The Edge of the Earth (14 page)

I inquired at a cooperage, where, luckily, a man knew the neighborhood I wanted, if not the establishment, and when I turned onto the street, I chose the correct direction by luck. Finally, I was standing in front of the unpainted clapboards and half-shuttered windows of our boardinghouse again.

It occurred to me as I climbed the house’s fusty staircase, in which hung the grease of years of frying sausages, that Oskar might not pass his tests. I carried a book with me to the empty parlor but found I couldn’t read it. I should’ve helped him think of the questions they might ask, the answers he might give. What if we had to stay here more than a few nights, gradually pawning all there was in our trunk? We should have considered the consequences of this day—of everything—more seriously.

At seven o’clock, I heard the clatter of plates and the rise of voices from the dining room. I’d told the landlady we wouldn’t be having dinner.

“Are you sure you won’t take a little something?” she asked kindly when I, going back for a shawl, passed her on the stairs. “Mrs. Cartwright never touched her sausage. You could have it for two bits. And I won’t charge a thing for the potato alongside.”

“No, thank you,” I said proudly. “My husband instructed me to keep my appetite up. We’ll be going out for a celebration tonight.”

“Ooo, a celebration!” she said mockingly. “Then you won’t want my poor meal.” She lifted her head and passed on.

They came in at last at eight o’clock.

It was Philip who apologized. “I’m sorry we’ve made you wait. I’m afraid we stopped for a quick bit of celebration along the way.”

“So you passed the test?”

“Did you doubt my ability?” Oskar bowed low to me. “Second assistant keeper of the Point Lucia Lighthouse, at your service.”

“Your husband,” said Philip, “gave the most unusual answers I suspect anyone in the Lighthouse Service has heard, but he convinced them that he’s, at the very least, overqualified for the job.”

As we waited for our lamb chops and peas in the chophouse that Philip recommended, an electric buggy puttered down the street.

I nudged Oskar. “See? That’s where you should be putting your engine.”

“Thomas Alva Edison says gasoline is more economical,” Philip said. “Electric storage batteries are too big and heavy to be practical.”

“Do you study science at the university, Philip?” I asked.

“I was studying history, but now I’m more interested in archaeology and anthropology. I’ve been cataloging Mrs. Hearst’s collection.”

“The newspaperman?”

“No, Mrs. Hearst. His mother. She’s got a collection of artifacts from all over the world, although what really interest me are the things from Indian tribes right here in California. Those people are on the verge of extinction, and we know practically nothing about them. I’d like to work in the field to record their languages, learn their customs, that sort of thing.”

I feared that this would prompt Oskar to bring up our recent Indian experience, but he was thumbing through a booklet produced by the Lighthouse Service, each chapter of which was devoted to a coastal location on which a lighthouse stood.

“Here’s where we’re going, Trudy.” He began to read:

“‘One hundred and fifty miles south of San Francisco, the remote light station of Point Lucia was erected in 1890 on a promontory three hundred and sixty feet above the Pacific Ocean. The point is surrounded on three sides by the Santa Lucia Mountains, which rise abruptly from the sea to heights of nearly a mile. An overland journey to the nearest town is three days rough going in fair weather and the track is impassable during the rainy season. The rugged coast admits no harbors except for the beach below the light station to which supplies are delivered by sea three or four times a year. Temperatures range from mid-forties to mid-eighties Fahrenheit.

“‘Because of Spanish land grants, Mexicans still control land to the north and south along the coast, although they do not occupy it. With the exception of some logging and a brief gold rush in 1891, no enterprises have induced humans to penetrate the interior. Last reported sightings of Indians native to the area were in 1875. Local fauna include cougar, bobcat, brown bear, beaver, sea otter, golden and bald eagle, cormorant, pelican, and red squirrel.’”

∗ ∗ ∗

With what remained of the proceeds of the knife and pickle fork, Oskar paid for all of our dinners, and his high spirits continued in our room that night.

“I dazzled ’em,” he said, describing his interview.

Between energetic ardor and the discomfort of the rope bed, we were awake late, so that I slept too long the following morning, long enough for the sun to eat through the fog, long enough for Oskar to pawn my silver-backed toilet set to pay the landlady, our passage to Point Lucia, and a Chinese porter to carry our trunk to the dock.

I cried at the thought of those implements lying lonely in a case in that dirty shop.

“I promise I’ll get them back,” he said, sitting beside me on the thin mattress, touching my tears with his sure fingers. “As soon as I’m paid, I promise I’ll redeem them.”

He seemed so desperate to make it up to me that I didn’t remind him that he wouldn’t be paid for months, and by then we would be far away.

CHAPTER 18

I
HAD WALKED AS
far north as the beach allowed, for here the rocks met the ocean in a wall that entirely blocked my path and my view of the coast beyond. However, the water was shallow, so, abandoning my shoes and stockings on the sand, I began to wade around the barrier. I needed to find out what lay past it. Perhaps we weren’t so alone here as the Lighthouse Service booklet and the Crawleys claimed. Maybe there was a village tucked in the hills that I hadn’t been able to see from the tender. The thought of finding a nest of Portuguese fishermen or even of Chinese shrimpers sustained me as I waded deeper into the cold water, wetting my skirt as far as my knees. Beyond the rock wall were more sharp black rocks, though these were low enough to climb. I picked my way over them and over and around the enormous tangles of bleached logs they’d snagged. The rocks bruised my feet, but I was determined to go as far as I could, to put the Crawleys and Mr. Johnston and even Oskar behind me, at least for a time.

A tide pool arrested me at last, a pool far more brilliant than any I’d seen before. It was wider and deeper, for one thing, and full of water almost clearer than the air, water that magnified the creatures beneath it. The colors were those of precious jewels, unnatural to an eye accustomed to the soft hues of the East. Violet balls of sea urchins, lustrous as Christmas ornaments, nestled in tufts of emerald algae. An orange crab, alarmed by my shadow, scuttled into hiding.

The pool was not only far removed from the light station physically, but also in tone. I remembered Mrs. Crawley marching out of the fog from this direction that first morning, but it was difficult to imagine her, brisk and businesslike, pausing to admire such treasure. I was sure I’d found a place that none of them knew.

The wind carried a dense animal smell as three seals heaved themselves onto a flat expanse of rock a short way out in the water. They joined two others that were already sunning themselves, their bodies like rolled rugs. And then all five of them abruptly, swiftly shimmied across the rock and poured themselves over the far side into the waves. They’d been startled by a new smaller black head that had surfaced nearby.

This animal didn’t climb out on the rock; it remained bobbing among the waves. It wasn’t, I determined, another seal but some other species with a nose less pointed and coloring more variegated. I couldn’t decide whether I was looking at the back of the head or the front before it disappeared below the surface, and although I waited five minutes, at least, I got no second look.

I knew nothing about tides. Though I’d read about the ocean advancing and retreating according to the pull of the moon, I never considered that such rhythms might affect me. It hadn’t occurred to me that the rocky stretches—slick with algae and crusted with mussels, periwinkles, and closed anemones—over which I’d walked would soon be under water. I did notice that the waves were beginning to reach close enough to throw their spray into the pool at my feet. I began to retrace my steps over the slippery rocks. There were stretches, I realized, where the water would eventually meet sheer walls. I might be trapped for hours—or worse.

I leaped when I dared, crawled when I had to, and slipped often enough to soak my dress and bruise and scrape my knees and elbows. At last, I reached a place where the rocks were too steep to climb, and I was forced to wade back into the water that now crashed in waves against them. When I’d started out, the water had merely tugged at my ankles, but now it rushed toward me, icy and unrelenting, wrapping around my waist. It shoved me toward the rocks, then dragged me into deeper water, first lifting my skirt and then trying to pull it from my body. I staggered around the bend and could see, far to the south, our morro with its cluster of doughty buildings upon it.

I pushed toward the beach, tripping in my haste so that for a moment even my head dipped into the brine. Streaming cold water, I regained the sand. The shoes and stockings that I’d left there were gone. Bitterly, I concluded that their loss did not matter, for they were nearly useless; there was nowhere for me to go. I’d verified what I’d already known to be true: the nothingness of rock, mountain, and sea stretched far, far beyond the distance my puny legs could travel.

The sun was setting by the time I staggered to the top of the morro. My feet were bleeding, and I was shivering so violently that my head ached, but most terrible of all was the fierceness with which I longed to be home, my mother calling for Gustina to bring hot water, my father shaking his head fondly at my rashness. My loneliness overwhelmed me like one of the waves, and I gasped and closed my eyes against it.

When I opened them, I saw Mrs. Crawley. I’d hoped to slink inside, unobserved by any of them, but there she was, swinging her arms mannishly as she came down the path toward me, preparing to bark a thing or two at me about lighthouse life.

She must have seen me from her window, for she’d brought a navy blanket, property of the Lighthouse Service. She wrapped it around my shoulders. “What’s happened to you? We worried.”

I sobbed then. I couldn’t help myself. “I’ve ruined my dress.” This was not at all my concern, but I couldn’t bear to voice any other, truer sorrow.

“For heaven’s sake, the dress will wash.”

I blotted my tears on the blanket’s rough wool.

“The husbands were afraid you’d fallen off the morro. I told them you weren’t so stupid. You went for a swim, though, I see.”

I told her how far I’d walked, about the purple pool and the relentless tide. “And I saw a strange animal. Not a fish, I don’t think, and not a seal. Its head was small and black, but there was a little brown on it, too.”

“An otter, I’ll bet, like the other. There must be a community of them, then. Good.”

We were quiet for a moment, remembering the pup.

“Go inside,” she said, resuming her old briskness, but in a way that warmed me. “Tell that husband of yours to make you a good hot bath.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Crawley.”

“And now you’ll know better than to go wandering off, won’t you?” Although her voice was kind, I could hear the flint beneath it. “You have to think about protecting your baby. Don’t forget, there are many things here that you don’t yet understand. This isn’t Minnesota.”

“Wisconsin,” I said weakly. She was right. I’d had no idea about the tide. I knew so little about this place. “I understand, Mrs. Crawley.”

“Euphemia,” she said. She gave me a little push toward our front steps, as if I were a child who needed direction, and then stepped to the bell outside her own door to summon her family to dinner.

∗ ∗ ∗

Oskar was sorry. He begged me to forgive him in words that washed around me like a warm bath. He’d advised against the literal bath, instructing me to take off my clothes and lie beside him in bed, skin to skin. It was the best cure, he insisted, for hypothermia. I was sorry in return not to have been more careful with his pages.

He claimed that he couldn’t re-create the diagrams. The solution to the wireless telegraph, the proper combination of magnet and mercury, wire and glass, he said, had come to him in a flash, almost in a dream; he couldn’t call it back. Although I urged him to reapply himself, he refused. It was true that, having never felt inspiration myself, I didn’t understand its fits and starts. Could he really have lost everything with those few pages? Or was it an excuse to jettison another project he feared would fail?

CHAPTER 19

O
UR BABY CAME
to nothing.

For some weeks, we’d lived in happy anticipation, expecting, despite Euphemia’s warning. Without electrical experiments to distract him, Oskar was enthusiastic again about furnishing our house. He built a cradle and a night table. “So I can bring you coffee in bed,” he said.

If it was a girl, he hoped we might name her Amelia, for his sister. He pressed his palm to my belly, which, in truth, had hardly grown. Had I felt it quicken? he wondered.

I had not. What I did feel one afternoon was a faint echo of the familiar tightening I’d known for a day or two every month since I’d been a high school girl. In an hour, I was gasping, holding my breath, curling myself into a crouch in a vain effort to push away the relentless, wringing grip.

“What is it?” Oskar asked desperately, standing over me as I rolled myself into a ball on our bed, trying to escape from my own insides.

“It’s nothing,” I said, my voice taut and small. “Nothing.” It was, I believed, the old monthly pain making up with a vengeance for the time it had lost. “Only Euphemia was wrong after all.”

I begged for it to release me, and after some hours it did, but Euphemia hadn’t been wrong, for within the river of blood that gushed from between my legs was a miniature figure, unquickened but nevertheless human. Its few inches included a tiny head and limbs. It hung from me, attached to my insides by a cord so fine that I could and did pinch it in half with my fingers. Later I would wish that I’d held the being who was not to be more tenderly, and at the same time, I would wish that I’d not dared to look at its haunting form at all.

Oskar had fetched Euphemia, and she whisked it away and led me to the bed. She fitted folded cloth after folded cloth between my legs to stanch the blood.

“Poor dear,” she said, and I didn’t know whether she meant me or the other.

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“It’s nothing.”

To buck me up, Euphemia told me that she herself had had three such experiences, one even further along. “If it’s going to happen, the sooner the better. You’re lucky.”

Euphemia said I ought to stay in bed, but lying there thinking about nothing made me cry, so as soon as I was able, I took myself outside to tend the tubs.

∗ ∗ ∗

Our collection had steadily swelled. Recognizing the cruelty and futility of trapping a living being in a few inches of dirty water, as the children had been doing with their jars, I’d asked Mr. Crawley to saw some empty barrels in half to make tubs in which the animals and plants we gathered might thrive. He’d hesitated. The barrels were Lighthouse Service property. We were required to return empty as many as we’d received full, unless we put them to another purpose. This was another purpose, I’d insisted.

“I’d not relish being the one to explain these shenanigans to Inspector Roberts,” he’d said, but his saw had been poised for the first cut.

As best as we could, we created the world of the tide pools in the tubs, arranging rocks to which anemones and mussels clung, making caves in which crabs could hide. One of the key ingredients, naturally, was salt water. We carried several buckets up at a time on the steam donkey, refreshing the tubs every few days. Our aquariums attracted gulls, so we had to build a scarecrow beside them, which pleased Euphemia, since it also discouraged the eagles from swooping down on the chickens.

The tubs helped to make sense of what we found. We began to understand how some of these animals grew and changed, who ate whom, which preferred shade and which craved the sun, which liked to live near one another and which couldn’t abide certain neighbors. I was impressed by the sheer range of life that the whole mess represented, but I was also beginning to recognize an order in it. Altogether, it was thoroughly satisfying work, even if some of the creatures, despite our best efforts, couldn’t adapt to the artificial environment and died.

It was so satisfying that adding to and organizing the collection became pretty much the focus of our school. In the classroom, while dried specimens continued to cover the floor, they were no longer a jumble. Using Some Species of the Pacific Coast, as well as our own observations and reason, we’d arranged our finds into distinct categories, the pressed seaweeds in one portion of the room, the bivalves in another, and so on.

Prime real estate under the window was devoted to the unusual man-made objects, among them the cormorant-feather disk that I’d seen on the cairn. The children had recently added some new things: one morning when I’d opened the door, I’d found Mary standing with her two cupped hands before her, forming a nest for four little bundles. I thought they must be mice or fledglings, but they were not living creatures. Rather, they were little twists of the rubbery plant called kelp.

By this time I’d discovered kelp to be a fascinating substance, monstrously long and tough, but also beautiful if viewed in the right way, with its strange hollow stems, its pale green bulbs like enormous pearls, and its trailing leaves that rose and fell like hair on the undulating water. To the children, though, it was as unremarkable as grass, so I couldn’t see why Mary cradled it with such care and why the rest gathered around so eagerly.

“We should each open one,” Edward said. “Jane chooses first.”

The kelp only served as a wrapper. “What are these things?” I asked. “Where did you get them?”

They didn’t answer, only went on pulling at the leaves, which fell quickly away to reveal four objects carved of soft gray driftwood, each about two inches high: a crab, a pelican, a dolphin, and a seal, the last sitting cunningly on its own little rock.

“Where did these come from?” I asked again.

“From the mermaid,” Jane said finally. “She left them on the stones for us.”

Baby Johnston’s grave. I felt a personal pain in thinking of it now that I’d experienced my own loss. Archie Johnston must have left the figures, I thought, as offerings for his dead child. Did he know that the living children took them for themselves? Remembering him giving Jane the worm shell on my first afternoon, I believed he did. Probably he guessed, and perhaps it gave him some comfort to play fairy godfather. Poor Mr. Johnston.

To be sure, we kept on with our sums and our passages. And we worked at our Latin—mostly to assign appropriate “scientific” names to beings we couldn’t identify in Some Species. But we would hurry through these lessons, and often in the afternoons, instead of climbing into bed with Oskar, I would scour the beach with the children, searching for new species and fine examples of those with which we were already acquainted, with a good deal of larking about thrown in. I explained to Euphemia that on these afternoons I was teaching my students to observe astutely, to handle wildlife with respect, to understand natural history and scientific classification, and to draw. (Having long ago exhausted my sketchbook and all of my writing stock, we were filling blank logbooks that I’d pilfered from the lighthouse.)

“As long as their chores are done, I don’t mind,” Euphemia said. “But,” she added, looking sternly at the children, “you must stay on the beach.”

They nodded solemnly and promised. I wondered if she feared they would swim away or disappear into the mountains. Of course we’d stay on the beach. There was nowhere else.