The Keeper sat in a hard-backed chair, a book balanced on his knee, and watched Harro asleep in Josh’s boyhood bed. He watched with an attentive expression, at once suspicious, yet concerned, as if the boy was nothing of what Willow claimed he was, and everything. Willow was sleeping downstairs on the couch before the cooling embers in the fireplace. Doc Folsom was gone; so was Rex, having borrowed Thunder to go into Whalebone City and bring back a party to bury Joe Johnston. Dosie had left on patrol.
That the boy had a certain resemblance to Trudelle, there was little doubt. The set of his mouth, the cheekbones, the high forehead, all could be rearranged in the Keeper’s mind to form into his wife’s gentle and patient face. Yet, those same features might be formed in other ways, too. If this was Jacob, it was a vastly improbable coincidence, but then again, Keeper Jack had seen too many instances of such coincidences occurring, especially when it came to the sea giving up its secrets. Had not, after all, Mrs. Donley found her husband Brick in the marsh three weeks after he’d fallen from a fishing boat in the Stream? Had not a plank containing the shipping license of a freighter washed ashore at the lighthouse, a freighter that had been lost off Hatteras the year before and included six Killakeet boys aboard her? Had not, in every instance he could think, the sea and the island somehow eventually provided an answer to what had happened to those who went out and, for one reason or another, not returned?
The Keeper allowed a sigh. What if there was never anything that could confirm or deny who the boy was? What if, instead, no proof at all ever came, one way or the other beyond Willow’s belief? What would happen then? Would Josh, who after the placement of Jacob’s headstone seemed to have finally come to terms with the tragedy, revert to his continuing torture? It had driven him away from Killakeet once. Likely, it would again, even if the war didn’t do it. It would have been best if you hadn’t come, the Keeper thought as he kept studying the boy.
Yet . . . here he was. He was the right age and had the frame and the features of the young man Jacob might have grown into. He was an orphan without knowledge of his parents. And it was not outside the realm of possibility, after all, that Jacob might have been found on the Stream by men too kind to let him drown but selfish enough not to endanger themselves. And if that had happened, it was perfectly feasible that Jacob might have ended up in Germany and grown up to join that country’s navy. After all, men without family or money gravitated toward military service, no matter what country they lived in.
A chain of circumstances, Keeper Jack considered, each one feasible, each linking to the other. If such links had been forged, then one could easily see the next link, that the German navy would bring the boy across the Atlantic, a natural occurrence considering the high probability of war that had existed between Germany and the United States ever since the Nazis had taken power. And even if there had not been war, might not the boy have eventually ended up as a merchant sailor? And any seaman who came to American waters would eventually sail the Stream that washed past Killakeet. If one could accept all the links, a case could be made that it was almost inevitable that, had he survived, Jacob would have returned as a young man just like Harro. The more the Keeper thought of it, the more his hopes rose that, indeed, his lost son slept before him.
He had gone to Emerson, who always seemed to have an answer. He opened the old book and let his thick, calloused finger trace the message: A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.
This is a boy who needs love, Keeper Jack thought. And if he is Jacob, he shall have it. But if he is not, then perhaps he should have it as well.
He closed the book, and inevitably the arguments in his mind started anew. No, this can not possibly be. This is hope gone wrong.
Shaking his head, Keeper Jack placed the book on the floor and wearily rose from the hard-backed chair. He did not even have to take note of the dim light at the window to know dawn had come and it was time to climb the tower and douse the light. He found Willow still asleep on the couch, the quilt that usually draped its back pulled around her. She was so pretty lying there, her face angelic in its sweetness. Certainly, Willow had taken to the boy upstairs. Maybe, he thought, this had all happened so that Willow would find the love she deserved.
But that was not clear thinking. Harro was headed for a prison camp for the duration of the war, a place where he would be subjected to disease and privation. Once he was gone from the island, it was likely no one would ever hear from him again.
Willow stirred beneath the quilt, then opened her eyes. “Keeper,” she said. “Is Jacob awake, too?”
Keeper Jack sat on the coffee table beside the couch. “No. He was very tired from yesterday, you know. I think he may sleep for a while longer.”
Willow stretched beneath the quilt embroidered with colorful whales and dolphins. Trudelle had sewn the quilt for the baby and Keeper Jack had kept it all these years. “Willow, may I ask you something?”
“Yes, Keeper.”
“Are you going to talk so easily now? All these years, you would not even look me in the eye when I spoke to you. And when you did speak, you spoke sort of . . . well, peculiar. You made sense but it was more as if you were talking to yourself than anyone around you.”
“Was that wrong? No one ever told me that I was being bad.”
“It wasn’t bad, dear girl. Just different.”
“How should I talk?”
“Well, honey, I guess any way you want. But it’s best to have a back-and-forth, like we’re having now. And it’s just nice if you look at the person you’re talking to. Do you understand? But you haven’t been bad at all.”
“I guess I never wanted to talk much,” she said, “not after I couldn’t be with Jacob anymore. That made me mad and then I got in the habit of not saying anything except what I wanted to say when I wanted to say it.”
The Keeper touched her cheek. “You are a remarkable girl, Willow.”
“I love you, Keeper,” she said. “Everybody loves you.”
“I don’t know about that,” he replied, but he was all but simpering at the compliment. “Why don’t you sleep some more? When”—he nodded toward the stairway—“when he comes awake, we’ll have breakfast together and talk some more.”
She snuggled back beneath the quilt and in a moment was sound asleep. The Keeper envied her innocence, and her peaceful slumber, unmarred by doubts. He went on to the lighthouse and climbed the old iron steps with a heavy pace. At the top, he swung over the door to the lamp, then crouched behind it to turn the valve that pinched off the gas. The flame went out with a gasp. It always seemed to Keeper Jack that the light literally died each morning, such was the finality of that last, choked attempt to stay alive. Yet, at night, the flame jumped awake so exuberantly and with such familiarity, he often wondered if it was in fact the same flame, not a new one at all. It certainly looked the same, a golden orb, edged in a translucent and glimmering blue corona. Perhaps, he thought, it was the same for hopes that leap full-bursting to life when Providence allows the wheel of life to turn. Perhaps what he was feeling was not the birth of a new hope but the coming to life of an old one that had never truly died, a sublime hope, per Emerson, cheering ever his faithful heart with unending love.
The Keeper went out on the parapet as he did each morning to see what he could see and, especially now, to clear his mind and ponder anew the nature of hope and love. It was there he spotted the Maudie Jane at tortured rest atop the line of sand hills just south of the Crossan House. At that astonishing sight, he forgot all else save to wonder in awful fear if perhaps he had not discovered a son, but had, in terrible fact, lost one.