He tells himself it’s only a claw. Or what’s left of one. The nails digging down into the earth. The white digits, which seem to be clasping a large quohog shell, are just visible, rising out of the damp, stony soil. Like something grasping for purchase. A creature struggling to get back to the air and sea. To live again.
During the winter much of Buzzards Bay had been frozen solid until a Coast Guard icebreaker cut a path through for ships to transit the Cape Cod Canal. A mound of ice gathered on the southwest side of Bird Island. Storms drove the ice floe half way across the flat, acre-and-a-half island, piled ice in heaps halfway up the sides of the thirty-seven foot lighthouse. Chunks as big as cars flattened everything, including the fences erected to stop erosion and protect the nests of seabirds.
Now the thaw has taken hold. Late March and the first spurt of warm weather is settling over Cape Cod, the south coast of Massachusetts and Buzzards Bay that divides them. The ice has melted at last, leaving the island rutted, bruised. Great swaths of spartina, beach plums, and poison ivy have been scraped away, the guts of the island tilled to the surface. Rough patches of rocks, mud, and sand steam in the morning sun.
Bird Island always has remains of dead seabirds scattered about. Corby Church never pays much attention to them when he comes out from Slocums Harbor to tend the light. The island is an important nesting area for roseate terns. They are small spitfires of birds. Their skeletons fine as mouse bones.
But this claw is much bigger. At first, he thinks that maybe it came from a herring gull, a cormorant, a merganser. But there is no sign of webbed skin between the toes. So perhaps it belonged to an osprey, an owl. Even an eagle.
A raptor might have been raiding the terns’ nests last summer. Kidnapping fat little hatchlings. Maybe a flock of terns attacked it before it could get airborne again. Raptors are slow and clumsy getting aloft, especially with a load. He pictures them as heavy bombers. Terns are daredevils, stunt pilots. Fearless. When he comes ashore on the island during nesting season, they strafe him from all directions. Still, he loves the terns. They are great fishers, and they protect their families against all comers. They could kill a raptor if enough of them attacked it. So maybe the owner of this claw got his just desserts.
The terns have not returned to nest yet. So Church is alone on the island carrying a buttoned-up golf umbrella in his hand, like a trusty walking stick. He uses it as a poker to push at the claw.
“Who are you? What dirty deed brought you to your death on my island?”
Standing over the claw in his canvas field coat, khaki pants, and clamming boots, Corby Church looks rugged. A character of the New England coast like the fishermen in The Perfect Storm. Age—early-to-mid 40s. With his old-school wayfarer sunglasses, wavy, sandy hair just going gray at the temples, he puts some of the townspeople in mind of the actor Jeff Bridges.
His lips purse as he uses the tip of his umbrella to prod at the place where the digits sink into the soil. He figures that with a little pushing he could dig up the rest of the carcass and put the little mystery of this island interloper to rest. Pass on his findings to the Woods Hole scientists who monitor the tern colony out here.
Then he can get back to work. There’s a lot to do this morning, his first visit to the island after the long, hard winter. He’s the Slocums Harbor harbormaster. The town is the custodian of the island and re-lit the old lighthouse thirteen years ago after nearly seventy years of dormancy. It’s part of his job to make sure the solar panels, wires, storage batteries, witching, and light are dry, clean. In working order. He likes tinkering with the equipment, tending to the tower itself. But the island is more to him than a job. After years of caring for the lighthouse, he has come to think of himself as the keeper of the island and the light. He knows every scrap of its history and lore, has a file drawer in his office dedicated to Bird Island. Subscribes to the Lighthouse Digest, even writes articles for it.
The tip of the umbrella catches on something beneath the surface. He drops down on his haunches, twists, jimmies the dirt. Pries at what has to be an even bigger bird carcass than he thought.
The earth erupts with bones—but not the leg bones of a raptor. Finger bones. Stubby little wrist bones spill out onto the ground in a mess. Then he sees the grimy, gray shafts of a forearm.
Radius and ulna, he thinks, remembering anatomy class at college. At Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
His poker’s tip catches inside a metal ring chained to something still under the ground. It looks like an antique handcuff.
“Holy shit. Christ.”
He drops the umbrella, lets it fall beside the bones, jumps to his feet and takes a step back. His chest heaves a wheezy sigh. Then, he listens to the morning’s southeast breeze beginning to whir around the lighthouse tower, the rush of waves against the stone seawall. A sad smile begins to ghost over his face. It’s the look of a man starting to face off with fear. With memory.
* * *
Mid-April, 1988. He’s keeping a lookout. Standing by the bones on the beach at Whale Cay. Watching. The boat will come for the rendezvous … when the moon goes down.
He paces, circles around the carcass of a beached dolphin. Stares at the skull, the teeth, the spine, the ribs. But mostly he looks at what is left of the pectoral fins. In the fading moonlight the fin bones seem like arms, with wrists and hands and fingers.
His bowels ache with emptiness. He loves the warm trade winds and the mild blue days here in the islands. Everything about the pink sand, the palms bending in the breeze, the jacks leaping in the waves. The smell of salt and wild hibiscus. The potcake dogs with their broods. But at night it’s a different story. The wind burns him. He feels the rhythm of this world lit only by smoldering stars, hot blood, a promiscuous moon.
The skeletal hands of the dolphin spread out on the beach. Lines and crests and loops of salt, a jagged script, trail away from the white digits. As if they were writing a message in the sand just at the creature’s hour of death. A love letter, a confession, a warning from another world. In a language he cannot read this hot April night. In the Abaco Islands chain. The eastern Bahamas. Beneath the fading light of a pale moon. When the sharks feed.
