The first was my own.
The season started early, with the shipping channels open and the light operating by the beginning of April. Pa took great satisfaction at being able to set the light shining and the mirrors spinning before any other keeper had even been able to reach his station. The freighters that had hibernated in Thunder Bay harbor nudged their way out onto the Lake in the wake of the icebreaker and set off, their holds brimming with cargo, for the locks at Sault Ste. Marie and Welland, and Pa was there to mark the first leg of their journey.
Spring was the season to collect gull eggs, which we boiled or used in baking, a delicious alternative before our own hens could provide us with a steady supply. Emily and I headed to the seagull rookery on Hardscrabble Island to gather them, my sister for the first time trusting my boating skills to transport us safely over the black waters of the Lake. We pushed Sweet Pea out in early morning, not bothering to step her mast, but instead each taking one of the oars and working together to cover the expanse to the steep cliff face on the south shore. We could see down Walker’s Channel, past the Devil’s Thumb, a sacred rock formation Mother called Shamanitou, which stood at the entrance. I’ve heard it is no longer there, the Lake having pried it loose with frozen fingers a few years after we left the island. Behind it, I could see The Red Fox in the distance and could tell by her position that she was heading for the Channel and would likely stop at Porphyry.
We rowed to the cobbled causeway that connected the two parts of the island and would provide enough shelter to pull Sweet Pea up out of reach of the waves. I secured the painter to a tree as an added precaution, as it was not unusual for the wind to stir up a swell with little warning. Emily and I took our baskets and worked our way through the dense shrub toward the top of the cliff.
Our presence had the expected response. Gulls rose to the air, filling the sky with discordant squawking and the shrill screams of panicked birds. They circled above our heads, swooping down frighteningly close, attempting to chase us away from the nests where their brown speckled eggs lay, exposed and vulnerable. Emily shrank from their assault, crouching, hands over her head, her eyes clenched tight. The noise and flurry were too much for her. I should have known that.
I pressed forward, leaving Emily beneath the trees, selecting one egg from each nest that had two, just as Mother had taught me. They would lay again, she said, just like the hens. I placed them in my basket gently, ignoring the flash of white wings near my face and the spinning turmoil in the sky above me until my basket was full. I knew Emily would not fill hers.
“Go back to the boat!” I told her. Her basket lay on the ground beside her, and I picked it up. “I’ll meet you there.”
In minutes I had filled Emily’s basket. I gathered both in my arms and set off, cautiously picking my way to the shore below.
Emily was not at Sweet Pea. The boat was still moored tightly to the tree trunk, so I placed the baskets in the bottom and sat down to wait. Coils of mist began to float along the far shore of Edward Island. It was a gentle fog, not the thick impenetrable screen for which the Lake is so infamously known. But it was enough for me to consider our short row back with more urgency. I needed to find Emily.
I began to push my way along the shore, thinking that she would have put some distance between herself and the screaming birds. In places, the vegetation grew right down to the water’s edge, and I had to blaze a path around, scratching my arms and legs on the prickly branches of wild roses and raspberries. As I rounded the north side, the ground gave way to a low knoll, relatively clear of trees. I had never come this way before.
Wisps of fog had climbed the hill as well, drifting like a stream around the island and settling in the shallow vales and along the shores. I gazed out across the Lake. From here, I could see Porphyry, beginning to float in and out from behind the gauzy curtain, although the light tower itself rose clear above the low-lying cloud. I looked around for Emily.
Instead, I found a cross—a simple wooden marker, its gray surface weathered. I knew without question I had stumbled upon a grave. The romantic in me was intrigued. Whose body lay beneath the pile of lichen-stained stones? Who had been so carefully laid in eternal sleep with a view of Lake Superior, in all her magnificence and many moods, spread out before them? Misty tendrils of fog wound in and out of the trees. I was terrifyingly captivated, hopelessly drawn toward the cross.
The bleached planks had each been carved, but the wind and rain and sun and snow had done their work, and I had to bend down to make out the markings. I ran my fingers across them. They read quite simply, “Elizabeth Livingstone, May 16, 1925–November 29, 1926.”
It is a strange feeling to stand facing one’s own grave. A Dickensian moment, when I think of it now, like poor Scrooge confronting his future in the company of a ghost. I knelt beside the cross, beside the small mound that contained beneath it the body of an infant, born on the birthday Emily and I shared, bearing my name. The gulls screamed. The Lake whispered. I felt painfully, achingly empty.
Yet again, the fog tapped me on my shoulder. I could not afford to linger.
I vowed to return, to ask questions, demand answers, but the events unfolding even as I knelt before the lost grave came to overshadow the mystery of my death. I was left to exist as a ghost.
I returned to the boat to find Emily there, sitting on a rock as though she had been waiting the whole time. We pushed Sweet Pea into the water and crept along the shore, keeping land in sight to avoid being turned around in the fog. We crossed Walker’s Channel and worked our way south toward the light. Pa had started the horn, and the sound bounced eerily against the invisible cliffs of Hardscrabble. The gulls, too, could be heard squabbling among themselves, calling out as they flew unseen above our heads. Emily and I rowed, the silence suffocating when it was not broken by the intermittent sound of the horn.
When we arrived, we found Mother sitting in Pa’s chair. She had a letter in her hand. It was from Maijlis. The Winnipeg Grenadiers had been stationed in Hong Kong, she wrote, and on the same morning as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Empire of Japan had also attacked the British colony. Fighting was bitter and lasted several weeks before the Commonwealth forces surrendered. Peter was missing, possibly captured, known to be wounded. Presumed dead.