“But that wasn’t what you were looking for in here—to find out who that man was? That’s not why your brother went out to Porphyry on his sailboat to get the journals?”
“No. Charlie never knew about him. No one did. Aside from Emily and me. And, eventually, your grandfather.”
“Right, so what does all this have to do with my grandfather?” As much as I find Miss Livingstone’s story fascinating, there’s no connection to the man whose violin and collection of Emily’s pictures started it all. It has nothing to do with me.
“It is all important, Morgan, but it is not simple or even easy.” Miss Livingstone hasn’t moved from her chair. “Your grandfather played a small but vital role much later in this drama.”
My mouth is dry. A raging hangover is simmering, and I can feel the rye in my throat. I have no idea what time it is. The room is getting brighter, so the sun must be up. The door isn’t quite closed, and sounds drift in from the hallway; the routine of life goes on, the shuffling of footsteps, doors closing, voices talking, Marty whistling far, far away. I can smell coffee and food cooking. I think of Laurie, wonder if she’s noticed by now that I’m not in my bed.
“I should call someone and let them know where I am.”
“They’ve been called,” she says, then adds, “hours ago.”
I only feel guilty for a moment.
I get up and help myself to a glass of water. The old lady says nothing. I can tell that she’s waiting for me, that she follows my movements and knows what I’m doing. She seems to sense that I’m eager to hear the rest of her story, to find out more about my grandfather, and how he knew Emily. I brush my dark hair back off my face and pull it over one shoulder, working it into a thick braid.
I walk back to the bed, flipping through the scattered journals. I stack them up in order, with the first years at the bottom, the ones I read aloud, and the newer ones on the top. There is only one more book.
“Where are the rest of your father’s journals?” I ask. “These only go to 1943. What happened to the others?”
“There are no others,” she replies, folding her hands in her lap. “There could not have been. If there were, your grandfather would not have been a part of this story. He would not have come to the island. He would not have met Emily. He would not have killed Grayson, the man I called the lone wolf.” She pauses for a moment, then adds, “He would not have been needed.”
I climb back onto the bed and wrap the afghan around my shoulders, flipping through the pages of the last journal. “Why?”
35
Elizabeth
Peter and Maijlis married in June of 1939. It was a small wedding, a simple ceremony, quickly organized, at Immanuel Lutheran Church on Pearl Street. Pa wore a suit and tie. He pulled at that tie throughout the day and removed it as soon as the pastor and his wife left the reception. Mother and Mrs. Niemi made platters of sandwiches and fried fish cakes and strawberry tarts for the guests who gathered in the church hall after the midmorning ceremony. Maijlis looked beautiful and carried a bouquet of lilacs, tied with a piece of blue ribbon.
We couldn’t afford new dresses, but Mother made sure that we were scrubbed clean and our clothes were mended and pressed. She braided our hair that morning, twisting the long black coils around our heads so that we looked like princesses. She wore purple, and seeing her without an apron around her waist, I could picture what she might have been like when she and Pa were married. She gave me strict instructions to keep an eye on my sister, to make sure that Emily didn’t cause a commotion or wander off into the streets of town. She didn’t need to tell me.
Peter wore his uniform. With no money for medical school, he had enlisted in the army and had just completed his training. A young girl of fourteen, I thought the wedding so very romantic, steeped as I was at that time in the novels of Jane Austen. But Mother, I suspect, did not share the sentiment. She was proud, so proud, but she was giving up her son, to Maijlis and to the army. I can remember her straightening his tie for the photographs, her hand lingering on his lapel as she stared up into his dark eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether she was sad or happy. Peter, I could tell, had never been happier. He leaned down and kissed the top of her head then rushed off to join Maijlis on the steps of the church for pictures. It was a moment of tenderness so rare and poignant, it has stayed with me always.
Peter and Maijlis moved to Winnipeg, where my brother served with the Winnipeg Grenadiers. That September, Canada declared war, and by the following May, Peter’s unit was sent to Jamaica for garrison duty, and Maijlis moved back to the little blue house on Hill Street.
Charlie found work at Port Arthur Shipbuilding. The company had been idle during the long, hard years of the depression, but the war that carried with it death and destruction ironically breathed life into the industry when they secured contracts to build warships for the Royal Canadian Navy. He boarded at a roominghouse in Current River and only made it out to the island a few times that summer.
The war was on everyone’s mind; it filled conversations around the dinner table, on the docks, and in the streets. Young men were recruited and trained and dispatched across the sea, full of idealistic righteousness, the kisses of their sweethearts warm on their lips and their mothers’ love knitted into woolen socks.
I had a letter from Millie. She wrote that they would be leaving soon for England, if they hadn’t already departed by the time her note reached our Island. Alfred’s father was unwell, so in spite of rations and restrictions, and the uncertainties of German bombs, they felt it best to leave their work in Canada and return to his home. She was preparing to publish a paper, she wrote, about the orchids of the boreal forest and wondered, might she include some of Emily’s sketches that she had taken with her? She sent her love to all, paper and pencils for Emily, and books for me.
Peter wrote to us frequently, his letters sometimes delivered five or six at a time. My replies to him filled pages and pages: I wrote of routine happenings at the light, of Emily’s latest creatures, of the story lines of the newest book I was reading. I sealed them up and sent them off on The Red Fox to a war that seemed so very, very far away, across vast lakes and an even vaster ocean, but also touched so very, very close to home.
Peter came home briefly in the fall of 1941, but we did not get to see him. He shipped out again a few weeks later, and I began to take more interest in Pa’s newspapers, which continued to arrive with regularity. We read them aloud in the evenings. They carried stories of the politics of war, of battles won and battles lost and the number killed and wounded.
The spring of 1942 marked the beginning of what I think of as the year of three deaths.