CHAPTER 31
I WENT TO THE lighthouse at the proper time and did Oskar’s duty with the oil and the scissors. If anyone had seen him go, I was to say he was exercising his leg by walking on the sand. It was an unbelievable story, but as he said, it was his business what he did as long as the light was tended.
When I’d finished my tasks, I was too anxious to sit down to the usual mending. I’d brought a book; that couldn’t hold me to the chair, either. Soon enough, I allowed myself to go up the stairs and then onto the catwalk, careful to avoid exposing my unprotected eyes to the beam as it swung over me. I stood for a long while staring north, trying to bore through the blackness to discover what Oskar was doing. Of course, I could see nothing. By now he would be squeezed into some hole in the rocks.
The night was extremely still, without wind or bird cry. Far below, the water rocked gently in its bed. If it had not been for the steady hiccup of the light, I might have imagined myself in the womb.
And then I heard a small stone roll across the face of the rock, just below where I stood. It gathered speed and knocked against other rocks until, with a crack, it fell silent. At first I didn’t grope for explanation. After all, rocks must often spontaneously dislodge from their seats. Indeed, such phenomena must have been happening for millennia, as evidenced by the jagged black teeth at the foot of the morro. Then another stone began to roll some yards farther to the south, and I heard a sort of scrabbling. Something large was moving below me. My heart beat with a sudden, painful force, and I let out a small, distinct gasp. The scrabbling stopped.
I’d clearly frightened whatever animal had come to this place. I recalled Jane telling me there were no predators on the rock except eagles. Could it be an eagle? Or was it Archie Johnston going to visit his child’s grave? Would he move so surreptitiously? Bravely, I hung over the rail as far as I dared, my loose hair streaming around my face like a waterfall.
“Trudy?” Euphemia’s voice came not from beneath me but from the bridge that connected the top of the light to the level where our houses stood. “What’s the matter?” She came on, her footsteps louder when they left the wooden bridge and landed on the metal catwalk. “Why’re you here? Leg paining him?”
I held my finger to my lips, but she couldn’t see that in the dark. “Shhh,” I said. “I hear something.” I pointed over the rail.
“It’s probably a possum. Or a fox.” She pulled open the door to the tower. “Come in.”
The beam passed over me in a brilliant bath of light, and I had to close my eyes quickly to avoid burning them. “Jane said there were no foxes.”
“Trudy, come in now!”
I disobeyed. I turned back to the rail and jackknifed my body over it again. When the light swept past, I spotted the cairn and possibly something else, though I couldn’t make it out behind the flash of brightness that clung to my eyes like a caul, a ghost of light blocking what was real.
“I think it’s Helen!”
I said this, but my words were overwhelmed by an enormous crash, as the window behind me shattered. I recoiled, stumbled, and fell onto the catwalk along with the glass. Instantly, Euphemia’s large hands gripped my arms. She pulled me to my feet. Pieces of glass that had stuck to my clothes and skin fell a second time to the floor and broke into smaller bits.
“Come away from here.” This time I followed helplessly.
“Why did she do that?” I held my arm close against my body, trying to keep the blood from dripping onto the stairs.
“I believe she’s unhappy sometimes,” Euphemia clanked down the steps ahead of me. “Maybe because of her baby.”
“‘Baby Johnston born and buried,’” I said, finally realizing what I should have understood for months. I couldn’t remember whose hand had written that line, although it rang of Euphemia’s efficient way with words.
“She hardly knew the child. Still, it’s a terrible loss for a mother.” She gathered a handful of what was left of my sleeve at the shoulder seam. With a sharp pull, she ripped the fabric, revealing the gashed flesh beneath.
“When did she have a baby? You said she’d gone back to the mountains. You said nothing about a baby!”
“Stand here.” She positioned me beside the pitcher and basin we kept for washing up. She wet a clean rag and began dabbing at my arm with a sureness that calmed me. “When she left, there was no baby,” she said simply, rinsing her rag and dabbing some more. “But she came back. It was a different season by then. It was June, when we get the fog. I’d had another baby by that time myself. I used to make a little nest of blankets on the floor right there.” She pointed, the bloodstained rag dangling from her hand.
The thought of a tiny Janie, snuggled in like a kitten, made me remember that my own child would have been in such a nest by now.
Euphemia bent to lift a worn shirt of Archie’s from the mending basket and pressed it against my arm. “Sit down and hold this awhile.
“All of a sudden, here she was one night, right here in the boiler room,” she went on, selecting a thin needle from her keeper. “I like to believe that she hoped to find me here, but it may have been Archie she meant to give it to, even Henry. Or maybe she didn’t care who had it just so long as it wasn’t her. Some mothers are like that.” She paused.
“I don’t understand—” I began.
“I’m telling you,” she said impatiently. “It isn’t an easy thing, you know. One, two, three.” She snapped her fingers. “This, that, and the other. There are circumstances. There are things we can only conjecture.” She turned up the flame of the lamp and passed the needle back and forth through it several times.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“She was standing at the bottom of the staircase when I came down from feeding the light, and I was so amazed that I was lucky not to drop the oil I was carrying.” Euphemia unspooled a length of black thread and bit it off. “You know, I believed for an instant that she might be a ghost or a trick of my mind. I’d thought of her so often, you see, but I’d never expected to see her again in the flesh. Her hair had grown in; her face was rounder. She didn’t appear to have suffered since she’d left. I remember feeling a good deal of relief at that.
“I was glad to see her.” She squinted, lining up the eye of her needle with her thread. “I was nervous, too. Where would I hide her? How could I spirit her away again before Archie found her? That’s what I was thinking. She had her own plans. She didn’t need me. Not to take care of her, anyway.
“Here, now,” she said. “Put your elbow there.” She nodded at the table between us.
She pulled the lamp close and then, holding the edges of my skin together with her left hand, passed the needle through with her right. I sucked in my breath and gritted my teeth at the pinch of it. I could feel the thread running through my skin. Deftly, she tied a knot and bent to bite off the thread again, her lips grazing my skin.
“She knelt right there,” she said, indicating the spot with her needle, “and she slipped her arms from the straps around her shoulders.”
I hardly felt the needle puncturing my skin, so intent was I on her story.
“I’d assumed it was bedding she carried on her back, but when she got that pack around to her knees, I saw what her burden was. Laced right into the basket was a newborn, a tiny nut of a baby.
“It cried a little when she lifted it from its cocoon.” She poked the needle in yet again. “It was a smart little thing; it knew that release from the basket meant it would soon be fed. But she didn’t nurse it. Instead, she held it out to me. I thought she wanted me to admire it. As I said, she’d been a sort of daughter to me; it seemed the natural thing, despite unnatural circumstances. She’d wrapped it in a bit of my old red calico. Can you imagine?
“It cried more when I took it. I smelled wrong, I suppose. But by the time you’ve had four, a crying baby isn’t agitating. I tried to soothe it, jostling it on my shoulder, wrapping my arms tight around it, because I’d seen that it was used to confinement. Babies like what they know.
“I remember smiling at it—thinking what a funny-looking little moppet it was. It had a thick mat of dark hair laying at all angles, and ears poking out like the little round handles of a jug.”
She’d finished her stitches and was gazing at nothing in particular, some spot in the air, recalling, as people do, the scene in her mind’s eye. Now she looked at me, studying my face.
“And then?” I asked. It seemed to me somehow that she wasn’t telling the story in the right order. I glanced at my arm. Although I knew the stitches were necessary, the wound hurt more than before she’d applied her needle.
Euphemia wrapped her arms around herself, as if she were the babe who needed swaddling. “I looked to her. I remember I was smiling and I thought she would be pleased to see my pleasure in her child.” She shook her head. “She was gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Gone away. She left that baby. With me.”
The image of Euphemia raising a stone over the baby otter’s head thrust itself unbidden into my mind.
“I didn’t know that she meant for me to keep it. I thought she’d reappear in minutes, then by morning, then in a week or two weeks’ time. Even months and months later, I expected her at every moment, especially those times when I was alone here in the light tower.”
“Was it Archie’s child?”
“Oh, yes. That was clear straight off. She looked just like him. But he pretended that he had nothing to do with her. No matter. I had no intention of giving an infant to the likes of him. It was me that child needed, and I made sure she got everything she required, the way babies do. Even in that first hour, her crying made my milk leak into my dress. She was much more demanding than my own.” She sighed. “I had plenty for both. Nature does provide.
“I admit there were times I was almost frantic, wishing Helen would come for her. Two babies at once was not an easy thing, I can tell you! But she didn’t come and she didn’t come, and at last I let myself love that baby, love her as I loved my own.”
“Oh!” The bleakness in her voice overwhelmed me, erasing entirely the sting of my arm. I knew what had happened to the child.
“Both of them sickened,” she said. “One and then the other. It was just after the inspector came. I remember him saying that he had been a twin himself, and he very much admired mine. I did my best for them both. I promise you, I did.” She looked at me almost beseechingly, as if I might harbor a doubt. “I managed to save only one.” She was rubbing her forehead with her fingertips, as if she could erase the memory of it. “When Helen finally did come back, I had to show her the stones.”