He let her cry for several seconds, then helped her to the faded pink-flowered boudoir chair in the corner and got her to sit.
While she tried to compose herself, she saw his gaze travel to the closet and the mess all over the floor. “Okay, let’s get some air in here so we can breathe,” he said. He went to the windows and opened both of them. Then he looked over at Maddie. “If you want to see what’s in those boxes, I can take them off the shelf. Not that you should get your hopes up, ’cuz my sister was a wicked packrat.”
Brushing back her tears, Maddie smiled. She told him to go ahead, then watched him gather the papers and files that were strewn in all directions. Next, he removed the boxes, one at a time, and lined them up on the bed so she’d be able to reach them without much effort. Then he stepped into the closet and vanished behind the clothes. After a few seconds, his feet emerged first: they kicked out one metal container, then another. And one more. They were the height and width of a standard file box, and seven or eight inches deep. Either Joe had just seen them, or he’d known that they were there.
“Done. Be careful of these, though,” he said, touching the containers. “They’re fireproof, which translates to heavy. You might want to wait until your son gets here.”
Unsure if she’d told him Rafe was coming, she decided to stop wondering how anyone on the island found out so much so fast.
She looked at the cartons and the steel containers and quietly asked, “Is it true, Joe? Am I really Native American?”
He reached behind his neck and appeared to tighten the straw cord that held his ponytail in place. “I could say yes, but it’s better for you to find out for yourself.” He nodded toward the boxes. “If you can’t find what you’re looking for in here, let me know. I’ll help you go through the junk in the living room. Sooner or later, you’ll run into the truth. After that, you can decide what—if anything—you want to do about it. When it comes to this stuff, there aren’t any rules.”
She thanked him, and he said he’d be on his way for now but that she should call whenever she wanted—whether for a particular reason or for none at all. He peeled a flap of cardboard off one of the boxes and wrote his number on it.
Rising from the chair, she thanked him again, grabbed the crutches, and followed him to the front door.
“It will be fine,” he said. “You’ll see. Worse things happen in life.”
Like being married to Owen, she thought, though it seemed like an odd time to have that pop into her brain.
Then Joe waved, turned around, and jogged down the path.
Maddie watched him go, feeling that, in spite of his congeniality, it was too soon to let down her guard. But on her way through the living room, back toward the bedroom and the boxes, she caught sight of her mother’s canvas on the mantel, and the odd-looking quahog shell. And the pottery bowl that listed just a little and had a painting of a daisy on the front.Herpainting, according to Evelyn. Evidence that Maddie had been there before. A reminder that she’d been happy. And she had belonged.
Chapter 11
After spending a couple of hours sitting on the bed, perusing her grandmother’s treasures in the cardboard boxes, Maddie had found directions for basket weaving; recipes for Indian pudding, succotash, dried herring; a yellowed set of blueprints for a building labeled “Gay Head Processing Plant,” dated 1961, and which, she’d supposed, was intended to process fish. She could ask Brandon—or Evelyn—if it was ever built. If she felt she needed to know.
Not having unearthed anything pertinent to her search, she abandoned the boxes and opened one of the steel containers. . . which was where, while digging through files of seemingly unrelated items—paid invoices and bank statements with dwindling balances, random handwritten notes including one about someone having gone clamming at a place called Red Beach planning to make chowder, and lists of basket sales at fairs over many years—she found a Bible.
It wasn’t much longer or wider than her hand, fingers included. Its black leather cover was faded, unraveling at the edges. The type inside was hard to read because it was so small. But halfway through the tissue-thin pages, an insert was attached: a foldout record of family lineage. Someone—her grandmother?—had printed a title: “Praying Indians of the Wampanoag People of Gay Head. Thurston.”
What followed was a list of what apparently were Indigenous names that went as far back as the 1600s, but Maddie neither recognized them nor felt a connection to. Until she landed on the significance:Isaac Thurston, Walks with Thunder, 1897–1989. She presumed he was her great-grandfather, Joe’s father and Nancy’s; Walks with Thunder must have been his Wampanoag name.
He wasn’t exactly a nineteenth-century Portuguese fisherman.
She stared at the page.
Then she went back to reading:Wife—Sarah Nightingale, Earth Talker. Daughter—Nancy. Wed to Bernard “Butchie” Clieg, June 7, 1953. Children—Hannah, Born May 13, 1954.No other names were listed. There was no reference to her grandfather’s death or to Hannah’s marriage to Stephen Clarke. And there was no mention of Madelyn, Hannah’s only child. It was as if Grandma Clieg stopped recording the lineage prematurely. As if the world had stopped revolving when Hannah married and left the island, leaving her roots behind.
Then she realized there weren’t any Wampanoag names noted for Nancy, Butchie, or Hannah. Perhaps the trend had stopped with her great-grandparents’ generation. Or as “Praying Indians,” they’d stopped using them. She knew that she had much to learn about their culture.
But Maddie also recognized that the entries seemed to prove that Evelyn and Joe were right: Maddie was half Wampanoag. Half Native American. Half Indigenous person. As she sat on the bed that had once been her grandmother’s, her feelings started to ride a wave that rolled from numbness to bewilderment. She wondered if this was how adopted children felt when they learned the truth about their birth.
Returning to the box, she spotted a large envelope tucked in the back; she pulled it out. Its clasp was half broken, as if it had been opened and closed too often. Inside was an 8x10 black-and-white grainy photo: a young woman and a young man, standing straight and close together, facing the camera. The man was dressed in simple pants and a fringed tunic that looked made of some type of hide; the woman wore a similar tunic as well as an ankle-length skirt with a design around the hemline; three long necklaces of what looked like wampum floated down her chest. Draped across her right shoulder was a woven blanket. Both the man and woman had long, dark hair; both wore tall moccasins. The demeanor of the figures dated it perhaps many decades but not centuries ago, because they were smiling.
Turning the photo over, hoping for identification, she saw a newspaper clipping taped to it. The photo was reproduced; the headline read: “Nancy Thurston Weds Bernard Clieg at Gay Head.”
Maddie stared at the clipping. She remembered reading somewhere, perhaps in the 1990s, that the name of the town called Gay Head had been reverted back to Aquinnah—its original name.
Slowly, she read the article about the wedding. It said that the couple—both members of the Gay Head Wampanoag Tribe—had chosen a traditional ceremony, complete with fire circle, songs and drumming, and Wampanoag clothing. It added that Nancy wore a blanket woven by her grandmother Gladys Nightingale, Spotted Fawn, and noted that the bride chose to take her husband’s surname, Clieg.
It hadn’t occurred to Maddie that her grandmother would have done otherwise. She had, however, once used a newspaper story in one of her classes that explained that Indigenous people of North America once were a matrilineal society, where women controlled their property and belongings. She’d used it as an example of how journalism could document cultural trends even in small ways. Perhaps in some tribes, married women retained their maiden names, too.
The important thing was that Maddie now knew that she, too, had Indigenous roots.
She looked at the photo again. In addition to her grandparents’ smiling faces, she saw that, yes, in spite of the shades of black and white, the couple’s skin hinted of coppery tones. The article made it clear that both of them were members of Wampanoag Nation. And, yes, the bride resembled a younger version of Grandma Nancy.
