Keeper of the Light (13 page)

“Not at all, not at all,” she said. She had developed this habit of repeating things, which seemed to irritate no one more than it did herself.

Paul set the recorder on the broad flat arm of Mary’s rocker, and his fingers shook as he turned it on. “Just begin anywhere,” he said.

Mary rested her hands in the lap of her cotton dress and crossed her sneakered feet one over the other. She looked toward the waterfront, where the boats glistened in the sun. How Caleb would have loved this—this invitation to speak for as long as he chose about Kiss River! He would have known right where to begin his story. But Mary had some uncertainty these days about what came when, what was truth and what was legend. It didn’t matter, though. No one would know.

She leaned back in the rocker and closed her eyes for a few seconds, listening to the faint hum of the recorder as it took in her silence. Then she opened her eyes and began to speak.

“The Kiss River Lighthouse was illuminated for the first time the night my husband Caleb’s father was born,” she said. “He came into the world in the downstairs bedroom of the keeper’s house. Caleb’s grandfather was the first keeper, and he and his wife had been in the house just a week when my father-in-law made his appearance—several weeks early, I should add. Everybody said it was the light that did it, that brought on his mother’s labor. The midwife timed her contractions by the rotation of the beacon. That was September thirtieth, 1874. Twenty-seven years later, in 1901, Caleb himself was born in the very same room, right about the same time of night, brought into the world by the same midwife, who they say was old as the stars by then.”

Mary was quiet for a moment. She looked toward the waterfront again and suddenly felt the limitations of the view, as she had when she first moved here. She missed the panorama from the tower and the endless expanse of sea rolled out beneath her.

“It’s inborn, Caleb used to say.” Mary nodded to herself. “All of it. Inborn.”

“What is?” Paul asked.

Mary looked at him. His pupils were mere specks in the center of his dust-colored eyes. “When you’re born under the light, you’re born with a need to protect people from the sea and the storms. From their own mistakes in navigation. Your first breath is filled with the sea; your first vision is a pure white light. And you know right from the start what your life work is—no one has to tell you. That light must never go out and so everything you do, day and night, is toward that end.” Mary paused a minute, cleared her throat. “It’s the same when you marry into it,” she said. “I knew from the day I first set foot in Kiss River that I would be Caleb’s partner in that task.

“You can’t grow up the son and grandson of a lighthouse keeper and not respect the sea, Caleb used to say. It’s beautiful and it’s dangerous, all at once, like some women.” Mary looked again at Paul Macelli, who began writing feverishly on his notepad even though the recorder was picking up every word. His fingers were white from squeezing the pen, and in spite of herself, she felt some sympathy for him.

She continued quickly. “There was supposed to be a minimum of two keepers at Kiss River. The assistant keepers came and went, but Caleb’s family never left. It was home to all of us.”

She talked about what it had been like for Caleb growing up at Kiss River, how his mother had carried him across the sound in a boat every morning so he would attend school in Deweytown. “That’s where Caleb and I met,” Mary said. “We were married in 1923, and that’s when I became the assistant keeper. But I’m getting ahead of myself, here.”

Her mouth was dry. She would have liked something to drink. A beer would be just right, but alcohol was taboo here at the home. She sighed, drawing her mind back to her visitor.

“So how did the keeper spend the day, you ask? Climbing stairs, that’s how.” Mary smiled to herself. “I still climb those steps in my sleep, all two hundred and seventy of them, and when I wake up in the morning my legs ache and I could swear the smell of kerosene is on my pillow. I guess you could say it was a monotonous life, but looking back it was anything but. It’s the adventures that stand out. The storms. The wrecks that washed up on the beach. How about the night the mosquitoes put the light out? Would you like to hear about that?”

“I’d like to hear anything you’re willing to tell me.”

“You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?”

“Uh, no.” He looked surprised. “Sorry.”

Mary shook her head in disappointment and then told him about the summer after she and Caleb were married, how the mosquitoes were as big as mayflies and how they were drawn to the light to such an extent that it could barely be seen from the sea. She told him about the time when Caleb was just ten years old and the clockworks that turned the lens failed. His father had broken his leg and couldn’t climb the steps to the lantern room, and they were between assistant keepers, so Caleb and his mother took turns for two entire nights, cranking the lens at the proper speed so that ships out at sea would know which light they were seeing and would not be driven off course. Mary could still remember worrying when Caleb did not show up for school those few days. When he finally made it in, he could hardly move from the stiffness in his arms, and he said his mother cried all night long from the pain in her shoulders. It was only the physical labor that was difficult, he claimed in later years. The timing of the rotations had posed no challenge, because their bodies had long existed in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the light.

Mary told him about the first wreck Caleb ever remembered being witness to. She could tell the story easily, she’d heard it so often from her husband. The wreck occurred one morning in 1907 when the four-masted schooner, the
Agnes Lowrie,
stranded on a bar off the coast of Kiss River. “She’d been sitting there quite a while by the time Caleb and his father got to her, along with the men from the lifesaving station,” Mary said. “They could see the people on the deck, waving at them, thinking they were finally about to be rescued. But everything went wrong.” She described the futile attempts to reach the schooner with the breeches buoy, dragging the story out, enjoying herself. “As she broke apart, people started jumping in the water, swimming toward the beach for all they were worth, but they didn’t know how mean the sea could be. By the time they got close to Caleb and the others, they were floating dead men.” Mary shuddered, remembering how Caleb’s voice had grown hushed when he recounted that tale.

Someone inside the retirement home turned on the television. It blasted loudly onto the porch for a few seconds before someone else turned it down.

“Well,” Mary said, “Caleb’s father died right before we got married, and seeing as how Caleb had plenty of experience, he was made the new keeper. He had to apply for it. They didn’t just pass the job on down, father to son, but it was no problem for him to get it. He was without an assistant for a few weeks before we got married, so it was just him and his crippled mother at the station one night when he was struck by a bolt of lightning.”

“Really?” Paul Macelli looked impressed.

“Yes, indeed. Indeed. Frightening thing, and I can tell you I was glad I wasn’t there to see it. He was standing on the steps inside the lighthouse when a bolt hit the tower and sent an electrical charge right through those two hundred and seventy steel steps. Caleb’s legs went numb, but he wasn’t about to let the light go out. No, sir. He dragged himself up to the lantern room right after he was hit and did a full night’s watch.” Mary looked out at the boats, thinking how typical that was of Caleb. Always steady and true. “That’s the way it was in the old days,” she said. “People had a sense of responsibility. They took pride in a job. It’s not like it is with young people today.”

Mary closed her eyes and was quiet for a full minute or two, long enough for Paul Macelli to ask her if she was through talking for the day. She looked over at him.

“No,” she said. “I have one more story for you. Let me tell you about the
Mirage.
”

“Pardon?”

“The
Mirage.
It was a ship. A trawler.” Mary’s voice was so low that Paul had to lift the recorder close to her mouth to catch her words. “It was March of 1942. You know what was happening then, don’t you?”

“The war?” Paul asked.

“The war indeed,” Mary nodded. “The lighthouse had electricity by then, so we didn’t have to worry about winding the clockworks or taking care of the lanterns. The only reason we were still there was that
someone
needed to be, so the Coast Guard let Caleb stay on as a civilian keeper. Thank the Lord. Don’t know where we would’ve gone. Anyway, seems like back then most of the war was being fought right here off the coast. The lights were blacked out all up and down the Outer Banks and the lighthouse light was dimmed. You couldn’t have any lights on shore because the German U-boats might see our ships silhouetted against them. Didn’t seem to make much difference, though. Those subs were picking off our ships one a day back then. One a day.”

Mary paused to let her words sink in. “Well, one morning, just before first light, Caleb was up in the lantern room and he spotted a small boat drifting way out to sea, bobbing up and down in rough water, most likely broken down. He could just make out two men in her. So he got in his little power boat and went out to them. The breakers were mean and cold, and Caleb wasn’t sure he’d make it, but he did. By the time he reached the men, they were half froze. Caleb towed them in, and once up on the beach, they told him they’d been on an English trawler called the
Mirage
which had been torpedoed by the Germans sometime during the night. They were the only ones who managed to get off before she went down.” Mary looked out toward the street. “When Caleb told me the name of the trawler, I remembered way back to when I was a girl and saw the word ‘mirage’ somewhere and asked my father what it meant. He told me how on a hot day, the beach can look like it has water on it when it doesn’t. ‘Sometimes, Mary,’ he said, ‘things are not what they seem.’ I should have paid better attention to what he was trying to tell me.” Mary looked at Paul Macelli to be sure
he
was paying attention himself.

“So Caleb brought these two British sailors up to the house. They spoke English with a kind of uppity accent. My daughter Elizabeth—she was about fourteen then—and I fed them three good meals that day, while they told us about being torpedoed and losing their friends and all.

“I bedded those boys down in the spare room upstairs that night. About eleven or so Caleb and I heard a scream coming from Elizabeth’s room, so Caleb quick grabbed his shotgun and went up there. One of the boys was in Elizabeth’s room, trying to talk her into some indecency. Caleb let him have it with the gun—killed him right there in the upstairs hallway. The other fella took off when he heard Caleb shoot his friend, so we quick called the Coast Guard and they caught up with him.” Mary smiled at the memory. “Found him tangling with a wild boar—a fate no man deserves. It turns out they weren’t Brits at all. They were German spies. The Coast Guard had been getting reports of them for weeks and hadn’t been able to track them down. Caleb got a medal for it, even though he was kicking himself for not just letting the two of them freeze to death out in the ocean. The
Mirage
didn’t exist, of course.”

Mary took in a long breath, suddenly exhausted. She pointed her thin, straight finger at her interviewer. “Sometimes, Mr. Macelli, things are not what they seem,” she said. “Not what they seem at all.”

Paul Macelli stared at her for a moment. Then he clicked off the recorder and lifted his briefcase to his lap. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “May I come back sometime to hear more?”

“Of course, of course,” Mary said.

Paul put the recorder in the briefcase and stood up. He looked out toward the waterfront for a moment and then down at Mary. “They tried to get you off lighthouse property in the early seventies, didn’t they?” he asked.

Mary stared up at him. He was a fool. He could have simply left, not tempting fate and her ire any more than he already had. Obviously, though, he couldn’t help himself.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said.

“Wasn’t it Annie O’Neill who helped you out back then?” he asked, and Mary wanted to say,
You and I both know it was Annie, now, don’t we, Mr. Macelli?
but she wanted this young man to come back. She wanted to tell him more stories of the lighthouse. She wanted to speak for hours into that little black recorder.

“Yes,” she said. “Annie O’Neill.”

She watched him walk down the sidewalk and get into his car. Then Mary leaned her head back against the rocker and closed her eyes. There was a burning pain in her belly that didn’t subside until she heard the sound of Paul Macelli’s car fade into the air.

Mary had met Annie in May of 1974, when she was seventy-three years old, practically a young woman. She’d been cleaning the windows in the lantern room of the lighthouse when she spotted a young girl down on the beach.
Her
beach, for the road leading out to the lighthouse was unpaved then and not too many people were willing to risk it. So at first Mary thought Annie was an apparition, and she stood at the window of the lantern room to see if the girl moved, if she was real. From that height, Annie was a tiny, doll-like figure, her dark skirt and red hair whipping out behind her as she stared out to sea.

Mary climbed down the stairs and walked out to the beach.

“Hello, there!” she called as she neared the girl, and Annie turned, shading her eyes with her hand and smiling broadly.

“Hi!” she said, her voice surprising Mary with its huskiness. So deep for such a young girl. Then she asked, as though Mary were the interloper here, “Who are you?”

“The keeper,” Mary replied. “I live here.”

“The
keeper,
” Annie exclaimed. “Well, you must be the luckiest woman in the world.”

Mary had smiled herself then, because that was exactly how she felt.

“I wanted to come out here by the lighthouse.” Annie looked down at the sand beneath her bare feet. “I met the man I married right here on this spot.”