The Western Light

by Susan Swan

  “Don’t touch me like that,” my aunt said and jerked away.

  He groaned. “You know how I feel about you.”

  “Then why are you with her?”

  “Louie, I can’t walk out on her when she’s pregnant. It’s not right.”

  “Your child’s not going to thank you for staying in a bad situation. Not when he grows up. Your child will think you were unfair to yourself.”

  “I’m aware of that. But what else can I do? Please try to understand my situation, darling.”

  Little Louie raised her voice. “I don’t want to understand. And I won’t, either. You got yourself into this situation. Now get yourself out of it!”

  Down the hall, a door opened. Heavy footsteps followed.

  Leaning over the banister, my grandmother shouted, “Who’s making that racket? I’m trying to sleep. Did you hear me, Little Louie?”

  “I heard you,” my aunt called.

  Satisfied, my grandmother disappeared down the hall, the floorboards shivering under her weight. A moment later, the front door closed and my aunt began slowly coming up the stairs. I peeked through the crack in the door and caught a glimpse of her face. She looked as lonely as a person could look and frightened, too.

  The next morning, my aunt and I kissed Big Louie goodbye and the two of us set off for home in our station wagon, my aunt’s face glum. She drove chewing Wrigley’s gum and didn’t offer a stick to me. Finally, I asked for a piece. “Why didn’t you speak up sooner?” my aunt asked. “Too much pride, huh?” She smiled slightly when I nodded and gave me a stick of Wrigley’s. Then she didn’t say another word for hours. I figured that she was worrying about Max and all the dumb things that made up her life back in Madoc’s Landing.

  PART THREE

  RETURN TO THE NORTH

  20

  WE WERE BACK IN BREBEUF COUNTY. THE WIND FROM THE GREAT Bay blew its fresh damp smell in our faces as my aunt and I stood at the top of the headland facing Madoc’s Landing. She said she wanted to put off our return for as long as she could, and I knew better than to pester her with questions.

  Across the huge inlet, our town looked no bigger than a lone seed in a giant watermelon. You’d never know that people could live in the tiny houses lining the shore, or that somebody like me belonged to one of them. I imagined that I could see our house near the trees on Bug House hill, and that my father was there waiting for us, his calls done for the day. Maybe he, too, like my aunt and me, was looking at the horizon where the pale limestone tower of the Western Light lay in a hopeless muddle of shoals, twelve miles out in the open, as the open water was called. It made me happy to think about my father again and, before I knew it, I was telling my aunt about the generations of Bradford families who ran a fishing station near the lighthouse and brought the whitefish and lake trout over to Owen Sound, most of them never learning to swim. I wanted to cheer her up and make her love the Bay the way Morley and Ben and I loved it, and maybe the way John Pilkie loved it, too. For me, it was a deep-down feeling of lastingness that had to do with the water and the rocks. The Bay was closer than the stars, I explained, but every bit as remote and mysterious. It had the oldest exposed rocks in the world and its deep waters kept us cool in the humid summers of Brebeuf County. “The Great Refrigerator,” as Morley called it. It was so much deeper and colder than the shallows of Lake St. Clair where John had been captured. Little Louie listened quietly, but when I told her that the Bay reached a depth of 540 feet near the entrance to Lake Huron, she shuddered. “Mary, deep water scares the heck out of me.” She spoke in the sad, frustrated tone she had used with Max the night before. Then she climbed back in our car.

  Stung, I got in too. If Morley or John were with me, they could have shown my aunt why the Bay was wonderful. They both grew up beside it, although you would be hard-pressed to find two more different men. They swam in its same cool depths, and felt the freshening of the same westerly winds. Morley and John were children of water, while my aunt came from a typical southwestern Ontario landscape with mile after mile of flat, furrowed fields. Like Morley and John, I was a child of water; I wondered if my aunt would ever be able to understand us.

  I WOKE UP AS THE station wagon turned into our driveway, the broad shape of our house rising up out of the darkness. The yellow light from its windows spilled across the large lawn and illuminated the back of a man standing at our side door. The door faced the backyard, not the street, and there was something odd about him waiting at an entrance we didn’t use. Morley’s patients rarely came to our home after hours. When the man saw us, he pulled his fedora down to hide his face and ran off.

  “He was one of Chief Doucette’s officers,” I whispered.

  “Ssssh, not now,” my aunt said. Squaring her shoulders, she walked up the kitchen steps, a suitcase in each hand.

  I trailed after her, glad for the dark. I’d spent over seven hours in the car and Hindrance felt so stiff I had to drag my leg in a dumb half-limp-half-shuffle.

  When he heard us, Morley rushed into the kitchen. “Make yourself a cup of cocoa, girls,” he said before he hurried back into the living room. “I’m not ready for you.”

  Little Louie put down our suitcases, scowling, and lit a cigarette, while I peeked around the swing door. In the living room, Morley was sticking a needle into the arm of a man with a rolled-up sleeve. The man watched my father do it with a wondering, childlike expression. Then the man rolled down his sleeve and hurried out the side door. I ducked back into the kitchen.

  “I left a message with Sal that we were coming home today,” my aunt said as Morley came in.

  Morley shook his head. “I didn’t get it.”

  “What kind of shots were you giving the men?” I asked.

  “Penicillin,” Morley said. “The drug cures all sorts of diseases.”

  “And what disease do these men have?” my aunt said.

  Morley hesitated. “It’s not for young ears. And there’s something else. I don’t want you to speak of this to anyone.”

  My aunt’s face registered shock. “All right, Dr. Bradford.” Without another word, she took me upstairs to bed.

  When my aunt went into her bedroom, I crept to the top of the back stairs and listened as somebody else came in by the side door. Perhaps it was the police officer who had been waiting outside, but I couldn’t get a good look at the man’s face. The patient didn’t talk about what was wrong with him, and my father was careful not to mention it. The conversation was about the hockey season starting up in the fall, and I overheard my father say the Rats would do better this year. The Rats had lost the season before, but like all the hockey fans in Madoc’s Landing, Morley was always hopeful the next year would be better.

  Downstairs, the man said, “Pilkie pulled a knife on the guard.”

  “Pilkie wouldn’t hurt anyone intentionally, son. The knife was blunt,” my father replied.

  Their voices faded away, and I hurried to my bedroom window in time to see a figure disappearing down the lane by our maple trees.

  At breakfast Sal told Little Louie and me that the men had the love disease. “They get a shot every four hours. For thirty-six hours, eh? Or their noses will fall off.”

  “The love disease hurts you?” I asked.

  Sal snickered. “You’re too little, Lady Jane. When you get the curse, you’ll find out soon enough.”

  I drew back as if Sal had struck me, and my aunt said quickly: “I realize Dr. Bradford means well. But I don’t think this sort of thing is a good influence on Mary.”

  “Well, it’s typical of Doc Bradford,” Sal snapped. “He’s the only doctor in town who’ll get up in the night to give it to them.”

  “I guess Dr. Bradford can do no wrong,” Little Louie said coldly. Then she went back to eating her soft-boiled egg. Sal started doing the dishes, making a lot of noise. I thought about telling them that one of Chief Doucette’s officers had received a shot of penicillin from Morley. But I nixed the idea in case Little Louie tol
d Sal about me imagining I saw John hiding in the cedars near the Great House. I didn’t want Sal saying my imagination was running away with me again, although it usually did.

  THE NEXT MORNING AT BREAKFAST, Morley announced that we were going on a picnic to the Western Light with Sib and Sal.

  “It’s time you took a look at paradise, Louisa,” Morley said. “There’s nothing else like it.”

  “If you say so,” Little Louie replied anxiously. My father didn’t know that my aunt was afraid of water.

  As for me, I had a hard time hiding my excitement. While I ate my cereal, I copied information about the lighthouse from Hansen’s Handbook to Georgian Bay into M.B’s Book of True Facts. “Our pioneer world was technically advanced,” I told my aunt. “As early as 1857 the Western Light had a state-of-the-art Fresnel lens, shipped from Paris, France.”

  She looked up from her newspaper. “Stop pulling my leg, huh? Brebeuf County was never that sophisticated.”

  “It was, too.” I gave Little Louie my haughtiest smile and she laughed. I didn’t care. If the Ontario Psychiatric Hospital reflected the world of Madoc’s Landing back to itself, the Western Light was the town’s true north — a sign of constancy in times that kept changing. I felt glad that John was associated with something so mystical and beautiful.

  21

  THE DUST FLEW UP THE CAR WINDOWS AS WE SPED PAST FRENCH-Canadian farms and their small roadside shrines sheltering tiny Virgin Marys. Their sleepy faces and heavy-lidded eyes reminded me of my aunt, except that Little Louie would be reading a book, not holding Baby Jesus. Soon we left behind the stands of reforested pine and dwarf apple trees growing wild, and the highway dwindled to a sandy ridge of backcountry overgrown with Shasta Daisies. In the distance, the shiny aluminum roofs of French-Canadian barns mirrored back the cloudless sky. The last barn belonged to the Beaudrys, whose red brick farmhouse overlooked the Bay. When he wasn’t working at the Bug House, Sib grew corn along with Christmas trees in its sandy soil. In the winter, he drove his scoot across the ice delivering supplies to the reserve on the Île au Géant, and on weekends, Sal cooked for Sib and his father, Old Man Beaudry.

  The front door opened and Sal came out carrying a picnic basket. “Well, look who you meet when you don’t have your gun.” She climbed into the back seat beside me. Our car careened bumpily down the old logging road to the ferry dock. My father parked near Towanda Lodge, where its caretaker, Old Man Beaudry, lived. Unable to restrain myself, I shouted, “Hooray! We’re going to see John Pilkie’s old home!”

  “Did he really live in such a godforsaken place?” Little Louie asked.

  “Yes,” Morley replied. “But it’s a beautiful spot, Louisa. Wait ’til you see it.”

  “And you helped Mr. Pilkie operate on John’s appendix,” I pointed out.

  “Who told you that story, Mary?” Morley said.

  “I guess I did.” Sal nodded. “I didn’t mean any harm, Doc Bradford. Maybe you could tell us how you did it, eh?” Morley scowled as if he was going to chew Sal out, and then he thought better of it. “I’ll tell you about it later. Out at the light.”

  “You knew the murderer?” Little Louie asked. “Was he always violent?”

  “I knew John when he was a little boy. Some of us think he was punch-drunk after he was hit on the head.”

  Little Louie looked skeptical while I listened, rapt, wondering if I should pinch myself. Morley had confirmed it — John didn’t mean to throw the match that started the fire.

  “Looks like some people are waiting to see you,” Sal told my father. On the porch of Towanda Lodge, six pregnant women sat in rocking chairs waiting for Morley, who was known in Brebeuf County for predicting when a baby would arrive. He was like a dowser, Sal said. He knew to the day and sometimes the hour when the baby was going to come. The women stood up as my father approached, their stomachs hidden under layers of clothing even though it was summer and hot.

  “I’ll just be a few minutes,” Morley called apologetically. He hurried inside, and the women went in after, their faces wearing the expression I often saw on the faces of my father’s patients. The adjective “adoring” comes to mind.

  ABOVE OUR HEADS, THE LIMESTONE tower rose up between two high, lichen-covered granite humps while around us, in every direction, stretched the calm waters of the Bay. The gears on Sib’s inboard began to grind, and there was a gurgling noise as Sib reversed into the harbour. When he turned off the motor, we heard nothing except the sound of waves washing against rocks. Who would guess that John had grown up in such a lonely place? Only to kill his wife and child? Of course, he wasn’t a true killer. Morley as much as said so.

  Under the hot August sun, the five of us climbed out of the launch. My father clamped his hand on my neck, gripping me hard. I was aware of him breathing slow and deep, as if he was more exhausted than he was letting on. Chances are the heat was getting to him, since we no longer had the breeze from the motorboat to cool us. Or maybe my father’s mind was still back with the pregnant women at Towanda Lodge. I had no way of knowing what was going on in his head. We followed Sal and my aunt across the scorching rocks. Underfoot, the granite felt dense as iron, and the rocks were slippery with lichen the colour of light green spearmint gum. Sal kept sneaking glances at my aunt, who had on a sundress and high wedge heels. Little Louie was having a hard time keeping her balance.

  “What did you wear heels for?” Sal asked. “Only cijits walk on the rocks on those things.”

  “What’s a cijit?” my aunt asked.

  “City idiot,” Sal said. My father chuckled. Sal threw him a mollified glance and my aunt flushed. At that moment, Sib appeared on the rocks below, holding a pair of sunglasses and calling my aunt’s name. Surprised, Little Louie whirled around and the strap of her sundress fell off her shoulder, exposing half her breast. Sib put his fingers between his teeth and whistled, and my aunt quickly pushed the strap back up, her cheeks darkening in a self-conscious blush, as if it was she, and not him, who had done something wrong. I was struck by how unsure of herself she seemed. She quickly took the dark glasses from Sib and hurried after Sal while Morley and I followed along behind. Suddenly, nothing felt the same.

  It occurs to me now that the atmosphere was charged with sexual tension. Everything had changed because my aunt’s strap had fallen down in the bright, fierce light of the August sun. In that instant the grown-ups felt free of the mainland, where life unfolded in respectable rituals, and I wondered if my aunt and Sal realized that walking ahead gave my father and Sib the chance to admire their backsides. You couldn’t see much of my aunt’s bottom in her pretty sundress, but Sal’s heartshaped rump was evident in her worn jeans. The sight of the two women, so different from each other, made me thoughtful. My fair-haired aunt, with her powerful, loping strides was more beautiful; but there was something appealing about Sal, who was shorter and thicker, and the saucy way she looked about her, tossing her thick, dark hair. I admired their feminine curves, and my own body, with its straight angles, felt like a crude approximation of theirs. To be honest, I looked like a stick drawing of a girl. Paste on a narrow face with a lopsided smile and that would be me, Mouse Bradford. I suspected Morley saw me as a disappointment, too. If I were his age, he would never choose somebody like me as his wife.

  THE PILKIES MUST HAVE PLANTED a garden, because on either side of the pathway wild irises and day lilies grew inside circles of whitewashed rocks. By the door of the old lighthouse stood two wizened apple trees, their stunted boughs hanging with baby green fruit. Sal and my aunt waited by the wooden ramp that led up to the house. “See that old thing?” Sal called, waving at a flagpole that lay flat on the ground. “John’s father tied him up to it during a thunderstorm. I guess you could say he left John high and dry. Well, not so dry.” Sal smiled knowingly and we all nodded. Sal had us in the grip of her storytelling powers now, and she was enjoying herself. “The waves were so big they sucked the water back, and John could see clear down to the bottom of the la
ke.”

  “Was John’s father mean?” I asked.

  “He was a no-good drunk, Mary,” my father said, the bitter sound of his voice surprising me.

  “That’s right, eh? Roy Pilkie was soused when he drowned out here,” Sal added. “His heavy boots pulled him down before anyone could save him. Say, Doc Bradford. Isn’t that the coast guard?”

  We turned and looked at a launch approaching the Western Light. When my father saw it, his mouth tightened and he looked worried.

  “Guess we’d better see what they want, Sib,” my father said. Sib nodded, and the two men started back down the rocks.

  “Doc Bradford won’t be long, Mouse,” Sal said. To distract me, she pointed at a bright turquoise paddle that had been fashioned into a railing for the stairs up to the lighthouse. “Isn’t that folksy? Jim Pilkie carved that paddle. Jim was good with his hands, I’ll say that for him. He taught John to be good with his hands, too. That’s why John knows how to rig up his escapes. Remember how he made a key out of a jam jar?”