Two. The Winter of the Long Cold

The cold came in January and it did not leave.

By the second week it had frozen the puddles in the cart track up to the north cottage into sheets you could break with a boot, and Ada Beausoleil had stopped coming down to the tower, and the reason was not the cold. Everyone said it was the cold. Hester Warren said it was the cold and then went on folding sheets and looking at the window, which is a thing women in that era did with their mouths when the truth was that they had already decided.

Ada was sick. Ada had been sick since before Christmas, in the way of a chest that has been working too hard for too many years, and the doctor from Gulls End had come out on the mail boat and sat with her for an hour and an hour and a half and had come back in and said the word consumption in the doorway and then, being a decent sort, said something else for twenty minutes afterward to take the weight off it.

"She's not going to see spring," Hester said.

"She'll see the light," Elias said. "The light doesn't keep a calendar."

He had gone up to the cottage every second day since the beginning of January with the log, the oil can, and a scythe, and he had done what had to be done, and he had come back down with his jaw set and nothing to say. Maren went with him the first time in January, up the track past the wrecked spruce, and found Ada in the chair by the window with a blanket over her knees and the wind coming under the door and finding the gaps in the boards.

"You'll want to take the lamp," Ada said, when she saw the oil can. "There's a wick in the drawer. And don't trim it with a knife, use the tweezers, and if you can't find the tweezers use your father's, he'll not miss them till Tuesday."

"You can light it."

"I can light it. It's the stairs I can't do."

So Maren lit Warren Light on the eleventh of January, 1963, and the twelfth, and the fourteenth, climbing the eighty-four iron steps with the key in her pocket and her heart going like a bird in a bag, and she wrote the hours in a school notebook at the kitchen table because the official log was on the hill and she was not allowed up it. Ada read the notebook aloud to herself in the evenings when Maren brought it down, checking the hours, and sometimes she corrected Maren's arithmetic out loud in a voice like a dry leaf.

"Two hours and forty minutes."

"It's two-forty."

"It's two-forty-three. Count the turnings."

Maren counted the turnings after that. Four seconds a revolution, sixty to the hour, and Ada could hear a clock that had stopped. There was a day in the second week of February when Maren was sure she had made an error of seven minutes, and Ada told her to go up and count again, and when Maren came back with the same answer, Ada said, "Then that's the time, and the log's wrong, or the log's right and the sky's lying. One of those three things is always true and you don't know which, so write down what you saw and let the Board pick which one they can live with."

And then Ada coughed for a long time, and the notebook was forgotten.

---

The storm of the twenty-second of February came up on the tide with a southerly, which is the wrong quarter for it, and Maren woke at one in the morning to a sound she had never heard before, which was the sea going onto the rocks at the foot of the tower with a sound like an audience.

Her father was already dressed. He was dressed and he had the log-book in his hand and the oil can and he was trying to get the lamp lit and it wouldn't go, and then Maren understood: the draft from the gallery door, blown open by the wind, had come down the stair and taken the flame off the mantle, and to light it again he had to get the door shut, and to get the door shut he had to go out onto the gallery in a southerly gale in the dark with a hundred and thirty pounds of an old man and one hand on the rail.

"No," Maren said. "I'll go."

"You'll go nowhere."

"I'll go and hold the door. You light the lamp. That's faster."

It was faster. She went out twelve steps onto the wet iron gallery in the dark with the wind taking the breath out of her in one piece and the sea below her going to and fro over the rocks with a white light on it, and she got both hands on the gallery door and hauled it to and dropped the bar, and she stayed out there three minutes and forty seconds holding the rail with both hands while the wind worked at her, and when her father opened the door from inside she came in like a swimmer and lay on the stairs laughing and coughing for a minute, and then she went and looked at the clockwork.

It had stopped at 11:20.

"It can't stop," she said. "There's a hundred and forty pounds on it."

"It stops when you let it run out," said her father. "I let it run out. Twelve hours, and I didn't wind it at noon because I was up north with Ada and it slipped my mind. That's all. A man who lets his own weight run out has no business writing a word about anybody else's absence."

They got the lens turning by hand — both of them, on the brake, shoving the weight round — and then it was turning and the beam went out over the water and Maren sat on the bottom step of the stair with her back against the wall, drenched through, and understood that her father had failed at his job because he had been sitting with a dying woman, and that he would carry that failure in the log under his own name for the rest of his life.

In the morning the log said:

22 Feb. Wind S, storm. Light extinguished 11:20 p.m. relit 12:05 a.m. Visible one mile, fog signal in operation. Second light burning 11:52 p.m. to dawn, unaccounted.

Maren read it over her father's shoulder while he wrote the last of the day, and did not say anything, and he said, without turning round:

"She had the key."

"You said she never needed a key."

"She had a key from 1938 and she never used it and I never asked her to give it up." He dipped the pen. "That's the truth, so it's what goes in the book."

---

Ada Beausoleil died on the ninth of March, in the front room of the north cottage, with the fire out and the window open on a morning cold enough to keep the flowers in the glass.

It was a hard death and a fast one. There had been a week in February when they thought she would last the month, and then a week in March when she was sitting up in the chair asking for the tide tables, and then two days, and then it was over.

Hester found her. Elias had gone over on the eighth to take the chair to the cottage and make the bed and put the stove in, because Ada would not have the County's hired girl in the room. He came down the track at four in the afternoon and did not go back up, and sat on the bench by the door of the keeper's house and let Hester bring him tea he did not drink.

They buried her on the fifteenth, which was the earliest the ground could be got into, with three feet of frost still in it under the spade. The island had a graveyard on the north side of the church at Gulls End, an acre and a half of leaning markers and salt grass, and the Marrows went over on the mail boat with four other people from the island and the mailman, and Ada Beausoleil went into a grave in the ground of a place where she had never lived.

They put on the headstone what the family had written on a slip of paper: ADA BEAUSOLEIL. 1878–1963. KEEPER OF THE LIGHT AT WARREN.

Hester said the name out loud at the graveside, and it was the first time Maren had heard her mother say it with any weight in it, and Maren looked at her and thought her mother had been waiting a long time to say it.

Then, in the lane behind the church, waiting in the sleet by the gate with her hands in her coat, was a man Maren had never seen before, and he was not a mourner, and he was not from the island.

He was maybe thirty. He had the shoulders and the black hair of a person from the coast, and he stood with his hat in his hands and his hat was not wet. When they came out he stepped forward and said to Hester, in a voice with a slight flattening of the vowels in it, "Mrs. Warren. I would like to speak with you, if it's permitted, and I will not ask you for anything. I only want to say thank you, and to say I know she was not alone."

Hester said, "Are you family?"

"No."

"Then I don't know what to thank you for."

"I lit for her," the man said. "In the winters of fifty-eight and fifty-nine and sixty-one, when the men were out and the light wanted tending and she couldn't get down the stairs any more. I was sixteen and I was good at it and she taught me. I am not family and I will not pretend to be. My name is Thomas Beausoleil and I am her brother's son, and I came on the boat with the flowers because I had to be on the same water as her one more time."

And Ada's son took off his hat, and looked at the wet graveside, and said, to nobody, "Well, Aunt Ada," and laughed once, and put his hat back on.

Maren saw her father put the log-book under his arm a little tighter.

---

On the seventh of April, the boat brought a letter from Augusta with a Board of Lighthouse Commissioners seal on it, addressed to Mr. E. Warren, Keeper, Warren Light, Thrush Island, and the postmark on it said it had been sent to the wrong address first and forwarded, and Maren, who read everything, noted that the letter had been in the mail system for nine weeks.

It said that in consequence of certain information received, and at the request of the District Superintendent, a full inspection of the station had been carried out on the fourteenth of March, and that the keeper's log for the months of November and February had been examined, and that the Board, being unable to reconcile the entries respecting the lighting-up of the light with the keeper's absence from the island on the dates in question, had resolved to require the keeper to furnish a full and particular account of the lighting-up of the light on those nights, and further, to explain the discrepancy between the hours entered and the hours which the log showed the light to have burned.

Elias Warren read it twice at the kitchen table and then folded it and put it in the drawer with the bills and said nothing for a long time.

"What do they mean?" Maren said. "You're asking them for what?"

"They're asking me to explain a second light."

"There was no second light. Ada was sick. You were on the island. The wind blew the door open and the clockwork ran down and you lit it with me at midnight and the light burned till dawn."

"You lit it," her father said. "You held the door."

"Both of us. And there's the entry: second light burning eleven-fifty-two to dawn, unaccounted. Which is a lie, and it's my lie because I wrote it for you, and I wrote it that way so that you'd have to say so out loud and be seen to be telling the truth." Maren heard her own voice go up and was frightened by it. "So it's a lie that saves you. And now they've written to Augusta about it. Why would they write to Augusta about a lie that saves you?"

"Because," said her father, "the log is evidence, and evidence does not care why it says what it says."

And Elias Warren took out the log-book and opened it on the table, and showed her the page of the twenty-second of February, and she looked at it, and then she looked at it again, and then she went very still, because she had been reading that book for three years and she knew every stroke of her father's hand in it — the slant of it, the way he crossed his sevens, the little descending loop he made at the end of a line — and the entry for the twenty-second of February was in a different hand.

It was a careful, upright, educated hand. It was the hand of somebody who had never written a weather observation in his life.

Maren's father watched her find it, and did not help her, and did not lie.

"Somebody else wrote that line," he said. "In March. The day after the inspection. A man from the Board's office came out on the mail boat with a warrant to look at the log, and he wrote it in your uncle Judson's best hand — paid him a dollar and fifty for the afternoon — and then he signed the keeper's name at the bottom of the page, because the keeper's signature is what makes it a record."

He turned the page and showed her. Under the twenty-second of February, in the same upright hand, was E. Warren — and Maren looked at it and at her father's slanted script in the margin where he had noted the wind and the visibility, and the two hands sat on the same page like two people in a doorway.

"So they made it up," she said.

"They made it up. And they had my log for three days and my father's word for it, and a hundred and forty pounds of counterweight to prove the light had stopped, and a dead woman at the north end of the island who couldn't be asked a single question without making everything else worse."

Elias Warren closed the book.

"They can take the light," he said. "That's what this letter is. They're going to say that a light whose keeper is not on the island when the light burns is a light with two keepers, and two keepers is one too many, and they will transfer the station to a man at the mainland station who will also take the mail and the stores and come out on the tide, and they will move Ada's cottage into the file of unoccupied property, and they will take the lantern and put it in a store in Portland and sell it in 1968."

"And Ada?"

"Ada is dead, and the dead are very good at not testifying."

"Then what do we do?"

Her father got up and put the kettle on, because he was a man who had been putting kettles on at moments like this for twenty years and it was the only prayer he had.

"We do nothing," he said. "That is what we do, and it is the hardest available option, and I would like you to remember that when you are older and someone tells you that a small person with a pen can change what a big person has written."