The story was old as the hills - blended like whiskey until it was part fact and part fiction, part fable and part morality tale, part warning and part history - not a single child who was raised on the island hadn't been told the story of Mary Margaret and The Great Sea Turtle.
Uncle Bernie told it the best on those Saturday afternoon story telling sessions in front of the candy store. Nana said it was what we did to explain the inexplicable events that challenge our faith, inventing a myth that we can cling to and find comfort in, no matter how unlikely it may be. Sparrow swore every word was the God's truth, claiming to have witnessed it. Being an agnostic, John Sullivan shrugged and allowed as how anything was possible. Even Miss Hilda, as strait laced and sensible a woman as anyone had ever known, had been known to say that even fairy tales must have a grain of truth somewhere in their origins. The children simply accepted the tale as told, not a solitary one of us would have had the courage to disbelieve.
Mary Margaret, the lighthouse keeper's daughter, lived across the passage on Briar Island. She had grown up at the water's edge, collecting shells and snails and keeping scrapbooks of stray gull feathers and other assorted tokens the sea liked to leave behind. She was a solitary child, not pretty but imaginative and self contained - she claimed to have seen mermaids by moonlight and other improbable ocean creatures, all with the gifts of speech and reason - and no amount of cajoling or discipline could make her recant. She talked to the sea and it answered, telling her wild tales of pirates and shipwrecks and lost kingdoms and the legend of the Great Sea Turtle who took 40 years to swim around the world, saving lost children and taking them with him to safety and a world full of dreams and sweets and good fairy queens. He was a mammoth creature, nearly the size of a small pony, Mary Margaret reported, and he carried the children in a silver and glass carriage with an entourage of sea horses, children who had ventured too far from shore, fallen off wharves, or had such unhappy lives that they waited for him, waist deep in the waves and crying bitter tears. They wanted to go, Mary Margaret said, wanted to ride balanced on his enormous shell with arms stretched out and faces to the wind. The Great Sea Turtle promised freedom and a world where children would never grow old but stay innocent, protected and carefree.
On a clear late summer day when she was eleven, Mary Margaret watched and waited for the Great Sea Turtle, dreaming of castles made of water stones and magic mountains beneath the sea. When she finally saw him - just as she expected, swimming on the surface with a throng of pink sea horses on either side of a shiny silver and glass old style coach - she began to weep and threw her small body into the ocean, swimming with all her strength through the whitecaps and waves. Sparrow, casting nets just off shore from a shabby old rowboat and facing into the sun, raised an alarm but the child was too far away to reach in time and he watched helplessly as she went under the waves and didn't resurface. Moments later, as he waited for the rescue boats, he looked past the breakwater and into the sun and to his amazement, saw what appeared to be a monstrously big sea turtle with a sea horse escort swimming furiously for open water, a small child in a blue dress balanced on its shell, arms extended and hair blowing in the wind. She turned and waved, he told the crowd of fishermen later, then I rubbed my eyes and when I looked again, weren't nothin' there but sun circles.
It might have been an illusion born of shock and sorrow and an old legend, people said. But the sea keeps its secrets, they also said, it's mysteries are vast and older than time. The only thing anyone knew for sure was that Mary Margaret was gone and that Sparrow had seen her go - The sea never tells, Uncle Bernie finished with a sad smile, She gives and she takes but she never tells.
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