“Can we eat outside?” Teena asked.
“The lawn’s nice and dry,” Cap said.
“Let’s make it a picnic,” Eddie suggested.
“Good idea, mate,” the retired seafarer said.
Captain Daniels took great pride in his small patch of grass. It seemed to grow right out of the rock on which the lighthouse stood. However, Captain Daniels had hauled in topsoil from miles away and spread it carefully to make the lawn. He tended it, and the flower beds which bordered it, with an affection that seemed strangely out of place for a swashbuckling ship’s captain who had roamed the seven seas.
The three of them sat down on the lawn. Teena passed around the sandwiches, opened the potato chips, and unwrapped the pickles and olives.
They ate for a while in silence, looking off across the blue water of the bay toward the open ocean beyond. Eddie’s gaze followed the curving shore line to the north. Land’s end in that direction was Cedar Point, which stuck its rocky finger out into the ocean. It was wildly rugged country, difficult to get to except by boat across the bay. Eddie supposed that was why the lighthouse had been built on the smaller point located on the more civilized curve of the bay. Yet the lighthouse was high and plainly visible to ships at sea.
Captain Daniels finished his lunch, dug a pipe from his pocket, and tamped tobacco into the bowl. “Mighty good,” he said. “Sure nice of you young folks to share your rations with me.”
“Oh, we like to do it, Captain Daniels,” Teena said. “It’s so much fun coming up here to visit you.”
“From what I’ve been reading in the papers,” the lightkeeper said, “I hardly expected to see you for a while.”