The Cold Shore

The telephone on the wall of the harbormaster's shack was a black rotary model mounted to an untreated two-by-six. When it rang, the bell shook the wooden casing with a sound like a bicycle bell inside an iron bucket.

Erick waited through four rings before lifting the receiver.

"He's not turning it off," the voice said. It was Callum, calling from the station at Cape Spear.

"The automated beacon is scheduled for midnight," Erick said, leaning his forearm against the salt-streaked windowpane. Outside, the tide was licking the black basalt of the gut, throwing white spray three feet into the kelp line.

"I know what the schedule says," Callum answered. "I'm telling you he locked the auxiliary generator room from the inside. He pulled the manual trip on the diesel transfer pump. If you want the computerized light running by morning, someone has to walk out to the spit and tell him the cutters are arriving at eight."

Erick looked at his wristwatch. Five twenty-five. Low water was at six-ten. After that, the spit became an archipelago of razor barnacles and six-knot undertow until sunrise.

"Why didn't you go?" Erick asked.

"Because I've known him thirty years," said Callum. "And people who have known a man thirty years are the last people he listens to when he's made up his mind to be ruined."

Erick hung up without promising anything.

He took his yellow oilskin jacket from the hook behind the woodstove. The stove was burning birch offcuts from the boatyard, smelling of sweet sap and wet bark. It was the only warm room within four square miles, and leaving it felt like a conscious betrayal of animal common sense.

The walk across the gravel bar took thirty-five minutes. The wind came off the Grand Banks without meeting land, carrying the smell of brine, cod oil, and cold iron. When Erick reached the base of the lighthouse tower, the white paint was peeling in thick scabs where the winter gales had worked under the lead primer.

He knocked on the heavy oak door with the butt of his flashlight.

Nothing for a full minute. Then the bolt drew back with a grind of ungreased brass.

Vance stood in the threshold. He wore three wool sweaters, one over another, the cuffs frayed to gray tassels at his wrists. He held a brass oiling can in one hand and a rag black with soot in the other.

"You're late for coffee," Vance said.

"I didn't come for coffee."

"Good. The tin's empty anyway."

Vance turned his back and began climbing the spiral iron staircase. Erick followed, his rubber boots ringing against the perforated treads. Sixty-four steps up, the lantern room opened under a dome of eight-foot plate glass.

In the center of the platform, the great Fresnel lens stood like a beehive made of diamonds, turning on its brass circular track with a dry, rhythmic hush. Every twelve seconds, the twin beams caught the fog outside, turning the darkness into two blinding tunnels of white mist before sweeping out across the void toward the Atlantic.

Beside it, on a steel mounting bracket bolted directly into the granite sill, sat the new automated unit: an aluminum cylinder the size of a beer keg with a solar array and a solid-state LED emitter. It had the clinical, indifferent look of hospital equipment.

"They're sending the tender at eight," Erick said, resting his hand against the safety rail.

"Let them send it," Vance replied. He was polishing the lower prism ring with the rag, his shoulder moving in slow, practiced circles. "The sea isn't automated. Why should the warning be?"

"Because it costs seventy thousand a year to keep oil and coal out here, and the LED runs on twelve volts and a lithium bank."

"You sound like the clerk in St. John's."

"I sound like someone who doesn't want to see you carried down these stairs by two constables who weren't born when you took this post."

Vance stopped polishing. He set the oil can on the sill and looked out into the white fog. For twelve seconds there was only gray wool. Then the beam flashed, illuminating the crags of the reef below—jagged, hungry, permanent.

"In '74," Vance said, his voice dropping below the hum of the gear drive, "the *Islander* lost her rudder three cables off the ledge. No radar worth a damn in a nor'easter. The skipper couldn't hear the horn over the surf. He steered by the flash. Not by a computer. By the flash that came from this room every twelve seconds because a man was standing here winding the counterweights with a crank."

"That was fifty years ago, Vance."

"The rocks haven't moved an inch."

Erick looked at the old man's hands. The knuckles were swollen from half a century of salt damp. He knew Vance had no pension waiting in town, no daughter who had room in her basement, no trade other than knowing how to keep forty pounds of lead clockwork turning through seventy-knot blizzards.

"If you stay," Erick said, "they'll declare you a trespasser. They'll padlock the gate at the spit and cut the telephone line."

Vance picked up the oil can again. "Then they'll have to walk through the fog to do it."

The lens completed another revolution. The beam swept across both men, washing the small glass room in brilliant, unforgiving light, before plunging them back into shadow.

Erick looked at the stairwell. If he went back down now, he would cross the bar before the tide cut the spit off. If he stayed, he would be on the island when the tender arrived with the replacement crew.

He took his gloves off, folded them, and placed them on the workbench beside the spare mantles.

"Give me the other rag," Erick said. "The lower ring has grease on the fourth facet."