Sanctuary Line (14 page)

“I think they forgot,” I said, wishing it were true, knowing it wasn’t.

He wouldn’t look at me. His humiliation was palpable. “Me
aparté,”
he said.

“No,” I said. And when he didn’t reply, “Okay then, me too.
Me aparté
too.”

Why is it that everything freezes right there and I can’t remember how we got out of the wood lot and back into our lives? I would have been called in to supper on the sun porch of the house, and Teo would have veered off in the direction of the bunkhouses, it had to have been so, but I remember nothing of our return. When I think of that day, there exists in my mind the insane belief that if I walked out the door right now and over to the wood lot, and if I searched hard enough and long enough in those woods, if
I followed the paths made by the Holsteins, I would find those two children crouching under that Jack pine, and that when I found them I would be able to make everything turn out differently. Mandy would still be splashing in the lake with her brothers, her blonde hair a nimbus around her head. Teo and I would be building dams in our river, and he would be free from the notion that no one wanted him. My uncle would have been planning the harvest of peaches, or walking through the grassy orchard examining the growth of McIntosh apples. But it is almost impossible to get into those woods now. The Holsteins have been gone for years, and scrub brush has obscured the paths. Are the creeks still being pulled toward the lake? Do the small brown trout still twitch in the watery shadows? And the children, if they are still there, are they able to go home?

As I’ve told you, my uncle loved to talk about the bifurcating lighthouse-keepers of our family, those who kept the “lights” of Ireland, as well as the later nineteenth-century American Butler keepers, as he called them, in spite of the fact that the most significant member of their ranks had ultimately migrated to Canada and settled not at all far from the farm on which the tales were told. “Born American,” he would say, if anyone dared to correct this detail, “came here only in defeat.” My mother, having sat beside her brother while the previous generation’s adults told these stories during the course of her own childhood, still maintains the belief that American lighthouses were bigger and better than their Canadian counterparts, whiter, brighter, their lamps travelling farther into a storm, more successful, and the keepers, except for one notable exception, more dependable. The Irish-American Butler farmers had similar gifts, apparently. They were taller, stronger, had better horses, more sons, endured fewer crop failures, built more attractive houses, and stuck to their guns, literally and
figuratively. They had a prosperous and rewarding nineteenth century, their lives unfolding near calmer waters or on richer soil, already well established while their brothers, the Upper Canadian Butlers, chopped wood and dug wells and threw up hastily built dwellings. “Except for our beautiful stone house,” she would add, “built by my great-great-grandfather, who, though foolish in his allegiances,” meaning his loyalty to the Crown, “at least had some sense when it came to housing his family.”

There is hardly anything left of the nineteenth century now on the north side of the lake. The remaining barns in our township have been reduced to skeletons; you can see their graceful beams and rafters, the gaping spaces that would have been their wide entrance doors, and sometimes a last load of hay in a sagging mow, placed there years ago by a farmer who either lost heart or died or both. Occasionally an oxen yoke can be seen fastened between two upright boards, or a harness hanging from a nail on what would have been a stall. These old essentials, of no use now except as objects of curiosity, seem almost to have become part of the decaying structure simply because they have not been moved or touched for so long. Most of the old frame houses have been replaced by newer models, or torn down and not replaced at all, their foundations ploughed under the huge fields of factory farms. Other, smaller fields go back to bush if they are of no use to the agri-industry, or if they have not caught the eye of a
developer. And in the villages, shops and stores, still vital in my own childhood, have either become boutiques or pizza outlets or have no life at all, their windows boarded, the signs above their doors fading.

What remains is a network of roads brought into being two hundred years ago by the land baron Colonel Talbot and a surveyor called Mahon Burwell, whom Talbot hired to complete the task. Burwell tramped through the bush with his crew and his instruments and provided the territory then known as the Essex-Kent District with three distinct roads and hundreds of more or less well-ordered plots for settlers, who, in return for the deed to their land, were required to build the concession roads that fronted their farms. The concessions, which run in an east-west direction, are – like the frontage of the plots they define — 1.25 miles apart, moving inland from the north shore of Lake Erie, or the front as it was then called (as if it were an unsettled weather pattern, which, indeed, it sometimes is). Moving at right angles to the concessions are the lines, named for the places to which they lead or after the early settlers who farmed the original acreages and who fill the graveyards scattered here and there at intersections. The road running two fields back of this farm is called Concession One, but the one heading toward the lake is called Butler’s Line or Butler’s Sideroad, depending on who you are talking to. It wasn’t until 1930, when the birdlife on the Point, five miles to the east, was deemed
worthy of preservation that the name of the old Point Road was changed to Sanctuary Line.

My great-great-uncle Gerald Butler, having left the southern States in what my uncle called “a paroxysm of shame,” would have ridden down old Point Road to reach his new post, and there were some interesting tales associated with his tenure there. But it was the story of why he chose to leave America that my uncle told, more than once, probably because, as he once stated, the Butlers were in love with both irony and tragedy.

The two remaining sons of Butler the Eye, discouraged, apparently, by the poverty and misery of the sparsely populated post-famine world of County Kerry, had set out from Tralee to seek their fortunes in the New World. The crossing had been difficult enough that by the time they landed in New York, they had survived homesickness, near starvation, ship cholera, and a series of such wicked storms on the open sea, their fear of weather, originally engendered by the knowledge of the fate of their siblings, was increased a hundredfold. One of the brothers, my great-great-grandfather, would eventually depart for Upper Canada, where he had heard there was good land to be had on the shores of Lake Erie. Another, a great-great-uncle who, like my cousin, was called Shane, had stayed on similar and as it turned out better land on the south shore of the same lake, where he settled and established the American Butler line. The third, Gerald, had decided to
pursue his father’s calling. Knowing the south of the continent was warm, he believed it must also be calm, and so, in spite of his reluctance to face the fury of the elements, he accepted a post as assistant keeper of the light at Mosquito Inlet in Florida. He was not to be principal keeper (that position was held by a fellow Irishman with an increasing wealth of children) but a keeper nonetheless who would, on occasion, be fully responsible for maintaining the light while the principal keeper took time off to deal with the demands of family life.

Gerald was a reader, and, had been encouraged in this activity by the Church of Ireland pastor on Valentia Island, a literary man who wrote poetry and had a sizeable library, which he was happy to share with any young person interested in books. The bloodlust and romance of Walter Scott’s novels particularly appealed to Gerald — he was very fond of
The Heart of Midlothian
— as did the eccentricities of the characters invented by Charles Dickens. For a while in his teens he was drawn to Trollope, especially to those novels set in Ireland. But by the time he sailed, he was deeply affected by the tales of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series and by the — mostly imagined — Aboriginal and colonial world this series revealed to him, page by page.

“Reading was the perfect pastime for a lighthouse-keeper,” my uncle always told us. A book could be easily held in one hand — a lantern was likely in the other — and
the stories it contained would cut the boredom of the long hours at the post. When Gerald finally settled in at Mosquito Inlet Lighthouse, therefore, he was pleased by his discovery that the tower he would spend so much time climbing and descending had been designed by one Frances Hopkinson Smith, an artist, engineer, and author of such titles as
Old Lines in New Black and White, Well-Worn Roads
, and
A White Umbrella in Mexico
. As I’ve already said, Gerald had acquainted himself with American literature and, while on board that grim ship on which he travelled to the New World, he had been engrossed in the stories of Washington Irving, coming to love Rip Van Winkle for his solitariness and his aversion to wives, qualities that Gerald himself shared.

Women utterly terrified him, my uncle said, unless they were characters in books. Over the years he had been briefly in love with Scott’s Flora McIvor, Green Mantle, Rachel Geddes, and Rose Flammock, and also with Estella from
Great Expectations
, Nancy from
Oliver Twist
, and for a moment or two after his mother’s death with Peggotty from
David Copperfield
.

So, after he settled himself into the routine at Mosquito Inlet, he began to read American literature in earnest, subscribing to
Scribner’s Magazine
once he had heard of it and ordering as many books as his salary would allow.

Reading the magazine he became familiar with the works of Lee Bacon, Charles G.D. Roberts, W.H. Henderson, who
wrote about the sea, and the small poem “Parting” by Emily Dickinson, with whom he fell briefly in love. He came to adore the magazine and was distracted from it only by his reading and rereading of Melville’s
Moby Dick
. Tales concerning the sea were a kind of home to Gerald, spending, as he had, countless hours looking over its surface toward the horizon and countless other hours, before he came to Florida, huddled against the chill of its squalls in a corner near a turf-burning stove.

In 1897, after Gerald had been in Florida for about a year, Principal Keeper O’Brien decided to take a ten-day leave at Christmas in order to visit some relatives in Georgia and my great-great-uncle was left in full charge of the light and all the other duties associated with it. Having been a principal keeper on Valentia in Ireland, Gerald Butler knew these duties well. In addition to ensuring the light was lit, he would be required to be on constant lookout, to make use of Morse code communications if there was anything to report, to make weather observations and report the same in a log, to start the fog alarm on misty nights, and finally, if necessary, to call upon rescue services and, upon occasion, provide sanctuary.

He was fully engrossed in
Moby Dick
at the time, had entered its territory in every way that it is possible to enter the territory of a book. “Amanda! What are the four ways that a person can enter a book?” my uncle would often ask at this juncture. “Emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually,
and philosophically,” she would dutifully recite. “Gerald,” my uncle would continue, “had come to that stage of rereading where it becomes possible to identify certain feelings simply by seeing the shape a remembered paragraph made on a page.” And, yet, apparently, he was still able to be surprised, even shocked, by something Ahab said, or even by a fractional gesture made by a minor character. He had become very interested in pastimes of whalers and had even begun a few scrimshaw projects of his own. He thought deeply about “The Whiteness of the Whale” and “The Spirit-Spout” chapters. He had come, therefore, to a stage where the fictional sea seemed more thrilling and interesting than the actual sea that he should have been examining but often wasn’t. He reasoned, I suppose, that these January days and nights in Florida were so utterly calm, a cursory glance now and then away from the page toward the horizon would be all that was needed. The waves were breaking half a mile or so from shore as they almost always did, and it seemed to him the winds were gentle and constant, certainly in comparison with any wind that had visited Ireland, and indeed much lighter than those that pounded the
Pequod
on various pages.

He was delighted by his literary discoveries, which were becoming those of one well read, although in a somewhat haphazard fashion. He noted, for example, that the first paragraph of “The Counterpane” chapter brought to mind two of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems for children, “The
Land of Counterpane” and “Bed in Summer,” and he wondered if Stevenson had read
Moby Dick
and whether that reading might have affected his subject matter. He thought that the community on board the
Pequod
was not unlike that of the soldiers whom he had encountered in Stephen Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
, which he had devoured on arrival in America because he wanted to know more about that country’s civil war, but also because the book had compelled him to devour it. Sometimes, in spite of the fact that he was alone, he experienced the camaraderie of the crew as if it were going about its business in the room where he read, and he felt the sway of the ship beneath his chair. When he had spoken to no one for over a week, he began to believe that he knew more about life aboard a whaling vessel than he did about life inside a cylindrical tower.

Eventually, Principal Keeper O’Brien returned, his loud and noisy family along with him. Gerald Butler enjoyed the children and was not entirely indifferent to Mrs. O’Brien’s meals. Moby Dick, though not entirely absent from his thoughts, became more ephemeral and ghostly. The children’s squabbles and their competitive games, the chaotic dinners and boisterous mornings, had brought him back to dry land.