A Light in the Storm

by Karen Hesse

  Uncle Edward held me close.

  “Am I wrong to tell you this?”

  Uncle Edward looked carefully down at me. His eyes were bright.

  “No, Amelia,” he said. “It’s about time you did.”

  Thursday, December 12, 1861

  P. Cloudy. Wind S.W. Moderate.

  I weep at times here, when I am alone at the Light. I weep at times when I fall into bed at the end of a watch.

  Tonight, an hour into my shift, while I was tracking a lumber ship, I heard footsteps on the spiral stair. I remembered when I heard footsteps and no one came. I thought it was a ghost then. Now I think it was Oda Lee.

  I remembered when I heard footsteps on my birthday and it was Daniel.

  I looked to the door, wondering who might be coming.

  It was a ghost this time. A ghost of a different sort. Father.

  Father surprised me, entering the lantern room.

  I wiped at my cheeks but he could tell I had been crying.

  I busied myself checking the oil reserves.

  Father put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. We did not talk for a long time. So long that I am afraid the Lighthouse Board would have found me negligent had they been watching. And yet at the moment I did not think of the Lighthouse Board. I thought only of the weight in my heart.

  As we stood there, so many thoughts went round in my head, like leaves in the wind. I could not catch hold of any of them and yet I knew them all. I knew them a hundred times too well.

  Father led me down the ladder to the floor below. He guided me to the window and stood by my side, his arm around my shoulder. We looked out into the dark and blowing sea. In the flash, I saw a tall swell forming into a wave. Though darkness followed, I knew the story of that wave, how it would swell and curl and rush over the sand and through the grasses. Father and I both knew what that wave would do, even in the dark when we could not see it.

  When the flash came again, the water was rushing back, back to the sea.

  “I wish we could go back,” I whispered.

  Father nodded. He said he had been fighting against the tide. He was tired of fighting.

  My hand tightened on the frigid sill. How cold it must be for Father to sleep here. How could he stand it?

  Father said, “I spoke with Edward today. He said I have been selfish. He is right. I am sorry, Wickie. The papers. You should know. The papers I gave your mother. They are divorce papers.”

  I did not dare look at Father’s face. Instead I studied his coat.

  Father said he would take care of Mother as long as she lived.

  “What will become of me?” I asked him.

  Father asked what I wanted.

  “I want to stay here, at the Light, always.”

  Father nodded, not to say I shall have what I want, simply to say he had heard me.

  Thursday, December 19, 1861

  Clear. Wind N. Fresh.

  A letter from Daniel.

  1st December 1861

  Near the Potomac

  Dear Amelia,

  With guard duty, picket duty, and a severe illness, your correspondent has been prevented from writing you for some time. If you will excuse the procrastination, he will endeavor to be more faithful in future.

  We have now every assurance of staying here all winter, and the prospect is anything but flattering. ‘Tis bleak here — the wind howls dreadfully, and the white, heavy frosts of early morn warn us that winter is coming.

  We have picket duty in abundance, but we all rather like it. There is only one thing that mars our pleasure in service, and that is the cowardice of the rebels. If a few would only sneak up to us and get shot once in a while, it would ease the monotony that otherwise clings around us. Still we cannot blame them for their love of life, can we?

  I will not deceive you. There is a great deal of sickness prevailing now in the regiment. The Doctor has had his hands full.

  We have devotional singing and praying in one or more of the tents every night, and, as “Voice after voice catches up the strain,” the effect is truly inspiring.

  Your little packages are received with every demonstration of delight, and I take this opportunity of returning to you a soldier’s thanks. I carry your likeness with me everywhere and often look to it for advice as I might look to you if you were near. After next payday, which will be on the first of January, a furlough often days’ duration will be given out, and one or two from each respective company given leave to travel home. Hope it shall be me.

  Yours truly,

  Daniel

  Wednesday, December 25, 1861

  Fair. Wind N.E. Light.

  Christmas. It was an unusually quiet day. I went early to the mainland. Mother seemed strangely animated. But now it is late. Mother and Grandmother are alone by their hearth, Father and I alone, but for the boisterousness of Keeper Hale’s brood. How grateful I am for their brightness. This morning Keeper Hale’s youngsters found their stockings filled with goodies from Old Kriss — sugarplums, nuts, candies. I cannot imagine how Keeper Hale manages with so many mouths to feed, but he is not supporting his wife and her mother at a separate address, and Mrs. Hale, big-hearted as the sky, is most clever. She used tin patterns and baked fancy cakes for her family as well as for Father and me, and even one for Mother and Grandmother. At the noon meal together we untied the bag of chestnuts and ate the goose that we had kept and fed on corn.

  Daniel is spending Christmas miles from home. Last Christmas I barely gave him a thought. This year is different. I look at the carving Father made for me last year, the carving of the Lighthouse. That little carving has brought me hours of comfort in this trying year. That and you, my diary. One of the aprons Mother sewed for me last Christmas I wore this Christmas to bake cookies for the Hale children. Wearing the apron makes me feel that Mother is close by. And the drawing Reenie sketched hangs over my bed. Mother does not need it now. Not the way I need it, to hold her near.

  I wonder what Christmas is like in the camps. Are the tents decorated with evergreens and colored lanterns? Do the ones receiving packages share with the others? Is there enough to go around?

  Daniel, wherever you are, however you are, I wish you a merry Christmas.

  Saturday, December 28, 1861

  Clear. Wind N.W. High.

  We are having a good deal of trouble with frozen feet in this terrible weather. Father bathes my feet in kerosene and rubs them every four hours, day and night. He does not let me do the same for him. He says his feet do not bother him.

  Father feels guilty that I should have frosted feet. If I did not live in this buffeted Lighthouse station, if I did not work like a man beside Father and Keeper Hale, if I lived in the manner of a protected young lady, as Mother would have it, I would not have to concern myself with frozen feet.

  But I have chosen this life. Frosted feet and all.

  We are fighting a war of our own here. To keep the Light, in all weather, under every adversity. The other night when I struggled to keep the glass free of ice and Father struggled to restore the voice of the buoy bell, then we were soldiers in battle against the elements. Certain battles must be fought. I will fight to keep the Light. I will fight to keep Mother, too, in whatever way I can have her. I have lost something immeasurable in Mother’s departure. But I have gained something immeasurable, too.

  I read that some bachelors go to war because they like the fighting, some married men because they like the peace. I am not certain where Father falls within those lines of reason, but somehow, he has managed to find a peace of his own.

  And I, though I have paid a price as dear as a lightkeeper’s lifetime of wages, I, too, have found a certain peace.

  I reread Uncle Edward’s poem at the beginning of this diary and I understand.

  Epilogue

  Oda Lee Monkton continued looting ships until she died of cholera in 1866.

  Keeper Robert Hale remained as Head Lightkeeper at the Fenwick Island Light until
1871, when he moved his entire family, except daughter Alice, to Alaska to accept a Government position.

  After furthering his education, Edward Martin, Amelia’s uncle, left Bayville in 1872 to teach at the newly founded University of Oregon in Eugene. Upon his death, in 1887, Edward Martin left all of his worldly possessions to his common-law wife, Daisy.

  Mildred Martin, Amelia’s mother, died in 1862, after suffering a seizure. Dr. McCabe ruled the cause of death as asphyxiation.

  John Martin, Amelia’s father, resigned as Assistant Keeper in 1863 after suffering a stroke. Alice Hale, Keeper Hale’s second daughter, remained at Fenwick Island, looking after John Martin, from 1869, until his death in 1878. Alice Hale married Creighton Sydney of Ocean City, Maryland, in 1871, and she and Mr. Sydney brought great joy to John Martin’s last years, surrounding him with their seven lively children.

  Daniel Worthington survived the War and returned to Bayville and to Fenwick Island to marry Amelia in 1863. However, Daniel did not remain at the Light for long. Though they were never divorced, Amelia and Daniel lived only briefly together as husband and wife. Daniel went west, working as a supervisor on the Transcontinental Railroad. On the night of his death in December 1913, Daniel Worthington asked that a candle be lit in an old wooden carving of a lighthouse. The wooden carving was sent back to Amelia Martin along with a chest containing Daniel Worthington’s personal effects and a rather large sum of money. The remainder of his estate was distributed between his two sisters.

  Amelia Martin took over from her father as Assistant Lightkeeper at Fenwick Light in 1863, at the age of eighteen. She was appointed Head Keeper of the Ragged Island Light, a stag station off the Maine coast, in 1869, saving twenty-two lives over the course of her career as Head Keeper and receiving various commendations and awards, including the Medal of Honor. She retired from the Lighthouse Service in 1920. At the age of seventy-seven, Amelia began a new career, bringing books by boat to island residents up and down the Maine coast. Amelia Martin died in her sleep in 1940 at the age of ninety-five.

  Life in America

  in 1861

  Historical Note

  The tiny state of Delaware occupied an unusual position during the Civil War: It was officially a slave state, yet its citizens chose not to join the Confederacy. Instead, Delaware remained in the Union and fought with the North. Small as it was, the state lay on the border between North and South, between freedom and slavery, and those who lived there found room for disagreement and division among themselves.

  The causes of the Civil War date to the founding of the United States, when Northern and Southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention disagreed over slavery. The framers of the Constitution compromised by writing about slavery without ever using the words slavery or slaves in their famous document. As a result, the first seventy years of the new nation were marked by continual tensions and negotiations between North and South, most notably on the question of whether or not slavery should be permitted in new territories and in new states admitted to the Union. As the North moved toward industrialization and wage labor, and the South developed as an agricultural society supported by staple crops and enslaved labor, the clashes between these vastly different economic systems grew more intense.

  When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, Northerners were ecstatic, for they felt certain that Lincoln would prevent the Southern states from gaining more power in Congress. The white South, however, reacted to Lincoln’s election with alarm because Lincoln believed that slavery should not spread beyond its present borders. Three months after the election, the seven states of the lower South voted to secede from the Union — to leave the United States. These states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) formed the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis as their own president. The Constitution of the Confederacy was similar to the Constitution of the United States, but with two significant differences: states’ rights were strengthened, and the institution of slavery was recognized and protected.

  At his inauguration in March 1861, Lincoln assured the white South that he would not attempt to end slavery in states where it was already legal. Although Lincoln personally judged slavery to be morally wrong, he did not believe it was his duty as president to impose those views on others. Lincoln did make clear, however, that the federal government would enforce the existing laws of the United States, which meant that the South did not have the constitutional right to secede, and the formation of the Confederacy was considered an act of treason. At the same time, because Lincoln’s first resolve was to preserve the Union, he would not go so far as to declare war. In his inaugural address, he announced to white Southerners, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war…. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”

  Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, belonged to the federal government. Lincoln had refused to surrender the fort to the Confederacy, for to do so would have condoned secession. But by early April, the United States soldiers stationed there were running out of supplies. Sumter would either have to be resupplied or evacuated. Lincoln made a careful plan, announcing that he would resupply Sumter with food only; there would be no resupplying of weapons, and the provisions would be carried on unarmed ships. These actions were intended to demonstrate that Lincoln refused to play the aggressor in a civil war that would tear the nation apart.

  But the Confederacy interpreted Lincoln’s plan as a declaration of war. On April 12, 1861, at 4:30 in the morning, the Confederates fired on Union ships that had arrived at Sumter. After thirty-three hours of bombardment, the federal government surrendered the fort, and the next day, President Lincoln called up 75,000 soldiers from state militias to serve in the Union army for three months. Lincoln, and almost everyone else, felt sure that this would be a short military conflict.

  In the spring of 1861, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy. White Southerners who owned the greatest numbers of slaves were the loudest supporters of secession and war. However, in the upper South, portions of the white population sympathized with the Union, notably in areas where the poor soil did not support the staple crops of a slave economy. Most white Southern Unionists lived in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. These were the “border states”: slave states that bordered on free states and remained with the Union during the Civil War. The white populations of the border states were divided by the war.

  Although Delaware permitted slavery, its economy shared more with the North than the South. Delaware farmers had always shipped their crops to northern markets on the Delaware River, and in the 1850s, the railroad solidified ties to Philadelphia and New York, while mills and factories were built in the Wilmington area. Wilmington had also served as an important stop on the “Underground Railroad,” a network of black and white activists that provided food, shelter, and safety to fugitive slaves fleeing north to freedom.

  By 1860, the vast majority of African Americans in Delaware were free, and a thousand black Delawareans joined the Union army. Delaware whites fought on the Union side ten to one. Still, many in the southern part of the state sympathized with the Confederacy. Tensions could run high within communities, and in each of the border states families found themselves on opposite sides of the war.

  African Americans, in both the North and South, supported the Civil War as a means to create a nation without slavery. People who wished to abolish slavery called themselves “Abolitionists,” and in the North, a minority of whites agreed that slavery was morally wrong and should not be tolerated anywhere in the United States. While Abolitionists were extremely critical of President Lincoln because they felt he wasn’t doing enough to end slavery, the majority of Northerners supported Lincoln wholeheartedly. Most white Northerners backed a war to preserve the nation and were initially satisfied to restore
the Union to a country half slave and half free. But that, too, would change as the war raged on.

  The first major battle of the Civil War took place in Virginia in 1861. At the time it was fought, the First Battle of Bull Run was the largest battle ever in American history. The Confederate victory at Bull Run confirmed the confidence and righteousness of the white South. To the North, the defeat brought shock and fear. Finally realizing it would not be a short war after all, President Lincoln soon asked men to enlist in the Union army for terms of three years.

  After Bull Run, the North worried that Confederates would invade Maryland, and Union soldiers stood guard on the north bank of the Potomac River. In October 1861, the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, fought on the southern bank of the Potomac, ended in a dramatic Confederate victory. Although the year came to a close with considerable uncertainty in the North, 1862 would bring a number of important Union victories, most notably the Battle of Shiloh, the bloodiest battle in the entire western hemisphere at the time it was fought.

  On both sides of the war, men who had enthusiastically signed up to fight — and had envisioned themselves returning home as war heroes — now experienced horrors on the battlefield such as they had never imagined. Those who survived witnessed death and destruction of tremendous magnitude and at close range, and many wrote home to tell their families what they had seen. Those on the home front suffered hardships as well, ranging from the daily miseries of food shortages to the overwhelming grief of losing loved ones.

  As the second year of the war opened, it had become abundantly clear that neither side was going to surrender except in the face of total military defeat. Union soldiers now fought to destroy all enemy resources — and slavery was just such a resource. The goal of destroying the Confederacy therefore came to include the destruction of slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln issued in 1863, forever changed the purpose of the war: All Northerners were now undeniably fighting to end slavery, and the official aims of the war now matched Lincoln’s personal beliefs. The Proclamation also confirmed just how much the institution of slavery had already been weakened by the war. From the start, enslaved men, women, and children had seized the opportunity of wartime chaos to escape from their masters and run behind Union army lines. For slaves and their sympathizers, the Civil War had always been a war for freedom. Now that was official, too.