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 Mara 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 Mara signed for on the bill with a stub of pencil, the way her father had signed for it before Mara was tall enough to see over the tailboard. Nine registered pieces this morning. More than usual. Mara 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. Mara 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. Mara opened the petcocks, primed each cylinder from the copper can, set the spark, put her left 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 Mara 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. Mara 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 Mara 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.

Mara stood at the wheel with her auburn hair blowing and her green 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 Mara's room over the sail loft, because it had cost more than anything else Mara 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. Mara 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.

Mara eased the throttle and let the Lettie G. slide in toward the Thrumcap wharf on the last of the flood.

Up close the place looked worse. Mehitable Eaton's lilacs had gone leggy. Her porch rocker was gone, and her curtains, and the brass number from the door; she had taken those to her son's house in Rockland. The sheep would be sold off at the end of the summer. The fish house below was rented now, people said, to a man nobody saw by daylight.

Mrs. Eaton had come out on the boat with all her worldly goods in June, sitting very straight on a trunk in the cargo well, and she had said only one thing about the sale, halfway up the bay. "Sixteen hundred dollars," she had said, to the water. "For Thrumcap. My husband would have sold it for six and thought himself lucky."

Mara had asked her who the buyer was. She had shaken her head. A trust, she said. A lawyer in Rockland signed for it. She had never seen a face.

The Lettie G. swung away from the empty wharf. Behind her the gulls settled back onto the roof.

By a quarter to ten the Lettie G. had left Tolman and Greenlaw behind and come around into the little harbor at Little Haddock, and Alonzo Witham was waiting on the wharf with a letter in his hand.

He was a big slow farmer of fifty with a sunburned neck, and he had signed for a registered letter from the Lettie G. that morning on her way in; Mara remembered, because his hand had shaken on the pencil. Now he held the letter out without a word.

It was typed on good paper. Sewall, Attorney at Law, Rockland, Maine. Dear Sir: I am instructed by my clients, Bay Shore Associates, for whom I act as trustee, to offer you the sum of two thousand dollars ($2,000.00) for your farm on Little Haddock Island, comprising some forty acres with the buildings thereon and all shore and rights appurtenant, the offer to remain open for thirty days.

"Two thousand," said Alonzo Witham. "The whole place isn't worth nine hundred. I know. I tried to sell it in 'twenty-four, after the herring went off, and nobody'd give me eight."

"Who are Bay Shore Associates?"

"That's what I'd like to know." He folded the letter along its creases, carefully, as though it might break. "Same people bought Thrumcap off Mehitable Eaton. Same lawyer. Nobody's ever seen them. Who'd pay double for a hayfield on a rock in the sea, and not even want to look at it first?"

Mara had no answer. Nine registered pieces in the pouch this morning, Mara thought; and at least two of them, now, from the same lawyer in Rockland.

"You going to sell?"

Alonzo looked up the hill at his barn and his crooked orchard and his white house with the blue door, and past them at the schoolhouse with its bell, where his daughter had learned her letters.

"I don't know," he said. "That's the trouble with that much money. I don't know."

The Lettie G.'s engine thumped patiently below them. Out past the harbor mouth, the Inner Reach lay as smooth as a plate in the morning sun, ringed by its islands, and somewhere in Rockland a lawyer whose clients had no faces was waiting for an answer.