Beyond the Bright Sea: Prologue–Chapter 3

by Lauren Wolk
As a baby, Crow was discovered in a boat adrift at sea and raised on an isolated island off of Cape Cod. When twelve-year-old Crow spots a fire on a nearby island, once the home of a leper colony, she begins to investigate her own past.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Prologue–Chapter 3, Chapters 4–9, Chapters 10–16, Chapters 17–28, Chapters 29–40
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. ramshackle
    in poor or broken-down condition
    The island where we found each other was small but strong, anchored by a great pile of black rock that sheltered our cottage—a ramshackle place built from bits of lost ships—nestled on a bed of earth and sea muck, alongside a small garden and the skiff that took us wherever our feet could not.
  2. skiff
    a small boat propelled by oars or by sails or by a motor
    The island where we found each other was small but strong, anchored by a great pile of black rock that sheltered our cottage—a ramshackle place built from bits of lost ships—nestled on a bed of earth and sea muck, alongside a small garden and the skiff that took us wherever our feet could not.
  3. strew
    spread by scattering
    At low tide, we could cross easily to the next island, Cuttyhunk, through shallows strewn with bootlace weed and minnows.
  4. milestone
    a significant event in your life or in a project
    So we always marked my birth on whatever midsummer day felt right. The same was true of my other milestones: moments that had nothing to do with calendars.
  5. tiller
    lever used to turn the rudder on a boat
    Or the first time Osh let me take the tiller of our skiff while he sat in the bow and let the sun coddle his face for a while, his back against the mast, the fine spray veiling him in rainbows.
  6. coddle
    treat with excessive indulgence
    Or the first time Osh let me take the tiller of our skiff while he sat in the bow and let the sun coddle his face for a while, his back against the mast, the fine spray veiling him in rainbows.
  7. ebb
    the outward flow of the tide
    Or the ebb tide when a white-sided dolphin stranded on our shore, Osh gone somewhere, and I came back from Cuttyhunk to find her rocking and heaving, her cries babylike and afraid.
  8. fluke
    either of the two lobes of the tail of a cetacean
    And I grabbed her crescent flukes and tugged, inch by inch, until the water lifted her enough so we both slipped back suddenly into the sea.
  9. hoarse
    deep and harsh sounding as if from shouting or illness
    “I’ve told you,” he said. “You were hoarse with crying when you washed up here. You cawed over and over. So I called you Crow.”
  10. crockery
    ceramic dishes used for serving food
    The sound of the porridge thwuping into the crockery, the tock of the wooden spoon against the edge of the bowl, made me wonder who had named those things.
  11. headlong
    in a hasty and foolhardy manner
    “As far as I could get from a place where people—where my own brothers—jumped headlong into such terrible fighting that no one could see a thing through that bedlam. And for what? Over what?”
  12. bedlam
    a state of extreme confusion and disorder
    “As far as I could get from a place where people—where my own brothers—jumped headlong into such terrible fighting that no one could see a thing through that bedlam. And for what? Over what?”
  13. kinship
    a close connection marked by common interests or character
    So different from the gulls and fish hawks that wheeled and dipped over the islands that I felt a certain kinship with the big, black birds that drifted over from the mainland like lost kites, tipping to and fro in the wind before settling noisily in Miss Maggie’s hornbeam tree.
  14. scour
    examine minutely
    Now and then, he called me a mooncusser, too, because I liked to scour the shore at night for whatever the tide had brought in, but I did not lure the ships that wrecked off Cuttyhunk, and I was no thief afraid of being moonlit as I searched for lost treasure.
  15. flotsam
    the floating wreckage of a ship
    The rest of the house was flotsam that had come to him, floating in on the tide, as I had, sometimes into our own little cove, sometimes on Cuttyhunk, where no one else wanted it.
  16. cove
    a small inlet
    The rest of the house was flotsam that had come to him, floating in on the tide, as I had, sometimes into our own little cove, sometimes on Cuttyhunk, where no one else wanted it.
  17. porthole
    a window in a ship or airplane
    He’d built the frame from long beams, the roof and walls from decking, the chimney from a vent pipe off a lost steamer, one window from a porthole.
  18. keel
    one of the main longitudinal beams of the hull of a vessel
    Our door was a piece of keel.
  19. solemn
    dignified and somber in manner or character
    The finest of these, two figureheads—solemn women with long, flowing hair—stared at us from either side of our fireplace, never blinking.
  20. tarnish
    make or become dirty or dull, as by exposure to air
    And a pair of sun-white whale ribs arched over our doorway, a tarnished ship’s bell hanging from their pinnacle.
  21. pinnacle
    a lofty peak
    And a pair of sun-white whale ribs arched over our doorway, a tarnished ship’s bell hanging from their pinnacle.
  22. bauble
    cheap showy jewelry or ornament
    And I’d found my share of baubles while searching the wrack line.
  23. wrack
    dried seaweed especially that cast ashore
    And I’d found my share of baubles while searching the wrack line.
  24. trinket
    a small cheap ornament, knickknack, or piece of jewelry
    A banjo clock that would never again keep time but had a tiny cupboard where I kept the other trinkets I’d found.
  25. hull
    the frame or body of a ship
    What Osh expected to see when he came up to the little skiff I don’t know, but it could not have been a new baby, lashed to the bench with strips of dirty linen, inches above the water that had seeped into the hull.
  26. swaddle
    wrap very tightly in cloth, as a baby
    He swaddled me in wind-softened sailcloth, washed me in a smooth sink in the rocks where rainwater collected.
  27. foster
    raise in place of a child's biological parents
    I couldn’t imagine that any of the other islanders would have fostered me had I drifted up on their piece of land.
  28. harry
    annoy continually or chronically
    Every last one survived, and they neither pecked nor harried her when the thaw was complete, but simply walked out her front door into the sunshine the next day.
  29. pelt
    the dressed hairy coat of a mammal
    Then she lined her coat with their pelts and was much the warmer for it.
  30. oblige
    provide a service or favor for someone
    Mouse was an obliging cat most of the time, but when Osh pinned her between his knees and trimmed her longest fur for his paintbrushes, she squirmed and yowled so pathetically that I mashed my hands over my ears and looked away.
  31. turbulent
    agitated vigorously
    And since there was nothing I had done to cause such things and nothing I could do to stop them, I didn’t feel bad about salvaging what we could when ships came to grief in the waters off Cuttyhunk, so turbulent that they were known as the Graveyard.
  32. fervently
    with strong emotion or zeal
    You might think that we wished most fervently for gold or silver—and I have to admit that when I finally found some treasure of that sort I was glad, for many reasons—but we never found any cargo more precious than the blacksmith coal that we harvested from a ship after it foundered in an August storm.
  33. founder
    sink below the surface
    You might think that we wished most fervently for gold or silver—and I have to admit that when I finally found some treasure of that sort I was glad, for many reasons—but we never found any cargo more precious than the blacksmith coal that we harvested from a ship after it foundered in an August storm.
  34. dinghy
    a small boat of shallow draft
    Every single one of the crew survived, which was cause enough for celebration, but we were happy, too, that the ship had wrecked in the shallows so that at low tide we islanders could walk out in our tall boots, pulling dinghies along behind, to load up as much coal as we could and ferry it back to shore.
  35. buccaneer
    someone who robs at sea or plunders the land from the sea
    Another, clamming off Nashawena, found a huge silver belt buckle that he cleaned up and wore as proudly as the buccaneers who had once sailed these waters, some of them true pirates, though only one of them—Captain Kidd—had been known to hide loot or give it away instead of spending it.
  36. wily
    marked by skill in deception
    Miss Maggie was happy with plain and simple, but she sometimes spiced my geography lessons with talk of gemstones caught and kept—and sometimes buried—by pirates like the wily William Kidd: African diamonds, Burmese rubies, Brazilian emeralds, all of them forged by the alchemy of the earth’s hot spots.
  37. alchemy
    a pseudoscientific forerunner of chemistry in medieval times
    Miss Maggie was happy with plain and simple, but she sometimes spiced my geography lessons with talk of gemstones caught and kept—and sometimes buried—by pirates like the wily William Kidd: African diamonds, Burmese rubies, Brazilian emeralds, all of them forged by the alchemy of the earth’s hot spots.
  38. resilient
    rebounding readily
    So hard and resilient that they could last for centuries in the cold salt and sand of islands like ours.
  39. deter
    turn away from as by fear or persuasion
    That did nothing to deter the mainlanders who came out by ferry in the warm weather to muck about on the shores of Cuttyhunk, hoping to find what Captain Kidd might have buried or what the currents had stripped from the shipwrecks slowly surrendering to rot in the Graveyard.
  40. recede
    pull back or move away or backward
    We liked to watch those mainlanders follow the receding tide out as far as it went, plunging long rods into the sand, hoping for the clunk of metal, sometimes digging up an old lantern or a rusty chain before being chased ashore by the incoming tide.
Created on Sun Jan 27 20:37:16 EST 2019 (updated Wed Jan 30 13:33:58 EST 2019)

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