by Amanda Dykes
“What?” Jeremiah’s shoulders square. “No. Not him.”
She faces him. “I can’t think of any other Robert Bliss poetry experts who just happen to be in the neighborhood. . . .”
Silence pounds a path to Jeremiah’s next words. “You’re right.” And without meeting her eyes, he gestures for her to lead the way.
Spencer’s “flat,” as he calls it, is a tiny apartment with barely enough room for the three of them. Especially with his stacks of binders and books, which make it look as if he’s bent on establishing a second library in town.
The look on his face when Annie asks about the poem is that of sun breaking through sky.
“Robert Bliss’s poem?” His enthusiasm pushes out a laugh. “You mean the poem that changed the tide of the nation? The words that transformed grief into hope? The poem that’s—”
“Pretty sure that’s the one we mean,” Jeremiah says.
“I’m sorry.” Spencer waves his hand in disbelief. “It’s just that when it comes to poetry—war poetry, especially—this is . . . it’s a phenomenon. You know the photo of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day?”
Annie nods. They’d studied it in her cultural anthropology class freshman year.
“Bob’s poem is that. I mean—printed just as many times, known just as well. For a time. But where that photo captured the jubilee of that day, his poem caught the broken hearts that followed the war and gave them a place to go. A purpose for their pain.”
Annie swallows, already knowing the answer to her next question. “Do you . . . happen to have a copy of the full poem?”
He laughs again, pulling out two of his binders from the stack near the front door.
He lays them on the round table and taps them. “And that’s just the start.”
Just the start? What is it, an epic ballad?
Her hand shakes slightly as she opens the first binder.
A clipped column of newsprint is held with black corner fasteners to the middle of the page, and the heading of the paper itself fills the rest of the page. The Pier Review, out of Ansel-by-the-Sea, Maine. Three humble stanzas line up:
LIGHTHOUSE
By: Anonymous
So send your rocks
And raise your hearts
And set to the work of living.
For the joy and the loss,
the gold and the dross—
The lives who were lost, still giving.
Stone upon stone,
strength upon strength,
Their courage shall rise from the sea.
Where their lives, at the shore,
Are igniting once more
To light the way home fearlessly.
And in the light . . .
At last, at last . . .
In the light, at last, there is life.
To honor a fallen soldier and help build a lighthouse to bring others home, send a rock in their memory to: Postmaster, Ansel-by-the-Sea, Maine.
Annie looks at Jeremiah. Jeremiah looks at Annie. Between them, the vision of the tower they’ve just come from rises up, understanding beginning to spark.
Her pulse skitters around the implications.
She tries to find words . . . but can’t.
Jeremiah turns the page. The same poem, printed in a Connecticut paper a week later. She flips to the next page—New Hampshire. Flip. New York. Flip. Boston. On and on, all the way west to California and south to Texas, Florida. Everywhere beyond and between. 1945. 1946, ’47. 1951, along with a clipping about the Korean War. 1965—Vietnam. The clippings grow sparser as the decades grow more recent but continue on into the ’80s. The ’90s, with Desert Storm.
Annie’s heart is in her throat, wet heat stinging her eyes as she traces a clipping from 1981.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Bent over the paper, Spencer pushes his glasses farther up on his nose. “That something could continue to be reprinted for so long. Viral, before that was even a-a thing.” He grimaces at his slip into casual language. “A phenomenon.”
Across the table, Jeremiah watches with a look beyond just the wonder of the poem.
He’s not looking at the binder. He’s looking at her.
“Annie?”
She sniffs, feeling all manner of tangled up. Frozen on this clipping from 1981—Beirut.
“It’s nothing,” she says, and forces the binder closed. It feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.
“Wait.” Spencer’s voice is excited, hushed. “Wait until you see. . . . Now, where did I put that other portfolio? One moment . . .”
He wanders from the room, leaving Annie and Jeremiah—and the countless lives they’re beholding in this moment.
Jeremiah has not budged, still studying her. Only compassion on his features, stoic though they are. Haltingly, he slides his hand across the table until it’s next to hers, where she still grips the corner of the binder.
He takes hold of the cover, letting his thumb slide next to hers.
“What is it?” His voice is low. Inviting trust.
She lifts her eyes to his, and despite her steely resolve not to crack . . . the wetness in her eyes brims over, drops. Right into his hand, which he lifts to dry her face.
His touch is strong. Gentle.
Let him in. Something inside nudges her. Only it’s more than a nudge.
Pulling in a deep breath, she opens back to the clipping about Beirut, taps it twice, pulling the cuffs of her sweater up over her hands.
“This . . . this is when my dad was there, in Beirut. And I was here.” When she’d stood on Bob’s dock, slipping her hand into his weathered one, understanding only that the great blue sea before her had taken her parents far, far away. Not realizing that at that very moment, Bob’s boathouse was filling with rocks. Rocks that represented lives lost. Lives that could so easily have been her parents’. “Every wave in that big old blue sea is a story,” he’d said.
How little she’d understood then. How she is only barely beginning to skim the surface now.
Spencer enters the room again, attention on a document in his hand. Jeremiah’s attention is still on her. Slowly, he releases her hand as she tries to focus on what the scholar is saying.
“Here,” Spencer says. “The one that changed it all.” He hands her a few pages.
Annie’s eyes skim the page of tiny print. TIME magazine, 1947.
BUILDING THE LEGACY OF A NATION, the headline reads. In smaller print, a subtitle: Fisherman-Poet Robert Bliss gives hope to a country from the rocky shores of Maine, building a lighthouse one stone at a time.
Annie’s breath catches. The opposite page is a full photo of a young man. Shadows and light caught in time to capture an image of the previously anonymous poet. He looks off over the sea, one hand at his side, wrapped around a single stone. A universe of stories in his eyes—stories that had lain silent now, for years.
Unspoken words that she holds the key to.
twenty-two
OCTOBER 1945
A week after the Words came to Robert, they run in The Pier Review. He can only call it “the Words,” for he cannot bring himself to call it a poem. It’s not his fault the Words went and stacked themselves up in syllables, fell into lines and stanzas like soldiers into ranks.
The day it runs in the paper, he feels the way it follows him like a shadow—the fellas giving him furtive glances at the landing, Mrs. Stevens studying him as she serves him his plateful of Gretel cakes, her young daughter, Bess, peeking at him from the kitchen. They know it’s him. It isn’t hard to figure in this town no bigger than a bushel basket. But no one gives him any rocks.
The second day, he stays away from town. Still no rocks.
And the third day, Sunday, he slaps courage back into himself and goes to church. Ansel is on a loop with other small towns up in this corner of the country, where preachers only visit twice a month. Services, then, are twice the occasion, to make up for occurring only half the time. His mother should not have to sit alone, on top
of everything else she’s lost. Savannah Bliss is a strong woman—of that there is no doubt—but there’s a stiff sort of protection that now rises in him when it comes to her. He and she, half of the family they once were, carrying on with these phantom pains, glancing down the pew where Dad and Roy should be.
So he goes to church, and he sits. The visiting preacher continues through the book of Luke, and he’s talking of the young donkey brought for Jesus. The disciples sent on this errand that surely seemed nonsensical to them, except for one thing—their King instructed it.
The preacher speaks of the way Jesus rode the creature down the Mount of Olives. At the base of that mountain just days later, darkest betrayal would deliver Him unto death, but as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the people rejoiced with everything in them. The preacher asked the congregation to imagine how His heart broke wide open at the sight of the city that would soon endure much pain.
The peoples’ complete outpouring, loud and jubilant in their praise of the miracles they have seen, made no sense to the Pharisees—they told Him to stop them.
Robert’s ears pound with the rush of blood, for he knows what is coming. And then the pastor speaks it. “‘I tell you . . . if these should hold their peace’”—more pounding in Robert’s head, in his heart—“‘the stones would immediately cry out.’”
The rest of the sermon is a blur. Robert tries to fix his mind upon it, but it’s as if there’s a foundation being constructed beneath him. Strength to stand upon, and he wonders if this is what God did for Noah, whose task was of significance ten-thousand fold more than his. A task that seemed downright crazy on the surface.
After the sermon, he’s the first one out into the sunlight. People trickle out, lingering as they always do. Swapping recipes, swapping condolences. He stands in the shadows of a pine cluster, waiting for whenever his mother is ready.
And then there’s a tug at his jacket. He looks down to see little Lainey Foster, face smudged with adventure and dirt, just like her Sunday frock. Wide brown eyes peer up at him, and she lifts a hand toward his.
He pushes off from the tree he was leaning against, kneels down, and takes what she offers.
And the weight of it—the warmth it’s absorbed from her hands—takes his breath.
“It’s for my daddy,” she says. “Mama says it’s a ’memberin’ rock.”
“A remembering rock.” He turns her words in his mouth, her rock in his hand. She’s said in two words what his clumsy rhymes took an eternity to say.
At a distance, her mother looks on, dressed in a coat of crimson, one hand to her mouth, fingers curled, the other holding the hand of Lainey’s younger brother.
“So, can you take care of it?” The girl bends to pick up a pinecone, and another, bunching her hands around them. Ready to carry her next load to the next place, wherever that might be.
“Yes,” Robert says. “Your daddy was a brave man, Lainey. Just like you’re a brave girl.”
“Okay,” she says, and turns to go, shouting over her shoulder as her curls bounce to her run, “Thanks, mister!”
He stands, and raises a hand solemnly to Mrs. Foster, thanking her. For the rock, and so much more.
She nods, tears in her eyes, then takes the pinecone Lainey is thrusting toward her.
The next day, it’s Lainey’s little face in his memory that urges him on to the post office. He worries he won’t get any more rocks—or maybe there won’t be enough. What had he been thinking? A lighthouse? It’s going to take a lot of rocks. Why hadn’t he stopped to calculate, before going and printing those words? And what did he know of finding a light source for such a thing? But Lainey, her untainted gift of the rock, drives him on. Maybe there will be a package or two today.
Jim pokes his head out from the back room of the post office. “’Bout time!”
“Got somethin’ for me, Jim?”
“Ayuh. But you got me in a pickle, son.”
“How so?”
“You wrote that article”—poem isn’t in Jim’s vocabulary, either, it seems—“and didn’t sign your dumb name to it, and now these boxes are comin’ here without a name, and I can’t bring ’em your way.”
“What makes you think it was me?”
“Where do you think you live, son?”
“I hoped no one would figure it out,” Robert mutters.
“The whole town knows it was you. We might as well have had front row seats when you were writin’ it. If you don’t want me to use your name, what do you want me to call you? Ansel Number Four Hundred and Fifty-Four?”
“Fine by me.”
“Follow me, Robert.” He gestures him back.
Ansel number 454 follows Jim into the back room, where there are thirteen packages stacked up behind the back door. Each addressed simply to Postmaster. The return addresses are, as he expects, from nearby towns—Machiasport, Cutler, Jonesboro. People close enough to have The Pier Review passed on to them by daily gabfests around town.
Jonesboro seems a bit far for word-of-mouth, but Mainers always did surprise him with the lengths they sometimes took things. Maybe he’d get a few from as far as Bangor, perhaps even Beals Island and Bar Harbor in time.
Jim pulls out a pocketknife. “May as well open ’em. Regulations say the recipient has to open them. That’s me, unfortunately. But then you’d better believe you’ll be hauling these away, young sir.”
One by one they open the packages, each one containing a stone. Some the size of a fist, some half as big, some twice so. But what socks the air out of Robert is what else they contain.
Pictures. Men, most right about his age, smiling proudly in their uniforms. Names, written on the back. Histories, tributes. With one, the story of a man who went back, and back, and back, at Omaha Beach, to deliver soldiers in a U-boat. The beginnings of D-Day, his courage a cornerstone of that fate-altering day. A turning point in the war, without which the next stone’s story may never have been told.
It is from V-E Day. A young American soldier in Paris, writing in a letter to his wife, telling of the streets filled with dancing. How every streetlight was turned on, after so much darkness. It seemed good to see all the light. . . .
And a man from Germany who came to America as a child. Faced with the challenge to use the language of his youth as a shield for his brothers-in-arms. Wielding words to draw German troops from their bunkers, without a single shot fired. Had it not been for his words, many lives would have been lost that day.
These are the stitches in the stone fabric. Each one connected to the next. These are the faces that tie themselves inextricably to these stones, and in doing so, give them life. That day, and in the many to come, Robert retrieves them—boxes already opened by Jim’s trusty pocketknife—from the back door to the storage room at the post office, to his boat.
Land over sea the earth moves, rock by rock in the boat. Onto the island, these bits of others’ worlds, and into their place in a great jigsaw puzzle in the clearing. It is here that Robert at last draws up a rough set of plans and begins to piece these broken lives together, each one with a prayer. And each one, with Roy’s voice urging him on with his dying refrain: “There’s a whole lotta light.”
Months pass this way. The boxes coming in spades, postmarks from farther and farther away. He places the pictures and stories inside the boathouse, not sure what to do with them, how to rightfully honor them. And with the rocks, he builds. Nights, mostly. When he’s pulled in his lobster haul for the day, washed the sea away, he rows to the island and works again until his eyelids burn with fatigue and his muscles rail against the strain . . . his soul taking flight with it.
Nigh on a year later, some paper down in St. Louis runs the poem, and goes and sticks Bob’s name on it. By Robert Bliss. A reporter there knew someone in Georgia who knew someone in Ansel who knew the guarded identity of “Anonymous.” The infernal transcontinental gossip chain found him out.
Bob hates it. He did not want to be known. Did not even write the word
s, really. He was only the hands.
The Saint Louis article brings rocks in a flurry for a while, but months later he looks at his dwindling pile of rocks and a tied-up sort of empty settles deep in his stomach—he needs more, so many more, to make this light reach high and far. Yet he does not want more, for he knows what they signify.
So he waits.
And part of him, still cursing that old gossip chain, begins to bless it when a reporter from TIME magazine shows up on his island one summer afternoon in 1947, wanting to interview him, to run a feature on the lighthouse that gave hope to a nation.
“You’re a real legend, you know.” The man in his plaid sports coat and bowler hat says, his shiny oxfords scuffed over with island dust.
Bob keeps working, keeps spreading mortar, piecing rocks together. “They are the legends,” he says, pointing at the tower.
“Many a-folk would be much obliged to know more about the man behind the tower.” The reporter draws a notebook out of his coat pocket, pen poised. “Can you tell me about him?” This reporter’s sharp. Walking around things, referring to Bob like he’s someone else not present. Weaseling his way in, really.
Bob stands beside the scant rocks remaining to be placed. Any other time, he’d run this guy off, and the man would never look back. But . . . he needs the rocks.
“Nope,” he says at last.
The reporter just waits, like that’ll make Bob change his mind.
“But I’ll tell you about them.” He gestures toward the tower. “The men. Their families.”
The reporter taps the pad with his pen. “Deal.”
“One more thing,” Bob says.
“Lay it on me.”
Bob lifts his chin toward the camera hanging around the man’s neck. “No pictures. Not of me.”
They shake on it, and three hours later, with the sun going down and the reporter’s hands crusted with the mortar he stooped to help apply as they talked, the man leaves. With a notepad full of tales . . . and the stolen click of a camera, last thing before he hoofs it down the mountain trail.
Bob would loathe that picture in the months to come. He’d stash away the copies the people from town brought him when it was printed, biting back all the choice words he had for that reporter. Ansel was happy. They felt honored, somehow. Maybe even . . . proud? But Bob ducked beneath all that, thankful at least for the new influx of deliveries that came, and came in abundance—and even came by hand one Saturday afternoon.
