The Western Light (28 page)

LITTLE LOUIE AND JOHN HAVE disappeared upstairs to talk over our situation. They don't want me to hear. Or maybe John doesn't want me to hear him trying to coax my aunt into a better humour. But I can hear the troubled sound of their voices rising and falling like the wind outside the lighthouse. “I should never have gone with you, John,” Little Louie moans. “We're going to die out here.” John shouts that they're going to be all right, and my aunt starts to cry. Now his voice drops, and he says imploringly, “Louisa,” and then some words I can't make out. But no matter what he says, she keeps on weeping and talking about how we're going to die. She sounds scared to death, like a schoolgirl. And for a moment I feel pangs of terror too, but then why should I care? Morley is dead. I might as well die myself. Besides, she took John from me. John wouldn't let me leave the scoot. Why wouldn't he let me go with my father? Why couldn't he set me down on the ice near Morley? John had the faster machine; he could get away in time. Maybe he didn't trust my father. Maybe he thought Morley was still mad because John walked out on the game and they lost their chance to win the Pickering Cup. The whole situation is so hopeless I start to sob again.

52

OUTSIDE, A SHUTTER BANGS IN THE WIND. THE NOISE COMES from somewhere in the living room. Farther away, there's a sound like the knock-knock-knock of a hard object bumping against wood. It has to be a large object to make a noise so loud. When I look out the window, a boat-like shape is being blown around on the ice, although it's difficult to make out what kind of boat it is in the rainy twilight. The harbour is dark with shadows. Now I see the impossible — what is beyond any sense of how things work back in the world of the mainland. Morley is steering the wheel of the scoot and the wind is catching the blades of its propeller and blowing the scoot in half circles. The scoot bumps against the boathouse dock. Without warning, it stops spinning. My father heaves himself off its bow onto the ice. He picks himself up and begins stumbling towards Double Rock. I knock on the windowpane although he's too far away to hear. He staggers up over the rocks and lurches along the slush-covered walkway. His frozen hair sticks up in pointy grey tufts, and he's weaving from side to side. The front door of the lighthouse rebounds off the wall with a crash. In the living room, there's another crash. Morley has upended the couch and he's peering under it. Why is he looking for me there? Then it hits me: he's looking for my body. I drag myself to the kitchen door, and call his name, but he's making too much noise.

“Where is she, John. Goddamn you!”

“Here,” I manage to croak. At the sound of my voice, he puts down the couch.

“Mary,” he says tenderly. “Thank God!”

I steady myself against the doorframe. “You came after me.”

“Sal found the note,” he replies. “Mrs. Pilkie said you got on the scoot and didn't get off.” There are steps behind me, and my father's face darkens.

“Don't come any closer, Doc Bradford.” Next to me, John lifts up the shotgun and sights it.

“No! No!” I scream. I must have blinked because I don't see Morley rush past me and grab John's gun. I didn't know my father could move so fast. He sticks the gun into John's chest. “Now I'm going to kill you, you son of a bitch!” he says.

“Go ahead,” John cries. “Finish me off, Doc Bradford!”

Immediately, John begins coughing, and I'm startled by how sick he sounds. His wheezing cough has turned into a phlegm-choked rumble.

The sound takes my father aback. He puts down the gun. With his foot, he pushes it under the couch and then he grabs John by the throat.

The two men hit the floor, making the kitchen walls shake. His hands tighten around John's neck until the veins stand out on John's forehead.

“I didn't run off with John! Tell him, Little Louie! Please!”

Her voice comes out small and whispery. “John and I got trapped on the dock. So we took the scoot.” She hesitates. “We didn't know Mary was on board.”

Morley's gaze locks mine, his eyes burning as if he's willing me to understand something. Then he slumps to the floor, his hands dropping from John's throat. We bend over him.

Gingerly, I touch my father's cheek. It's blue and cold. “Is he dead?”

“He's got hypothermia,” John says, rubbing his neck where Morley was choking him. “It makes you sleepy. Let's get him warm. My daddy taught me what to do.”

I nod my head and Little Louie does too.

He looks at us, and points at the kettle hanging from a nail on the kitchen wall. “Get some snow from outside and boil some water and we'll put hot cloths on his chest and forehead. The arms and legs don't matter.” Little Louie and I retrieve snow and heat it up in the kettle as John grabs my father's ankles and drags him closer to the stove. He removes Morley's duffel coat and plaid shirt and massages my father's chest. Little Louie pours hot water over the rags I've found behind the stove. John applies a hot rag to my father's face and spreads a larger one across Morley's chest. We all listen to Morley's breathing. At first, it's hard to hear any sound but Morley's chest is still moving up and down. John runs his hands across my father's face and chest; then he says under his breath: “Please, Doc Bradford, please.” He looks towards the window, popping his fingers against his palms. Outside the sky is a rainy void, and I think of the Pilkies' name for their island: “Little Alcatraz.”

“It's not working.” John sounds genuinely disappointed.

“He's alive. You have to save him.”

“Don't look at me like that, Mary. I tried, eh?” he cries, his big eyes glowing with hurt. “I brought you girls out here for nothing. I'm good for nothing. Crazy, too.” He sits down with a loud crash at the kitchen table. “You know it's true, eh? Nutty as a fruitcake.” He bangs his forehead on the table. It makes a horrible sound against the wood. Little Louie shouts at him to stop, but he keeps right on doing it. The sound is terrible. “We know your wife did it!” I burst out.

He stops banging his head. Immediately his coughing starts up and he pulls out a plaid hanky and blows his nose. “What in hell are you talking about?”

“Little Louie and I saw the file. My friend Ben stole it. You told Dr. Shulman she did it.”

He looks at me first and then at Little Louie. Their gaze holds for one, two, three, four seconds. Overcome, he drops his head. “I'm not good enough for you, Louisa,” he says in a hoarse voice.

“Oh, John,” she says softly.

“I was punch-drunk, eh? I can't remember. Maybe I killed them. Peggy was going to leave me and take the baby, too. I let people down. That's what I do. But I wouldn't hurt either of you. Do you believe me, sweetheart?”

Fear is bright in my aunt's eyes, and I know she's thinking the same thing. What's he going to do to us? “Well, you can't disappoint me,” I pipe up. “I have been disappointed by life already.”

“A girl like you?” He cackles hysterically. “You think you've been disappointed?” But when I pull up my left pant leg so he can take a good, hard look at Hindrance, he stops what he's going to say and sighs.

53

I SUPPOSE I WAS CRAZY TO THINK HE WOULDN'T HURT ME, BUT by then I realized I was in no danger. Each of us knows one or two people who give us a sense of who we might become, even if no one mentions the possibility out loud. Maybe we've sensed it in ourselves from the beginning and all we need is someone to reflect that possibility back. As long as a few people see our potential we can hope that someday we might become the person they think we are. I was that person for John Pilkie and for a while he had been that person to me.

So in a version of Sal's meanest, shaming voice, I told him we couldn't waste time. He and Little Louie watched while I dragged myself over to the bookshelf, pulled down the old guidebook,
How to Survive in the North
, opened it to the right page and shoved it under John's nose:

If nothing else is available, a rescuer may use his own body to warm the hypothermia victim. Some Eskimo tribes place the victim, naked, in the arms of another naked tribe member until the body heat of the rescuer revives the victim.

“You want me to get skinny with your father?”

“Yes.”

“I'm not a goddamn Eskimo.”

“Eskimos know more about cold than us. Please. Just try it and see.”

He turned his back to us for a moment, but when he spoke again, his voice was contrite. “All right, Mary. I'll do it for you.” Shaking his head, he began pulling off my father's trousers. Morley's eyes flew open. Grumbling and muttering, he held on to his belt and wouldn't let go.

“It's all right,” I whispered in Morley's ear. “We're doing this to keep you warm.” I remembered what Morley had told me about pain. So I said, “It's not that you aren't cold, Morley. It's that you don't mind if you're cold. Pretend you're tossing the cold away. You'll see. You'll warm up.” My father's eyes closed. He began to snore.

John wrapped a scarf around my father's head. “To keep the heat from escaping, eh? Now turn the other way, and let me get my clothes off.”

“I won't look,” I said. “Please save my father.”

“That's what I'm aiming to do.” He grabbed my hand. “Do you forgive me?”

I didn't say “yes.” Instead I wiggled out of his grasp. For a moment, I thought he was angry again.

He dropped his eyes to the floor. “You're going to make me work hard for that, aren't you?”

I still didn't answer. Not until John climbed under his raccoon coat with my father. Then I whispered, “Yes,” but I don't think he or Little Louie heard me.

Out on the Bay, the wind had picked up again, and it started to rain, hard and fast, drops that shook the old windowpanes of the lighthouse. The wood stove was throwing off more heat than before, and every so often, my aunt or I woke up to stoke it. Through the kitchen window, the sky was black as pitch, as Sal would say, although Sal seemed a million miles away now, and I knew the girl who used to listen to her was gone for good.

SEVERAL TIMES DURING THE NIGHT I dreamt John and my father were rolling over and over on the floor, locked in each other's arms. Sometimes my father was on top strangling John with his bare hands, and sometimes John was on top holding a pillow to my father's face. Once he wasn't on the floor at all but standing over my father holding Jordie's shotgun.

When I woke up, it was late morning. The stove was keeping the room very warm, and Little Louie was cooking up the cans of pork and beans that John had found in the root cellar. My father was fully dressed. He sat in a chair, drinking hot water from a tin mug. He stood up slowly when he saw me, and I put my arms around his hips and placed my cheek on his stomach. He patted my head over and over without speaking. I guess we looked pretty funny, but I was glad to be close to him, glad and thankful to be like any girl with her father after a disaster, knowing there is more to be said and not sure where to start. Then Morley shifted his weight slightly and I could feel the rumble of words starting in his chest.

“Are you all right, Mary?” he asked.

“Yes. Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

I took an anxious breath because I didn't know if Morley would believe me. “John saved you. He made you warm last night.”

“John made a mess of things. He could have killed you.”

“But he didn't.”

“Thank God for that.” The anger in Morley's voice subsided slightly.

“Where is he?”

“Gone. He left that for you.” My father pointed at a note on the kitchen table. It had been written in the familiar curling script:

To Mary:

 

I figure with your leg and my bad luck we had more in common than you might think, but you and Louisa are better off without me so I'm on my way. I told her to stay and look after you. You'll find your brooch in the pocket of your snowsuit. I took it to help your aunt and me start a new life out west but we don't need it now. I wish I had done better for you and Louisa and Doc Bradford.

 

Love,
J.P.

I retrieved the brooch and held it in the palm of my hand, and it struck me that one day soon Big Louie would come up to visit, and I would wear the brooch for her and tell her everything, well mostly everything that had happened at the Western Light.

“He's gone?”

“He's in the old dory,” my father replied.

Little Louie came outside with me. During the night, the ice had gone out, and in every direction I saw a broad reach of shiny dark blue water. Then I spotted the dory. John was rowing it out into the shipping channel where the late morning sunshine, filtering through the clouds, lit up large, floating chunks of ice. He had walked eleven miles in a blizzard and hid himself in the basement at Towanda Lodge, the place he had worked as a teenager, and now he was setting out on the Great Bay, a sick man in a small boat who would need all his strength to row to the nearest harbour. But he had grown up in the wilds of the open. If anybody could make it to land, it was John.

“You didn't go?” I asked my aunt.

“No,” she said as if she wished otherwise.

In soft, halting words, Little Louie told me how John had stolen Sib's truck from the Beaudry farm. He was to pick her up at the dock, because the road by the harbour is the only way out of town. But as soon as John arrived, things went haywire. Sib had reported the truck stolen and a police officer spotted them in it. So my aunt did what she'd told my father they'd done, they fled the truck and got on the Lands and Forest scoot because John knew it was the fastest one. She cried and apologized: “I guess I wanted someone who needed me more than anything.” I replied that I understood perfectly, although I didn't really understand — not for years and years.

Then we fell silent. To the north, the sky had clouded over and a band of watery pink light glowed beneath ragged-looking thunderheads. We saw a zigzag of lightning, followed by a loud cracking noise. John put down his oars and unfurled the dory's sail. My breath caught in my throat as he steered the dory into the wind, and I thought — as I have thought during all the special times in my life — that I must not forget the moment presenting itself to me, because I wanted the experience to stay in my memory, maybe not exactly the way it was but as a symbol of all that had happened and could be remembered, to be turned over again for new meanings until I could certify it as part of the experiences that have made me who I am.

Out on the Bay, the hull of his dory was turning as black as India ink under the storm clouds. The figure of John had darkened too and the dory grew smaller and smaller until it was a smudge on the horizon. We waited until it was out of sight.

Little Louie took my hand and we went back into the house, where Morley was serving up the pork and beans. We ate to the raucous, communal sound of seagulls diving for fish.