May

by Kathryn Lasky

  It was not simply that May and Hepzibah were as unlike in appearance as any mother and daughter could be, but they were just as different on the inside as well. None of May’s organs were failing. She had hardly been sick a day in her life. She was robust and brimming with health, a health that her mother seemed to almost resent. The closest she ever came to voicing any bitterness was when she would regard May while she was hoeing in the garden or lugging an immense basket of wet laundry to hang out to dry. On those occasions Zeeba would sigh deeply, shake her head, and say wearily, “I do envy that girl’s strength.” Then in a slightly lower voice she might whisper, “Almost unnatural, though,” and look at May as if she were a complete stranger.

  And although May did not envy her mother’s ill health she sometimes wondered if her mother would like her more if she were weaker, more fragile. Would it please her mother to see her very, very sick? Would it bring out a tenderness in her? May thought about the mothers and daughters in Bar Harbor walking arm in arm down the street, window-shopping or maybe even in summer buying an ice cream to share. Those mothers and daughters seemed as if they belonged together whether they looked alike or not. They were coupled through deep feelings. Did those girls ever catch their mothers looking at them as if they were complete strangers? Did they feel out of place in their own families, as if they didn’t quite belong?

  “Belong.” She whispered the word to herself and felt a deep and terrible overwhelming sadness flood through her. The wind temporarily eased and then a few seconds later began again with a thin wail that built to a mournful lament as it scoured around the corners of the house and pried shingles from the roof.

  May turned her gaze to look out the window at the two five-second flashes as they swept across the snow. These two flashes were followed by a ten-second gap. This was the “signature” of the Egg Rock Light, or its characteristic sequence. Each lighthouse along the coast of the country had its own sequence designed to aid mariners in distinguishing one light from another. The flashes were like parentheses in the darkness of the long winter nights whose shadows clung like lint through the short day when hours of light were whittled away minute by minute.

  May and her father maintained their light. It was a great deal of work. In all there were over one hundred and fifty instructions for proper lighthouse keeping. The first was that the lamps must be lit at sunset and kept continually burning “bright and clear” until sunrise. It was the extraordinary lens that multiplied the light of the kerosene lamp through its array of prisms, bending it into horizontal sprays. It was a beacon for ships at sea, warning them of The Bones, rock ledges that lurked just beneath the surface and earned their name from the lives they had claimed from innumerable shipwrecks before Egg Rock Light had been built. Edgar Plum’s father had been the first lighthouse keeper of the rock. And now Edgar had tended it for thirty years. When the weather was foggy or stormy, the light was kept burning both day and night.

  May put down her darning and went to the window to watch the sweep of the light more closely.

  “You see it, don’t you, de-ah?” her father said.

  “Yes, Pa, I think that wick is smoking again.”

  “Well, time to wind anyhow. I’ll tend to it.” From the watch room they could service the light, wind the clockworks, oil its gears, and then climb up a short ladder to get inside the lens itself, which rose like an immense glass beehive. Once inside they could stand on the slowly rotating platform and trim the wick of the lamp.

  May looked at the bottle on the table. It was almost empty. But she would not say anything. She never did. No matter how much her father drank he was never too unsteady to climb the winding stairs of the sixty-four-foot tower to the watch room, just below the lantern room. But he seemed tired tonight. “I’ll go up, Pa. I need to stretch my legs.”

  “So do I,” he laughed, and rose to start the climb.

  “You know, I swear I can smell those fumes down here,” Zeeba moaned. “The durned thing ain’t vented properly. I think that’s what’s been giving me a headache. And of course that’s no help for my eyes. Or maybe that’s what gets to my eyes first and why they be failing and then that gives me the headache. Vicious circle, it is.”

  “Oh, Mother, I don’t think the fumes could come down here,” May said. “You know they rise with the heat up in the lantern room.”

  “It’s back-drafting. Don’t contradict me, child. You think you know so much. Well, you don’t.”

  May listened. She had a keen ear for all noises. The cries of the cormorants when they spotted a school of mackerel; the flap of a schooner’s sails buried in the howling wind as it tacked across the bay. And she knew the sound when the lantern was not vented properly, and this lantern was not back-drafting.

  Since as long as she could remember, May had helped her father with the light, simple tasks at first like hanging the brushes up neatly after he had dusted off the prisms. She liked these lighthouse-tending chores. They were so different from the odious tasks involved in tending her mother—emptying her bedpan when she was too tired to do her business in the privy, mixing up the endless potions, preparing hot or sometimes cold compresses depending on which body part was “failing.”

  It was not very long until May was able to help her father trim the wick, wind up the clockworks, and her favorite—polish the lens with the brushes and the special solutions. She loved climbing into the glass beehive and slowly turning around, caught in the glittering reflections of the prisms. The prisms intrigued her. It seemed magical to her how they multiplied and focused light.

  So she asked Miss Lowe, who was the librarian in Bar Harbor. Miss Lowe was eager to answer her questions and very excited. She took out what looked like a triangular piece of glass from her drawer. “Come over to the window,” she said. She held it up to the light, and suddenly what had been a simple beam of sunlight on one side of the prism became bent bands of colored light.

  “It’s like a rainbow!” May exclaimed.

  Miss Lowe found as many books as she could with information about prisms. Rainbows, May learned, were nothing more than millions upon millions of water droplets through which the sun’s rays passed and bent and split into bows of color. She thought of those droplets she had seen ensnared in the eyes of the children who dove off the wharf.

  For her birthday that year Miss Lowe had given May a small prism of her own, which she hung up in her room and watched as the light passed through on sunny days, casting shimmering spots of color onto her bare walls.

  May now heard her father’s footsteps receding as he climbed higher in the tower. She was about to pick up another sock and begin darning when there was a horrendous crash, then a stuttering of light across the snowfields.

  “The lantern!” May screeched, jumping out of her chair. She raced up the winding stairs. There were always buckets of water up there in case of fire, but she did not smell kerosene or smoke. However, she did hear a ragged groan and then a gasp.

  “Pa! Pa! Oh my God!” she yelped. Her father was on the rotating platform of the lens. There was blood on his hand, but no fire, and the lens was still rotating in its housing. But something had shattered. Then she saw the shards of the lantern’s chimney. As if to confirm this the light was stammering into the night! The signature of the flash would be broken, the characteristic sequence of the Egg Rock Light garbled, and sailors would become confused and their vessels fetch up on the deadly rocks and ledges.

  May was stunned. She felt herself at the vortex of a frightening collision of events. Her father was bleeding, the chimney was broken, and the night was growing wilder.

  Then the unthinkable occurred.

  “What the devil! That drunken old fool! I knew it! I knew it!”

  Hepzibah Plum stood in the doorway of the watch room. She was a tower of dark, glowering rage. She glared at her husband. Her eyes settled on the star that was sewn on the lapel of the indigo blue coat, the uniform that all keepers were required to wear. The star was awarded to
keepers who had been commended for efficiency four consecutive quarterly inspections by the lighthouse service board. “They’re going to rip that star right from your jacket, Mr. Plum!”

  “Mother!” was all May could say. Never in her entire life had May seen her mother in the tower. Never had she climbed the stairs. But never had her father fallen, and never had the chimney shattered and the signature of the light been scrambled.

  Suddenly May felt as if her entire world was as fragile as that glass chimney, and was breaking all around her, threatening to crush her at any moment.

  2

  THE SURGE WITHIN

  HER FATHER’S CUT WAS NOT AS BAD as the blood indicated. But Gar had injured his hip and was in great pain. It would be days before he could walk enough to get himself down the winding stairs. “Don’t worry about me! Don’t worry about me!” he kept repeating as May bandaged his hand. “I’ll be okay. Look—the light’s still working. You’ve stopped my bleeding. We’re still a lighthouse.” He gazed around the neat, spare lantern room with its small workbench, neatly arranged tools, and gleaming wood floors that May waxed twice a month.

  “We got a spare chimney you can fetch,” Gar said.

  “But it’s not as good, Pa, as the one that’s broke.”

  “It’ll do for now. We’ll order a new one soon as we can.”

  Somehow May managed to get her father down from the circular platform to the service area. She ran back down the winding stairs to bring him blankets and pillows so he could rest more comfortably.

  From the floor of the service area one could look straight up into the dome of the lantern room with its large glass storm panes and polished brass fixtures. The only decoration in the entire lantern room was a small figure of Saint Anthony, the patron saint against shipwrecks, attached to a narrow panel between two of the windows. Almost every lighthouse up and down the east coast of the United States had either a painting or a carved figure of this saint, who was also charged with a vaguer mission as the saint of “lost things.”

  She noticed the figure was slightly askew on its hook.

  Her father patted her hand. “Now, don’t you worry none, May. We’ll get a replacement for the chimney soon as we can get ashore. I got a spare here like I said.”

  May knew this, but the spare did not draft as well; the wick in the lantern wouldn’t burn as steadily. But her father kept trying to reassure her. “Ships can still see us, de-ah. We’re still a lighthouse and I’m the keeper. With your help we’ll do fine. Now, if you could fetch me a cup of tea, that would set well.”

  Hepzibah, who had remained in the service area, or watch room, had hardly said a word since her initial outburst but merely pressed her lips together, then turned around and began to descend the stairs, accompanied by a stentorian array of groans, inhalations, and exhalations that telegraphed her fury.

  For Hepzibah Plum, that consummate miser of illness with her insatiable greed for suffering, it was unimaginable that she was not the only one whose body was now failing. Her avarice for illness became so overwhelming that she headed straight for her bed like a passenger embarking on a transoceanic passage who grew seasick if she ventured on deck.

  In addition to keeping up with the usual lighthouse-tending chores, May became a full-time nurse for both her parents.

  The first day after the accident May thought she herself might collapse from running between two patients separated by fifty-eight feet of vertical distance. Her mother became more demanding than ever. Illness was not something to be shared, divided. May was called to rub her mother’s poor cramping feet; fetch the endless array of powders, pills, and tonics; cook special broths for her failing stomach, her bladder complications, her heart palpitations.

  “Bring me my powders, May,” Zeeba croaked from her bed.

  May came in, stirring the glass with the greenish powders vigorously with a small spoon. “I’m doing it just like you like them. No bits left in the bottom.”

  “Good,” Zeeba replied. May handed her the drink. While she sipped, Zeeba kept her eyes leveled on May, then handed the glass back. “You understand why you can’t go back to school when the weather breaks.”

  May tried to hold the glass steady, but a rage boiled just beneath her skin.

  “Well … I mean if Pa’s okay and —”

  Zeeba cut her off. “Pa will be fine. But I’m declining, and I need you here. Pa can’t fix my medicines, and soon as this storm clears out it will be allergy season. It’s always that way.”

  “But that’s spring. That doesn’t come until late April or so.”

  “Storms bring it on early.”

  “But, Mother —”

  “Don’t ‘but, Mother’ me!” Hepzibah snapped, and sank back on her pillows.

  If she had felt stifled before, May was almost suffocating now. She was cut off more with each passing minute. There was no respite, no chance to escape. It was as if a noose were tightening and she was being strangled, gasping.

  She began to imagine the interminable dreariness in which she was destined to grow old. She pictured an old withered version of herself—her red hair fading to gray, wrinkles scoring her face, her generous lips becoming thin and pale, clamped tight trying to hide purple toothless gums as the years slipped by and she tended not one but two invalid parents. The future loomed ahead with a relentless grimness that was crushing.

  On the second night after Gar’s accident the wind gusts became so strong the lantern room in the tower actually began to sway. Beyond the rattling windows, May heard another sound.

  This was not the shrieks of the wind nor the shrill cries of seagulls. This sound threaded through the crashing of waves on the rocks. It was that of a human voice crying out in the midst of the storm.

  “Pa! There’s someone out there!” she gasped.

  “What?” He looked bewildered. How could she hear anything through the din of the storm?

  “There is someone out there!” May was amazed herself but certain that she had heard a voice crying out.

  “But—but —” her father stammered. “The light’s been working.”

  “Pretty good, yes. But someone is out there, Pa. He’s in trouble.”

  The light had been working as best it could. The backup chimney, it turned out, was slightly chipped, causing the light to waver just a fraction because of imperfect drafting. There was a stuttering hiss she had detected. Had that affected the beams of refracted light? She wasn’t sure. But maybe, in that sliver left dark by the stuttering, a ship … She did not complete the thought but raced over to the telescope and pressed her eye to it, then turned the eyepiece to focus. She gasped in horror. Through the wind and crashing waves she saw it—the three spindly masts of a coastal schooner slanting into the night. They were leaning almost parallel to the sea, and the hull of the ship lay on its side like a mortally wounded creature. Immense waves crashed over the rock ledges, scouring the wreck.

  “Pa, there’s a ship on The Bones! It’s on The Bones!” She pressed her eye so hard against the scope’s eyepiece that she would have a half ring printed beneath it for almost a day. The sight through the lens was terrifying, and she began to relate what she saw to her father. She heard him trying to drag himself to a window, but his hip was so bad he couldn’t stand. “Stay there,” May ordered. “I’ll tell you everything. They’re launching a surfboat from the rescue station!”

  A half dozen men were climbing into the craft to man the oars. It would be a race between the men in the surfboat and the fury of the sea. She saw the captain of the surfboat standing in the stern, trying to steer with a gigantic oar through the raging sea to the wrecked schooner on the ledges. It seemed to take forever.

  “It must be Duncan captaining the surfboat,” her father offered.

  “Well, whoever it is, he’s having a time of it getting close.”

  “’Course he would. Too close he’ll get snagged in the rigging.”

  Periodically May would gasp and think all was lost as the s
urfboat disappeared into the deep trough of a wave and then in the next instant reappear and seem to hover ten feet above the wreck.

  “The bow oarsman just heaved a big grappling hook with a line attached. I think he got it hooked on the stern rail. Almost! Almost!” May was nearly jumping up and down. But then a tremendous wave cracked the schooner in half, the masts plunged into the sea, and the ship was scrubbed off The Bones. She gasped as she saw three bodies falling into the water.

  Two men stood up in the bow of the surfboat. A tiny spark of hope was kindled when she saw they stood with life rings to toss. Yes, there was a man in the water clinging to a piece of wood. They were close, but each time she felt they might grab him, a wave pushed them back. Finally, they flung a line that unfurled like scribbling in the darkness.

  Just at that moment she spotted another man. He was not that far away, and yet she was not sure if the men on the surfboat saw him. May felt something rise up inside her. She turned from the telescope and ran down the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” her father shouted. “May, where are you going? You can’t do nothing. The surfboat is out there! Don’t you go out there. Don’t! Don’t go near the water. May!”

  But she was already out the door. She could hear the surfboat’s men yelling to the sailors and the sailors’ desperate cries lacing the night. She raced down to the dock and clung to a piling. Suddenly the snow and rain cleared and the moon staggered out from behind oily clouds, casting a ghastly light on a scene of wild destruction. She held on to the piling and leaned out as far as she could. She had no fear of this water. She had never been afraid of this sea. Why then was her father so fearful? She’d seen something deeper than any rational fear inscribed on his face when she ran from the house. It was terror—absolute terror.