The Lightkeeper: A Novel

The LIGHTKEEPER

A Novel

Sherry Shenoda

Ancient Faith Publishing • Chesterton, Indiana

Loon-Call Light, Maine, 1938

The Light had been kept by a large, solitary man with faded eyes the color of the sea in midwinter. She arrived, her left foot still bare on the warm sandy beach of a more pleasant assignment. She sighed, stepped forward, and felt the last few grains of warm sand fall away as her foot was firmly encased in a sturdy leather boot. A death, she thought, and my vacation is over. She glanced at the man, wrapping the musty coat that had materialized on her shoulders more firmly around her to ward off the chill. Wherever she was, it was definitely North.

She had come from a remote island Light complete with balmy breezes, warm sandy beaches, and solitude. She had been covering the Light for a truant young Lightkeeper who had abandoned his post to seek his true love, or some such rot. She’d read his note to the Company, full of angst and remorse for leaving a massive beacon unlit and unmanned. At least he’d folded his uniform and left a note.

She wasn’t unsympathetic. Loneliness she understood. She could have written that story. Irresponsible desertion, though, she had no patience for. She rolled her eyes into the top of her head at his gross negligence, sighed, and kept the Light lit in his absence, which turned out to last about a month. A glorious month of living in a shift, barefoot, her straight hair whipped by warm sea breezes, dining on fresh fish and coconuts. She’d wanted to stay forever.

Forever, she thought with a huff. Whatever that means. She shifted in her recently boot-clad feet. The boots pinched, and she wanted to be finished with whatever had to be done here so she could be warm again. Of course that errant keeper down south had returned a month later, his tan fading, a great, ridiculous grin on his face and a bride in tow. She saw them coming in the distance, from the high watch of the lighthouse, and climbed down to meet them on the road. It would have been immensely gratifying to give him a talking-to, but she was never granted that particular pleasure. No, she had to content herself with the thunderstruck look on his face as he saw that the Light was lit. And well lit, too, she thought smugly, but by then she had begun to feel the Change, and nothing was as sobering as that. She took a few more hurried steps up the path as they rounded the bend in the road up ahead.

The man dropped the hand of his bride and broke into a run, frantically waving his hands above his head. She sighed, for she had already felt the chill of the North circling around her skirts, and she slowed her pace with the dread of certainty. Between one stride and the next the warm sand slipped away, the seascape changed, the errant keeper and his bride faded, and she was here—cold, hair in a practical bun, wearing a damp coat that smelled faintly of old fish. She brought a sleeve to her nose and wished she hadn’t. Oh, and this keeper was not taking a vacation or a nap.

She took a long, measured breath. Time to get back to the real work, she thought. Some days were worse than others. She wasn’t normally so callous toward death, but this transition had been more jarring than most. Her heart softened as she looked down on the man slumped forward at the small table tucked against the curved wall of the Light. She instinctively reached out and carefully closed his eyelids, her fingers lingering for a moment against his leathery cheek. They curled back in surprise at the warmth of his skin.

He must have died only recently. She found her fingers drawn back, sifting through his soft white hair and passing down to his broad shoulders and back, only a little bent by age. His body was bowed over the keeper’s log, which she carefully eased from under his right hand. It was surprisingly heavy, that hand, though her mind didn’t register the fact until later. Her gaze fell on her own hand next to his: hers ageless, smooth, and unmarked, the log beneath it. His was heavily veined, spot-marked with age, the nails square and the pads calloused. She curled her own hand into a momentary fist.

She glanced over the log with detached interest, as a doctor might conduct an examination. The last few nights had been uneventful. The keeper had developed a mild cold earlier in the week. Pneumonia, probably, she thought, glancing down at the top of his head. Her eyes fell on the last entry, reading it without interest at first, then again, more slowly, her heart rate quickening.

She picked up the hefty book and rifled back a few pages. He had an uncramped, careful scrawl that was easy on the eye. She often made character judgments—rather unfairly, she knew—from a keeper’s log, and she decided immediately that she would have liked to know this old man. He was a meticulous author, descriptive but not tediously so.

Cold wind from Nor’easter last week. Fresh breeze, moderate waves. Sighted two ships starboard. No visitors.

Glad I missed that, she thought. Fresh breeze, moderate waves—Beaufort 5, she thought automatically, translating the keeper’s language into weather shorthand. A glassy sea was a rare zero, and hurricane-force winds were a malevolent twelve. She had been through enough storms to develop a proper respect for a dread Nor’easter.

She turned the page.

Moderate breeze, small waves breaking. Relieved for two nights by SS while away in town. Supplies acquired. No visitors.

Beaufort 4—oh stop it! she thought, annoyed with the reflex. This was followed by a list, in his carefully measured handwriting.

She flipped back a few pages, but there was only page after page of uninteresting, stock keeper-log material. This made the last entry particularly befuddling.

His handwriting was the same, and he hadn’t written it in a hurry, as the man-child on the island had written his letter to the Company. It looked like every other entry, but instead of commenting on the weather or the number of ships, it simply read:

Welcome home.

The hair on the nape of her neck rose in response, and she startled as something brushed against her skirts. She glanced down to find a large grey-white cat twining itself familiarly around her ankle. It glanced up at her, wide blue eyes set in a silvery moon-shaped face, and blinked. The Keeper blinked back, and the cat turned and leapt lightly onto the table, crouching next to the slumped figure. She sniffed his hand and gave a plaintive meow.

The Keeper’s gaze followed the cat, then caught on an object in the man’s palm. She left the log lying open and with her thumb and pointer finger tried to slip it free, while the cat meowed encouragingly. He held the item securely, even in death, and when she lifted his hand to open his fingers, her mind finally registered that his hand was heavy, substantial. She yelped and let go, his hand thudding dully back onto the table.

“Curious,” she murmured aloud, and the cat tipped its head at her.

She frowned down at the man in confusion. She wasn’t afraid, not really. Nothing could hurt her here. She was, however, wary, and even more improbably, she was interested. The Keeper paced beside the man a moment in the small space, and then tentatively touched his shoulder. Solid. He was as solid as she was, and she shuddered. The humans never felt this way to her.

She had buried a keeper just the week before, a middle-aged man without a family, on the colder, eastern shore of Ireland. She fished him from the sea and knew right away, from the waterlogged feel of his body and the cold, sea-blue tinge he had taken from his watery grave, that all that was left of him was a body. Cradling his slight weight against her and absorbing the seawater against her dress, she lifted him gently from the sea. She wished uselessly, as she had a thousand times before, that there was more she could do, that something could be done other than to treat a body with respect while she laid it to rest.

She floated that keeper in her arms from the sea, knelt with him by a little plot of soil with a view, and dug him a grave. It was the tail end of winter, but the frozen ground parted easily under her hands as though she were planting a seed in spring sod. She staked the ground to mark the site and tended to the Light. It was sixty-eight steps to the top, and after lighting it, she had taken an uncharacteristically defiant step off the side of the beacon. Burying bodies always made her a little testy.

She landed with the slight crunch of—not bones, despite the great height—but just a little snow beneath her boots. She remembered a flock of white-crowned widgeons gliding overhead. She had rolled her shoulders, turned up the collar of her long coat, and glanced back to see the Light burning brightly. She recalled her lifted eyebrow, the unspoken anything else you need me to do? just before she translated. That was routine, she thought. Easy.

Her eyes fell again on the keeper’s hand and the thing he was loosely gripping. She had a suspicion that this keeper’s death was not going to be easy. She ignored the feeling of wrongness at the weight of his fingers and gently pried them from the object he held. Her breath caught as what he had been clutching tumbled into her hand. She cupped it carefully and passed her thumb back and forth over it, one corner of her mouth lifting reluctantly. She hesitated for only a moment.

The cat folded its paw like a sphinx. “Don’t give me that look, cat,” she muttered, and tucked the small object into her pocket.

She stepped lightly to the lantern glass and pushed the small door open to step outside. She gasped against the cold, smiling as it stung her cheeks after the warmth of the lantern room. She took several deep breaths of the winter air and tilted her face up to the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper above her. The waves crashed against the shore below and she counted them silently, as she often did, to calm herself. Some beaches were what she thought of as threes: every third wave was a larger wave. Some beaches were sevens for the same reason. She counted. It was a threes-beach.

Calmer, she turned back into the heat of the lantern room, and to her task. Then a long, horrible wail pinned her where she stood. She froze while the haunting sound sliced through the clear winter night. “It’s just a loon-cry,” she chided herself aloud. Nevertheless, the sound held her until the last note died away. She shook her head and reached for the door, chilled.

This will be no ordinary night, she thought with a grimace, gazing down at the slumped figure. She sighed, and rolled her shoulders once again. She sketched the Sign in the air over him and began to unbutton the cuffs of her stiff coat, to push and roll the sleeves up to her elbows.

A slow snow began, each flake seemingly suspended for an eternity in the unnatural brightness of the courtyard lit by the lighthouse beam.

She went into the cottage and stripped the bed sheet from his bed. Back outside, she awkwardly lowered his body into it. The bumping journey down the spiral staircase of the Light had been unspeakable, and she decided immediately to forget the sound his body made on each tightly stacked step.

She began dragging the body across the yard, her hair on end and feeling like a raw nerve, her quick, panting breaths white in the dark night air. The sheet made the going only marginally easier, and she kept uselessly muttering “I’m sorry” to the body behind her. They cut a large skid mark across the yard away from the base of the Light as she painfully made her way to the large apple tree that partially shaded the cottage.

The journey was a revelation to her, who thought herself both a woman of the world and entirely imperturbable. By the time she had reached the tree, she didn’t feel much like either. She paused more than once, dragging her forearm, gooseflesh and all, across her face. Her cheeks and nose stung from the bitter cold.

She steeled her heart against the man whose body she couldn’t bear to look at. “I hate this,” she informed him, since there was no one else to listen. “Why can’t I lift you? You’re so heavy.”

She couldn’t understand why he was so substantial, why this was so painful and difficult. They were normally all so easy to lift. Why you? she asked silently. There was no answer, just the silence of the moon-faced cat, which didn’t seem inclined to leave her alone.

His weight didn’t make it easier to give him a decent burial. She leaned a moment against the apple tree, glancing down at the body in the sheet. He looked peaceful, undisturbed. She was the one disturbed by this incident. He was gone, had no cares here, and she momentarily considered simply stopping, leaving him where he was. Who is there to see? She shook her head violently at the unbidden thought and pushed away from the tree. She chose a spot, hoping she wouldn’t come across anything in her digging, and went to look for a shovel.

It was no easier to part the earth than it had been to carry his body. Every clod of dirt seemed to resist her efforts, and she nearly despaired as a dusting of snow fell around her, not sticking, but melting as it reached the ground. She longed to be inside, with tea, and warm in bed.

The wind picked up, and she pulled the stiff coat around her, closed her eyes momentarily, and then slowly emptied her mind of everything unbearable, as she had taught herself to do from time to time, in order to do things that could not be borne. She acknowledged the cold and discomfort, and then dismissed them. She took the things she liked and buried them deep, until she was just a live body, burying a dead body.

She opened her eyes. Her boots squelched in the mud beneath the tree as she counted. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven feet long. Three wide. Her hands knew how and worked methodically, one shovelful of earth at a time, the hole deepening around her as the night darkened above her. She worked into a rhythm, one boot on the shovel, stomping it into the hard ground, arms shaking with the effort to scoop out the earth. If she could have wept from sheer exhaustion and misery, she would have.

It was close to morning by the time the hole was long enough and deep enough, and she finally looked up, noticing that the sky had lightened. She looked briefly down at herself and started. She sniffed delicately. “Did you see her hem?” she murmured. “Six feet deep in mud!” Her bark of laughter sounded hysterical even to her own ears.The cat peeked over the side of the grave, eyes wide, and gave her a questioning head tilt. “Not a fan of Austen, are you?” asked theKeeper, then rolled her shoulders once more before beginning to climb out of the grave. Her face came momentarily on the same level as the dead keeper’s. Not for me, this grave, she thought, and hoisted herself out.

There was no one else there, and the keeper didn’t seem to have family to mourn him save the cat, so she collected her thoughts, found what compassion remained within her after the long night, and before she lowered him as gently as she could into the grave, tried to honor the white hair on his head and the crags that lined his face. She knew not what he worshipped, so she invoked the One she worshipped and made the Sign again over his resting form, and over the newly turned earth in which she laid him. As the cold, windy morning began to break with the faintest of light, she kissed his leathery cheek, blessed his brief, difficult life, and, under the scraggly apple tree, laid him in the ground.

She stepped back for a moment before beginning to shovel the dirt back into the hole. Her grimy hands, seeking warmth, reflexively sought her pockets, and the fingers of her right hand brushed against the object the keeper had been holding. She felt a twinge of guilt. It was clear that it was beloved, and she nearly pulled it out to put it back in his hand. She had never understood why humans buried beautiful things with their dead. She hesitated, her dirty fingers stubbornly tightening over it. No, she thought. This doesn’t belong in the ground. The cat meowed beside her, as if in approval.

Turning away, the Keeper emptied her mind once more, picked up the shovel, and began replacing the earth, one shovelful at a time. The night had been interminable to that point, but now it picked up speed, seeming to make up for its previous glacial pace. Afterward she vaguely remembered making a grave mound and leaning the shovel against the tree. There was a water closet and bath, and the welcoming warmth of the keeper’s cottage. She remembered kicking the door closed behind her, prying off her boots, dropping her sodden clothes to the ground by the bed, bathing hastily with a cake of soap she found next to the tub, drying off with a small towel she found in the kitchen, wrapping herself in a quilt, and tumbling into sleep before her head hit the pillow. The cat had followed her inside as though it owned the place, so she made no fuss when it curled beside her head like a dream. Perhaps this whole night is a dream, she thought wearily. Her last thought was a vague hope that the Light was still burning, because she had no strength left.

Copyright ©2021 by Sherry Shonoda. All Rights Reserved. Published by Ancient Faith Publishing.

Sample pages only. Purchase the full book at http://store.ancientfaith.com/the-lightkeeper/