Keeper of the Light

“Yes, Mr. Macelli,” Mary said, clearly startling him.

“Uh.” A grin came quickly to his lips. “I guess you remember me,” he said. “It’s been so long, I figured…”

“I don’t forget people.”

“Well.” He fumbled with the latch on his briefcase. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?” He pulled a notepad and a small black tape recorder from the briefcase. Apparently he did not want to talk about the past, which was fine with Mary.

“Not at all, not at all,” she said. She had developed this habit of repeating things, which seemed to irritate no one more than it did herself.

Paul set the recorder on the broad flat arm of Mary’s rocker, and his fingers shook as he turned it on. “Just begin anywhere,” he said.

Mary rested her hands in the lap of her cotton dress and crossed her sneakered feet one over the other. She looked toward the waterfront, where the boats glistened in the sun. How Caleb would have loved this—this invitation to speak for as long as he chose about Kiss River! He would have known right where to begin his story. But Mary had some uncertainty these days about what came when, what was truth and what was legend. It didn’t matter, though. No one would know.

She leaned back in the rocker and closed her eyes for a few seconds, listening to the faint hum of the recorder as it took in her silence. Then she opened her eyes and began to speak.

“The Kiss River Lighthouse was illuminated for the first time the night my husband Caleb’s father was born,” she said. “He came into the world in the downstairs bedroom of the keeper’s house. Caleb’s grandfather was the first keeper, and he and his wife had been in the house just a week when my father-in-law made his appearance— several weeks early, I should add. Everybody said it was the light that did it, that brought on his mother’s labor. The midwife timed her contractions by the rotation of the beacon. That was September thirtieth, 1874. Twenty-seven years later, in 1901, Caleb himself was born in the very same room, right about the same time of night, brought into the world by the same midwife, who they say was old as the stars by then.”

Mary was quiet for a moment. She looked toward the waterfront again and suddenly felt the limitations of the view, as she had when she first moved here. She missed the panorama from the tower and the endless expanse of sea rolled out beneath her.

“It’s inborn, Caleb used to say.” Mary nodded to herself. “All of it. Inborn.”

“What is?” Paul asked.

Mary looked at him. His pupils were mere specks in the center of his dust-colored eyes. “When you’re born under the light, you’re born with a need to protect people from the sea and the storms. From their own mistakes in navigation. Your first breath is filled with the sea; your first vision is a pure white light. And you know right from the start what your life work is—no one has to tell you. That light must never go out and so everything you do, day and night, is toward that end.” Mary paused a minute, cleared her throat. “It’s the same when you marry into it,” she said. “I knew from the day I first set foot in Kiss River that I would be Caleb’s partner in that task.

“You can’t grow up the son and grandson of a lighthouse keeper and not respect the sea, Caleb used to say. It’s beautiful and it’s dangerous, all at once, like some women.” Mary looked again at Paul Macelli, who began writing feverishly on his notepad even though the recorder was picking up every word. His fingers were white from squeezing the pen, and in spite of herself, she felt some sympathy for him.

She continued quickly. “There was supposed to be a minimum of two keepers at Kiss River. The assistant keepers came and went, but Caleb’s family never left. It was home to all of us.”

She talked about what it had been like for Caleb growing up at Kiss River, how his mother had carried him across the sound in a boat every morning so he would attend school in Deweytown. “That’s where Caleb and I met,” Mary said. “We were married in 1923, and that’s when I became the assistant keeper. But I’m getting ahead of myself, here.”

Her mouth was dry. She would have liked something to drink. A beer would be just right, but alcohol was taboo here at the home. She sighed, drawing her mind back to her visitor.

“So how did the keeper spend the day, you ask? Climbing stairs, that’s how.” Mary smiled to herself. “I still climb those steps in my sleep, all two hundred and seventy of them, and when I wake up in the morning my legs ache and I could swear the smell of kerosene is on my pillow. I guess you could say it was a monotonous life, but looking back it was anything but. It’s the adventures that stand out. The storms. The wrecks that washed up on the beach. How about the night the mosquitoes put the light out? Would you like to hear about that?”

“I’d like to hear anything you’re willing to tell me.”

“You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?”

“Uh, no.” He looked surprised. “Sorry.”

Mary shook her head in disappointment and then told him about the summer after she and Caleb were married, how the mosquitoes were as big as mayflies and how they were drawn to the light to such an extent that it could barely be seen from the sea. She told him about the time when Caleb was just ten years old and the clockworks that turned the lens failed. His father had broken his leg and couldn’t climb the steps to the lantern room, and they were between assistant keepers, so Caleb and his mother took turns for two entire nights, cranking the lens at the proper speed so that ships out at sea would know which light they were seeing and would not be driven off course. Mary could still remember worrying when Caleb did not show up for school those few days. When he finally made it in, he could hardly move from the stiffness in his arms, and he said his mother cried all night long from the pain in her shoulders. It was only the physical labor that was difficult, he claimed in later years. The timing of the rotations had posed no challenge, because their bodies had long existed in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the light.

Mary told him about the first wreck Caleb ever remembered being witness to. She could tell the story easily, she’d heard it so often from her husband. The wreck occurred one morning in 1907 when the four-masted schooner, the Agnes Lowrie, stranded on a bar off the coast of Kiss River. “She’d been sitting there quite a while by the time Caleb and his father got to her, along with the men from the lifesaving station,” Mary said. “They could see the people on the deck, waving at them, thinking they were finally about to be rescued. But everything went wrong.” She described the futile attempts to reach the schooner with the breeches buoy, dragging the story out, enjoying herself. “As she broke apart, people started jumping in the water, swimming toward the beach for all they were worth, but they didn’t know how mean the sea could be. By the time they got close to Caleb and the others, they were floating dead men.” Mary shuddered, remembering how Caleb’s voice had grown hushed when he recounted that tale.

Someone inside the retirement home turned on the television. It blasted loudly onto the porch for a few