To Keep the South Manitou Light

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82 Jessie hurried down the steps, stopping just long enough to clang shut the iron hatch doors. She clattered through the passageway and into the house. “Mama, Mama!” she cried, but in the doorway to the sitting room she stopped. In the lamplight she could see that even though her mother still slept, lines of pain etched her face. Her ankle—Jessie took one look at her ankle and backed into the kitchen. It would do no good to waken her. She wasn’t able to walk, let alone climb the steps of the lighthouse. And Jessie knew that if she wakened her, her mother would try to get up, that she would do anything she had to do to keep the light shining. Jessie hurried down the kitchen steps into the blizzard outside . Looking up at the lighthouse, she could see the light was getting dimmer and dimmer as the ice glazed over the windows. “I can’t do it,” Jessie said, clenching her fists to stop their shaking. “If I go up there, if I go outside up there, I’ll fall. I know I will.” She wanted to curl up on the snow-covered ground and die. The full brunt of what she had done bore down on her with all the force of the north winds. Never had her family let the light fail, never until this night. And the shame of that swept over her like a giant wave. Her mother’s words echoed in her mind: “You’ll have to do 23 the best you can, Jessie. You’ll just have to do the best you can.” Out in the channel, a steamer blew long and low.The sound sliced like a knife into Jessie’s thoughts. How many ships’ captains were looking frantically for the light, praying for a lull in the blizzard so they could see the South Manitou Island Light? It was that image—the ships being tossed in the waves, the captains unable to see through the sheets of snow, the schooners with their sails growing heavy with ice—that finally made Jessie go back into the house. “There’s no one else,” she told herself. “There’s just no one else.” She knew where the ice scrapers were hung. Her grandfather had always kept them in the closet under the stairway. As a child, Jessie had never been allowed near them because their blades were so sharp. She lifted the lantern to see into the darkness. The blades glowed like silver in the light. They had been newly sharpened. And Jessie knew that, while she had been praying that the ice storms would never come, her mother had been getting ready. # Halfway up the winding steps of the lighthouse, Jessie dropped one of the scrapers. It clanged against the steps as it fell. “Fallen down, fallen down.” Omie’s words echoed in her ears. She retraced her steps round and round, down to the platform where the scraper had landed. Everything in her wanted to just keep going down, down the winding steps, away from the top of the lighthouse and what she would find there. But the ships, if she could just keep remembering the ships. Picking up the scraper, she hung it and its twin around her neck. There was a reason, other than for hanging them on a peg in the closet, for those long leather cords. 83 By the time Jessie pushed open the hatch and climbed up into the watch room, she was covered with sweat. Her grandfather ’s heavy wool jacket felt prickly through her cotton blouse. “Please, God, make a hot wind,” she prayed.“Please help the windows be clear of ice.” In the watch room she grabbed another cloth. Maybe the glass is just fogged up on the inside after all. Maybe I just didn’t rub hard enough, she thought. She had always had trouble keeping her imagination under control. Maybe, once again, it was conjuring up a danger that didn’t exist. Slowly, she raised the hatch that led to the base of the light. Shielding her eyes, she looked up. In the dazzling light she couldn’t tell if the windows were white from steam on the inside or ice on the outside. Watching out for the sharp blades, Jessie carefully lifted the ice scrapers off her neck and placed them on the floor beside the...