by Anne Nesbet
Real lighthouses were tall, sturdy, massive, giant things, but this one was remarkably short and squat, a miniature (vertically) of a lighthouse. The opposite of a giant. For another thing, the storybook lighthouses were always perched on rocks overlooking the crashing waves of an angry sea, and this one looked out over the rolling Maine woods. Because of the rocky lip here, you could see a long way, but nowhere were there waves and seagulls. So that was strange.
And yet, it was clearly a lighthouse all the same. The squat tower part tapered as it rose. A narrow set of steps led up about seven feet or so, where there was a platform with a clever iron railing around it, and a black cap of a roof on top.
Carved into the stone tower on the side facing the path were three very large words, The Beckon Beacon, and then four lines of smaller words, harder to see. They had been carved in very deep, and someone had painted them black at some point, but many years of weather had worn them down. By using her miraculously sharp new eyes — and by running the tips of her fingers over the carved letters — Gusta figured out that the poem went something like this:
A lighthouse cries out “Danger,”
And sometimes it calls us home.
True hearts be a beacon that beckons
to wanderers, wherever they roam.
It would win no prizes for poetry, but Gusta’s heart was pounding in her chest.
Why would a person build a lighthouse so very far from the sea?
Gusta climbed up the very steep steps and swung herself onto the platform there, where in any ordinary lighthouse you might expect a light. There was no light here, but there was a thick old glass vase, holding the place of that light, and in that vase were what looked like little scraps of paper, the occasional dried flower, and a heap of glinting rocks, brought up, seemed like, from the dirt road through the woods.
She was still in her scientific explorer mode as she sent a hand reaching into the vase. The first couple of pieces of paper were so old that whatever writing they had on them was completely faded, and then the third and the fourth both had the same two words on them: Come home.
And that was when Gusta’s conscience smote her, and she saw that she was reading the longings that had been secretly held in other people’s hearts. She ceased to be a scientific explorer and let the pieces of paper fall back into the vase with all those shiny rocks. She couldn’t help feeling that she had just narrowly dodged becoming a much worse sort of person than she wanted to be.
And the sun was sinking in the sky, so the message might as well have been for her: Come home.
She wasn’t sure anymore what those words actually meant — where home was or whether to get there was a matter of coming or going — but before she could remember how home-less she was, she was already hurrying back down the hill, toward the big yellow farmhouse on the corner of Hoopes and Elm.
For a few days it looked like the inaugural performance of the Orphan Band on the great occasion of the Kendall Mills union vote would not happen after all. Uncle Charlie didn’t feel up to attending an event where there would be so many reminders of his awful days at the mills after the mangling of his arm. And he was adamant that without someone along to look out for her, his daughter, Bess, was certainly not going to be heading off to any town hall for any union election. No, sir.
Josie tried to talk Uncle Charlie into seeing it her way, which was that five dollars was a lot of money, and she, Josie, was all the protection Bess or Gusta needed to have.
Uncle Charlie shook his head: still no.
Then when Gusta was at Mr. Bertmann’s workshop the next afternoon, keeping track of the results of some would-be Air Cadets’ eye exams, a small miracle happened.
The last of the would-be cadets had banged the door shut behind him, and Gusta was checking over the numbers she’d written in the big Air Cadet notebook, when she thought about those five dollars Mr. Elmer Smith had promised them, and how that would have been the equivalent of nearly seventeen whole hours of work for Mr. Bertmann, and a small sigh had escaped her.
“What is wrong, child?” said Mr. Bertmann.
Gusta did her best to explain. They had formed a band, they had learned their songs, and now Mr. Elmer Smith from New York City wanted them to perform, but Uncle Charlie said without a chaperone, no, et cetera.
Mr. Bertmann listened, and then waved his hand in the air as if calling all the pigeons in the world to a meeting.
“Well, this is a situation of great simplicity!” he said. “I will come with you and be your chaperone! Any other action, child, would be unworthy.”
So on the day of the union election, and with Uncle Charlie’s relieved approval, the three members of the Honorary Orphan Band swung past Mr. Bertmann’s workshop on the way to the town hall. He had an umbrella with him, which he was using as a walking stick.
“So I am ready for any weather,” he said, even though, to look at the sky that day, you would have said the weather would surely be fine.
By the time they got to the town hall (which itself was an elegant old wooden building), there was already a crowd of men flowing in through the doors. The girls, being distinctly shorter than the rest of the crowd — and also distinctly more weighed down by lumpy objects, like for instance the French horn — found themselves hanging back for a moment, feeling shy.
“Probably that Mr. Smith didn’t really mean to hire us,” said Bess in a whisper.
“Now, really, Bess!” Gusta felt a responsibility for boldness settling down on her shoulders. After all, who had been to a hundred union meetings in her day, starting in merest babyhood? Augusta Hoopes Neubronner, that was who. She stood very straight and looked like she knew what she was about. “Follow me,” she said. “What we need to do is go in and find that Mr. Elmer Smith. The union man.”
And she charged up the stairs to the town hall door. At the door she noted with satisfaction that the girls and Mr. Bertmann were still right at her heels.
There was a lot of staring happening, of course. It was still an open question for Gusta, whether staring was worse without glasses, when it can sometimes feel like the whole universe is staring at you without letting you see it stare, or with glasses, when every last detail of every single pair of staring eyes demands to be noticed and counted. Now, though, to set a good example for the other girls, she absolutely forced herself to ignore those stares.
“This way, this way,” she kept saying. The union man would be up at the front of the hall, would he not? There was a table set up there, and up above the table, set apart from the main level of the hall by a short set of steps, was — oh, Lord — a stage.
And she had been right, of course: Mr. Smith was at that table. He came bounding over to them as soon as he saw them, shook everyone’s hand, and said he was pleased as could be that they had come out this afternoon to help him with this meeting.
“I’ll bore them for a little while with a bit of speechifying,” said Mr. Smith, “and then we’ll bring you folks on to wake us all up again. Sound like a plan?”
Mr. Smith found them a spot to wait near the steps that led — oh, Lord — up to the stage, and the girls got their instruments ready and tried not to catch one another’s eyes.
They didn’t listen particularly closely to Mr. Elmer Smith’s speech about the benefits that would accrue from joining the Federation of Woolen and Worsted Workers. Gusta, of course, had heard speeches of this sort many times over. She thought Mr. Elmer Smith seemed to be doing a pretty decent job with the basic pattern of such talks, but she was distracted by how dry her lips were getting. She kept licking her lips, and then remembering all over again to stand tall. The others were quiet, too. Josie probably had other, bigger things on her mind still — and, to judge from the unique aura of her nervousness, might even be actually looking forward, at least a little, to performing. Josie was like that. And Bess was emitting a faint hiss-and-crackle, like one of those rattlesnakes they have out in the West: it was her jar of dried beans, in her trembling hand
.
Then Mr. Elmer Smith paused and cleared his throat. “And now, friends, while you cast your vote right here in this free election supervised by the fine people of the National Labor Relations Board, we are all going to be entertained with a few tunes from the struggle, by your own homegrown talent, the Honorary Orphan Band of Springdale, Maine!”
That was their signal.
The steps —
oh, Lord!—
THE STAGE.
“Pretend we’re just out practicing in the woods,” said Gusta to Bess. It was perhaps the stupidest thing she had ever said. No place was ever less like the Maine woods than this oh-so-crowded hall.
“And be loud,” added Josie more practically. “This is a big place. We better be loud.”
“I will be right here with my umbrella!” said Mr. Bertmann, as if that were a comforting piece of information. And in fact, it kind of was.
Afterward Gusta couldn’t even remember how they had managed to do it, but they had. They played their songs, all five of them. The crowd of faces out there — the crowd that had started off looking so curious, distant, and amused — warmed up and started smiling different, brighter, nicer smiles. Applauded after each song. Why, by the third song, there were actually some cheers and shouts. The fifth song was “Hard Times in the Mill,” and the cheering was so loud and insistent, they had to sing it over again right then and there. It was a miracle — it was amazing — Mr. Elmer Smith was coming up the steps to the stage right now, the hugest of grins running right across his face —
And then a ruckus interrupted.
There seemed to be an upset rumble growing around the door of the hall, back over the heads of the crowd. The sound of a human thunderstorm, still off beyond the horizon. Angry words being exchanged, like the collisions of overheated clouds.
“What’s going on?” said Mr. Bertmann to the men around him. He sounded rather alarmed. Then he called up to Mr. Elmer Smith: “I thought you assured us there would be no trouble!”
“There oughtn’t have been any trouble,” said Elmer Smith, the light of battle in his eyes. “We’ve given them no reason for trouble. But you know how local authorities sometimes are.”
“They’re complaining about the band!” said someone in the crowd. And indeed, they could hear now some of the angry shouts from the opposite side of the hall, something along the lines of, “Is this an election or a circus?”
Mr. Bertmann, surprisingly nimble for a man of his age, sprang up onto the stage, with Gusta’s case, his umbrella, and their coats in his hands.
“Ach,” said Mr. Bertmann. “Come quickly, quickly, you girls. There must surely be a back door. This way . . .”
Gusta had to give Josie, whose face glowed with the fascination as she eyed the brewing trouble, a sharp tug to start her moving in the right direction. “Come on!” she said to Josie. Gusta had heard a lot of stories about meetings that went wrong. “We’d better get Bess out of here!”
That was clever thinking on Gusta’s part. Josie blinked and grabbed Bess’s hand, and with Mr. Bertmann urging them on, they all made a break for the back door.
Which turned out to exist, which was a good thing.
But which, perhaps less fortunately, was already occupied by one of the sheriff’s deputies.
“Hold on, kids! What have we here? And who are you, grandpa?”
“My name is Bertmann, and these girls were innocently playing folk songs. I don’t know what has gone wrong here, but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s time we get these children well away from this place, if there’s going to be any trouble.”
“We had a tip-off there might be some incendiary political statements being made in this venue,” said the sheriff’s deputy. “Under the guise of a fair and neutral election. Thought we’d better come take a look. Nothing wrong with legal organizing, of course, but I hear some of these outside men may have links to the Communist Party, and we can’t have that. There’s been some ruckus recently, ever since that fellow, August Neu —”
Then he yelped, because the horn had slipped right out of Gusta’s hands and caught him — bang — on his toe. It was partly accidental: Gusta had been aiming for her own toe, but the horn had jumped like it had a mind of its own.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, oh, please, please, Mr. Bertmann, let’s go home!” she cried out, as if it were the horn’s misbehavior making her so upset, and not the name of her own father starting to slip out of the mouth of the sheriff’s deputy.
Josie and Bess were staring at her because she wasn’t behaving like herself. But she was desperate to get out of there.
“What you got in that case, girl? Bricks?” said the sheriff’s deputy grumpily. “Oh, now, don’t cry. I’m all right. I’ll just take this Mr. Bertmann’s name down, official-like, and then you’re free to go.”
He had Mr. Bertmann spell it out for him: M-A-X B-E-R-T-M-A-N-N. And then he did let them go.
But Mr. Bertmann was shaking so hard that when they were only a little bit away from the town hall, he had to sit on someone’s front steps, just for a moment, to pull himself together.
“Don’t be ill!” said Gusta, trying to fan more air into his pale face, because she’d seen someone do that sometime, perhaps in a moving picture. “Please be all right, Mr. Bertmann. I’m so sorry.”
“It is I who am sorry,” said Mr. Bertmann. “I should have guessed there might be trouble. There, there, there, I am feeling better now.”
He climbed back to his feet.
“I am better now,” he said again, though he still seemed a little wobbly. “Don’t you worry about me, dear girls. They took me by surprise, asking for my name that way. It reminded me of bad things, elsewhere and long ago. But I am better now. It is all better. Let’s go.”
They went, but they didn’t feel as though everything were all better. It felt as though a shadow had fallen across them and chilled their hearts.
“And we didn’t even get our five dollars!” said Josie, shaking her head. “Well, all I can say is, better not breathe a word of this to Mrs. Hoopes, girls! Not a word!”
And the heaviness inside Gusta, where all the secrets festered, thickened and increased.
It was a beautiful afternoon, and Gusta was walking home from Springdale High School by a different-from-usual route.
Any route home from the high school was going to be a somewhat-different-from-usual route, of course, because Gusta didn’t belong at the high school at all, being only a fifth-grader at Jefferson Elementary, up the road. But this afternoon, after school, she had had a new and thrilling experience: she had come over to the high school with her French horn, in order to rehearse with the very grown-up kids in the string orchestra.
Miss Kendall had given a melodious and heartfelt little speech before they started playing.
“My dear musicians, I want you to meet Augusta, who is going to be our French horn soloist. She is a guest artist for us, visiting from Jefferson Elementary School. Augusta, dear, are you ready?”
Gusta nodded, while all the high-school students gaped at her. They did nothing worse than gape because they all loved Miss Kendall so, but she could guess the kinds of things they must be thinking. If Miss Kendall wanted to bring in an elementary-school baby to play the French horn, then, well, they were willing to see how it went. Plenty of time for high-school sarcasm later, if the baby messed everything up.
Miss Kendall was smiling at Gusta, a warm smile that was like having a lovely quilt draped over your shoulders by someone who would care about you no matter how many notes you might drop, under the pressure of having to play the French horn in front of a room’s worth of high-school musicians.
“It is completely normal to be nervous, Augusta!” she said, and then she turned her head to the string players. “What have we learned to call our nervousness, musicians?”
“Anticipation!” said the orchestra, all at once.
“That’s right,” said Miss Kendall. “Anticipation. We are all a
nticipating a lovely performance, and we are all so very glad you are here.”
And under that kind of encouragement, how could the rehearsal go but wonderfully well? The high-school students (who were so surprised they actually applauded her after her solo) sent Gusta off afterward in a happy cloud of good feeling.
Which was why Gusta decided to take the slightly unusual road home. She wanted to stretch out the sweetness of this moment for a while, and replay it in her memories a few extra times before returning to the everyday Hoopes Home hubbub.
She let herself be a little careless in her wandering. If she arrived home a little later than she would have otherwise, that didn’t seem like such a terrible thing. And the day was so pleasant, and her heart, for a change, was so floaty and glad.
Then there was a bossy ding-ding-ding behind her, and she turned to find a beautiful green Schwinn bicycle catching up to her. She had to jump to the side of the road to make room for it — and as she jumped she saw that the person riding that bicycle was none other than Molly Gowen.
It figured.
What a beautiful bicycle she was on, though! It was still new enough to be shiny. Even Gusta, who would never in a hundred years have dreamed of getting on a bicycle when she lived in speedy, dangerous, blurry New York City — even Gusta felt a momentary pang of jealousy when Molly Gowen floated by on her brand-new Schwinn.
About five seconds after Molly flew around the next corner, however, there came a series of disturbing sounds:
The bark of a dog that was clearly a big fellow who meant business;
A shout from Molly and a screeching of bike tires;
Another shout from Molly, this time as part of a terrible chord of crashing noises;
And more barking from the dog.
It was enough to make a person want to run very fast in the other direction, but Gusta overcame that urge and ran forward instead, to see what had happened.
She came around the bend and saw a sorry sight: Molly Gowen on the ground, the bicycle nearby and not nearly as straight and sleek looking as it had been just ten seconds before, and a big black dog barking furiously at Molly, as if berating her for having the gall to fall off her bike in front of the dog’s particular territory.
