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Letter in a Bottle

Dear person who finds my message,

I live in a place called Mermaid’s Hands. All our houses here rest on the mud when the tide is out, but when it comes in, they rise right up and float.

They’re all roped together, so we don’t lose anyone. I like Mermaid’s Hands, but sometimes I wish I could unrope our house and see where it might float to. But I would get in trouble if I did that, so instead I’m sticking this message in a bottle. If you find it, please write back to me at this address. Tell me what the world is like where you are.

Yours truly,

Em

June 27 (Em’s diary)

Today Ma used up the last of the cough medicine on Tammy, and I rinsed out the bottle. It was a good, small size, and I decided today was the day to send out my message. Small Bill helped me row out far enough to see the free and open ocean.

“It’s probably just gonna bob around here. Least it won’t sink,” he said, examining the corks that I put all around the outside of it, held on by electrical tape. “Not until the stickum wears off the tape, anyway. Maybe the dolphins will play with it. Maybe they’ll pass it on to the seapeople. You want it to go to the seapeople, or people up here?” He waved his hand at the sea, but he was meaning the folks on the shrimp boats and the big cargo ships, and the ones out on the oil rigs, too.

“Well, either way, but I want someone to write back,” I said. “Wish I could be the message … Go visit the seapeople, or go see some new place above-water.”

“You want to leave here?”

“Not for good! Just to look around. Just to see stuff with my own eyes. Haven’t you ever wanted to visit the seapeople?”

Small Bill shrugged. “Maybe the seapeople. Don’t think I need to meet any more dry-land people, though. You want me to throw that for you?”

“No, I want to do it myself.” I stood up real carefully, so I wouldn’t capsize the dinghy, and threw the bottle as far as I could. “Don’t say, ‘Not bad, not bad,’ like you’re the king of good throws,” I warned.

“Not sure you threw it far enough for ‘not bad,’” Small Bill said, grinning, and then I nearly did capsize the dinghy trying to spill him out of it, but he was lodged in as good as a hermit crab in its shell. So we rowed back and played tag with everyone else for a while, and Small Bill’s mom gave me a bundle of dried leaves tied with cordgrass twine. Ma only likes dry-land medicine that comes in bottles, but Dad’ll make those leaves into a tea for Tammy.

And now I wait to see if anyone gets my message in a bottle.

June 28 (Loop Current Charter Fishing Tours log entry)

Nice family today; a father, two sons, and one daughter. Calm seas, plenty of fish. The family took home a couple good-sized red snapper. My own line snagged at one point on some rubbish—it was a little bottle wearing a life jacket of corks, and would you believe, it had a kid’s message in it. Decided to send it to Matt. He’s shipping out next week; maybe he can drop it in the Straits of Malacca or something. If someone over there finds it and writes back, the kid’ll really get a thrill.

June 28 (Em’s diary)

I won’t go to the post office today. There couldn’t be a letter for me there yet. I hope not, anyway. I don’t want nobody to have found my message in a bottle yet, because if they have, they’re probably from around here. Unless the bottle really does go under the waves, to the seapeople.

Things I wonder about: What would happen if the Seafather himself found it? Would he harness up a seadragon and come riding right into Mermaid’s Hands, to find out how we’re all doing, here? Would he give me gills and invite me to come with him and have adventures?

But if he came in this close to shore, he might make a tsunami, and that would be bad. Small Bill says he wants a tsunami to take out Sandy Neck, but if a tsunami came, it would hit our houses first. Small Bill thinks we could float through it. It’s not like a hurricane, he says. There’s no wind. There’s no rain.

Small Bill hates Sandy Neck because a lot of folks there are mean. They don’t like people from Mermaid’s Hands.

“It’s because they’re jealous,” Dad says. “Scratching away at a hard, dry life on their hard, dry ground while we live life floating. What we need comes to us.”

But some of the Sandy Neck folk go shrimping and fishing, too, so I don’t think Dad is one hundred percent right.

“It’s because they’re afraid,” Mr. Ovey says. “They’re afraid of people with seablood. People who came out of the water, or are called into it.”

That’s what people in Mermaid’s Hands have: seablood.

“Especially people with marlin blood, right Dad?” Small Bill says.

Things I need to remember: Not to be jealous of Small Bill’s genealogy. Mr. Ovey’s six-greats-ago grandfather was a marlin, and Mrs. Ovey’s seven-greats-ago grandmother was a sea turtle. But all of us got seablood, even if it’s not from creatures with gills or shells. We’re either born with it or it’s sung into us. The Seafather gave it to the Choctaw and Biloxi and Pensacola people who hid out in the salt marshes, so no white folks could find them, and to runaways and other slippery folk who were happier on the sea than the land—like Vaillant, who swam from Haiti to Cuba and Cuba to here, to get away from slavery. Gran said that when he found out there was slavery here, too, he decided to give up on dry land altogether and pledged allegiance to the sea. The Seafather admired Vaillant so much he gave him fins. Whenever Small Bill starts talking about his marlin ancestor, I start bragging on Vaillant’s fins. The marlin was just born with fins, but Vaillant earned them.

Vaillant’s one of my ancestors because of Granddad. Granddad died when I was little, but Gran tells the story of how Granddad came to Mermaid’s Hands: he swam in, just like Vaillant. He never would say where from. They sang him into Vaillant’s line when him and Gran got married.

Getting sung into a genealogy proves that not everyone on dry land is bad. Some of the best seachildren started out as dry-landers.

Ma came from dry land. Dad worked away from Mermaid’s Hands in a cannery the summer he turned eighteen, and he met Ma there. She told us how he brought her bouquets of whitetop sedge and milkwort and other wildflowers each morning, and at the end of the summer he brought her back to Mermaid’s Hands to meet Gran and Granddad. When Dad married Ma, she got sung into a brand new line: red-winged blackbird. Tammy loves that, because she loves birds. And red-winged blackbirds are pretty, but they’re land birds! Even if you can see them in the long grass in the water, sometimes.

It’s true nobody would say Ma’s one of the best seachildren. Ma don’t even call herself one. Sometimes I think if only she’d of been sung into a petrel line, maybe it would of put a bigger love for Mermaid’s Hands into her. I worry sometimes, that Ma don’t like it here all that much. Dad and her argue a lot. But Dad says so long as he can get Ma to smile, everything’ll be all right. Mostly I believe that.

July 1 (Em’s diary)

There was nothing for me at the post office. There was only a letter for Ma from Aunt Brenda. Next time we go, I think it would be okay for me to get a letter. By then the bottle will of been floating long enough to reach someplace far away.

Person who gets my message, will you be a grown-up or a kid? Will you live right by the sea, or will you be visiting it? Will you be excited to find my letter?

I should of put a treasure map in my bottle, along with my note. A treasure map would of made it more exciting. But I’d need to have a treasure to do that, otherwise the map would be a lie, and I don’t have a treasure.

Maybe tomorrow Small Bill will want to go looking for Sabelle Morning’s treasure again. Just because we haven’t found it yet don’t mean it’s not out there somewhere. We just need to look harder. Tammy can come too, and Skinnylegs and Clara, if she ain’t busy watching her brothers.