Where No Light Should Be

Chapter One: The Last Boat In

The lamp went out at twenty-two minutes past six, and that was the hour Effie Grantham liked best.

She climbed the thirty-nine iron steps with the extinguisher in one hand and the log book under her arm, and she put out the flame the way her grandfather had taught her, gently, so the wick would not smoke and glaze the chimney. Then she stood a while in the lamp room with the great fourth-order lens around her like the inside of a glass beehive, and she watched the color come back into Lake Superior.

November light on that water was not really light. It was a grudging gray that leaked over the eastern rim and showed you what you already knew: eleven miles of running sea, the black teeth of Dogtooth Reef half a mile off the point, and the low humped back of Kettle Island going away west under its stunted spruce. The island was twelve miles long and mostly rock. Somebody a hundred years ago had named it for the deep round holes the old ice had ground into its reefs — kettles, the fishermen called them, some of them wide enough to swallow a skiff and deep enough to hide it.

Effie opened the log on the little table under the north window and wrote in her small square hand.

*Nov. 4, 1897. Wind NE, fresh, hauling N. Sea heavy on reef. Bar. 29.41 falling. Lit 4:41 p.m. Nov. 3, ext. 6:22 a.m. Consumed 2 qt 1 gill. Lens clean. Ice in oil house.*

She looked at the last line a moment and added: *No ships.*

That was not remarkable. In the first week of November, the fleet that was still running kept out in the deep water, and the ones that were not still running were laid up in Duluth and Ashland and Two Harbors with their fires drawn and their hatches battened for the winter. The season was over. The lake knew it. You could feel the year closing like a hand.

Effie was fifteen. She had trimmed wicks and logged weather and polished brass at Dogtooth Point since she was nine, and for the last twenty months she had done nearly all of it, because her grandmother Ada Grantham was the official keeper of record and Ada Grantham was sixty-eight years old with a hip that ground like a millstone in cold weather. The Lighthouse Board did not need to know how the work was divided. The light burned dusk to dawn, the log was kept, the returns went in on the last boat of the season. That was all the Board asked.

The island asked other things.

She went down to the dwelling, and the kitchen was warm, and Ada was at the stove with her sleeves pushed up over her forearms, which were the forearms of a woman who had hauled her own water for fifty years.

"Out clean?" Ada said.

"Out clean."

"Barometer."

"Twenty-nine forty-one, falling."

Ada made a sound in her throat. "Then Skeat will run his boat today and not tomorrow, and the whole island will be down at the harbor by noon to watch him do it."

The mail boat. Effie had forgotten, which was strange, because she had been thinking of it for a week. Leland Skeat's *Ranger* was the last connection between Kettle Island and the rest of the world, and once she made her final crossing there would be nothing coming or going until the ice broke in April. Eighteen or twenty weeks. Some years more.

"I put your good stockings by the fire," Ada said, not looking around.

"I don't need good stockings to stand on a dock."

"You need good stockings because they'll be looking at you," said Ada, "and they always look at your feet first, the mean ones. Eat your porridge."

Effie ate her porridge.

They did not talk about why the island looked at them. It had been two years, near enough, and the not-talking had worn a groove so deep that they could walk it in the dark.

On the night of the eleventh of November, 1895, the steel steamer *Marietta*, downbound with iron ore and the Copper Range payroll in her strongroom, had come in on Dogtooth Reef in a northeast gale and broken her back and gone down in eleven fathoms with all twenty-six hands. Three bodies came ashore that week. The rest stayed where they were. The inquiry sat in Duluth in January and heard from a shipping agent, an underwriter, a lake captain who had passed the island at ten that night, and an assistant lighthouse inspector, and it concluded, in the mildest language it could find, that the keeper of the Dogtooth Point light, Amos Grantham, had shown a confused light in a gale, and that his log for the night of the eleventh was incomplete, and that his habits had not been what the Service required of a man in a lonely station.

His habits. Effie had been thirteen and she had sat in the back of that room in a coat too big for her and heard a man she had never met say the word *drunkard* about a man who had not touched liquor since her mother was born.

Amos Grantham came home to Kettle Island and did not speak much for six weeks and then died in his chair with the *Notice to Mariners* open on his knee. The doctor from the mainland wrote *apoplexy*. Effie thought that was a fine long word for a thing that was really just a name being taken away from a man.

Ada had been made keeper because there was nobody else and because the Board did not want the expense of a new man at a station that would be automated or discontinued inside a decade. And the island had gone on being the island. Some of them were kind in the way people are kind to the sick. Some of them crossed the lane.

"They'll be four passengers," Ada said suddenly. "Off the boat. Skeat's been bragging on it a week."

"Four? In November?"

"Salvage men." Ada set down her spoon. "They mean to bid the *Marietta*'s boilers before the ice takes her apart."

Effie put her own spoon down.

"They can't dive her in November."

"They can look at her in November," said Ada, "and lie about her in December, and sell her in January." Her mouth was a hard line. "They'll be up here wanting to see the charts. You'll be civil, and you'll show them nothing."

"Grandpa's charts aren't secret."

"Everything of your grandfather's is secret now," Ada said, "because everything of your grandfather's is all we've got."

***

The *Ranger* came in at four o'clock with a white bone in her teeth and the sea slapping her quarter.

Dogtooth Harbor was not much: a hooked spit of shingle, a stone crib pier that the ice rebuilt every spring in a new shape, Leland Skeat's long tarred fish house with its net reels, Orrin Pethick's store with the anchor painted on the gable, and, up the slope on the good ground, the Kernow House — three stories of white clapboard with a green mansard roof and eleven windows facing the water, which in summer took in fishing parties from Chicago at four dollars a day.

By November the Kernow House had one guest and eleven cords of firewood. Its owner, Adelaide Kernow, stood at the head of the pier in a sealskin coat with her hands folded in front of her, and she was smiling the way she always smiled, which was politely and completely, like a woman reading a bill of sale.

Everybody was there. Effie counted them without meaning to, because counting was a habit of the station: the Sivertsen brothers, Odd and Nils, and Nils's boy Karl; Bertram Lisk, who mended nets and never spoke; Gus Mott, who had been a cooper when there was a fishery worth barreling for; Orrin and Hattie Pethick from the store; old Ephraim Voyle the boatbuilder and his son Judd; Aksel Rinne, who trapped the west end and came in twice a month smelling of woodsmoke and marten; Bess Tegg, who cooked for the hotel; Ossian Rife and Weems Dando, Adelaide Kernow's two hired men, who did the hotel's heavy work and, in the off-season, other work that nobody described; Dr. Neville Garth in his green scarf, standing off by himself; Sammy Croft, who was fourteen and slept in a corner of Skeat's fish house with the smoked whitefish and had no people anywhere; Skeat himself at the wheel; Adelaide Kernow; Ada; Effie.

Nineteen. That was the winter list. Nineteen souls on twelve miles of rock, and Effie could have said every one of their names in her sleep, and did, some nights, the way other girls said prayers.

The *Ranger* came alongside and Sammy Croft jumped for the pier with the bow line and made it fast and got his hands out of the way of the surge without being told, which was the whole art of it.

The first man off was big.

He came over the rail with a carpetbag in one fist and landed on the crib planks like a dropped anvil, and he laughed at nothing at all — just laughed, out loud, at the island, at the weather, at the cold coming off the water — and the sound of it went up the slope and turned every head.

"Well," he said. "Look at that. Look at *that*." He was looking at the light.

He was forty-odd, black-bearded, in a canvas coat with a fur collar, and when he shifted the bag Effie saw his right hand. The whole back of it was scarred white and hairless, a smooth shining glove of old burn or old crush that ran up into the cuff.

"Bellinger," said Adelaide Kernow, coming forward. "You'll be Mr. Bellinger."

"Jack Bellinger, ma'am, and I'll be anything you like if there's a fire in it." He took her hand in the scarred one and did not seem to notice that she looked at it. "Kernow House? I've heard of your table as far as Cleveland."

"You have not," said Adelaide Kernow.

"No," he agreed cheerfully, "but I intend to."

After him came two men who did not laugh — a wide, silent one named Teague and a lean one named Marlin, both of them handling their crates the careful way men handle gear they will be trusting their lives to. Diving gear. Effie saw the shape of a helmet through the slats of the second crate and something turned over in her chest.

The third passenger was a small dry man of fifty in a black overcoat, with a leather case chained to his wrist by a thin strap. He came ashore looking at nobody, and when Skeat said something to him he answered in six words and wrote something down.

"Alfred Doyne," he said to the pier at large. "Adjuster. Kirkbride and Mull, Chicago."

The word *adjuster* went through the crowd like cold water down a collar. Insurance. Effie saw Adelaide Kernow's smile stay exactly where it was.

And then, when the crowd had begun to shift and Skeat was passing up mailbags, one more man came off the boat.

Nobody had said there would be a fifth. He had ridden deck passage in the lee of the wheelhouse with a blanket over his shoulders, and he came down the plank slowly, holding the rail with both hands like a man on a ladder in a wind. He was perhaps thirty-five and looked sixty. His cheeks were hollow and shone with sweat in the cold. His coat was a good coat once. He carried nothing but a flat oilcloth packet under his arm, held there the way you hold a thing you have been holding a long time.

He stopped at the foot of the plank and coughed. It went on a while. When it was done he took the cloth away from his mouth and folded it over quickly.

"Room," he said to Adelaide Kernow. "I want a room."

"We're closed for the season," she said pleasantly.

The man put his hand in his pocket and brought out a ten-dollar note. It was creased into eighths and it was stained, water-stained, the ink gone soft and brown at the folds, as though it had been wet through once, long ago, and dried badly, and never spent.

Adelaide Kernow looked at the note for a moment longer than she needed to.

"What's your trade?" she said.

"I haven't got one."

"Your name, then."

"Hain," he said. "Fergus Hain."

And Effie, standing back by the net reels with her collar up, saw Dr. Neville Garth's face when the man said it. The doctor had gone the color of the sky.