Persistence - Part II: Triumph

PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part III: Stories (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)

Part II: Triumph

“Here he is!” I heard a boisterous call as I made my way down the stairs. Cyrus Peterson was leaning over the counter, a short blue pencil in his hand, preposterously small reading glasses perched delicately on his massive nose. Before him were business ledgers and other such papers. He appeared to be doing some accounting. Yawning, I asked him where to find breakfast in town.

“Won’t find much in the way of restaurants,” he explained. “Least not the kind of restaurant you want to be eating at. There’s a cafeteria, but its only customers are fish-plant workers, and after six hours dealing with old fish anything looks delicious. But I was just cooking some breakfast, and seeing’s how you’re the only one here, I’d be glad to offer you some.” I was more than happy to accept.

Over a breakfast of eggs and fried potatoes, I decided it would be a good time to ask Cyrus for some of his legendary wisdom regarding the town of Triumph. At first he lauded me with stories of the good old days, when Triumph was home to one of the province’s biggest fisheries. But the fish in the nearby seas had dwindled, folks were having to go further out, fishing was more expensive and less fish were coming in. Eventually the industry caved in. “People here today just don’t want to move,” he explained. “But Triumph is pretty much done in now. There’s some fishing to be done but we’re never going to be like that again. Those days are over for us.” He looked down at the table for a long moment, as if considering the idea for himself.
“You some kind of reporter?” he asked suddenly. There was a note of suspicion in his voice, and I did not know how to respond.

“Well,” I finally began, “Not for a newspaper, no. I’m a student, I study folklore, urban legends, ghost stories, things like that.”

“Just like your friend, then, I expect?”

“About the same, yes.” I confessed. Cyrus shook his head in resignation.

“What do you think you’ll find here?” he asked. “We’re not anything special. You kids read too many books, you think all the small towns are full of wackos.”

“I’m not here to make you out to be wackos, Mr. Peterson,” I tried to explain. “But every town has its stories, doesn’t it?” Cyrus pondered the question for a moment, and nodded after a few seconds.

“I suppose so,” he said at last. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Triumph’s got its ghosts, or so some would say. But I doubt our stories are any more interesting than anyone else’s.”

The moment was right. “Could you tell me a few of those stories?” I asked. I reached for the notebook in my back pocket, but Cyrus was pushing his chair away from the table. “Not right now,” he said. “I’ve got to get these papers done. Come see me tonight and I’ll tell some stories. That’ll give me some time to remember them.”
“Your son, Mr. Peterson- David said he knew this town like the back of his hand, would he be able to show me around?”

Cyrus grinned. “Want the grand tour, eh? Well, Jeb’s got to be down at the plant in two or three hours, but a tour shouldn’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes. I’ll call him down for you.”

Jebediah, a man I placed somewhere in his early thirties, graciously agreed to show me around town, to see what little there was to see. The fog of the previous night had all burned away and a nicer day could not have been asked for. The sun was shining brightly and there were only a few high wisps of cloud in the sky.

The town itself was not the most beautiful I’d seen, but it was not the run-down, half-rotten sprawl that Lovecraft had once convinced me was the paradigm of all small towns. His description of the town in ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, with its half-collapsed houses and clock-towers missing their faces, had given me a vision of a town diseased. Triumph was not like this. Most of the houses were in bad shape, it can be said, but they remained distinctly human places, and were obviously being maintained as well as meager budgets could allow. These houses were places of life, despite- or perhaps because of- the economic troubles of their occupants.

I could understand now what my friend meant when he said that the people seemed like ghosts. To me they seemed like their houses. They did not seem happy, exactly, but neither were they miserable. These were people who simply made do, people who lived a life of monotony, and it would only stand to reason that they would be jaded, bored. The dull look in their eyes, the unenthusiastic way in which they greeted each other, all of this could, I thought, easily be attributed to their lot in life as fishermen and their wives in a small town on the coast. The modern exuberance, the lust for life that we are encouraged to foster, is entirely a creation of our own, a product of our age. Life was not so exciting and romantic for our ancestors, the ancestors who, in large part, lived lives similar to the lives of these townspeople.

Aside from the houses, the only memorable structures in the town were its large fishery (along with its cafeteria, whose appearance suggested that Cyrus was right to caution me), a small government office, and a great red ogre of a church. I asked Jebediah to wait a moment or two while I snapped some photographs of the church, for it was majesty in ruins; a large red-bricked cathedral with a tarp over part of the roof, missing bricks, and a cracked and broken set of stairs leading into its darkened interior. Jebediah explained that the church served many roles– it was a place of worship, an emergency shelter, town hall, and, through its weekly bulletins, the town newspaper. When I asked, Jebediah told me that the church had always kept an archive of its bulletins in order to hang on to the town’s history. This seemed to me the logical place to begin my search.

As our last stop before we returned to the hotel, Jebediah took me down a short dirt road to see the ruins of the old lighthouse. Trees hemmed in alongside and above us on the overgrown road, which had clearly not seen regular traffic for a very long time. At the end of the road was a clearing, and as the trees parted and gave way upon our entering this clearing, the lighthouse suddenly and shockingly dominated the sky. The clearing appeared to be little larger than the lighthouse itself and before I’d even noticed it we were suddenly mere feet from the stone behemoth. It loomed over us like some great mindless predator.

Now this was a sight that would have made my predecessor smile, for it seemed almost transposed directly from one of his stories. I was expecting a simple foundation, perhaps with some large stones and debris from the lighthouse’s storied past lying about, waiting to be overcome by the earth. But the lighthouse had apparently been abandoned comparatively recently, such that it was still standing in all its grotesque magnificence. There appeared to have been a fire, quite severe by the look of things. The door was scorched and burnt, held closed by a large and heavy padlock. All of the windows had broken out, their frames warped and twisted like the legs of dead spiders from the heat. Above these windows the exterior walls of the lighthouse were stained with massive black spikes of soot and burned paint. At the very top were the magnifying windows, shattered and broken, the railings around them snapped at insane angles. The roof was sagging noticeably in one place and looked ready to cave in.

To the side was the corpse of a small house, presumably for the lighthouse-keeper and his family. This was entirely destroyed, and were it not for the foundation, a half-standing chimney on the far side and a greater concentration of charred debris I could have overlooked it completely. I walked to the edge of the foundation and peered inside. My eyes fixed on a charred and warped spoon on the edge of an equally obliterated metal card table, still waiting for a meal to come. I felt a chill, though I did not know why.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“Well, a fire, of course.” Jebediah replied. “Back in twenty-eight. Nobody really knows how it started. We think it may have been lightning.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

Jebediah gave me a long look. He walked a few feet away and peered momentarily at the top of the lighthouse, where a large black crow had landed to survey our little expedition. “Two. Two dead,” he explained. “A mother and daughter.” he glanced quickly at me. “The keeper’s wife and his daughter, you know. He was in town, and nobody heard or saw anything, I guess, and when he went home, this is what he found.”
Something about the way he was talking seemed strange to me. It seemed he was somehow telling me more than the truth. “And nobody’s thought to rebuild the lighthouse?” I asked quietly. Jebediah smiled and headed back towards his truck.
“No point,” he said as we drove away. “They’ve been building lighthouses all up and down the shore, new ones with brighter lights. That thing was just a big oil lamp, it’s amazing it didn’t burn down sooner.”

“Still, you think somebody would do something with it, restore it, if just for the history.”

“Folks around here know history, we don’t need museums.” he laughed, but I thought I noticed a kind of nervousness in his laughter. The birds had stopped chirping in the forest around us. “That lighthouse, it was a bad business, but it’s over now.”

Jebediah drove us back to the hotel and, now that I had my bearings, I decided it was time to do some investigating on my own. Cyrus Peterson was busy out in front of his hotel, his torso buried under the hood of his son’s pickup truck. “Can’t be bothered to learn to do this himself,” he muttered to himself. “Little bastard leaves me to do everything.” I decided now was not the best time to press him for more stories. Given that the lighthouse was the only real story I had so far, I decided to go to the church and look through the archived bulletins for further clues.

I made my way up the hill to the massive church. I found myself even more enthralled than before with its beautiful desolation. Going up the steps and through the big doors I was suddenly met with ten or twenty people, just milling about and catching up with each other. The conversation dropped to a murmur as soon as I entered, and I received a great number of suspicious looks. For a moment I felt that I had made a huge mistake in coming here, that this church was a place for insiders only, that I had violated some unwritten code. I searched frantically for a friendly face. In one corner was the youth who had driven me in from Lunenberg. He was talking with a few friends his age. I approached him, with a mind to ask where the archives could be found, but as soon as he saw me heading his way, he and his friends quickly left the church. I felt a sudden sense of profound alienation.

“Who are you?” I heard a voice behind me inquire. I nearly jumped through the ceiling. Taking a moment to compose myself, I turned to face an elderly woman.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said who are you? Haven’t seen you before.” she was squinting at me suspiciously, her gnarled hand clasping and unclasping the top of a wooden cane.

“My name is Jason, I’m a student in Halifax. I’m here on a visit,” I replied, trying to avoid words like ‘reporter’ and ‘folklore’. My brief conversation with Cyrus that morning had shown me that it would probably behoove me to speak as little as possible about my true intentions here.

“A visit? Here? What’s to see here?”

“I’m just interested in your history, that’s all. I’m told there was once a big fishery here.” To my relief, the woman’s face softened.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “You should have seen this town when I was a girl. Not like today,” she shook her head. “I suppose you’re here to see the bulletins, then?”

Hardly believing my luck, I agreed. I appeared to have won her over, as she gladly led me down a set of dark stairs into a room filled nearly to the ceiling with old cardboard boxes, most of them stamped with the logo I’d seen outside the fish plant. She stayed and regaled me with more stories about the good old days until I finally mustered the courage to explain that I’d rather be alone while I went through this material. “Oh, shy, are we?” she cackled. “Well, alright then. But put everything back where you find it! I’m too old to go reorganizing this whole mess.” With my heartfelt promise that I’d be careful, she left me to my work.

The archives were truly a mess. While they were generally arranged more or less chronologically, many were torn or otherwise ruined, and some boxes were out of place, meaning that I had a hard time tracking down the right pile to begin my search. With no other events to investigate aside from the unsettling lighthouse fire, I rifled through the pile until I found the box labeled BULLETIN ARCHIVE - 1920-1930.

Locating ‘28 quickly enough, I began to search through the bulletins for any mention of the fire. The news in Triumph was of fish-hauls, houses being built, old houses being torn down, marriages, new babies, and obituaries. These were punctuated by the occasional disaster- a flood, a particularly bad snowstorm, a fire. Yet I could find no mention of the lighthouse. I shuffled back and forth through 1928 two or three times, and I was sure that the lighthouse was not mentioned.

Digging through the rest of the box, I scanned over every bulletin for the entire decade, and the lighthouse was not mentioned once. I assumed that maybe the bulletin for the week the lighthouse burned had simply gotten lost or destroyed, but the 1920-1930 box, being near the bottom of a pile, had appeared to have suffered much less than those that were more exposed. Furthermore, what struck me as strangest of all was that it wasn’t only the fire that wasn’t mentioned, there was simply no mention of the lighthouse at all, nor its keeper or his family. For one of the largest structures in town to go unmentioned in the town’s only newsletter for an entire decade seemed highly unlikely to me. It was almost as though the lighthouse had not existed during these ten years.

That lighthouse, it was a bad business, but it’s over now.
I had played a bum hunch. With no other leads to track down, I began rifling through the other boxes. They appeared to date from at least 1870, and I amused myself by reading some of the older ones. I could begin to understand the nostalgia with which the elderly people in town spoke of the old days; the black and white photos I saw in these old bulletins spoke of a much happier time. The church in which I stood was featured in one of the bulletins from 1890 as having been recently built. Far from the disrepair the place was in now, it seemed almost to sparkle in the sun. The townsfolk were gathered around outside it. Everyone seemed young and happy.

Then I followed along as the fishing trade began to decline in the early 1900's. The headlines were less encouraging:

Fish shortage may last, according to captains.
Eastern fisheries closes.
Mayor encourages young people to stay in Triumph.

I imagined the surprise, the disappointment of the town as they saw their way of life shrinking into next to nothing. This life that they had made for themselves was supposed to last. They expected their sons and daughters to lead the same life. It was a good life, and things seemed like they could go on, and nobody would ever be wanting as long as there was good hard work to be done. But where do we go from here? What do we do when our best-laid plans turn into nothing? I knew what they did- most left, and some stayed. And that was Triumph.

I was so engrossed in the local drama that I almost skipped right past the story I was looking for. On the bottom of the first page of the bulletin from the second week in April, 1911, there was a simple headline and a short story:

Lighthouse Fire

Constable Michael Burns reports that sometime in the early evening of April 9th, a fire started in the home of lighthouse-keeper Daniel Morgan. The fire spread quickly and gutted the small house.

Tragically, Morgan’s wife Aliza and daughter Hannah were both killed in the fire. Both bodies were found in the remains of little Hannah’s bedroom. Constable Burns reports that it is believed Aliza had gone to retrieve her daughter to make their escape, but had soon fainted from the smoke. Lighthouse-keeper Morgan was in town at the market at the time of the fire.

The cause of the fire is as yet unknown, although the afternoon’s thunderstorm suggests lightning as a possible cause. The lighthouse-keeper’s house appears to have been destroyed completely, but the lighthouse itself

The story ended abruptly. I turned the page and saw a large black and white photo of the scene I had witnessed earlier in the afternoon; the fire-demolished house with its standing chimney, its hollowed-out foundation. But there was something different about the scene, something I could not quite put my finger on. And then I realized what it was. The windows of the lighthouse were intact. The roof was in passable shape. The trails of soot and ash bursting from the windows were entirely absent. The door was solid, not charred. I felt a chill as I read on.

appears to have suffered no structural damage whatsoever. Nevertheless, Morgan explains that he has no intention of returning to his work. Deeply disturbed by this event and left without a home, he has resolved to move. We offer Morgan our deepest condolences and wish him the very best of luck.

The town will advertise the job, but town manager Davis explains that the cost of rebuilding the burned home likely means that the lighthouse will shine no longer. For years, the new lighthouses in Lunenberg and down the coast have made Triumph’s lighthouse little more than a curiosity and, Davis explains, the cost of running it no longer justifies its worth.

I was baffled. I was sure I had seen that lighthouse completely gutted, almost beyond repair, yet the fire reported in the bulletin had not touched it. Nor had any of the bulletins mentioned a second fire, at least before 1930. Why had Jebediah given me the wrong year in his recounting of the story? When, then, had the lighthouse burned, if it was still in decent shape when Morgan’s family met their end?

I resolved to ask Cyrus that evening. I felt that I was really on the trail of something now. If my friend had even gotten to the archives in the church basement, I could see how he could have easily missed the story about the lighthouse, seeing how we had the same guide to the area, a guide who was either misinformed about the correct date or was hiding the date on purpose. However, now that I knew that something strange was going on, I felt sure that I would uncover something worth reading.

That night I enjoyed a dinner with my host, a simple meal of baked fish and more potatoes. I didn’t pry him for any information at dinner, as I had a certain secret weapon in the form of a large bottle of whiskey I’d picked up in Lunenberg. I thought that after dinner I would sit down with Cyrus and the two of us would talk things over, aided by the strong spirits.

I returned to my room later that evening in order to sit down with my notes for a while and come up with some questions for Cyrus. Obviously, I intended to ask him about the second fire at the lighthouse. I also wanted to ask him about any other strange happenings around the town that could have been related to it, as well as some general history of this declining village. My room had a little desk and I poured myself a small glass of the whiskey, sitting down to do my writing. I quickly became engrossed in the story. Visions flitted through my mind of the lighthouse burning. It must have been quite a fire to leave such obvious stains on the outside of the building. I wondered if it would be possible to get inside.

Without warning I was suddenly shocked out of my writing. There was no sound or vision to startle me. Again, like in my dream, I was tense, on edge. My head snapped immediately toward the corner where I had dreamed of the figure, hiding herself behind her hands. There was nobody there. Still, I could not shake this sense of presence, could not deny that there was something in the room with me.

My heart lurched suddenly as I heard a tremendous shattering of glass behind me. Before I could even turn I saw shards of glass rocketing across the room. I spun around and saw that the large mirror across from my bed had completely shattered. Not a piece of it was left on the wall. It had exploded outward, covering the bed and floor with fragmented glass as though something had crashed into it suddenly from behind. Yet it was a wall-mounted mirror, and that would have been impossible.
I was standing and examining the glass, heart pumping, when the door slammed open. I nearly attacked Cyrus Peterson when he burst through the door.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” he bellowed.

“Mr. Peterson, I’m sorry, but this has nothing to do with me,” I explained, doubting seriously that he would believe me. He was scared himself, eyes darting around the room like a nervous cat. “I was at the desk over here, you see?” I gestured madly at my papers scattered everywhere.

Cyrus took a long look around the room and finally sighed. “This house, it’s old, it swells and shrinks. I guess the mirror just got pressed a way it didn’t like. Never seen something like this happen before.” We stood for a moment, both winded with surprise. Finally he glanced at the bed. “Aww, for fuck’s sake.” It was the first time I’d heard him swear. “There’s glass all over your bed, you can’t sleep in that. Pack up your things and I’ll move you to a different room.” I had no arguments.