by M Dressler
“And I’ll tell you this, Emma Rose Finnis, if you’ll listen to me. When you get to Lighthouse Point, you forget all about Quint Lambry and his parents who’ll never say yes to you any more than they would to me, and you look around and you see if you can’t find a sweet lightkeeper with a snug little cottage to keep you in. And you get yourself married to him and you plant a sweet little garden out front, for all your little ones to crawl around in.”
“How?” I laughed. “With the lightkeepers already married, and the first and second assistants already having families, and the head keeper old and away half the time because his wife’s got tuberculosis?”
“But things happen, Emma.” She nodded seriously at me, her eyes wide. “Accidents. And sickness. And men who get lonely. So you be nice to all of them, I’m telling you, and wait to see what time sees fit to bring you. Who’s taking you out there?”
“The Lambrys’ wagonmaster, at sunrise.”
“Right. Because they want to be sure to see the back of you before another day is out. See what I mean?”
That evening a soft, needlepointed valise with rosewood handles appeared outside my door at Mrs. Strype’s boardinghouse, along with a note in steep-slanted, boyish handwriting:
For Miss Emma Finnis. From Lambry House.
It wasn’t Augustus and Eugenia Lambry who’d sent it, that was for sure. But I told Mrs. Strype it was. Then I packed my shirtwaists into it and my stockings and my two skirts, along with the hairbrush that had belonged to my mother, and a bottle of rose toilet water, and my second pair of boots.
The next morning, the long-faced wagonmaster helped me into the wagon. The sun was just up, and smoke hung over the cove and the idling schooners. I sat up tall, not looking back once, not up at Evergreen Hill, nor down to the docks, nor at anything else behind me that June morning. My only thought was of the path in front of me.
The horses nickered at each other and the driver turned them toward the north road. Yellow-red dust kicked up at our sides, and the stumps of cut trees rolled past us like stepping stones. Once we were clear of the village, the groves of redwood sprang up tall and the wildflowers craned their faces toward the sun, and the day went from slate gray to silver-backed blue. I found myself breathing in and counting my luck. I was young. I had new work. Better work. I owned a traveling valise, fine as a Turkish carpet, riding along next to me. And I had a chance, at last, to better myself, one way or another. I had nothing to do now but sit still and let myself be driven, like a queen. The day turned fine as a parade and the sun turned warm and rode on my shoulder.
I made small talk with the wagonmaster about how many automobiles there were on the road now and how careful a wagon had to be not to be shoved to one side. Before I knew it, the mills had vanished into dust behind us and the woods lost their height, and the land turned scruffy and naked, bending toward the bath of the sea. My driver pointed ahead to where the road twisted.
We topped a rise, and he said, “In a while you’ll begin to see it.”
We drove with the sun on our right cheeks.
And then there the Point was. A handle of land, thrusting out above the sea. At its end, like a spoon balanced over the edge of a cup, a circle of headland, and on top of it a cluster of white houses, each with a dark, red-shingled roof. And at the very edge of the Point, the lighthouse itself.
It looked lonely. Franny was right.
The wagonmaster dropped his wheels into a lane and moved us slowly under ragged cypress and over deep ruts. He explained supplies had no other road to come down but this steep one, in good weather and bad, to bring coal for the coal building, oil for the lamp, and metals for the blacksmith’s shop. The lightkeepers had a great deal to do, he said, to keep the light going. But he supposed it kept them busy, having to do everything for themselves, all alone, and no one else to count on if things went bad in a storm.
We came out of the trees and onto the handle of land. My eyes went first to the biggest of the houses, shuttered in the distance.
“That one’s for the head lightkeeper. And that one’s for his first assistant.” The wagonmaster pointed over the ears of the horses. “Now, the building attached to the light isn’t one anybody lives in. It’s called the signal house, and that’s where they muster the horns and run the lamp. Here you see the coal house and the smithy, and the oil house and the pump house, and here”—he turned the wagon toward the first, smallest house—“is where you’ll find Mrs. Folde.”
The house and garden looked unready, with moving crates still tipped on their sides and straw slouching out. But white smoke curled from the chimney, and the picket fence was freshly painted, and sunlight bounced off an unshuttered window. I spotted a woman’s face behind it.
I had high hopes Mrs. Folde would be a better employer than Mrs. Strype. I hoped she would let me do my work without complaints, and maybe even thank me, now and then, for doing it. I hoped that maybe being all alone, on a lonely spit of land, might make someone more grateful for help.
I looked again at the window, and the face was gone.
The wagonmaster waited for me as I went into my servant’s cottage, behind the second assistant lightkeeper’s house, and lit the kerosene lamp. I found a bed made with a quilt and a chest at the foot of it. Across, a washstand with a good mirror hanging over it. A coal stove in the corner. It was better than anything I was used to.
I set my new valise down on the quilt, then turned and came out again with coins in my hand.
“No! You don’t have to pay me, Miss Emma.” The wagonmaster shook his long chin. “Mr. Lambry takes care of everything.”
“But this is from me. Take it for a thank you.”
“Keep it in case you need a ride back into town. I can fetch you back, if you ever want me to. Just send word. If you get lonely. Good luck to you, now, Miss Emma.”
He tipped his felt hat and clucked to his horses and swung in a wide circle across the short tufted grass and away.
When he was gone, I went back inside. I folded my clothes and my nightgown inside the chest. I put my shoes beside the bed. I put my mother’s hairbrush on the washstand. The stove’s cold chimney reached in a crooked black arm through the ceiling. There was no coal yet in the hod.
I pulled back a pair of thick gingham curtains from the one window, and the room felt warmer. I blew out the light. On the sill, someone had left the head of a tiny animal, a bird’s skull, and a sprig of dried wildflowers.
I turned away to brush my hair in the mirror and pin it up again. My face was windblown from the drive, and the cleft in my chin had turned deep red, like a gash.
I straightened my shirtwaist, flung my shawl over my shoulders, and started for the Folde house.
The second assistant lightkeeper, the wagonmaster had explained to me, always had the smallest house, no matter what the size of his family. The second assistant was the “lowest” man at the Point. Well, never as low as a maid, I thought. Although now I could think of myself as a housekeeper, which was something, I remembered, as I walked toward the back stoop and saw at the screen door the face I took to be Mrs. Folde’s. A moment later, the door was swung open with one arm, and then I saw a woman so big with the baby growing inside her she could hardly keep upright. Her narrow face was hot and her back tilted.
“Finnis?”
“Yes, ma’am. Emma Rose Finnis.”
“Come up the steps, here, please, will you. I can’t come down.”
Her hand in mine was soft as butter. Her lips looked cracked and tired.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come out before. It’s hard for me to get around, these days. The doctor says I might have another set of twins on the way.”
Another, did she say? “Then I’m glad I’m here to help, ma’am.”
“The children have already had their breakfasts and are out. They should be having their baths, but it takes too much out of me.”
“That’s why I’m here, Mrs. Folde. To assist you,” I said again, smiling at her, h
oping she’d return the smile. She didn’t.
“Come in then.”
I followed her into the kitchen where she braced herself for balance against the white-washed walls.
“If you’d like, Mrs. Folde, I could give the children their baths as soon as they come back?”
“No. You’ve just gotten here. And I do like to tend to the children myself. Just not so early in the day. You don’t know how things go on here yet. Your work,” she said, letting go of the white wall and reaching for the pie cupboard, “will be mostly in the kitchen. And seeing to the rest of the house, of course. And the garden, if I can get one going.” She opened the cupboard, showed me the tins. “When I’m over the worst.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But the children,” she said, grimacing, “are my responsibility. Every mother knows that. Over here, this is our dining parlor.” She opened a swinging door to a small, snug room crowded with a round table and six chairs. She stared at the bright lace curtains, batting her eyes like someone trying to stand and sleep at the same time.
“Mrs. Folde,” I said quickly, “won’t you please sit down? And let me get you some milk?”
“The children need the milk. There are five of them.”
Five. A lucky family, then. “Where are they now, Mrs. Folde?”
“With their father. Out on the headland, checking the weather. They’ll be dirty all over with grass and mud when they come back. He’ll send them straight to me, because we have to keep everything neat for—” She seemed to wince. “And then they’ll hate me for putting them straight in the tub. It’s the same struggle every day. But we have to keep organized, the head keeper says. We never know when we’ll have an inspection. This room is the front parlor.”
She went in and leaned against an overstuffed chair with a knitting basket tucked against its cushions. The coal grate burned close by.
“A light station is like a ship. A ship,” she repeated. “It has to be run tightly, my husband says. Although for some keepers’ wives, it’s easier than for others. The first assistant has a larger house and only one child. And don’t you find it’s always easier to keep a house if you have more room in it, and not less?”
I thought of the boardinghouse, all of the rooms to clean, all the linen to wash, and couldn’t say so.
“Well. It is.” She closed her eyes and opened them again. “Your job will be to help me keep things orderly. Because we never know when the head will come back or the state lighthouse commission will visit.”
“Yes, Mrs. Folde.”
“You’ll cook and clean according to our schedule. We adhere to a strict timetable here. Around the clock.” She nodded, and I thought how much her face looked like a china doll’s, one that’s been tipped back too many times so that its eyes close when they should be open and open when they should close. I didn’t think she could be ten years older than me, but she looked so much older, burdened by her belly and her heavy skirt.
“We live by the clock here. With the head away so much, and only Mr. Folde and Mr. McHenry to see to the fueling and the winding, we … we get our fair share. Mr. Folde is often tired. Which is why we need privacy and rest in the afternoons. You’ll be expected to leave the house then for an hour and a half. You can take your break after I’ve put the children down for their nap. Then you can go to your room, or go for a walk, or do as you please. That’s your free time. Try to enjoy it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because for the rest you’ll be doing the washing, ironing, mending, cooking, sweeping, coal-hauling and taking the ash out … But you won’t mend Mr. Folde’s shirts, because he’s picky about that. I’ll see to those. And the lampshades and curtains always need dusting, out here, with all the sand, and the dishes and silver need polishing, to keep the spots off, and the rugs need airing already, though we haven’t been here two weeks.
“And—about tea time. Sometimes you’ll serve tea but not with the good tea set, the one we inherited from Mr. Folde’s family. It’s very old,” she said nervously, “and he’ll fire you if you break even a saucer, as he did our last girl, at Eureka Point. And then”—she looked at me with her strained eyes—“where would I be?”
She led me into the front hall, holding her stomach with one hand and with the other lifting her netted hair, soggy as wet toast, from her neck. She moved her hands down to her back. “There’s no room here in the house for you, though I wish there could be. You’re in what used to be the grain cottage.”
“It’s fine, Mrs. Folde.”
“You probably saw that the children put a few old things in there, on the sill. The twins, Roger and Timothy, are six. Theresa is five. Christina is four and Alva is three. Elizabeth was two when the croup took her. The children miss her and pretend she’s still alive and living out there, in the grain room. Please don’t indulge their morbid ways. And don’t let them make a sister out of you, Emma. Your work is with me. We have no time for child’s play. There are more ships sailing past, every day. And there are fogs and storms and nights that are worse for a moon, instead of better, although I don’t see how, and the lamp mechanism has to be wound every two hours by Mr. McHenry or Mr. Folde, and the oil filled and kerosene put to the horns, to say nothing of all the repairing … And the weather report to make, and all of us answerable to both the head and the commission. It’s—Oh. Here are the children.” She backed away toward the staircase, away from the front door, as if to brace herself.
They poured into the house like weeds riding on a tide and stopped and stared at me—two identical boys, thin, their chests heaving; three little, pale girls with pigtails. The children were all blond and wan, like Mrs. Folde. The older ones introduced themselves politely, and then Mrs. Folde hurried them all upstairs, while the man I took to be Mr. Folde shut the door and checked the hour on his heavy steel pocket watch. He snapped it shut and then held out his hand to me.
“You’re our new girl?”
“Yes, sir. Emma Rose Finnis.”
“Wonderful! Thank you for coming all the way from town.” He took a step backward, and I saw that he looked young, younger than his wife, with a downy mustache and lashes as soft as a girl’s. But also with that strain around the eyes. Though he was dressed well, in the lightkeeper’s coat, he smelled of oil and sweat.
“Mrs. Folde explained to you how things run here? Yes? Good. Then you know she’s going to keep you busy until the afternoon. But then you’ll have a rest. That’s the hour when we observe what we call ‘family peace.’ Before the next shift begins. You might like to take a walk then.” He smiled, and the smile almost reached his lashed eyes. “There’s a little path that runs down to a small beach when the tide is out. I often go there myself. To take a constitutional.” He reached up to stroke his stiff collar, and I thought his Adam’s apple looked tight, as if it wanted to bolt from his neck. “Well, I hope you’ll be happy here, Emma. I think we all hope that. I need to get back to work, now. Have a good morning.”
That afternoon I covered my neck with my shawl and followed the path that ran along the keepers’ houses and away toward the lighthouse. The sun was sharp as tin. The first assistant’s house was only a short walk from the Foldes’. With its many unshuttered windows it was much larger, it was true, than the house I’d just spent all day cleaning and dusting. It had a windswept garden and a cow tied in the side yard and a piece of stubborn lawn growing out front. The head lightkeeper’s shuttered house, farther along the path, was even bigger, though of course still nothing like the Lambry House, nothing grand, really, no more than a shop owner in town might manage. Beyond the head keeper’s place was a space of long, flat, green turf, and then the block of the signal house and the towering light itself, its beacon swimming high up in its glassy cage. I stopped to look up but didn’t come any closer, because Mr. Folde had warned me not to bother Mr. McHenry when he was on the watch. The light tower stood attached to the rectangular signal house by a slanted, red-tiled roof, but still somehow looked
as though it were a thing apart, all on its own.
I swung around and walked the rough ledge of headland and looked down at the waves hammering one another. I stood there with my shawl tightly around me, and from time to time I craned my neck back at the lighthouse and saw what appeared to be a small man scuttling around its railed walk. When he went inside and I could see him no more, I walked away along the cliff, as far as I could along the edge. I sat down for a while with my back to a fallen cypress log, staring out at the open sea, wondering when Quint Lambry might come to see me. I sat till the bark gouged at my back. I had no timepiece, but the sun had moved over to the west and it was colder than before.
Time to go back, I told myself, and tidy up and get ready to make the Foldes their dinners. Pretty soon I’ll get used to all of this. Quint will come when he comes, if he comes, and if he doesn’t, well, there’s still seven dollars a week and a quiet room with its own stove and space to run around in, if I want to, and nothing to see me and frown or point at me, except a gull’s beak above me in the wind.
It was on my way back, while I was hurrying through the side yard of the Folde house between the empty crates, that I heard what sounded like a sharp cry. I froze, worrying that one of the children had fallen. But when I stopped to look through one of the lace-curtained windows I could see it was only poor Mrs. Folde, bent, holding onto the arms of her overstuffed knitting chair, while Mr. Folde stood behind her and tried to lift her heavy skirt. She turned and pushed him away, and he stepped back as though stung.
I hurried the rest of the way to my quarters and shut the door. It wasn’t my business, I told myself, what married people wanted to do during their “family peace” time. But I hadn’t liked the way Mrs. Folde’s cry had sounded chipped, like a cup being bitten, or the way Mr. Folde had fallen away, stumbling, embarrassed, feeling for his balance in the air and finding nothing in all that tidied room to hang onto.
