The Keeper of the Light
For forty-one years, Tomas had climbed the ninety-eight steps to the lamp room every evening at dusk. He knew which step creaked, which one was worn smooth in the middle, and which one to avoid in winter when the damp came through the stone.
The letter had arrived in March. The lighthouse was to be automated. A machine would switch the lamp on at dusk and off at dawn, and it would not need a keeper, a cottage, or ninety-eight steps climbed twice a day.
Tomas did not argue. He understood the arithmetic of it. What he could not explain to the man from the department, who had been polite and had stayed exactly eleven minutes, was that the lamp was not the only thing he had been keeping.
He had kept the record book, in which every ship that passed had been noted in his small, square handwriting. He had kept the habit of watching the water at three in the morning, when the fishing boats came back in weather that should have kept them home. Twice he had kept a man alive by noticing, from ninety-eight steps up, that a light on the water was not moving the way a light on the water should.
On his last evening he climbed the steps as usual. He lit the lamp, though the machine was already installed and would have done it for him, and he sat with it until the sky went grey.