Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  Again he gazed out over the water, its shimmering surface. Fiat lux. “Let there be light,” he said aloud, which is what he had taken to saying every evening when Jean climbed the stairs to his priestly tower to light the lamps for the reflectors.

  Once the words were out of his mouth, Grif was sorry he had said them, for he’d forgotten that speaking came at a cost. Since his bad spell after Jean found him on the beach, he had acquired a follower. It was nothing corporeal, nothing he could actually see. But he could hear it, barely, a small voice that rode in his own, that was plaited into it like a thin twist of hair. It seemed to come from a distance, as if a child were calling him, and he heard it only when he spoke. His own voice obscured the message it was trying to deliver, if indeed it had one.

  For a long time he stood stalled again, quietly, listening.

  Jean had been observing Grif’s halting descent. This was easy enough from the light tower, where he’d gone to polish the mirrors. The catoptric reflectors were beautiful and a pleasure to work with, and the system—the concentration of light required from the lamps, the principle of reflection it was based upon—was interesting. It all had to be carefully maintained. He had tried to involve his guest in this process, in the science of it at least, to keep his mind from becoming as diffuse and useless as scattered light. Not that such light wasn’t lovely, the poetic effects, but it was very hard to live by.

  He pitied the young man and regarded him as someone frozen and gradually thawing. He certainly looked it at the moment, standing motionless on the stairs that led to the beach. A man could die up here of thirst before Grif got to the bottom and back with a couple of pails of water. Jean had to wonder, as he often did, about the genius who built this lighthouse. He could have split the idea in two and constructed the house near the shore and the tower above; but that would not have been economical, and the government was famous for its economy. Say what you will about the Yanks, they gave their light-keepers training, uniforms, assistants, supplies, holidays and a regular wage, whereas the Canadian government stuck theirs on a rock with a sack of beans and forgot about them. They encouraged their light men to marry and have a brood of young ones so there would be more free labour. And married keepers were not carted off quite so soon to the laughing academy from having walked around and around their chunk of rock until their wits were entirely unravelled.

  Jean hoped he had not made a mistake giving Grif that rifle, such an efficient instrument of self-delivery. He was only trying to do … what? Sober the boy, give him some simple work to do, put the feel of metal and wood in his hands so that he might weigh in closer to the earth. To Jean it seemed as if Grif had exceeded some limit, as a murderer does when he transgresses a moral boundary. It was unnatural how Grif folded himself into the dark at night, letting it take him. He never reached for a lamp, never lit a candle. How could a man not desire the light? Jean could not resist; it was his profession, after all, possibly his vocation. He felt moved to ignite his guest as well, to spark some small flame, to keep a living fire in him, however slight.

  This was why, even though he didn’t have any need to hear the sound of his own voice, he had begun to tell Grif stories—hard-luck ones mostly, parables of misery and misfortune, just to let him know that he was not exceptional. Grief is a country that everyone gets to visit at one time or another, and some are genuine natives of the place, born and bred. Grif hardly spoke anyway, so Jean did, his honest, unadorned words lighting the dark.

  He talked about homesteading out west, which he had tried for a while until he got tired of eating dirt and dodging the hailstones as big as fists that pummelled his livestock into the ground. He described running a hand over their prone bodies afterwards and feeling how their muscles had been pulped to mush. He told Grif about farmers who went berserk in their sod houses and axed their families to bits, or of those who got lost walking from the barn to the house during a blizzard, a journey measured in feet. They might be discovered in the spring, lumps thawing in the field, or never seen again. No need to tell tall tales about the West because the weather there, summer or winter, could be so extreme it pulled a man apart like taffy. Once, Jean said, he woke in the morning with his beard frozen to his shirt, his hair completely white with frost, even his piss in the pot frozen solid. There had been a snowstorm during the night, which had practically buried the house, snow drifting over the eaves and onto the chimney. The quiet was unearthly, and the sense of being interred was all too earthly; and the memory of it made light-keeping on this open, far-seeing bluff like glorious resurrection itself.

  Jean had also worked as a cowboy for a time, until he noticed that at about thirty years of age most cowboys were maimed somehow: legs broken, shoulders busted, fingers ripped off in the bight of a rope, not to mention the fun of getting kicked, bitten and rolled on by your horse. Next he’d tried the rail lines, where the work was tough but the evening entertainment even tougher. The men loved to fight, bare-knuckle, John L. Sullivan style, and didn’t think anything of it if their noses got flattened, their eyes blackened, their jaws cracked. Sometimes bets were placed, sometimes not; they beat each other stupid for the sheer joy of it.

  Grif listened to all of this with interest, and for a time it stopped him from attending to whatever it was that otherwise diverted and absorbed him, his ear slightly cocked as if he were trying to catch some telltale scratching in the walls or a signal issued from the other side of the world.

  Jean couldn’t decide what was more troubling about his young friend: the fact that he was so incurious and failed to ask even the most obvious of questions—Where am I? What is this island called? How far is it to the mainland?—or his habit of sleeping at night with that ragged and bloated parcel of his clutched to his chest, as if it contained his numb and displaced heart. Jean had given some thought to what it did contain. Not a bible, he decided, or a thick wad of cash. Letters most likely—yes, a cache of love letters once rich and sweet as butter, but with death’s touch gone rancid and stale. Letters from some dear one lost on the Echo, a young wife possibly, someone he could not bear to speak of, someone who had in fact taken his powers of speech with her.

  “You know,” he’d said to Grif at dinner that day (Jean had made a Fidget Pie—onions, apples, bacon), “the trouble with ghosts is not that they haunt you, but that they do not. Let’s say a person has lost a loved one, and to see them again in any faint form, even a wisp of them, would satisfy a great longing. But they do not appear, ever again. Not even in those spirit photographs you’ve probably seen. Those are fake, a real swindle. Grif, what you have to worry about in this world are the quick, not the dead. People are capable of great harm. One man alone can cause unbelievable damage.”

  Grif only shook his head slightly. Whether in disagreement or because he was bound too tightly by memory, Jean couldn’t tell.

  Looking down toward the stairs again, he saw that Grif had finally made it to the beach, and was walking unsteadily over the stones, making this ordinary task look perilous. It was almost as if he were made of some watery substance himself, and was moving forward with necessary caution lest he spill and drain away through the cracks.

  No, Jean thought, he should not have given him that gun.

  His benefactor needn’t have worried. Grif had no intention of decorating the beach with the contents of his head, even if it was a sure way of silencing what dogged him. He had been mulling over Jean’s admonitions about the spirit world. Such rationality was a discipline the light-keeper had to adhere to if he wanted to maintain his life here. He was a man who had withdrawn from the cruelties of human society (the real theme, surely, of those Wild West stories), and who had become self-sufficient with his garden, his goats and chickens, his slab of mossy bacon hanging on a hook in the larder, his rack of books from the Upper Canada Tract Society, his daily consuming chores, and his mind as certain and concentrated as that beam he cast upon the water every night. No doubts, no missteps. Even the entries in his logbook were ca
lm and matter-of-fact. He recorded details of the weather, supplies used, all incidentals pertaining to his job. The most unsettling aspect of that log, to Grif anyway, was that he appeared nowhere in it. He flipped through it sometimes when Jean was up in the lightroom fussing, cleaning, refilling the lamps with oil. The corpses were in the book, sure enough, their discovery and burial duly recorded; but he was not. Grif supposed that Jean was protecting him, granting him an immunity, a respite from the record. Yet it would have been a relief to see his name listed there among the rust scrapers and monkey wrenches, the hard-edged and undeniably real that had earned a place in the log. Or possibly the keeper regarded him as more of an absence than a presence, a no one drifting beyond the pale, just one more of those pestering ghosts he absolutely refused to acknowledge.

  Other light-keepers had not been so careful and exclusive. Dipping back far enough in the log, past hands bold or shaky, Grif had encountered those unafraid to record strange or supernatural sights. One man had seen a sea monster with fins and a sinuous neck and red knobs the size of cauliflowers on its sides. Another, mermaids … In a strong wind you hear them, plain as gulls crying. In Lake Huron! How charming other people’s fantasies, and terrors, were. Grif did not think that those old-world fisher-girls would have lasted long in the cold waters of this rough and prim country.

  Nearing the water’s edge, Grif hopped onto a rock that sat a few feet out, in order to more easily scoop up two clear, grit-free pailfuls. He saw then a boat in the distance moving toward the island. Lonely Island. He had read that in the log too, but the weight of sadness in the name made it too heavy to repeat. That boat, it could be anyone, although he knew that Jean had been expecting an official search party. Bodies had to be identified.

  Quickly now, Grif filled the buckets and hurried along the beach to the stairs. Water brimmed, flashed with caught light, brilliant as a woman’s dress, spilling over, flouncing down, as he ran up, and up, to the tower.

  CHAPTER NINE

  skelf

  Grif lay listening to the water slapping the belly of the boat, applause for his daring. Or for his trusting nature. His gullibility? That he could ride in a boat at all amazed him, but what other way was there to escape the imprisoning shore of this island, since he couldn’t sprout wings and fly, and Jean wouldn’t be making a supply run for months. He was not like the light-keeper, who had achieved a solitary and saintly contentment. Grif was abraded by the calm, unnerved by the quiet, which was not pure quiet at all but infested with small, indefinable and accusatory sounds. Nor could he shake the feeling that he was being stalked, hunted. Which is how he came to be stretched out in the bottom of a homemade skiff, one that was held together with a lick of paint and crossed fingers for all he knew, and skimming through the night like a bug on a leaf.

  It was his hope that the lake was going to be as selective as lightning, in that it wasn’t going to strike twice and send him to the bottom. Never again did he want to be caught on the wrong side of the waterline, like an image trapped in a mirror. The lake had rejected him once, had not wanted his body defiling it. No place was reserved for him in its army of the drowned. And if he believed that, he really was gullible.

  Grif had in fact invested his trust elsewhere: in Ned Hawke, who was at the helm and had let it be known that he was unsinkable.

  “I’m a floating man,” claimed Ned, explaining how he had discovered this talent when he went overboard on a sidewheeler up near Spanish, carried either by the wind or by sheer exuberance. At the time, ashes and burning motes from a shore fire were being blown onto the deck and the passengers had been placed on “spark duty.” Issued with wet mops, their job was to extinguish those bright spores before they burst into full flaming blossom. Ned pitched in, and with such enthusiasm that he also pitched over into the North Channel and floated away like a pine chip, a wee skelf riding buoyant on the waves as if he were adrift in the salty Dead Sea.

  “Ah,” Jean had said, watching Ned’s caddis-fly contraption slide ashore and the man himself leap nimbly out on the beach. “A visitor.” He had expected a search party, but this was better, much better. “Come,” he said to Grif, who was about to melt into whatever background would have him, “he’s a good man, you’ll want to meet him. You might want to bring those buckets again, too. Now that the stairs are washed so beautifully, we could use a little of that wet stuff to cook with.”

  “Ned.” The man doffed his name like a hat, informally, drawing it right off the top of a longer nominative—Edwin Tobias Hawke. The hand he offered to Grif in greeting was small, warm, dry as a stick. He was slight and weathered, and gave an impression of living lightly in himself. To Grif’s young eye, Ned had reached an age where age no longer mattered—his hair white as a dandelion clock’s, his skin tanned as a boot; his body had arrived where time intended to take it. He himself had arrived on a whim, in his whim-built boat, having travelled a great many miles across the water for nothing more complicated than a cup of tea with the light-keeper.

  Ned ranged widely over the north, walking or sailing, and more or less lived out of doors, having at one point in his life gone outside and discovered that he had no inclination to go back in. He might squat on an uninhabited island for a while, dragging his skiff ashore, flipping it over, propping up the bow with an oar and setting up house underneath. It didn’t seem to trouble him to sleep on the rocks like a handful of earth scattered overtop. Ned would leap from his stony bed, limber as a child, fossils imprinted on his cheeks. Ammonites, he would say, fingering the shapes before they faded like stars in the morning light.

  That cup of tea Ned came for was more complicated, as it happened, and outsmoked the usual Smoky Oolong and Darjeeling. Declaring that leaves were for the cloven-footed, Jean rooted around in the shed until he’d collected up the tailings and tag ends of several orphaned flasks and bottles. He then poured these into a bailing tin, indiscriminately marrying the grain, the grape, the juniper berry and the lowly potato. An evil brew it was, a bilge cocktail, and they sat on the dock in the beneficent afternoon light passing it from hand to hand, bailing it in with a gentlemanly relish.

  Ned also passed on what news he’d picked up of late, telling Jean about a mutual acquaintance of theirs who had contracted blackleg at a logging camp in Blind River.

  “Landlubber’s scurvy,” he said to Grif. “They eat nothing at those camps morning and night but salt pork sandwiches smothered in corn syrup.”

  He told them about a couple of young fellows who broke into the light at Mississagi Strait and downed a crock of wood alcohol, and by the time the bodies were discovered they had turned completely black.

  His news had a restlessness, a propulsion of its own, and Grif noticed how it moved outward, further and further afield. He related a story about a ship in port at Windsor that had exploded and sent a two-hundred-pound radiator sailing into the town’s funeral parlour, where it flattened the director and made blood squirt out his ears, like a man who’d had a date with Skevington’s daughter. (“Who?” said Grif. “Torture device,” Jean explained.) Ned then ranged across the lake to Detroit, where a prominent senator was himself boiling mad. The local papers were having a field day with a story about a boat named after the senator’s daughter that was in dry dock having her bottom scraped.

  Talk then turned to the disaster of the Maine, blown up in the Havana harbour in February, and to the trouble in the Transvaal following the Jameson raid on the Boers. And honestly, it surprised Grif to hear them go on. These old hermits, how removed they were from the world’s troubles, free of it all, and yet they were keeping such a close watch, canny as small animals in a large predatory field.

  “You know,” said Jean, “some say we will soon be seeing the end of war, that humankind is getting to be too advanced for such barbarism.”

  “Some say, yes,” Ned laughed, slapping his hand down on the dock. “Arbitration is the new way, and reason. We’ll all sit down together and talk things over. Somebody might have told t
he Yanks that, though. Never seen a country more feverish for war.”

  “Canadians were happy enough to join ’em. Signed up by the thousands, I hear.”

  “A noble cause, the Spaniards being an inferior race. Like the French, eh, Jean?”

  “Hah! Here’s to the French. Least they had the sense to scupper that temperance plebiscite.”

  “What I don’t follow, boys, is how this idea of everybody working in factories and making a few industrialists rich contributes to mankind’s moral progress.”

  “Everybody’s too worn out working sixteen-hour days to fight. Makes them less aggressive, you see.”

  “Is that it? Well, here’s to reason, then.”

  “To world peace.”

  “Did you say peach?”

  “Peace. Clean out your ears, man.”

  “Ah, I guess that’s why those factories overseas have been so busy.”

  “Read about that new Maxim machine gun. Sixteen rounds a minute it can fire.”

  “They’ve improved the field gun, too. Has an automatic recoil.”

  “And now there’s smokeless powder.”

  “Torpedoes, mines.”

  “Hell, we must be in for a whole shitload of peace.”

  “Hmph, a new century, hard to imagine. Never thought I’d live to see it.”

  “Don’t count your chickens, Ned.” Ned spat into the water and they all sat in silence watching the foamy topped-up gob gently undulate, until out from under the dock a quick, shadowy form emerged, darted to the surface and snapped it up.

  “Did you see that? A bloody great sturgeon.”

  The sight reminded Grif of someone taking communion, a greedy beast gorging on the insubstantial—for all the good it would do him.