Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  Gerald was a reader, and, had been encouraged in this activity by the Church of Ireland pastor on Valentia Island, a literary man who wrote poetry and had a sizeable library, which he was happy to share with any young person interested in books. The bloodlust and romance of Walter Scott’s novels particularly appealed to Gerald — he was very fond of The Heart of Midlothian — as did the eccentricities of the characters invented by Charles Dickens. For a while in his teens he was drawn to Trollope, especially to those novels set in Ireland. But by the time he sailed, he was deeply affected by the tales of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series and by the — mostly imagined — Aboriginal and colonial world this series revealed to him, page by page.

  “Reading was the perfect pastime for a lighthouse-keeper,” my uncle always told us. A book could be easily held in one hand — a lantern was likely in the other — and the stories it contained would cut the boredom of the long hours at the post. When Gerald finally settled in at Mosquito Inlet Lighthouse, therefore, he was pleased by his discovery that the tower he would spend so much time climbing and descending had been designed by one Frances Hopkinson Smith, an artist, engineer, and author of such titles as Old Lines in New Black and White, Well-Worn Roads, and A White Umbrella in Mexico. As I’ve already said, Gerald had acquainted himself with American literature and, while on board that grim ship on which he travelled to the New World, he had been engrossed in the stories of Washington Irving, coming to love Rip Van Winkle for his solitariness and his aversion to wives, qualities that Gerald himself shared.

  Women utterly terrified him, my uncle said, unless they were characters in books. Over the years he had been briefly in love with Scott’s Flora McIvor, Green Mantle, Rachel Geddes, and Rose Flammock, and also with Estella from Great Expectations, Nancy from Oliver Twist, and for a moment or two after his mother’s death with Peggotty from David Copperfield.

  So, after he settled himself into the routine at Mosquito Inlet, he began to read American literature in earnest, subscribing to Scribner’s Magazine once he had heard of it and ordering as many books as his salary would allow.

  Reading the magazine he became familiar with the works of Lee Bacon, Charles G.D. Roberts, W.H. Henderson, who wrote about the sea, and the small poem “Parting” by Emily Dickinson, with whom he fell briefly in love. He came to adore the magazine and was distracted from it only by his reading and rereading of Melville’s Moby Dick. Tales concerning the sea were a kind of home to Gerald, spending, as he had, countless hours looking over its surface toward the horizon and countless other hours, before he came to Florida, huddled against the chill of its squalls in a corner near a turf-burning stove.

  In 1897, after Gerald had been in Florida for about a year, Principal Keeper O’Brien decided to take a ten-day leave at Christmas in order to visit some relatives in Georgia and my great-great-uncle was left in full charge of the light and all the other duties associated with it. Having been a principal keeper on Valentia in Ireland, Gerald Butler knew these duties well. In addition to ensuring the light was lit, he would be required to be on constant lookout, to make use of Morse code communications if there was anything to report, to make weather observations and report the same in a log, to start the fog alarm on misty nights, and finally, if necessary, to call upon rescue services and, upon occasion, provide sanctuary.

  He was fully engrossed in Moby Dick at the time, had entered its territory in every way that it is possible to enter the territory of a book. “Amanda! What are the four ways that a person can enter a book?” my uncle would often ask at this juncture. “Emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, and philosophically,” she would dutifully recite. “Gerald,” my uncle would continue, “had come to that stage of rereading where it becomes possible to identify certain feelings simply by seeing the shape a remembered paragraph made on a page.” And, yet, apparently, he was still able to be surprised, even shocked, by something Ahab said, or even by a fractional gesture made by a minor character. He had become very interested in pastimes of whalers and had even begun a few scrimshaw projects of his own. He thought deeply about “The Whiteness of the Whale” and “The Spirit-Spout” chapters. He had come, therefore, to a stage where the fictional sea seemed more thrilling and interesting than the actual sea that he should have been examining but often wasn’t. He reasoned, I suppose, that these January days and nights in Florida were so utterly calm, a cursory glance now and then away from the page toward the horizon would be all that was needed. The waves were breaking half a mile or so from shore as they almost always did, and it seemed to him the winds were gentle and constant, certainly in comparison with any wind that had visited Ireland, and indeed much lighter than those that pounded the Pequod on various pages.

  He was delighted by his literary discoveries, which were becoming those of one well read, although in a somewhat haphazard fashion. He noted, for example, that the first paragraph of “The Counterpane” chapter brought to mind two of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems for children, “The Land of Counterpane” and “Bed in Summer,” and he wondered if Stevenson had read Moby Dick and whether that reading might have affected his subject matter. He thought that the community on board the Pequod was not unlike that of the soldiers whom he had encountered in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, which he had devoured on arrival in America because he wanted to know more about that country’s civil war, but also because the book had compelled him to devour it. Sometimes, in spite of the fact that he was alone, he experienced the camaraderie of the crew as if it were going about its business in the room where he read, and he felt the sway of the ship beneath his chair. When he had spoken to no one for over a week, he began to believe that he knew more about life aboard a whaling vessel than he did about life inside a cylindrical tower.

  Eventually, Principal Keeper O’Brien returned, his loud and noisy family along with him. Gerald Butler enjoyed the children and was not entirely indifferent to Mrs. O’Brien’s meals. Moby Dick, though not entirely absent from his thoughts, became more ephemeral and ghostly. The children’s squabbles and their competitive games, the chaotic dinners and boisterous mornings, had brought him back to dry land.

  But, of course, he continued to read. Six months later, when he opened the June issue of Scribner’s, he was struck by the opening sentence of a story by Stephen Crane. “None of them knew the color of the sky,” it read. Why not? Gerald wondered, glancing at a cloud passing the window. He turned back to the page. There followed a description of waves, of emerald green and amber water, of a faraway shoreline, and of a small open lifeboat on the sea. And then a bit of dialogue that included a reference to Mosquito Inlet Light. His own Mosquito Inlet, his own light. Gerald looked out over the sea for a moment, allowing this reference to register in his mind and savouring the experience of finding a place with which he was intimate immortalized in print, then he plunged back into the story with even greater enthusiasm.

  Gulls arrived and withdrew. The men in the boat detested them. The sea tossed the small vessel, slapped its side, spilled over its gunwales. Seaweed slid by. Sharks loitered in the vicinity.

  “See it?” said the captain. Gerald stopped reading and looked out at the ocean. See what? he wondered, knowing the answer. He turned the page and one of the other men in the boat saw what the captain was referring to. The lighthouse was “precisely like the point of a pin.” The boat, on the other hand, was practically submerged. “A great spread of water, like white flames, swarmed into her.”

  Gerald’s heart was banging in his chest. The lighthouse “had now almost assumed color,” he read, and then the lines he had been dreading stood out in terrible black on the white of the page. “‘The keeper ought to be able to make us out now, if he’s looking through a glass,’ said the captain. ‘He’ll notify the life-saving people.’” Gerald tore through the magazine to the contributors’ notes at the back. “Mr. Stephen Crane wrote the story on page 48, having survived 36 hours in a dinghy after the sinking of the ship ‘Commodo
re’ off the coast of Florida on January 3 rd of this year.” On his watch, Gerald realized with horror, on his watch.

  He dove back into the story. “‘No,’ replied the cook. ‘Funny they don’t see us!’” Tears sprang into my great-great-uncle’s eyes. Moby Dick swam into and out of view. He dared not read further, but a sense of inevitability and the beauty of the prose held him. “Slowly and beautifully the land loomed out of the sea,” he read. “The wind came again. It had veered from the northeast to the southeast. Finally, a new sound struck the ears of the men in the boat. It was the low thunder of the surf on the shore.” Gerald had heard that sound, had listened to it night after night for months. “‘We’ll never be able to make the lighthouse now,’ said the captain. ‘Swing her head a little more north, Billie,’ said he.”

  Stephen Crane was alive, thought Gerald with great relief. The prose — even the contributors’ notes — could not have been written had he not been alive. The story had a positive ending, not one that included him, of course, but happy in spite of everything.

  He read further in a marginally better state of mind, sickening only when he came to the penultimate sentence. “The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land’s welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave.” He wondered, briefly, what duties the dead oiler had performed on the ship, then he put his head in hands and wept. He loathed Moby Dick. What did it matter if Daboo’s tattooed arm resembled a quilted counterpane? Who cared about “That ghastly whiteness … which imparts such abhorrent mildness”? He had failed to carry out his own duties. He had failed to provide either rescue or sanctuary.

  All night long he paid attention to the light. And when it did not need attention, he looked out at those parts of the ocean that the light revealed and into the utter blackness beyond its beams, and listened to the sound of the waves and the wind until he was almost mad. North, north, north, the surf seemed to be saying. “‘We’ll never be able to reach the lighthouse now,’ said the captain. ‘Swing her head a little more north, Billie,’ said he.” Whether he was polishing the bull’s-eye lenses of the celebrated Fresnel Light or whether he was staring out into beams and blackness, he continued to repeat these sentences until he came to believe that the gentle command contained in the statement was intended not only for the cook at the oars but also, and more particularly, for himself. “‘… a little more to the north,’ said the captain.” By dawn, Gerald was holding a telescope, scrutinizing the surface of the ocean for the appearance of a small, endangered boat, praying that an opportunity for redemption would present itself. But he had already decided what he would do. He would go north and join his brother on the far side of Lake Erie: he would look for work there. A lake cannot kill men the way an ocean can, he mistakenly concluded. He decided to leave that very morning.

  And that, according to my uncle, was how my great-great-uncle, sometimes known as the ex-reader, came to man the light on the farthest point of what is now the sanctuary. “He had failed to provide sanctuary,” my uncle concluded, “and so there could be no real sanctuary for him. Once it became clear to him that more shipwrecks took place within view of his lighthouse than anywhere else in the great lake system, he would not believe that it was the dangerousness of that part of the lake rather than his own negligence that caused the tragedies to occur. In the midst of a particularly stormy November, when the owners of shipping companies were once again attempting to move one last load of goods with fatal results, he walked down the curved stairs filled with grief and guilt. Then he locked the tower door behind him and stepped into the waves.

  “Like the oiler in ‘The Open Boat,’” he was found “in the shallows, face downward.” And, like the oiler, “his forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.”

  “Those are two important words,” said my uncle, who would himself eventually reveal his own “abhorrent mildness” with an inability to take action at a moment when everything was at stake. “Rescue, sanctuary,” said he.

  My uncle was always breaking things, casually or deliberately, by accident or sometimes, I think, with unconscious intent. There were the rocks on the beach, smashed open with a hammer when he was looking for fossils. There was that garage I told you about. A tire on my summer bicycle exploded once, when he filled it with too much air. When he tried to replace a windowpane, the result was often shattered glass. And then there was the day he broke the house.

  A long, V-shaped crack had appeared between the chimney and the outer west wall where the chimney stood, and my uncle had taken it into his head that it was the fault not of the leaning chimney but of the house itself. The building had settled somehow, he explained to us, in a way that was causing it to separate from the chimney, which he swore was plumb, straight as an arrow. “This old house,” he said to us, “needs to be straightened and I think I know just how to accomplish that.” More than once that summer he could be heard mumbling to himself about the house and its state of repair, almost as if he had taken what the Irish call a scunner to the building, or as if the very structure of the place had betrayed him in some indefinable way. “Post and beam,” he said to my mother once in exasperation while she laughed at him and shook her head. “It’s nothing but a great big slowly rotting box!”

  The mothers were gone for the day, a shopping expedition, I expect, or perhaps a round of visits to the elder relatives in the remote dusty villages of the back townships. Mandy and I were in the last stages of our childhoods by then. She had moved beyond The Children’s Treasury of Poetry and into the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg – “The fog comes on little cat feet,” and all that – and I had already begun to pay attention to bugs. I had filled several jam jars (with holes punched into their tin lids) with desperate, small crawling things that lined the glass, searched for escape, and ignored altogether the leaves I had dropped into their transparent prisons for sustenance.

  It must have been a Saturday: I remember the workers were absent from both field and orchard. The boys, Teo among them, were called away from their games to help, as was Teo’s mother, who was foreman and lived alone in an old trailer near the bunkhouse. Her son was now, apparently, old enough to sleep with the other male workers in what my aunt preferred to call “the dormitories” but that the rest of us still referred to as the bunkhouses.

  My uncle brought a heavy length of rope, thick as his arm, into our afternoon. Then, with our assistance — we were placed at regular intervals and at each corner — he surrounded the house with this rope and dragged what remained of the coil out to the lane where the tractor waited. Once the vehicle was started up and began to move, I remember my hands burning while the hempen cord was yanked, unexpectedly, out of my grasp, and then the smell of diesel fuel, a soft groan, and a slight shift. My uncle inserted three or four wooden shims and slapped two inches of the cement he had mixed earlier into the space that had appeared between the floor beams and the foundation on the east side of the house, while we all stood nervously by. All except for Teo, who was handed a trowel and encouraged to apply the wet, grey paste in the spots my uncle said he had missed. I remember thinking my uncle wanted to miss spots, wanted Teo to work alongside him. “You’re the filler-inner,” he said to the boy.

  Fooling around with something as large and permanent as a house was as amazing to my cousins and me as Peter Pan’s flying ship or the wind-tossed farm in The Wizard of Oz, or as amazing as the painstaking relocation and then the explosive disappearance of Old Great-great’s barn. We knew that only our uncle could have arranged this alteration of the ordinary, the stationary, this miraculous though hardly seismic displacement. He walked with us back to the west side of the house and posed for Mandy’s new camera in front of the chimney, which now hugged the outer wall in the way the great-greats had intended. Then he invited us inside for what he called refreshments.

&n
bsp; The kitchen was serene and unchanged. Looking through the door that led into the parlour, however, we saw that my aunt’s treasured pine floors had snapped like kindling during the course of events. Once this piece of information had registered among us, Teo and his mother hastily withdrew to the bunkhouse. I and my cousins also left the house, all joy wrung out of us as we sat in a line on the picnic table, facing the lane, waiting for our mothers’ return with a combination of anxiety and fear. My uncle did not join us. He just stood in the broken parlour, self-removal and distance all around him, a drink in his hand.

  He did not come back outside. He did not ask us to help him return the rope to the shed. He did not drive the tractor back to the barn. He just left those physical manifestations of his wrong-headed conceptions visible and in place, as if he were trying to say, “Look at what I tried to do. Look at my failure.”