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 Mara 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. Mara 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.

Mara stood on the concrete with her hands in her jacket pockets and the crates round her feet, and for the first time in her 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 Mara 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.

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

Mara walked the crib first, the whole way round, slowly, the way Orval Hepburn would have done every evening of his thirty-four years.

It took four minutes. The concrete was pitted and stained, and green at the edges where the waves came up. There was a rusted bollard, a coal chute nobody had used since the war, a wooden bench on the lee side facing south toward home, with initials carved into it: O.H. and D.H. and a date, 1953. Gulls stood on the windward rail and looked at Mara without interest.

On the lee wall of the tower, at shoulder height, someone had painted a line in white and written beside it, in neat capitals, NOV. 1940. The high-water mark of a storm. It was well above Mara's head. Mara looked at it for a long moment, and then out at the lake, which was blue and bright and perfectly innocent.

Mara went in.

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

Mara 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 Mara 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 her elbow and the lens turning overhead, Mara 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 Mara, and I'm fine." A crackle, a pause. "Say again: I'm fine."

Mara sat very still.

It was her own voice.