by Lisa Samson
Halfway to the dock, Gerald took hold of my arm with his other hand. “Stop just a minute, Mary-Margaret. I’m getting a little breathless.”
We stood in front of a span of eelgrass, the ribbon leaves swirling in the gentle ebb of the water.
“I’m sorry.”
He rested his hand atop his head, then rubbed. “Used to be I could drag you along.”
“You still want to. Surely that counts for something.”
Farther out, the last skipjack from our island sailed toward deeper waters for the day’s catch. I sighed. I don’t know why Elmore keeps trying. He’s old and the crabs are low. Even Phillips Seafood is importing their crabmeat from the Philippines sometimes. And I don’t think Mr. Phillips, when he started the restaurant all those years ago, meant there to be that obvious connection with his name. But the bay just isn’t what it used to be.
“It’s all changing, isn’t it, Gerald?”
He unzipped his jacket, grimacing at either the heat or the tulips. I couldn’t tell you which. “Every last darn thing. Remember how big those blue crabs used to be? The size they call larges these days we’d have thrown right back in.”
He started forward and we continued toward the dock behind Mercy House. As promised, the boat awaited. Shrubby had probably gone home to his sorting shed where a bunch of hard crabs in large trays were losing their shells. Shrubby’s always bringing us soft crabs. He’s not Catholic, but he believes it can’t hurt to bring food to nuns. That’s what he says. “You gals seem nice enough,” he says.
The tai chi class convened outside in the courtyard. Blanca, who teaches them before heading to St. Francis’s where she heads up the CCD and the general doings of Christian education, waved as if I spirited away patients in rowboats every day. I waved back and helped Gerald into the boat.
The boat kept slipping away from the dock. In my exasperation I cried out, “Will somebody help us?” and looked up toward the heavens.
The boat stood still and I’m not sure who decided to lend a hand, a guardian angel perhaps? I do believe in those. Or Jesus himself? It didn’t matter.
“How long do you think it’ll be before they find the note?” I pictured the look on Angie’s face when the nurse asked if she knew anything. Her perfected deer-in-the-headlights expression, along with her reputation for crying at dog stories, would aid her silence and keep her from telling falsehoods, direct or indirect. I don’t have the same skill and I’ve been to confession many a time for many a lie. Never large, scheming, overblown ones. Just lies to keep me out of basic trouble.
After we settled on the wooden benches, Gerald in Spark’s place near the front and facing out, me by the motor, I grabbed the handle of the pull cord and gave a fierce yank.
As if I thought it would fire up the first time.
Again, I tried. Again, I failed.
Gerald looked over his shoulder with a sly grin, and in that flash I saw Jude so clearly I felt as if my heart would stop.
“You want to give it a go?” I asked.
“You’re doing just fine, MM.”
We were both too old for this.
I pulled again, ready to demand heavenly help if it went amiss one more time, but the propeller stirred up the murky waters and I lifted the loop of rope off the piling. We puttered toward the light.
“No sense in hurrying unduly, Gerald. There’s nothing they can do about us now.”
“No. No, that’s very true.” He raised his chin and breathed in deeply. He turned and winked, his eyes jumping with a mellow joy. He surely did remind me of Jude’s dog, Spark. “Here we go, MM. An adventure. Never thought I’d be having another adventure.”
Indeed.
I pictured Jude and Spark on the waters. Rowing, rowing. Always rowing.
It took us about fifteen minutes, silence accompanying us because we never thought we’d ever do this again. I pulled up to the dock beneath the lighthouse and fixed the boat.
Climbing up the ladder to the decking, the green smell of the bay water and blue scent of the wind that made its way across oceans and grasses and trees enfolded me. It was the smell of Jude who spent much of his time on his stepfather’s oyster boat. It was the smell that would touch me when he’d call to me from beneath my window in the middle of the night, and yes, I’d sneak out of the dormitory, my bare white feet glowing against the stone floor of the corridor, my breath scraping the holy stillness. It was the smell of lonesomeness and feeling trapped. It was the smell of trying to find your way.
Sometimes, however, when Jude wasn’t thinking about it, it was the smell of contentment. But not often. And only when we were alone together and I forgot who I was, who he was, and we sat cross-legged facing each other and I held his hands as I told him about what happened that day. If it was something exciting, that is. We had our times. When the bishop would visit, when the seniors graduated, when I made breakthroughs with my art. Jude soaked in every word. Sometimes he’d lay a hand just above my knee and I’d let him. He had well-developed hands, strong and already like a man’s at seventeen. It did something to me to see it there on my leg.
And somehow I saw a kite flying off the railing of a lighthouse, brightly colored and winging against the clouds.
Gerald waited in the boat. “Do you think it’s locked?” he asked.
“No.”
Of course it could have been locked, but if it was, Jesus had provided another way. Jesus always provided what I needed to do what he sent me for. Even if it wasn’t always apparent at first glance. Sometimes Jesus is sneaky that way. He doesn’t always just hold it out there for us on a silver platter like tea sweets in front of the queen. He gave us brains for a reason.
My hand curved around the knob. “Yes, it’s locked!”
“Look in the light next to the door. Always kept a spare there.”
I opened the glass door of the brass light and felt inside. Metal moved beneath my fingertips. “I think I’ve found it.” I pulled it toward the opening, tipped it up, and grasped it fully between finger and thumb. “Yes. It’s a key.”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “Hattie told me to leave it there.”
“I’m telling you, Gerald. She knows a lot more than she’s letting on.” Oh boy, did she.
I slid the key into the lock and pushed in on the red door. Oh my. Oh my.
Quick note before I continue on:
I simply must remember to plant those bulbs tomorrow! It’ll be a miracle if they grow, but I’m missing Jude and it would be nice to give God the chance to do something tiny and spectacular and maybe even a bit miraculous.
The lighthouse sitting room, empty now, brought back so many memories. The first time I came to the light I was fifteen; the walls were papered in a bluish floral print and Mr. Keller was reading a book in the comfortable chair near the kitchen door. Jude blew in, relieved in spirit yet despising his surroundings. I remember thinking, Well, there are no girls out here. He rowed me out himself and I admired his arms, his smile, the sun on his hair the entire time. He chattered away. Most people thought Jude a sullen youth. Not me. And it was summertime.
“Dad,” he said. “I wanted you to meet Mary-Margaret.”
Mr. Keller peeled off his wire-rimmed spectacles, stood up with a smile, and offered his hand. Men didn’t shake the hands of young women much in those days. I felt grown up. I took it, we shook, and I realized why Jude left. This was a holy man of the sea, a man who enjoyed silence and contemplation, a man completely unlike his son. His blue uniform was perfectly pressed, his beard trimmed close to his jaw. In some ways I was right; in other ways I was completely wrong. But who could have known what Jude was really going through?
“Nice to meet you.”
He made me a cup of tea and we chatted about his books and I told him I wanted to be a teacher, a School Sister of St. Mary, and he thought it a fine idea.
“So, I take it you’re not one of J.G.’s paramours?”
Jude George Keller.
“No, s
ir. For some reason, Jude just likes to talk to me.” Thankfully Jude didn’t mention our kisses. And I didn’t think I was truly lying. Not if he meant “paramour” like I did.
He sighed. “I’m relieved to hear he’s talking to someone.”
And the sadness of a father-son relationship that could never find that place where the similarities gather together like foam at the edges of the sea clung to us.
“Why do you stay here, Mr. Keller?” I asked.
“I don’t know how to do anything else.” He laid aside his book. “And I like the quiet.”
His father before him had kept the light and he supposed he could go back to the fishing he did as a teen, but when the opportunity to succeed his father opened, he snatched it up. He already knew the job; there’d be little training on the part of the Coast Guard. “It was equally good for both parties. Only Petra didn’t think so in the long run, I guess.”
“Jude’s mother?”
“Yes.” And the matter of the ugly divorce predicated by Petra’s hopping aboard her lover’s skiff and puttering away permanently laid a hand at the back of Mr. Keller’s head and pushed his chin to meet his chest.
And there he saw the floor. The pine flooring he’d run over as a lighthouse child, in a desert of water, removed but happy.
“She couldn’t take the desolation. Kept begging me to take her to town all the time. But I couldn’t leave the light. Finally, I got her a little boat of her own, little Elgin outboard, and she’d go every day, hair flying in the wind.”
I pictured Petra in one of her bright floral dresses with loose angel wing sleeves of chiffon fluttering just above her slender elbow as she controlled that little motor, maybe the only thing she felt she could control. You might picture her a bleached blonde, but she wasn’t. The same hair as Jude’s grew out of her head in a heavy mass of curl that she clipped near the nape of her neck. And her lips, such sweet lips, she’d cover with pink. I thought her a free spirit, yet sweet. Not coarse or rough. Untamed, really, like periwinkle gone wild. The few times I saw her with Jude when we were young, she was just crazy about him.
He refreshed my tea with a shaking hand. “Of course people tried to warn me. She’d been hanging around the bar down near the shoe store.”
“Broomhall’s?”
“Yes. And then one day she met that man. But I suppose I lost her the day I bought her that boat.”
Jude walked in from the decking, gold-brown hair mussed by the fingers of the breeze, cheeks pink, blue eyes still filled with the sun.
“Can I make myself some coffee?” he asked.
“That’s fine, J.G.”
And even at fifteen I saw their relationship in that inch-long snippet. Dad offers tea; son wants coffee.
Tea is good. Coffee is good.
Unfortunately, Jude and I left thirty minutes later. We skimmed over the bay, calm that day, and he said little and it didn’t feel awkward.
I returned to school, to the prayer chapel where I said some prayers for my friend, Sister Thaddeus joining me silently. Jude went home and got the beating of his life from his stepfather.
He should have stayed at the lighthouse, but nobody knew enough to interfere in the situation.
Gerald called up the steps, pulling me back to the here and now. “MM? Everything all right?”
I headed back outside and looked down to where my old friend stood on the dock beneath the lighthouse. Somehow he made it out of the boat on his own. His strength seemed to be returning, infusing a revived will in his muscle fibers, pumping blood to spots gone weak. In years gone by, the keepers kept their own livestock down there on a platform just above the boat slip. It wasn’t strange for cows and chickens to lose their lives to a squall, the waves of the bay reaching over the railing for the poor beasts and dragging them into the water. Of course, even back in the forties when I’d head out here with Jude, there was no longer a need for any livestock. They had installed a generator that ran their electric lights, and their stove and refrigerator ran on propane.
“It’s fine, Gerald. Just a little spooky. I’m hearing the voices of years gone by. Do you think you can make it up the steps?”
He grabbed onto the railing. “If not, I’ll die trying.”
“I have to admit, it would be the perfect way for you to go!”
Gerald shook his head. “How you get away with being so caring and yet so unsentimental is beyond me.”
I hurried down the steps and circled an arm around his waist as he climbed up to the only true home he ever knew.
“I’m not sure how you and Jude turned out so differently, Gerald. Could you be any less alike?”
“No.” He grunted as he heaved his body up another step. “But Jude and I had different mothers.”
“What?”
We paused. He nodded, his clear blue eyes picking up the light sliding in through the pilings. “He didn’t know that. Only Hattie knows. I hate to talk about it. My father was first married to a fine woman. She didn’t have those . . . urges that Petra had. Guess sometimes our paths are handed down to us in our genes.”
“Oh, I hope not, friend. At least not completely. And I hope it’s not ironclad.”
“Well, that’s where people like you come in, I suppose. Hopefully it makes a difference.”
Oh dear Lord, yes. At least that’s the hope, isn’t it?
We continued the climb. A gull swooped in and out beneath the house, weaving her flight between the iron pilings; in the distance a couple of pleasure boats skimmed along the bay, their sails fully pregnant with the breeze. People on the water just know how to live, don’t they?
“Do you think we’ll get in trouble?” he asked, knowing the answer if his smirk was any indication.
“Would it be worth it if we did?”
“Oh, yes sirree.”
It took us a full ten minutes, Gerald resting after each step, breathing like a runner after a mile, but, by golly, we reached the deck. And considering he was at death’s door yesterday, I’d say we’d practically run a marathon. Gerald stood by the railing and looked out over his waters and I mean it literally when I say the lines of his face receded like the past back into which he slipped.
“So how did your mother die?” I asked.
“She was outside washing the windows to the lantern and fell down on the rocks. Broke both her legs and cracked her head open. She died three days later up in Salisbury.”
How did I never hear this? Why would an entire town keep Mr. Keller’s secret? Sisters, I still don’t know the answer to that one. There were too many secrets out at that lighthouse. Jude’s was the most dangerous.
We all grieve what happened to Jude, the massive repercussions he bore due not only to Petra’s decisions but because of the woman herself. I believe it all goes back to this: none of them really believed God actually loved them.
It’s hard to come to that point of realization. I know. Despite my calling, it took me years to see it myself. It actually took Jude for me to understand the tenacious love of God, and I told him that. He chuckled, but when I explained, he knew I was right. Oh, we’ll get to that part of the story in due time.
The calmly committed love of Jude’s father could have never filled the space left inside Petra by a clinging, suffocating mother who claimed she loved her daughter to pieces, but in truth, only used Petra to feel better, to complete her, to fill the gaping space left inside by parents who deserted her to her own grandmother’s care. Petra had other matters to deal with, we’ve figured, perhaps her uncle or a man in the neighborhood. Nobody’s left to tell us and we don’t know for sure what or if anything abusive happened. But Jude and I couldn’t imagine another scenario that would warp someone into what Petra became.
All those uneven links in a heavy chain holding up years of pain and the inability to cope—no wonder Petra snapped.
Unfortunately, she took Jude with her in the fall. Somehow he was handed down that maverick blood, or maybe he just heard her complaining too
much when Mr. Keller was outside painting the lighthouse or up in the lantern polishing the brass and cleaning the 4th order Fresnel lens. He took his life practically in his hands every time he climbed outside the lantern and washed the windows. But Petra never saw it that way and she used Jude to make up for her husband’s deficiencies.
So she scrubbed the inside of the house from top to bottom almost every day, the peace cords in her mind fraying with every swipe of the graying rag until one day, according to Jude, she threatened to jump off the lantern and onto the rocks supporting the structures.
The next day Mr. Keller bought her the skiff.
I never knew why that was the final straw for Mr. Keller. Now I do.
So Jude came by his restlessness honestly. I still blame myself for not seeing what was really going on with Petra Keller. But who could guess such a thing? We walk by people every day who are daily experiencing a horror, and we don’t even know it.
That evening after we visited his father, Jude walked me back to school, made some smart remark softened by the look that came into his eyes at times like that, which told me yes, he understood the parameters of our relationship, but he didn’t have to like it.
Brister Purnell, his stepfather, came off the boat in a “hel-luva mood.” That’s how Jude described it, and whenever I hear that word, I think of Helluva Good Cheese, which is actually pretty good cheese. Apparently some watermen from Virginia, real scallywags, were poaching from his crab pots, and kept Brister and his crew at bay by pointing their shotguns at them.
It was a poor catch that day to put it mildly.
“We gotta figure out how to keep that from happening again,” Brister said as Petra placed a plate of crab cakes, homemade slaw, and home-fried potatoes in front of him. Say what you will about the woman, but she knew how to cook.
Jude slipped in just as his mother set his plate on the table, just under the gun, and they had a conversation that amounted to something like this: “Let me at them, Brister. Take me out of school tomorrow and onto the boat.”
Brister, burned a reddish brown from his years on the water, set down his fork. “Brave words from the ladies’ man.”