The Lighthouse

Jan drove them over more rutted gravel to where an old rust-red pickup was parked near the largest of the outbuildings. The bed of the pickup was loaded with boxes, a chest of drawers, an old wheelbarrow. When he shut off the engine Alix could hear the wind skirling outside, the hissing pulse of surf against the rocks far below.

“That’s Bonner’s pickup,” Jan said. He sounded the horn a couple of times; no one appeared. “Well, where is he? Inside somewhere sulking, I suppose.”

“You can’t blame him if he is, can you? We’re taking his job away from him.”

“I don’t have much sympathy for him.”

“No?”

“No. He’s unpleasant and lazy. Look at all this. He hasn’t kept it up.”

“He’s only a caretaker, not a maintenance man… ”

“Doesn’t make any difference. He’s lived out here for three years; he ought to have taken some pride in his surroundings, whether he was paid for it or not.”

“Not everybody feels about lighthouses as you do, Jan.”

“That’s no excuse either. This is an important piece of history; he should have kept it up.”

There was no arguing with him on the subject, so she let it go. But he was overreacting: the buildings didn’t look all that bad, really, at least not from the outside. They could have used a fresh coat of whitewash-and the fence needed repair-but for a coastal light that had been out of service for more than twenty years, everything was in fairly decent shape. Especially the lighthouse itself. Alix studied it through the windshield. It was a variation on the Cape Cod style of lighthouse architecture: a compact two-story rectangular frame building-the watch house-with its three-story tower rising through the center. The tower had been fashioned of bricks made from nearby clay deposits, Jan had told her, the surrounding structure from the timber that had once covered this headland. High above, a catwalk circled the outside of the glassed-in lantern room. She could just make out part of the massive Fresnel lens mounted inside, a marvelous piece of nineteenth-century engineering rendered obsolete by modem technology.

She asked Jan. “Does the light still work after all these years?”

“I’ll answer that after I’ve spent some time with it.”

“You’re not going to try operating it?”

“No,” he said, “of course not. Come on, there’s no sense in sitting here. We’ll track down Bonner ourselves.”

They found him inside the garage, in a workshop area toward the rear, packing tools into a wooden crate. “All of this stuff is mine,” he said, as if challenging Jan to call him a liar. He also said he hadn’t heard the horn, which likewise may or may not have been the truth. He was a dried-up little man somewhere in his fifties, with a bulbous head and dry brown hair combed sideways across the top. His eyes were dull and unfriendly, and so was his manner. Alix decided Jan was justified in calling him unpleasant.

“Need another hour to clear out the rest of my belongings,” Bonner said in sullen tones. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

“Why should we mind?”

“Keys on a peg inside the lighthouse door. I didn’t leave you no provisions. Didn’t see why I should.”

“We didn’t expect you to.”

“Kitchen stove’s almost out of propane. Enough for one more meal, maybe.”

“I’m not surprised,” Jan said. “Where are the empty cylinders?”

“Pantry.”

“Where do we get refills?”

“A-One Marine.”

“In Hilliard?”

“Closest place, ain’t it?” Bonner looked at Alix for the first time. “You going to live out here too, missus?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, you won’t like it.”

“No? Why not?”

“Just won’t. No place for a woman.”

“They had women lighthouse keepers at Cape Blanco a hundred years ago,” she said, quoting Jan. “Or didn’t you know that?”

Bonner grunted. “I’ll finish my packing now,” he said to Jan. “You can find your own way around; you been here before.”

It was cold in the garage; Alix felt chilled inside her light jacket. But the wind outside set her teeth to chattering. “I’m going to get something heavier,” she said. She went to the station wagon, rummaged around among the clothing bags until she found her heavy pea jacket. Jan helped her put it on.

“It’ll be warmer in the house,” he said, “even if Bonner didn’t bother to set a fire.”

“God, I hope so. It’s not always going to be this cold, is it?”

“Most of the time until March, probably. You’ll get used to it, California girl. You lived in New York and Boston, remember?”

“How could I forget?”

“Suppose we take the grand tour? When Bonner leaves we’ll unload the car; then I’ll make us hot toddies.”

“I could use the hot toddy right now.”

“Hey, where’s your pioneer spirit?”

“It froze to death about five minutes ago.”

He laughed, a sound that was lost in the shriek and bluster of the wind, and started away across an expanse of thick weedy grass. Shivering, hunched inside her pea jacket, Alix followed his broad back toward their home for the next twelve months.

Alix

The kitchen depressed her.