“I’ve seen them, but I haven’t read them.”
And now she can’t. Not without help. “The first one starts in 1917 and goes to 1920. There are more from other years. They’re also marked as personal, that they aren’t government books.”
The old woman nods, and explains. “My father was a lighthouse keeper. In 1917 he would have been stationed at Battle Island Light. He only spent one year there before the government moved him to Porphyry Point Light Station. Part of a lightkeeper’s job was to keep official logbooks to record such information as when the light was lit, when it was extinguished in the morning, weather conditions. So he had to distinguish that these are his private writings.”
I carefully turn the page to where the lightkeeper made his first entry. “The year is written at the top, and then there are several entries on each page.” My hand skims over the paper, working together with my eyes to decipher the blotched letters and bring them into words and sentences. “Along the left side columns there are just letters, W, NW, N, NNW . . .”
“Wind direction. Can you read the writing?”
She seems anxious about whether I’m able to read it. I wonder what she hopes to hear.
Monday, 23 April—I have arrived at Battle Island Light Station, where I will be serving out the season as assistant. Wilson and I have had the light operational for the better part of two weeks, as shipping season is now in full swing. I am learning to man the diaphone at the fog station—a brute of a machine, but I’ve been told it is a much welcome improvement over the hand-pumped system of the past.
Friday, 25 May—It has been a cool, wet spring. I took the punt around to the fishing grounds and lifted the nets yesterday. I was rewarded with three whitefish, one lake trout, and a sucker, keeping all but the sucker. I have received mail and word of Lil, and have written to suggest she join me for several weeks by catching a ride on The Red Fox the next time Captain Johnson makes port in McKay’s Harbor. I’m sure the Swede wouldn’t mind dropping her here along with the mail and the few supplies I’ve ordered the next time they’re laying nets in our area, which I expect will be in a month or so. I’m learning that many lightkeepers have their families live with them for the season—it makes for happier workers, breaking up the tedium and loneliness. Lil, I am sure, would be as happy here as I am. She is, if anything, better suited to this life than I, having been born and raised so closely connected to the land and Lake.
I look up at the daughter of the man whose words I’m reading. “Lil was your mother?”
“Yes. My father immigrated to Canada from Scotland in 1914—chased from the family farm and unable to find work. He came to Canada intent on settling in the west, as so many of his countrymen did, but fell in love with the lakes on his journey from New York. He landed a job working on the mail boats traveling between Collingwood and Port Arthur.”
She fills me in on her family’s history. I can read, or she can talk—it doesn’t matter to me. So I just shut up and listen.
“The next winter, he decided to try his hand at the fur trade, and moved into an old cabin near McKay’s Harbor, or Rossport, running trap lines. He met my mother there and married her in 1915. Her father was Scottish, too. And a trapper. But he was a hard man, from what Pa said, heavy-handed, and strict with his children. Her mother was Ojibwe, and taught her the traditional ways. She learned how to knit snowshoes by attaching sinew to the wooden frame, to skin and tan the animals that found themselves tangled in their traps and snares, and to look to the forest for food and medicine. I suppose there always existed in her a conflict, her half-breed nature never settling easily into being one or the other, and always with that, a sense of pride tempered by shame.”
She pauses. “By the time Pa was working on Battle Island as assistant lightkeeper, they had brought my brother Peter into the world. Charlie, Emily, and I came along during their time at Porphyry.”
I continue to read. It’s a little like a storybook, and the characters begin to come to life on the pages.
It makes me remember, too. It makes me think of my history, my family, of the times we spent in front of the fire on cold winter nights, me sitting in his lap, listening to him talk about the Lake and laying nets and the storms that forced their boats into harbor where they would wait for the weather to change so that they could bring their haul of fish back for processing.
Tuesday, 10 December—Calm seas. I’ve been told that I will be transferred next spring to Porphyry Point Light Station. It is an older light, without the upgrades seen here at Battle Island, but it is near Edward Island, close to the entrance to Black Bay, and only a day’s sail to Port Arthur. Because of the war, and in spite of Borden’s conscription, lighthouse keeping has been declared an essential service, and I am to take up my post at Porphyry next season with a view to serving my country.
I look up at the old woman. She seems tired. She holds her teacup in her lap, but it’s been forgotten. Her head rests on the back of the chair, yet in spite of that, she doesn’t look relaxed. Her lips are pressed in a tight line, and her brow is furrowed. Whatever it is she hopes to hear from her father, it was not written in 1917.
If I’m going to find out about the pictures, I’ll need to do more than read.
11
Elizabeth
I listen to the words spoken by the girl. Like the raindrops falling outside, one by one they fill the gaps until the memories pool together and flood through me. I can see Pa moving through his duties at the light, picture him as a young man, resurrected by his phrases. It is an existence he chose, and one to which he was so well suited. The girl speaks, but I can hear his voice, too. It surfaces and floats past, deep and warm. Resonant.
I realize that Morgan has stopped reading.
“Have you reached the end, then?” I ask, and set my teacup down on the table beside me.
“Just the first year.” I can hear her shifting, and the sound of the journal’s cover quietly thudding shut. “Is he dead?”
“My father?” I answer with some incredulity. “Good lord, child! Long dead. If he had lived, he would be well over a hundred years old by now.”
“No,” she replies. “I mean your brother. The cops that were here the other day said they couldn’t find him on the boat. I overheard them, you know, when they were talking to you.”
“When you were hiding?”
“I wasn’t hiding.”
“What are you afraid of, Morgan?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“And you’re being nosy.”
“So are you.”
A smile tugs at my cheeks. She is spunky. I stand—I have been sitting too long, and my limbs are stiff—and make my way across the room to my bed. Sitting down on it, I bend to remove my shoes.
“I suppose I am. But then again, you were the one sneaking around where you didn’t belong.”