“Perhaps you had best leave out the science, Uncle, and write only in terms of the economic logic,” I said.
“Could we have dinner sent up?” Frannie asked. She had seen a wheeled cart, on which lay a tray loaded with food, being pushed down the corridor, and I was sure she wanted just such a magical and unexpected conveyance to enter our room.
I told her, “Under the small silver dome on the cart we saw is the hotel mouse. And we are supposed to let it eat up our crumbs when we’ve finished because it is very dainty and leaves nothing to be scraped off.”
“Really?” Frannie said.
“Una has quite taken up your brand of teasing,” Aunt said to Uncle. “Under the small silver dome, Frannie, there is a round of butter.”
“ ‘Honored Sirs,’ ” Uncle read from his position at the desk, “ ‘Today I have become newly acquainted with an apparatus, invented by Augustin Fresnel, that is vastly superior to the Argand Fountain Lamp, currently used in most lighthouses in this country. The apparatus has been duly tested in France, having been installed on July 25, 1823, at the great Cordouan Lighthouse—’ ”
Aunt put in quietly, “Torchy, you’d best tell the Governor about the Fresnel’s efficiency.”
Uncle referred to his notes jotted down at the mariner’s supply and reported that with the best parabolic reflectors set in the Argand lamp, 17 percent of the light was used, whereas with the dioptric apparatus 83 percent was saved. What with his numbers and a patriotic appeal not to let our country lag behind France, Uncle wrote a splendid and, as it later proved, convincing letter. Although, for reasons not entirely clear to me, subsequent historical accounts credit New York with installing the first Fresnel lens in this country, in 1842, let the record show that, in fact, the first Fresnel, when I was sixteen, became the blinking eye of our Lighthouse.
The first night we were back on the Island, we moved chairs out onto the dock and admired the steadiness of our light. I felt half in a trance—that Boston was gone, and it was replaced with our own simple vista. Aunt Agatha nodded at the beam and said, “How strange that sometimes things as well as people deserve some formal farewell.”
Uncle agreed. “Once I heard a sailor sing good-bye to the crow’s nest, the last night he stood watch.”
“May I be as constant as that good light,” Aunt said.
“You are, dear wife.” Uncle reached out and stroked her cheek with the curl of his finger.
ALL THE NEXT WEEK, Frannie and I took an old, worn quilt to the elbow of beach and lay on the sand to watch the steadfast light. Its sides widened, like a megaphone, as it shone out and finally diffused itself into the dark with no boundary definition.
How would we feel to have that steady illumination replaced by something intermittent? Something that swooped and darted far above our heads? Lying on the quilt on our strip of sand, I felt subdued, as people sometimes do, at the end of an era.
Suddenly Frannie said, “Feel my forehead, Una. I’m glowing.”
I touched her skin with my fingertips and felt the extraordinary heat immediately.
“We must go in.”
FRANNIE WAS rapidly very sick with the fever and blisters. They were so tight with fluid that they seemed to shine. In her delirium, she imagined the Giant to be walking. Once her eyes opened wide while I sat with her, and I quickly told her there was no such thing as the Giant. She nodded her head feebly and whispered through parched lips, “I know. He’s only a leg.” Quickly I gave her a spoonful of water. Then she shouted, “He has a hinge at the knee!”
When one night we saw she might die of the smallpox, a terror gripped me such as I had never experienced. Helpless, I stood aside while Aunt bathed her forehead and Uncle held both of her hands. I wanted him to hold on to her forever. Once he let go, and I feared Frannie had died, but then he reached farther up and held her arms. Suddenly for myself I had to break the stasis of our waiting.
I slipped outside and climbed up the stone boulders to the tower. I leaned my head against the stone. A hundred feet below the waves crashed against the headland, but the breeze was soft on my back, like a kindly touch. I didn’t know why I went there, but quiet words formed on my lips. With my forehead pressed against the stone, I prayed, “O Tower, who joinest earth and sky, O Lighthouse, who warnest of the danger of the sea, impart Thy cool temperature to Thy little servant Frannie, who hast served Thee well in the past. Be our Friend now. And guard over her and keep her safe from death.”
I recalled the small religious objects from around the world I had seen in the shop window in Boston. I imaged and prayed to them all—Buddha, Bastet, Shiva, the wooden mask—to preserve the life of Frannie. To the sunlight bathing the interior of King’s Chapel.
When I returned to our bedroom, I pressed my forehead against Frannie’s, as though to transfer coolness. Then I sat down and held her vacant hands, while Uncle grasped her arms. Aunt brushed her lips with a wet rag, bathed her forehead, pulled up her nightgown to bathe her blistered ankles and shins.
Frannie lived, though the skin of her face was left forever pockmarked. After her illness, her body elongated and lost its delightfully sturdy and churnlike appearance. I couldn’t help noticing that some of the pits on her skin were just like those in the stone of the tower, and, thus, through her illness, she had come to look a bit more kin to our Friend.
Before the government sent out the Fresnel lens and the dozen men to install it—how strange it was to see our Island population so inflated, to see foreign ropes and pulleys dangling from the tower, to hear shouts more shrill than gulls, and to regard the jackets and cast-off gloves of the installation crew lying on our rocks and grass, to glance shyly at their mouths chewing above the extended board of our table—before all that, the government sent two young men to survey the scene. They arrived in a small dark boat named the Petrel: Giles Bonebright and Kit Sparrow.
CHAPTER 14: The Petrel
THE SKY being white that day, their sail was not the first I saw of Kit and Giles, but the dark wooden curve of the Petrel. I called to Uncle and Aunt, who were weeding and cultivating the garden, and Uncle, leaning against the long hoe handle and shading his eyes to see better into the morning sun, said it must be the advance guard of the Fresnel.
It had been a month since our Boston trip and Frannie’s contracting of pox, and I had almost come to believe that our light would not be changed after all. Now I glanced up anxiously at the tower. I wondered if my inanimate friend shuddered at the thought of having his eye changed. I was sure that I would.
Whenever the world of the Island seemed too small for me, his steps provided the route that lifted me up to the freedom of the air. Up there, the gulls flew below me, the sea crawled at my feet, and only the vastness of the sky was above me. I relished it. If I stepped outside, on the high platform, the wind blew around my body till I was cold, and I would retreat into the lantern room or around to the lee. Many times it was the sun shining on me with unfiltered force that moved me to the curve of shadow. But I loved the sunlight, and, at that height, my blood seemed to fizz and evanesce, and I opened my arms to it many times.
Since the high platform of openwork iron ringed the lantern, sometimes I challenged myself to skip around and around till I was dizzy. Then I lay down on the grill in a rapture. With the clouds spinning around my head, I was the center of a benign and exhilarating universe.
THERE THEY CAME, while we stood in the vegetable garden, and the dark form of the Petrel and the straight way they came put me in mind of how the shark had approached Uncle and me in the fishing boat, before the beast began to circle. I projected an imaginary line drawn from their boat to us. In a linear, unhesitant way, they would come forward till the prow bumped our dock.
“I’m going up in the Lighthouse,” I announced. I knew that these visitors would not yet be changing the lens, but I needed to say good-bye to the old order. I left my relatives standing among the planted rows to walk inside. The stone house seemed dim as I moved around the f
amiliar objects, touching them, or speaking to them.
If the lens was changed, would not everything be changed?
I opened the door to the tower, where the stairs up to the height of the house were fashioned of stone but beyond that level changed to the same open grillwork as the encircling platform at the top. I stepped hard and fast, dared myself to climb faster, and increased the tempo. My feet resounded on the iron stairs. I created my own wind and roar. I thought myself to be a tornado.
When I passed the first window in the tower—the sunlight piercing through it—breath was still strong in my lungs, and I raced on up, as fast as my feet could lift me. Never had I run up the tower with such speed, and I imagined the tower itself was proud of me and enjoyed the passion of my rising knees and feet.
I let myself through the iron door into the lantern room. There was the old Argand apparatus, the fountain lamps, and their parabolic reflectors. Uncle kept them polished to perfection and had told me that some ignorant lightmen rubbed the reflector too abrasively and ruined their surfaces. I stood beside the lamps and looked through the glass to sea. Yes, there was the small dark boat, and now I could see the white sail and two men tending the boat. They were the size of ants, and their arms and legs seemed no thicker than a hair.
If they looked up, they would not guess that a girl was standing among the lamps. My chest was heaving, and I thought of how completely concealed from the world I was now and had been when inside the tube of stone, myself rising in the sky by the power of my own legs. While they sailed closer, they may have looked at the long column, but they had no idea of a girl within it winding up the spiral stairs.
Suddenly I wanted to startle them. I opened the door of the lantern compartment to the encircling grillwork, and as I had done perhaps a hundred times, I stepped into the open air. The wind washed my skin immediately and flattened my long broadcloth skirt against my legs and made it toss and ripple behind me. My dress was dark blue. If they looked up, they would surely notice me against so white a sky. I grasped and spread my skirts to make myself broader. Perhaps I would appear as an indigo angel, if they were the superstitious type who believed in mermaids and angels and the like. Perhaps if I stood still, they would count us as eccentrics who had a figurehead for our Lighthouse as most ships had for their prow, and they would wonder whether I was real or carved.
Now their boat was as large as a large toy, and I could read on its side in red script the word Petrel. They wore broad-brimmed hats, fastened, no doubt, under the chin, and I could see nothing of their faces, but I liked the way they moved about their boat—neither lazy nor hurried in their movements—and I thought of how in New Bedford my mother had encouraged me to watch and make judgments about the way people went about their work. Between these two, I could draw no contrasts. They seemed to move in harmony.
Just then I was startled by a sea eagle swooping close. It was a fearsome thing, with cruel beak and talons the size of clenched fingers, but it was only looking for a lofty place to rest. Nonetheless, I jerked away from it and lunged toward the abyss. The railing caught me, the gasp still in my throat. With a raucous cry, the eagle veered toward me. I snatched off my bonnet and struck out at the bird, and it squawked angrily back at me. Now it attacked, hovering, pinning me against the railing. The great wings beat furiously up and down.
I raised one hand to protect my eyes and face, and with the other, holding my bonnet by the strings, I swung at it. Again, it squawked, a shrill and piercing cry. Its flapping wings spread out much fuller than my skirts, and I could see the broadness of the pinions and their rugged brown color. Never had I seen such a cruel face. Its mouth was open with its screaming at me, and I saw the sharp, horny edges of the beak and, near its base, black nostrils. The eagle was a flurry of feathers and harsh noise. I beat at it with my bonnet, and the bird curved off into the air, at first flying below me and then circling over both me and the Lighthouse, and flying up till it was nothing but a speck.
“The eagle was a flurry of feathers….”
The back of my hand was cut. Not wishing to drip blood on my dress, I held my hand over the railing into the wind till it was numb in the wash of moving air. My knees were trembling. I did not like doing battle. A flap of fabric had been ripped loose on my bonnet, and threads had been caught and pulled in many places. One of the ties had come off and floated away. I was lucky the eagle had not flown off with my bonnet as his trophy. I smiled a little at the thought of such an empty victory for a bird. But for once I was too much shaken to enjoy the humor of my own pictures.
“Hal-looo.” The sound seemed to puff all around me. A human voice rising on an updraft. “Hal-looo.” I looked out to sea. One of the sailors was waving his hat at me and calling. The other stood still with his hands on his hips, but he looked at me.
I felt too weak to return the salute. I opened the door to the lantern room and retreated inside. I sat down on the floor, and I was glad to be encased in glass, out of the moving air, safe. Inside enclosing glass there is a warmth, sent there by the sun, and held while it compiles. I sniffed, but I did not cry. The still warmth comforted me. I drew up my knees and folded my arms across their top and laid my head there. The back of my hand smarted where the eagle’s toenail had passed. I felt dazed, my eyes open but unseeing, but I could feel my heartbeat slowing, and I was glad for the peace. Outside, around the window above my ears, the wind softly played, as it often did. But it had hosted those wings.
At length, I noticed the reflection of my body in the parabolic surface of one of the lamps. I was distorted, of course, so that I was little more than a stretch of color. But the blue was the blue of my dress, even if it was all bent. I looked for my face and the color of my flesh. My features were so warped and ugly that I felt offended by my accidental mirror.
My hair, which had been braided and coiled under my bonnet, had come down. The reflection showed it as a mat of darkness. With both hands, I began to divide it into sections and replait it neatly. I had lost my pins, but I made the braids neat and bound them with a thread pulled from the frayed bonnet. Mine were fat braids and long enough to hang over my breasts to my waist. I took my time with the braiding.
My cheeks were hot, and I did not like the way the contest with the eagle stayed in my muscles. I felt nervous and troubled. I remembered how, unbalanced, my body had lurched out toward the abyss. Placing my hand at the top of the girdling hipbone, I could feel the sore place where the top railing had caught me and kept me from charging over. I looked at the blood-crusty line drawn over the back of my hand. It had wanted my cheek, but I wouldn’t allow that.
When my hands were little, and my mother was teaching me to sew, she placed her hands over mine. She put her middle finger, encased in a pitted silver thimble, at the end of the needle and pushed for me. This finger, with the thimble, is a little engine, she said. It makes the needle go.
I thought of the miles and miles of thread that her thimble had pulled through cloth. What song had the needle sung to the fibers of the fabric? When she quilted, the needle passed through three layers: the pieced top, the inner batting, and the sturdy muslin underlayer. If all the thread from all her quilts were measured, would it stretch a thousand miles? Had her needle trudged, as a man’s foot might trudge, over a journey of a thousand miles?
She sat still, I thought, and yet she traveled. And when one stitches, the mind travels, not the way men do, with ax and oxen through the wilderness, but surely our traveling counted too, as motion. And I thought of the patience of the stitches. Writing a book, I thought, which men often do, but women only rarely, has the posture of sewing. One hand leads, and the other hand helps. And books, like quilts, are made, one word at a time, one stitch at a time.
I did not know how long I had stayed aloft, nursing my right hand and musing, but with that last thought, I unfolded myself and stood up; felt ready to go down. I spiraled slowly down the steps, the soft way a milkweed seed sometimes twirls to earth. I wanted time for any vague
thought to come to mind that mind should want. No new ones came, but the pace seemed a meditative winding, and what I was winding was like yarn on an oblong skein, softly enfolding a quiet center that was myself.
My feet passed from the metal steps to the sixteen stone ones, and then I came through the wall into the common room. They sat at the table together, my adopted family and the two strange men, who were young; the odor of fish chowder laced with onion and celery filled the room.
“This is Una,” my aunt said, “our niece and cousin.”
Both sailors stood up, as though they were the best-bred gentlemen in the world.
“Battler of eagles,” one said.
“As brave as a dragon,” the other said.
“Then this heap of stones is my treasure,” I replied to the second one, thinking how in legends a dragon nested atop its pile of gold goblets and chains and stolen coin.
He replied, “My name is Giles Beowulf.”
I looked at him skeptically, for I knew Beowulf had fought the fire dragon for his treasure.
“Bonebright,” he corrected. “Giles Bonebright.”
“You have a magic name,” I said, “if not a legendary one.” I looked closely, as though his bones should be shining through him. He was tall and fair. His nose was unusually large, rather a disfigurement, but his eyes, also, were unusually large, blue, and wide-open, with nicely arched black brows, though his hair was light.
The other sailor, shorter with dark hair, comely, merely said, “Kit Sparrow.”
“I must wash my hand,” I said, and I went to the water pitcher and poured into the china bowl. I hoped that washing over the scab would not renew the bleeding.
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