She’d left two harbors in snow before dawn. Some hours had passed with only the magnetic pull of the lake beneath her, and now the Nocturne was surrounded by fog as dense as paraffin. Despite the chill, she unlatched the porthole, pushed the window open, reached outside and clenched her fist, trying to hold the fog in her grasp. That’s when she heard the basso profundo of the ship’s whistle, and a faint echo answering from the distant shore.
She brought her hand back inside. It was slicked by the fog and she wiped it dry on the sleeve of her blouse. The ship’s whistle blew again; there again, the answer.
The purser came through steerage. “Next stop’s the Gininwabiko light,” he called, opening his leather pocket ledger. “Mrs. Sauer?”
She startled at her name but managed to acknowledge him with a quizzical look.
“Keeper Sauer asked me to escort you personally. We’ll drop anchor in five minutes. The lighthouse launch will meet us shipside. I’ll fetch your trunk now. May I have your baggage ticket?”
She withdrew it from her handbag. “There are two trunks.”
“Find yourself to the forward gangway. Portside.” He threw his thumb over his right shoulder. “Thataway.” He pocketed his ledger and looked over the top of his pince-nez at the open window. He reached over and latched it shut. As he did, the ship sent another moan into the day. After this third call, she didn’t hear the distant echo, but rather felt, even from amidships, the vibrating deck as the anchor chain ran out.
“I reckon Cap found his spot. Better make haste.” He turned and hustled through the cabin as she stood and walked the other way.
She found herself alone at the railing, the black water rolling beneath her as slow and gentle as the orbiting night sky. The ship’s whistle blew every third or fourth swell, calling her husband through the fog. For a moment, she fancied stepping into the killing water. She even leaned over the railing and glanced once in each direction. No one would see her. She could end her trial before it began. She gripped the railing more firmly and sent the water a beseeching query.
The answer came from the secreted shore—a lament calling back, a chorus of howls belatedly harmonizing with the whistle. They were so close she could reach out and hold their music.
“That’s not your mother’s lap dog,” the purser said, standing there as suddenly as the howling had found her.
She acknowledged him by peering harder into the fog. “Wolves,” he said.
As soon as he said it, she heard a different sound: a symphony of splashing oars and dissonant whistling materialized into an ill-shapen boat, lit by a single lantern and rowed by Theodulf. The din on his lips was meant to be Beethoven.
“A big pack’s up in those hills,” the purser said. “Dozens, is what I heard. Reckon there’s been no need to kill them yet. Or no one around to do it.”
Now Willa did turn to him. “Whyever—”
“Lo!” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Master Sauer! Lo!”
His whistling stopped and the oarlocks complained. “Nocturne,” another voice shouted back. Her husband’s. Theodulf ’s.
“Lo!” a different voice added to the choir. The captain, if she understood his regalia. “Aye, Master Sauer! Come abeam. We’ll trice up.”
He had a line in his hand, ready to toss to the launch. The lantern light grew brighter until it was no light at all, and Theodulf was there, in full uniform, standing astride the thwart, the long oars still in his hands, his eyes steady on the gangway, though not on her. Not at all.
Defiantly, Willa turned to look at the purser. But he was gone, replaced by one of her trunks and the distinct sensation that he had had no more substance than the fog.
“Toss the line,” Theodulf said. The boats triced up.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Sauer,” the captain said, unlatching the gang-plank and lowering it to the launch’s gunwale. Then he said, “Ma’am?” and offered the crook of his arm.
A mere six feet separated the Nocturne and her husband’s boat. Six feet that may as well have been the whole length of the lake for as much as she wanted to cross it. But cross it she did, reaching down for Theodulf ’s offered hand, pausing to note the brass buttons on the cuff of his peacoat, the starched white collar and necktie, the gleaming visor of his peaked cap. When he took her hand, it was not with gentleness or kindness or love—as any other man might have greeted his new wife—but rather as though her arm were a hawser, and he a stevedore bitter at his labor.
After hoisting her aboard, he fetched the first trunk, and waited aboard the Nocturne for the second, speaking to the captain. When finally he loaded the second trunk, he said, “A fair load for one lady.”
Not hello. Not sweetheart.
He uncoupled the gangplank and watched as it was hauled back aboard the ship, where the captain stood holding the railing with one hand. The other was raised in a half-hearted and unofficial salute. Theodulf, misunderstanding the gesture, straightened himself and said, “We’ll watch for you going home tomorrow, sir. Here’s to clearing heavens and fair breezes.”
Willa didn’t say that the fog would relent soon but give way to snow. She didn’t say the calmness they all bobbed in now was exordium to stiff northern winds sure to bring unkind seas. She didn’t warn him, or say a proper hello herself, or stifle her unhappiness. She only sat on that seat and stared at her worn brogues, knowing how the wind would blow, hoping for an hour’s reprieve sometime in the middle hours of the night so she might catch a glimpse of the perihelion of Halley’s Comet.
Theodulf said nothing, not even when the Nocturne sent up its farewell whistle and the wolves answered one last time. No, he didn’t say anything until Willa, seeing the shore materialize through the fog some five minutes later, observed another man on the dock, his dark form silhouetted against the whiteness of the boathouse, and asked, “Who’s that?” and he replied, “That’s Father Richter.”
“Why’s he here?” she asked.
Theodulf looked over his shoulder, whether to lay eyes on his beloved priest or to take measure of where the dock was, she could not know. “He’s here to bless the light.”
“To bless the light?”
He finally looked at her then, his unkind gaze coming up from under the shadow of his hat. “How would this light shepherd even a single vessel if it were not itself blessed by God?”
“Why didn’t you signal the station foghorn for the Nocturne?” she asked.
“She’s not commissioned until sundown.”
“Not even in this weather? Not even for your new wife, to guide her safely?”
“Contrariwise to regulations,” he said, then pulled harder on the oars. As if to shorten his time on the boat with her. His legs were spread wide, his boots planted firmly on the burden boards, one on either side of a trunk. He kept his chin tucked on his shoulder. His mustache was hoary gray and long, and it hung limp around his lips. His hands squat and rough and gripping the new oars.
“Father Richter’s blessing of the light, that’s regulation?” she pressed.
“My service is first to God,” he said.
As if God were rewarding his piety, the fog started rising. All of it this time. As the last tendrils evanesced, the lighthouse came into relief atop a sheer granite cliff. Theodulf steered toward the boathouse, which she could see sat some eighth of a mile up the shore from the base of the palisade. Father Richter was close enough now that she recognized the stole hanging from his narrow shoulders, a brilliant green at odds with the dull gray hills above.
“Just a few more minutes,” Theodulf said. He sculled easier now that the fog had lifted, and the launch sliced through the water. “One more thing,” he added. “You’ll tell Father Richter confession before you settle in.”
“Pardon me?”
“He’s here to bless the light, as I say. But we’ll take the opportunity to visit the sacrament of penance. Who can say when next the good Father will call on us?”
She turned and watched the wake of the boat lag behind, watched the steam from the Nocturne rise with the retreating fog. It was her turn for reticence. Not because she was chastened or acquiescent, but because she knew her husband was immovable on this, the subject of his piety and the decorum he pretended. She also knew he was a fraud—in the matter of his faith, to be sure, but also in a slew of other ways—and to expose him all at once would rob her of what little promise the years ahead possessed. There’d be time to parley with Theodulf. She’d wield her secrets like strychnine.
So instead of extending their quarrel, she turned her attention to the lightening sky. It was quick to move on this wild shore. Her father had taught her a long time ago to sense barometric pressure, and between the weight of her blood and the arcus clouds hauling down, she reckoned the weather would remain all day. That this realization broached as much unhappiness as her general circumstances was almost a relief, filling her, as it did, with a sense that the blood coursing through her would indeed funnel through her own heart.
Just before they came into earshot of Father Richter standing on the end of the dock, Theodulf offered a sudden remark. “We should want absolution, Willa. We should want God’s grace and goodness. Asking forgiveness and doing penance is a way to that absolution.”
She had other notions about absolution, but only smiled at Theodulf as he rowed for the shore.
His first condition of their engagement had been her conversion to Catholicism. She supposed his evangelizing, with its elementary logic and somber flourishes, was a fact of life now. The only time he’d held her hand was on that morning in her mother’s parlor, while he spoke ardently about the mysteries of God and the joy of belief. Then and now, Willa might have quailed—she no more believed in God or thought herself Catholic than she believed she would one day love the man rowing this boat—but instead of despair she channeled a kind of resolve she’d not known she possessed. Oh, she would be devout, not to her husband or God, but rather to her sacred sciences. To reason. To her own true self.
Theodulf stood with one hand still on the starboard oar and the other clutching a coil of hempen line. The robed figure of Father Richter stood on the dock, ready to help them land.
A moment later, the priest greeted them. “I daresay, I wondered if you’d find your way back in the fog.”
“We followed the wolf song,” Theodulf said. “They sing heresies!”
Theodulf tossed the line and Father Richter tied the boat to a cleat. “Mrs. Sauer, you look hale. Welcome home,” he said, and then offered his hand, which Willa took as she stepped onto the dock.
“Father Richter. You’re a long way from Sacred Heart,” she said. Father Richter helped get Willa’s trunks dockside before putting a hand on her shoulder and saying, “I need go where the sinners are. And this”—now he spread his arms wide, east and west, as though to encompass the shoreline and the wilds above it—“is rich territory for reprobates and degenerates.”
At this, Theodulf joined them on the dock. Despite the cold, a gloss of sweat glazed his brow. He held up one finger as though he were about to make a point, removed his hat, and wiped away the sweat instead. “Welcome to Gininwabiko, Willa. I hope you’ll be happy here.” Without waiting for her response, he said to Father Richter, “She’s ready to repent. Shall we go up to the house?”
Father Richter only nodded, took one end of the first trunk, and followed Theodulf up the path to the lighthouse.
It was a steep five-minute walk to the top of the palisade and the compound atop it. There were three identical brick houses backed by three wooden sheds and fronted by a walkway that led to a concrete bunker she assumed was the oil house. The foghorns were mounted on the roof of another brick building, which sat on one side of a staircase. On the other, the lighthouse loomed, eight-sided and magisterial and ready for service.
“This is our residence,” Theodulf said, pausing before the stoop of the house farthest from the light. “I thought it would offer the most privacy. The first and second assistants will be here on Sunday. Their families will live there and there.” He pointed at the other dwellings one–two.
“It’s more than I was expecting,” Willa said, glancing up at the house, a two-story foursquare with dormered windows overlooking the grounds and the lake from the second floor.
“I told you it was lovely,” he said. “Did you doubt me?” “Doubt you? Whyever would I?”
“Good,” he said, oblivious to her mocking, then nodded at the front door and the stoop before it. “Father, will you help me with this? Willa, wait just one moment.”
And again she was dumbfounded. Would she really not be permitted inside her home without first saying confession? In as much time as it took her to understand this truth, Theodulf and the priest were stepping back out. Now her husband had a captain’s chair, which he set on the porch. Father Richter trailed with a folded blanket in one hand, and his bible in the other. He arranged the blanket next to the chair.
“Child,” he said, offering the blanket.
Theodulf was already hurrying back down to the dock for the other trunk. She watched him, his shoulders set and sloped, his stride lumbering, until he crested the hill and disappeared downslope. Willa turned to the lighthouse. Wisps of fog still licked the windows of the lantern room, as if it were exhaling, its breath plenty, for the fog no sooner ended than the clouds did commence. She scanned the rest of the sky to discern the time, but there was none.
“Please, Mrs. Sauer. Kneel. Say your confession.”
Father Richter gathered his cassock and sat down, gesturing at her spot, which was turned away from him. They would be shoulder to shoulder, he facing the house.
She glanced again at the empty trail.
Father Richter saw what she did. “Your husband is a good and pious man. His virtues and the virtues of this light station will help save countless lives. It is a storm-ravaged and wild place you live now.” He clutched his bible, brought it to his lips. “God’s grace will be your most faithful companion.”
For a moment, she fantasized about Theodulf disappearing. Of him never cresting the hill again, with or without her trunk. She could live here alone. Happily. She might even consign herself to a life of prayerful devotion. Again she glanced at the lighthouse and the sky forever above and beyond it. A glimpse of heaven, without her husband there to sully it. She could have daydreamed for an hour, but Father Richter’s rotten breath rode a sigh from the cauldron of his throat, choking her back to her place on that stoop.
“Child,” Father Richter said again.
As the priest had gathered his cassock, so Willa now gathered her skirts. She knelt on the blanket, there at the door of her new home. Father Richter peeked at her, and then made the sign of the cross and whispered, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” She wanted to howl. To make music with the beasts, to sing harmony to their heresies.
His eyes were still closed, but Father Richter leaned toward her and said, “Begin with your venial sins, Mrs. Sauer.”
I am full of anger, she thought. Is anger a sin? Envy, yes. Pride and greed, yes, sins, and I am full of these. But more than anything, I am full of wrath.
“We are all impure. Each and every one of us,” he said, as though reading her mind.
Now there came from the near distance wolves barking. Short and warning. It sounded like they might be on the other side of the house. Six or eight yelps.
Father Richter looked quickly heavenward, then just as quickly down at Willa. He kept his gaze on her, as though by force of will he might divine her secrets. When she didn’t budge, he said, “If you do not repent, you will be—”
“Bless me father, for I have sinned,” she began, recalling the rules she was expected to abide by. “This is my first confession since January.” She saw an inscrutable smile rise in his beard. His eyes were closed again, and she could sense as much as see a kind of ecstasy in his fluttering lids at having won her voice. This sickened her—that she should be so unfaithful to herself, that she should let this man and his simplemindedness prevail upon her—and in order to quell the nausea, she had a fiendish idea.
“I have had impure thoughts,” she lied. “I have been covetous and I have been desirous and that’s not the whole of it.” She saw his own eyes glance sideways at her. If he was dubious, she couldn’t tell, so she pressed on. “I have lain with another girl. I would do so again.” She feigned a caught breath.
At this he gasped, but because he was genuinely surprised. Perhaps even stricken.
Before he could regain his bearing, she added, “I have injured. I have taken the Lord’s name in vain.” She felt gleeful and hurried through a litany of false sins. Idolatry, envy, blaspheming, sloth. What else was forbidden?
Across the grounds, Theodulf reappeared with her chest. He set it on the path and continued to the lighthouse, avoiding her gaze as he passed. During their courtship, such as it was, he had spent their Saturday afternoons not promising primroses and complimenting her beauty, but proselytizing and praying and laboring over the ten commandments, as though her conversion meant his salvation. That she so easily convinced her husband of her righteousness, well, it was a small thrill. Especially now, as she paid this entry toll into her new life.
“Is that all, child?” Father Richter asked.
What she didn’t confess was that her true sin, born only in those moments with Father Richter, staring at her husband beneath the lighthouse, in full regalia, was that she felt murderous.
Instead of confessing anything more, Willa merely nodded in answer to the priest’s query. And as he prayed over her soul—granting her pardon, assuring her absolution, and assigning her penance— she made a silent vow: her covenant would be with the wilds—the wolves and water and celestial bodies. She would remain as agnostic as nature. And as cunning.
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From A Lesser Light by Peter Geye. Used with permission of the publisher, University of Minnesota Press. Copyright © 2025 by Peter Geye.
