The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

Built in 1911 on a spur of black rock at the mouth of the bay, the lighthouse at Cape Morrow had not been lived in for almost thirty years. Its light, which had once been tended by hand every night of the year, was now switched on and off by a computer in Halifax. Only the keeper's cottage, painted white with a red roof, still belonged to a person, and that person, until three weeks earlier, had been Anne MacInnes's father.

Having left the island at eighteen, Anne had come back rarely and never for long. She was a radiologist in Toronto, a woman whose life was organized into appointments and screens, and she had arrived intending to stay four days: long enough to sign the papers, empty the cottage and hand the keys to the heritage society, to which her father had left the building.

Opening the front door, she was met by the smell she remembered from childhood, a mixture of salt, kerosene and pipe tobacco. Nothing had changed. The barometer still hung beside the stairs, its needle pointing permanently to Change. The kitchen table, at which she had done her homework every winter evening, was covered with charts, and on the shelf above it stood a long row of logbooks bound in green cloth, the oldest of which dated from the year she was born.

Her father, a man of few words, had written in the same way. Wind NE, force 6. Visibility poor. Fog signal on 0300 to 0700. Lamp cleaned. Page after page, the entries followed one another with almost no variation, recording the weather, the ships that had passed and the small repairs that keeping a light alive required. Reading them, Anne felt both moved and slightly guilty, as though she were opening letters not addressed to her.

It was on the second evening, sitting by the window with a cup of tea gone cold, that she found the entry for the night of November 14, 1979. The handwriting, normally so neat, was hurried and sloping. Wind SE, force 10. Fishing vessel Mary Colleen aground on the Ledges. Radio contact lost 2140. Launched dory 2155. Then nothing until the next morning, when, in the same uneven hand: Four men ashore. All alive. Lamp kept burning throughout.

Anne read the lines three times. She had been six years old in 1979. She remembered storms, of course, the cottage shaking, her mother pacing the kitchen, but she remembered no rescue. Her father, who had told her a hundred stories about seals and shipwrecks from a century before, had never once mentioned this one. Launched dory, he had written, as if it were no more remarkable than cleaning the lamp.

The next morning, unable to think of anything else, she drove to the village and asked at the general store. The woman behind the counter, whose name was Bernadette and who had known Anne's father for fifty years, put down the box she was holding. "The Mary Colleen," she said. "Oh, everybody here knows about that night. My cousin Liam was one of the four. Your father rowed out to the Ledges alone, in a sea nobody would have gone out in, and brought them back one at a time. Two trips. The lamp stayed lit because your mother climbed the tower every hour to check it."

"He never told me," Anne said. Bernadette smiled. "He never told anybody. When the coast guard wanted to give him a medal, he said he would accept it on condition that there was no ceremony and no photograph. They sent it in the mail. I doubt he ever opened the envelope."

That evening Anne searched the cottage, and in the bottom drawer of her father's desk, beneath a pile of tide tables, she found an unopened brown envelope addressed to Mr. Hugh MacInnes, Keeper, Cape Morrow Light. Inside was a small bronze medal and a letter of thanks signed by four men, the youngest of whom, Liam, had added a line of his own: My daughter was born last month. We have called her Anne, after yours.

Anne sat for a long time with the letter in her lap, listening to the sea. She thought of her father climbing back up the rocks in the dark, soaked to the skin, and then simply writing the time and the weather, as he always did. She did not leave after four days. Having telephoned the hospital and the heritage society, she stayed until the end of the month, reading every logbook from the first page to the last, looking for the father she had never quite managed to see.