The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  “I don’t call that freedom.” Coming back to town no higher than I was now, no better off? Except for the money I’d saved.

  “But haven’t I proven myself to you, Emma Rose? Coming here every week? Haven’t I been true to you?”

  “Yes. You have.” I leaned my head on his shoulder.

  “But you still say no to everything I ask for.”

  “No. Not everything.” There’d been more than one yes.

  “Then just tell me when the commission is coming,” he said, suddenly hot, “because I can tell you I’m not coming anywhere near here while you’re serving cakes to my father’s cronies. I won’t face that.”

  “Quint, why so angry today?”

  “Because everything’s impossible!” he raged. “I can’t get engaged until I’m twenty! I’m dependent on my father till I’m twenty-one. My father says the government is trying to punish the rich with this new income tax, and he’s closing his fist as tight as a monkey’s around what he’s got and he says he’s doing it for us children, for our futures. To protect us. But I can’t see how … and I can’t will myself to play the meek son anymore. My brother, he’ll do anything Father and Mother tell him to. And my sisters are no better—they trot like wind-up donkeys to the parties at Fort Kane, and my mother expects me to chaperone them. It’s so medieval. It’s not what I want. My mother says I should try to see the world the way my father sees it, but …” He shook his head.

  “Quint.”

  “Since you have so much work to do, I’ll go. Unless you’ll run away with me, right this minute?” He kissed my cheek, distracted.

  Should a girl ever leave something safe for an unsure saddle? Especially if her heart leaps every time she sees the fine horse and its well-dressed rider? How I wished I had a mother to guide me! And how foolish that I’d once imagined, when I came to the Point, that Mrs. Folde might be the woman I could confide in, when more and more, these days, she saw me only as the girl who would wear a white cap on the day the commission came, while she wore me like a feather in hers.

  No, there was only me on the grass, and when Quint had gone, only me in my cottage, sitting on the quilt, the cold kept out by a few pieces of coal in the stove, and by the live sound of a mallet ringing through the walls. Mr. Folde, at work nearby in the carpentry building. Making some repair. After a while, the hammering came less even, less steadily. It sounded like a heart losing its rhythm, speed.

  I came out at dusk with my shawl over my shoulders, headed toward the house to make dinner. Mr. Folde was coming out from the shop, his work vest covered in sawdust, a piece of heavy lumber studded with bolts balanced on his shoulder.

  He stopped in front of me, the weight of the wood rocking to one side. “Good evening, Emma.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Folde.”

  “Has young Lambry left early today?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I guess it’s busy out in the logging camps, now that spring has started.”

  “Yes.”

  “You look a little tired.” He straightened the wood as it tried to swing away from him.

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “If young Lambry is coming too often, I can—”

  “No! Thank you.”

  He said nothing for a moment, balancing his load and staring off toward the eye of the lighthouse, its long throat starting to blush in the sunset.

  “You need to take care of yourself, Emma. It’s important to all of us.”

  “Yes.”

  I said nothing more. I felt strange. I’d been careful around Mr. Folde ever since he’d started noticing my hair, complimenting my ribbons. I heard Franny’s words again. But things happen, Emma. Accidents. And men who get lonely, after. So you be nice to all of them, I’m telling you. And see what time sees fit to bring you. I kept my eyes fixed on the Folde house. But I couldn’t move toward it. He and his lumber were in my way.

  “Mrs. Folde is expecting me, sir.”

  “Of course.” He leaned forward and began walking, head down, into the dying wind.

  21

  Pratt and Ellen have walked and driven all over Benito together. They’ve gone to the village newspaper. They’ve gone to the library. They’ve asked at the Chinese temple. They’ve visited the thin-columned house at the end of Main Street that keeps the files and photographs preserved by the historical commission. They’ve driven over to St. Clements Church, to check the parish records, trying to guess at her name—my name.

  Emma, I could tell them. Sometimes, when I’m tired of being hunted, I almost want to. Just to hear my name spoken again. Emma Rose Finnis. That’s who I was and always tried to be—a friend, a hard worker, honest.

  They sit together in Pratt’s car, going over their notes. There’s a lingering stiffness between them, like the tightness over a healing cut.

  “All right, Ellen?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Need to call it a day? Go home?”

  “No. Where would I go?” She taps her slate. “Nothing’s safe till we finish this. I want to finish. What do we do now? I don’t see a sign of any missing girl who might have wanted to haunt the Lambry family.”

  “Unless we consider their housekeeper, Mrs. Broyle.”

  “She died an old woman. Her grave is in Evergreen. Where else can we look?”

  “In the gaps. The empty spaces.”

  “Well, we’ve done that, haven’t we?”

  “A different kind of gap is where we are now. The gap in a story.”

  “So how do we fill it?”

  “My answer might surprise you.”

  “Try me.”

  “If the head is getting you nowhere, go with the heart.” He taps his chest.

  Is that what he thought he was doing, whenever he stroked his shirtfront?

  “The Benito Gazette,” he says, looking out his windshield, “reported the Lambrys lost their son aboard the schooner Lorna.”

  “But the Gazette listed all travelers in their shipping news section, always.” She checks her device again.

  “And they had no female passenger listed on board, that voyage.”

  “The schooners were packed with cargo, the docent said at the historical commission.”

  “‘Trains of the sea,’ they were called.” Pratt frowns. “And piled high with lumber, more than any other commodity. Wood was given precedence over human cargo. Tickets for passengers were expensive.”

  “Mrs. Fanoli stressed the girl we’d be looking for wouldn’t have had very much money. She’d be working class.”

  “A ‘slattern,’ she said they called her.”

  “A slut?” Ellen says the word as though it means nothing.

  “Or maybe only someone who sweated at her work. But a dirty name. Who did the dirty work in those days?”

  “The washerwomen pounding the laundry.” She flips through the black and white pictures. Of girls like me and Franny. “Cooking in the camps and in the boardinghouses. Tending to everything no one else would do, or wanted to.”

  “And how do you think they felt doing that?”

  It felt unimportant, I think, sitting right behind them.

  Ellen closes her eyes and leans her head back against Pratt’s fine, stitched leather. “I know exactly how they felt. At least, I think I do. I had to tend to someone all the time. Do everything. Because nobody else would. It makes you feel like nothing.” She opens her eyes. “It makes you feel, if no one notices you, small.”

  “And when you felt that way,” Pratt asks, “what did you want to do?”

  “Escape. Get away.”

  “But what if you couldn’t?”

  “I did as soon as I could … As soon as I … As soon as there was nothing left for me to do.”

  “You say you left when there was nothing more for you to do. And then you left for somewhere peaceful. You told me that.”

  “But,” she says and sits up sharply, turning, “that’s why I don’t think whoever we’re looking for was o
n the Lorna. Because the Gazette said it was only taking a special load of lumber north to the fort and then turning around and coming right back to the village. It was just going to another roughneck place. An army post. Not even as nice as Benito. You saw the pictures at the history museum. Half of Fort Kane was nothing but mud and canvas. I wouldn’t go there. Much less only to come back.”

  “But would that have mattered to you, if you just wanted to get away?”

  “Not if I had any idea my ship was going to founder at—” She stops herself, blinking.

  “Go on, Ellen. It’s all right. We have to use our instincts for other lives. It’s all we have. That’s what we’re doing, right now.”

  They sit silently for a moment under the cover of Pratt’s roof. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I need to stay close. I need to be ready.

  “The boat never got any farther than Lighthouse Point,” Ellen says.

  “So what about the lighthouse, then?”

  “Six miles to the north.”

  “Still functioning?”

  “Abandoned, years ago. They’ve got lighted buoys out on the water now. Everything’s automatic.”

  “Would we find anyone there?”

  No. Not me. I’ll make sure of it.

  “I don’t think so. It’s turned into sort of a den for delinquents. The buildings are sad. It’s all a mess. Though a cleaner did come and flush it out, at some point.”

  “But maybe missed something useful. As other things have been missed in this town.” Pratt taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “I say we go there now.”

  “It’s getting dark, though.”

  “We’ll drive back to the hotel and pick up a few lights. Unless you’d rather stay there?”

  “No, I want to go. I’m feeling something. Something about how it feels. To come back from the dead. And want to make a life for yourself again. I think I’m getting the hang of this. Did you see how that crawler at the Botanical Garden didn’t even really upset me?”

  Pratt studies her. “I did.”

  Brave little Ellen. I’ll give her that.

  “So,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  22

  I need you. I need you. I need you, Mrs. Folde said.

  For soaping and scrubbing the baseboards until the children’s scuff-marks were all gone. That’s how she needed me. For beating and airing the hooked rugs and laying them down again. For taking the chimneys from the lamps and polishing them. For oiling the banister and burnishing the brass. I need you, Emma, right now. For this work. I need you.

  If only a person knew, if only you knew when you were going to die, you might spend your last hours in some other, more treasured way than spitting on dulled brass. On a beach. With a bright boy. Reading a poem. Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

  Mrs. Folde grew so nervous about the commission’s visit she decided to send the children and the baby away with her sister, who came with her husband in a Packard.

  “I’m torn, oh Emma, I’m so torn,” she said as she waved them goodbye. “I do want those men to see we’re a growing family—but not such a circus we can’t handle the head keeper’s responsibilities. If only I hadn’t let myself be burdened with so many little ones.”

  The sun rose on the day of the commission’s visit, my nineteenth birthday, and I did nothing more than put a fresh ribbon in my hair and begin making the tarts. I missed Quint, who hadn’t come to see me since we’d argued about my waiting on people he knew. He didn’t know it was my birthday. That was my doing. I hadn’t told him. I should have, and if I had, I would have said all I wanted, truly, was to see the same moon he did at night and not count what that might be worth.

  “I need to make clear we’re a good family,” Mrs. Folde said as the hour drew near, fidgeting with her hair, coiled high on her head. “Not like some keeper’s wives, whom I won’t mention, whose bloomers have no lace on them. All right. Let’s keep to our schedule. The men’s shifts have been altered today. Mr. Folde is going early to the lighthouse, and then will come back to us. We’re on our own for now. Let us rise to the occasion.”

  It was a warmer day than it had been all spring. The starch in the napkins was already wilting. But God took the measure of a soul, Mrs. Folde said, and so did the commission, by how well that soul bore disaster.

  I tried not to think about Quint as I pulled the curtains tight to keep the sun out. Still, I couldn’t help peeking through them, hoping for a surprise, something sweet, unexpected.

  At noon I saw the touring car carrying the commission down through the woven canopy of the cypress trees. Three large men, all wearing bright yellow straw hats, sitting tall in their seats, like suns all risen to the same height. Such steady-looking heads. I supposed they had to be, since they had the job of supplying so many light stations with men they could trust, up and down this stretch of coast.

  I called out to Mrs. Folde. She flung her apron aside and told me to put my cap on. She took one last, beady look around the dining parlor and checked her face in the hall-tree mirror. “I don’t look bohemian, do I?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Madam. Don’t forget.”

  She told me to stand ready to take the men’s hats. We watched through the glass of the front door as Mr. Folde came boldly toward the car—he must have seen them coming from the signal house—and met them at the picket fence. If he was anxious, shaking their hands, he didn’t show it, or showed it only by the slightest rise in his shoulders under his keeper’s jacket.

  Mrs. Folde whispered, “He looks so well, doesn’t he? So fit?”

  “He does.”

  “Oh, there’s really only one choice of man, here. Anyone can see that. All right. Here they come.”

  While I carried the first luncheon tray into the dining parlor, the largest, most thick-mustached of the men was saying with a raised glance that they would take this refreshment and then walk outdoors. Mrs. Folde swept around to show them to their seats. As I started back to the kitchen I heard her say, in a higher-pitched voice than I was used to, “Oh, but who would have ever thought it would be so hot in April! But they say ‘warm warns before storm’—as my husband’s wonderful weather observations always bear out.”

  The first soup course in, I was glad to sit and rest for a while beside the pie cupboard. I had everything for the next course ready, the sandwiches, then after that the royal blue tea set—though why anyone would want to serve both soup and hot tea on a day like this, I didn’t ask Mrs. Folde.

  I wiped the sweat from under my cap and pulled at the front of my shirtwaist and looked out the screen door toward the empty lane. Nearly a year now since Quint had first started coming down it. Three seasons. Summer, winter, and spring. Yes, he’d proven himself, I had to admit. He was no Johnny-come-and-go. I felt my heart twinge a little, with a strange, hot nervousness.

  Mrs. Folde’s little silver dinner bell rang—my signal to bring in the sandwich tray. I saw that Mrs. Folde was nodding across to Mr. Folde at the crowded round table. The thickly mustached gentleman, the commission head, looked sweaty between them, and the two others had adjusted their collars to the warm room. Mrs. Folde made a sign to me, even though I knew already who to serve first. The head was saying it was a pity electricity hadn’t come yet to the Point; it would require less manpower at the station, he said, and free the keepers to “do more scientific work.”

  “True,” Mr. Folde said, “but in the end that would mean less work and so fewer keepers.”

  “Yes, the fat of progress does lead to the thinning of labor. But times are changing. What else can we do but change with them?”

  “Perhaps”—Mr. Folde bowed in his seat—“we could remember that nothing can replace what a man can observe and do—especially in cases of surprise or emergency. If the electric supply were to fail, for example, as we know it has at some stations”—he took a cool cucumber sandwich from me—“it’s better to have two men at the pump instead of one. And it might perhaps
be held as a loss to the lightkeepers’ service, and maybe even to humanity—if that’s not too large a claim—to allow certain forms of progress to lessen the chances of men earning their living … or even to live meaningfully at all.”

  “There is that, yes. But there is also a decided loss to the service, Folde, when we devote the energies of a man—say, a man of your obvious qualities—to the menial tasks of conveying grease and oil. The service notes this loss and feels it.”

  “Oh!” Mrs. Folde interrupted brightly. “But surely we can all agree the head keeper always has a great deal more time to devote to scientific study, and therefore such a position should be given to a man of—of obvious qualities.”

  “True, madam,” the head commissioner replied. “But the head must also be willing to embrace modern principles. Especially if these are more efficient at getting things done. And even if they run counter to his own, er, humanitarian principles.”

  Mrs. Folde looked a little confused.

  She sent me away.

  The bell rang again half an hour later, and I brought in the tarts and cream and went back for the tea. The set was clumsy and old-fashioned, and I was expected to bring it on the heavy tray all at once—the pot, the sugar caddy, the milk, the cream, the cups, the saucers, and all the silver spoons. A queer silence hung around the table as I pushed through the swinging door, as though they’d had to stop whatever they’d just been saying because of me.

  After a moment, the thickly mustached leader said, “But changes are afoot in that corner, I hear. My dear friend, Augustus Lambry, feels his son has learned all that he can in the camps and the mills and is sending him off to a private university on the next ship, in advance of next year’s term. So he can get some private tutoring in politics and economics over the summer. The boy is suddenly eager, by all accounts, to learn the latest forms of thinking. It’s just as well. Many of us out here in the wilderness don’t want to admit it, but we deprive our sons of proper company and the right sort of associates and connections if we keep them for too long in the country air.”