“No. Pa was gone, Charlie was away at war. And I could get nothing from Mother. I asked her about it, working up the nerve one stormy winter night when the wind was howling like a pack of wolves and we were tucked up snug with our knitting. She simply replied, ‘Some graves are better left unmarked.’”
“It’s what you hoped to find in your father’s journals.”
I had hoped, I suppose. I know there is a child, a child with my name and my birth date, dead and buried. It is not me, as much as at times I feel like an apparition floating through life at Emily’s side. We were like one. Elizabeth and Emily. Emily and Elizabeth. The presence of that wooden cross and pile of stones cannot change that. It is only now, when my side grows cold, when I am trying to learn how to be just Elizabeth, that she once again haunts me.
“It matters little now,” I reply.
“Doesn’t it?” the girl asks. The yearning again. She tries to sound indifferent, but it is in her voice. “Don’t you think that when you know your past, it can make a difference to your present? And your future, too?”
She is no longer speaking of me. “Your grandfather did have a hard time staying away.”
38
Elizabeth
I was out on snowshoes on a clear day in early March, checking snares. Our supply of meat was diminished, and I set rope traps along well-traveled caribou paths around the island. There was warmth in the sun, but the air was desperately cold, so that I stopped frequently, swinging my arms to warm my fingers. The islands in the distance, Trowbridge and Pie, as well as the Sleeping Giant, were mounds of indigo, sitting on the horizon across the mottled blue-and-white expanse of the Lake.
At first I thought it was a moose, a black silhouette between Porphyry and the islands off Silver Islet. But the motion was wrong. Moose had begun to move into the area as the caribou dwindled, and would take advantage of the bridges winter builds between islands, crossing them to new foraging grounds. But this black figure did not have their loping, long-legged gait. I returned to the light, pointing out the approaching image to Mother. She grunted, and put on the kettle. I climbed the tower, and from this vantage point watched. As time passed, I could make out the shape of a man on snowshoes towing a toboggan. By the time the sun disappeared as a fiery orange ball over Thunder Bay, your grandfather was unbuckling his snowshoes at Porphyry.
Mother lit the fire in the assistant keeper’s house. I did not notice the smoke trailing from its chimney as I whiled away the afternoon in the lighthouse. But the chill was gone from the main room, and a pot of bean soup was bubbling on the stove. She had known.
David brought with him a peace offering for me—books. I had read and reread the volumes on our shelves so many times I could recite portions of them by heart. It was difficult to suppress my gratitude. But I did. I took them and casually placed them on the ledge beside Pa’s desk, masking my excitement with polite thanks. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I would burn precious kerosene in the lamp for the next few nights devouring every sweet, magical word.
He also brought Emily a gift; little cakes of watercolor paint, a selection of horsehair brushes, and paper. He patiently showed them to her, mixing the pigments together to create new hues that he washed and layered across the page. And then he stood back and watched the enchantment as Emily took the brush into her own hand and her paper came alive, singing and dancing with color. These were her first real paintings.
For that I was grateful. I told him so as he left the warmth of our sitting room and headed out across the darkness to his own quarters, where his stove crackled defiantly against the cold night. He stopped and stood beneath the sky, alive with flickering green aurora borealis, and he told me again, “She’s really very good.”
“I know.”
And I turned back into our cottage and shut the door, leaving him standing in the black night.
It was too cold for him to play the fiddle on those evenings. I imagine he could do little more in his drafty wood-framed building than huddle beneath blankets with his feet tucked right up against the grate and the fire blazing, radiating heat only a short distance from the flame. But he began to play on the evenings he spent with us, and as the days passed, there were more and more of them. He played for Emily. And when his foot started stamping as his bow danced on the strings, Emily clapped in time to the rhythm. I couldn’t help but smile. David couldn’t help but notice.
And I wondered if he really played for me.
*
June is when the Lake is cold but the air has captured the heat of the sun. More than any other, June is the month that breeds fog. I was completing the daily ritual of polishing. Each night, the light blinked white, illuminating the darkness that stretched wide in every direction. And while the intent was to inform passing ships of our location, it also inadvertently served to attract a host of winged insects, some as large as my hand, and set them fluttering against the hypnotic lure of its panes. Emily found inspiration in the forms—some still clinging to the glass, others expired in clusters on the ledges and planks of the gallery. She climbed with me, pencil and paper to my wash bucket and rag, and sat and drew while I wiped. From my vantage, I could see across to Isle Royale, a lowlying gray headland beneath darker gray clouds, and to the west, a steamer passing Thunder Cape, her course bearing out beyond Black Bay toward the downbound shipping channel. I noted her position, intending to monitor progress and mark the name and time of passage in our logbook when she reached the point.
I checked again some forty or so minutes later and could not see the ship. I could see the gray Lake, flat and dull, lazily pulling at the rocks off the point, and far in the distance, the mesa on Pie Island. Between, water merged gray and indistinct. My rag hung for a moment while the images settled. A fog bank, low and thick and dark, had formed. The ship was wrapped in the center of it.
My rag dropped and lay where it fell. I descended the tower, calling to Mother and David to let them know that the horn must be started.
The fog station at Porphyry was just steps from the dwelling and light tower. Two six-horse coal-fired steam engines ran compressors that produced the air for the signal. We only fired them up when the keeper or assistant could no longer see Passage Island or Trowbridge Lights. Our station had a distinct sound pattern—one long blast lasting two and a half seconds, repeating every minute. It was a loud whistle, deep and round, which tailed off in a distinctive grunt at the end of each descending blast. Ships knew it was us.