Signal, Repeat

The launch came round the north end of Tinker Reef at three in the afternoon on Tuesday the fourteenth of October, 1986, and Lorne MacIver throttled back and let the swell carry her in.

"There she is," he said, as if Elias might have missed it. "Last of the old girls."

It was hard to miss. Eleven miles out from Tobermory, with nothing between it and the far shore of Lake Huron but a hundred miles of cold blue water, a square white tower stood up out of the lake on a squat grey island of its own. The island was not an island. It was a crib: a great box of timbers the size of a church, filled with stone and sunk on the reef in 1911, and capped with concrete, so that the light could stand on it where no land had ever been. The waves broke along its windward side in long white sheets and fell back. On the lee side there was a landing stage with an iron ladder and a derrick for hauling stores.

Lorne laid the launch alongside as gently as a man setting down a cup. Elias went up the ladder, and Lorne's deckhand swung the crates up on the derrick after: the solar panels in their foam, the battery cells, the new station set from Canadian Marconi still in its box, the monitor receiver, a carton of tinned stew, a carton of coffee, a bag of clothes.

"Tuesday," Lorne called up, from the wheelhouse door. "A week today. Weather allowing. You've got the radio and the base has got you twice a day, and if anything goes wrong you sit tight and we come." He looked up at the tower, squinting. "Orval kept her thirty-four years. Said she was the best company he ever had."

Then the launch backed off the stage, and swung, and opened her throttle, and went away south toward the long low line of the Bruce, getting smaller, until she was a white speck and then nothing, and there was only the wind and the sound of the lake against the crib.

Elias stood on the concrete with his hands in his jacket pockets and the crates round his feet, and for the first time in his working life was entirely alone.

Seven days. That was the job. The Coast Guard was taking the keepers off the last of the old lights on the Great Lakes, one by one, and replacing them with batteries and boxes; and Elias was the person who fitted the boxes. A light that had needed a man and his wife and a sack of coal in 1911 would need, by next Monday, nobody at all: the sun on a row of panels, a battery bank in the engine room, a keyer to send the radiobeacon's letters, and a new radio set in the watch room that would report, twice a day, to nobody, that all was well.

After that, the lantern would never hear a human voice again.

Elias picked up the bag of clothes and the coffee, and turned to the tower.

There were a hundred and twelve steps, an iron spiral round a white well, past the living quarters and the engine room and the watch room with its long desk under the windows. At the top, a hatch, and then the lantern itself: a glass room, ten feet across, and in the middle of it the lens, a great beehive of cut glass in brass rings, taller than Elias, catching the afternoon and breaking it into bars of colour that lay over everything.

It turned, slowly, on its bath of mercury, even now, in daylight, because nobody had told it to stop.

Elias stood a while with his right hand on the brass, feeling it move. From up here the lake went out in every direction to the edge of the world. There was not a ship on it. There was not a cloud.

Three flashes every fifteen seconds, the chart said. Tonight Elias would see them for the first time from inside.

In the kitchen, taped to the kettle, there was a card in a careful old hand. Kettle sticks. Light don't. — O.H.

Elias worked until dark, and then by lamplight: crates up the stairs, the battery cells into the engine room, the new set unboxed on the long desk in the watch room under the lantern. At eight o'clock Elias called the base on the old set for the evening check, and Normand Laframboise at Tobermory said, "Copy, Tinker Reef, welcome aboard, the Leafs lost," and signed off.

At eleven o'clock, with coffee gone cold at his elbow and the lens turning overhead, Elias wired the monitor receiver into the new mast cable, tuned it to the station's own working frequency, and switched it on, to be sure it heard nothing. That was all a monitor receiver was for: to listen to the station's own transmitter and confirm, to a box at the base, that the station was still talking. Tonight there was nothing to hear. The new set was not even connected yet.

The speaker hissed. And then a voice came out of it, close and clear and tired, as if from the next room.

"Base, Tinker Reef. Twenty-three hundred, Friday the seventeenth. Main power's down. I'm on the batteries. This is Elias, and I'm fine." A crackle, a pause. "Say again: I'm fine."

Elias sat very still.

It was his own voice.