Sister Emily's Lightship: And Other Stories

  Simon decided on following the Leith path, and he walked with a brisk stride that dis-invited even a nod from the few people he met along the way.

  But by the time he got to St. Bernard’s Well—that strange stone neo-Classical folly built by the Waterworks over an actual well whose waters were quite the vogue amongst the New Town gentry—the majority of his anger had passed and he sat down for a bit to sketch, his back against the stone wall.

  There was a patch of uncurling ferns near his feet and he loved the sight of the little plants as they unbent their necks. He got the patch down in seven quick lines and then, with three more lines, one fern became a horse’s head.

  Simon laughed at the conceit. Rather more fanciful than his usual work, but perhaps—he thought—perhaps it was time for him to uncurl as well. He was thirty-six years old and half his life gone by. What had happened to the dream that the boy who walked from Crail to Edinburgh had had?

  He realized how dreadfully misplaced his anger had been that morning.

  As he was thus musing, out of the clear slate of sky there came a crack of thunder.

  “By God,” Simon cried, and stood up quickly, preparing to run to the sanctuary of the folly. He was a son of fisherfolk, after all, and not about to believe the innocence of that blue sky.

  As he turned…

  9.

  Andrea’s walk along the Leith River had started quietly enough in bright sunshine. But the weather report on the television that morning had promised scattered sunshine and occasional rain.

  “Or was it scattered rain and occasional sunshine?” she murmured. Each of her days in Scotland so far had begun with that same promise from the weather man. Each of those promises had been exactly fulfilled, Scottish weather being charmingly predictable.

  The scattering began with a bit of spitting, not enough rain to be worried about only enough to be annoying.

  Andrea had no idea where the next exit from the Leith Walk might be, and there was no way she was going to climb over the fence, go through that little woods, and then scale the stone wall she could almost make out, just to get away from a spatter. She’d been a mountain hiker too long to worry about such things.

  Besides, she thought—jamming her pretty blue Scottish tam on her head and tucking her hair under it—in her khaki pants and Aran sweater she was more than ready for a wee bit of rain. In fact she positively welcomed it.

  But the little rain suddenly turned into a downpour.

  Luckily that was when she spotted the stone temple ahead. Racing for it, she got in the lee of the wall before the major flood opened up overhead.

  Mounting the steps two at a time, she thought she was safe when—without warning—a bolt of lightning struck a little spire on the top of the temple’s roof, traveled down a wire, and leaped over to the metal ornament on her tam.

  She did not so much feel the shock as smell it, a kind of sharpness in the nose and on the tongue. Her skin prickled, the little hairs rising up on her arms. Then she sank into unconsciousness, falling over the side of the wall and onto the slippery grass below.

  10.

  A bolt from the blue, you are thinking.

  How corny.

  The sky was actually blue at the moment, except for patches of clouds scudding backwards, in an effort to escape time.

  Andrea’s eyelids fluttered open.

  She sighed.

  The first thing she saw was the face of a very concerned youngish man staring down at her.

  The second thing she saw was that his eyes were the same bleached blue as the sky over them.

  Then she noticed the ginger eyebrows and the cheekbones sharp enough to cut cheese with.

  “Am I dead?” Andrea whispered. “Are you an angel?”

  Corny yes.

  But most lives are as filled with corn as a Kansas field.

  Or—if you prefer—a cornfield in east Fife.

  Different kinds of corn, of course.

  Different kinds of lives.

  11.

  One minute Simon had been sitting quietly drawing. The next minute he heard the crack of thunder and after that a body came hurtling over the side of the stone wall and sprawled face up at his feet.

  For a moment Simon thought it was a boy. The tarn and the pants confused him. But once he’d looked carefully—at the face with its lambent skin, at the long black curls spilling out of the tam, at the soft swell of breast beneath the woolen jumper—he knew it was no boy.

  Then the fallen girl’s eyes opened. They were almost purple, enormous, lovely.

  “Am I dead?” she asked. “Are you an angel?”

  “Och, lass, I’m a silversmith. And how could ye have died from that wee jump?” he asked.

  “I mean from the lightning,” she said.

  He glanced up, worried. After all—there had been thunder. But the grey clouds had sped away.

  Glancing down, he said, “No lightning, lass. I think ye swooned and fell over the wall.”

  “I’m not the swooning type,” she said.

  “Then what type are ye?”

  He meant nothing bad by the question, but she looked confused. Then she tried to sit up and seemed to be having difficulty doing it. So Simon put a hand to her back to help her up. And though he’d never put an arm around a woman before without being related to her, this seemed so natural that he did not give it another thought.

  However, it was then that he realized she was not the young lass he’d taken her for. There were a few strands of silver in her hair, tangling through the curls. He imagined taking that silver and weaving it into a pattern on a bracelet.

  As his master knew, nothing with Simon was ever lost.

  12.

  She saw his sketches, she pulled a small notebook from a back pocket of her trousers and showed him hers. They spoke of silver and gold and the intricacies of cloisonné. They talked of working with electrum and foil and plating. They compared the virtues of enameling and embossing.

  They did not speak of love.

  It was too soon.

  And soon it was too late.

  Somewhere a minute or an hour or a day or a week later, they figured out the difference in time.

  “You’re an old man when I am born,” she mused.

  “I am dead when you are born,” he said.

  But time has a way of correcting itself. Of making sense of nonsense.

  And one minute or an hour or a day or a week later, Andrea turned a corner of a street off Grassmarket—dressed now of course as a young woman should—and she went in one step from streetcars to Suburus.

  “Simon!” she cried, turning back. But Simon and his century were gone.

  13.

  Andrea returned home but she didn’t feel at home. The sky over Chappaqua had a dirty, smudged look. The air reeked. She could not bear the billboards along the highway nor the myriad choices of toilet cleansers and bath soaps at the super market.

  She shut off her tv and sold her fax. She went shopping for long skirts and shirtwaists in second hand shops.

  She told her customers that she had a great deal of back work to do and gave them the names of several other jewelers they might patronize instead.

  She said goodbye to her three friends.

  “I’m thinking of moving to Scotland,” she told them. She did not tell them where.

  Or when.

  Then she sold her parents’ house, took the money in a banker’s check, bought a ticket on Icelandic Air, and flew with a small suitcase of second hand clothes to Scotland.

  The Royal Bank of Scotland was more than happy to open an account for her, and she rented a small flat in Leith.

  Then she set to work. Not as a silversmith, not as a jewelry maker. She became a researcher, haunting the Edinburgh churches to see if she could find where Simon had been buried. To see if there was some mention of him in the town rolls.

  Her search took her the better part of a year, but she had time.

  The rest of my life if nee
ded, she thought. Her parents’ house had brought in a great deal of money. It was not money that worried her. It was the rest of Simon’s life she was afraid of.

  Once she’d been through every cemetery in the city she was at a loss, until she remembered that Simon had once spoken of being an East Neuk lad. On a whim she went by bus out to Crail, the little fishing village Simon had mentioned.

  It was a pearl of a village with a mercat cross topped by a unicorn in the center of the upper town. The tollbooth was a tiered tower with a graceful belfry. When she went along the shop row, passing a bakery and a butcher’s, she was stopped by a glass-fronted jewelry store. It sold both new pieces—rather simple and not terribly interesting—and antique ware. Glancing up at the sign over the lintel, she was stunned.

  MORRISONS JEWELRY SINCE 1878

  Trembling, she went in.

  14.

  You’ve guessed it now.

  How the story ends.

  But you are wrong again.

  Andrea does not find Simon—for he is long gone and no amount of standing about in electrical storms can bring her back again in time.

  Who she finds is the great great grandson of Simon Morrison who is also named Simon.

  And that Simon, on hearing the name Andrea Crow, immediately gives her a job as a jewelry maker in the shop because it has been a family legend—accompanied by a notarized document—that some time in the new century such a young woman would come. Black curls, violet eyes, and a master jeweler’s skill.

  In his early thirties, this Simon looks nothing like old Simon. He has a roundness to his face and a sunny disposition. He does not so much make jewelry as sell what others make.

  After half a year, he proposes and Andrea accepts and they marry, though Andrea explains that some part of her will always belong to old Simon.

  This young Simon understands. It is, after all, part of the family tradition. Scots are big on lost causes.

  Andrea’s designs become popular in Scotland and then England and then the Continent. Neiman Marcus rediscovers her work. She and Simon have three children.

  And in time they fall in love.

  In time.

  Sister Emily’s Lightship

  I DWELL IN POSSIBILITY. The pen scratched over the page, making graceful ellipses. She liked the look of the black on white as much as the words themselves. The words sang in her head far sweeter than they sang on the page. Once down, captured like a bird in a cage, the tunes seemed pedestrian, mere common rote. Still, it was as close as she would come to that Eternity, that Paradise that her mind and heart promised. I dwell in Possibility.

  She stood and stretched, then touched her temples where the poem still throbbed. She could feel it sitting there, beating its wings against her head like that captive bird. Oh, to let the bird out to sing for a moment in the room before she caged it again in the black bars of the page.

  Smoothing down the skirt of her white dress, she sat at the writing table once more, took up the pen, dipped it into the ink jar, and added a second line. A fairer House than …than what? Had she lost the word between standing and sitting? Words were not birds after all, but slippery as fish.

  Then, suddenly, she felt it beating in her head. Prose! A fairer House than Prose—She let the black ink stretch across the page with the long dash that lent the last word that wonderful fall of tone. She preferred punctuating with the dash to the hard point, as brutal as a bullet. I dwell in Possibility.

  She blotted the lines carefully before reading them aloud, her mouth forming each syllable perfectly as she had been taught so many years before at Miss Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

  Cocking her head to one side, she considered the lines. They will do, she thought, as much praise as she ever allowed her own work, though she was generous to others. Then, straightening the paper and cleaning the nib of her pen, she tore up the false starts and deposited them in the basket.

  She could, of course, write any time during the day if the lines came to mind. There was little enough that she had to do in the house. But she preferred night for her truest composition and perhaps that was why she was struggling so. Then those homey tasks will take me on, she told herself: supervising the gardening, baking Father’s daily bread. Her poetry must never be put in the same category.

  Standing, she smoothed down the white skirt again and tidied her hair—“like a chestnut bur,” she’d once written imprudently to a friend. It was ever so much more faded now.

  But pushing that thought aside, Emily went quickly out of the room as if leaving considerations of vanity behind. Besides the hothouse flowers, besides the bread, there was a cake to be made for tea. After Professor Seelye’s lecture there would be guests and her tea cakes were expected.

  The tea had been orderly, the cake a success, but Emily headed back upstairs soon after, for her eyes—always sensitive to the light—had begun to tear up. She felt a sick headache starting. Rather than impose her ailments on her guests, she slipped away. They would understand.

  Carlo padded up the stairs behind her, so quiet for such a large dog. But how slow he had become these last months. Emily knew that Death would stop for him soon enough. Newfoundlands were not a long-lived breed usually, and he had been her own shaggy ally for the past fifteen years.

  Slowing her pace, despite the stabbing behind her eyes, Emily let the old dog catch up. He shoved his rough head under her hand and the touch salved them both.

  He curled beside her bed and slept, as she did, in an afternoon made night and close by the window blinds.

  It was night in truth when Emily awoke, her head now wonderfully clear. Even the dreadful sleet in her eyes was gone.

  She rose and threw on a dressing gown. She owed Loo a letter, and Samuel and Mary Bowles. But still the night called to her. Others might hate the night, hate the cold of November, huddling around their stoves in overheated houses. But November seemed to her the very Norway of the year.

  She threw open first the curtains, then the blinds, almost certain of a sight of actual fjords. But though the Gibraltar lights made the village look almost foreign, it was not—she decided—foreign enough.

  “That I had the strength for travel,” she said aloud. Carlo answered her with a quick drum roll of tail.

  Taking that as the length of his sympathy, she nodded at him, lit the already ensconced candle, and sat once again at the writing table. She read over the morning’s lines:

  I dwell in Possibility—

  A fairer House than Prose—

  It no longer had the freshness she remembered, and she sighed.

  At the sound, Carlo came over to her and laid his rough head in her lap, as if trying to lend comfort.

  “No comfort to be had, old man,” she said to him. “I can no longer tell if the trouble is my wretched eyes, sometimes easy and sometimes sad. Or the dis-order of my mind. Or the slant of light on the page. Or the words themselves. Or something else altogether. Oh, my dear dog…” She leaned over and buried her face in his fur but did not weep for she despised private grief that could not be turned into a poem. Still, the touch had a certain efficaciousness, and she stood and walked over to the window.

  The Amherst night seemed to tremble in on itself. The street issued a false invitation, the maples standing sentinel between the house and the promise of road.

  “Keeping me in?” she asked the dog, “or others out?” It was only her wretched eyes that forced her to stay at home so much and abed. Only her eyes, she was convinced. In fact she planned a trip into town at noon next when the very day would be laconic; if she could get some sleep and if the November light proved not too harsh.

  She sat down again at the writing table and made a neat pile of the poems she was working on, then set them aside. Instead she would write a letter. To…to Elizabeth. “Dear Sister,” she would start as always, even though their relationship was of the heart, not the blood. “I will tell her about the November light,” she said to Carlo. “Though it is much the
same in Springfield as here, I trust she will find my observations entertaining.”

  The pen scratched quickly across the page. So much quicker, she thought, than when I am composing a poem.

  She was deep into the fourth paragraph, dashing “November always seemed to me the Norway…” when a sharp knock on the wall shattered her peace, and a strange insistent whine seemed to fill the room.

  And the light. Oh—the light! Brighter even than day.

  “Carlo!” she called the dog to her, and he came, crawling, trembling. So large a dog and such a larger fright. She fell on him as a drowning person falls on a life preserver. The light made her eyes weep pitchers. Her head began to ache. The house rocked.

  And then—as quickly as it had come—it was gone: noise, light, all, all gone.

  Carlo shook her off as easily as bath water, and she collapsed to the floor, unable to rise.

  Lavinia found her there on the floor in the morning, her dressing gown disordered and her hands over her eyes.

  “Emily, my dear, my dear…” Lavinia cried, lifting her sister entirely by herself back onto the bed. “Is it the terror again?”

  It was much worse than the night terrors, those unrational fears which had afflicted her for years. But Emily had not the strength to contradict. She lay on the bed hardly moving the entire day while Mother bathed her face and hands with aromatic spirits and Vinnie read to her. But she could not concentrate on what Vinnie read; neither the poetry of Mrs. Browning nor the prose of George Eliot soothed her. She whimpered and trembled, recalling vividly the fierceness of that midnight light. She feared she was, at last, going mad.

  “Do not leave, do not leave,” she begged first Vinnie, then Mother, then Austin, who had been called to the house in the early hours. Father alone had been left to his sleep. But they did go, to whisper together in the hall. She could not hear what they said but she could guess that they were discussing places to send her away. For a rest. For a cure. For—Ever—