The Keeper (16 page)

That was what she always said to him: ‘Do not be afraid.’

He had stepped off the path and searched the runnels in the sand where the shore break sucked back, tumbling the harvest of shells, exposing them.

–
You can find a better one.

And the wave had come and taken him.

They found him in a gully. They reached him with the shark hook, gaffing him like a fish.

Oh – but long after he was silent on the breast of the sea, face down in the water.

What do we know of the moment of death?

We cannot even imagine it.

Misklip leaned his back against the wall of his hut, the cat tranquil beside him, and drank the brandy.

–
August, always August.

Then young and newly recruited, Misklip had been with the other workers, carousing on a Sunday. He had brought out his banjo and his accordion. He had played and they had danced.

They had seen him. They had noticed.

And playing for them had reminded him of home: the jug of wine, the familiar haze of
dagga
, bringing all the boys and girls to laughter and romance down some alley, in some house, on the edges of the harbour just outside the gate.

The sad sweet thrill of Saturdays.

The empty Sunday streets.

The hopeless search for work on Mondays with a pounding head.

His mother’s tears.

He had taken the only job that he could get. A job that no one wanted.

In those days when the guano workers came to the island there were no convicts. No warders. And no one inspected their luggage to see if they carried drink. They brought the wine. They brought the spirits. They brewed
skokiaan
from potatoes and pumpkins, which they had brought with them on the tug. They had their parties and their singsongs at the weekends after five days of digging shit. The wives of the older workers made them food. Tannie Jacoba, when she wasn’t drunk, regaled them with stories.

The keepers. Their children.

The donkey that tried to hide whenever it saw the smoke of a tug, knowing it would have to drag supplies up to the house.

‘
Die ou donkie was net so lui soos ’n kaffertjie
,’ she’d say. ‘And he thought he was a penguin.
Hulle het onder mekaar lawaai! ’n Aaklige geraas
!’

And then she would bray in imitation of the donkey and laugh – reverting to her own wild cackle. ‘
Ja
, but that old donkey always followed the boy and
oumies
. It knew it was safe. She,
die oumies
,
sy’t vir almal gesorg
.’

Then one day the wine ran out. They had made a brew of potato. They had added methylated spirits.

It was Sunday. It was August. And the wind was howling round the island. Misklip played his banjo. He played his accordion.

They sang and danced. They drank the brew.

Except the headman.

He had come with the shark hook from his house, thumped it on the floor to silence them and ordered them to stop.

It was all too late. Already fights had broken out. Taunts. Jeers. Old resentments flared.

It was then that the door of the shed flew open and the lighthouse keeper, Karel Harker, strode into the room. He had laid about them with his sjambok, striking and shouting, ‘
Wat maak julle onbeskofte mense! Dis Sondag
.’

Even the women had caught the lash. Even old Jacoba. But the headman – that old barnacle, that grizzled warlord – had
challenged him. He had picked up the shark hook, the talisman of office, and stood his ground, barring his way. ‘These are my people,
meneer
Harker. I will deal with this.’

‘Drinking on the Sabbath,’ Karel Harker had thundered.

‘Please leave.’ The headman held the hook more firmly in his grasp.

The keeper had turned on his heel and left. And the headman had cast his eye across them all, the hook in his hand, and said, ‘I am ashamed.’

So they had sat then and eaten the food that had been made. Like children, in fear of a hiding.

They were washing bowls and making tea when the mother came, sudden and wild in the doorway of the shed, and demanded, ‘Where is my child?’

‘
Ons het almal na die blinkoog seuntjie gesoek, ou Kat
,’ said Misklip. ‘
Die ou dierbare boytjie
.’

For hours they searched, never thinking to go near the sea until there was nowhere else to look.

He was in a gully where the sucking tide had left him, his little pockets filled with shells.

Misklip had stood within the silent throng – the loud
dronkverdriet
of the outsiders keening with lament. The parents’ sudden, sober, silent disbelief.

When Karel Harker had left the shed, he had walked away, feeling the silence that had waited – like a drawn breath – until he’d reached the yard.

His weeping wife had started up at him from behind the gate.

‘Get back into the house!’ He’d raised the whip.

She all but fled before him.

‘Stop that snivelling,’ he’d said coldly, following her into the hall. ‘Don’t think I haven’t seen you standing on the jetty wasting time, crying for those boys. No wonder your sons have chosen to go to school where there is order and discipline. They are better there.’

‘No, Karel, no!’

‘And how dare you defy me in my duty!’

‘I only said that we should not interfere with the guano workers when they were happy. How could I know that they were drinking?’

‘What else would cause that row?’ He had scanned her. ‘Really,’ he’d said contemptuously, ‘you have less sense than a pigeon.’

‘I think,’ said Louisa quietly, ‘that the lighthouse has made you mad, Karel. They say, in the end, it always does.’

She’d stepped from his reach as his hand came up to strike her.

It was then that they heard the thundering on the door.

Karel had opened it.

The headman had stood at the threshold with the shark hook like a trident, as if he and it had risen from the sea.

Behind, a keening woman. Further back, at the entrance to the yard, the huddled figures round the bundle in the father’s arms.

The headman had pointed with the shark hook, as if delivering sentence. ‘This child has drowned.’

Louisa had uttered a cry.

‘Be quiet, woman, this has nothing to do with you!’ Karel had shouted.

But it had everything to do with her.

Karel had turned back to the headman. He said for all to hear, ‘If you drink and don’t care for your children, what can I do? This is your fault.’

But they – looking back at her standing behind her husband in the doorway – had known whose fault it was.

Louisa had turned away into the gloom of the living room.

Indeed, she had already died.

Misklip put the bottle away from him, retching slightly. ‘
Die oumies
wanted shells,
Kat,
’ he said. ‘We knew, us people digging shit. We used to see her. Her
ennie blinkogie ennie donkie.
’

The old cat settled down into his paws, his great scarred head held level, his gaze detached. Misklip took a last sip from the bottle, upended it and tossed it on the bed.

He began to weep.

He remained slumped with the cat sitting at his side – not touching him but there, like a wild thing in the shadows, alert to every sound outside: the return of the convicts from their digging, their voices and the shouts of warders, Riefaart’s authoritative call. The crank of the pump handle, the swish of water as they washed themselves.

Outside the small four-paned window the light was turning milky in the late afternoon. The little hut shook now and then, straining its joints, settling in, then lifting once again like a small craft at sea.

When, at last, Len Hendricks appeared in the doorway, Misklip had taken up his mouth organ and was playing a thin lament, counter to the fretting of the wind.

‘There are people in the shed,’ Len Hendricks said. ‘You must take this hook back there when they have gone.’

Misklip stared at him, dismayed. ‘I will not touch that hook.’

‘
Jis, maar jy’s dronk
.’ Len surveyed Misklip as he leaned the shark hook against the inner wall.

‘
Vat weg daai bose ding!
’ Misklip cried.

‘
Luister
, Misklip,’ Len came into the room. ‘
En dis ’n goeie naam vir iemand
wat so
useless
is soos jy, nè
?’ He stood above him, hands on his hips. ‘I will send the spook to haunt you if you don’t do as I say,
hoor jy
? I can call her up out of the lighthouse any time.’ And he glanced across Misklip’s shoulder at the cat. ‘And I’ll skin that cat and line the dashboard of my new car with the fur!’

He turned on his heel and walked away, leaving the door to swing back and forth in the draught.

‘
Waar’s die fokken haai
?’ Misklip shouted after him, feeling the rage and bile rise – the great shame of impotence and misery. He took the hook, lifting it in two hands and staggered towards the shed. He pushed the door open with his back, swivelled and half stumbled into the room – wild, disorientated, angry.

The warders and the convicts were there standing round a brazier. ‘
Wat gat oom met daai aaklige hoek vang
?’ said one of the warders in alarm.

‘
Die spook
!’ hissed Misklip, heaving it up on to his shoulder.

‘You people are spooked by everything,’ said the warder. ‘They told me before I came here. Don’t run around after dark. Don’t talk to the people at the light. Don’t go near the well.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘They say the lighthouse can spook you too if you go too close …’

Behind them, in the shadows, the boy had laughed.

‘Wat lag jy, kaffertjie?’

‘As ek kaffertjie is, is oom ’n hotnot.’

Misklip turned – a new and mighty strength – caught the lad in the solar plexus with the hook and gutted him.

‘He was so drunk,’ Hannes says to Rika, ‘he could see no reason. I thought he might die from the effects himself. Later he was like a wrung-out scrap – all the life sucked out of him.’

Rika knows that state. She has seen it sometimes: the place beyond the pain of injury, the trauma of wounds. It lies dull and flat in the eyes of men when the essence of life has gone and nothing remains but the faintly palpitating flesh.

That is how it was for Louisa Harker too.

Nothing left – just the shallow breath, the fear of her own relentless heartbeat.

She watched the small procession on the next day move across the vast expanse of sky, the conclave standing in the weed and succulents, the nests and burrows, apart from the other graves.

Even in death:
Never cross the line
.

It had been nearly sunset – an opalescent sky of pearl and grey, a high, cunning wind.

She had heard the hymn drifting.

She stood mute, listening, the tears coursing down her cheeks, unchecked.

She had sinned against her marriage vows and wished her husband dead.

She had cursed the light.

She had made a graven image.

She had turned her back on God.

–
I deserve no sons myself and they are taken from me.

–
I have killed a boy.

She had no business to live.

–
Rescue me from those who pursue me.

It was herself she needed to escape.

Like a pigeon setting off for shore – a long, inbred compulsion – knowing, as it does, that the odds are all against it but going still, she placed the shell lighthouse on the kitchen table and beside it laid her shawl – that shawl that had protected, warmed and comforted her sons. She took her Bible from the shelf – so familiar, so well explored – and underscored the words in pencil, gouging the thin sheet:
Suffer the little children to come unto Me
.

She went from the house, closing the door.

The first beam of the light shone out in the dusk, sweeping the island, sweeping the sea. She stood a moment and looked up at it. Somewhere in the lantern room was Karel, her husband. It was not his fault that he was mad. The mercury fumes had worked their way into his flesh and made it one with the lighthouse.

It was the keeper’s lot.

By whose devices the great sea lights in every quarter of the world shine more brightly.

They were noble words.

Perhaps, after all, it was a holy thing to tend the light – that great protector, that comfort and that beacon to sailors on the sea. Perhaps the greatest evil was to defy and curse it.

She walked down to the beach and stooped to pick up stones. She was not gathering shells – the pink and tan and green and grey – but the pebbles on the scree-strewn shore.

She weighted her pockets.

With the flash of the beam lighting the way – slow march, its rhythm sure – she walked to the well and let herself down into it.

It was midnight when they found her.

Night as dark as any but for the beam of the light. The shadow that it drags behind it, the blackness of its slipstream, is the wing of the flint-eyed carrion bird.

That unimaginable. That absolute.

After Hannes had radioed for the doctor, he unlocked the cupboard where the first-aid kit was stored. He opened it and checked the contents.

‘Would you like a thermos of hot water?’ Aletta asked, subdued. ‘The kettle has just boiled.’

‘Yes. Good idea.’

She went to the kitchen to make one.

He took it from her.

‘Can I do anything else?’ she said.

‘Make some food in case the doctor has to stay.’ And he hurried outside. It was getting dark. She could hear his footfall on the gravel of the yard. He had switched on his torch. The beam stabbed at the gloom. The last gannets were coming in to roost.

Aletta went back into the living room. She turned on the radio. The news. That measured voice. She turned it off. The outside world had become unimaginable to her. She went in search of new packet of cigarettes, tossing the old box into the bin.

She stood at the window and stared at the sea.

Wandering back to the kitchen, she opened the fridge and peered at the contents. She picked up a tin in the pantry and looked at the label. She put it down.

Why had Misklip attacked the convict? And why was he so drunk?

Did it have anything to do with his unaccountable behaviour that morning when – in triumph – she had showed him the shell lighthouse? The words he said remained, a knell:
So het die kind gesterf.

The only person who could know the answer besides Misklip himself was Len.

He was on duty in the lighthouse.

She hesitated a long time. What if Hannes came?

She trailed through the house and out into the yard. She took Hannes’s binoculars with her and scanned the dark. She went inside and made a cup of coffee and stood with it by the yard wall, straining to hear if any sounds came from the guano shed. She went back to the house and took up her book.

Hannes returned briefly after checking with Len in the watch room for news of the boat.

‘What’s happening?’ Aletta asked.

‘I’m afraid the boy will die.’

‘Why did Misklip do it?’

‘He was raging drunk. The chap insulted him.’

‘I should think he’s used to that. He gets insulted every day,’ she said. ‘It must be something else.’

Hannes shot her a glance. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Those convicts must have brought the drink.’

‘Unlikely.’

‘Misklip told me that the warders drink brandy and play cards at night.’

‘You seem to know a great deal about Misklip’s business,’ he said narrowly.

‘I don’t spend all my time up a tower like you.’ She reached for a cigarette, that small barrier, that hot point of light imposed between herself and the world.

‘There’s still one burning in the ashtray.’ Hannes pointed. ‘You’re going to kill yourself one day.’

‘Not as fast as you will breathing in those mercury fumes in your fucking tower,’ she retorted.

‘I hate it when you speak like that,’ he said. ‘It makes you cheap.’

‘I am cheap! Didn’t you know?’ She inhaled a deep breath of smoke, the tip of her cigarette glowing fiercely. ‘But at least I believe I’m sane. You can’t be quite so sure any more.’

He went away then.

And – impulsively – she took her rage up into the tower and confronted Len.

Aletta went to the foot of the stairs and peered upwards. It was very dark. High, high above, the faint glow from the lantern room.

She climbed the stairs, past the curved cupboard where she had first found the shell lighthouse, past the landing where the stairs gave way to the steel ladder. She stopped and breathed quietly, her lungs tight, her throat dry. She gripped the rails with both hands and climbed.

All those cigarettes. Perhaps Hannes was right.

The light intensified. The flash of the beam lancing out had left its afterglow inside the well of the tower. She climbed on, watching the shadow of the rail beneath the shadow of her reaching hand.

She pulled herself through the trapdoor into the lantern room and stood up.

Len turned with an exclamation. Then he grinned. ‘Come to dance with me?’

‘Listen, Len,’ Aletta said, skirting the slowly turning lenses, the shadow of refractions making strange reflections on her face. ‘I don’t know what happened today or why Misklip was drunk, but I know you are giving him booze and I can guess why.’

Len put up his hands. ‘Hold on, hold on, baby,’ he said, advancing on her.

‘Stop your crap and listen,’ Aletta said.

‘No,
you
listen,’ he returned, standing close. ‘You say a word and I will let your husband know all sorts of things about you.’

‘And what could I say about you?’ she blazed back.

‘So what?’ he said. ‘I don’t care who knows I fucked you once. Or how much you liked it.’

‘You disgust me, Len Hendricks,’ she said quietly. ‘You have always disgusted me.’

‘
Ja
?’ He cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘You’ve been diving, not fishing. What are you looking for?’

‘What you going to give me if I tell you?’ He took her wrist but she twisted it out of his grip. He pulled the buckle of his belt straight. ‘It’ll be worth it, I promise.’

‘If you are thinking of salvaging, it’s illegal. You’ll get caught and go to jail.’

He said nothing – but the look implied, Who’s going to know if
you
don’t tell them?

‘I just want you to get off this island. And leave Misklip alone.’

‘So what’s it with Misklip?’

‘They’ll arrest him and it will be your fault.’

‘I will stop them.’

‘How?’

‘Ways and means.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Want a bet?’

‘Hannes says the boy will die.’

‘So? What’s he to you?’

‘Nothing. I don’t even know his name,’ she said. ‘But Misklip’s not a criminal. He was drunk and it’s your fault. He’s terrified and he’s only a human being.’

‘And the
kaffir
isn’t?’

‘Oh, for Chrissake, Len, you know very well what I mean.’

‘Do
you
know what you mean?’ said Len. ‘Because I will tell you, in case you can’t figure it out for yourself. You too scared to say anything against me in case you lose your big, upright, important, tight-arsed husband because no one else will want you.’

‘Hannes will always want me!’

‘
Ja
?’ He laughed. ‘Better not put him to the test. Guys like Hannes always put the light first.’

‘No, they don’t.’ She said it knowing he was right, hating him for it.

‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘When it comes to the light – you way down the line, Letts.’ He cast his eye over her. ‘And anyway, you such a sour, shifty bitch, did you know that? I don’t know what happened to you. You used to be fun. And sexy.’

She stood stunned.

‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘You can’t afford to bugger up Hannes’s promotion either – because he’s going to get it soon. Blokes like him always do.’

‘Yes – and blokes like you don’t.’

Len flushed darkly. ‘Listen here, Aletta Oosthuizen,’ he said.

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why not? It’s your name.’ He laughed shortly. ‘I don’t need a bloody lighthouse to know who the hell
I
am. Hannes does. I’ll be out of here sooner than you know and you’ll be wondering why the fuck you didn’t come with me. Get out there and have fun. Climb on the back of the motorbike like you used to, hey? Got you going,’ he laughed. ‘Think I didn’t know that, hey?’

She swung at him but he caught her wrist. ‘You really want to know why it is you won’t say anything, Letts?’ he said. ‘I was the first.
The first.
Girls never forget the first.’

He said it as if it were an article of faith, a certainty.

‘I hate you, Len. More than anything.’

‘Not more than this lighthouse,’ he said, letting her go. Then he looked straight at her – his mouth twisted, a touch of sentiment, just a shade unsure. ‘You won’t, Letts. Because of the kid.’

She left him then because there was nothing she could say to expunge the bruise that never healed, the fault line in her being.

She hated him for his injustice. His ignorance of her.

Mostly, she hated him for the truth of what he’d said.

–
Because of the kid.

She reached the foot of the tower. She took her small torch from her pocket. She went to the great double doorway and looked out into the darkness. She listened intently.

No one was coming.

She switched on her torch and fled across the yard and down the path towards the house. She opened the door gingerly, listened before she stepped inside.

Hannes was not back yet.

‘She did not see me walking up the path,’ Hannes says to Rika. ‘I had not turned on my torch. The beam from the lighthouse was enough. I saw her leave and go across the yard and down the path and through our back door. I went up into the lantern room.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I said to Len Hendricks, “They’ve just left. The sea’s pretty rough and I wonder if the boy will make it. I can only hope so for Misklip’s sake.” Len only shrugged. And then I said, “Why do you think he got so drunk?” and Len said, “They say he saw the spook.” ’

‘Did you challenge him?’ Rika asks.

‘No.’ He pauses. ‘I wasn’t going to get involved in nonsense like that. And anyway, I was biding my time, gathering evidence. I said instead, “What was Aletta doing up here in the lantern room?” He said she hadn’t been there. That maybe she had gone to the radio downstairs.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘Of course not. I could almost smell her. And Len …’ He trails off, glances across at the quiet, gracious hands resting in Rika’s lap. How can he say to her – There he was, all alert, just like a randy dog.

When Hannes returned to the house Aletta was in bed, the light turned out.

He did not believe she was asleep. She was too silent, the dark too watchful. He said, ‘Aletta?’

But she did not answer.

When he woke in the morning and she brought him his tea, he looked up at her. Her eyes were swollen, the lids translucent.

She had been weeping.

And if angry tears, dashed off, were all too familiar to him, this grief was not.

He put his hand out to her. But she turned away.

Aletta stood in the living room. It was mid-morning. Hannes had gone down to the guano workers’ houses to talk to Misklip. He had to write a report about the incident.

He needed to know the facts. Methodical Hannes.

Aletta did not go to her dancing room. She did not wish to dance. She did not wish to eat. Or even to smoke. She went to the bookcase, took out each of
her books, turned it round and placed it back on the shelf inverted. Then she went to the garage, opened the door and searched among Hannes’s things – his tools, his fishing tackle – and she found a wooden packing case. It was one of those that came with their furniture and that Maisie and Cecil had unpacked for them. The lid was neatly stowed inside. She dragged it to the door, turned and looked back at the little boat hanging from its pulley from the rafters.

–
We’ll sail to Black Rock and Seal Island.

It had remained suspended from the ropes – as it had in every lighthouse where they’d ever been. If they had launched it – only once – would they have broken through the impasse, this inevitable, that defeated them?

She took the box into the house and packed in everything that she had brought herself. Her father’s cigarette box, her small tarnished silver competition dancing cups, her mother’s photo in a frame, her extra dancing shoes. A dozen little pieces of sentimental bric-a-brac.

Then she fetched her records and she put them in as well.

There would be no more music.

She carried the box back to the garage and pushed it into a corner, securing the lid.

‘You know, not so long afterwards, I found a box in the garage,’ Hannes says to Rika. ‘Inside it were all Aletta’s things. I had a look at them. I hadn’t really noticed most of them before. Little ornaments and pictures. And her books. I was looking for something to read and there were all these books turned back to front on the shelf.’ He shakes his head wearily. ‘I didn’t even notice that she’d stopped dancing.’

‘Surely.’

‘I was too preoccupied with Len and what he was up to. What
they
were up to.’

‘Oh good grief,’ Rika says. ‘Surely! It couldn’t have been plainer than if she had written it in black and white.’

‘Why didn’t she just
say
?’

‘It was shouting at you,’ Rika says, almost in exasperation. ‘From the bookshelves, from the empty spaces, from the silence.’

‘But she didn’t
say
.’

‘Nothing could be clearer.’

After she had packed the box and put it back in the garage, Aletta searched around for a small awl and chisel. She went to the old keeper’s cottage and took the shell lighthouse from the cupboard. She put it on the table, resting the tower on the bunched-up shawl to protect it. Carefully she scratched her name on the wooden base.

A.H. August 1957.

She sat looking at it, tracing her finger gently across the carved precision of Hannes’s mother’s name.

Louisa Harker August 1921.