by M Dressler
Quint had already tied his mount to the fence and was busy making conversation with Mr. Folde. Mr. Folde turned around, his pale brows a little knitted under his lightkeeper’s cap. I could tell he was seeing me in a new way.
“It seems you have a visitor, Emma.”
“Yes. It’s nearly my break-time. I thought we’d take a walk.”
“Mr. McHenry is in the signal building. Have him show our guest—your guest—the lens.”
“Thank you.” That was a surprise. I hadn’t even seen the lighthouse myself, yet. “I will.”
“Well. Have a good afternoon. It’s our family peace time, Emma, as you know.” He tipped his cap.
As he turned toward the porch, he looked up, and I looked with him, to see Mrs. Folde’s wan face at the second-story window, staring out longingly.
I went up to Quint’s horse and carelessly stroked its neck.
“So. You’ve come,” I said.
“Glad?”
His eyes smiled at me. Less shy each time we met. He likes being with me, I thought. Or is it that he likes pushing his family to one side and cutting his own whip?
“I asked Mr. Folde’s permission to come once a week and walk with you.”
“Mr. Folde’s? Isn’t it my permission you need to ask?”
“I thought I already did.”
“It’s lucky you did.”
“I don’t think Folde knew what to make of my asking him.”
“A Lambry asking anyone’s permission. What’s the world coming to?”
“I think it’s important people be treated equally.” He looked down at his boots, flinching.
I said, “Let’s walk, then.”
We passed over the fits and starts of salt grass and strolled by the McHenrys’ bright house. The McHenrys’ garden was bigger than the Foldes’, so much so they could grow standing crops. They were hardworking people—Mrs. McHenry digging daily in her herbs, and Mr. McHenry keeping mostly to the lighthouse—and they adored their little boy, who was rosy and fat.
“Nice bit of land.” Quint nodded. “No timber, though.”
We passed the head keeper’s house, deserted except for the staked goat keeping the lawn short.
“I’ve hardly seen them at all,” I said. “It’s so quiet here.”
“Do you like it, Emma?”
“It’s all right.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
I laughed. “That’s not very nice.”
“You know what I mean.” He kicked at a clump of turf and stared off into the distance, to where the coast bent its way toward Fort Kane. “You see that strip of timber, over there? Uncut? That’s the sort of land I’d like to have for my own mill one day. When I come into my own money. In three years. Unless my father agrees to help me sooner than that. In which case all kinds of things would be possible,” he said, drawing closer.
“And how are Mr. and Mrs. Lambry?”
“Mother thinks everyone’s becoming savages, dancing the foxtrot. Father is weighing where to put his investments next. I don’t think he’ll leave me hanging on much longer. There’s no family pride in that.”
“Ho there!” a man’s voice shouted.
Mr. McHenry, coming out from the signal building ahead of us, holding his pudgy, gloved hand up.
“That’s the second assistant,” I explained.
“Hullo, hullo!” Mr. McHenry called. He must have seen, from the lighthouse, Quint’s fine horse, his fine clothes. He’d never come running out that way for me. “We have a visitor!”
The men’s hats were tipped.
“Come up, come up!” Mr. McHenry said excitedly. He was short and stout and didn’t look as young as Mr. Folde. His eyes were thick with brown wrinkles from staring out to sea. I had planned on liking him, but he’d seen me walking on the cliffs for days now and never so much as a you must see had come from him, as he was saying now to Quint. Sometimes I’d pass him sitting with his wife and their boy, picking rosemary in the garden, and I thought Mrs. McHenry watched me with a wary eye and was happy when I kept on walking. The Point wasn’t, after all, one sweet little family, as Mrs. Lambry had said it would be. It was more like a little island with two tiny wild tribes, each guarding against the other.
But now that I had a Lambry with me, I was taken right in.
“How many steps is it to the top, Mr. McHenry?” Quint asked.
“One hundred and three. But you won’t feel them, not at your age,” he joked, though he seemed a little nervous. He opened a low, black door and we passed into an all-white room filled with what looked to me like oil casks resting on their sides. Mr. McHenry explained these were the siren compressors.
“I see.” Quint nodded. “And how do you keep the lamp running?”
“Vapor oil. We have the signal flash set at ten-second intervals. That’s the Point’s own signature, Mr. Lambry, so ships won’t confuse us with any of the other light stations hereabouts. Now, the spinning action itself, see here, we keep turning by means of a clockwork.” Mr. McHenry bustled around like a proud housewife. “See this chain going down? All the way through the hole in the foundation of this building, you see that?” He made us lean over the hole that yawned into the blackness below us. A chain disappeared inside it, oozing with grease.
“It has to be so long to keep the turns going. There’s a weight on the end. We crank the chain onto this drum, see, every two hours. We go in shifts. That keeps the lamp spinning.”
“But isn’t that”—Quint wrinkled his nose—“awfully primitive and … dull?”
Mr. McHenry’s pudgy eyes widened, shocked. “If you were a lightkeeper, Mr. Lambry, you’d know that we like that sort of constancy. A lightkeeper wants everything to be predictable. Every day, every hour, the same. That’s the key. And there’s plenty of other interesting work for us to do, to keep us busy. Here, for instance, is the kerosene we use to keep the engines and compressors primed. And there are always important repairs to make—here’s where we keep our tools. It’s work enough, I can tell you, for the two of us, me and Mr. Folde, with the head keeper away on his travels. Mind your step now, and we’ll take the spiral stair for the top.”
Like a daisy wheel, up we went. Round and round, clanging on the steps. I’d never climbed so high, turned so tightly. It made the heart pound. Mr. McHenry led the way, and I followed, Quint going last, like a gentleman. We ducked through a small hatch at the top and … brightness, brightness everywhere! We were standing inside a circle made of glass. It was like floating in a miracle. All around us the sky stretched, and the flapping white wings of the sea carried the eye to the horizon. Below us, the land fell far away and looked broken, only chunks of stone, and the sun came from all directions as though it were standing still.
The lamp’s lens, above us, it was so strange. It looked like an oyster made of crystal, whirling. Mr. McHenry was telling Quint its beam could be seen as far out as fifteen miles. He walked us all the way around the base of it inside the house, so we could marvel at its clearness and steadiness. He said it was made in England, a Fresnel, the best kind in the world.
“Now see here, this is actually a glass door, and you can step outside on the walkway and see what a time we have keeping her painted and fresh.”
This time Quint went out first. I followed and the wind hit and filled my chest and skirt. My boots echoed on the slick metal walk, and I made straight for the cold rail. It was freshly painted. I looked down over it and saw, below us and to one side, the signal building surrounded by soft tufts of grass and to the other, the open cliffs and the spray spewing over rocks, far down, in cartwheels.
Mr. McHenry went back inside the lamp house, embarrassed, saying he had spotted a smudge he didn’t like on one of the panes.
“It’s so quaint.” Quint shook his head. “Two men pulling on a chain to make a light go around. There must be a better model.”
“I like it. It’s simple.” I liked how easy it was to understand.
“Si
mple, yes. Childish, even. Just wind it up. Like a dancing toy. Maybe we should dance?” He reached to put his arm around my waist.
“He’ll see you!”
“Do you care? I don’t.”
He swung me around, foxtrotting me backward around the walkway, lightly.
“Are you afraid being up so high, Emma?”
“No. I’m not.” I smiled up at him.
The walkway was slippery with the mist and new paint. But I wasn’t afraid. The rail was high enough. The sun only blinded you because it was perfect. The perfect day.
“Me neither. I’ve got you,” Quint said.
“And I’ve got you.”
And then, suddenly, Quint’s elbow dropped, and mine. I didn’t understand it. Where were our feet? My heels tried to dig in and found nothing but air. My chin was falling forward and my chest hit wet metal—I saw my hands clawing, scraping in front of me, like an animal’s paws I didn’t recognize—and there was nothing to hold onto and my skirt went over the edge and I thought, how can it be that I’m only eighteen. I’m only eighteen, and this is the end. So this is how it happens—so easily. A foot in the wrong place. That’s all. You were holding tightly onto his arm. But it’s nothing. All the longing that you feel inside you? It’s nothing. We’re nothing. The truth, right underneath, all the time.
Mr. McHenry’s arm reached over Quint’s shoulder. “I have her! We have you! Pull yourself up, Miss Finnis! Pull yourself up! Holy Jesus!”
I heard another sound. It was the blood in my head. Pounding.
I kicked and fought and wriggled my waist onto the platform. Only then could I turn and pull in my knees.
Mr. McHenry collapsed to the metal walkway beside Quint. Their faces were both so white, they looked like marble.
“She’s all right.” Quint swallowed. “She’s all right!”
“Holy Jesus. As good as gone.” Mr. McHenry shook.
“No! She wasn’t! It was—if this was only—A better handrail!” Quint barked. “If only this place were properly up to date and maintained—”
“You’re not going to say”—the keeper grew even paler—“this was my fault?”
“I am saying—”
“Stop,” I shouted. And felt the hair on my head, and the pulse in my scalp. “Stop.”
Quint held me. Close.
“We should, we ought to,” Mr. McHenry babbled, “get you downstairs?”
I said, “We were only dancing.”
“I’m sorry.” Quint held my hands. “We were. You’re all right now.”
“We should get the miss down.”
“You go,” Quint said, suddenly sounding like lord and master, ordering the lightkeeper, “and get her something hot to drink and have it waiting for us.”
“Yes, yes, yes sir!” Mr. McHenry stood and scurried.
Quint fretted over my chin when we were alone. “What a stupid, stupid—accident.”
“Yes.”
“Can I give you a kiss on the cheek, to show you how sorry I am?”
I didn’t answer him. I wanted to stand. How good it felt to stand. To be whole. Yes. Like I had been an empty shaker, for a moment, but now the salt was poured back in.
“Just let me know at least you’re not angry with me. Look at me, Emma. Please, look at me?”
There was anger inside me. I knew it was there because I felt it, lurking, but it was mixed with something else, some wild wonder at living, some pumping, jerking aliveness. Quint stood near me. His soft whiskers so close. Each whisker as clear to me as a golden thread.
“I’m not angry now.”
“But no kiss?”
“Why should I?”
“If I’m better behaved? No more dancing pranks, ever again?”
His blue eyes were so serious.
“Maybe. When you come to the Point again.”
“Then I can come again?”
And of course he did. Many times. And when he came, we stood at the base of the lighthouse instead of in its eye, and his mouth tasted as soft as it looked, and his hands were more certain at my tingling back, and I let them go where I wanted.
15
My work for the Foldes grew dreary. Mrs. Folde complained bitterly and suffered during the last weeks of her time. Mr. Folde grew cool, distant as a light on another shore. The children turned listless and fretful. Still, whenever Quint left, I would be smiling from our walks around the Point, and sometimes I would have a new ribbon for my hair or a silk flower to set on my window sill, next to the tiny bird’s skull. After I told Quint I’d done well at Benito’s schoolhouse until my father’s accident had forced me to go to work, he started bringing some of his library to read on the little beach below the cliffs, where we sat on the shelf and I heard:
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
We and the laboring world are passing by;
Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky.
He told me that his mother was wondering why he went out riding so much and he laughed and said she’d been trying to interest him in some of the local girls who had come back for the summer from their boarding schools, but that each of them was as dull as soap and made him want to beat his head with a stick.
When Mrs. Folde’s pains finally came on, it was late on a gray day, and I took the five Folde children to sit quietly with Mrs. McHenry and her boy in her large parlor, while she braided herbs in her busy hands and talked about what a trial life-giving was and that it was a good thing that men (other than the doctor, who Mr. McHenry had fetched from town) knew to keep away at such a time, because they couldn’t understand it.
It was eleven at night when we got word that the doctor had delivered two baby boys: one sturdy as a mushroom, who’d screamed as soon as his lungs hit the air; and the second blood-soaked and lifeless, who’d never opened an eye or drawn a single breath.
Mrs. McHenry had turned red and held her own baby close to her. Mr. McHenry came in and said it was a dreadful thing but that it had to be accepted, that there was nothing, when all was said, that could be done if God had decided one soul was meant to be stronger than another.
I watch as Pratt leaves the Lambry House with my rosebud in his pocket. I’ve been lucky; everything is now going according to my plan. He must be growing more certain now that it’s Alice he’s hunting. For who else but an artist would make such a fanciful thing, a baby rose drowned in red watercolor?
There’s this to keep me safe, too: Pratt’s way of hunting is to call out the name of a ghost, and so turn her name against her. But if he doesn’t know the right name to call, how can he turn the ghost and make her light and betray her anger, the way he lit the boy in the mine? He can’t. For no man can call a soul unless and until he gives it a name, the way Mr. and Mrs. Folde gave a name even to their stillborn son, Infant Joseph. And no hunter who favors Pratt’s way of killing can rouse a ghost, stirring her to betray her heart, unless he knows rightly how to rouse her.
Yet he might be made to call out the wrong name. And when he does, he might point his fist at a false flash of light, at the fire from a dragon’s mouth, and believe that he has done it in, leaving me be at last.
Patient, I flit down to the cove, the beach. I trail the young couples, the lovers who’ve come out of their honeymoon suites, watching them take off their shoes and drag their feet through the waves, holding hands, picking up shells, happy, as if there’s no shadow underneath us all. I wonder that they can’t see love is a kind of ghost, too: a light that can’t be seen but is real, with just as much chance of being snuffed out. I wonder if the living understand how ghostly love is, truly, how hard it is to put your finger on it. Is love the moment when your eyes fly up the lane and you think, wildly, not of the gift of ribbon he’s bringing you, but of the laughing way he’ll give it? Is it love when your feet move faster and the lane seems suddenly twice as long, is it love when eye
meets eye, and mouth meets soft mouth, and mouths suddenly become another set of eyes, searching—as if kissing were a kind of seeing? Is it love when you see the future stretching out in front of you, endless as the sea? Or when an hour feels as shallow as a thimble?
I float back toward the woods now. What might Pratt know about love? I wonder. Or the Danes? Or little Ellen? When I reach Ellen’s peaked cabin, in the garden where the plants have all died, a little mound of earth has been built up and a cross erected above it, with a kitten’s pink collar buckled to it. Which must mean Ellen’s wandering pet has joined the night of the animals, the dark air that stirs the leaves and pads in tracks that go no farther than your doorway.
The cabin is dark, the curtains drawn. Ellen is by herself. She’s been upset by everything that’s happened, I can see. She must want some company. She sits in an easy chair with a blanket wrapped around her small shoulders. Her shining tablet rests on her lap, its light glowing against her stomach. Her bobbed hair hangs straight down over her forehead. She looks like she’s not seeing anything at all. Like Mr. and Mrs. Folde when their baby was put into the ground.
She stretches her fingers out and begins tapping on the slate. I settle on the chair like a cat behind her ear. She reaches up, not knowing, to adjust the blanket.
Philip,
Received your message. Sorry I didn’t respond sooner. My cat died today. But I’m feeling better. I really want to keep helping out.
This is what I’ve found out: The first roses were planted at the house by the first Mrs. Lambry—her name was Eugenia—soon after her son died. The yellow roses growing there now and in other places around town are descended from those bushes. I asked Mrs. Fanoli from the botanical garden about Alice and what the roses might have meant to her, and she said Alice took special care of them for most of her life because it was a kind of family responsibility passed down through the women, but that she had let things go in recent years and some of the vines have gone wild.
