Beyond The Bright Sea

I’ll never know for sure when I was born. Not exactly. On the morning Osh found me, I was just hours old, but he had no calendar and didn’t much care what day it was. So we always marked my birth on whatever midsummer day felt right. The same was true of my other milestones: moments that had nothing to do with calendars. Like the day Mouse showed up at our door, whisker thin, and decided the cottage was hers, too. Much as I had.
Or the first time Osh let me take the tiller of our skiff while he sat in the bow and let the sun coddle his face for a while, his back against the mast, the fine spray veiling him in rainbows. Or the ebb tide when a white-sided dolphin stranded on our shore, Osh gone somewhere, and I came back from Cuttyhunk to find her rocking and heaving, her cries babylike and afraid. I used my bare hands to scoop away the wet sand that stuck her fast. And I grabbed her crescent flukes and tugged, inch by inch, until the water lifted her enough so we both slipped back suddenly into the sea.
She looked me in the eye as she passed, as if to memorize what I was at that moment. As if to say that I should remember this, too, no matter what happened later.
None of which had anything to do with calendars.
Still, I know I’d lived on that tiny island for eight years before I began to be more than just curious about my name. The dream that woke me, wondering anew about my name, was full of stars and whales blowing and the lyrics of the sea. When I opened my eyes, I lay for a minute, watching Osh as he stood at the stove, cooking porridge in a scabby pot.
I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “Why is my name Crow?” I asked.
When Osh stirred the porridge, the spoon made a sound like a boat being dragged across the beach. “I’ve told you,” he said. “You were hoarse with crying when you washed up here. You cawed over and over. So I called you Crow.”
That answer had always been enough before. But it didn’t explain everything. And everything was what I had begun to want.
“In English?” I asked.
Osh sometimes spoke in a language I didn’t know, his voice like music, especially when he prayed, but also when he painted his pictures of the islands and the sea. When I first asked Osh about it, he said that it was one of the few things he’d kept from life before the island. Before me.
Even though he did not speak it often, that other tongue flavored his English so he sounded different from everyone else. Miss Maggie called it his accent. But I thought maybe it was everyone else who had an accent.
“No, not English at first,” he said. “But people here speak English. So: Crow.”
I stood and stretched the night out of my bones. My arms, in the thin morning light, looked almost nothing like wings.
But when I stepped onto a stool in front of our mirror-just big enough for a face-I could see the resemblance in the curve of my nose. The birthmark on my cheek that looked like a little feather. My hair, darker than anyone else’s. My dark eyes. My skin, like Osh’s after six months in the sun.
I looked down at my skinny legs, my bony feet.
Plenty of other reasons to be called Crow besides the way I had once cried.