Three Knocks

TThe letter from the Department came on the same day as the fog, which is the kind of thing my grandmother would have called a sign and I would have called Thursday.

I found it in the box at the end of the lane when I walked up for the mail at four. Brown envelope, government crest, my name typed with the middle initial wrong. I read it standing in the ditch with the wind trying to take it out of my hands.

Re: Reed’s Point Lightstation (Fennick Cove, N.S.). Further to previous correspondence, please be advised that the lightstation has been declared surplus to operational requirements. In the absence of a viable proposal from a community organization by December 1, the Department will proceed with the removal of the tower and associated structures. The automated aid to navigation will remain in service.

The automated aid to navigation was a white plastic box on a steel pole, forty feet from the tower, that blinked every six seconds whether anyone needed it or not. It had been doing its job since 1993. I didn’t hate it. I just couldn’t imagine loving it.

The tower had been doing its job since 1873.

I folded the letter into quarters and put it in my coat pocket and walked back down the lane toward the Point. From the top of the hill you can see the whole of it: the long finger of dark slate ledge going out into the Atlantic, the keeper’s house with its red roof and its crooked chimney, the shed, the old fog bell on its wooden frame, and at the very end, white and octagonal and peeling, the light.

It’s not a tall tower. Thirty-eight feet. Tourists who drive out from Lunenburg are always a little disappointed, as if they’d been promised something from a postcard. But it has stood on that rock for a hundred and fifty years, through every storm the North Atlantic could think up, and my family kept it for sixty-two of them. My great-grandfather Samuel, and then my grandfather Will, until 1993. Then the government took the keepers away and gave the rock a plastic box, and leased the house back to Grandpa and Gran for a dollar a year and a promise to keep the roof on, and they raised me in it.

She died in March. I’ve been keeping the roof on ever since.

By the time I got to the bottom of the hill, the fog was coming in.

If you didn’t grow up on this coast, you think fog is weather. It isn’t. Weather is a thing that happens to you. Fog is a thing that arrives.

It comes off the water in a wall. You can watch it. On a clear afternoon you’ll see a gray line on the horizon, as neat as a ruler, and then it’s a band, and then it’s a cliff, rolling in over the swells without a sound. It takes the islands first. Then the headland across the cove. Then the end of the Point, and the tower, and then it’s in the yard, and the world shrinks to the size of a room. The air goes wet and cold and tastes of salt. The gulls stop. Everything stops, except the sea, which you can still hear breathing out there somewhere, very close, in the white.

Gran used to say the fog off Reed’s Point was older than the rock. That it had a memory. That it kept count.

I used to roll my eyes. I’m twenty-eight. I work nights at the coast guard communications centre in Halifax, or I did, before they gave me bereavement leave and then a second round of bereavement leave and then a careful phone call about “taking the time I need.” For six years I’ve sat in a dark room with a headset on and talked to boats. Fishing boats, ferries, tankers, a lost sailboat full of dentists from Ohio. I know exactly what fog is. Fog is a reduction in visibility caused by warm moist air passing over cold water. Fog is why we have radar and GPS and AIS and me.

I locked the door anyway.

I made tea. I put on the radio. I sat at Gran’s kitchen table with the government letter flattened under the sugar bowl and a pad of paper beside it, and I tried to write down every person in Fennick Cove who might join something called the Reed’s Point Lightstation Society, and I got as far as Hattie Boutilier (91) and stopped.

Outside the window there was nothing at all. White to the glass. The beacon on its pole made a soft pulse in the fog every six seconds, like something blinking in its sleep.

At eleven I went to bed.

At two I woke up because someone was knocking on the door.

Three knocks.

Slow. Evenly spaced. The kind of knocking a person does when they know you’re home and they know you’re asleep and they’re sorry about it but they’re going to keep knocking anyway.

I lay there with my eyes open in the dark.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Here is what you need to understand about Fennick Cove. There are forty-one houses, a church, a post office that’s open three mornings a week, and Hattie’s fisheries museum, which is a shed. There’s one road in. The nearest neighbor to Reed’s Point is the Fralicks, a mile up the hill, and they’re both over eighty and go to bed at eight-thirty. Nobody comes to the Point at two in the morning. Nobody comes to the Point in fog.

Except that’s not true, is it. That’s not what Gran used to say.

Three knocks in the night, Rosie, and nobody there when you open it. That’s a forerunner. That’s the old people’s word. It means something’s coming.

Something like what?

Something you won’t like.

I got up. I pulled on a sweater over my pajamas and went down the stairs in my socks, and I did not turn on the light, because if there was nobody there I didn’t want to see the nobody clearly.

The knocking had stopped.

I stood in the front hall. It’s a narrow hall, with a row of coat hooks along one wall and a framed photograph at the end of it, and above the hooks, on its own peg, a coat that nobody wears. It’s an old oilskin, the long yellow kind fishermen wore before Gore-Tex, gone stiff and brown with age, the cuffs cracked. It’s hung on that peg since before my grandmother came to this house. Gran never let anyone take it down, not even to clean it. When I was little I used to think it was a person, standing in the dark at the end of the hall.

I put my hand on the doorknob.

Out in the fog, the bell rang.

The fog bell is the oldest thing on the station. It’s iron, about the size of a barrel, hung on a wooden frame next to the shed, and before there were horns and before there were diaphones it was how the keepers spoke to ships that couldn’t see the light. They’d ring it by hand all night, every night of fog, until their arms gave out. There’s a clockwork mechanism inside the frame that was supposed to do it for them, but Gran said it never worked properly, and it hasn’t been wound since the forties.

It doesn’t have a rope. The rope rotted off years ago. You’d need a ladder and a hammer to make it ring.

It rang three times. Deep and slow, so low you felt it in your teeth.

Then nothing. Just the sea.

I opened the door.

The fog came in over the threshold like a cat. Cold and wet and smelling of kelp and diesel and something underneath, older, like the inside of a church. The porch light made a yellow globe about six feet across, and beyond it there was only white.

“Hello?” I said. My voice went out into the fog and didn’t come back.

And then I heard footsteps.

Not on the porch. Down below, on the rocks. The long stony slope that runs from the yard to the water, where Gran used to warn me never, ever to go. Slow, heavy steps, crunching on wet stone. Coming up.

A light swung in the fog. Small and orange, the color of a candle. A lantern.

I should have shut the door. I know that. I know exactly what I’d tell anyone else to do, because I’ve told people on the radio what to do in a hundred emergencies, and none of those instructions involve standing in a doorway in your socks while something walks up out of the sea toward you.

I didn’t shut the door.

He came out of the fog at the edge of the porch light, and stopped.

He was tall, and soaking wet. Water ran off him. He wore a long oilskin coat, the old yellow kind gone dull as mustard, hanging open over a thick fisherman’s sweater dark with seawater, and he carried a brass lantern in one hand and something else in the other, a long tin cone I didn’t recognize at first: a horn. His hair was dark and plastered to his forehead. There was blood on his knuckles, as if he’d been rowing a long time.

He was breathing hard. His breath made clouds.

He looked up past me, past the house, out to the end of the Point where the old tower stood invisible in the fog, and his face changed. I’ve heard men on the radio sound the way he looked. Just before they tell you they’re taking on water.

“The light’s out,” he said.

His voice was hoarse, accented: Cape Breton, or further. Something old in the vowels.

“I— what?”

“The light.” He took a step toward me, and I took a step back, and he saw that and stopped. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t mean to frighten you. But the light’s out. I left it burning. I left it burning not an hour ago, and it’s out.” He turned in a circle, staring into the white. “And the horn. Why isn’t anybody on the horn? There’s a schooner coming in—there’s men out there, they’re coming in blind—”

“Sir,” I said, in my radio voice, the calm one. “The light is automated. It’s on the pole. It’s working.” I pointed to the beacon, which was a faint pulse in the fog behind him. He followed my finger and looked at it for a long moment, and I watched his expression go from panic to bewilderment to something worse.

“What is that?”

“It’s the light.”

“That’s not a light. That’s a—” He didn’t have a word for it. He looked back at me. Really looked, for the first time: at my sweater and my pajama bottoms with the cartoon moose on them and my socks. At the house behind me, the porch with its plastic chairs. “Where’s Mrs. Reed?”

Something went very quiet inside me.

“I’m Ms. Reed,” I said.

“No,” he said, slowly. “No, you’re not.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because the porch light had fallen across his face now, fully, and I was looking at his face, and I knew it.

I’d known it my whole life.

There is a framed photograph at the end of the front hall. It’s been there longer than I have. Two figures on the rocks below the tower, squinting into the sun, black and white and a little blurred: a gangly teenage boy with my grandfather’s ears, grinning, and beside him a man in a heavy sweater with his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Dark hair. A straight, serious mouth that looked like it was trying not to smile. On the back, in my great-grandmother Clara’s handwriting: Will & Jonah, August 1942.

I used to say goodnight to that photograph. When I was small. I used to think he looked kind.

I’d say goodnight to Grandpa Will, who was still alive then and lived in the room upstairs, and I’d say goodnight to the man next to him, whose name I knew because it was cut into a little bronze plaque on the base of the tower:

JONAH MERRITT ASSISTANT KEEPER LOST AT SEA 14 NOVEMBER 1942

The man on my porch was dripping onto the boards. Same mouth. Same eyes. A small scar through his chin I’d never noticed in the photograph, white against skin gone gray with cold.

“Please,” he said. Quiet now. “I need to know where Mrs. Reed is. Clara. And Sam. I need—Will’s on that schooner. He’s sixteen. He’s on the Lettie Rose and she’s coming in tonight in this, and I left the light burning for them, I disobeyed orders and left it burning, and now it’s out. And I don’t know how long I was out there in the dory. I don’t—” He pressed the back of his bleeding hand to his forehead. “I don’t know how long I was out there.”

The fog bell rang once more, down by the shed. Soft, this time. Almost gentle.

And the man on my porch looked toward it, and when he turned back to me there was something in his face I can only describe as recognition, as if he’d heard someone call his name from a long way off.

“Ma’am,” said Jonah Merritt. “What year is it?”

I opened my mouth to tell him.

The fog moved. That’s the only way I can say it. It didn’t blow; there was no wind. It simply moved, the way a curtain moves when someone walks behind it, and it came up over the edge of the porch and folded around him, and for a moment I could see him through it, gray and soft, his eyes still on mine.

Then it drew back.

The porch was empty.

There was a puddle of seawater on the boards where he’d stood, and a line of wet bootprints leading down the steps and across the grass and onto the rocks and into the white, toward the sea. Just one line. Going down. Not coming up.

I stood in the doorway until my feet went numb.

When I finally closed the door and turned around, I saw the coat.

The old oilskin on its peg at the end of the hall, the one nobody wears. The one that’s hung there, bone dry and stiff as cardboard, for as long as anyone can remember.

It was dripping. And under the brown, where the water ran down it in streaks, I could see yellow. The same long old-fashioned yellow I’d just watched walk into the fog on a stranger’s back.

Seawater was running off the hem in a steady trickle and pooling on the floor, as if someone had only just come in from the sea, and hung it up, and walked away.