The Lightkeeper's Daughters
Jean E. Pendziwol
part one Endings and Beginnings
1
Arnie Richardson
The black Lab is aging. His arthritic legs stiffly pick their way along the well-worn path, stepping carefully over roots and carrying his stout form between the trunks of spruce and poplar. His muzzle, flecked with gray, tracks close to the ground, gathering the scent of his master’s trail.
It is a morning ritual, one that takes them from the cottages at Silver Islet through the woods to Middlebrun Bay—a ritual they have practiced since the Lab was a gangly-legged pup. But even then, all those years ago, the man’s hair was white, his eyes framed by crow’s feet, his beard dusted with silver. Now they are both slowing, man and dog, wincing at stiff joints, choosing their footing carefully. Each morning when they set off at the first pale orange light of dawn, they greet each other with the simple satisfaction of knowing they have another day to do so.
The man leans comfortably on a walking stick, a length of knotty pine first polished by the waves of Lake Superior and then varnished until gleaming in his workshop. He does not need it, not until the trail begins to climb, and then his grip tightens and the wood becomes a part of him, necessary and integral. He pauses at the top of a ridge. Two paths merge here, the one they are on joining the much wider, more frequently traveled route that is part of the hiking trails of Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. The park is quiet now.
It is a mystical place, this peninsula, jutting out into Lake Superior; chiseled rocky cliffs and worn ridges, mysteriously carved by wind and rain and time, take the form of a giant slumbering in a cradle of icy gray water. Legends speak of an Ojibwe god, Nanibijou, lying down at the entrance to Thunder Bay, his magnificent form turning to stone, eternally protecting rich silver deposits. The story may be myth, but the silver is real. Extracting its riches led to deep shafts sunk well below the surface of Superior, where miners followed the veins of ore under the constant threat of encroaching water. The mine gave rise to the town, no more than a hamlet really—a cluster of wooden houses, a blacksmith shop, a store, all abandoned when the Lake won its battle and buried the silver in an icy grave. After a few years cottagers arrived and dusted off the floors and tables, polished the windows, nailed loose shingles into place, and Silver Islet came back to life, if only for a season each year. For generations now, the man’s family has spent the summers in one of the houses, visiting during the winter months for a few days or even weeks when the weather permits. He has walked this path since he was a child.
Man and dog begin their descent toward the shore, the dog’s tail painting half circles in the air behind him, the man’s stick alternately thumping against damp earth and tapping against hard rock as the trail wanders toward the bay. Lake Superior is beginning to stir, shaking off the mist that settled like a shroud overnight. The foghorns at Trowbridge and Porphyry light stations, now silent, spent the hours before dawn calling out to unseen vessels as they carefully charted their way across Thunder Bay, past the cape at the foot of the Sleeping Giant, out toward Isle Royale and into the shipping lanes of Lake Superior. But the rising sun and the waking wind have chased away any remaining wisps, and instead of the ominous warning of the horns, songbirds serenade the walking pair.
The warning would have been a more fitting accompaniment.
The dog’s gait quickens as he senses the nearness of the Lake. His bones are tired and his eyesight faded, but he is a Lab, and the water calls to him. He passes the man and lopes onto the beach of Middlebrun Bay, snatching a stick from the line of debris that was tossed high up above the waterline by waves during a recent storm. He sets off along the shore, the path his paws trace through the sand erased by the Lake as quickly as it is drawn.
The man is not far behind, but far enough that the dog has spotted her before his owner’s first footprint appears. The Lab’s vision is clouded, but he can sense her presence and discern her shape as it emerges from the rocks and trees and beach and waves. He stands in the water, barking, his stick dropped, forgotten.
She is about twenty-six feet long, her wooden hull splintered and gaping on the port side, her boom swinging as the Lake rises and falls beneath her. Each breath of the water lifts her off the rocky bottom, setting her down again with a shudder. The main sail is still set, but flapping, tattered. She is listing, her bilges breached, the Lake moving through her. The man doesn’t need to see the name painted on the stern; he knows that the cursive script reads “Wind Dancer.”
The beach pulls at his feet as he rushes toward the boat, his prints punctuated by the round end of his walking stick so that his trail looks like a message written in Morse code. The bay is shallow, but there are rocks skirting the far end, and it is there that the vessel lies. He gives little thought to the clamoring of the Lab, calling out instead to anyone who may yet be on board. He stumbles toward the point, splashing into the icy water. Numbness creeps up his legs, clutching him, grasping, but he ignores it, continuing over the rocks, avoiding the crushing gap between boat and shore, and hauling himself into the cockpit where he stands, shivering.
He has never been aboard Wind Dancer before, but still the flood of memories threatens to drown him, rushing back as he looks from broken rudder to snapped halyard. He remembers the fort the two of them built together out of driftwood as boys, feels the tug on his rod the time they took the little gaff-rigged boat Sweet Pea out fishing in Walker’s Channel for the first time alone, tastes the beer they shared, stolen from a picnic basket and carried to the black volcanic beach on the far side of Porphyry Island. He hears the whispering of names, Elizabeth and Emily.
“Goddammit, Charlie!” He speaks aloud, looking up at the mast and tattered sail, at the silhouette of two gulls soaring high above. “What the hell have you done now?”
It has been sixty years since they last spoke, sixty years since Porphyry Island went up in flames. He has seen Wind Dancer many times, heard stories of her captain, of Elizabeth. Emily. But they did not speak, he and Charlie. Doing so would have given voice to their complicity, however well-meaning, and fed the ache of regret. It has haunted him. Not a day has gone by in all that time that he hasn’t thought of them. Not one.