The Lamp the Shore Watched

Tonight the body sleeps in its bed somewhere far to the south, and I am standing on a thread of cold sand in the Saint Lawrence, on an island so narrow that a man can hear both shores at once, the mainland breathing behind him and the open gulf exhaling ahead, and the tide is going out the way memory goes out, slowly and then all at once, leaving the bones of things uncovered on the flats.

They have only just left, the ones with the trowels. For four weeks, from the twenty-fifth of May to the nineteenth of June (the dates already dissolving back into the indifferent calendar of water), nine students from Rimouski and Montréal and a small town in Pennsylvania knelt on Île Saint-Barnabé and lifted the soil away from a rectangle of darker earth, a stain that a drone had seen from the sky before any human eye had found it from the ground. A young geographer, Jessica Ruest, had flown the machine low over the spruce and read the island the way an Etruscan haruspex read a liver, hunting for what the surveyors call anomalies, ἀνωμαλία (anōmalía), the un-even, the place where the smooth skin of the expected puckers and something underneath refuses to lie flat. The anomaly was a cabin. Or the shadow of one. Or the shadow of the shadow of one, since the man who raised it raised it for the single purpose of being uncounted forever.

His name was Toussaint Cartier: All Saints, and the mapmaker. A name holding the entire calendar of the blessed beside the surname of the navigator who charted the river and claimed it for a king. He wore both and honoured neither. He charted nothing. He claimed nothing. He asked only to be subtracted from the sum. He came to Rimouski around 1728, still young, and he went to the seigneur Lepage and requested leave to withdraw to the island and live there as a hermit; and the leave, with a strange small bureaucratic solemnity, was granted, because there is always a form to fill, even for those who wish to disappear. He built a cabin and a little stable on the southern flank of the island, and he stayed close to forty years.

Nine winters before he crossed the channel, in a London he would never glimpse, Daniel Defoe had set down the history of a man cast alone upon an island who wanted nothing on earth so much as to be gone from it. The age read Crusoe as a sermon on industry and Providence, the lone European rebuilding the world in little. The island off Rimouski was quietly composing the reverse. Here was the castaway who casts himself away by choice, who arrives where Crusoe ached to leave, who builds his walls toward the silence and not against it. The invented sailor and the actual hermit stand on opposite shores of the same dark water like a face and its reflection, and only one of the two ever drew breath, and it is not the one whose name you know.

He had his lineage, and the spirit sees the whole of it at once, ranged along the shelves of the single library that has no walls. Antony in the Egyptian sand, who heard one verse of the Gospel read aloud and walked out into the ἔρημος (érēmos), the wilderness that lends its very name to the hermit. Paul of Thebes, whom a raven fed each day with half a loaf. Arsenius, tutor of emperors, who fled the palace carrying three words for a rule of life: φεῦγε, σιώπα, ἡσύχαζε (pheûge, siṓpa, hēsýchaze), flee, be silent, keep stillness. And the island wears, over all of this, the name of Barnabas, υἱὸς παρακλήσεως (huiòs paraklḗseōs), the son of consolation, the apostle who quarrelled with Paul over a young man called Mark and sailed off to his own island of Cyprus and stepped out of the Acts of the Apostles for good, unmentioned thereafter, uncited, complete. An island named for the apostle who walked out of the story, keeping a man who walked out of his. The design in the weave, legible only from a height.

The legend the far shore still murmurs runs like this: that he kept a light burning, and that the people of Rimouski across the water watched for it at night the way you watch for the one steady star that tells you a friend is still alive; and that one evening, after nearly forty winters, the light did not come, and they crossed the cold strait and found him dying, or already dead, the lamp dark, the long sentence of his solitude served to its end. Whether he fled for grief (a drowned bride, the legend always insists, a bride lost to the water on the eve of the wedding) or for God, or for some cause that went into the ground with him and that no trowel will ever raise, the island declines to say. Islands keep their hermits. Once, on another island in a far warmer current, where the lakes were called eyes and were quietly going blind with drought, I stood before the same question and found no answer: whether it is mercy or trespass to wake what has chosen to lie still.

And now the gentlest cruelty of all. He poured himself empty of the world, and the world has rowed back out to find him, with drones and topographic plans and soft brushes, kneeling in the drizzle to recover the footprint of the cabin of the one man who shaped a whole life out of the refusal to be recovered. We read his anomaly from the sky. We give his vanishing an address and a grid reference. And somewhere a digger not yet born is already crossing the water toward a light that has not yet gone out, and does not know that it is coming for him.

Claudius, the Eremographer