LIGHTHOUSE ON VENENO ISLAND

A tribal woman stood before my father’s lighthouse, stamping the base of her spear on the packed dirt. Her wooden eye held an iris crafted from golden viper scales. It glinted in the evening sun, dotted with a painted pupil. The woman’s voice, warbled and shrill, spoke in a tongue we did not understand. My mother and I watched from the lighthouse window, knowing she saw us with her working eye, but we dared not greet her. She alarmed us so.
     My father said no one in the world knew how to speak the tribe’s language. He often spoke of it with a stir of fascination and irritability. When the lighthouse came to the island, no one recognized the tribe, and lingual and cultural experts visited to no avail.
   With loud boots, my father stomped past me and my mother, fighting the shaky wood door with a scruff and iron-hinged squeal. 
   “Get out of here!” he yelled. “Get! Scram! Get back in your jungle!”
     The woman stood there—one healthy eye, one ornate—staring through us and the lighthouse. She continued to drum her spear into the walking path. So, my father went for his rifle.
     As Mother and I continued to watch through a foggy thick pane, Father stepped onto the pathway and fired the rifle at the sky. The woman of the wilderness ignored him for two more shots, then calmly turned, and walked toward the jungle.
  “Cremini!” Dad stomped his feet and the shoulder of the rifle on the wooden floor. “I never seen the likes of it!” 
    “Maybe it’s us,” I said. The army granted me, my mother, and brother special access to the island for Thanksgiving. 
“No, it’s nothing on you,” he said. “It’s the lumberjacks wanting their wood, but we got nothing to do with that deal. Let’s carry on with our business.”
     Our manner of business was a Thanksgiving dinner after sunset. My mother and I did not start working on the feast until afternoon, given my father’s exhaustive duties manning the lighthouse. Most folks have no clue how laborious it is to man a lighthouse. My father normally had an assistant, a man who left by the very boat we arrived on to see his family. With my mother, brother, and I inexperienced, Dad would not be free to sit at the table until late. 
     This dinner was especially unique for Dad. He relied mostly on canned foods boated to the island once a month. But for our trip, we brought ingredients to make green bean casserole and stuffing. Father normally ate canned potatoes, but we brought real ones. He often ate fresh bread made on-site, so we could not rival that, but we brought canned food he never tried: jellied cranberries, recently invented. It was all a little topsy-turvy, swapping fresh and canned foods on him, but he seemed excited with a gleam in his eye.
     At nightfall, I set the table with Mother. Placing a heavy bowl of mashed potatoes, we heard that woman wailing in the distance. We ignored her, minding the table, but my father did not...