Chapter 7: The Light She Tended

The coast of northern Maine, they had been told, was a rugged edge that adhered to no laws. The shape of the coastline wound and buckled from the northern provinces of Canada to the milder country of New Hampshire, defying the crisp borders of maps. The landscape was ever-changing, with the Atlantic pebbling the rocks and rewriting the coastline over eons, millenia. No defense could freeze the tide. 

But among the shore’s many protuberances, a single point jutted out. It gouged the ocean, forming a serrated parabola that set the tide on its heels. This was the place where the Light had been built. The Point at Sugarloaf Scarp.

The world wound itself back in time as the Roebucks neared their new home. The rail cut beyond the region of the world where humans belonged, into a forest that was older and darker than anything the state of Virginia could conjure. Lucy could scarcely see sunlight through the pine needles. She wondered if such a rugged place might protest a train charging over steel rails. 

“This is the nation’s true heart,” Everett said excitedly. He had propped himself forward on his seat cushion, studying the fern-green wilderness through the window. 

“You’ve never been here before.”

“But I can feel it. This is a forest of forests.”

Lucy cocked her head at him. It was strange to see him in the compartment, surrounded by upholstery and filtered air. He did not belong indoors, let alone within the boundaries of a machine.

“What draws you to such dense country?”

“I find it persistent, like the ocean.”

“The ocean is fickle. It is always changing.”

“But it remains the ocean, no matter what form it takes. In that way it persists.” 

Lucy took his hand in hers. The grip was like coiled wire. 

“What do you know about this Birch fellow?” she asked. “Your Assistant Keeper.”

“Not much, aside from the fact that he served in the Navy. Hopefully he’s not a drunkard and no stranger to working through the night.”

“Is he a married man?”

“Yes, to a woman called Alice. She’s a bit of a brainiac, I’ve been told. She studies birds.”

“I imagine she’ll have her work cut out for her. The woods must be teeming with beaks and feathers.”

“All with their own songs,” Everett said happily. “Like a music box, always playing.”

The town of Westgate hadn’t quite determined what it was or what it should be. Timber was the source of its existence, and it was surrounded by endless groves of pines, firs, and beeches. Men had planted Westgate on a slope, oddly, and the buildings tilted on their foundations like crumbling teeth. Not much had popped up in the town: a grocery, a surgeon’s clinic, a few watering holes and eateries for weary workers. Not far from the center of town was a lumber mill that turned the felled trees of Maine into fresh planks of wood, ready to be shipped across the nation.

The people of Westgate were used to the train stopping and starting again in their town, but rarely did anyone get on or off. They eyed the travelers suspiciously, guessing what brought them to the northern tip of Maine. It was clear by the way the man walked that he made a living with his hands, as they did. But there was something different about him. They couldn’t define it straightaway — was it the way that he tracked his boosteps, as if calculating the sturdiness of the land before him? Or the cut blue eyes, which had been run clear with salt? The man wasn’t crusted over with Earth as they were. He wasn’t a person of timber and Earth, who knew the drag of mountain slopes and the haul of lumber.

“A wickie,” one of them whispered as he passed. Once it was uttered, everyone knew that it was true.

“Sugarloaf Point,” Everett repeated to the train clerk.  “We were told it would be close.”

“By distance, sure. But it’s dense country between here and the coast.”

“Where can I find a carriage?”

“Better off walking,” the  lerk said. “Road’s pitted out.” 

Everett nodded. “I’m guessing you haven’t seen the Inspector of the Lighthouse Board’s First District? Man called Prosser.”

“You’re a good guesser.”

Everett raised the corner of his mouth, lifting his palms from the counter and bowing respectfully. He went to his wife, who was staring up at the black hillside of timber.

“It seems that it’s us against the world,” he told her. “We’ll have to send for the bags once we arrive.”

“Good. I could use a walk.”

With autumn approaching, the Earth clung to the last tinctures of heat that had rolled so easily through the country weeks prior. Lucy and Everett walked through the heart of Westgate, studying the folks who had become products of Maine. The workers moved as if the weight of the hour didn’t press upon them. Their joints seemed to move more fluidly; their skin didn’t drag against the air around them. Some of them milled about the bones of a schoolhouse that was just going up. As of yet, it was nothing but wooden stakes in the ground that marked the vertices of the future structure. 

“Perhaps we won’t have to teach them on our own after all,” Everett said, tipping his cap to the workers.

“Teach who?”

“The little ones, when they come.”

Lucy clutched his arm tighter and smiled into the rushing wind. In time, she thought. When they were ready.

They had nearly reached the end of town when they came upon the window shop. Neither of them would have noticed the place if it wasn’t for the great sheets of glass hanging from the porch eaves. There were over a dozen of them, and no two came in the same shape or size. Thin rectangles; French glass with panes of oak, hickory, maple; portholes like the ones in the Chamberlin Hotel. They glittered as they turned in the cooling breeze. Lucy squinted at the sign hanging from the shop.

Letourneau Glass

The letters were set in a script  that looked down on the street tersely. On the porch, something moved. Lucy thought it was a shadow before making out the shape of a man, hunched over a table. His face was cast down, his palms pressed against a small ocean of glass.

“Bid goodbye to Westgate,” Everett said. He was standing at the mouth of a neglected road up ahead. “The light is waiting.”

The trees formed a weaponless army around the couple, frozen without the wind. They knew, brainlessly, that two souls were passing through land that no one had mastered. Rivers of water flowed beneath their bark, from root to branch. The woods of Maine, Lucy noticed, had a sharper bite than what she knew in Hampton. The pollen was finer than flour and the soil darker than mousse. The robins and jays seemed smaller and stronger than the ones that flitted back home. They flew in straight lines and knew what they were looking for when they darted their heads.

She followed Everett’s bootsteps for what could have been minutes or hours. It was impossible to know if they were pushing deeper into the heart of the forest, or if they were approaching the edge of the pines. Lucy resigned herself to a lack of knowing, skirting the trees mindlessly and moving her legs on Everett’s repeated claims that they were nearing their destination. 

And then the sea materialized in the air like a cut rind. Everett paused and sniffed, hungry for the scent of brine. He strained his ears for the roar of the ocean — and there it was. As delicate as a heartbeat; a breath could drown it out. 

“We’re close,” he almost whispered, and continued his march up a soft incline. Soon, the pines began to thin out. A breeze muscled through the needles, hitting their faces broadside, and there was no denying that it derived from a pulsing organ at the center of the sea. 

The hill leveled out up ahead. Everett paused at its crest, becoming a silhouette against the ripening afternoon. The light was as gold as paint. Lucy waited for a moment, clinging to the momentary thrill of not knowing her home. Then she joined her husband. With her eyeline, she could trace the great line of the horizon, unfettered by land. Above it was the endless sky; and below it, the impossible cradle of the planet’s water. The whitecaps looked like small brittle birds on the lawn of the ocean.

Everett assumed the gaze of a totem beside her. He looked at the sea, the cloud-rich sky, and the Light Station unfurled before them. The keeper’s quarters; the foghouse and storeroom; the Tower at the lip of Sugarloaf Scarp.

“Let’s start with the light,” he said. 

“No.”

He looked at her sharply. “But the light-”

“This is our home now. We can look at the tower once we know where we live.”

Everett opened his mouth in protest, but he knew that she was right. Together, they stepped away from the dark tangle of forest, setting a line for the keeper’s quarters.

No person had laid eyes on the structure in seven weeks’ time, and the forest had begun the slow process of gumming over it. Lichen latticed the roof shingles, and the walls of the cottage were wet with seaspray and wood dew. A spider’s lace broke over Lucy’s face as they approached the front door. They pushed through the quarters softly, testing their feet against the floorboards. The wood, harvested from the surrounding pines, was darker than molasses and fragrant with sap.

“You’ll have to remind me to crouch,” Everett said, regarding the cross beams. He could easily graze the ceiling with outstretched arms.

The stairway was a steep, dark-paneled corridor that groaned as they climbed it. It spit them out at the mouth of a hallway with two chambers bulging off of it. The first was a small study, lopsided by the stairwell. The room was completely bare, save for a pine desk squared beneath the far window. A rectangle was planted upon it — a stack of wood pulp pages stitched into a spine. Everett peered at the book’s cover as if it had been inked with a passage of great meaning before cracking the spine open. Each page was identical: a field of blank space biopsied by lines stretching from east to west. There wasn’t a single word printed inside the book. 

“What is it?” Lucy asked.

“My log,” he answered, slipping the book in his jacket pocket. “My record of the light.”

The chamber at the far end of the hall was meant for sleeping. It had a double mattress in it, and a large window that opened to the tower on the point.

“We’ll have to hang some canvas,” Lucy said, regarding the open glass. “Unless we want the light to rouse us.”

“You are quite the comedienne.”

“I’m perfectly serious. How do you expect us to sleep in a room filled with light?”

A wrinkle developed between Everett’s eyebrows. “It is my duty to watch over the lens…”

“We will work it out later. If you cannot budge, I’ll wear a blindfold to bed.”

“If you must.”

Lucy stared out at the sea that seemed to have no end. She thought of the freighter lines on the Hampton roads. The brackish water colliding at the mouth of the James, the Elizabeth, the Nansemond. The delicate rocking of Chesapeake Bay, cradled by the long limb of Delaware. 

“Okay,” she said mildly. “Let’s see the tower.”

It was not a gentleman’s stroll from the keeper’s quarters to the Lighthouse. The workers had planted the tower at the edge of the scarp, which made for a perilous decline from the sloping hill. A pathway had existed once, but the Earth devoured it. Gobs of granite littered the point, and the rains had formed a withered ravine just wide enough to catch a boot. This would be Everett’s walk, every morning and every night. A lamp would be required.

The lens was a gleaming, symmetrical thing at the height of the tower — mostly colorless, with a tinge of the sea in it. They sailed toward it like a pair of moths, ignoring the fact that they were approaching the edge of the terrestrial world. The tower, Lucy realized as they approached it, looked to have been preserved by the sea. It did not have the patina or the cracks of the one at Old Point Comfort, and the white paint was slathered on with thick, even strokes. It waited for them at the edge of the scarp, posed like a dancer at the end of her routine. Just beyond, the Earth plunged one hundred feet to a jawline of serrated rocks. Everett ignored the ocean as it made a racket on the rocks, fumbling in his pocket for an iron key that he stuck in the door. The lock clicked, unfreezing the knob, and the tower let them in. 

A handrail had been cast in the interior wall, curving upwards and clockwise around the circumference of the tower. It encircled a column of space filled by a lead weight that hung from cables threaded into a pulley system. They extended all the way to the top of the tower.

“Rotation clockwork,” Everett said.

“What does that mean?”

“The lens is not fixed like the one at Old Point Comfort. The weight pulls on it, spins it on its axis.”

Lucy thought for a moment. “How do you get the weight to the top of the tower?”

“I don’t know.”

He released her hand and mounted the staircase, climbing alongside the hanging weight and its marionette strings. The whole way up his hands slid over the wooden bannister, slick with oil. He peered out each miniature window until he arrived at the ladder that led to the lantern room. 

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Lucy nodded, her heart firing beneath her dress collar. Everett pulled himself up the rungs, his wedding ring clinking against the brass with every reach of his left hand, and swung the hatch open. The lens was planted in the center of the room like a glass flower. A blade of sunlight filtered through it. The contraption, to Lucy’s surprise, did not resemble the one at Old Point Comfort. It was double the size — a room’s height, at least, with a six foot diameter. A grown man could step inside the lens where the lamp belonged without so much as crouching. Though it had the familiar curved prisms, there was not a single belt of glass stretching around the center. Rather, four bulls-eye panels made up the midsection of the lens. Each one was equally spaced, quartering the lens, and rimmed with a strip of brass. 

“There it is,” Everett breathed. He was frozen, as if he had seen a glimpse of his maker.

“Our Light,” Lucy whispered in his ear.

He tried squinting away the tears in his eyes, but the lids could not hold. What else could he do but cry? They had arrived at their life.