Island

1.

It’s raining on the island, cool for June. I feel spy-like in my black trench coat with its unnecessary shoulder straps. My friend is driving us to Christiantown. God’s Town, off Indian Hill Road. A one-lane dirt road.

“You do look Finnish,” my friend says. “I can see it.” I’m thinking of the body divided into quadrants, humors. A quarter Nordic, genes dispersed, as in a sea. We’re in the woods, all bright green, the on-again, off-again rain making it restive and calm at the same time as though something is happening in the trees, but it’s not to be feared. “There it is.” I’m yelping. It’s appeared out of nowhere, a gray shingled church, white door: Mayhew Chapel. The gray leaking into the letters. Four thin metal bars from top to bottom. Rust drips from the center-lock stain the white wooden door. Stone foundation. Yellow flowers. The original chapel is gone, burned down. This one was built in 1829. It’s tiny, meant for a town of forty-nine people.

When they built it, my ancestor Thomas Greenough was still alive on the mainland, eighty-one years old. A Christian Indian, Wampanoag.

How he becomes literate enough to be a teacher, how a Wampanoag comes to be named Thomas Greenough, how his land is taken from him, how he becomes a self-educated lawyer, how he dies in the almshouse, how his obituary is ten times the length of his neighbors who died on the same day in January 1837, how his burial place and that of his wife, Jane, and his son John are unknown, how the southeast corner of the graveyard in Ancient Cemetery in South Yarmouth—a village once an Indian reservation, once entirely Wampanoag “which land is to lye for their use forever,” according to the July 1, 1713, division of land—is unmarked for the people of color buried there, just grass—that is all a mystery.

2.

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The Mayhew Chapel has glass windows on both sides. I can see the white pews inside. The original was built in 1680, the whole town a “Praying Town.” The Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoags must have been packed inside the building’s one room, peppering the minister with questions: “How do we rise from the dead?” I would like a clear answer to this too.

My grandmother’s sister said Thomas Greenough, my ancestor, was angry when the selectman took his land. The court upheld the taking and he went to live on a pond. I wanted to touch what he had touched. I found the pond, but it’s a Boy Scouts camp now. I felt I was trespassing, standing at the shore, walking into the water. I had to walk sideways on the hill, around the boundary markers. Had to look like I belonged.

There’s one other thing I can touch: the writing of his hand. Thomas painted his initials in black inside the oldest windmill on Cape Cod. He’d helped to lift the windmill, move it from West to South Yarmouth. And at some point, his hand on the inner wall beside the winding staircase, the beams and tower, he wrote “T.G.” and the date “1782.” But the windmill is no longer there. It was given to the father of modern assembly by a group of automotive dealers, dismantled and shipped to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where it now stands with Thomas’s writing inside it, like a letter waiting for me.

The Mayhew Chapel and the Wampanoag Burial Ground are preserved by the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah. The burial ground is across from the chapel. The path is marked private, only open to tribal members. I turn to another path on the opposite side of the chapel, a U that leads to a root cellar. I look inside, a stone room empty and dark. A flyer taped up to a kind of kiosk at the end of the path tells how the Wampanoags loved their children so much, they never punished them. I remembered reading that—how the missionaries wanted the Wampanoags to be more severe, but the most they would do was something so gentle that it’s floated away in my memory.

3.

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Mayhew Chapel on Martha’s Vineyard was also a Wampanoag school, beginning in the seventeenth century. It’s raining again, and my friend is in the car with it running. But I walk back to the front door of the chapel, stand on the heavy flat stone, and see a triangle of paper sticking out from the side of the door, like a note someone is passing to me. When I touch it, it folds out and opens like a fan, but remains wedged in the door. It’s yellowed. Someone has written Peetut Yâsv and beneath this “Come In.” “Take it,” my friend yells. I can’t. I can’t take anything from here. Hurriedly, I copy the message down on a scrap of paper, hoping I’ve got it right.

As a girl at the church in South Yarmouth, I’d stare into the flames behind the minister until I fainted. Every week, my mother moved me farther back in the pews, away from the candles. I’d felt near to something inside the fire. It felt like God. I was trying to get closer.

In the car, my friend glances at the message from the door. “Wouldn’t it be something if it’s Finnish?” she says. It does look kind of Finnish, I think. And later, when I try to decipher what I think it says, I see that Peetu is Finnish—the name of a famous Finnish snowboarder and also of a Finnish DJ. For weeks, I’d thought I was being welcomed. “Come In.” All along it may have been someone who had been invited and never arrived. But with the four locks, how could that person have entered? If he had opened the door, the note would have fallen to the ground.

Before we left, I had wanted to take pictures of the inside of the church, been frustrated at the locks. My friend said, “Just put your camera up to the window.” Like magic, the inside appeared—the white pews with cranberry red, hymnal red painted on the top edges, the windows on the other side shuttered, garnet carpet with little stars, wooden altar, lace edge. Paint peeling from the ceiling. I feel God most in an empty church, empty space. If I pay attention, there’s a way to pass across, get inside.