The Drawbridge Keeper's Summer

• Chapter 1 The First Crank
• Chapter 2 Salt Air and Iron Gears
• Chapter 3 The Logbook
• Chapter 4 Crossing Point
• Chapter 5 The High Tide
• Chapter 6 Low Water Mark
• Chapter 7 Morning Fog
• Chapter 8 The Wanderer
• Chapter 9 Rules of the Channel
• Chapter 10 Midsummer Light
• Chapter 11 Heavy Timber
• Chapter 12 The Lobster Fleet
• Chapter 13 Uncharted Waters
• Chapter 14 Slack Water
• Chapter 15 Voices Across the Sound
• Chapter 16 August Heat
• Chapter 17 Echoes in the Fog
• Chapter 18 A Shift in the Wind
• Chapter 19 The Night Watch
• Chapter 20 Rust and Tension
• Chapter 21 Storm Warning
• Chapter 22 Breaking Strain
• Chapter 23 The Open Span
• Chapter 24 The Last Passage
• Chapter 25 Closing the Gap
• Chapter 26 Autumn on the Island

The grease on the gears of the Heron Island drawbridge was the color of a wet slate shingle and smelled faintly of fish oil and very old pennies. It was seven forty-five on a Tuesday morning in late June, and Mara stood on the wooden catwalk with a heavy brass key in her palm. The key was nearly six inches long, its teeth worn smooth by forty years of keepers who had come before her, mostly retired lobstermen with bad knees or quiet widows who wanted a room with a view of the reach. Now, the key belonged to her, at least until the goldenrod died back in September and the summer people boarded up their cottages.

Heron Island was shaped like a sleeping hound, two miles long and barely half a mile wide, anchored to the coast of Maine by three hundred feet of graying spruce timbers and a central steel span that swung upward like a heavy jaw. To the tourists in their clean white SUVs, the bridge was a picturesque obstacle, a brief delay on their way to porches with rocking chairs and high-priced lobster rolls. To the seventy-two year-round residents, it was the only thread that kept them from drifting out into the Atlantic.

Mara tucked the key into her denim pocket and stepped inside the gatehouse. The small octagon-shaped shack was no larger than a toolshed, clad in cedar shakes that had silvered in the salt air. Inside, there was a high stool with one leg shorter than the others, a shelf holding a three-legged kerosene stove, a transistor radio with a wire antenna wrapped around a rusty nail, and a massive, leather-bound ledger. This was the logbook. Its pages were thick and yellowed, smelling of damp cellar and dried ink.

According to the instruction manual printed on a laminated sheet of cardboard tacked to the wall, her day began at eight. The tide was flooding, pushing cold, green water through the narrow channel beneath the planks. Under the floorboards, the pilings groaned as the current pressed against them, a deep, rhythmic vibration that Mara could feel in the soles of her sneakers.

She checked her watch. Seven fifty-two.

"Don't go staring at the clock, girl," a voice rumbled from the doorway.

Mara jumped, her hand flying to her collar. Silas Clough stood in the opening, blockading the light. He was the town road commissioner and, by default, the bridge supervisor. He wore an oil-stained canvas coat despite the morning warmth, and his beard looked as though it had been scrubbed with sea salt and never quite dried. He had a thermos of black coffee cradled in one arm like a newborn child.

"I wasn't staring," Mara said, though she had been. "I was just checking the tide."

"Tide does what it wants," Silas said, stepping inside. The small shack immediately felt crowded. He smelled of woodsmoke and peppermint. He reached out and tapped the glass of the barometer on the wall. It didn't budge. "The folks on the island don't care about the tide. They care about their mail, and they care about the milk truck. If the milk goes sour because you're daydreaming, you'll hear about it from Mrs. Gable before noon."

"I know," Mara said. She had lived in the mainland town of Oakhaven her whole life, three miles inland where the trees were thick and the sea was just a blue line on the horizon. Getting this job had been a stroke of luck, or perhaps a lack of other candidates willing to sit in a ten-by-ten box for twelve hours a day, six days a week, for minimum wage. Her friends were working the registers at the supermarket or hauling traps for their uncles, but Mara wanted something quiet. She wanted time to think, though she wasn't yet sure what she needed to think about.

Silas pointed a thick, calloused finger at the iron wheel in the center of the floor. It resembled the steering wheel of a sunken pirate ship, four feet in diameter, with heavy wooden spokes radiating from a central hub of solid iron. "This is the crank. It’s geared sixty-to-one. That means for every sixty times you turn this wheel, the bridge rises one foot. To get it high enough for the tall-masted ketches from Camden, you’ll need to turn it three hundred times. Understood?"

"Three hundred," Mara repeated. She looked at her arms. They were thin, pale from a winter spent studying for exams she had already forgotten.

"And don't go rushing it," Silas warned, leaning against the doorframe. "You rush, you strip the teeth on the rack. You strip the teeth, and the island is cut off until the county send a welder from Bangor. If that happens, the lobstermen will throw you off the pier, and I won't stop them." He didn't smile, but there was a faint twitch in his grey eyebrow that might have passed for humor in a warmer climate. "Let's see you do a dry run. Open her up for the eight o'clock."

"Is there a boat coming?" Mara asked, looking out the east window toward the open bay. The water was flat and gray, dotted with the red and yellow buoys of the lobster traps.

"Doesn't matter if there's a boat or a floating log," Silas said. "At eight o'clock, we test the gears. It’s the rule. Write it down in the book first."

Mara sat on the stool and opened the ledger. The ink from the previous day, written in Silas's crabbed, back-slanted handwriting, read: 19:00 - Closed for night. High tide. No incidents.

Underneath, in her neat, schoolgirl print, she wrote: 08:00 - Scheduled opening. Weather clear. Wind light from the East.

"Good," Silas said, watching over her shoulder. "Now, go put the barrier down."

Mara stepped out onto the wooden approach. The bridge was a simple swing span, though everyone called it a drawbridge. Instead of rising into the air like two matching halves, the center section pivoted horizontally on a massive central pier, swinging out like a gate to let boats pass on either side.

To stop the traffic, there was no fancy electric gate with flashing red lights. There was only a heavy pine log, painted with faded red and white stripes, suspended by two chains across the roadway. Mara unhooked the chain from its iron cleat on the guardrail and lowered the log until it rested in two notched wooden posts.

A low, blue station wagon was idling on the mainland side. Inside sat Mr. Penny, the island’s retired mail carrier, his face obscured by a cloud of pipe smoke. He tapped his wristwatch and nodded at her through the windshield. He wasn't angry; he was just keeping time. Everyone on the neck kept time by the bridge.

Mara walked back to the gatehouse, her heart hammering against her ribs. She gripped the wooden spoke of the wheel. It was cold and slightly greasy.

"Foot on the brake first," Silas commanded.

She looked down. A heavy iron pedal protruded from the floorboards near the base of the wheel. She pressed her right sneaker onto it. The pedal sank three inches, and she heard the distant clatter of the iron brake shoes releasing their grip on the central shaft.

"Now," Silas said. "Throw your shoulder into it. Don't just use your wrists, or you'll be at the chiropractor by Friday."

Mara leaned forward, gripped the top spoke with both hands, and pushed.

Nothing happened.

The wheel felt as though it were welded to the bedrock of the bay. She braced her left foot against the wall of the shack, bent her knees, and shoved with all her weight. With a sickening, metallic groan that resonated through her teeth, the wheel yielded.

Clack.

That was one tooth.

"Keep it moving," Silas urged, his voice surprisingly soft. "Once she's rolling, she's got momentum. It's the starting that kills you."

Mara gritted her teeth and pushed again. The wheel turned a quarter-circle, then a half. The groaning from below changed from a screech to a rhythmic, low-frequency rumble. Through the window, she saw the wooden roadbed begin to move. It was an extraordinary sensation—the solid earth beneath her feet was suddenly parting, rotating away from the mainland.

The gap opened. First a foot of dark water, then three, then six. The green tide swirled in the gap, sucking at the green slime on the stone abutments.

"Ten," Mara gasped, her breath coming short.

"Don't count out loud," Silas said, though he was watching the gap with an expert eye. "It makes you look like you're struggling. Keep your head up. Watch the water, watch the road. You’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head on this job."

By fifty turns, Mara’s shoulders were burning. The muscles along her shoulder blades felt like hot wires. By one hundred, her hands were slick with sweat, slipping on the smooth wood of the spokes. She could see Mr. Penny through the side window; he had turned off his engine and was reading the morning paper.

"She’s halfway," Silas said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small pocketknife, beginning to clean his fingernails with the tip of the blade. "You're doing fine. Just don't let the wheel spin back on you. If you let go of that brake while she's swinging, the weight of the span will spin this wheel fast enough to break both your arms."

Mara gripped the spokes even tighter. The thought of the massive iron wheel spinning wild, a blur of wooden teeth, made her knees go soft. She kept her foot pressed hard against the brake pedal, her thigh shaking from the effort.

At two hundred turns, the bridge was nearly perpendicular to the road. The channel was open. A small outboard boat, a twelve-foot skiff with an old evinrude motor, was idling fifty yards down the reach. Inside was a young boy in an oversized orange life jacket. He waved to Mara as she stood sweating over the wheel. She tried to wave back, but she couldn't spare the hand.

"That's young Toby," Silas said, squinting through the salt-grimed glass. "His father’s got the weir down by the cove. He’s early today."

With twenty more heavy, agonizing rotations, the bridge reached its limit. It hit the wooden bumper on the central pier with a soft, hollow thud that vibrated through the floorboards.

"Hold it there," Silas said. "Lock the pin."

Mara reached for a secondary lever near her left foot. It was a long, rusted bar of iron. She pulled it upward. Below, a heavy steel pin slid into a slot on the central pier, locking the bridge in its open position. She could finally take her foot off the brake.

She collapsed against the wheel, her chest heaving. Her hands were red, the skin across her palms hot and tender. A small blister was already rising at the base of her thumb.

"Eight minutes," Silas said, checking his silver pocket watch. "Not bad for a girl from the woods. My cousin Arthur used to do it in five, but he had arms like smoked hams and died of a stroke right here on the floor. So, five is probably too fast."

He walked to the door and looked out at the channel. The skiff was passing through now, its small motor popping in the quiet morning air. The boy waved again, and this time Mara managed a weak nod.

"Now," Silas said, turning back to her. "The hard part."

"The hard part?" Mara asked, her voice cracking. "I thought that was the hard part."

"Getting it open is easy," Silas said, picking up his thermos. "The tide is working with you on the swing. But when you close it, you're pushing against the current. And if you don't line the tracks up perfectly, the latch won't drop, and the first log truck that tries to cross will tip right into the mud."

He stepped out onto the catwalk, the wind catching his heavy coat. "I've got to see about some gravel for the north road. You've got twenty minutes before the mail truck comes back from the post office on the mainland. If you aren't closed by then, he’ll blow his horn until your ears bleed."

He walked down the approach, his heavy boots thudding on the planks, leaving Mara alone in the octagonal shack.

The silence returned, larger now than it had been before. The transistor radio crackled with low static, a faint country song drifting through the small speaker. Mara looked at her hands, then at the massive wheel.

Through the window, she could see the island. It looked different from here. On the mainland, the houses were painted white with neat green shutters, and the lawns were mowed every Saturday. On Heron Island, the cottages were gray, weathered by sixty years of gales, their yards filled with old lobster traps, rusted anchors, and wild blackberry bushes. It was a place that didn't care about appearances. It only cared about utility.

And she was now the gatekeeper.

Mara sat on the stool and pulled the logbook toward her. She dipped her pen in the inkwell.

08:12 - Skiff passed through. Outward bound.

She watched the blue station wagon on the other side. Mr. Penny had put his paper down and was looking at her through his windshield. He wasn't blinking. He was waiting.

She took a deep breath, stood up, and placed her hands back on the greasy wood of the wheel. The summer had just begun.

The wind had shifted by eight-thirty, swinging around from the east to blow straight up the gut from the open Atlantic. It brought with it the chill of deep water, the kind of cold that lived in the dark spaces under the ledges even in late June. Mara stood on the catwalk, the skin of her arms prickling with goosebumps under her flannel shirt. Her hands were still throbbing from the morning’s first opening, the palms patterned with the rough imprint of the iron-bound wheel.

Across the channel, Mr. Penny’s blue station wagon remained idling, its tailpipe puffing thin plumes of white exhaust into the damp air. Beyond him, on the mainland side, a yellow gravel truck had pulled up, its diesel engine rattling like a bucket of loose bolts. The driver, a young man Mara didn't recognize, was leaning his elbow out the window, spitting sunflower seed shells onto the gravel shoulder. The island was waiting for her to close the gate, and the pressure of those waiting eyes felt heavier than the three-ton steel span itself.

She stepped back into the octagonal gatehouse, the small space smelling intensely of the damp wool socks she’d hung near the kerosene stove to dry from yesterday’s drizzle. The transition from the open air to the tight, timbered interior always took a moment to adjust to; the light in the shack was green and watery, filtered through small, square panes of glass that had been pitted by decades of blowing sand.

"Foot on the brake," she muttered to herself, repeating Silas’s instructions like a catechism.

She pressed her sneaker down on the iron pedal. The machinery below responded with a heavy, metallic sigh as the brake pads pulled away from the drum. Mara took hold of the wooden spokes of the wheel. Her palms were tender, the fresh blister on her thumb already soft and watery, but there was no time to hunt for bandages. She grabbed the wood higher up this time, using her height to get leverage, and threw her weight forward.

The wheel resisted. Working against the incoming tide was an entirely different beast than swinging the bridge open with the current. The water was rushing through the narrow channel now, a green, muscular force that pressed hard against the submerged iron framework of the central pier and the trailing edge of the wooden roadbed. The bridge felt stubborn, like an old horse refusing to turn back toward the barn.

"Come on," Mara grunted, her sneakers slipping slightly on the grit-strewn floorboards.

She found a brace point with her left heel against the heavy hemlock sill of the door. She shoved again, using her thighs and back. The wheel gave a slow, agonizing turn. Clack. The iron teeth of the rack engaged, deep under the water, grinding against forty years of silt and salt crust.

With every rotation, the resistance grew. The tide seemed to realize she was trying to close the door against it, and it pushed back with the weight of the whole bay behind it. Through the window, she watched the gap slowly begin to narrow. Six feet. Five feet. The water in the gap was boiling now, squeezed into a tight, angry flume as the span rotated toward the stone abutment of the mainland.

Her breath came in ragged, burning gasps. The silence of the morning was gone, replaced by the roar of the diesel truck, the idling rattle of Mr. Penny's wagon, and the internal thrumming of her own heart in her ears. Her shoulders felt as though they were being pulled from their sockets. Silas had warned her that the last ten feet were the worst, where the tide was forced through the narrowest opening just before the span docked.

"Keep it moving," she whispered, her voice lost in the creaking of the timbers. "Don't let it spin."

If she let go of the wheel now, the pressure of the tide against the diagonal face of the bridge would send the wheel spinning backward like a runaway carousel. It would shatter her wrists before she could even think about jumping out of the way. She kept her right foot locked down on the brake pedal, her leg shaking so violently from the tension that her knee knocked against the casing of the gear housing.

Ten more turns. The wooden nose of the bridge was six inches from the mainland receiver. The heavy iron latch, a massive bar of forged steel that looked like an oversized butcher’s hook, hung suspended above its slot on the stone pier.

With a final, desperate heave that brought the scent of iron filings and hot grease right to her nose, Mara slammed her foot down on the auxiliary lever. The locking pin dropped with a hollow, earth-shaking thunk that traveled up through the soles of her shoes. The bridge shuddered, settled, and lay still.

On the road, the gravel truck immediately put-putted into gear, its heavy tires rumbling across the wet hemlock planks of the deck before Mara had even finished securing the chains. The vibration of the ten-ton truck shook the gatehouse so violently that the transistor radio slid three inches along the shelf and a half-empty mug of cold tea spilled its contents onto the ledger.

Mara didn't care about the tea. She collapsed onto the three-legged stool, her arms hanging between her knees like dead weights. Her fingers were curled into stiff, useless claws, and she couldn't stop her hands from trembling. Through the salt-crusted window, she watched Mr. Penny’s station wagon roll slowly across the span. As he passed the gatehouse, he didn't look up, but he gave two short, polite taps on his horn—the universal sign of island clearance.

She sat in the quiet for nearly ten minutes, listening to the drip of the spilled tea onto the floorboards and the steady, rhythmic slosh of the tide against the pilings below. The bridge was closed. The island was whole again, connected to the rest of the world by three hundred feet of timber and iron, and she was the only thing that kept those two worlds from drifting apart.

When the trembling in her arms finally subsided to a dull ache, Mara stood up and tore a sheet of brown paper towel from the roll on the wall to dry the ledger. The ink had run slightly, turning her neat entry for the eight o'clock opening into a soft, blue bruise on the page, but the words were still legible. Beneath them, she wrote:

08:35 - Bridge closed and locked. All traffic cleared. No incidents.

She looked at her watch. It was eight-forty. The next scheduled opening wasn't until eleven, when the lobster boat Morning Star was due to bring in its first haul of the day to the co-op on the mainland side. Two hours. To a seventeen-year-old used to the bell-regulated rush of high school corridors, two hours of empty time felt like an ocean.

Mara stepped out of the gatehouse to inspect the damage to her hands. The blister on her right palm had popped, leaving a raw, red circle of skin that stung sharply in the salt air. She walked down the wooden steps to the edge of the approach, where the land gave way to the gray stone abutment.

The bridge itself was a marvel of nineteenth-century engineering, simple but massive. It had been built in the late eighteen-nineties, back when the island was home to three hundred quarrymen who split granite out of the cliffs to pave the streets of Boston and New York. The granite was gone now, the quarries filled with deep, clear rain-water where the local kids went swimming on hot August afternoons, but the bridge remained, a monument to a time when things were built to outlast the men who made them.

The central pier, upon which the entire weight of the swing span balanced, was a circular tower of dressed granite blocks, fitted together without mortar. It sat in twenty feet of water, exposed to the full force of the winter gales and the summer tides. Atop this stone tower sat the rack—a massive gear ring twelve feet in diameter, its teeth each the size of a loaf of bread. The pinion gear, which was connected to the wheel in Mara's gatehouse by a series of long, iron shafts, meshed with this rack to turn the bridge.

Everything was covered in a thick, protective layer of black grease that looked like tar. It was Silas’s job to grease the gears twice a year, a messy, two-day operation that involved crawling into the dark spaces under the roadbed with a wooden paddle and a five-gallon bucket of fish oil and tallow. The smell of that grease was everywhere, a heavy, mineral stench that seemed to coat the back of Mara’s throat.

She walked out onto the center of the span. The wooden deck was made of three-inch-thick hemlock planks, laid crosswise and secured with heavy iron spikes. The wood was worn down in the wheel tracks, the grain raised and silvered by the weather. Between the planks, she could look down and see the water rushing through the gap forty feet below—a dizzying glimpse of green and white foam that made her grip the wooden handrail with both hands.

A gull landed on the opposite rail, its yellow eye fixed on her with a look of cold calculation. It screamed once, a harsh, scraping sound that echoed under the timbers, then took off, dipping its wings as it swept down into the shadow of the bridge to hunt for sand eels in the eddy behind the central pier.

"Don't get too comfortable out here," a voice called from the island road.

Mara turned. Walking toward her was a girl about her own age, carrying a canvas tote bag over one shoulder. She wore faded denim overalls with one strap unbuckled and a pair of mud-spattered rubber boots. Her hair was a wild tangle of dark curls, pinned back behind her ears with two rusty bobby pins.

"You're the new keeper," the girl said, stopping at the edge of the wooden deck. She didn't cross over onto the swinging section, as if respecting some invisible boundary.

"I am," Mara said, wiping her greasy hands on her jeans. "Mara."

"I'm Tess," the girl said. "My dad’s got the lobster boat Nova. We live down by the eastern cove. I saw you opening up for Toby earlier. You looked like you were trying to kill that wheel."

Mara felt her cheeks redden. "It's heavier than it looks."

"Everything on this island is heavier than it looks," Tess said, swinging her bag onto her hip. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, green plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a roll of white athletic tape. "Silas told my dad you’d probably have hamburger hands by noon. He sent me up with these."

She tossed the bottle across the small gap between the approach and the span. Mara caught it with both hands, the plastic cold against her raw palm.

"Thanks," Mara said, feeling a sudden surge of gratitude that she hadn't realized she needed. "Silas didn't seem like the type to worry about bandages."

"He doesn't," Tess said with a quick, sharp laugh. "He worries about the bridge. If your hands go, the bridge doesn't open. If the bridge doesn't open, my dad’s lobster traps sit on the dock and rot. It’s business, not charity."

Despite the bluntness of the words, there was no malice in Tess's voice. It was just the way people talked out here—plain, direct, and stripped of the polite fluff Mara was used to back in Oakhaven. On the island, everything was connected to the sea, and the sea didn't have time for manners.

"How long have you lived here?" Mara asked, unscrewing the peroxide bottle. She poured a small amount over her raw skin; it hissed and turned into a thick, white foam that burned like fire. She didn't let herself wince.

"All my life," Tess said, watching her with approval. "My great-grandfather was one of the stonecutters at the quarry. When the quarry closed, he bought three acres on the south shore and started hauling traps from a dory. We’ve been here ever since. My brother’s on the mainland now, working at the shipyard in Bath, but he’ll come back. Everyone comes back eventually. There’s nowhere else to go."

She looked out toward the open reach, where the horizon was beginning to blur with a soft, gray haze. The wind was dropping, the water turning from green to a dull, leaden gray.

"Fog’s coming in," Tess observed, pointing with her chin toward the outer islands. "You'll want to keep your ears open. Some of the pleasure boats from Camden don't have radar, and they get lost out here regular as clockwork. They’ll come crawling up the channel looking for the horn."

"There's a horn?" Mara asked, looking back toward the gatehouse. She hadn't seen anything that looked like a foghorn inside.

"Under the stairs," Tess said. "An old brass hand-pump. Looks like a bicycle pump but bigger. You have to pump it three times every two minutes when the visibility drops below the red buoy. It’s loud enough to wake the dead, and it smells like dead fish because of the leather washers inside, but it works."

She stepped back, turning her face toward the road that led into the interior of the island. "I’ve got to get these groceries down to the house before the butter melts. See you around, Mara. Don't let Silas scare you. He’s mostly grease and wind."

"See you," Mara said.

She watched Tess walk away, her rubber boots making a rhythmic clop-clop on the gravel road until the trees swallowed her up. The island road was narrow, bordered on both sides by thick stands of spruce and alder that grew right to the edge of the ditch. It felt secret, like a path leading into another century.

Mara went back to the gatehouse and wrapped her palms in the white athletic tape Tess had left. The tape felt cool and supportive, binding her torn skin together so she could grip the spokes without the sharp, biting pain.

She sat on the high stool and looked at the transistor radio. She turned the plastic knob, static roaring through the small octagonal room until she found a station from Bangor playing an old country ballad. The singer's voice was thin and reedy, accompanied by a weeping steel guitar that seemed to match the graying light outside.

Through the window, she watched the fog. It was coming in fast now, a wall of soft, white wool that swallowed the outer islands first, then the red buoy at the mouth of the reach, and finally the green spruce trees on the far point. The world was shrinking, closing in until there was nothing left but the gatehouse, the bridge, and the thirty feet of dark water directly below her.

The isolation was sudden and absolute. Back in town, the fog just meant turning on the headlights and driving a little slower on the turnpike. Here, it felt like the curtain falling on an empty stage. She was seventeen, sitting in a wooden box on a pile of rocks, responsible for the only way on or off an island she barely knew.

The weight of it wasn't a physical thing, not like the iron wheel or the hemlock planks, but she could feel it nonetheless—a quiet pressure in the center of her chest, like the water pressing against the pilings at high tide.

She reached down and pulled the brass key from her pocket. She laid it on the desk next to the ledger, its worn teeth catching the dim light from the window. It was just a piece of metal, but it was the key to everything.

At nine-thirty, she heard the first sound through the fog. It wasn't a horn or a motor, but the low, rhythmic thrum of a large diesel engine, deep in the water, coming from the mainland side.

Mara stood up, her muscles instantly tensing. She walked to the window and peered out into the white soup. She couldn't see anything, but the sound was getting closer, a steady chug-chug-chug that vibrated through the floorboards of the shack.

It was time to go back to work.