by Amanda Dykes
Liesl smooths her hand over the TIME article on the picnic table between them. “We came at last to my husband’s sister, in New Hampshire. A tiny farm. Do you know what we grow?”
There is a childlike smile upon her face, as if she is about to reveal that they are the keepers of the sun, or that they sow gold and reap it in spades.
She leans in and speaks it with that much magic, too. “Corn.” She shakes her head in wonder. “Corn! We grow something that brings life. My children—they are healthy. Not . . .” She churns her hand in the air, searching for the word. “Not oysgedart.”
Robert looks to Eva, whose head is tilted in befuddlement.
Liesl laughs. “I am sorry,” she says. “My English is still growing. Oysgedart is—in the Yiddish—not enough meat on the bones, I think you would say. My children are not like skeletons any longer. Thanks be to God.
“One day as I was cleaning the farmhouse, I found this. Luka’s sister, she read it to me. It is not new, I know, but . . . I had to come when I saw your face.
“That night, all I could do was weep. To know that your brother did not come home from that night at sea . . . to know that for us to farm corn beneath the sun, he will never see that sun again. I went into the field under the moon, out in the corn. And I took this from the earth for him.”
She reaches into the worn knapsack and pulls out a stone. Large and gray, with streaks of blue. “It is for your lighthouse, if I am not too late.” She cradles it in her hands and offers it this way, hands shaking. “For him, or for Luka, or perhaps for both of them.”
Robert slides one hand beneath hers, and the other on top of the stone. “You’re not too late.”
His mother wipes her tears and lays a hand on Liesl’s. Asks after her children, drinks in every detail as if they are her own family, her parched mother-heart storing up this healing treasure.
“I . . .” Liesl drops her gaze. “I am sorry. That he did not come home to you. Because of me.”
Robert’s jaw works, heat coming in waves inside. “There is something you should know, Mrs. Rosen.” He tells her of the night of Roy’s own rescue, how it changed his brother. How he longed to save another, as he himself had been saved.
And in his telling, a peace settles about Liesl like a shawl. A sad smile, and she says at last, looking out at the ocean, “Roy Bliss.” She has not said his name until now. “He . . . how do you say . . . ? He changed”—she gestures toward the water—“the tide for us. Nothing can undo the evil that came before him, but he did more than undo it. He . . .”
She wrings her wrists. “Unter wasser.” She looks to Eva for help.
She tilts her head. “Under water?”
“Yes, like that, but . . . more. All the way. S-s . . .”
“Submerged?”
“Yes! He submerged into the pain. And he gave himself into it. It is as my husband used to say, just what our Yeshua did for us, giving life through His death. And we wish to honor His life with ours.”
“Your husband,” Eva says gently. “Luka. He hasn’t returned . . . yet?” Her wording is hopeful but gentle, and Robert wants to kiss her for it. He would have blundered that question a thousand ways.
Liesl’s smile fades. “No,” she says. “He has not. And we know he will not, unless there has been a miracle. But . . . I have had more than my share of miracles, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t think God keeps a count of those, Mrs. Rosen,” Eva says.
The woman laughs. “This is true. Perhaps, Mr. Bliss, your light will help guide my husband home to us someday.”
Late that night, when the echoes of the ballgame are long silent, and Mrs. Rosen has boarded the Machias train to her home in New Hampshire, Robert turns her rock in his hands, sitting at the kitchen table. Liesl’s words play over him. And although it is far past midnight and the morning will soon call him out to sea, he heads through the night to Roy’s boathouse. There, with chisel and mallet in hand, he begins to engrave the rock with two words:
Eines tages.
twenty-seven
JULY 1962
Years. Years, it has been, this scraping together of coins and wages, of occasional donations and a windfall or two. A war in Korea, come and gone. His mother departed to heaven, leaving him grieving the purest, farthest-reaching love he has ever known. She leaves him, too, with an inheritance of this place she loved—Sailor’s Rest—and an old family tract of land up in the woods, and the most treasured inheritance of all: her hazelnut pie recipe, for Eva.
Now the war in Vietnam is making waves, everyone speculating on whether and when America will get involved. Every year, every war milestone and Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day, the poem gets picked up again, the rumor spreading that the light tower is still being built, and fresh waves of rocks come. Enough to nearly finish the tower.
But though there is still plenty of building to do, the tower is not the problem now. It is the lens room, where the light will go. The light itself, when it comes down to it. Turns out the price of scallops doesn’t hold a candle to the price of larger-than-life glass panels. Even after so many years, Bob has an ocean of distance between his bank account’s contents and the price tag on the almighty Fresnel lens.
Freh-nell, he’s learned. Corrected every time he opened his mouth and pronounced it Frez-null. Freh-nell, the people at Cornwell Company insist over the phone. They’re awful high and mighty about it, for a company that makes baking ware. And lighthouse lenses, apparently.
It was usually the same woman—Titan Trish, Bob has dubbed her in his mind since he’d first called them four years back. Her voice became pitying when he explained his situation. How the lighthouse needed a pretty big lens. Second-order, she called it. That meant it’d be so big he could walk inside it, all six feet of him. The light needed to reach as far as possible, but he knew the first-order lens, the biggest of them all, was too far out of reach.
Imagining how it sounded to her ears, he didn’t blame her for the way her words took on a near-condescending tone, like she was speaking with a child asking for the world.
“It’s highly unusual,” she’d told him back then. “For an individual to purchase a lens, especially these days. Not much call for lenses now.” She’d sounded morose, had gone on to bemoan the modernization of lighthouses, the way they were being updated, and lighthouse keepers—“those stalwart souls,” as she called them, who risk life and limb to the sea—are being thrown to the wayside.
Today’s phone call is no different. “Not many folks call up to purchase lenses anymore,” she reminds him, a tired edge to her voice. “And never of that magnitude. Have you planned a characteristic?”
“No,” he answers, just like the last time she asked. He can’t yet think of the flashing light pattern she refers to, which will have to be unique so as to be identifiable at sea. No, he can’t think of it yet—not when he doesn’t even have the light. He says as much.
“Have you an organization to work with?” She continues her barrage. “The coast guard, perhaps? We’ve dealt with them in the past, and they have the means to—”
“Do I sound like a gull-blasted organization?” Bob huffs, only slightly regretting the way his words stop her nasal chatter cold.
“No, sir, I don’t suppose you do.”
“I’m sorry.” He rubs his temple. He’s at the end of his rope, all these families counting on him to do what he promised. And he’s taking it out on Titan Trish. “I’ll call you back.”
He hangs up the phone in the store at Joe’s Landing, rattling the display of tape measure key chains on the counter, and shoves his hands in his pockets. Mrs. Crockett averts her clam-wide eyes quicker than a dart, busying herself with the paper-wrapped canned deviled ham as if it’s the most urgent task in all the world.
Hal is hunched over The Pier Review, head in hand and elbow to desk, pretending nothing out of the ordinary has just happened. He turns the page, starting in on the article boldly heading the page: JOHANNES HAS SHOW
DOWN WITH HOMER. There’s a picture of the coon cat sitting on the end of a pier while the dolphin swims by in the distance. Slow news day, apparently.
“Didn’t go so good?” Hal mutters, looking over rectangular glasses.
“No.” Bob doesn’t elaborate. Astronomical price tags to the tune of many, many thousands of dollars are busy pounding themselves into his brain.
“Too expensive?”
Bob rakes his hands through his hair. There seems only one option now. “I don’t see it, Hal. How I’ll ever get the money. At this rate, it’ll take me . . .” He presses his eyes shut and does some numbers in his head. His savings are meager, and that was from living hand to mouth, shoveling every extra penny he could over to the lighthouse fund. Eva, God bless her, is just as determined as he to see the tower lit. She’s plunged full-force into living off the land and sea like a true Anselite, clamming and fishing scallops with him and foraging fiddleheads, tapping maples . . . all of it.
She’d been cut off from any family money after she’d married him but hadn’t blinked twice. Had rolled up her sleeves and blundered her way into learning how to cook, clean, harvest, build, all so they could be together, and all to save a penny for the light.
They’d started a dedicated account eight years ago, thinking they’d have enough saved by the time the tower grew high enough to put a lens in. If he was to scrape together the rest . . .
His shoulders slump, and he leans against the pole where the now-silent yellow phone hangs. “It’ll take me to my dyin’ day to save enough money. I’ll be so old I won’t be able to finish the thing.”
Hal sets down his paper, folds it, and leans over both his folded arms. Being one of the men who buys lobsters from him, he knows more about Bob’s income than most anyone in this town. He tips his head toward the counter between them. “You could put a can out.” He rummages below the counter and pulls out a rusty Folger’s can, slaps a paper over it with some electrical tape, and scrawls Light the Lighthouse in thick black ink.
It’s generous of him. And Bob, much as he hates to, lets him. But even so he knows that without some miracle, they’ll never make it.
It keeps him up nights, thinking of the rocks sewn together with mortar over on the island, of the boxes gathering dust in the boathouse while he figures this tangle out. The hope—false hope now?—given to the people who’d packed those stones with care and sent them off to a stranger in an obscure corner of Maine.
In the dark of night, he wrestles down the only possible solution. So in the morning, sun bright and air clear, Bob skips a good day of lobstering to head over to Bangor. When he returns, an envelope of official papers stuffed in the pocket of his father’s old suit, he feels not a lifted burden but the weight of a traitor’s brand. He’s done it. Sold off his family’s land in the mountains. He can almost feel the trees groaning their protest, right in his very bones. He’d hounded the manager of the mill about their policies, their plan to keep the land sustained, not strip it all at once. He’d gotten it in writing, even. And he’d left the mill with enough money to burn a hole in his soul . . . and to buy that Fresnel lens.
He stops at Joe’s Landing to call Titan Trish up on that yellow phone again. The only good thing about this day is the way that pinched voice falls silent when he says to order him up a lens.
“I’m sorry?” she says, as if she hasn’t understood right.
“No need to apologize, ma’am,” Bob says, relishing this. “Just send it right over when it’s ready. You’ll find I’ve wired the money already. Have a nice night, then.”
“But, sir! There’s paperwork to do, and an order like this takes time to build, and—”
“Very good,” Bob says. “Send along whatever’s needed. Bye-bye, then.”
The receiver protests in her tin-can voice as he hangs it with a satisfying final click.
“Things go good?” Hal mutters, buried in his newspaper.
“Ayuh,” Bob says. “Real good.”
He leaves with the faintest flicker of hope. Just a spark, somewhere in the abyss of churning guilt over what he’s done to fund this lens. But it’s enough to carry him over the weeks and months as he waits, as he draws diagrams of how this “wonder lens” works. The way it takes a solitary light, and simply by the angles and positions of the bulls’-eye-like glass, magnifies it, breaks it up into countless projections of itself, which reunite into one solid, giant beam of light that blazes through dark, reaching out to guide boats to safety.
It’s a mechanism that echoes something eternal, something deep inside Bob. Broken things made whole. Light cracking through dark. A cracking that echoes a cleaving of granite buried inside him.
Summer ends, and one cool autumn day Bob walks into the post office to find Jim repeating a scene from the past, leading him out back for an arrival too big for the tiny post office.
Together, he and Ed—a broken soul his Words have recently, miraculously, drawn to Ansel—load the crates onto his boat. They’re surprisingly light, for the size of what’s inside. “Delicate,” Titan Trish had told him last week over the phone. “Don’t let its strength fool you. It’s intricate. Be careful.” Her voice had morphed from pitying to matronly since his order, and his conversations with her now felt more like checking in with a protective miser. She wasn’t dull of intelligence. She knew, no doubt, that something big had been sacrificed to make this happen. “There’s no insurance on this,” she’d said. “Go easy.”
The finality of it makes his bones suddenly feel like they’re made of glass, too. He and Ed place the crates in the Savvy Mae with such tenderness, they may as well have been newborn babes. It puts to mind that far-off echo of a memory, holding little William the night he brought news of his father’s death. The same gravity settles in him now.
Across the bay the blessedly still waters take them. Thank you, Lord, he prays. Mentally he shuffles through logistics—how they’d get it off the boat, around back to the boathouse. Where they’d store the crates until it was time to mount the lens. The boathouse’s back corner, probably. No one ever went back there. Not since Roy had gone away. It seems fitting, somehow, that the crowning glory for his brother’s lighthouse would rest there while it awaits its final home.
But all those thoughts fly out of his mind the second they step off the boat. Light is beginning to fade, but there’s enough to see clearly that a man sits on the front steps. Head down, something defeated and hard about his posture.
There’s something familiar about him. An inkling inches its way up his spine that he should know this man. And yet everything that feels familiar is just the slightest bit foreign, too.
The man looks up—and Bob nearly drops the crate he and Ed are carrying, right there on the path.
“Whoa.” Ed steadies him with a hand to the shoulder. “You okay?”
No. No, he isn’t.
The man . . . is Roy. The spitting image of his brother the last time Robert saw him alive. Like time had frozen back in 1945 and delivered him nearly two decades later to this moment, to knock the wind clean out of Robert.
His eyes slam shut. He shakes his head to clear this ghost away. But when he opens them again, there he is. Alive as the day, walking toward him with some great burden weighing him down.
Bob swallows. Tries to find words. To move toward the young man. But can’t.
There’s still a good space between them when the man stops and looks at Bob as if he’s sizing up an enemy.
“Robert Bliss?”
Bob swallows back a wave of tremorous unknown. Nods.
“I’m William.”
twenty-eight
The kid looks like a thousand-mile road trip rolled up into one person. All dust and weary and lost. Dark circles under his eyes, brown hair falling into his face—a face that looks as if it decided long ago this world wasn’t a kind place, and maybe had good reason for that verdict.
He is settling in up in the room Robert and Roy had once shared. Well, settling in is pr
obably an overstatement—all he had on him was a worn duffel bag that hung limp and nearly empty.
“What now?” Bob blows his cheeks out, asking the question somewhat to himself, but more so to God. His thoughts are becoming more like an ongoing conversation with heaven, these days—usually more questions than anything else. And this was a big one. What now?
What would Eva do? She’s away for the night caring for Mrs. Bascomb, who’s been ailing. If she were here, she’d shatter this tension with her warmth, work her magic, and get that kid to drop the brick wall around him. What would Ed do? He’d taken off as soon as he figured out who William was, telling Bob he’d be around tomorrow. Sensing, maybe, that there was a lot that needed to happen between uncle and nephew.
So . . . what now?
Food. The answer comes quick and hard. A guy needs food, and that kid more than most. He’s gaunt, though maybe that’s his normal appearance. Bob had no way of knowing. The last picture he has is of a four-year-old on a bike somewhere in Minnesota, beaming up at the camera and, most likely, his mom, behind the lens. After that, Jenny had wed—a Theodore Sawyer—and her letters trickled to a stop, ending with a request that Bob not write anymore. Kindly said, but it had burned. Reading between the lines, Bob assumed Mr. Sawyer wasn’t too keen on his wife writing to another man. Bob understood, once he got past his initial anger. And though something had felt off about the request—something unspoken and subdued in Jenny’s tone—he’d had no choice but to respect it.
But here, now, was William. Looking for all the world like the second coming of Roy, with a dusting of Jenny’s freckles and her blue eyes, too. Surreal.
Bob reaches into the cabinet for a box of cornmeal, pulls a pail of buttermilk from the pistachio-green refrigerator, and some cod fresh caught this morning. The boy needs something hearty. Bob’s no chef, but he can fry up a fillet to golden-crisp, and Ed had taught him about a little something called the po’ boy. Music to a man’s soul—that’s what the southern dish is. Bob has no shrimp or oysters, and Ed had declared that using cod instead was like “drinkin’ air when what you want’s a swig of ice-cold water,” but it fills a man up. And that kid needs filling.
