This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Peter Sargent
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
The Towers Of Jerhico
The the cold whipped moisture from his reddened cheeks, the boy was fixed to his spot on the beech, his each searching the storm for a single light. He spotted a soft glow smeared across dark clouds. The wind beat those clouds into monstrous faces with swirling black eyes. The sea was an open desert with no salvation, save for that beacon.
Then the light went out. Three deep rolling bell chimes sailed across the harbor. These weren't the fog bells, but a call for help. The walls of the tower were buckling. Men gathered along the shore and shouted over the wind while discussing what to do, but at last they arrived at the consensus that there wasn't a hope of rescue. The cries continued until at last everyone gathered on land let out a shudder when the bell sang its last goodbye. In the clear morning, they went to the ledge and found calm, empty water where the lighthouse had been.
* * * *
On the night David shot himself, my father gave me an old leather bound book. First he stumbled to the china chest, knocked over a chair, and tripped on it. He pushed himself up, groping for the chair shoved it out of his way. I didn't go to help him. Since a the day a hale of burning cinders took his eyes, he had never been willing to accept any charity from anyone, even if it was nothing more than an outstretched hand. He'd said his condition was his reward for his life, and so was the bullet hole in David's neck.
Dad went to the bottom drawer and put the place settings inside on the ground. His withered hands searched from side to side before they fell on their prey. He snatched it up and plunked it down on the dining table. He separated the pages with a delicate touch. The handwriting inside the book was careful and small. My dad told me that his own grandfather had written it. He pointed out the window. There was the ocean and a dim globe of light that came and went.
The lighthouse at Minot's Ledge had been a fixture since my earliest memories. Sometimes when I came to visit Dad, I stood at that window and watched its steady sequence of pulses. My father might be fixing a dinner, something that always turned up burnt. He would drop it on the table and stand next to me and tell me about the lighthouse.
“That wasn't the first tower that's stood out there.”
He'd told me that more than a few times. He told me as though he thought that even if I'd learned nothing in school, he would be happy if I knew the history of Minot's Ledge. There had lived a keeper by the name of Andrew Wilson. He'd been my father's grandfather and the first of our family to live in America, the man who'd built the house in which I grew up. He'd died on the ramparts of the first light to stand there. He'd gone under as the storm took it out to sea.
The book on the table with the neat penmanship had been the keeper's log. Among other artifacts, it had been stored in a sea chest that was the only item recovered from the wreck. Dad slammed the book shut with sudden strength.
“David's come to it.” he said.
He was facing the window now and the rain was starting to come down hard. It spilled into the space between the sill and the opened bottom pane.
“David's come to it.”
My father brought me out to the little three season porch. It was just big enough for two chairs. Walls and a roof enclosed the rough wooden floor, but the structure hung off the house without any electricity or heat of its own. Dad dragged out an electric heater, its cord leading back into the house.
“I know I've lived too hard.” he said. “I'm sorry for you boys. I know it hurt your brother.”
A crescent of water appeared beneath his dead eyes. I'd never seen dad cry and even then the tears didn't spill over. Rather, the pain simmered at his edges. I wanted to say that David wasn't his fault. David was an adult when he pulled the trigger. Our father still thought of him as a little boy who'd never grown up. I always thought it was better to say that my brother had been a broken man who never grew old. Dad had believed he was hard on us, but we both knew that he was harder on himself. There had been no money and we'd lost what we'd had.
There was a part of our family legend that Dad savored the most in the telling of it. He always said that the men didn't last very long. He was no proof of that himself, but after I'd heard the gunshot that night and after I'd found David slumped on the carpet with blood dribbling down his chin, I was ready to believe it. Before that, my uncle had driven himself and my aunt and my cousins into a wall and even that hadn't been enough. It had taken my own brother.
I said, “I don't want to hear about it anymore. Even if it's true, what's the point if there's no way to stop it?”
“He can stop it.”
“Your grandfather?”
“I'd once met some women who'd known Andrew Wilson back in Scotland. They'd said he'd left because no one wanted him there. He was too strange. They'd said he was sick. Well ladies talk. Grandpa worked and that was enough.”
“How was he strange?”
“He was a stranger in our modern world.” said Dad. “He was a wise and rough man that no one understood. I remember the last time I saw him. He was sitting on this porch and it was the winter my grandmother'd died. Grandpa had only built the porch for the spring through the fall, but he'd pulled a chair out to sit in anyway. I might have been about five. I'd said something to him and and I don't remember what it was, but he didn't respond. I decided to just sit there in silence on the cold wood at the foot of his chair.”
Dad cleared his throat and sat in silence for a minute or so. The bells on buoys clanked outside and seagulls shrieked.
Then he said, “I sat in awe of his huge, monstrous form. When it was dark he looked like the dusky profile of a maintain and when the light from the ledge swung around it made deep shadows in the rocky crevices all over his face. His face was beaten by wind and sea spray. My grandmother's death too. You know she died at sea. He always said the Lord gives and takes away, as if the Atlantic were the hand of God. What do you think?”
“I know how you feel.” I said. “After David, I'm starting to understand.”
“Grandpa said he was going to die the next day and he did. He hadn't tended to the light in years, but he went out to see his old first mate, who'd taken over after him. I watched him struggle to keep his balance on the rocks and climb into his boat. He wrapped those shriveled hands around the oars and pushed out into the icy water. He'd always been a stranger to this world and somehow haunted by a pain I couldn't imagine. And if I can't I know damn well you can't either.”
“So...” I said. “The book?”
“That book holds the only thoughts of a man of few words. It was his only rest. Bring it back to him and let him get his peace. Let us get ours.”
* * * *
The Wilsons had been fishermen in Scotland. On New England shores they had been the same and also lobster men, whalers, cargo captains, and lighthouse keepers. However, as the decades passed those professions faded. My father wished he could live as they had. He thought that is was because he couldn't that he could also not bear life at all.
The time I remember going deep sea fishing with my dad and his buddies. I didn't like to fish much, but I did like to watch the ocean. The sun gli
ttered on the water's top. Once I was thinking about what lied beneath the velvety surface and a shuddered and I fell. I hit the boat's deck. I remember seeing the clouds and those rays of glory blasting out of them. Next, I woke up in the hospital.
I'd passed out because of what I'd seen in my eight-year-old head. What if there's no land down there? I saw fathoms of featureless space. What if I fell in and kept falling forever? This is what hell is like. It's cold and the weight of it pushes in at you from all sides. It floods into your nose and mouth. It's also miles and miles of nothingness, as far as you can see in any direction. Your feet never touch the ground and your only hope is the glimmer of sunlight dancing far about you, but it grows smaller and dimmer as you sink. There's nothing to grab onto. All that is left is loneliness. This hell has nod evil and no other sinners. Maybe they're elsewhere in the vast emptiness, but you never see them.
The ocean wasn't made for people.
Even today I still get that feeling, and even on land. On the day my brother died, he'd been haunted with the same sensation.
“I don't belong here.” he'd written. “I was never meant to be. I'm living someone else's life.”
* * * *
Dad died a couple months later. He didn't do it to himself after all. The blindness got to him first. He didn't see a car that swung around the corner and the rain was so loud it drowned the sound of the engine. Even so, I always wondered about the burning iron shards that had made him blind. Maybe the curse had taken its time with Dad. I hate feeling so common sense about it all; I hate it.
I watched my son standing at the grave site. The casket sat on its brass risers and he put his chubby little palm on it, leaving glistening fingerprints on the glossy wood. That little boy could still let himself feel the sadness. For me it felt more like driving sleet that numbed my face. I'd hoped that by looking at my father's vacated body that I could still capture some of that innocent sorrow, but that never happened.
Ask keeper Wilson.
I glanced over my shoulder at my wife. A little later, after we'd returned home and everyone was in bed, a sneaked out the lighthouse like a man with an affair.
* * * *
They had shut down the light earlier that year. The last keeper took me over in his boat to that place where the stone tower rises from the open sea. It stood against the winter in its solitude, white salt spray frozen to its skin from the foot to the glass turret. It was a long ivory colored steeple pointing to the sky. From the boat I examined the ladder I would climb.
The old keeper said, “You haven't told me, but I know you're looking for the old man.”
“Yeah.” I said. “What do you think?”
“In first tower, a stovepipe ran from the living space to an exit just below the gallery. Three stories up. When Keeper Wilson was at watch, he was in the habit of banging on that pipe to summon his first mate from below. Well... there's no such pipe in this one, but one night I heard a tapping on an electrical duct and there was no one else there.”
“I've seen two lights out here before.”
“I haven't seen it myself, but I've heard that too.”
I climbed into the battlement and the old keeper closed the heavy door behind me. The only light now came from my flashlight. Since the cavernous fuel tanks buried beneath the floor had gone dry, there was no electricity to run anything in the structure. I climbed the spiral steps up the center and found myself in the keeper's den. There was a small round window inviting a shaft of dusty light. The only objects in the room were a desk and a chair. I place Wilson's log book on the desk, sat, and opened it to the last page.
It read. “The wind E blowing very hard with an ugly sea running mountains high, which makes the Light House real like a Drunken Man – I hope God will in His mercy still the raging sea – or we must perish. If it be so – O God receive my unworthy soul for Christ sake for in him I put my trust.”
I had read these words before with disappointment. I had hoped that reading them again in the room in which they had been written would make them mean something more, but hopes were useless.
After some hours, the sunlight dimmed in the porthole. This place was strange. There was water all around like on a ship, but the great tower was steady while the sea rolled around it. I looked out to where the sun sat on the horizon and where a blackish ship crossed through gathering winds and clouds. It was likely a barge, full of electronics that guided in the absence of a working lighthouse. I could make my mind see an ancient wooden bark hauling its burden to old Boston Harbor, bearing my back to the native century of my ancestor's ghost.
I climbed in the gallery, a glass dome that reminded me of a green house. A cage of lenses wrapped the dark lantern in its center. The winds picked up and I could see the water begin to thrash a hundred feet below where I leaned against the glass, alone. The storm was coming. I had picked the right time to see the second light, the ghost light. Only stormy nights similar to the one that had taken the first tower called Wilson from his grave beneath the water. Duty compelled him to quicken the lamp and see his charges to safety. I had seen it myself from shore, when the retired guardian came to life and its eye shone once more.
The storm grew and I felt my sweaty palms against the iron railing as a giant wave hit and the great stone pillar shook. Sometimes storms here were so powerful that they drove waves higher than where I stood. That night, when sleep began to take me, I was startled by water crashing on the glass. I stood up and looked over. On one side was a valley, where violent water lapped the stone basement. On the other rose mountains of water. A wave leered at me before it dashed to pieces against the gallery.
Keeper Wilson had stayed here until the floor beneath him had bent and fallen, a shame to those lying abed inland. I too was determined to stay in the next, though I kept my arms wrapped around the railing. At last I slept.
* * * *
Spittle covered my face when the tower shook and I awoke. Each new wave beat the walls with a thousand tons of water. Despite the racket this made, I heard a still, small sound hear where my cheek was slumped against a copper pipe. Three tapping sounds, followed by silence. Then three more taps.
I stood and there was light on every side of me. The light grew and receded. I heard the tapping in each interval of darkness. The lantern in the center of the gallery was cold and motionless. I faced the ocean. I saw a big bulb of light among to the tall crests of water. Pressing my face against the glass, I could see a tall and narrow shape that rose from the water to meet the light and I knew it was the Old Minot's Ledge tower, raised from its crypt on the sea on floor. It stood steady and strong and bright across from where my dark structure shivered.
Tap, tap, tap.
I flung open the hatch to the stairs below. I climbed down them, back into the keeper's den. Someone had opened the porthole below and cold sea water was washing into the room and covering the floor up to my ankles. The waves arrived again and again, filling the room. Frigid salt water bit at my skin and then again I saw the swinging beam of light from the other Minot's Ledge Lighhouse.
The light reached through the round window, alternately casting a glow deep into the room and leaving it in blackness. When the light went, I saw that it left an echo of itself against one wall, a glowing shape that lingered for a moment. I walked closer to that spot on the all. When the after image appeared again, I saw the lines of a face in it. It faded and then the ghost tower's probe brought it back. This time the face had changed a little. It had been looking away and now it was looking at me. In a moment between the glare and the darkness its eyes stared in to mine and faded once more.
I said, “Why aren't you in the gallery keeping the lantern alive?”
The face returned and spoke.
“I came for you.”
It disappeared and yet the voice continued on from the darkness.
“And for my book. I have to finish my account of what happened.”
I fetched the keeper's log book. The mere shadow of
light reached out and I let go of the book. Wilsom emerged from his two dimension specter into a full form that stood beside me and took the volume from my hands. He stepped through the water and set his log down there. He took the pen I had brought. The water gushed around him, but he sat just as a ghost would, with every bit of calm while he scrawled out his final words.
At last he put the pen aside and stood. He seemed to turn to me, though I couldn't see his face anymore. That part of his head had become a featureless glow. I went over and read what he'd written on a page marked with the date on which he'd died.
“I have returned from the gallery, where I'd seen an awful vision. I tapped the pipe so that my first mate may confirm what I've witnessed, but he did not come. I went below to find him and he wasn't anywhere to be seen. It was then that I knew he was already dead. I realized that my eyes had not seen a vision, but reality. It was that other country into which my soul had already entered. From the top of the light I had seen the ocean below me, parting as did the Read Sea, but with no land beneath it. There was no bottom to the ocean at all. Above me I saw a light. And in that light I saw the face of an angel, the angel for death.
“Now I must confess what I was too late to say before. They speak of me, that madman Wilson. I used to see the ladies that whispered when I passed and I knew what they said. Isn't that Andy, the same Andy that butchered his neighbor's cat when he was a boy? There are worse things they could speak of if only they knew.
“I wish that I'd turned to them and shouted, Yes, yes it is the same Andy Wilson! The very same and you know it well! Why do you seek to torture me? Don't you know that I am tortured enough> Do you think that a sound mind butchers cats, or walks across the tidal rocks barefoot in winter? Some say I am hard, but I say that I am weak. I might remind you of the days that I am well dressed and sing in the church choir with an angel's voice, but I also know of days when the Devil takes me and I know not of what I've done until I've done it.
“I wish I had a name for my kind of mind!
“It's horrible, what the Devil does. I am the worst of sinners, the worst. I butchered that cat and I butchered my wife. Oh God the Almighty, you know that I loved her and that she had been the only woman who dared love me. She knew it wasn't truly me who'd done those things. And yet I woke up one night and I slit her throat there in our bed. That was a night in February. I dragged her body onto the floor in the dining room and I cut it into pieces, at the joints, with a hack saw. I buried all those pieces together. I buried them under the shed behind the house where my son still lives with his own family.