Bright Island
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 1937 by Random House, Inc., copyright renewed 1964 by Howell A. Inghram and George C. Thompson
Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Dan Williams
Interior illustrations copyright © 1937 by Random House, Inc., copyright renewed 1964 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Mabel Louise, 1874–1962.
Bright Island / Mabel L. Robinson; Lynd Ward. — 75th anniversary ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When sixteen-year-old Thankful Curtis must leave Bright Island, Maine, for the first time in 1937, she has trouble adjusting to life on the mainland, new people, and “proper schooling,” and yearns for her days of farming with her father and sailing.
eISBN: 978-0-375-97137-2
[1. Boarding schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Maine—Fiction. 5. Coming of age—Fiction. 6. Islands—Maine—Fiction. 7. Maine—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Ward, Lynd, 1905–1985, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.R5674Br 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2012009178
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1_r1
To Mildred, a valiant sailor
and
To Ruth, who sailed her into port and came back alone.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART I
ON BRIGHT ISLAND Bright Island
What’s a Girl For?
In the Fog and Rain
Holding the Summer Captive
Migrating Time
PART II
AWAY FROM BRIGHT ISLAND A Strange Land About Her
Learning that Lies in Books
Learning that Lies in People
False Summer
PART III
BRIGHT ISLAND NOW AND THEN Bright Island Thanksgiving
The Business of Producing Cinderella
A Stranger on Bright Island
The Stranger Leaves Bright Island
Breaking Through Winter
A Course in Navigation
PART IV
BACK TO BRIGHT ISLAND Scudding Before Heavy Weather
To the Lee of Bright Island
About the Author
PART I
On Bright Island
Bright Island
Out where the quiet bay widened into the darker blue of the ocean, Bright Island lay quite alone. Its bay shore was curved into a smooth cove which caught sunsets on its yellow sand. It climbed toward the ocean end through pastures of sweet fern, lifting itself by boulders rougher and barer until it flung a headland of them out into the sea where the water was never still. Where the rocks reared highest some strange writhing of the earth had left a mass of gleaming white stone which held the sun all day. The lobstermen set their course by Bright Island.
The island was complete; cool woods, meadows of blowing hay for animals, and a weathered gray house on the sheltered bay. The hot July sun poured over its silver roof but the curtains blew out with the sharp breeze which ruffled the bay into shining fragments of light. Even without the wood smoke from the kitchen chimney the island had the air of a place where people lived. A faint cowbell, the bleat of a lamb, the neat rows of green potatoes, a lobster boat swinging at its mooring with Sunday idleness. The house had no neighbors but it seemed to need none.
The kitchen door opened with an energetic pull and a woman peered out at the bay under the shade of her hand. She saw what she evidently expected, a white sail in a slip of a boat just dipping out of sight around the point of the cove. “It mightn’t be too much to expect,” she reflected aloud, “if you have a girl that she should be some help on a day like this. Well, it will be something to be thankful for if she turns up at all.” She tested her oven and slid two pans of trussed-up chickens on the hot grate. “Shouldn’t have named her that, I suppose. Seems to set her to doing things that wouldn’t make anyone thankful. Aye, but she can’t be young but once,” and she fell to thinking of her own young days as she pared the vegetables at the wooden sink. Six boys she had raised on this island, all grown but the two in the small graveyard fenced in from the sheep. She could see it from her kitchen window. Four fine boys left to her, all married and away on the mainland. They were all grown and well scared that night she was taken. She could remember the dream as if it happened last night of her painful toiling up the steep hill at home in Scotland, the one called Rest-And-Be-Thankful. Sharp stones cut her all the way and harsh winds buffeted her. But at the top the sun shone and the green hills of Scotland stretched away at her tired feet and she was suddenly filled with peace. When she came back to her senses and knew that the seventh baby was a girl she decided to rest and be thankful, and that should be the baby’s name. Thankful they called her, and as there was no minister on the island for a christening only her mother knew her full name.
She was contented enough, this Scotch woman on a Maine island, and if the daughter wasn’t turning out the sonsie buxom creature that she could expect of a Scotch lass, she had too many other concerns to worry about Thankful. In spite of her homesick dream of the home mountain she would rather live here than anywhere else in the world. She felt a queen in a well-ordered domain, well-ordered because she herself carried out her own orders. That was the kind of queen to be.
Today the sons and their wives were coming over from the mainland for Sunday dinner. Mary Curtis would not have asked them at just this time when the berries were ripe and needing her care, but they had suggested it themselves. “Some kind of advice those girls think they should be giving us, it’s likely,” she speculated. “Well, it never does them any harm to give it.” She made room for a big blueberry pie in the crowded oven. “Wonder if Jonathan found all his clean clothes. Oh, you did, didn’t you?” to the man who looked so clean that she needed no answer. She got none. Jonathan usually let her answer her own questions. But he saw to it that his own were answered. “Where’s Thankful?” he said.
Mary Curtis said she didn’t know and it was quite obvious that she was more interested in the state of the chickens than in the location of Thankful. “Sunday’s her day off from lessons,” she offered, “and she’s out in her boat somewhere. She’s still missing Gramp, I guess.”
“And could she not help her mother with eight people on the way to dinner?” Jonathan looked grimmer than Mary liked to see him.
“Here”—she took a clean tablecloth out of a drawer—“set the table with the best dishes. She’ll be along soon. She didn’t want to see them much anyway.”
“Well, why wouldn’t she?” Jonathan bent his lanky length over the table, smoothing the cloth with big painstaking fingers. “Her own brothers, ain’t they?”
“Not all of ’em,” chuckled his wife. “Don’t forget the wives.”
“Not likely to.” Jonathan held the bitter conviction that these mainland girls had stolen his boys away from the island.
“Anyway,” Mary comforted him, “the babies have to go to their other grandfolks. We’ll have
none of them underfoot.” She liked children well enough but she had brought up her own and as far as grandchildren were concerned she was still determined to rest and be thankful. “Well, things are about ready. See if you can hear Jed’s powerboat.” She looked as unhurried and cool as if she had been sitting in her rocker all the morning. “Small need I have of help,” she remarked to the empty room, “but the lass better get to the mooring before her brothers.”
Again she shaded her eyes and looked out over the cove. The putt-putt of the motorboat was just around the point. The light breeze had died out and the bay lay flat and white in the noon sun. She shook her head. “Becalmed. Another good excuse for not getting here. Her father will be in a fury.”
The sound grew louder and she reached for a towel to wave. The boys always expected this greeting. Then she began to laugh. The powerboat chugged into the bay tugging a small sailboat which still flaunted a useless sail. In the stern she could see the sun-bleached head of her daughter who held the tiller to the very mooring. “And who will be in a fury now?” She felt sorry for the child dragged home at the tail of a powerboat to a dinner which she hated, but there were the vegetables to dish up, and cold water to draw from the well. Thankful couldn’t run wild all the time. She sighed a little herself for the quiet which would not be hers again until sundown.
It was soon gone, that peace which seemed to belong to the old gray house. It never had seemed overfull when the boys lived in it, Mary Curtis thought. It must be the wives. There seemed to be more than enough of them to go round. The girls chittered and chattered so. Thankful had disappeared again, her mother hoped to put on a clean dress. The girls fussed so over her overalls, even for sailing. Too bad they couldn’t have found her at home all tidied up.
Everybody was offering to help, but Mary Curtis, moving competently among their protestations, had dinner on the table before their outstretched hands could seize a dish. Just as heads were bowed for grace Thankful slid into the only empty chair and ducked her pale mop of hair over her plate. In the first solemn moment after her father’s Sunday prayer, all of the eyes, pairs and pairs of them, bored into her. Except mother who was testing the edge of the carving knife. Thankful met them fleetingly under the fine wings of dark eyebrows which gave her a startled look.
She stared at her plate again until she was sure that food had taken their attention. Then she watched them speculatively with eyes that seemed to be measuring them up. Ethel, the big blonde, moved uneasily under the scrutiny. The rest watched the division of the white meat. Thankful had the kind of eyes that belong to lighthouse keepers and island dwellers, deep blue used to seeing quiet scenes as well as storms. The way they looked out under the dark winged eyebrows and the mop of hair bleached lighter than her sun-warmed skin made her what the girls called an odd-looking child. Ethel always said it was hardly decent that a girl as old as that should wear so few clothes but perhaps she spoke out of an envy for the long light body they failed to cover suitably. Thankful looked fragile but no one knew better than Ethel, who had once tried to discipline her, how false an impression she gave. Thankful came of strong stock.
The boys looked it, hard-muscled all of them except Homer who had softened in his clerk’s job. His father eyed him contemptuously. Though Homer was his mother’s boy, not his. They had alternated in naming the boys, and Jonathan’s boys were like their names, rough and plain. Jed, the oldest, owned a powerboat which supplied lobsters to the big fish markets. Silas, the third boy, was fire warden on the mountain though his wife and children spent most of their time with her folks at the foot of it.
Mary Curtis chose her names from the books she had studied and taught in the days in Scotland before she had come to America. And both her boys had indoor jobs. Homer, the clerk in the town bank, and Petrarch, who owned his grocery store and ran it with profit. Among them all Thankful had early learned the art of dodging and disappearing. They seldom caught her as they had today. It was the wind, she thought resentfully.
The wives Thankful scarcely bothered to keep separate. They looked alike and talked alike and acted alike. She wondered how the brothers had ever selected them. She knew how steadily they were trying to make her alike, too, and learned a different kind of dodging. “It’s as hard to put your finger on her,” Ethel said, “as if she was greased lightning. I hope no child of mine will take after her.” But so far she had seen no signs.
“Seems kinda queer not to be hollering at old Gramp.” Gladys poured gravy over her potato. “He was getting pretty hard to talk to.”
Thankful’s eyes flew to the little fenced-in graveyard with its big new mound. She almost expected Gramp to come in and settle Gladys for that remark. Didn’t the silly idiot know that the reason he was hard to talk to was because he wouldn’t listen to her emptiness? And all he had to do was to shoot one glance at Gladys under those black eyebrows, and didn’t she squinch up! It was like a clan when Gramp sat there erect at the head of the long table with Jed, the oldest boy, on one side and Thankful, the youngest girl, on the other. He ruled his clan well, that old sea captain, and Thankful thought she would never be through missing him.
Out of all the strong boys the girl was his favorite, the only one of them that cared for the sea. Thankful looked at her father bent with the tasks of the land and saw him through Gramp’s eyes. She could hear him telling how he had sent his boy, Jonathan, to sea only to have him sick all the way across, and back with a schoolteacher wife he had picked up in Glasgow, and a set against the sea that no one could alter. “But an island is next best to the ship,” she could hear him say, “and this one has always belonged to us and always will, please God.”
He had suffered when the boys, one by one, took up their lives on the mainland. “And where will Bright Island go next?” he would ask. “There’s only you, my girl, that can abide it.”
“I would live nowhere else,” Thankful would promise him. “I will marry a sea captain and when we have sailed all over the world we will settle here and have ten children, all sailors.” Gramp would laugh, but he liked to hear her say it.
He had built her a boat and cut the sail and sewed it. She had helped, and they rubbed it down and polished it like a piece of rare old furniture. He had cut the letter patterns for the name, Thankful, and one day when he was busy she had taken those she could use and cut others until when he came back he found painted on the stern in letters that slid a bit, The Gramp. She could still hear him roaring at her, but he let them stay.
Thankful sighed softly and listened to voices nearer. Jed was talking to her and she liked him best. “And what would you think of that, old Corn-tossel?” he was asking. He grinned at her puzzled face. “Haven’t heard a word of it all, I’ll bet.”
Gladys interrupted his good-natured protest. “I should think she might at least listen when we take the pains to plan things for her.”
Thankful was still so close to Gramp that she wanted to reply in his words, “Who asked you, and who wants you, to plan for me?” She didn’t know how exactly like him she looked out under her dark brows at Gladys, but she noticed her startled blink. Gladys did not interrupt Jed again.
“Time you had some real schooling, we think.” We means the girls, Thankful thought scornfully. “All of us boys had to go over to mainland High long before this. Of course”—he nodded respectfully toward his mother—“of course she knows how to teach you and you’ll learn more Latin and Algebra than you’ll ever need. But we think …” He hesitated.
“We think,” finished his wife, “that a little wholesome life with other young people would do you no harm.” She looked around the table for support.
To Thankful’s faint dismay they all seemed to be giving it to her. But after all, she thought, they’re not my father and mother. “I have my lessons every morning, don’t I, mother?” she offered.
“Certainly do,” responded Mrs. Curtis briskly. “A good learner, too. Got all the Latin I know.”
“That’s just it,” Sadie lea
ped in, “she’s got to stop because there’s no one to teach her any more.”
“At that,” said her husband dryly, “she knows more than you, my girl.”
Thankful flashed him a grateful glance. Sadie had the air of settling with Silas later.
Jed went on with patience but as if he wished someone else would undertake the job. “You could take turns staying with us, except Silas, of course, on top of the mountain.” Only place I would stay, Thankful thought, if I was silly enough to stay anywhere but here. “Pete has a nice little car to take you over to school in bad weather. And there’s the movies twice a week. And church socials, and—and …” His voice trailed away under the blank unresponsiveness of Thankful’s face. “Well,” he said cheerily, “what do you think of the idea?”
Thankful felt about in her mind for something satisfactory and found nothing. “Thank you, Jed, and the rest of you”—her eyes touched the circle of faces pressing in on her—“it would be very nice. Especially the mountain.” There, she didn’t mean to say that! “But I like it here. And I wouldn’t think of bothering you. And mother’s a good teacher. And well—I guess I’ll stay here. Thank you.” Now that was settled. She drew a long breath and wondered how soon she could get away from the table. Her gull, Limpy, was yelling for his dinner out there on the Gramp where she had left him so that he wouldn’t hop on the dinner table. And her goat was scrapping with Rosy, the lamb, who teased him and could take ample care of herself, and the breeze had come up again and was flapping her sail which she hadn’t stopped to furl, and altogether what was the use of wasting any more time here? The girls always washed the dishes.
“ ’Scuse me, please,” she muttered, and pushed back her chair.
“Wouldn’t go just yet, Thankful.” Surprisingly enough her mother had taken a hand. “Might as well settle this thing.”
“I did,” murmured Thankful poised on the edge of the chair.