Part 2

They paid the undertaker a bribe to allow them to bury the father under the boulders of the island. He had been an impenetrable, cold, man, but they knew how much he loved this sea-beaten patch of earth. 

Peter took up the craft –and it was a craft, tending the fire of the lamp, the pantheon of light, the rotation of the beam. He believed he did it well, with as much tenacity and consistency as his father had. But he wanted to do it better. In the decade that they had lived on the island, nobody had ever visited them from sea. For all his beckoning with the light, Peter’s father had never successfully guided a single ship to their island. 

Peter understood the canonical rule: a light across a vast expanse is there to draw you in, to let you know there is some life in all the darkness. He had learned this as a young child, visiting his grandfather in the city. Through the rain, the buildings looked like mirages, and the lights blurred and seemed to move in the sky – first here, then there. His knee-high rainboots were awkward on the sidewalk that hardly caught any rainwater; it was like a deer walking over a boulder. He had been on the mainland only a few times, in that city whose buildings were huge cliff faces in the fog.

“See up there? That light– just there, is where we’re going to.” His mother pointed to a light near the 20th floor of the hospital. The light was alone in a row of black squares. 

His grandfather had cold hands; Peter didn’t know how to be held by them at first. He was afraid to be left alone in the room with his grandfather. Men, in Peter’s experience, expected children to do or say something interesting, to prove that they were alive and intelligent. He had not known many men, just his father and the old lighthousekeeper who once lived with them, relieving his father from day shifts when the region required a 24-hour watch.

His father, alone with Peter in the brief times when his mother had to leave the lighthouse island for an errand of her own, would always say, “what more do you have to say?” “Can’t you talk?” Otherwise, he would be always slightly distracted when Peter did have something to say. So Peter let his father think he was either shy or stupid. 

But here was this old, green-eyed man, with skin that rumpled around his arms like tissue paper, blinking slowly at Peter. His parents had gone to fetch dinner for the four of them. And there they were alone. Peter stood there in his awkward, too-large boots, and his damp jacket. 

“Oh, come, sit up here.” His grandfather patted the chair next to the hospital bed. Peter hesitated. His jacket was sodden. 

“Take that off if you like. But I don't mind a little rain. Look what I have here. From my favorite nurse.”

It was a bowl full of cherries. Peter climbed into the chair and sat. 

They chewed on the sweetness, winnowing out the pit with their tongues. His grandfather showed him how. Then it was quiet except for the sound of cherry pits hitting the wastebin.

The only time Peter had observed lights for any other purposes than drawing in was out on the road, when his father held a lamp in front of their horse-drawn cart so he could see the road ahead. Sometimes moths gathered around this light, fluttering frenziedly around their surrogate moon.

Peter wanted to impress his mom, show that he had learned something, that he could be useful even without his father, and not just literary. So he went onto the little deck and prepared a rigging that any boat coming in could hitch to. Why had his father never set up a place for anyone to dock their boats from sea?

And he started making shapes out of drift wood. First, a star with seven sides – a cut out as wide as Peter’s arms. He placed it over the hexagonal mirror so that, as the light fell on the ocean and shone around it, it made a long shadow of a star, that looked wrinkled out on the waves. When a wave broke the edges of the star seemed to sparkle. From the lighthouse, it was brilliant. A star shooting in broken spurts across the rocky water. 

His mother slept, and carried on with her garden, and cleaning the house, and repairing the windows. It was him alone manning the lighthouse.

Then he tried different colors. He had a collection of sea glass in a large barrel that he had collected since they had come to the island. Deep indigo, red, orange, the rare yellow, the many shades of green, purple glass. He soldered the glass together into a kaleidoscope of color, and rigged it over the light. Surely someone would be so mesmerized they would want to draw closer. Through the night, the light passed through the glass, and reflected a dense rainbow whatever it glanced off of. From inside the lighthouse it was a dazzling dance of color. 

Still nobody came!

From the sea, sailors and barges saw a frenetic pulse of different colors and shapes on the horizon. It was a struggle to know where to steer the ship. Usually the light blinked in a pattern to communicate navigation instructions. But this light seemed to shudder with color. One captain, who had navigated the port for years, figured there was some sort of malfunction in the lighthouse.

"The old man must've croaked. Wonder who they've got up there now."

So then he tried words. All the time Peter had spent alone had given him a great appreciation for the poets. So he painted poetry directly onto the kerosene lamp. It cast a great, distorted shadow through the letters. For a week, Peter beamed out a new line every night, and rinsed the lamps during the day. “Much madness is divinest sense” wrapped perfectly around the hexagon. “Too strange for misunderstanding” another night. Then Peter tried his own words. Perhaps the seamen thought him unoriginal for quoting other people’s work. He labored over a six-word line through the day and didn’t sleep at all. He wrote “waves wrinkling the unfathomable darkness.” He thought it wasn’t bad at all. From the lighthouse, the poem unveiled itself slowly, as the light moved from within, casting each letter briefly in shadow on the sea, surrounded by a brilliant light.

From sea, the captain saw a light riven with strange shadows. It was disorienting, but still they knew to avoid the shoals.

"Moths must've nested in the lantern room."

Peter had heard that coyotes would howl to pretend there were more of them than there were. Sometimes a few would sing, each in rotating voices and tones, so a group of three would sound like ten. This seemed to help prevent them from being attacked, or at least disorienting their enemies. Scaring them away with their dazzling enormity. It was just Peter and his mom after all. Perhaps he was scaring people away somehow. 

So for one night, Peter didn’t turn on the kerosene lamps at all. He sat in the dark. There was a moon lighting the sea but at an angle that kept the lighthouse and the shoreline shrouded in darkness. Peter let himself sleep. He awoke to the shouts of men below –frightened, hasty, scrambling.