Out of the Wild Night Read online

  “Exactly.” Sal nodded. “And sometimes they’re around for a while, when needed, and then they’re gone for decades but later return. I’ll never pretend to understand how it all works, but I do think they try to help us out.”

  “Hey, ghosts!” Phee called suddenly. “All you ghosts! Please help us to find homes for more families, can you?”

  I recognized Phee’s strong feelings about home. She is a child who understands the sting of loss.

  The kitchen was silent for a moment … and then a handbell sitting on the windowsill rang, a clear diiiiing!

  As Phee gave Sal a wide-eyed look, feet clumped down the stairs outside the kitchen door, boom-boom-bam, as if wearing loose fishing boots.

  Sal hopped up and peered out the back door. He shook his head.

  “Just like Flossie,” murmured Sal. “Funny, she used to walk heavily on those steps and loved borrowing my boots. One of these days she’ll be back with us. Sometimes I think the house sends out remembered sounds for no reason at all, to fill the corners. Maybe it was you who did it, calling to the ghosts just now. Well … Your mother will be pleased about what we’re trying to do, I know that.”

  “Think she’s okay?” Phee asked, her voice small.

  “Of course I do.” Her grandfather’s voice was deep and calm. “As I said, this home of ours sometimes chimes in.”

  Both sat in silence for a moment, watching the embers glow in the kitchen stove.

  “My dad was an immigrant here,” Phee noted, as if finishing a thought. “Maybe that’s why Jules and Flossie didn’t live with you, even when you asked. Maybe that’s why he went back to Haiti. The ghosts in the house.”

  Another silence. “I think it was something between the two of them, plus your mother’s need to be independent,” Sal said. He looked tired. “We Folgers rarely forget that we were immigrants at one time, too,” he added.

  Neither noticed that all three of the inside doors to the kitchen had drifted wide open, as if the house was listening.

  November 12.

  As far as Sal knows, the kids in the Old North Gang are beginning their work today, standing on the sidelines and reporting.

  They return to Lydia Lyon’s house. My heart beats faster.

  “GO!” I shout to them. “Closer!”

  In the last three days, a dumpster has been filled to the top with old boards and beams. Eddy Nold now plans to lift the entire house, resting it on scaffolding in order to dig out the basement, a job that buys us some time, as they are ignoring what’s left of the upper floors.

  The very sight of all that ugly destruction makes me fluttery with fear. Hollower than the hollowest pumpkin.

  Men circle the foundation, pointing and talking. A bulldozer sits idle nearby. Now the contractor marches around the corner.

  “There.” He points. “Start by that huge fieldstone. I’ll just step inside to see whether—” His voice is muffled as he ducks in what was once the front door and looks up at the chimney. A brick shoots down from above, hitting him on the forehead.

  “Holy creepers!” he shouts, and backs away. One boot plunges beneath the flooring. Suddenly he’s down on his knees, sunglasses hanging from one ear, blood trickling from a cut above his eyebrow, eyes almost as big as Mrs. Rebimbas’s wonders.

  “You okay in there, boss?” one of the workers asks.

  “Sure thing,” Eddy says, staggering out. He dabs at his forehead and brushes off his pants. A loud giggle comes from nowhere, and the Nold group spins around. The Gang look just as surprised. The adults frown. The kids nod hello to the adults, but there’s no response.

  One of the workers covers his mouth and then clears his throat, turning away.

  Eddy narrows his eyes. “Let’s just get this dig launched,” he barks.

  “Why aren’t they making us leave?” Markus whispers to Paul.

  “Because we’re small,” Maddie whispers with a grin.

  “Speak for yourself.” Cyrus pokes her.

  “She is,” Maria snaps back.

  Tempers are wearing thin.

  An hour later, the site is deserted minus the kids and Eddy Nold’s truck.

  Once Eddy gave the order to begin excavation, the bulldozer’s ignition stuck and then the on-site generator blew. It looked to me like sabotage—but whether or not there were ghosts behind it, I couldn’t say.

  I don’t seem able to see spirits the way Gabe does.

  Shaking his head, Eddy sent his workers home early and retreated to sit in his truck, dab at his head, and make phone calls.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” he shouted, his voice carrying through glass. “Crazy, just everything going wrong. Yep, yep, that’s right, we’re taking a slow-down day. Tomorrow, sure thing.”

  The Gang had wandered quietly to the back of the house as Eddy talked, hoping he wouldn’t notice. Gabe stood next to Phee, looking up at the second floor.

  Suddenly he stiffened, squinted, and raised a hand as if to say, Be right there. Phee touched his shoulder. “Careful,” she said softly.

  Gabe nodded and opened the back door. The interior looked dark and gloomy. He stepped inside, and the house seemed to swallow him whole.

  While Gabe is in Lydia Lyon’s house, Eddy drives off. I flip back through time, running my fingers over the days. I do this when I’m nervous and unable to ring or call out.

  Hands can speak.

  It was Phee who came up with the name Nantucket Hands over a year ago.

  “That’s it, Sal! Let’s start a kind of adventure club, only it’ll be for people of all ages who are struggling to stay here, you know?”

  The idea began back when she and her grandfather first bumped fists, when she was a little girl.

  “Mmm …” Sal was examining a leaky window. “Like the name. And how will this club help folks out?”

  “By making people care about each other. And believe everything will fall into place,” Phee said promptly. “Like you always do for me.”

  “I do?” Sal grinned at her. “Now, what makes you think that?”

  Phee poked her grandfather. “Come on, you silly! You even make ghosts sound normal.”

  “Which they are,” Sal added.

  Over the next hour, they sat on the steps of the Folger house and made a plan.

  By spring, Nantucket Hands would begin its work: uniting people who were struggling to earn a living in the island trades, wanted to stay, but didn’t qualify for affordable housing. Helping them share with, and gather strength from, one another and then—and this mattered a great deal to Sal and Phee—find the right footing to work toward having year-round homes.

  Sal hoped for funds so that the group could go on expeditions. These might include a picnic at Altar Rock—the highest hill in the moors—a trip to the Lifesaving Museum, or perhaps even a day of fishing. A visit to the so-called Oldest House, built in 1686, or a clambake on a remote beach. Everyone would return to their everyday lives feeling less alone. That, and proud of the special island they called home, whether or not they had been born here.

  Sal wished that everyone in Nantucket Hands would grow to recognize herself or himself in the history of the place. Without being mushy, he would send out the message that friends mattered and that to live by your hands on this island was to belong.

  “I don’t have all the answers, Phee,” he had warned her at the start. “This island is a dot in the ocean, and there won’t be room for every single person who wants to stay and work, you know? There’s no overflow town down the road, like on the mainland. But we who live here can do better at honoring the ways we lived in the past, not just telling stories about them. We could begin by not destroying any more of the strongholds of our ghosts, places as unchanged as this house, and not forgetting that they were built by people who knew how to survive. Boy, did they know how! The past might hold more solutions than people realize.”

  “Do ghosts get things done?” Phee asked, her hands on her hips.

  “Well now, if y
ou don’t scare them away, they might,” Sal said.

  I must say, I agree! Ghosts, like the Gang, will not give up easily.

  Has Nantucket Hands gone on an actual adventure? I am the Crier, but admit that I can’t keep track of everything at every moment, nor can I do much about how busy things get around here, even in a windless November.

  At any rate, joining hands is forever a good thing, as Mrs. Rebimbas knew, and it could help us through these dangerous times.

  Nantucket has a bouquet of cultures it couldn’t claim in my day. Perhaps that jumble of languages and hopes will save us all.

  Unlike many kids growing up here now, I, Mary W. Chase, only ever spoke plain old English, although we learned some Latin in the schools. “Latin will make you learned,” my aunt used to say as she snapped beans or pared potatoes. Knowing I couldn’t seem to spell or read easily, she’d say learn-ed as if it were two words, leaning on the syllables. I was clumsy with a knife and slow at school, mostly because my head was filled with other things.

  Aunt Thankful had spent her adult life caring for elderly parents, and was always trying to improve me. In an effort to make me a better person, she forced me to sit quietly in the house, hands in my lap, for at least an hour a day.

  Was she trying to make me like her? I don’t think it worked.

  Her slowing me down inside only made me more determined to escape. I was happiest on my own and thoughtful around all the things that made me curious, like the language of clouds or how a crow can become friends with a human.

  Meeting kids from far-off parts of the world might have made me less shy. I could’ve spent time with others who were also asking questions.

  I might’ve had a voice while I was alive.

  Gabe waved hello to someone unseen before stepping into the Lyon home. Who was it?

  I can’t help wishing that Gabe were a powerful crow with wings and not a boy! I’d feel better if he wasn’t alone with ghosts in a wreck of a house.

  He and the others have a brave plan, that’s for sure. While Gabe is inside, the Gang waits wordlessly outside Mrs. Lyon’s place, looking at a building and yard that were once filled with laughter and the patter of small feet. What happened to all the good smells of stew cooking in a big pot, the dance of clothes drying on the line, the chatter of a garden in bloom?

  Where does the busy beat of living go when it’s gone?

  The kids whisper together as the afternoon darkens, wondering if it’s time to chase their friend.

  Why am I thinking of crows, those birds that fear few others and become invisible at night?

  I realize crows have lots in common with lonely kids. Not lonely—that sounds bad. Grown-alone kids. Like me and like Phee. Or Flossie. Or Sal. Or Gabe. All raised as the only kid in a home.

  Crows are survivors. Like Criers, they announce what matters.

  If a person is mean to a crow, that crow will be mean back. I’m telling the truth. They will shriek and sometimes even dive on nasty people. I once saw a crow grab the feather off a neighbor’s hat, but only after she’d waved her arms and scared the birds away from her crab apple tree. And for no reason, as she wasn’t using the apples that year; her yard was a carpet of delicious reds.

  That woman never did it again.

  The house my aunt Thankful lived in all her life has a millstone in the backyard. A big, flat rock once brought to the island by a miller who lived there before her parents did. He had ordered the wrong size for one of the four island windmills, and so he carted it home. To me it was a table. It’s still there.

  I picked daisies and braided them right on that flat, smooth top. I took my dolls for walks around the edges and lined up treasures I’d pocketed while running around, objects like a nail twisted into a question mark, a chipped bit of crystal from a lamp, or a bright shard of crockery, finds that jumped out underfoot. In those days, people threw broken household goods out back, so there was plenty to discover.

  Crows always notice what is in a person’s hand, and they do like a sparkle.

  One day I was sitting on the millstone having a snack while my aunt hung the bedsheets. A crow watched me eat. First his head went one way and then the other. His eyes were bright and shining, like bits of polished coal.

  Very quietly—Aunt Thankful would have been angry if she’d seen me wasting good food—I put a bite-sized piece of bread next to a blue-and-gold chip of china, something I had found. I looked at the crow and tapped the spot with my finger. Then I stood up and walked away.

  The crow watched me and also my aunt, who hadn’t noticed what I’d done.

  Minutes later we were inside, folding shirts. I was peeking out the window.

  The crow swooped down and ate the bread. Then he looked at the chip, turning his head from side to side. He picked it up in his beak and flew away.

  The next day, there was a bright-red bead on the millstone, right on that spot. Truly, it made me as happy as if he’d left a ruby.

  The crow and I were great friends from that moment on. We gave each other many presents—opalescent buttons, a twist of shiny ribbon, the handle from a daffodil-yellow teacup, a silver buckle missing its tongue, a bent hat pin. I always kept the crow’s gifts carefully arranged in ocean clamshells sitting on the millstone. I called it my museum. It stayed outside except in bad weather, and the crow never took back what he’d already given.

  My aunt couldn’t admit he was special, but she left my museum alone. One day, the crow didn’t return and I had no idea why.

  Aunt Thankful didn’t talk about sadness, instead treating it like a rotten spot in a turnip. Something to carve out and toss away. I looked for my crow for years, and somehow the story of my crow and me became known around town when I was growing up.

  Sal heard the story from his parents, and decades later, he told Phee. She began watching crows in the backyard trees.

  Have you heard the term a murder of crows, meaning a group of crows? It goes back to the 1400s in Europe, and might date to the fact that crows sometimes snack on dead creatures. Or perhaps it’s just their rough cry, size, and deep-black feathers.

  Maybe it’s all of the above, plus the fact that crows reason and remember, making them capable of murder.

  After my crow vanished, I felt better when I thought about him being so tough.

  Still no Gabe. But oddly, a crow now flies overhead, circles the Lyon house, and alights on a nearby tree. I see Phee squinting at the bird.

  I peer, too, feeling guilty. I hope with all my heart that Gabe can work with the ghosts inside, and that they save the Lyon house and then mine.

  Selfish of me, I know.

  Maybe I’m not that important. Perhaps a crow could be just as good at being a Crier.

  “Hey!” I call to the crow. “Can you help that boy? Will you help us all? I’m the girl who made friends with someone in your family long ago!” The bird looks down at me, black eyes gleaming. He turns his head to one side and then the other, as if to be sure it’s really me.

  He flaps his wings, looking larger than life. I step back. Now a closer sound, a stumble-thump: A boy pops out through the door. Gabe! In one piece! The other members of the Gang surround him in a rush. I try to eavesdrop but can’t hear what he’s saying.

  I look up, wanting to thank the crow. It’s gone.

  I slump, relieved but worn by worry, and settle for seeing the Gang hurry off together, Gabe in the middle. I look back toward the silent Lyon house but see no other children.

  Now Gabe raises a hand in a see-you-later way. My heart jumps for just a moment, until I remember the other ghosts nearby. No, I’m not seen.

  The crow soars between us and cuts off my view. It circles by as if to say, That’s enough for now. No more curiosity. Take your bead and go!

  I do, spreading the news.

  People here talk about “the Nantucket way,” which means giving what’s needed, but not in a showy manner.

  More like a crow or like Sal.

  He always ma
de enough for his family to get by on through word of mouth, although how that worked was something of a mystery. He’d fix a roof or seal a leak in the bottom of a boat and then refuse to leave a bill. Friends knew what to do. Either they’d leave an envelope with cash in the Folger mail basket by the front door or start delivering a bunch of fish or vegetables. Sal rarely said thank you. Nor did he expect anyone to say it to him.

  He’d be out on a job and someone might stop by and ask casually if he could fix their rotten porch. While he was working on that porch, a neighbor down the street might leave a note on his bike, asking him to please replace a few storm windows when he had the time. One thing led to another.

  “Once an islander, always an islander,” Sal explained to Phee when she asked him why he liked patching instead of doing work that paid regular money. “Kids born here have a lifelong advantage. They understand, from day one, that a life can be built this way.” Sal paused, looking down at his scarred palms.

  Phee knows every line on those hands. She can close her eyes and picture them without seeing.

  “It’s our way of being human,” Sal added. “And it’s efficient. These old houses were built to survive, and their materials actually last longer and adapt better than most modern materials. An old wooden house expands and shrinks; it understands how to be moist and then dry without damage; it breathes. Very little is absolutely flat or level, which does confuse some people. Take the lime-based plaster made with ground oyster shells and horsehair, the stuff that’s still on our walls here; it absorbs both noise and moisture better than drywall. And these old wooden beams and floors that came from first-growth American trees: This is denser and therefore stronger lumber, and because it changes with the seasons, it lasts. Some young folks in construction don’t know that, and honestly think old equals weak.

  “No sirree. Not around here.” Sal grinned.

  I grinned, too.

  Recently, Sal has noticed something very odd happening toward the back of the Folger property.