Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  Then he nosed it back in, up to his waist in freezing surf. The little beach was being swallowed by the tidal surge, wave upon wave.

  Nadia struggled in the crashing, leaping salt water, spray in her face, her hands clutched to the stern and then a larger wave struck her full in the face and she went under. She tore her arm on something below the surface, something steel, and salt water rushed into her mouth. James shut his muscular hand around her parka hood and dragged her out. She stood gasping and shaking on the shells while James struggled the little skiff back onto the track and back into the boathouse. He was surprised at the buoyancy of it and at the sucking power of the sea. He came to Nadia and put his arm around her and helped her into the house.

  Ow. Ow.

  Be quiet. James wound gauze over the iodine. It was a puncture wound. Then he put his chin on top of her head and held her close against him.

  He was so much taller than he had seemed in his wheelchair and she felt all the length of his body against hers and his collarbone against her temple. They both smelled of salt water and wood smoke. He unbuttoned her wet and disreputable khaki workshirt to reveal the female within, her thin, pale skin. Then her trousers. I knew you were in there, he said. Beneath all this. I suspected it all along. He wrapped them in a blanket. She was naked and salty with her feet to the fire. He ran the tip of his forefinger along her shoulder and up to her mouth, watching her.

  They abandoned the blankets. Then they were in the bedroom with the covers thrown back. Nadia burrowed under them, shivering. Bright pinheads of wet snow flicked at the windows. She heard James unbuckle his belt and strip off his soaked trousers and then he was beside her in the bed with its curtains and pillows. His long pale body tight against hers and after a while they were warm. The room was warm. The kerosene heater threw its floral patterns of light on the ceiling. He sat up, relaxed and loose on the sheets. He leaned on one elbow and ran his hand down her face and torso and thighs.

  Darling, you are very thin, he said. And beautiful.

  She smiled up at him and lightly touched the tip of his nose.

  They lay face-to-face and put their arms around each other. In the other room the stove cackled loudly over its load of fuel pellets like an enormous fiery hen. The voice of Big Radio was deeply engaged with a biography of Doc Watson and played illustrative clips of his music: Was blind but now I see. They did not hear it, nor did they hear the Pacific seething over the Outer Rocks. She forgot about the gauze and the iodine on her arm. He bent over her and lifted her against him with his powerful arms for he was starved for her and had been starved for her for all these months and distances.

  They woke early in the morning, swamped with rucked sheets and quilts, to turn to each other yet again.

  It was midmorning before she got out of the bed. I’m so hungry, she said. I’m famished.

  He watched her dress. No kidding.

  Yes. There has to be something left in one of those jars. If not, not. She bent and kissed him.

  Tant que je vive, he said. However long that is.

  They lay together in bed every night and she ran her small, strong hands over his back, his thighs and ribs. He was building muscle, slowly. Too slowly. She brought iodine and ran a bath and they sat together with bright hot skins; steam pearled the bathroom window, and afterward they slid into the bed where hot water bottles had heated the sheets. They were hungry. Still hungry for each other and for nourishment.

  Chapter 44

  He climbed down the sea-facing rocks that were laddered with mussels gasping in the climbing waves, seawater draining from their jaws. He pried them loose with a screwdriver. The wind was not so bad. He filled a bucket with them and with difficulty clawed his way back up to the elevated walkway, the surf slamming into his knees. He sat with Nadia opening the mussels until the kitchen was cracking underfoot with splintered shells and rank with the smell of shellfish.

  Now, he said, like this. He threw away mussels that were open and cut the beards from the closed ones with the knives that said Celebrity Cruises on the handle. He put the saucepan on the stove and in it simmered the last four tablespoons of butter with wild onion swimming in bits. Nadia watched.

  Where did you learn mussel cooking? said Nadia.

  We had a cook, said James. I watched her do this.

  . . . the four Pickwickians assembled on the morning of the twenty-second day of December. . . . Christmas was close at hand. . . . And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, . . . meet once again . . .

  They listened to Male Voice One and his reasonable tones. After fifteen minutes the mussels opened and they used steak knives to take out the meat, and they dipped the morsels into the sauce and ate them all. They broke the beaten biscuits into the liquid with its swimming bits of wild onion and were happy together and smeared with butter.

  Merry Christmas, James said.

  She lifted a mussel on a fork. Happy New Year.

  Nadia packed the traveling bag. She had made up ship’s biscuit with the last of the flour. She wrapped it in the shrink wrap in which the radio had been packaged and put in the last can of meat paste, a can opener, and a plastic jug for water. She added two kitchen knives, dropped in the compass, and then wrapped his change of clothes in the plastic shower curtain.

  He sat at the FM radio. At 98.2 he found he could pick up a distant and static-distorted broadcast of some maritime transmission. Maybe it was a trick of the storm.

  Chan the Uncanny at Saturday Inlet. What did he . . . local criminal activity unregistered . . . Sigint relays pirate radio Nootka. . .

  What’s sigint? said Nadia.

  Signals intelligence. James bent to the radio listening intently. It means they are monitoring radio transmissions.

  A voice broke in very loud, very clear. Mayday mayday mayday this is M.V. Primary Enforcer at 49 degrees, 10 minutes and 30 seconds north and 125 degrees 53 minutes and 25 seconds west, ship white and orange, one hundred ninety feet, fifty-two people on board repeat.

  Primary Enforcer this is Nutrition Valor we have you at 49–10–30 and 125–53–25 we read you unable to assist.

  What’s Mayday? said Nadia.

  A ship in trouble. Somebody’s going down.

  He tied on the sagging life vest. It leaked stuffing like dandruff. Only one of them would go. If he should overturn at least she would still be alive. If he could not get back this night he would signal from the coast with his small flashlight, the black tube he had given Nadia long ago on the rooftop. In Morse: T for tomorrow. Then OK.

  What if you’re not okay?

  James said, I will be okay. He turned to her and bent down and kissed her, his long hand on the back of her head, tangled in her thick, flying hair. Don’t run off with anybody while I’m gone.

  Right. Some guy with a bigger boat. And then with difficulty, she smiled.

  He kissed her again and they ran the skiff down the tracks.

  A sharp and level wind came from over the sea to fill his sail and send him flying headlong into the long rollers. They were crowned with froth and drift. He found a kind of wild suicidal joy in the salt water pouring over the bow and the lift, the rise, then skidding down the far side of a long roller, and all the sea before him.

  As he pushed on he saw that he was heading to land too far north of the wreck. He had to come about and get out to sea and come back at another approach. Now he could see each separate rock half buried in surf and the distinct limbs of the drooping firs. There were tiny pocket beaches of pewter-colored sand. The firs that had survived clear-cutting in the ravines stood like drenched persons with their arms hanging down and draining rain. As he watched, a great fir waved its drooping limbs and teetered in the wind and then fell. It came down the cliff end over end, snapping branches, its roots fl
inging dirt and stones and it shattered on the rocks at the bottom. The surf swarmed up to take it to pieces.

  He came about; he ducked and slipped to the other side and then the sail went slack on top of a wave crest and spun, caught the wind again, and then he was burning along the surface on a beam reach and headed out to the great sea. The melonseed was so far over to port that the rail was under. James went on, far to the southwest so that the wicked and beautiful coast receded and became indistinct. Lighthouse Island was only a line of trees and the great tower and within it Nadia, her hand on the Fresnel lens.

  A cross wave struck him on the port side and buried him in foam and salt; James took the can in one hand and began to bail.

  After a long reach he brought her about on the northeast tack and this one took him straight into the inlet and the wrecked ship and at last a feeling that he was truly sailing, in flight on the surface of the ocean and despite his weakness a sense of uplift and joy, of speed.

  He ran the skiff into the small inlet where the ship’s prow and bridge thrust up out of the waves. The rollers lost their momentum here. A small sandy beach shone like satin in the gray daylight. A small doglike animal trotted across it pressing in shining paw prints that were neatly washed away by the thin, shelving waves. There was a safe half buried in the sand, a great deal of storm drift, some enormous logs and ranks of smaller wood, torn fabrics that seemed to lift and simmer in the waves, bottles of all kinds, net floats, seashells, and a sodden, discolored novelty chicken hat thrown overboard from some cruise ship.

  He stood up in the dancing boat and felt in his legs a colorless sensation. He had tired more quickly than he knew. The prow and part of the ship’s bridge and crew quarters were abovewater like a slanted and half-drowned block of apartments, rising far over his head. Far below the surface the railings plunged down into the depths and disappeared. Indefinable things waved in the current. Her name was painted in bright letters on her side: M.V. Nutrition Packer.

  This was yet another Primary Resources ship gone aground, a fish processor.

  He dropped the sail on the skiff and then tied on to the angled rail at the point where it came out of the waves. The ship seemed about two hundred feet long but he couldn’t tell with two-thirds of her underwater. He swung up on the rail. On the white wall of the bridge rising above him someone had painted, Bargage Maru salvage rights. Mitts off.

  Damn. Salvage people had already been here. Damn, damn. He stood looking at it, trying to gauge the freshness of the paint. Disappointment left him with a feeling of outrage, as if he had been robbed.

  He walked carefully up the sloping deck to the bridge where the glass panes were smashed in and rain poured onto the consoles and the monitors. His rubber-soled shoes gripped the grainy deck. He climbed in. Most of the navigation devices had been pulled out and the wires stripped. He pulled out the map sliders but the charts had all been taken or perhaps destroyed before it was abandoned. Secretive bastards.

  James climbed out again. They would have had warning before they struck and so did not leave much behind and whatever they did leave had been salvaged.

  Where would the galley have been?

  He eased through a tilted and destroyed cafeteria; the furniture and dishes were underwater at the far end where the steep slope made a pool. The water was clear and not silted and when he shone the flashlight into it he could see dishes and glass jars and cutlery heaped up against the downward bulkhead. The place was awash in squid and rubber gloves. It was growing dark.

  One or two jars seemed unbroken and it took him a long time to take hold of them. His feet were protected by his shoes but he had no gloves. In the dimming light he dropped into the freezing water up to his waist and shone the flashlight down into the water and kicked aside the broken glass until two jars were lying clear of the glass fragments. He placed the flashlight on a shelf, held his breath and went under and felt slowly and carefully. After a while he had the two jars and a bowl. He took them back up through the galley where forty-gallon pots had tumbled against one another and giant jars of mustard and pepper and mayonnaise had all fallen into the water, the contents washing away.

  He found two large Mylar packets. They were not broken and he read the labels: Rotini Pasta and Scrambled Egg Powder, twenty pounds each. He had no idea why the salvage rats had missed them but they were a gift, treasures. He would return with something to show and this made him happy in the increasing dark.

  He groped up the sloping deck and then out.

  He could see the island from the prow. There stood the lighthouse tower with a pinpoint of light in it and the entire island surrounded with a haze of spray. He turned the flashlight toward the tower and made one long dash. After an interval he made another dash. T: tomorrow. Then OK.

  He knew she would pass her hand or a sheet of cardboard over the light if she saw his signal. There it was; three dashes, then a dash, dot, and dash. OK. The light of a soul and human speech in a stony world.

  That night he sheltered in the bridge and instrument room, wrapped in everything he had, including the life jacket, listening to the rain. He lay on the wet, sloping floor. It took forever to get the top off one of the jars. He carefully turned the contents up into the bowl. Then he took up some of the objects on his knife. It was okra. He ate it, and also the next jar; some kind of fish fillets.

  And so, he said to the empty ship. I have learned to sail on the open sea and I’m coming back with rotini and scrambled egg powder. So there you go.

  Chapter 45

  Nadia remained in her cold tower for a few minutes after she had sent her Morse signal with the kerosene lantern. She nervously flipped the microphone switch and slid the sliders. Then in the blue evening snow she saw the cat trying to paw the door of the house open.

  Wait! she shouted. Wait! She ran down the steps of the light tower at top speed. When she held the house door open he darted inside and hid.

  She poured in fuel pellets to make a large, hot fire in the stove that would last all night and went to bed without supper. Let the cat make up its own mind, come when it would. She named him Edward because they have to have names, as far as she knew.

  She put out some of the bottled beef for the cat but nothing for herself. She wasn’t doing much hard work. She didn’t need to eat. But she felt a draining in herself, a sort of systems crash. She listened to the wind that sang like an oboe at the windows. Something beat regularly against the side of the house as if to draw her attention while another thing forced the front door. Nadia imagined Terminal Verna landing on the shelly beach in the nocturnal surf in some podlike Jules Verne nautical thing, with her teeth like burglar bars, stalking creepily up to the house with her truncheon. She imagined James trapped inside the wrecked ship. Then the skiff going down under a great wave and its sail overwhelmed. She jumped out of bed in flight from her thoughts and went to the junk room and found a broken chair. She took up a chair leg. If Terminal Verna or anybody else showed up they would have a fight on their hands.

  She carried the FM radio into the bedroom. She used up fuel pellets as if there were no tomorrow. She got back into bed. “At night the old world comes into its own,” said Dr. Maturin and he was right. She laid the chair leg alongside her body like an extra arm.

  The pellets were disappearing from under the woodshed roof. Soon it would all be gone. Then they would have to go drag in driftwood, hoping the sea would bring them more. Then they would have to cut down trees and run away as they fell, and then cut them up limb by limb and saw through the great solid trunks and then split them. But they were not strong enough.

  Then she sat up, dressed in many layers of underclothes and one of James’s flannel shirts, listening to a thin, high sound.

  The cat. He was at the door to the bedroom, crying in a small voice. Now that James was gone, now that there was just one person, he had decided to take a chance on not being strangled and drowned.
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  She sat up and made enticing sounds. The cat danced around with his front feet a few steps and then looked up at her and began to purr. He was dressed in a marmalade tuxedo with a white muzzle and an orange mustache that made him look as if he had been eating tomato sauce.

  He stood beside the bed and glanced up at her for a few seconds at a time, and away again. Then he jumped up and stalked across the blankets purring with his green eyes fixed on Nadia and clearly thinking about the 98.6 degrees of warmth he would sleep next to, not to speak of the hot-water bottle.

  Edward, catto de tutti catti, you are a he. I knew it. She reached out to him.

  He became brazen and adoring. His purr was thunderous and he gripped and ungripped his paws on the blankets, saturated with happiness. Then he lay on his back with his front paws doubled on his chest and fell asleep. He quivered in dreams. His tail jerked and lashed and he woke himself up and stared at her and then fell asleep again. Nadia watched him for a long time in a fascinated amazement and wondered if she ought to pet him. When she did he seemed very happy. An advance into the world of animal communication.

  She turned on Big Radio to find where in the reading cycle they were now but suddenly it had taken on a hollow, booming background noise as if the satellite had broken out of its orbit and landed on another planet that suffered from an electronically troubled atmosphere, broadcasting from the bottom of a Venusian ocean. It was now arriving at the time of year for the end of Pickwick and the beginning of the easterners but it was hard to listen to. This was very worrisome.

  She sat up and shook the receiver. Edward woke up and also stared at the receiver. In the background there was a sound like gulls, some kind of birds, who twittered behind the strains of Handel’s Water Music. How could that be? The predator birds of space. The reception had to be connected to the console up in the tower and she had ruined something.