Keeper of the Light

seconds before someone else turned it down.

“Well,” Mary said, “Caleb’s father died right before we got married, and seeing as how Caleb had plenty of experience, he was made the new keeper. He had to apply for it. They didn’t just pass the job on down, father to son, but it was no problem for him to get it. He was without an assistant for a few weeks before we got married, so it was just him and his crippled mother at the station one night when he was struck by a bolt of lightning.”

“Really?” Paul Macelli looked impressed.

“Yes, indeed. Indeed. Frightening thing, and I can tell you I was glad I wasn’t there to see it. He was standing on the steps inside the lighthouse when a bolt hit the tower and sent an electrical charge right through those two hundred and seventy steel steps. Caleb’s legs went numb, but he wasn’t about to let the light go out. No, sir. He dragged himself up to the lantern room right after he was hit and did a full night’s watch.” Mary looked out at the boats, thinking how typical that was of Caleb. Always steady and true. “That’s the way it was in the old days,” she said. “People had a sense of responsibility. They took pride in a job. It’s not like it is with young people today.”

Mary closed her eyes and was quiet for a full minute or two, long enough for Paul Macelli to ask her if she was through talking for the day. She looked over at him.

“No,” she said. “I have one more story for you. Let me tell you about the Mirage.”

“Pardon?”

“The Mirage. It was a ship. A trawler.” Mary’s voice was so low that Paul had to lift the recorder close to her mouth to catch her words. “It was March of 1942. You know what was happening then, don’t you?”

“The war?” Paul asked.

“The war indeed,” Mary nodded. “The lighthouse had electricity by then, so we didn’t have to worry about winding the clockworks or taking care of the lanterns. The only reason we were still there was that someone needed to be, so the Coast Guard let Caleb stay on as a civilian keeper. Thank the Lord. Don’t know where we would’ve gone. Anyway, seems like back then most of the war was being fought right here off the coast. The lights were blacked out all up and down the Outer Banks and the lighthouse light was dimmed. You couldn’t have any lights on shore because the German U-boats might see our ships silhouetted against them. Didn’t seem to make much difference, though. Those subs were picking off our ships one a day back then. One a day.”

Mary paused to let her words sink in. “Well, one morning, just before first light, Caleb was up in the lantern room and he spotted a small boat drifting way out to sea, bobbing up and down in rough water, most likely broken down. He could just make out two men in her. So he got in his little power boat and went out to them. The breakers were mean and cold, and Caleb wasn’t sure he’d make it, but he did. By the time he reached the men, they were half froze. Caleb towed them in, and once up on the beach, they told him they’d been on an English trawler called the Mirage which had been torpedoed by the Germans sometime during the night. They were the only ones who managed to get off before she went down.” Mary looked out toward the street. “When Caleb told me the name of the trawler, I remembered way back to when I was a girl and saw the word ‘mirage’ somewhere and asked my father what it meant. He told me how on a hot day, the beach can look like it has water on it when it doesn’t. ‘Sometimes, Mary,’ he said, ‘things are not what they seem.’ I should have paid better attention to what he was trying to tell me.” Mary looked at Paul Macelli to be sure he was paying attention himself.

“So Caleb brought these two British sailors up to the house. They spoke English with a kind of uppity accent. My daughter Elizabeth—she was about fourteen then—and I fed them three good meals that day, while they told us about being torpedoed and losing their friends and all.

“I bedded those boys down in the spare room upstairs that night. About eleven or so Caleb and I heard a scream coming from Elizabeth’s room, so Caleb quick grabbed his shotgun and went up there. One of the boys was in Elizabeth’s room, trying to talk her into some indecency. Caleb let him have it with the gun—killed him right there in the upstairs hallway. The other fella took off when he heard Caleb shoot his friend, so we quick called the Coast Guard and they caught up with him.” Mary smiled at the memory. “Found him tangling with a wild boar—a fate no man deserves. It turns out they weren’t Brits at all. They were German spies. The Coast Guard had been getting reports of them for weeks and hadn’t been able to track them down. Caleb got a medal for it, even though he was kicking himself for not just letting the two of them freeze to death out in the ocean. The Mirage didn’t exist, of course.”

Mary took in a long breath, suddenly exhausted. She pointed her thin, straight finger at her interviewer. “Sometimes, Mr. Macelli, things are not what they seem,” she said. “Not what they seem at all.”

Paul Macelli stared at her for a moment. Then he clicked off the recorder and lifted his briefcase to his lap. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “May I come back sometime to hear more?”

“Of course, of course,” Mary said.

Paul put the recorder in the briefcase and stood up. He looked out toward the waterfront for a moment and then down at Mary. “They tried to get you off lighthouse property in the early seventies, didn’t they?” he asked.

Mary stared up at him. He was a fool. He could have simply left, not tempting fate and her ire any more than he already had. Obviously, though, he couldn’t help himself.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said.

“Wasn’t it Annie O’Neill who helped you out back then?” he asked, and Mary wanted to say, You and I both know it was Annie, now, don’t we, Mr. Macelli? but she wanted this young man to come back. She wanted to tell him more stories of the lighthouse. She wanted to speak for hours into that little black recorder.

“Yes,” she said. “Annie O’Neill.”

She watched him walk down the sidewalk and get into his car. Then Mary leaned her head back against the rocker and closed her eyes. There was a burning pain in her belly that didn’t subside until she heard the sound of Paul Macelli’s car fade into the air.

Mary had met Annie in May of 1974, when she was seventy-three years old, practically a young woman. She’d been cleaning the windows in the lantern room of the lighthouse when she spotted a young girl down on the beach. Her beach, for the road leading out to the lighthouse was unpaved then and not too many people were willing to risk it. So at first Mary thought Annie was an apparition, and she stood at the window of the lantern room to see if the girl moved, if she was real. From that height, Annie was a tiny, doll-like figure, her dark skirt and red hair whipping out behind her as she stared out to sea.