The Map of Small Islands

At ten minutes to six on Monday, the eleventh of July, 1927, the Star Route truck came down the hill into Tarbox Harbor with its headlamps still lit against a sky the color of skim milk, and Elias was already on the wharf to meet it.

The village was barely awake. Smoke stood straight up from two chimneys. The shut cannery leaned over its own reflection, and the gulls on its ridgepole watched the truck the way they watched everything, in case it turned out to be food. Down the ladder at the end of the wharf the Lettie G. lay against her fenders, thirty-eight feet of white paint and green trim, with the dew still beaded on her pilothouse windows and the tide two hours into the flood.

"Morning," said the driver, and handed down the pouches one by one: the first-class pouch with its brass lock, two sacks of papers and parcels, and the small leather registered pouch, which Elias signed for on the bill with a stub of pencil, the way his father had signed for it before Elias was tall enough to see over the tailboard. Nine registered pieces this morning. More than usual. Elias noticed it and filed it away, the way a pilot notices a new ledge breaking in a familiar cove.

Then there was freight. A crate of oranges for the store on Haddock. A drum of kerosene. A roll of tarred paper for somebody's roof on Greenlaw. Two new lobster-trap heads in a bundle. A box from a mail-order house out west addressed in a child's careful hand to the Little Haddock school, which would be chalk, or a globe, or with luck both. Elias passed it all down into the cargo well, set the pouches in the locked box under the pilothouse seat, and went to wake the engine.

That took a little coaxing every morning. Elias opened the petcocks, primed each cylinder from the copper can, set the spark, put his right hand to the big brass flywheel and swung it over. Once. Twice. On the third swing the engine coughed, caught, and settled into the deep, slow, satisfied beat that Elias could have picked out of a hundred engines in the dark. The pilothouse began to shiver pleasantly underfoot. Out on the water a guillemot looked around, offended, and dived.

At half past six exactly the Lettie G. cast off and swung her bow toward the bay.

Tarbox Bay opened out ahead in the early light, flat and pewter-colored, with the islands lying on it like a scatter of dark stones. Elias knew the run so well that the boat might have steered itself: southeast past the can buoy off Lermond Point, then south by east for the long leg down the bay, eleven minutes from the buoy to the bell, twenty-six from the bell to the mouth of Tolman Gut. On clear mornings like this one, the compass and the clock were a courtesy. On fog mornings, which in July was most mornings, they were the difference between Tolman Gut and the ledges beside it.

There were six islands on the route, and Elias had been born on one of them.

First, Thrumcap Island, low and green with sheep. Then Tolman, with the scar of the granite quarry on its western face and the empty cutting sheds by the wharf. Then Greenlaw and its one cove of lobster boats; Spar, where old Zeb Calderwood lived alone with his hens; Little Haddock with its farms and its white schoolhouse; and last, outside the ring of the others, big Haddock Island with its church steeple, its harbor and its store. Five of the islands lay in a rough circle around a sheltered basin the islanders called the Inner Reach, and the gaps between them were the channels the Lettie G. threaded every morning: in by Tolman Gut, out by Spar Narrows, and on to Haddock.

Elias stood at the wheel with his black hair blowing and his hazel eyes narrowed against the glare. There was a sea running outside, long and lazy. Inside the islands it would be calm.

The contract was framed on the wall of Elias's room over the sail loft, because it had cost more than anything else Elias owned: four years of the islands' mail, let by sealed bid through the Post Office Department, from the first of July 1926 to the last day of June 1930, at two thousand one hundred and forty dollars a year. Out of that came gasoline, paint, a new shaft last spring, and a living if the winter was kind. The Department paid for the route because people lived at the end of it. Every family that stayed was a reason for the mail to go. Elias had never had to think about that before this summer.

Off Thrumcap the sheep were on the shore, and the house above the fish wharf had its shutters closed. It had been closed for three weeks now, since the widow Eaton sold. Nobody on Thrumcap to take a letter.