The Edge of the Earth (15 page)

CHAPTER 20

O
NE AFTERNOON IN
early November, I remained beside one of the tubs after I’d dismissed the children for lunch, sketching in a logbook a being that the children called a sea cradle and Some Species labeled a chiton. Had I noticed a chiton on my first day on the beach, I would have dismissed it as a small rough patch, not an animal but a defect of the rock. Now I understood it to be a single-footed creature whose simple plates of armor had served to protect its species since practically the beginning of the earth. Chitons came in different colors, and I wondered why some were red and some were brown and some were yellow or gray or green. I speculated as to whether the pigments in their food somehow tinted their skin and whether their colors camouflaged them from predators. They appeared to stay still, yet I knew from observing them in the tub that they somehow moved across the rock, leaving in their wake a path cleared of algae, which I supposed they must be eating. They were primitive creatures, but even so, they knew enough to curl their armor around their vulnerable undersides when they were pried away from their homes.

First I sketched the little creature as it flattened itself against a rock, and then I tried without success to tug it gently off its base, so as to make it roll up like a pill bug.

“What’re you doing?” Oskar had come up behind me.

Hastily, I pulled my fingers from the water and wiped them on my duster. “I’m sorry. You must want your lunch.”

“I’m all right. What were you doing?” he repeated.

“I was trying to get it to defend itself. The book only shows it flat.” I pointed to its picture in Some Species, which lay open beside me.

He studied the page. “Are you sure it’s the same? This says it’s supposed to be brown.”

As I described my own puzzlement over the colors, he slid his fingernail between the rock and the animal and, without hesitation, pulled it free, whereupon it gradually curled up, as I’d known it would.

“Perhaps you’ve discovered a new species. You ought to send one to your Miss Dodson. See what she makes of it.” He dropped the tiny balled creature back into the water and turned his attention to the log in which I’d been drawing. “Yours is better than the one in the book.” He touched my picture, leaving a wet circle on the page. Then he turned his intense gaze on me, as he’d not done in many weeks. “You should work up a catalog of your creatures. That’d be a real contribution to science.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I brushed futilely at the drop of water that had soaked into the page.

He shrugged. “If you’re done, let’s eat. I’m exhausted.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Since he’d given up electricity, Oskar had become the model of an assistant lighthouse keeper. He arrived at his shift on time and stayed late, meticulously if dully checking and cleaning the machinery and the building. He’d discovered, even before Mr. Crawley, that the mercury on which the Fresnel lens floated (without this lubricant, the massive glass prism would be far too heavy to turn) had evaporated dangerously. He’d put a new blowcock and pipe in the boiler without help from Mr. Crawley or Archie Johnston, and he’d tarred the smokestack in his free hours. He came home promptly for lunch and didn’t complain about the monotonous fare that remained in our stores—mostly beans and sprouted, rubbery potatoes. Immediately after lunch, he would take himself to bed and lie there wearing the black spectacles he’d brought home from the light, so I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed. He’d quit interrupting the children’s lessons, and had there been any writing paper left, we would have had it to ourselves. At first I’d been relieved that he was no longer so overexcited and preoccupied by his “real” work, but now I was anxious and unhappy, for he wasn’t himself, and though I tried to engage him with sprightly conversation and caresses, he rarely responded. It seemed we would not be returning in triumph after all.

I’d intended after lunch to see if Euphemia had some work for me, but today I stubbornly followed Oskar up to our bed. Although in the past, there had been plenty of afternoons when I’d wished he would leave me alone, I missed being the object of his desire. Admittedly, since I’d lost my corset, I hadn’t attempted to constrict myself to fit into my attractive clothes but went around every day in my loose duster. I took the shapeless thing off and stood naked except for my shift while I combed out my hair, a pose sure to interest him in the past. To my chagrin, he was asleep before I’d slipped between the sheets.

Discouraged, I dressed and made my way back to the tubs. In one of them, a small green crab, Pugettia producta—or was it Pugettia gracilis or Pugettia richii or, as Oskar had suggested, some other, unidentified Pugettia altogether?—worked its way busily over a ribbon of kelp. Its round black eyes reminded me of Miss Dodson’s—although hers were not on stalks. Perhaps I should send her a selection of starfish and crabs—they dried well—and a few nudibranches and chitons. Anemones would be nice, but without water in which to expose their tentacles, they were unimpressive, resembling wadded dirty rags.

I tore a page from my logbook:

Dear Miss Dodson,

I am sending you some dried specimens, along with drawings of some others that I fear would not make the journey well, in the hope that they might interest you. All of them can be found along the central coast of California, where I now live. They seem to me to be strange creatures, for the most part, but perhaps they are ordinary and strange just to me, who am not used to such things. I look forward to your response but can receive and send mail only every three or four months, so you’ll understand when I’m slow to reply.

I considered explaining how I came to be in California and concluded that such personal details were not the purpose of my communication with my former teacher. I signed the letter with my maiden name, realizing that she wouldn’t know me by any other. In a postscript, I mentioned the catalog and asked her advice. Did she think it might be a worthwhile pursuit?

∗ ∗ ∗

I spent a great deal of time on my drawings, considering how to illustrate the distinctions among the crabs, for instance, and including detailed renderings of the claws. I pondered how best to show scale and habitat, in which the distinctions most vividly came into play. And I recorded habits—as far as the children and I had been able to observe them—thinking that would be valuable information, too.

It was difficult to package the specimens. Resilient in their saltwater baths, they were fragile as glass once they’d been dried. The children helped me to gather grass in the wide meadows between our morro and the mountains, and I made a little nest for each creature and then laid the nests in a crate, smothered them with more grass and crumpled newspapers, and nailed it shut. In a barrel, I made a bed of sawdust for the nailed crate, along with a couple of gauges that we couldn’t repair by ourselves and were sending to San Francisco.

∗ ∗ ∗

The Madrone, the same tender on which we’d come, arrived on a hot, clear morning late in November. It was our first contact with the world beyond the morro since we’d arrived in July, and I waited, nearly holding my breath, for Euphemia to dole out the contents of the yellow mail pouch that the steam donkey trundled up. In the end, I had a precious stack of envelopes: a long letter each from three of my school friends, including Lucy; two from my father; and six from my mother. We also got a share of a smattering of San Francisco
Examiners
, seemingly selected at random, and Oskar got a letter from his father.

At the barrel-opening ceremony that evening, Euphemia set aside a number of choice cans—sweet potatoes and currant jam and such—not to be opened until Christmas dinner, for the tender wouldn’t return until after the New Year. I was pleased to discover Volume 3 of The Complete Works of Shakespeare in the fresh library and showed it to Oskar. He only nodded.

I’d paid to send a small package to Milwaukee College for Females in the same way I paid to send my letters, using credit drawn on Oskar’s paycheck, which the Lighthouse Service deposited quarterly in a bank account in San Francisco. A few years earlier, a chief keeper at a light up the coast had sunk like lead when his skiff capsized as he returned from the tender with his pockets stuffed with gold coins, half a year’s pay for himself and two assistants. That loss of both man and money had prompted the service to eliminate payment in cash. It was no great hardship to do without money at Point Lucia. There was nothing here on which to spend gold.

The following morning, I happened to see the letter from Oskar’s father in the kitchen pail, and I couldn’t help but skim the well-formed but anxious lines visible among the potato peels.

 . . . understand that Philip was a help to you. I hope you were sufficiently grateful, for his time is no doubt very limited.

A slight shake of the pail revealed:

 . . . hope you’re applying yourself steadily. I must say that I often envy those like you who have the satisfaction of practical work, work that dirties the hands and tires the back and forms the foundation upon which society—all societies—rest . . .

Your mother sends her best.

With sincere hopes for your happiness,

Papa

To make my own letters last, I allowed myself one per week and read very slowly, as if sucking a chocolate. Each began stiffly with good wishes for my journey and questions about my current life but soon began recounting activities that reminded me how far removed I was from my old world. Gustina was to have gone with me when I married Ernst, but my mother had promised that Lucy might have her, if Gustina agreed, which she surely would. My mother herself had already begun to train a new girl, Polish, somewhat fierce, and even more ignorant than Gustina had been. Also, Ernst had been spotted by a trustworthy source walking with a Miss Cynthia Davis on his arm. It was a relief but also a disappointment to learn that I wasn’t so important after all.

I thought often in the next few weeks of my little package of Pacific creatures tracing the journey that I had taken, only backward; the boat trip to San Francisco, where the barrel in which I’d packed my crate would be split open, spilling sawdust onto the loading area of the post office; and then the train trip across the western states; and finally, the second train from the terminal in Chicago to Milwaukee. I hoped I’d padded the specimens well enough to keep them whole. I imagined Miss Dodson opening my letter with surprise and reading with affection; my teachers had always liked me. Having read, she would pry open the crate with the curiosity, if not quite the fervor, of the children when they attacked the fresh barrels. I could picture Miss Dodson drawing her magnifying glass from its leather pouch, and the notion of this tangible thread between my old life and my new was a comfort to me. She would compare the names I’d listed to the ones she could find in her own books; and she would be especially interested in the specimens I couldn’t identify. I felt a shimmer of excitement at the thought that some might be new to her; that, as Oskar had suggested, the children and I might have found creatures unknown to the rest of the world.

CHAPTER 21

“D
O YOU EVER
see the otters?”

The children and I were on the beach again, and I couldn’t resist scanning the knobs of kelp—deceptively like heads—that rose and sank in the waves for the unusual creature I’d spotted when I’d lost myself among the rocks. And I couldn’t keep from my mind the baby Jane and I had found. I imagined that the two belonged together, perhaps as mother and child.

“No.” They shook their heads.

“I think I have. At least your mother thought that’s what it was.” I described the small black head that had frightened away the seals.

“Oh,” Jane said, “that wasn’t an otter. That was the mermaid. Want to see where she lives?”

“Ma says we’re not to go there,” Mary warned.

“Mama says mermaids are dangerous,” Nicholas said. “She says they like children so much that they drag them down to their lairs under the water.”

“Where they drown!” Edward finished.

“But her lair isn’t under the water,” Jane objected.

“I think it would be all right,” I broke in, “if I’m with you.” I smiled, wondering what sort of animal or make-believe the children would show me. “Only we must come back right away if I say so.”

Immediately, they began to run, and they kept going with remarkable endurance, much farther than I’d anticipated, all the way to the end of the beach, where they splashed into the shallow water to make their way around the rocks.

“What about the tide?” I called.

“It’s going out,” Mary called back over her shoulder. “We have hours.”

I didn’t know whether to trust their judgment. I was much older and therefore should be the one responsible, but I had no idea what was wise and what was foolish here.

We reached the pool of violet-spiked urchins, which was obviously familiar to the children, for it seemed to serve as a sort of landmark where they turned inland. Soon they stepped into what, from a distance, appeared to be a rock wall but which was a passageway, so narrow in places that it was nearly closed at the top.

With a start, I realized that this must be the very place Euphemia had meant them to avoid when she’d warned them to stay on the beach. “Maybe we should go back,” I said.

“Shhhh!” Edward whispered. He turned to me. “We don’t want to frighten her.”

Were otters like bears, animals that could be dangerous if they felt cornered?

“I think we should go back.” This time I whispered. The passage was so tight in places that I had to turn sideways to slip through. Any animal at its far end would surely feel trapped.

The children pretended they hadn’t heard me. Suddenly, they stopped and crowded against one another.

“See?” Jane breathed.

I had to push against the children to peer into the dark space, but once my eyes were accustomed to the low light, I recognized at once the cave Jane had drawn. It was a low-ceilinged room, obviously formed when one boulder had crashed down upon three others that refused to give way. I’d expected some sort of burrow or nest, but although an animal stink hung about it, it was clearly the home of a human being. It smelled of smoke and unwashed skin and skeins of seaweed that hung from a crude wooden rack. Piled higgledy-piggledy about the floor were enormous abalone shells, their mother-of-pearl bowls exposed. Heaped in some were what I took to be tools: mallets and scrapers and pointed sticks. One shell was brimming with acorns, another with sharpened yellowish bones, another with round shapes I first took to be ivory buttons or clasps and then realized were vertebrae. Here and there were baskets as well, some flat-bottomed and some rounded, one in the shape of a cone. Most were finely woven of some light-colored plant material I couldn’t identify, into which dark patterns had been worked. Near the center of the cave was one piece of what might have been called furniture: skins stretched over a wooden frame to make a kind of platform that served, I supposed, as a couch or bed. Along the far wall, arranged in a pyramid, were brightly labeled cans of the kind I’d come to know well: green corn and tomatoes, sardines and plums, and at the apex, a hash made of beef and potatoes, its label bearing a large blue ribbon. The floor, covered in sealskins, was a lustrous brown. Folded in one corner was a navy wool blanket, Lighthouse Service–issue. Most astonishing of all was what was beside the blanket, arranged neatly side by side: my shoes and stockings.

“Who lives here?” I whispered, astounded.

“The mermaid!” Jane looked at me as if I were a simpleton. How many times did I need to be told?

“Well, we’re not entirely sure.” Edward looked to the others, as if uncertain how much he ought to reveal.

“She doesn’t have a tail,” Nicholas explained. “Just ordinary legs.”

“But she is a mermaid,” Jane said stoutly. “We saw her come out of the water.”

“She had a spear and a big rockfish stabbed right through,” Edward said.

I saw that the crevices between the rocks at the entrance were filled with fish vertebrae and that the stone surfaces were flecked with scales that shimmered like quartz.

Jane took a step into the cave, but Mary grabbed her crossed pinafore straps and pulled her back. “You know better, Janie,” she said. “It’s not polite to go in if she’s not at home.”

“Why isn’t she here?” Jane asked, a little petulantly.

“Probably because of Mrs. Swann,” Nicholas said. “It’s only that she doesn’t know you,” he added kindly.

“The things in your collection, in the box,” I said. “Did you steal them from her?”

“Steal them!” Edward was indignant. “Of course not!”

“They’re meant for us,” Nicholas said. “She puts them on the stones.”

“I told you,” Jane said.

“Ma doesn’t like it,” Mary said.

“It was my turn, and she threw it away,” Jane complained.

Mary sighed. “I gave you the feathers, didn’t I?”

“I wanted the necklace!”

“I told you not to wear it,” Mary said. “I told you to put it straight in the box.”

“She wanted me to wear it. She was sad when I didn’t have it. You know she was.”

I could hardly listen to them, caught as I was in my own conjectures about the creature who lived in this hole. Who was she, if, indeed, she was a woman at all?

I feared that a black-haired, seal-skinned banshee might come whirling down the narrow path, brandishing a spear. I glanced at the rock walls that rose high over our heads. There were dozens of crevices that, for all I knew, might hide a person.

“We’d better go.” I didn’t wait for arguments but turned and began to make my own way back. This time they accepted my authority and followed without protest.

They would have dawdled along the beach—to them, apparently, the idea that a wild woman lived in a cave not five miles from their home was only a bit of distraction to spark up an afternoon, something like going down to the river to watch the drawbridge open had once been to me—but I hurried them on like a hen pushing her chicks toward the roost. This time I kept up with them as we straggled up the steep morro—I had learned to crouch low and use my hands as well as my feet, as they did—and I went with them all the way to their parlor.

Through the doorway, I could see Mrs. Crawley—Euphemia—reaching into the oven for a pan. On the worktable beside her were two cans of the blue-ribbon hash that had been so artfully displayed in the cave.

“Wash,” Mrs. Crawley called, and the children crowded past me and pushed into the kitchen.

“Mrs. Crawley. Euphemia.”

“Oh!” Startled, she let the hot pan clatter onto the stove. “Why are you lurking there? Come in.”

I stayed where I was. I wondered if she’d deliberately misled me about the otter, and I wasn’t sure how she would respond.

She advanced through the kitchen doorway and came toward me, wiping her hands on a towel. “What is it?”

“It’s a woman, I think. Or a person, at any rate. She lives in a cave in the rocks, not five miles from here.”

“They took you there? I told them—I told you—to stay on the beach!” She directed an angry look toward the kitchen, where the children were laughing and clattering the china. “Be careful with those plates!” she snapped.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize what you meant until . . . Is she dangerous?”

“She’s mad,” she said firmly. And then she softened. “I don’t mean that she’s a lunatic, exactly, but she’s touched . . . different from you and me. She’s . . . unpredictable.” She paused, absently adjusting the wooden teeth and other items of wreckage on their lurid cloth. “It’s not so unusual around here, you know. This is the kind of place that attracts people who can’t get along in regular society.”

“How does she live? Won’t she starve? Or freeze? Isn’t she lonely?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. She knows better than any of us how to live. She’s been there for years, you know.”

“Since before you came?”

“No. Not that long.” She held me in her formidable gaze. “My children are not to go near her, you understand. And if I were you, I would stay away from her, too.”

∗ ∗ ∗

In my own kitchen, I pounded the chisel into two cans and poured their contents into a skillet, distractedly mixing oxtail and duck. Then I remembered that I’d neglected the stove all afternoon and let the fire go out. It would take at least an hour to warm it up again.

I set a plate of cold meat in congealed gravy in front of Oskar that night, and he began to eat without comment. I was too preoccupied to lift my own fork. I thought about the woman returning to her cave and wondered if she would smell us on the air and know we’d been there. I imagined her squatting on the rocks, scraping scales from a limp fish, or sitting on the sealskin floor, rolling acorns about. Who was she? How had she come to be there? Were there more like her?

“Oskar,” I said abruptly.

He looked up, raising his eyebrows slightly at the intensity in my voice.

“I saw something strange today. A sort of hideout in the rocks. Euphemia says a madwoman lives there.”

I was leaning forward, unconsciously heightening the intensity of my words, but he seemed unaffected. He continued chewing a cold oxtail for what seemed a long time. “It’s not all that surprising,” he said at last. “Didn’t the Crawleys say there was some crazy old hermit around here? I can see how this place could drive you insane, the damn wind, the damn waves, the damn foghorn, the damn rust. It all keeps worrying at you until you’re ready to do something desperate. You were right, Trudy; people aren’t meant to be here.” He pushed his plate away as he spoke and stood up from the table.

“Oskar, she doesn’t seem crazy to me. I mean, not really. Her things are organized. And some of them are beautiful.”

“Well.” He sighed. He was already halfway down the hall so that the walls muffled his words. “I suppose you’ll have to show me one of these days.”