TACHS Practice Test 7

The Lamp at Kettle Point

¹Lena had climbed the ninety-two steps of the Kettle Point lighthouse a hundred times, but never alone, and never after dark. Every evening her father went up at sunset to light the lamp, and every few hours through the night he climbed again to trim the wick and wind the clockwork that turned the great glass lens. Lena's job was to carry the oil can and stay out of the way.

²On the evening of the October gale, her father came in from the woodpile white-faced, his ankle swollen like a loaf of bread. He tried to stand and sat down hard. "The lamp," he said. Outside, the wind was tearing the tops off the waves, and somewhere out there, Lena knew, schooners were running for the harbor.

³"I'll do it," she heard herself say. Her voice sounded thin, like someone else's.

⁴Her father looked at her for a long moment. Then he told her everything she already half knew: the match, the wick turned up slowly so the glass chimney would not crack, the crank for the clockwork, forty turns and no more. "And Lena," he added, "the tower shakes in a big wind. It is supposed to. It won't fall."

⁵The stairs were worse than she had imagined. The tower hummed and shuddered, and the lantern she carried threw her shadow, huge and wobbling, against the curved wall. Twice she stopped and pressed her forehead to the cold iron rail. But at the top, when the wick caught and the flame steadied behind the lens, the beam swept out across the black water, and Lena forgot to be afraid. She wound the clockwork, forty turns, and watched the light wheel slowly around.

⁶She climbed the tower four more times that night. By the last trip, she noticed, she no longer counted the steps. At dawn a schooner lay safe at anchor inside the harbor, its sails folded like laundry. Her father, propped by the window, had watched the light all night long. When she came down, he said only, "Steady as ever." But he said it the way he talked about the best keepers he had known.