The Lightkeeper

by Susan Wiggs

  How could she explain? Could she tell him that she was running? Running. She had reached the very edge of the world, and now he wanted to send her back...to what? A wave of nausea struck her. Willfully she fought it, tamped it down, conquered it. She’d come too far to give in to terror now.

  Trying not to tremble, she traced her finger around a knot in the scrubbed pine table. “Do you know what it’s like, Jesse Morgan, to be stripped of everything, right down to the clothes on your back?”

  He regarded her without expression. “No.”

  “It’s extraordinary. Liberating, if you will. And completely frightening.”

  “I can help with the money until you find some acceptable situation.”

  “Ah. And is there such a position in this town called Ilwaco? Will they accept an unmarried Irishwoman with a babe in her belly?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” he said.

  She stared at him, stunned to hear such naiveté from a man who clearly knew the dark side of human nature. “People have small minds and cold, tight little hearts.”

  “That’s not my problem,” he grumbled.

  “God forbid that it should be,” she retorted. “God forbid that you should have to cope with another person.” Surprised at herself, she got up from the table and walked away from him. What was it about the man? she wondered. He brought out the worst in her.

  He got up, too, and followed her across the keeping room. “I didn’t ask you to come washing up on my beach.”

  She whirled to face him, surprised to find him standing so close she could feel his body heat. “Then I apologize profusely for doing so.”

  They glared at one another, chins jutting, each silently defying the other to speak. Mary felt a stirring in her chest, her throat. And then, all in a rush, came the mirth. Untimely as Indian summer, it came bubbling up through her, and no amount of glaring and posturing could stop it. She laughed until the tears came, then used her sleeve to dab at her eyes.

  Jesse Morgan looked thoroughly annoyed. “You’re getting hysterical. You should go and rest.”

  “I’ve been resting all day. I’ve been resting since Sunday. And I wasn’t laughing at you but...but...I don’t know. At the entire situation. There’s not a reason in the world I should have survived, but I did.”

  “There’s a reason—” He cut himself off and turned away, going to the front door and pressing his fist to the lintel while he looked out.

  “What do you mean?” she asked softly, looking at him, always looking, studying him from behind. Why did he fascinate her so? Why did he draw her toward him, make her eager to brave his temper and his insults?

  “Nothing. What I really need to know is why you claim to have no kin, no friends, no one in the world.”

  She swallowed hard. “Because it’s true.”

  “Everybody has someone.”

  “Even you, Jesse? Do you have someone?”

  He turned back to look at her. “My parents, but they’re on an extended trip abroad. And a sister,” he said tersely. “I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Annabelle,” he said. “And she—” He broke off and braced his arm on the door frame. “We’re speaking of you, not me. I want to send a letter or a wire. Surely there’s someone—”

  “There is no one, damn your eyes!” she burst out. “No one! No one!” She knew what was coming next—he was going to ask her who put the baby in her belly.

  Without giving him a chance to speak, she pushed past him and slammed out of the house. Blinded by tears, she stumbled across the yard to the path leading to the lighthouse. The lamp was not yet lit for the night, and the tower stood in stark silhouette against the fiery sky: a beacon of hope, a sentinel of loneliness.

  She heard his tread like a muffled thump on the path behind her, and she turned to look at him. Angrily wiping at her wet cheeks, she said, “When you found me, I was running. I wanted to run away so fast and so far that I didn’t care if I reached the very ends of the earth and fell off. Can you understand that?”

  He looked solemn. “Oddly enough, I can.”

  “Then you must know how I feel.” She studied the outline of the lighthouse high on the bluff. “People don’t generally run toward things, but away from them. It’s no accident that I wound up here. At the edge.”

  “A lot of people do,” he said. “We have more shipwrecks here at the Columbia bar than anywhere else on the coast.”

  “I wasn’t talking about shipwrecks.” She reached out and, before he could pull away, she grasped his hand in hers. “Don’t do this, Jesse. Don’t turn me in now.”

  “Turn you...?” He stared down at their clasped hands. She expected him to pull away, but he didn’t. He took a step closer. “Tell me what sort of trouble you’re in. Did you steal something? Murder someone?”

  “Certainly not. And you know that. In your heart, you know I’m no criminal.”

  She took a risk, a huge leap, knowing in advance it was the wrong move but unable to stop herself. She pressed the palm of his hand over her stomach, where the child grew. “Isn’t my trouble rather obvious?”

  He reared back as if she were a flaming brand. “Jesus Christ, woman!”

  “What? All I wanted—”

  “And all I want is to be left alone. Stay away from me, Mary. Just...stay away.” He strode up the hill toward the lighthouse.

  She watched him go, his long body and longer shadow flowing along the sunlit pathway. She wouldn’t see him again until morning, for he would be all night tending the lamp.

  What a strange and mournful existence it must be for him, keeping the beacon lit through the night, watching the ships pass by. Did he ever wonder who they were, where they were going? Did he ever think of leaving this place?

  He was a man of deep secrets. He was hiding something in his past that made him turn his back on the present. She ran her hand down the dress she was wearing, the fine sprigged muslin that smelled of lavender sachets.

  None of her affair, she told herself, and yet she knew she had to try to know this man. The world had given up on Jesse Morgan. The world kept its distance.

  There’s a reason...

  She had been spared from death when everyone else on the Blind Chance had drowned. Jesse would not tell her why he thought that was so, but Mary stared at the lighthouse and watched the lamp flare to life inside as he lit the wicks for the night. In an unguarded moment, he had said, “There’s a reason...”

  She knew why.

  She had followed his light after the shipwreck. His light had helped her survive. The man who had kept it lit for her could not know it, but he was the reason for her survival.

  He claimed to want nothing to do with her. But it didn’t matter. She could help him. Maybe they could help each other. Just as he had pulled her from the angry surf, she knew she must draw him into her own light and awaken the man behind the glacial blue eyes.

  She wasn’t even certain she wanted to do this. All she knew was that she needed to. Though shaken and hurt and angry, she had no other choice, no other place to go.

  She felt the bluster of a freshening wind coming up from the sea. Clouds gathered on the horizon. A storm was brewing.

  “You’re a fool, girleen,” she said aloud. “The man’s a foul-tempered beast. He clearly can’t stand the sight of you.” Her hand stole to her midsection. “You should know better than to trust a man with a handsome face.”

  * * *

  As the dawn crept past huge gray thunderheads, Jesse kept one eye on the incoming storm and the other on the station log. As head keeper, he was required to write a journal of the daily activities at the station. His reports were terse and dry: “Heavy seas and a wind from the southwest. Squalls attended with showers of rain.”

  S
unday’s entry followed suit. “Recovered one survivor, a female, from the wreck of the oysterman Blind Chance.”

  He would never write down the fact that she was as beautiful as an angel and as lost as a lamb. Nor that she was with child. Those things would force him to regard her as a person, not merely a duty. He wasn’t ready to do that. He would never be ready.

  He finished the current entry and wiped the nib of his pen. The storm would break with the dawn, and he must get ready. He felt the pull of an almost mystical connection with the sea and the sky. Long before most men saw a storm coming, Jesse felt it in his bones. It was not a pleasant feeling; it was more like a queasy, vague sickness.

  Right now, the sensation was acute. He drank a tepid cup of tea. He washed his face and trimmed the wicks in the great lantern, then stood and looked out at the leaden sky and the boiling sea.

  The iron gray of the water clashed with the coal-tinged storm clouds. Sea spouts whipped up out of the water, set in motion by the seething tempest. For now, though, the horizon was swept clean of anything but the jagged line of the crashing distant combers and swells.

  He stood in the beacon house and watched and listened. A quickening wind slapped at the glass panes of the pulpit and whistled insidiously through the cracks. Behind the lighthouse, the great trees bowed their heads in deference to the power of the coming storm. The grasses on the dunes of Sand Island lay flat as if ducking for cover. A flock of seagulls huddled together with their heads tucked under their wings, each with one foot drawn up.

  Jesse checked the time. He was nearly at the end of his watch. Before long, Magnus would come to relieve him and begin the daytime duties. Jesse went out on the catwalk and greeted the storm. Unlike the birds and the trees and the world around him, he took no pains to retreat. He shoved his face into the wind and let the slanting sheets of rain slap at him with punishing, needle-like sharpness.

  He stood gripping the rail like the captain of a great ship that was going nowhere.

  And then he saw it. First a flicker on the incoming surf. A flash no bigger than a wavering candle. Then the sight of a hull climbing a swell. The instant it appeared, another swell surged up to swallow it.

  Someone was out there, trying to get to shore.

  Jesse pushed away from the rail and went inside. He set the fog bell to ringing and hurried down the winding stairs.

  He raced for the barn, mounting D’Artagnan bareback to save time, and urging the horse with reckless haste along the path to the beach. Hang on hang on hang on. The rhythm of the command was pumped from his heart to every limb of his body.

  The boat was still out there, still being thrashed in the surf, drawing closer and closer to the jagged black rocks that lay tumbled below the cape. Jesse couldn’t tell if there were any people in the small craft. He’d find out soon enough.

  He galloped a hundred yards to the north, where the dunes descended gently to the sandy beach. Then, with a firm tug on the reins, he steered the horse out into the surf.

  He had spent years teaching the horses this maneuver, and D’Artagnan obeyed without balking.

  The snarling waves lunged at Jesse. He bent low over the horse’s neck and rode straight at them. The gelding’s hooves kicked into the bared teeth of the sea.

  The battle began.

  For Jesse, this was the essence of life. It was the only thing that made him feel alive. Raw energy flared through him. The fight against the sea had a rhythm all its own, pushing and pulling, neither force ever letting go.

  He would never go to sea—the horror of the past had ensured that—but in the surf, where land and water met and clashed, he was in his element. The horse half surged, half swam toward the small, floundering boat.

  It was a ship’s boat. He could see its rounded hull through the lashing rain. A swell the size of a house built up, blocking his path to the small craft. His legs clung to the sides of the horse as D’Artagnan reared. Water washed over man and horse in a huge, drowning cascade that seemed to have no end.

  Time stopped. Silver bubbles rushed past his open eyes. No, not bubbles. Stars. He saw stars. His lungs were ready to explode. In a moment it would all be over.

  He and the horse shot out of the bottom of the swell and burst forth as if the sea itself had given birth to them. And there, only a few feet away, wallowed the distressed boat.

  He made out a row of Cyrillic characters in the chipped paint on the hull. The Russians had evidently wrecked somewhere and abandoned ship.

  A couple of men hauled ineffectually at the oars. A sailor in the bow spotted Jesse and screamed in fear. Jesse’s lips peeled back in a grimace. No doubt they thought he was a horseman of the apocalypse, come to lead their souls to hell.

  Another man hurled the tarred end of a rope in Jesse’s direction. Ah, yes, that fellow had much more sense than his companions. Better to throw the devil a line than to trust in God.

  * * *

  Covered from head to toe in borrowed oilskins, Mary stood on the beach with Palina and watched the drama play itself out in the surf.

  When the fog bell had awakened her, she’d seen Erik and Magnus race past on horseback, heading down the hill toward the beach. She had gotten to the strand just in time to see Jesse and his horse being swallowed up by the biggest wave in the sea. Her soul had begun to burn to ashes; Jesse was underwater for a long time. And then, when it seemed time to abandon all hope, he and the horse had burst free of the gray-metal waters as if the sea had spat them out.

  Jesse had tied the line from the boat to his horse. The horse was now plunging through the surf toward land. The wind blew so hard that Mary and Palina clung to each other to stay on their feet.

  Magnus and Erik met Jesse as the boat grounded itself in the sand. Shouting incoherently, the sailors—six in all—clung to the men and horses and ropes, whatever they could get their hands on, and let themselves be dragged to safety.

  “Come, we must help with the injured,” Palina said, taking Mary’s hand.

  Mary hurried to the waterline, where the sea bit at the sand. As she reached with both hands for one of the victims who was staggering toward her, she happened to glance at Jesse. She expected to see in his face the grim determination of a man battling the elements for dear life. Instead, what she saw shocked her.

  What she saw was a pure, raw joy, frightening in its intensity.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You’ll catch your very death,” Mary said, standing in the doorway of the barn and watching Jesse with the horses. “You haven’t stopped to rest or dry off or eat since it happened.”

  “If I fell sick every time I got wet, I’d be long dead,” he said, not looking at her. He brushed D’Artagnan and murmured something to him.

  “Do you talk to your horse often?” Mary asked.

  “He doesn’t sass back at me.”

  She bristled. Jesse had been perfectly solemn as he spoke the words, so it took a minute for her to realize that this was his idea of a jest.

  “Very funny,” she said, stalking into the barn. Her Goodyear’s rubber boots, too large by far, clomped on the straw-strewn floor. “What can I do?”

  He didn’t look up from his grooming. “Give them each a scoop of sweetened oats.”

  While she found the barrel and the scoop, she spoke over her shoulder. “What will the sailors do?”

  “Since none of them were injured, they can go right to the telegraph office in town. They’ll have to wire their shipping company and then wait for a boat bound for Russia.”

  “Do they ever stay, people who survive the shipwrecks?”

  He didn’t stop working, but his hand faltered as he curried the horse’s withers. “No. They never stay.”

  Mary didn’t believe him. As she poured oats into each horse’s feeding trough, she kept her eyes on Jesse. He was soake
d to the skin, his Kentucky jeans hugging his hips and thighs, his boots squishing as he moved. A plaid shirt clung to his shoulders and chest, outlining his form in a way she should not have noticed, but did.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  She flushed. “Palina said lightkeepers are always supposed to be in uniform when they’re on duty.”

  “I’ll make note of that.” Again he had that deadly solemn expression, but his lips twisted wryly.

  This time she laughed. “You are a caution, Jesse Morgan.”

  “Aren’t I just?”

  She leaned against a stall door. What a strange and fascinating man he was, one moment dour and unpleasant, the next moment dour and incongruously amusing. She wished he would smile at her, just once.

  “Do you ever laugh, Jesse?”

  He scowled, working at a tangle in the horse’s mane. “What the hell sort of question is that?”

  “A perfectly reasonable question. I find myself wondering what you find funny.”

  “Very little. Particularly after I’ve been on duty all night and battling the waves all morning.”

  “You loved battling the waves.”

  This time he stopped what he was doing and stared at her. “That’s not true.”

  “No need to get your dander up. It was just an observation.”

  “A mistaken one.” He unhitched D’Artagnan, led the horse to its stall and took off the bridle. The gelding immediately plunged his muzzle into the feeding crib and started crunching the oats. “Get up to the house and into some dry things.”

  “You’re dismissing me, then?”

  “If I were to make myself any clearer, you would see straight through me.”

  She made a huffy sound and turned, marching out of the barn. On the slope leading across the meadow to the house, she turned back once, to see if he was looking at her. She kept thinking that surely he was watching her go, watching and wondering and thinking that perhaps he had been rude.

  But no. He continued to work as if she had never been there. While she watched, he bent and picked something up from the floor. Then he stripped off his shirt and wrung it out. Mary lost all sense of time as she observed him in the gray misty light of the rainy day. His chest was broad and deep, more thickly muscled than she had imagined.