of the old marsh, and its stories of animals and birds caught, unable to free themselves, until they sink and die.

  When we were younger, a group of us went down to the marsh together. Billy Hillman, Sarah’s cousin, believed it was a lake and decided to wade in. He quickly became stuck in the deep, thick mud.

  “Don’t move! Don’t try to free yourself!” George called out and signed.

  But Billy struggled and sank deeper.

  At George’s command, we formed a human chain. George was closest to Billy, and he held his hand while we all pulled so we wouldn’t lose Billy and George. Billy lost only one shoe to the grimy pit.

  The shoe is a landmark on George’s map of memories.

  We never told our parents that we had tested death and won.

  I trace my route for tomorrow. I will keep to the right side of the lane and approach the marsh to the north of Mr. Pye’s shop.

  Vibrations through the floorboards shake me out of my reverie. I quickly put everything back where I found it and step into the kitchen.

  Mama is standing by the table.

  “Heard sounds,” she signs, looking stricken.

  “Sorry,” I sign.

  Mama returns to folding linens, and I have no choice but to finish my chores before supper.

  I wipe the ornate cupboard that has been passed down in our family. I put the dishes and cups I washed on its shelves. I look at Mama with a smile, hoping she’ll praise my delicate work, but she remains absorbed.

  When I return to my dusting, my rag brushes a hanging teacup. It teeters on its hook, slips, and falls, shattering on the wooden floor. It must have made a loud, sharp sound because Mama spins around. I quickly assure her that I will clean up the broken pieces.

  I watch her mouth move, her brow pulled down in a scowl. She is yelling at me, without signing, as she collects the pieces of the cup in her apron. I can see her lips flying as she stomps over to the basin and dumps the shards inside.

  I want to put my hands over my ears to remind her that I cannot hear her scolding. But tears are stinging the backs of my eyes, threatening to spill over. I wipe my wrist against the corner of one irritably.

  I am grateful when Papa comes in, breaking the tension by stomping his heavy boots. He warms his hands by the hearth and pours a cup of tea.

  “Mary,” he signs, brushing his right hand gently across his cheek. He has used that sign for me since I was born and he first stroked my face. Then he pats me on the top of the head, like I am still his little girl.

  In a way, I am. There has always been an easy intimacy between us. I do not believe it is because I was born deaf, like him, but rather because we are similar in spirit. Also, I think it endears me to him that I take after his mother, Lila Lambert, in physical appearance. Like her, I am slender with sunlight-colored hair and hazel eyes.

  Sam is in the kitchen too, warming by the fire. He is white with red spots and brown eyes. Pushing away my upset, I sign “sit,” and Sam does. Papa and I have taught him a dozen signs. Eamon usually keeps him well-brushed, but I gently pull a few burrs from his coat as I pet him.

  Normally, Mama doesn’t want him in the house. But she is not paying attention. She is staring longingly across the kitchen at George’s bedroom.

  Papa and I see what she’s doing. He takes Mama’s hand and gently pecks her on the cheek, before washing and sitting down at the table.

  I serve the chicken
and vegetable soup and join Mama and Papa.

  “Mr. Butler said a young scientist is visiting Chilmark, as Reverend Lee’s guest. I saw them walking up from the beach,” I sign.

  “I have heard the same,” Papa signs. “Maybe we should invite him for supper.” He looks at Mama, who gives no response.

  “John Skiffe is in a rage.” Papa tries a new subject. “He’s convinced that acres of land the Wampanoag were granted access to in perpetuity by the colonies are his forebear’s land, and he’s determined to get them back.”

  If the Wampanoag believe land should be held collectively, they must not understand his claim.

  “Over by the Butler farm?” Mama’s interest is piqued. “I thought he grazed his livestock there.”

  “He did for a while,” Papa signs. “He squatted on the land rather than owning it.”

  “Edward,” Mama signs, “it’s improper to call a neighbor a squatter.”

  I try not to giggle at Papa’s insolence toward Mr. Skiffe.

  “Clarissa, I don’t like to contradict you,” Papa signs sincerely, “but we all started as squatters on this island. In this dispute, the Supreme Court has come down in favor of the Wampanoag of Gay Head.”

  “They often change their rulings,” Mama reminds him.

  I look at Mama. Her eyes appear worried; blue sky with dark clouds.

  “True,” Papa signs thoughtfully.

  “Young Wampanoag men intimidate us!” Mama insists. “Knocking down fences the Church guardians build to unlawfully graze their livestock.”

  “No Wampanoag have harmed us,” Papa signs calmly. “I would not let that happen.”

  Is Mama scared of all Wampanoags? Is she scared of Thomas? Isn’t he our friend?

  Mama nods at Papa and gives a weak smile.

  When we finish eating, Mama and I clear the table, while Papa stokes the fire.

  As I wash the dishes, I tell myself a story about a girl who lives alone in a castle on a distant star where everything glows. The only way that she can communicate with others is with a spyglass. She signs and then looks through the glass to watch for a reply. At night, when the sun is away, it is too dark to see the person on the other end of the spyglass. How can she help but feel all alone?