The Lightkeeper's Daughter (4 page)

“Och,” says Murray, with a shake of his head. “She’s come home, Squid. Can’t you see? She’s come home.”

He said those same words to Hannah the first time she met him. She was kayaking along the coast, from Vancouver to Alaska, in the days when very few would even think of doing that. Her boat was canvas over wood, her clothes just wool and cotton. For a girl alone, only nineteen, it was a thing of daring and adventure; she was like that once.

In Prince Rupert a fisherman told her, “Be sure to stop at Lizzie Island. It’s like something from the Caribbean.” He spoke of sandy beaches, a sheltered lagoon. His hands drew sweeping curves across the air. “And there’s a lighthouse there,” he said. “The keeper’s like a hermit.”

She paddled across the sound, from Tugwell bar to Melville Island, then through the gap below Dunira. And she saw the light then, Lizzie light. She thought it was cheerful and brave.

For three days she camped in the rain and waited for the wind to shift. The bugs came in clouds; they covered her tent and crawled through the wool of her sweaters. They blackened her skin like coal dust. And when the weather broke, late on the fourth day, she didn’t give a thought for time or tides. She loaded her kayak and set off for Lizzie.

It was farther than she’d thought. Darkness came and the moon rose behind her. She paddled down a silvery path, toward the beacon that flickered on the wave tops. She landed at two in the morning, in a hush of surf at the back of the island. She built a fire of salty wood that crackled and sparked, and she lay beside it, on her back, watching the stars.

In the morning the sun glinted off sand that was silver and gold. The surf broke in a continuous rumble, echoing back from the forest behind her, as though the island were breathing. She found old railway tracks buried in the sand, and followed them up to the crumpled ruins of a boat shed. There was a trail that took her over moss and devil’s club, round windfalls and enormous old cedars, past tumbling banks of shells turned gray with age. Then a side trail led down to the shore, to a smooth shelf of rock where sea lions lay like buff-colored slugs, in a mass all over one another.

As she walked closer, one of them arched up from the rock, pushing with its flippers. Then the whole herd, with a ferocious bluster and roar, rushed headlong to the water. They tumbled and slid; they rolled from their shelves. They went in a wonderful, thundering rush, and the sound stirred the birds into a screaming cloud of white and black.

There was one animal left. It was a pink blob high on the rock. Then it stood up on freckled legs and snatched at a towel.

“You gave me a fright,” he said, calling down. It was Murray McCrae.

He gathered his clothes and walked barefoot over the barnacles, as fast as he could, hopping and flouncing like a pink elf. He disappeared behind a boulder.

“Do you know,” he said from there—half shouting— “that sea lions are the original mermaids?”

She saw an elbow, a knee, a flash of bright hair. “Really?” she said.

“When the sailors came across them—they must have been years at sea—they saw chubby and voluptuous women.”

His voice was soft, his words almost like a song.

“Frankly, I don’t see it myself,” he said. “Imagine a woman like that, with arms but no legs.” He came around the boulder in kneesocks and shorts. He was fitting the buttons into his shirt, but he had them in the wrong holes. “Och,” he said. “She’d flop like a dying fish, a woman like that. But they’re fascinating creatures, sea lions. Do you know that the bulls collect whole harems of females?”

And then he blushed.

Later, Hannah would see the same thing, a rambling babble, from other men who spent years alone on the lights. But at the time, she thought Murray McCrae was just plain odd.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Hannah James,” she said. The first words that she’d spoken.

“I’m Mr. McCrae,” he told her. “Hannah, have you ever seen a lighthouse?”

He took her on what he called the grand tour. He showed her everything, talking all the time. He took her to the powerhouse and pointed out the parts of the generator as it rumbled away in its spotless house. “The injectors here; one, two, three, four of them.” He had to shout to make himself heard. “The starter motor, see. Twelve-volt, of course. It’s a three-phase generator, pumping out a hundred and ten volts.” He stepped back, then looked around the room. “What else?” he asked. “Oh, yes. Silly me.” And he unscrewed a battery cap, to let her see the acid.

“And now,” he said. “The tower.”

She loved the tower, its staircase spiraling up, the huge lantern with the polished machine in the middle, the prism and lens turning slowly around. “Don’t look right at it,” he warned. “It would burn your eyes in an instant.”

When they stepped out to the platform he was talking less quickly, more carefully, and his voice had lost its shrill of excitement. They stood in the sunshine, looking at the island.

He had been there nearly ten years already. He was a coal miner’s son, from Drumheller, Alberta. “I was lucky,” he said. “Sheer blind luck. I went looking for a job the day after the lightkeeper died. They were desperate for a replacement.”

“What happened to him?” asked Hannah.

“Oh,” said Murray. He looked away. “I believe that he died here on the island.”

The house was nearly empty. Murray had burned all the old, moldering furniture the previous winter and was now building his own a piece at a time, starting with whole logs pulled from the beach. He had one chair and no table, but a wallful of shelves full of books. Hannah stared at the titles, standing before them with her hands at her back, as he boiled crabs for their dinner.

“Are you a biologist?” she called to the kitchen. There were books about plants, books about animals. There wasn’t a novel among them.

“No,” he shouted back.

She waited for more, but it was all he said.

They sat on the floor to eat, cracking the shells with their hands, using the crabs’ pointed feet to dig out the flesh from the claws. It was just before dark when they walked back down the trail to the camp.

Hannah had heaped sand onto the fire, and the coals were hot underneath. They stoked them with moss-covered twigs and slivers of cedar that Murray peeled from a log with his little red knife. Then he fanned up flames with a copy of the Audubon guide that he carried in his pocket the way her own father had once carried the Book of Common Prayer.

She was smitten with Murray. He was a gentle, shy man who hadn’t touched so much as her elbow. He was twice her age and a little more, and she found that exciting. But dangerous too.

“Sit with me,” said Hannah. She spread her poncho on the sand. She didn’t bother unfolding it first. “Come on,” she said, and patted the cloth, quartered into a square.

Murray sat in the sand.

He wasn’t about to seduce her. And she sighed and thought it was all for the best. In the morning she would load up her kayak and paddle away to the north. But then the auklets came; it was the auklets that kept her on Lizzie.

It got very dark. She watched Murray prod at the fire. And then she heard a whistling, and something darted past her head. It crashed through the bushes behind her, crackling through the branches. Another came behind it.

“What was that?” she said, startled.

Murray poked at the fire. “Auklets,” he said.

“They scared me,” she told him.

Murray came beside her. She thought he was about to hold her, but he only reached past—“Excuse me,” he said—and picked up his Audubon book. Two more of the things hurtled by with the same weird hum and whistle.

“Rhinocerous auklets,” said Murray. He opened the book and held it flat to the firelight. Hannah saw a funny, fat-bellied bird with a little spike of feathers above its beak.

“They feed far from shore,” he said. “They come back after dark to their burrows in the woods.”

Hannah had seen the holes; she’d thought they were marten dens.

The auklets came in a flurry, smashing blindly into the dry undergrowth.

“Och, for heaven’s sake,” said Murray. He was looking at the book, bending so close to the fire that Hannah worried he might set his hair alight. “They’re not auklets at all. They’re actually a type of parrot, if you can believe that.”

“A parrot?” she said.

He twisted the book. Then he laughed. It was the first time she had heard his laughter, and it was a lovely sound. He said, “I can’t read in this light. It says
puffin.
‘A type of parrot-billed puffin.’ You see, I transposed the words.”

Three or four auklets whirred past in the darkness. A straggler came blundering by, and then it was quiet.

“Apparently,” said Murray, “they have very poor eyesight.” He closed his book.

“But they find the island,” said Hannah. “And I’m sure there’s a hundred burrows back there, but each bird must go right to its house. How do they do that?”

The book cracked open. Murray hummed as he read. “It doesn’t say.” He slapped it against his palm. “What a question,” he said. “What a puzzle. I think tomorrow I’ll have to sleep out in the bushes here. Try to watch the burrows.” He nodded. “I’ll see if there’s any coming and going.”

He stood up then. The sand was cold and dewy, and it stuck in a black patch to the seat of his shorts. “Well, good night,” he said.

“Wait,” she said. “Do you think . . .” He turned around. “Could I get a job here?” she asked. “Do you need an assistant or something?”

Murray stared at her. He said, “I think you belong here, Hannah James. Och, you’ve come home.”

Squid is furious. “What do you mean she’s come home?” she asks. “She hasn’t come home at all.” She whisks Tatiana from the sandbox. Grains whirl in the sun like shaken salt. “She’s never been here before, so don’t say she’s come home.”

Murray shrinks into sadness. “I only meant,” he says, “that she’s so much like family.”

“Family?” says Squid. Hannah, too, is shocked by the rage. Squid is shaking. “She doesn’t look like you. She’s never met you.”

“Well, she’s family now,” says Murray. It amazes Hannah that he can go patiently, doggedly on. “I don’t give a fig about anything else.”

Squid laughs her ugly laugh. “You sure did,” she says. “When it happened.” She rears back. From her forehead to her neckline she’s a vivid red. “Well, guess what?” she cries.

“Stop it!” shouts Hannah. “The two of you stop it!” She lunges between them, frantic to keep them from opening doors that aren’t meant to be opened. She can almost imagine a squeal of old hinges, the echo of voices down cobwebbed corridors. It’s Squid’s fault, she thinks; Squid has always done this. She’s the only McCrae who’ll go rampaging through these private and secret places.

Hannah shakes her finger, first at Squid and then at Murray. It horrifies her that she is actually shaking a finger under Murray’s nose. “And now,” she says, another echo from the past, “not another word from either of you.”

Murray looks shocked; absolutely shocked. His pale eyebrows arch on a sunburned forehead. Squid laughs. Surprisingly, Tat does too—a glimmer of life dancing in her eyes.

Hannah forces her face into a look that’s meant to seem stern. Already, she can see, the matter is settled as far as Squid is concerned. Squid can forget these things, these arguments, as easily as she can shrug her shoulders. It’s not the same, though, for Murray.

Squid lifts Tatiana onto the grass. “I guess I’ll get settled in,” she says, and passes between her parents, off across the grass.

Murray looks down at his sandbox, at the weave of bird tracks. “Och,” he says, with a sigh. Then, louder: “Tat! You forgot your Barney doll!”

“Are you going to let her stay in the small house?” asks Hannah.

He says, “She might as well do what she wants. It’s what she’ll do at any rate.” And again his words are an echo from the past.

By the middle of July, her first year on the island, Hannah was sharing the big house with Murray. They didn’t share a bed; there wasn’t one yet. They slept on a fat bolster stuffed with sphagnum moss. They made love only when the sun went down, when the room was so dark that Murray could undress without her seeing.

The summer days were long. It was September before Hannah was pregnant. She was twenty years old. She wanted their child to be born on the island.

Murray shivered and shook through April and May, afraid he would faint when he was needed the most. He had a vision that he would keel over headfirst into the barrel-shaped baby bath, and drown as Hannah flopped on the bed like a mermaid. But he did just fine. He delivered the baby, then hovered so close that Hannah got frightened; she thought he had snared himself in the umbilical cord.

Squid came along a year later, a year and a day, on a night that was stormy. They named her Elizabeth, after the island. She wasn’t expected for another month; like everything she’d do in the years ahead, she surprised her parents that night. There was blood and pain, an anguished scream, and the wind howled and shook at the walls.

It was sooner than they’d planned, but already they had the two children they’d hoped for. “And now,” said Murray, with great earnestness, “it’s clear sailing from here.”

In December of that year, a week before Christmas, a mission boat stopped at the island. It had come from Lawyer and was off to Langara, taking Santa Claus to the lighthouse children. Murray and Hannah were married in the boat’s little chapel as it rocked in a swell from the west. Their witness was Santa Claus, standing beside them with his beard off, twirling it between his fingers.

That night, their wedding night, Murray told her, “If the children ever ask, we were married two years sooner. Is that all right with you?”

They never asked, though they could have by the time they were two, so quickly did they grow and age. Before they could walk, they could swim. Murray wanted it that way. He taught Alastair; Hannah taught Elizabeth, who— typically—developed her own style, more like a beetle than anything else. She could swim backward as fast as she could going ahead, squirting along under the surface with punches and kicks. “We’ve got ourselves a squid,” said Murray. And the name stuck like glue.