With her list in one hand and the basket in the other, Alix went down the first aisle to the left. That was where the bottled water was; she loaded the basket with that and took it up to the counter. The older woman didn’t even glance up from her magazine. Alix was surprised, and mildly amused, to see that it was Sunset, a publication whose offices were located in Menlo Park, Palo Alto’s neighbor to the north, and for which she occasionally did freelance illustrating. Sunset was a glossy paean to the refinements of living in the western U.S.-such refinements including an indulgence in gourmet food and wine, redwood decking and hot tubs in the backyard, and spacious homes with lots of cutely concealed storage space. The magazine’s presence in this backwater store was a contradiction that pleased Alix, as life’s inconsistencies often did.
She was loading a second basket with meat and poultry when the bell above the door jingled. Alix glanced that way. The woman who came in had stringy brown hair that hung to her shoulders, wore a soiled and stained quilted coat. Despite the bulkiness of the quilting, she looked painfully thin. She went to the grocery counter and began talking to the storekeeper in low tones. Alix couldn’t make out the words, only the rhythm. The thin woman had an accent. Texas, perhaps-someplace like that. Her voice faltered and trailed off; then the storekeeper spoke in gruff tones that carried to where Alix stood.
“I told you the other day. No more credit. You and Hod are two months behind.”
“I know that, Mrs. Hilliard.” The words were soft, helpless.
A pause. Then the Hilliard woman said, “Can you give me something on account? Twenty dollars?”
“Ten is all I have…”
“Oh, hell. What do you need?”
“Milk. Bread. Eggs-a dozen.”
“All right. That all?”
“We can get by on it. And I’m grateful—”
“Just give me the ten dollars, Della.”
The thin woman, Della, fumbled in the deep pocket of her coat and produced a pair of crumpled five-dollar bills. Alix’s basket was full again, so she moved toward the counter. At close range she could see that Della’s complexion was sallow, her fingernails nicotine-stained and bitten to the quick.
Mrs. Hilliard took the two five-dollar bills, rang open the old wooden cash register, and put them away. Then she said to Della, “Go pick out your groceries. And take some oranges, too-they’re cheap, and good nourishment.”
Within a few minutes, Della had finished gathering her meager groceries and was bagging them herself, under Mrs. Hilliard’s watchful eye. When she’d finished, the storekeeper held out the copy of Sunset to her.
“I’m done with it. You want it, you can have it.”
Della started to reach for it, then withdrew her hand and put it into her coat pocket. “Thank you, Mrs. Hilliard, but I don’t think I want it.”
“I won’t charge you for it.”
“It’s not that. I’d just rather not.” Delta picked up her grocery sack and quickly left the store.
Now what was all that about? Alix wondered. The woman wasn’t averse to buying food on credit, but she wouldn’t take a free magazine…? Oh, of course-it would be painful looking at all that rich food, all that affluence, when times were bad.
Della, Alix decided, was a sensible woman.
Jan had emerged from the hardware section carrying a handful of tools, glass cleanser, and metal polish. He motioned at Alix’s list. “Help you with that?”
“Sure.”
She tore off the bottom half and handed it to him. The faintly surprised look on Mrs. Hilliard’s face made Alix smile. The woman might not be curious about their tenancy at the lighthouse, but their domestic arrangements seemed to hold a certain interest for her. Apparently the men in Hilliard didn’t share the household duties with their wives.
When the last item on the list had been crossed off, their purchases filled six large cardboard cartons. Jan took the first and went to move the car closer, while Alix counted out twenty-dollar bills into Mrs. Hilliard’s square, blunt-fingered hand. Just as she finished, the bell above the door tinkled again and two men-a lean one in a brown parka and a stockier one in a pea jacket similar to her own-came inside. A medium-sized dog-red, like an Irish setter, but obviously of mixed ancestry-followed them, circling and jumping up on its hind legs in an effort to get some attention. The men’s faces were ruddy from the cold, and they gave off a faint fishy odor. Fishermen, probably, already done with the day’s work.
“Pack of Camels, Lillian,” the lean one said.
The lines around Lillian Hilliard’s deep-set eyes had tightened. “Mitch Novotny, I told you before about that dog. Get him out of here.”
The man brushed limp brown hair off his forehead and smiled disarmingly. “Now, Lillian, Red’s not hurting anything.”
“Not yet, but any minute he’ll have that produce all over the floor. He’s too rambunctious for his own good. Yours, too.”
As if to prove her point, Red lunged against a bushel basket and sent potatoes flying in all directions.
Mitch rolled his eyes ceiling ward. “Okay, okay, you’re right as usual.” He snapped his fingers at the dog, then pointed toward the door. Red ran over there, and the stockier man held the door open so the animal could go out.
“Now, you pick up after your dog,” Mrs. Hilliard said. To the stocky man she added, “And you help him, Hod Barnett. Your wife was just in here wheedling more credit from me, so it’s the least you can do.”
The man called Hod Barnett-Della’s husband? — scowled but bent and began helping Mitch pick up the potatoes. Alix glanced at Lillian Hilliard and saw she was watching him with a smug expression that belied the compassion she had shown earlier for the woman. Probably enjoys dispensing charity because it gives her power over people, Alix thought.
When the two men were done Mitch turned back to the counter, counted out change for the cigarettes Mrs. Hilliard handed him. Then he and Hod went out past Jan, who was just returning.
Jan took the largest carton, and Alix followed him outside with a smaller one. The two fishermen were standing in the gravel parking area nearby, lighting cigarettes in cupped hands. They glanced at Jan and Alix, their expressions neither hostile nor accepting; rather, their looks were ones of apathy and indifference. The dog was once again frisking around, begging for attention, and Jan gave it a nervous look. He was afraid of dogs, the result of a childhood misadventure with a German shepherd in which he’d been painfully mauled. Where larger dogs were concerned, his fear was almost a phobia.
As Jan started to where the station wagon waited with its tailgate lowered, Mitch’s dog turned playfully and went after him, nipping at his heels. He pivoted in alarm and shook his leg, trying to push the animal away. The groceries shifted dangerously in the carton; he came near to losing his grip, staggered as he tried to maintain it. Red closed in again, teeth snapping at Jan’s calf.
Alix stifled a cry. But Mitch just laughed. “Hey, Red,” he called, “don’t bite that fella’s leg off.”
Jan half stumbled to the station wagon and thumped the carton down on the tailgate. The dog nipped at his leg again, this time catching the cloth of his jeans. Jan’s face was pale with fear. He swung around in reflex and kicked the dog solidly on its rump-not hard enough to hurt it, but hard enough to make it yip and scurry backward. It stood at a distance, tail down, eyes accusing.
“Hey,” Mitch said angrily. “What the hell’s the idea?”
Jan had leaned a hand against the Ford’s roof. He looked up, said blankly, “What?”
“I said, what’s the idea, kicking my dog?”
“It was biting me…”
“Red don’t bite. Nips a little, that’s all.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
Mitch tossed his cigarette onto the gravel and took a step forward, his jaw set in tight lines. Hod Barnett looked uneasy now. Alix felt an uneasiness of her own, one that deepened her concern for Jan. Out of the comer of her eye, she saw that a pair
of women who had been approaching the store had stopped to watch.
“You can’t just kick a man’s dog, mister.”
Jan straightened, frowning. “I told you, I had no way of knowing the dog was harmless.” He made the mistake of enunciating each word, as if speaking to one of his slower students. “Why don’t you keep him on a leash?”
“That dog never hurt nobody,” Mitch said.
There was belligerence in his voice, and Alix’s fingers tightened on the carton she was carrying. God, he seemed to want to fight! That was the last thing they needed as newcomers to Hilliard. And Jan, never a physical person, was in no shape to take on these two; he wouldn’t back down-he wasn’t a coward-and that meant he might get hurt.
She hurried to the car, set her carton down, caught hold of Jan’s arm. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get the rest of the groceries.”
“All right.”
But he hesitated, because Red was back near his master, circling again, his tail sawing the air, and both Mitch and the dog were between the station wagon and the store. Another man had joined the two women, Alix saw, drawn from Bob’s Barber Shop next door. She also saw Lillian Hilliard watching through the front window of the general store. The woman had been firm with the two fishermen earlier; why didn’t she do something to defuse this?
Mitch sat on his heels, put one hand on the dog’s collar. But his eyes were still on Jan. “You hurt my dog, damn you.”
“No I didn’t. Look at him. Does he act as if he’s hurt?”
Surprisingly, as if he felt as Alix did about avoiding a fight, Hod Barnett said, “He’s right, Mitch. Hell, Red’s not hurt.”
Mitch was silent, glaring. His hand moved protectively over the animal’s somewhat shabby coat. Alix watched him tensely-they were all watching him that way.
The frozen tableau lasted another three or four seconds. Then Mitch let go of the dog and stood up in slow movements. Some of his anger, Alix saw with relief, seemed to have dissipated.
“Yeah, all right,” he said to Jan. “But you listen, mister. Maybe where you come from it’s all right to kick another man’s dog, but not here, not in Hilliard. Don’t ever do it again, hear?”
Jan said without inflection, “I hear.”
Mitch turned abruptly and went across the street toward the Sea Breeze Tavern; Hod Barnett and the dog followed, Red now nipping at his master’s heels. The other three locals also stayed where they were, their expressions watchful, cold-accusing. Lillian Hilliard had vanished from the window of the store.
Alix let go of Jan’s arm. He bent over the tailgate and pushed the cartons inside with agitated movements that belied his calm exterior. Then he said, “I’ll get the other things,” and walked off to the store in a stiff, jerky stride.
Alix went around to the driver’s side. The three watchers moved then, too; the man returned to Bob’s Barber Shop and the women continued on to the store, their glances sweeping over the imitation-wood-paneled length of the new Ford. When they were past, one of them pointed at the rear license plate and said in a voice obviously intended to carry, “Califomians.”
Everything was said in that one contemptuous word. Some Oregonians, Alix knew, resented their neighbors to the south, looking scornfully upon the Golden State with its urban sprawl, its fast-paced and often eccentric lifestyles, its prosperity. It had never bothered her before; even the rash of bumper stickers a few years back-DON’T CALIFORMCATE OREGON-had amused her more than anything else. But this was different. This was personal.
When Jan returned with more cartons she slipped in behind the wheel, sat huddled inside her pea jacket. The overcast sky seemed even bleaker now, the village’s shabby buildings more uninviting-part of a foreign and incomprehensible landscape. And the wind, gusting in across the bay, was a bitter, icy cold.
Jan
The first lighthouse, a marvel of structural engineering not incomparable to the great pyramids, was the Pharos of Alexandria, completed under Ptolemy II in approximately 280 B.C. “Admirably constructed of white marble,” according to Strabo, it stood for two centuries near the mouth of the Nile; what finally destroyed it is a secret lost in antiquity. No accurate description or representation of the Pharos has survived these past two thousand years, although an imagined rendering appears on many Roman coins. Edrisi, the Arabian geographer, described it in 1154 as “singularly remarkable, as much because of its height as of its solidity… During the night it appears as a star, and during the day it is distinguished by the smoke.” The fact that it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World has nowhere been disputed in
No. Too flat, too pedantic. The Pharos must have been awesome; it deserved better than this. Sparkle. Flair. Make the student-excuse me, the reader — see the sun on the white marble, the smoke from its open fire, the glow radiating out to the Mediterranean sailor in his galley.
Jan ripped the sheet of paper from his old Underwood portable, crumpled it, chucked it at the cardboard carton he was using as a waste receptacle, and inserted a fresh sheet. His fingers felt cramped; he flexed them. He still wasn’t used to working on a manual typewriter-any kind of typewriter, for that matter. He had a secretary at school; she transcribed his dictated tapes on an IBM word processor.
All right. Try it again.
In the Romance languages the word for lighthouse is pharos. a word derived from the world’s first and most remarkable safeguard for the mariner, the Pharos of Alexandria. Completed under Ptolemy II in approximately 280 B.C., this marvel of structural engineering stood sentinel at the mouth of the Nile for two centuries, by day sunstruck and wreathed in smoke from its slave-tended fire, by night sending out its beacon across the dark waters to the unwary sailor
For God’s sake, no! Childish. Like a bad freshman composition. No one would publish this sort of drivel.
The pain intensified behind his eyes.
It was no longer sharp; it had modulated into that bulging ache again, as if the pressure might pop his eyes right out, roll them down his cheeks like sunstruck white marbles. Wait it out, that was all he could do. Just when he felt he could suffer it no longer, it would subside and he would begin to feel normal again for a few days. Then it would come back, as it had tonight, after a full week of relative peace, to remind him of what the future held. Sharp and pulsing. Dull and pulsing. Savage. Nagging. Bulging. That was the worst, the bulging
Damn you! he thought suddenly, savagely, and drove the heels of his hands against his eyes. His vision blurred, shifted; he endured a panicky moment until it cleared again. Calm, he thought. Calm. He reached for his pipe, loaded it with McBaren’s, set fire to the tobacco.
On one comer of the table that served as his desk, the stack of finished manuscript pages caught his attention. He picked it up. Nineteen pages so far. Not bad, really, considering how much time in the week they’d been here he’d spent on housekeeping matters, on preparations for work on the light, on organizing his notes and research material. Introductory remarks, a prologue comprised of an edited-down version of Anderson’s taped reminiscences about his days as keeper of Washington’s Destruction Island Light, and a scant beginning for the general-history chapter. And now he could not seem to get past the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The title page seemed to stare back at him, mockingly.
Guardians of the Night
A Definitive History of North American Lighthouses
By Jan H. Ryerson
He replaced the stack, got to his feet, and paced the room. The smoke from his pipe formed an undulant line, like marshy vapor, just below the low ceiling. He felt restless now, disinclined to work, disinclined to do anything and yet in need of movement, activity. After a time he stopped pacing and began to rummage manically through the file boxes of research materials he had brought from home. Photostats of old newspaper, magazine, and book articles. Books and pamphlets of utilitarian value, some of them quite rare-A. B. Johnson’s The Modern Lighthouse Servic
e, for one, published by the U.S. Government in 1890. Annual reports of the U.S. Coast Guard. Departments of Treasury and Commerce lists of Lights and Fog-signals, 1900–1954. Lighthouse Service Bulletins, 1866–1939, and Lighthouse Board Reports, 1920–1939. Transcriptions of taped interviews with four men who had worked as lighthouse keepers in various parts of the country-one of them Anderson-and two others who had worked under George R. Putnam, U.S. Commissioner of Lighthouses in the 1930s. Copies of the Journal of American History, the New England Historical Quarterly, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, National Geo graphic, and several other publications-all with articles by him on various lighthouses and aspects of lighthouse history that he planned to incorporate into Guardians of the Night. An extra copy (why had be brought an extra copy?) of the small-press edition of his Ph. D. dissertation, Lighthouses of the Upper New England Seaboard, which in revised form would comprise from one-quarter to one-third of Guardians.
He thumbed through some of the material, but the words seemed to blur together like ink under a stream of water. He paced some more. He sat down, pulled the sheet of paper out of the Underwood’s platen, rolled in another.
The Romans built many lighthouses, none of the splendor or size of the Pharos. Beacon towers for ships, which appear to have been in use long before the Pharos was constructed, although there is no record of when such lights were first adopted, were revived by the seafaring Italian republics in the twelfth century. There were few such beacons in the world, however, when the first lighthouse in America was erected at Boston in 1715 no 1716
Bulging. Bulging.
On his feet again, pacing the room. It seemed to have contracted, the walls to have bent sharply inward. Claustrophobia-a byproduct of the pain, the tension, the restlessness. He had experienced it before; there was no use fighting it. Open space was what he needed. Fresh air, cold air.
He went out along the hall to the staircase, down into the living room. The place was still: Alix was in her studio with the door shut, working on the first of her illustrations for Guardians — the Pharos, her conception of what it must have been like. She had shown him the preliminary sketch earlier, after supper. Good, very good. So much better than the crap he’d written tonight.
The Lighthouse Page 4