Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

But Mick and Forest are a special case. A few days ago, I came home from a walk and heard Forest shouting at the top of his lungs. Standing at the back door, I couldn’t make out a single word. His voice had climbed into the realm of watery hysteria. A moment later, Mick came barreling outside. I had to jump to get out of his way. His face was flushed, his eyes glittering like coal. He did not seem to notice me hovering there. He was in too much of a state. He strode off in a rage.

I AM STILL busy with Galen’s book. Every so often, he will ask me about my progress — eyebrows raised, a pointed glance — as though the text is somehow important for me. Ever the dutiful student, I have been hard at work. I have learned about the reign of the eggers. I have learned, too, about the appearance of the lightkeepers. I have studied the history of my adopted home.

On a blustery afternoon in May, I took the book upstairs. I settled in my chair, rather than the bed, so I would not doze — my spine awkwardly bent, my shoulders taut. The baby was jammed inside my uterus at an uncomfortable angle. Flipping through the pages, I read about the lightkeepers.

In the 1800s, it seemed, there had been no lighthouses along the Pacific coast. None at all. Ship captains either had to voyage in daylight or cross their fingers and pray. The Islands of the Dead were such a flagrant hazard to passing boats that the government began to pay attention. Nautical travel was on the rise. It was absurd that the place had yet not been marked with a lighthouse. A crew was sent to remedy this situation.

But the archipelago did not make the work easy. The builders could not transport their usual tools to shore. They could barely get to shore themselves. It was not possible to bring bricks and mortar from the mainland either. Instead, the workers had to mine their materials out of the living rock. (As I read, I remembered the gashes I had often noticed in the landscape, rough-hewn scars. These quarries had, in the centuries since their creation, eroded until they did not look man-made anymore. They had the appearance of marks scored into the earth by an alien spacecraft.) The crew would chisel bricks out of the ground, then crawl up Lighthouse Hill bearing the stones on their backs, like the slaves who had once built the pyramids.

In 1855, after many failures and injuries, the lighthouse was completed. Four lightkeepers were stationed there. They did not have a cabin, like ours. Even the coast guard house had yet to be conceived of, let alone built. Instead, the lightkeepers lived in a stone shack. Food was scarce. Four men, no women. On top of everything else, the pay was wretched. And there were the eggers to contend with.

I sat up straighter, lengthening my spine. Then the baby engaged in a particular maneuver, one I had experienced just a few times before. It felt as though the fetus were skiing down the interior slopes of my body. It never failed to startle and delight me. I had described the sensation to Mick once, and he had explained that in all likelihood it was the baby turning over, doing loop-the-loops in my womb.

I flipped to the next page in the book, recalling myself to my work. There was an illustration at the top of the chapter: a man with a devious expression and a handful of orbs clutched against his chest. An egger.

At the time the lighthouse was built, no one had officially laid claim to the archipelago. Vast portions of the United States were still unowned. So the eggers had overrun the islands. The situation among these men amounted to something between a black market economy and outright piracy. The lightkeepers were caught in the crossfire. As they slept in their shack and made the trek up the hill to work the mechanism, they were aware of squabbles taking place on the other side of Southeast Farallon. Eggers versus eggers. Fistfights were common. Now and then, knives or guns would make an appearance — at which point the lightkeepers would signal the mainland for help. Soldiers would be sent to break things up.

From there, the situation continued to deteriorate. The avarice of the eggers was unending. Once, after a skirmish, an enemy faction decided to hide out in Great Murre Cave and pretend they’d fled the islands. While inside, they were showered by guano. Soon, there was so much ammonia in the air that it became toxic. Driven by greed, the men refused to leave, and so they died there, one by one.

I resettled myself, trying to accommodate the baby’s girth. The eggers had begun to remind me of the gulls I saw outside every day — motivated by voracity and anger, bent on the ruthless extermination of all others. The gulls, too, would risk their own safety, even their own lives, to attack an intruder.

The lightkeepers, on the other hand, seemed rather like the biologists. They did not intervene in the natural world. They observed and recorded without interfering. They tended the lighthouse and left the animals alone.

Eventually — inevitably — the eggers had turned their attention to the lightkeepers, too. The eggers had damaged and defaced the government’s property. They put up signs warning the lightkeepers not to set foot on their turf. They insisted that the lightkeepers pay for every murre egg they ate. Perhaps the strain of the long war had affected the eggers’ minds. At last they attempted to oust the lightkeepers entirely. There was a skirmish in which several people were injured.

The murre population was, by then, in a downward spiral. There were fewer and fewer eggs on the ground — and chickens had finally begun to appear en masse in California. There was nothing left to fight for. But the eggers fought anyway.

In 1881, the government took action. Soldiers came and removed the eggers in one clean sweep. Only the lightkeepers remained.

I WOKE TO a knock at the door. I did not realize I’d dozed off until I opened my eyes. I was still in the chair, spine molded against the wooden slats, book in hand. One finger held my place. There was a crick in my neck.

Mick appeared in the doorway, his hair sticking up. His face was burnished brown from a day in the sun.

“You’re busy,” he said.

“No. Come in.”

I laid the book aside. Mick wandered around the room for a minute, touching things in what appeared to be a random way. He seemed nervous. He spent a while examining the knob of my closet door, fiddling with a loose screw.

Finally he turned to me.

“I was thinking about our conversation,” he said.

“About the gulls?”

“No.” He pointed to my belly. “About this.”

His expression was hesitant. He sat on the edge of the bed, a safe distance away, his weight making the mattress slope.

“You haven’t told anyone else, have you?” he said.

“No. Just you.”

“Good,” he said.

He bit his lip. He seemed to be struggling with an idea — something weighty, out of character with his usual sweetness and jollity. I waited. Mick’s mind moved in slow, determined shifts, like the changing of the tides.

“Say it was me,” he said.

“What?”

“Say it was me,” he repeated. “To the others.”

Still, I did not understand. Mick clicked his tongue impatiently.

“Galen and Forest,” he said. “And especially Lucy. We’ll tell them I’m the father.”

He reached across the empty air between us and collected my hand, pressing it between his hot palms.

“I want to do this for you,” he said. “I can’t do much, but I can do this.”

“I don’t—” I began.

His grip intensified, crushing my fingers.

“Please,” he said. “I mean it. You can tell everyone it was me. Even your family. Your dad. Everyone. It’ll make your life easier, won’t it? No more questions to answer?”

I could not speak. I threw myself forward, landing against his chest. We nearly tumbled off the bed. Mick burst out laughing. His arms closed around me, holding me, steadying me.