I did not pause then to respond, but I could feel the flush start at the back of my neck and trace its way up past my ears. I dropped his bags in front of the new dwelling and turned to look at him. “This’ll be where you stay,” I said, and then added, my voice low so that Emily could not hear, “Don’t you ever mock her again. Ever.”
We heard his violin for the first time that night. The Lake was still, muttering softly along the shore, the trees quiet. Emily and I lay together in bed, the window open so the spring air washed across our faces, the music mingling with the songs of the chorus frogs. It was beautiful, achingly beautiful. It made me think all the more of Pa and Peter and Charlie. I was determined not to let his songs soften me, to melt the resentment and anger that had settled on my soul. I tried, but somehow his playing touched a place inside me, and I let my tears fall freely. I would not let him see. I would not let him know. But Emily knew. She wiped my face with her sleeve, and then took my hand, leading me out into the moonlight, and we sat, staring at the yellow square of his window until it went black and the frogs were left to sing the refrain unaccompanied.
*
There is little hierarchy between keeper and assistant. In practice, the one does not have superiority over the other, and while some keepers lord it over their helpers, that was not the case at Porphyry. The work was shared equally, your grandfather learning quickly, always ready to step up to the task at hand in spite of the limitations placed by the piece of lead lodged in his hip.
Mother was much more accommodating than I. She showed him how the light worked, how we wound the clockworks and oiled the cogs and where we recorded the fuel levels and the wind direction and names of ships that had passed within view of the light. When Mr. Niemi took him fishing on their tug, and returned him to shore horribly green, my mother brought him tea and had me complete his tasks at the light until his world stopped bobbing up and down and he’d been able to wash the odor of fish guts and vomit from his clothing. She accepted him on the island, encouraged him even, when we had for so long kept the outside world apart, and this puzzled me. For a time. She and I were just as capable of running the light station without anyone, let alone a man crippled and soft, to help. Perhaps she saw Peter in him, thought of him wounded imprisoned in a foreign land, dying with unfamiliar stars overhead. Besides, she said, the island was no place for the weak. By this I knew she meant Emily, and it infuriated me. Her plans for Charlie did not include her daughters; daughters whose pencil drawings of bumblebees and pennycress did little to keep the light burning, the horn sounding, and food on the table. I wondered then if my application to the Department of Transport had even passed from her hands to the crew of The Red Fox.
I, however, made it clear that David was not welcome in our home, around our table, sitting in Pa’s chair with a pipe in his hand listening to the news on the radio traveling across the expanse of the Lake from Michigan. He was not Pa. He was not Peter. And he was not Charlie. I was not susceptible to his boyish grin and playful attempts to engage me in conversation. Our relationship revolved around the operation of the light.
He learned to handle Sweet Pea, preferring the little outboard to the sails or oars, and ventured farther with each excursion, sometimes returning with an extra trout or partridge, knocking at our door with the offering and leaving without waiting for thanks or even an invitation to share in its cooking and eating. I grudgingly had to admit to his superior mechanical skills. He could fix anything. While I struggled with the greasy parts of a stubborn motor, he quickly disassembled, repaired, and reassembled everything from the kerosene-fueled steam engine to Sweet Pea’s 9.9-horsepower Johnson.
He grew stronger as the season progressed, his hair bleaching in the sun and his face becoming burnished and brown, crow’s feet forming at the corners of his eyes from squinting out across the water. He never lost the limp, but within a few months the cane remained on his porch when he walked the pathways to the lighthouse or wheeled the cart from the boat harbor with provisions. Visitors to the island loved him. He chatted with the boaters about fishing and fog and the best bays to anchor in, and gave picnickers from Silver Islet tours of the light. He made occasional trips to Port Arthur on The Red Fox and brought back little brown bags full of candies that he gave to Mother, intended, I’m sure, for Emily and me. Emily began to wait for his arrival, collecting her bag of sweets when the ketch docked briefly in the harbor so that he could disembark, but I never gave him the satisfaction.
Emily and I lay awake many evenings, listening to his playing. Some nights, the notes crashed as fierce and strong as the waves that chased each other, rolling and tumbling like great leviathans born on the Keweenaw Peninsula to die, splayed on the black volcanic rocks of our shore. Other nights the music was sweet, soft, and gentle like the rabbits that leaped beneath the lilac bush and dined on Mother’s garden. More than once, when Mother was busy with the light, and the moon beckoned mischievously, Emily and I danced, two white gowned faeries in the shadow of a beacon, our feet keeping time to the rhythm and the rhythm keeping time to the fireflies.
I would not give him any sign of approval. My interactions with him remained minimal; only what was necessary to convey the most recent weather report or note the expected date for the next delivery of fuel.
Emily, however, was more easily charmed. Or perhaps, unlike me, she saw things for what they were. She began to slip her drawings beneath his door. Flowers, butterflies, and yes, even the image of the two dragonflies, found their way onto the assistant keeper’s stoop.
He came up to me one day as I was hanging our washing on the line to dry in the fresh August breeze. He had a picture in one hand, a detailed drawing of a raven, meticulously rendered in pencil, breathtaking in its realism.
“These pictures of Emily’s are really very good.”
He startled me, appearing as he did between the tea towels and the pillowcases. I pinned another cloth to the line.
“You think I don’t know that?” I snapped, though I didn’t, really. They were lovely, but I did not have a frame of reference for the great art of the world. Not yet. And of course the sketches that Emily had given to Millie had been published with her research about orchids.
“No, I don’t think you do. She has a remarkable talent, a gift. People would pay a lot of money for these. You could leave this island. Make a life someplace else.”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve.” I dropped the clothespin I was holding back into the basket and turned to face him. “What makes you think we want to leave the island? That we want some other life? What’s wrong with the one we’ve got?” I had thought of it sometimes, when the nights were lonely. When I missed Pa. But Emily and I were together. She had the freedom to be herself on the island, and I wouldn’t allow myself to consider anything else. “You don’t know me. You don’t know Emily.”
“I know she adores you, Lizzie.”