I bristled. He had not earned the right to call me Lizzie.
“Elizabeth.” I responded tersely.
“She adores you, Elizabeth. She would follow you anywhere. She will be happy anywhere you are. She lives for you.”
He had it wrong. I lived for her. I protected her.
“She’s safe here.” I said. “People don’t understand her in the city. They won’t let her be. It’s too noisy and too crowded, and she wouldn’t be free to make her drawings. It would kill her.”
“And what about you, Lizzie, what do you want?”
This time I didn’t correct him. I just picked up my basket and walked back to the house.
A few weeks later, the bears came.
We had been careful with our refuse, burning what we could and burying table scraps and vegetable peelings in the garden. We cleaned our fish on the beach, tossing the waste to the ever-present gulls that fought over bits of guts and attempted to fly off with oversize pieces of skin. But sometimes it wasn’t enough.
Emily was sitting on a wooden deck chair, facing out toward the Lake, the woods behind her. Mother had gone to town on The Red Fox and wasn’t expected back until the next day, so David and I were sharing duties at the light. A passing freighter had captured Emily’s attention, her umber hull sitting low in the water as she headed southwest, cargo holds full, trailing a plume of gray smoke from two white stacks.
I was hauling water to the henhouse. We had ended up with a rooster in the mix this year, and Mother decided to allow one of the hens to hatch a clutch. The little yellow chicks peeped and darted between my feet as I entered their confines. The rooster had since made his way into a stew. I stooped to collect the brown eggs in my apron while the hens complained.
He ambled across the grass between the assistant keeper’s house and the light. He did not notice Emily at first, still and silent as she was, but wandered erratically in the clumsy appealing manner of the young, pausing to sample the pansies growing in a garden near the step. I knew he was a yearling; he lacked the size of a full-grown adult, but was much too large to have been born the previous winter. From where I stood, I could smell the pungent odor of his fur, dank and sour, and see the sharp claws on his oversize paws. He had inadvertently positioned himself between my sister and me.
Emily felt his presence, turning, and the animal startled. I had hoped he would run into the woods. He didn’t. He reared, sniffing at the air, looking back and forth between Emily and me.
“Emily.” I spoke calmly and clearly. “Don’t move.”
The bear dropped to all fours, swinging his head back and forth, grunting and chuffing. Emily looked at me. I did not read fear in her eyes, but I sensed it from the bear. He was trapped, and trapped bears were unpredictable. I moved slowly, stepping sideways, one hand grasping my apron full of eggs, the other waving above my head as I tried to bring his attention back to me. He reared again, and then lunged toward Emily, pulling up at the last second, circling around, facing her again.
The shot whistled past my head, clattering into the metal pail that hung beside the coop, knocking it noisily to the ground. The volley echoed, a sharp crack, disappearing over the Lake, and the bear bolted into the bush.
I turned toward David.
“What the hell!” I hollered. “Can’t you shoot a goddamn gun?”
From where I stood, his aim had been off a good two feet, clipping the tools hanging on the shed instead of finding its mark in the head of the bear.
David looked at me. His eyes, usually soft and slightly amused, were instead dark and brooding. With his gun still in hand, he turned and walked past me, heading toward the woods without saying a word.
Emily came over to me. I was shaking, a combination of anger and relief trembling through my body. She looked at me, defending him with her eyes, admonishing me in silence.
“Don’t look at me like that, Emily!” I replied. “You could have been hurt, or even killed.” I did not trust my sister’s mysterious connection with wild animals to extend as far as calming a panicked black bear, even if it was young and small.
Emily bent down to the ground. She opened her delicate hand, splaying her fingers wide, but still they couldn’t fill the imprint in the soft soil beneath. These were not the imprints of the yearling. The sow that made them must have been standing only six feet away from me. She would have been twice the size of her cub.
He had been faced with an impossible choice, Emily or me. Instead, he had aimed with precision, startling both bears into flight with the tumbling, clanging collision of metal pail against the ground.
He returned a few hours later, going directly to his cottage without a word. There was no music that night, no dancing in the moonlight. And each time I rose to take my turn at the light, he was there, sitting on the step of the assistant keeper’s house, his gun across his lap.
It was on nights like those, when death loitered in all her mysterious forms, that I thought of the baby, only eighteen months old, lying beneath the mound of cobblestones on Hardscrabble Island. I did not think of her often, but that night, I did.
*
“Did he kill them?” Morgan asks.
“No. Mr. Niemi told us he saw them swimming across Walker’s Channel a few days later. Only then did your grandfather let down his guard. And at that, only some. He became very protective, which both thrilled and annoyed me, checking on us frequently, watching for Emily and I to arrive back in Sweet Pea when we took the boat around to other islands to fish or pick berries or set snares. I was surprised when in early December he boarded The Red Fox for Port Arthur.”
“You didn’t go? You still stayed on the island through the winter?”
“We had no place to go. If we had, I don’t know that Mother would have. And we managed, although it was so much quieter, without Pa reading the newspaper to us in the evenings, his deep voice singing along to the radio and his hearty laugh rolling around the room. He left a void in my life bigger than the Lake herself. I cut down a tree at Christmas and decorated it with yarn bows and popcorn garlands. We baked honey-sweetened bread and listened to concerts broadcast on the radio. When the ice froze in late February, we snowshoed to Silver Islet to collect supplies brought out for us by the Richardsons. I saw Arnie then. We had not seen much of each other in the years since the cemetery. He was going to school in Kingston, studying to be a lawyer. We stopped in for a mug of cocoa at his place, but it was an awkward visit, our stilted conversation lacking the familiar comfort we had grown used to as children.”
“And you never found out who was buried on Hardscrabble?”