The Lighthouse Keeper’s Invoice
A retired keeper bills the agency that replaced him, net thirty days.
Renny Oakes knew the letter was a form letter because she was the one who wrote it. Please submit any outstanding expenses related to your service within 30 days of separation. She had written it in 2016 for people who had bought their own printer toner.
The envelope from Edmund Pask came to the Coastal Aids to Navigation Authority, Accounts Payable, on a Thursday in July. It was addressed in ballpoint and carried a second stamp in case. Inside were two sheets of graph paper. He had ruled the columns himself, with something straighter than a ruler.
INVOICE. From E. Pask, Keeper, Tern Ledge Light, 31 years. To the Authority. For services and costs not previously raised.
Climbing the tower. 114 steps, four trips a night on average, 31 years. That is 5,159,640 steps, not counting when I forgot my glasses. At one cent per hundred: $515.96
Left knee, one. See above. Replaced 2011. My share of the bill: $1,400.00
Paint. Regulation white was discontinued in 2003 and nobody told the regulation. 61 gallons of the nearest match from Corran Hardware, about $30 a gallon: $1,830.00
Birds. They fly at the lens on bad nights. I picked about 2,900 off the gallery over the years, ten cents each: $290.00
Dinghy, lost November 1994 taking two men off the Margaret Dunn: $380.00
Less: 26 hams received from Mr. Ives, the older of those two men, one every Christmas since. I don’t know your policy on gifts. Figure $20 a ham. Credit of $520.00
Radio. Pete Landry called me on the working channel around three most nights for eleven winters after his wife died. He was never in distress. It is not in the log. No charge. Listed so somebody knows.
Wife. Joan stayed nine years, eight more than your housing officer gave her. She lives somewhere dry now and sends a card. No charge.
Two days in April showing your contractor where the breakers are. He was polite. He asked what I would do now. 16 hours at my last rate of $21: $336.00
Third man off the Margaret Dunn. I had him in the light for about four minutes.
Less: one chamois lens cloth, taken home by mistake on my last day and kept on purpose. Credit of $4.00
Total due $4,227.96. Net 30. P.S. The fog signal at Tern Ledge has been going since Tuesday. I can hear it from my kitchen. We have had a clear week. That will be spiders in the visibility sensor, they like the housing in July. Somebody should go out.
Renny had been in payables for twenty-two years. The rule was that any expense over $25 without a receipt went back with a Form 19-C, and there was not a receipt in the envelope. She got out a 19-C. She looked at it for a while, and then, because it was a slow Thursday and she was curious in the way you are curious about a tooth, she opened a new voucher and started coding.
Paint went to Facilities, which was honestly correct. The steps and the knee she put under Occupational. Birds went to Grounds. The hams she took down the hall to Marv in Legal, who read the line twice and said the statute of limitations on a ham had probably run. She entered the credit.
Pete Landry she coded to nothing. The line had no charge, so the system let it through and showed it to no one, which was more or less how it had gone the first time.
At line ten the system stopped. Amount is a required field. She tried a zero and it took the zero, and she looked at the zero on the screen and took it back out.
He answered on the second ring.
“Mr. Pask, this is Renny Oakes in Accounts Payable at the Authority. I have your invoice.”
“Is it the paint?”
“The paint’s fine. It’s line ten. There’s no amount on it, and the system won’t take a line with no amount.”
He didn’t say anything. Behind him, through what must have been an open window, she could hear the horn. It was a long way off and very low, and it went every thirty seconds. She had signed the purchase order for that horn and had never heard it. She counted two blasts.
“Take the line off, then,” he said.
“I can do that.”
Another blast.
“What does it need?”
“A number. Anything. It just can’t be empty.”
“He was about twenty-six,” Pask said. “That’s no use to you.”
“No.”
“I had him four minutes. Put four.”
“Four dollars?”
“Does it have to be dollars?”
“The field’s dollars.”
“Well,” he said. “Then it comes out even with the cloth.”
After they hung up she sat with the graph paper for a minute. She had paid for a good many of those chamois cloths over the years. They ran eleven dollars, and they had never in her time run less. She looked at his neat four-dollar credit and at the blank he had left one line above it, and she thought about a man at a kitchen table with a straightedge, working out how to get somebody at the Authority to pick up a phone.
She entered 4.00 on line ten and coded it to Operations, the only honest code on the voucher. The total came to $4,231.96, well inside her signing limit, a thing she had never once been glad of. She approved it and it went away to wherever they go.
Then she opened a maintenance ticket. The description field took forty characters. She typed Spiders in fog sensor. Per the keeper. and it fit with two to spare. Estimated response was eleven business days. She thought about calling back to tell him, and then figured he could count.
