The Edge of the Earth (12 page)

CHAPTER 15

O
SKAR WAS ELATED
and confident. He convinced me that it was a sign—if one believed in such things; of course, we did not—that all was as it should be. After all, I was a young married woman; producing a child was what I was meant to do.

In a matter of minutes, it seemed, I changed from my mother’s daughter, who might make any messes she pleased, because it wasn’t really her job to keep order, to my own child’s mother, who didn’t want her baby born into any more disorder and chance than its own coming would create.

That night I roamed the house, straightening and scouring. I scrubbed the kitchen table with salt, wiped the soot from behind the stove in the parlor, and repaired a rent in a sofa cushion. I took my Aladdin lamp upstairs and surveyed the schoolroom. Oskar had never made shelves—the wood hadn’t been to his liking, or Mr. Crawley had needed it for some other purpose; he’d been vague enough about the reason to make me understand that, in truth, the job no longer interested him once he’d found a more exciting pursuit. The trunk around which the children and I staggered forward with letters and numbers formed a sort of island, surrounded by a sea of dried creatures and weeds, along with various shells, sticks and stones, egg cases, teeth, and bones, which we’d gradually removed from the crates where I’d stored them, so that we could examine one thing or another. The idea that Mrs. Crawley thought this ought to be cleared away wholesale disheartened me. Had we just been biding time while we waited for Nature to organize her agenda? Unable to face such a thought, I turned away.

Our bedroom was equally untidy, the blankets recklessly cast aside as Oskar had left them when he’d risen from bed for his dinner. As I reached to pull them up, I saw that the sheets were no longer the creamy white they’d been when my mother folded and placed them in the trunk, but pale brown. There were stiff circles where Oskar’s spilled seed had dried, rusty swipes of blood, even patches of actual mud. How had I allowed this?

I yanked the sheets from the bed. On them I piled every towel and handkerchief we owned, and every item of clothing we’d worn in this place. Hardly an inch was fit to touch human skin.

I pushed it all down the stairs in a filthy mass.

For over an hour, partially clothed in one of the remnants of my former life—a dress I’d dragged here, not realizing it would be too fine to remove from the protection of my trunk—I spread a mixture of soda crystals and water on all of our cuffs and collars and the worst of the stains on the sheets and napkins. It seemed crucial to return everything to the state in which it had been before we’d left Milwaukee.

The next morning, even though it wasn’t the usual day, Mrs. Crawley agreed to wash her family’s clothes as well, so as to make heating the copper worthwhile. She and Mary and Jane and I went to the cellar, where we plunged shirts, trousers, petticoats, skirts, and linens of all descriptions into fiercely boiling water, while the steam curled our hair around our faces.

“It’s to be expected,” Mrs. Crawley said approvingly. “You’re readying the nest.”

I was as much irritated as reassured by the idea that I might be acting under the influence of some universal feminine instinct.

“That’s enough, my girl!” Mrs. Crawley barked.

I snapped to, but it was Mary she was addressing. The girl was vigorously grating soap over the writhing clothes. A dark gray scum had gathered at the top of the copper.

“You’ll scrape your fingers and get blood on the sheets if you’re not careful,” her mother said. “That’s plenty of soap, anyway.”

Jane had the safer job of dropping bluing into a tub of cold water. The globes of heavy color sank and stretched into jellyfish and then dissipated into wisps of indigo smoke before they disappeared into the clear water. “See? It’s invisible, but you know it’s there,” she said. “Just like electricity. Mr. Swann says that everything and everybody’s got electricity inside ’em. Did you know I had electricity in me, Ma? Mr. Swann says electricity is one of the invisible powers of nature. It’s all over the place, even in the air.”

Her last sentence made electricity sound less like the mysterious and beautiful bluing and more like the particles of dirt roiling around the copper.

“Mr. Swann has a great many ideas, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Crawley said, handing me one end of a dripping sheet to wring.

“Oskar’s designing some experiments involving electrical waves,” I explained.

“Experiments? I didn’t realize that Mr. Swann was a scientist.” She began to twist the sheet.

“Well, anyone can be a scientist, don’t you think?” I recoiled as icy water ran up my forearm. “I mean, it’s just a matter of considering what’s known and determining how to pursue what’s not, isn’t it?” But the words that Oskar had spoken so robustly sounded hollow when I delivered them. “He’s going to build a machine,” I tried, struggling to keep my grip on the sheet that Mrs. Crawley was fiercely twisting. “He’s going to send messages from the parlor to the lighthouse using the electric waves in the air.”

“Hmmph,” she said, dropping what had essentially become a dry snake into the basket. “He might try shouting.”

When we went outside to hang the clothes, Mrs. Crawley told the girls they could go and play; they’d helped enough.

“I wanted to tell you privately,” she said when they’d run off, “that it’s good to prepare, but it’s better not to expect. You never know what might happen.”

“You mean like Baby Johnston,” I said.

She looked at me sharply.

“I read it in one of the logbooks. ‘Baby Johnston born and buried.’”

“Oh. Yes, that’s right.”

“And his wife?”

“Gone, too, I’m afraid,” she managed around a mouthful of pins.

“Poor Mr. Johnston. He practically threw me off the rock when I tried to look at the grave.”

“You’ll learn, Mrs. Swann, that privacy must be respected here.” She gave the sheet she was about to hang a violent shake to discourage wrinkles. “When you’re living this close to people, sometimes you have to look the other way. There’ll be times you’ll want them to look the other way, too.”

“He left birds on the catwalk again.” Mr. Johnston had crept silently up the path and was standing just behind us. I stiffened, worried that he’d heard our conversation. “And his mess was all over the place downstairs.”

I had a fleeting image of some marauding animal before Johnston passed some familiar-looking papers to Mrs. Crawley. I imagined with chagrin the boiler room looking like our front room or kitchen after Oskar had spent hours working on his plans, the pages he’d carelessly let fall from the table drifting like autumn leaves against the legs of the chairs.

“I’ll have Henry speak to him.”

“Oh, Henry knows,” Mr. Johnston muttered as he continued past. “Who do you think found the dead birds?”

“Dead birds? What can he mean?”

“I told you. They fly into the windows at night. Keeper’s supposed to check for birds on the catwalk before he goes off duty.” She handed me the sheaf of papers. “More about that invisible power, I daresay.”

∗ ∗ ∗

We were finished by noon, and I was home in time to make lunch, but Oskar was late, as usual, and when he came in, he was preoccupied and shuffled through the piles of papers that he’d heaped on the kitchen table over the last few weeks. Having exhausted these, he went into the parlor and thumbed through the pages he’d spread across the sofa. I watched as he held
Electric Waves
by its spine and shook it.

“What are you looking for?” Yes, I was disingenuous. I was annoyed about the embarrassment he’d put me through.

“Some papers,” he said. “Some drawings. I had a sort of inspiration last night, but now I can’t find my notes.”

“You left them in the lighthouse.”

“Oh!” Relieved, he turned to the door, obviously intending to retrieve them from the tower.

“They aren’t there now. Mr. Johnston picked them up. He said they were a mess all over the boiler room. And that you didn’t clean up the birds. You left dead birds lying on the catwalk. You’re spending too much time on this electricity business. You’re not paying attention to what’s important, Oskar. The lighthouse is your job, your real work.”

“The lighthouse is hardly what I’d call real work.”

“Oskar, you must do it properly. It was embarrassing, listening to Mr. Johnston say those things in front of Mrs. Crawley.”

“Forgive me for embarrassing you in front of the All-Powerful Crawley. If you understood what it meant to have real work, you would know that occasionally it might come before a dead bird. Now, please, give me those papers.”

“Yes, of course, I’ll give them to you. But really, Oskar, you can’t let the light go out. That would be very serious.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not letting the light go out!” He’d followed me into the kitchen, and I looked beside the stove, where I believed I’d set the papers.

“Where are they?” His voice had a hard edge.

“I thought I’d left them here. Mr. Johnston gave them to Mrs. Crawley, and she gave them to me.” I went back into the parlor, where I hopelessly lifted the cushion of the armchair and peered beneath it. “Where could I have put them?”

“You must find them.”

“I understand. I’m looking.”

“No, you don’t understand. You must find them. They’re very important.”

“Oskar, you left them flying around the boiler room!”

“Where they’d be now, if that busybody hadn’t taken them! Idiot!”

“You can’t call him an idiot for picking up papers that you left behind.”

“He’s an idiot, and you are a stupid girl! What have you done with them?”

At that I stared at him and then ran from the door. I’d set the papers on the ground while I pinned the last of the clothes. I remembered it clearly now. I ran to the lines on which the shirts and trousers and underthings frolicked and the sheets billowed like sails. Of course, by this time the papers had blown away. Nothing light and loose could stay put on that mountain. I started back to the house to confess what I’d done, but when I came to the bottom of the stairs, I kept on down the path, my feet moving faster and faster, until I stepped off the edge and began to slide.

I took myself all the way down to the beach and walked fast, fast and north, where there was nothing to stop me.

CHAPTER 16

I
T WAS NOT
the first time I’d wanted to run away from my husband. Only three days after we’d been married, halfway to California, I had almost turned back.

The train from Milwaukee had taken us as far as Chicago, and from there we’d booked a Pullman sleeper. But at the station Oskar changed the tickets for a parlor car, a tiny private room furnished with a sofa and two armchairs that transformed into beds at night. The walls were hung with looking glasses, the curtain rods plated with silver, the spittoon shining brass—the effect of the whole was all brightness and light. We had a table on which to spread our books and pencils—Oskar was determined to spend the journey developing his electrical engine designs. Cases of books were set into the walls, and many of them, including a guide to San Francisco, had been chosen with the Western traveler in mind.

In the dining car, where the linens and silver were marked with the Union Pacific’s own crest, we were seated opposite a handsome couple, a little older than we. Mr. Hatch had a boyish look, and Mrs. Hatch wore her hair in a cascade of little curls in back—rather an old-fashioned style, but it suited her delicate face. They were from Muncie, Indiana, where the husband owned a machine shop and the wife kept ducks.

“I recommend the chicken,” Mrs. Hatch said. “It’s not as plump, certainly, as the hens we get from two or three farmers in Muncie, but it isn’t too tough, and the gravy is acceptable. Don’t you agree, dear?”

“It’s decent enough,” said Mr. Hatch, “although it’s a shame this train doesn’t buy its fowl in Muncie.”

Oskar easily made himself the host of our little party, drawing Mr. Hatch out about his shop and ordering a bottle of wine for the table, which our new friends made a show of refusing at first—they claimed to be mostly teetotalers when they were at home in Muncie, where one can have “a perfectly pleasant time without strong spirits”—but then Mr. Hatch said, “When in Rome,” and Mrs. Hatch agreed, and they both enjoyed themselves very much and became wonderfully pink in the cheeks.

“The Muncies,” as Oskar and I referred to them privately, were to be met by the mister’s older brother, who had gone West ten years before and had not had the benefit of anything Muncie since. They planned to tour Yo-semite, where, as Oskar said, the famous big trees would be grand but surely not so graceful as the elms and oaks of Muncie.

Oskar and I shared the larger of the two beds, the one made from the sofa. We were new to this, having spent only one night in Chicago acquainting our bodies, and my pleasure was still greatly tempered by anxiety, but Oskar was uninhibited in his delight, and I had to shush him more than once, so as not to disturb the lady schoolteachers from Albany with whom we shared a washcloset. In the middle of the night, it was I who was awakened, however, by the scratch of his pen on his sketchbook—my sketchbook, really, since he hadn’t thought to pack one of his own.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll see,” he said, smiling.

He went on with his scribbling, and I was obliged to put the pillow over my head to find my way back into my dreams.

At breakfast, Oskar didn’t wait for the porter to show us to a seat but went straight to the table at which our new friends were already drinking their coffee. “Take a look at this,” he said, laying his sketch before Mr. Hatch.

“What is it?” Mr. Hatch picked up the paper and squinted at it.

“It’s a lathe powered by an electric engine. It’ll transform your shop.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were a salesman,” Mrs. Hatch said.

“I’m not a salesman!” Oskar was offended. “It’s just that I’ve been working a good deal with electricity lately, and it seems to me that someone with an operation like yours ought to consider changing to a more efficient power source.”

“Well,” Mr. Hatch said, “thank you. Very nice.” He folded the paper and pushed it under his plate.

“I doubt you’ve come across this sort of thing in Muncie,” Oskar said. “You ought to take a closer look.” He nodded encouragingly at the edge of paper that was visible under the rim of the plate. “I do know something about engines.”

Mr. Hatch made a show of drawing the page out and carefully opening it, spreading it over his plate. “Paper’s very nice.” He looked the drawing over. “It’s a pretty picture,” he said at last, “but this thing wouldn’t have the power to drill a hole in a doughnut. Make a darn clever toy, though.” He refolded it neatly and handed it back to Oskar.

Just then the train pulled into a station where many Chinese men were strolling about the platform or squatting, the ends of their long braids brushing the wooden floor. At an earlier station, Oskar and I had bought glasses of buttermilk from a boy on the platform with a bucket and a dipper, and I’d seen other people selling cheeses and lengths of sausages, bottles of medicine, stationery and newspapers and books, but these Chinese weren’t selling anything. They took no notice of the train and looked as if they’d been shipwrecked on that wooden island in the middle of a sea of wheat.

“Why are they here?” I asked. “What are they doing?”

“They’re waiting for an emigrant train,” Mr. Hatch explained. “Probably got put off the one they were on because the car was needed.”

“You have to watch out for those in San Francisco,” Mrs. Hatch said.

“Emigrant trains?” I said.

Mr. Hatch laughed. “No, Chinks, of course.”

“William!” Mrs. Hatch said sharply. “You know I don’t like such vulgar talk.”

“Well, anyway, whatever you call ’em, you can’t trust ’em. That’s what Tom says, and he ought to know. They’re thick as rats in a barn out there in San Francisco.”

“Oh, William! You know you don’t believe that. Those poor people, they’re just trying to better themselves.”

“You wouldn’t like it much if they were all over Muncie, washing clothes and digging ditches.”

“I suppose you’re right. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sending my pillowcases to a Chinaman, although you hear they do it in San Francisco all the time.”

“What is that?”

Mr. Hatch was pointing at what I’d taken to be a heap of rags but which had begun to shift and shudder and now rose from the platform, supported unsteadily on two brown sticks. Above folded and flapping bits of cloth, a mat of hair took shape, half hiding a face brown and creased as damp leaves, split by a toothless red mouth. The Indian came at us, bending, swaying, dipping, reaching, spewing incomprehensible syllables in abject tones.

Mrs. Hatch shrank from the window in horror. “Don’t look,” Mr. Hatch commanded.

The creature’s eyes, slits between swollen lids, were as unsteady as the legs. Its gaze wandered over the cars but returned to me. The thing held out its appendages. “Mun-nee! Mun-nee!” it beseeched. Someone threw an object—maybe a roll—from one of the windows; it landed well back on the platform. The creature turned, exposing its back to the train.

And there a baby rode. It was wrapped tight against a board, its round, dewy eyes in its dear new face gazing at us with confident dignity, as if we were its subjects, gathered to pay our respects.

“Hey! Give you greenbacks for the papoose!” some lout shouted. “Sell us the papoose!”

The rag creature looked back over her shoulder, but her aspect had changed. Contempt shaped her face, and derision sharpened her eyes. Her disdain—her loathing, even—raised her up. She was, after all, a woman. A mother.

The train, refreshed with coal, pulled away from the platform, and with relief, we welcomed eggs and toast and bacon to our table, busying ourselves longer than was strictly necessary spooning sugar and spreading jam. We’d all been debased, I suppose, by what we’d witnessed at the station and were shy of facing one another in such a state.

Finally, Oskar spoke. “You have to admit it wouldn’t be altogether a bad thing.”

“What wouldn’t?” I asked, relieved that he’d shrugged off Mr. Hatch’s dismissal of his drawing.

“For that unfortunate woman to sell her baby.”

“What! Swann, that’s ridiculous!” Mr. Hatch sputtered.

“When you think about it, it makes good sense,” Oskar said. “How will she raise that baby? Obviously, she can’t even take care of herself. He’s bound to suffer, and he’s likely to die.”

“We’re not slaveholders anymore,” Mr. Hatch protested. “We don’t sell people. We never did in Indiana.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Hatch put in. “Now, if you were to suggest that some responsible group assume care for the child, some church, perhaps, or the town . . .”

“Take him away and put him in an orphanage is what you’re suggesting?”

“Yes, so some nice people can adopt him,” Mrs. Hatch said. “I’m sure it’s done all the time, when parents are drunk, for instance, or crazy.”

“She isn’t crazy,” I said.

“No?” Mr. Hatch asked. “What makes you say that? She looked crazy enough to me.”

“Didn’t you see when she turned around?” I said. “She was disgusted with what she heard. With all of us, I’m afraid. She knew what she was about and what we’d done. That’s not crazy.”

Mr. Hatch was shaking his head. “I don’t see why you say we did anything—”

“But,” Oskar broke in, “if you just take him, then the mother is left with nothing, which isn’t fair. Because right now she does have something dear, something that people want.”

“An Indian baby?” Mrs. Hatch scoffed. “I doubt there’d be many who’d sincerely want that child.”

“Even such a little prince as that?” Oskar sighed. “I suppose you’re right. After all, we destroyed these people so that you Muncies can live wherever you please.”

“Oskar!” I was shocked.

“What are you talking about? We haven’t destroyed anyone!” Mr. Hatch said indignantly.

“At least some of us,” Oskar went on, “are ashamed. We appreciate the horror of what’s been done in our name.”

“And yet,” I said, determined to put my husband in his place, to pay him back for the discomfort he was causing me, “we ride the train, which, as I understand it, destroyed the Indian as much as anything.”

“Yes,” he said irritably. “Of course we ride the train. What would be the point of not doing so?”

I couldn’t blame the Muncies for leaving the table in a huff. In our parlor, I remonstrated with Oskar. I averred that some of what he said was true—the child was precious, and the Muncies were benighted—but he ought not to have run roughshod over them, and he ought not to set himself above them. Did he not see that we were hardly different? He would not agree. He made fun of Mrs. Hatch’s laugh and the way Mr. Hatch held his fork. He declared that he wouldn’t waste another minute on such people. I regretted this deeply, not so much because of any attachment to the Muncies themselves, although they’d been friendly to me, but for the fact that in breaking with them, Oskar had cut what I’d seen as our last tie to the East. It was strange to consider that, although all my life I’d lived in “the West,” Wisconsin had become “the East.”

In the afternoon, we stayed in our compartment and ate the remaining hard rolls, now worthy of their name. Then, unusually exhausted, Oskar attempted to convert our sofa into a bed without assistance from the porter. He was asleep before the sun had set.

We’re climbing into the Black Hills, an accurate name for these dark, stunted pines and tortured rocks . . .

Unable to concentrate on my letter to my mother, I lifted my pen and stared at Oskar from my chair. He looked uncomfortable, his body contorted by the ill-constructed bed. Ernst never would have said what Oskar had said, any of it, anything like any of it. But then I hadn’t married Ernst, had I?

The Union Pacific had furnished our parlor with a map of the nation’s train tracks so that passengers could mark their progress. I unfolded it and spread the whole of the country across my lap. Tomorrow we would reach a large depot in Ogden where many eastbound trains must stop. I imagined myself climbing down from this train and getting on one of those. In a couple of days I could be far from this wild, unsettling landscape and back in the comfortable streets I knew. I thought of my parents’ house—the blue velvet curtains, the kitchen worktable, the currant bushes in the backyard below my bedroom window, all dear and familiar. But if I returned to them, I would forever be the girl I’d always been.

I refolded the map. As well as I could, I slid into the half-made bed with my husband and allowed the motion of the train to rock me to sleep.

In the hours that remained of our journey, I wrote letters filled with descriptions of the Great Salt Lake and daylong sagebrush deserts and the mountains, all jagged rock and green pine pressing close and black gorges yawning open. I’d never seen anything remotely like any of it, and I wrote honestly of my pleasure in experiencing such variety and strangeness. But with each fresh stretch of landscape, I was more aware of how many new worlds imposed themselves between me and home, and when we came down into the valleys of California, I felt the Sierras close behind me like a door.