Show Me a Sign: Prologue–Chapter 6

My story is built not with brick and mortar, but by finding the right words and making events come to life.

Its sea-worn, mottled black skin was covered in humps and bumps.

I love words, but they confound me too. The way my mind thinks is not just in signs or English words and sentences, but in images and a flow of feeling that I imagine resembles the music I’ve never heard.

I circle around it as if it is hallowed ground and head back home.

Great warmth and a savory smell emanate from our kitchen.

There is much discord between the Wampanoag and us Vineyarders that I know worries Mama and Papa.

Papa says that we both lay claim to the same tracts of land, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts goes back and forth in its rulings.

When I’m done cooking, I’m supposed to wipe the table, but instead I watch Mama wash a dish and wonder at her contentment with her daily chores. She always does them meticulously and with great calm.

Mama wrinkles her brow as she carefully lays a pan of hot cranberry muffins on a trivet.

“There are no lions on Martha’s Vineyard,” she signs emphatically.

“That is fanciful,” Mama signs. “It’s not true life.”

Papa enjoys when I tell a tale, and George was always most excited by my whimsies.

I look up to see the horse's wild eyes. Even with the bit in its mouth, it seems to be squealing. It bridles, spooked.

In spring and summer, their yard is full of greensward, and their fence and arched trellises disappear beneath roses of every color and scent.

But I chafe at the unfairness.

I pass his blacksmith’s forge; its soft-coal fire smoke fills my nostrils.

Mr. Butler is a short, rotund man who is known to engage in gossip.

When they have docked down-island at Edgartown Harbor to bring us provisions and trade for our whale oil and wool, that’s one thing.

“I’ll abide research,” he signs. “So long as he doesn’t try to take advantage of townsfolk.”

“Outsiders,” he signs. “Never give them credence at first. Only welcome them after they’ve proved themselves trustworthy.”

“The story…,” he muses.

“Tell me why some of us are deaf and others are hearing,” I prompt him.

Even though his hands are old and gnarled, he signs with great skill.

She is also eleven years, a thickset girl, with black curls pulled straight, lively brown eyes, and a sharp, boisterous nature.

Nancy raises the palm of her hand in front of her mouth and shakes her head defiantly to demonstrate Miss Jenny’s refusal.

“That wicked old man with his bad luck cat,” Nancy signs, and skips in circles around me, making the sign for “haunt” in the air.
“Stop!” I sign. “Don’t be morbid. Remember George.”

“It is a silver heirloom and quite valuable. She didn’t want Mother to sell it. She told me I must find it under her bureau, polish it till I could see my reflection, and hide it in a safe place. She wanted me to use it when I marry and have my own home.”

“Maybe,” she signs, “we can have a dance for the dead.”
“That’s blasphemy,” I sign.

“You sound like your mother,” Nancy signs, with a discernible frown.

A picture flashes through my mind: George wrapped in his death shroud.

Could I really lull his uneasy spirit to rest?

She would hate to be compared to her fussy, pious mother, but I have seen Mrs. Skiffe shrink back from freedmen as Nancy does now.

He nods amiably in response.

Mama is cordial to him in their brief interactions, when he carries wood or butchered meat to the kitchen door, but he isn’t invited into our home.

In the distance, I locate Sally leaning against the railing of the paddock where we keep Bayard, a brown colt who will take orders from no one since George died.

Is she not afraid of the sleek, volatile beast?

I remember Papa saying the Wampanoag don’t want their land divided into private parcels under the control of settlers, and that Chilmark was once a sachemship, a common land of the Wampanoag.

Thomas looks squarely at me while he dumps the water in a trough and puts down the bucket to sign.

We work hard to sustain our small community.

She has a skein of spun wool in her hand.