The Edge of the Earth (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

“M
ARY’LL SHOW YOU
around the place,” Mrs. Crawley said, and for a moment she rested her rough hand tenderly on her elder daughter’s shoulder. “Janie, would you like to go along?” The little girl was leaning her head against her mother’s hip. She nodded, and Mrs. Crawley smoothed the child’s hair behind two delicate ears that stuck straight out like the handles of a teacup, revealing inquisitive brown eyes. “You two,” the woman said to her sons, “better fetch wood. We’ll want a good bonfire tonight.”

The boys went whooping off, and the look Mrs. Crawley sent after them was at once exasperated and fond. “I’ll be providing the dinner tonight,” she said, turning abruptly back to me. “Seeing as you haven’t had time to set up your kitchen.”

Set up my kitchen! What did that mean? In school, we’d been taught to brown flour and keep it handy in a jar for thickening and coloring. I knew how to make a white sauce and a fruit salad and how to clean a cake pan. My mother had shown me how to bake a coffee cake with the bacon grease she collected in a green ceramic jar and how to gently encourage custard to mingle with clouds of beaten egg whites. I remembered some of the lessons she’d given our girl: how to store glasses and cups in the pantry—upside down, so as not to collect dust; how to clean the ash from the stove without spilling it on the floor; when to change the water in the reservoir. I feared that these random bits of knowledge wouldn’t be enough.

Indeed, I felt much closer in station to Mary than to her mother, although I took pains to conceal it. My guide, who chewed at her thumbnail as we walked, was entering that awkward stage of a girl’s life when she is no longer darling but not yet pretty, and it was difficult to know whether she would become so. She was unformed, her freckled face a plump, boneless disk, and she had a habit of adjusting her small glasses by pushing at them with one finger.

She took me first to the barn where several brown chickens strutted and poked about, entirely focused on the ground and uninterested in the fact that their patch of earth hung high over the ocean. A green-tailed rooster, suspicious, turned one black eye on us, rather in the way of Mr. Johnston.

The little girl, Jane, was more forward. “Ma says the hens wouldn’t know a fox if it bit ’em,” she said. “I’ve sure never seen a fox. Have you seen a fox?”

I informed her that I had.

“I’ve seen eagles,” Jane went on. “They swoop down”—she made a huge gesture of wings with her arms—“and pluck the chicks right up.” Here she reached forward, fingers outstretched like talons, and made a grabbing motion in the air. “It’s gruesome.”

“Ma says the eagles have to eat, too,” Mary said, and Jane nodded at this piece of wisdom.

I was surprised to see a cow chewing its cud behind the barn.

“Ma says children must have milk.” Jane squinted her eyes, sizing me up. “She said you’d churn us some butter. She said where you come from, everyone knows how to churn butter.”

Apparently, Ma wasn’t always right.

When we reached the workshop, Mary demonstrated the whetstone, hiking up her skirt so that she could work the pedals unencumbered. Then, still sitting on its seat, she slid her glasses, which had slipped low on her nose, back into place. “Might I ask you a favor?”

I had to smile at her formality. “Of course.”

“May I try your hat?”

I unpinned my hat and arranged it on the girl’s head and folded the veil down for her.

“Oh!” She was disappointed. “You can see out perfectly well.”

“Let me see,” said Jane, so I had to settle the hat on her as well. “You’re right, Mary,” she said with similar dismay. “You can see out perfectly well.”

Did they imagine that I’d been bumbling along blind?

As I’d observed from the tender, the lighthouse was set at a little distance from the rest of the buildings and somewhat lower on the rock. Its upper third reached the top of the morro, and the catwalk that encircled the light was accessible from the level where we stood by way of a little bridge. Oskar was up there when we emerged from the workshop, but he seemed to be looking at something far out at sea. In any case, he didn’t notice the hand I raised.

“That one is ours,” Mary said importantly, pointing at the southernmost entrance of the awful stone building where three apartments were clumped.

“We get the biggest,” Jane announced, “because our father is the head.”

The center house into which the girls led me was a sort of tunnel, a passageway pressed between the two other apartments; light could enter directly from the east at the back or the west at the front, but otherwise not at all. It was obvious from the smudges along the walls, the hard brown grease on the cooktop, and the skeins of dust against the baseboards that no one had prepared the place for us and that the previous tenant had been no housekeeper.

I was amused to see evidence of squatters. In the parlor, Mary quickly gathered up a doll, several squares of inky paper, a tin pot, and some other detritus she gave me no time to identify. In the kitchen, both girls were proprietary, demonstrating the running water in the sink and drawing my attention to the heavy china, patterned with a small navy lighthouse, in the plate rack; the iron pot and skillet in the cupboard; and the drawer of silver-plated utensils.

Upstairs were two little bedrooms. The front one was furnished with nothing but a bed.

“This one,” Jane said, her palm pressed to the door of the back room, “is for your baby.”

I laughed. “But I don’t have a baby.”

“Ma says you will,” she insisted, “sooner or later. Mary and I are hoping for a girl, aren’t we?” She turned to her sister.

Mary nodded. “In the meantime,” she said boldly, giving me a sideways look as she opened the door, “we’ve been using this room for our collection.”

The floor looked like a beach. It was littered with shells and pieces of driftwood, dried and flattened seaweed, and what appeared to be bones. Washed up here and there were small creatures at once gorgeous and monstrous. Some were bristly, some pebbly, some curly, some knobby. Almost everything was strange to me: white tubes, brown disks, and opalescent cups; shapes of orange and pink, blue and violet; branches and coils, spines and nubbins and surfaces that appeared glassy smooth. Confined in jars were more creatures, some sluglike, some waving tentacles. Presumably, they’d been plucked live from their homes (although most appeared to be dead, despite the attempt to provide them with an appropriately watery environment). I lifted one jar, half full of cloudy water, for a closer look and nearly dropped it again in horror. Inside, a blobbish thing floated and stank.

“I think this is dead,” I managed.

“I suppose we ought to throw it away, then,” Mary said regretfully.

“What can we do with all this?” I would speak to their mother.

“I don’t know.” Mary’s tone was bright, as if the problem didn’t concern her.

“You won’t tell Ma, will you?” Jane said. “She don’t like us keeping this stuff.”

“No, she don’t,” said a deep voice from the doorway. I was so startled that I almost dropped the jar again, but it was only Mr. Johnston, who’d somehow crept up the stairs without our knowing. “Here,” he said, his tone unexpectedly kind as he dipped one hand into his shirt pocket. “I picked this up the other day.” He handed Jane a twisted tube of a shell, hollow as a drinking straw, while the two boys, who’d come up the stairs after him, crowded in.

“Thank you!” Jane handed the shell ceremoniously to one of the boys, who placed it with care, although seemingly randomly, among the other flotsam and jetsam on the floor.

Mr. Johnston hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “What’s in the trunk? Rocks?”

“Did you really bring rocks?” the littler boy asked eagerly.

“It must be our books,” I said. “I’m sorry it was difficult to move. We ought to have packed more novels and verse. The lighter stuff.”

The children looked baffled, and Johnston, too, frowned at me for a moment before he raised his eyebrows. “Huh,” he said, and smiled as if he’d discovered something he’d not anticipated that pleased him.

“Let’s see!” All of the children piled down in a rush, so I felt obliged to follow. Archie Johnston came after us in a leisurely way, as if the place were more his than mine.

“Thank you, Mr. Johnston,” I said.

I’d meant it as a dismissal, but he merely nodded. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

I might have begged off, said that I’d misplaced the key or wished to wait for Oskar, but the children were so expectant, I hadn’t the heart. At least my night things were secure in our valise, I thought as I parted the two halves of the trunk, exposing my personal possessions to Archie Johnston.

The children’s pleasure soon overwhelmed my discomfort. Opening my trunk before them had the quality of Sir Richard Burton’s accounts of displaying matches and pocket watches to the Africans. My violin was stroked and plucked; my sketchpad admired, more, I fear, for its being nearly a whole volume of rich, blank pages available for marking than for the few stiff still lives, portraits, and landscapes I’d rendered. My pencils and pens were painstakingly tested. My feathered hat (only slightly crushed) and my paisley shawl were modeled; my rose geranium oil was sniffed. There was much scuffling and grabbing and shoving and poking, and when curiosity was sated, many items were grubby and disheveled. I supposed such behavior was typical of little boys, and the little girl was, after all, too young to know better, but I was surprised at Mary, who might be expected to fold a pair of stockings.

For me, the greatest treasure were the bedsheets between which my mother had slid the same sachets she used in her own linen cupboard. By the time we reached them, Johnston had become bored and wandered out, so I was able to open them wide without self-consciousness. I took them upstairs, turned the mattress to what I hoped was its freshest side, and slid the sheets over it. Then I lay facedown on the bed, breathing in the dear, lost scent of home. This was a mistake, however, for almost immediately, the rank odor of the mattress bullied its way through. I rose quickly and hurried back down the stairs.

“Is there anything to eat?” Jane asked. She was wearing my lavender gloves.

“I wish there were.” Fully recovered from my ocean voyage, I was conscious of a keen hunger.

“Ma might give you some raisins,” Edward said doubtfully.

Just then, as if he’d summoned her, Mrs. Crawley appeared at the open door. “Edward, you know we haven’t got raisins.” She turned to me and said, as if in explanation, “We never open the new barrels until after supper. Sort of a ceremony for the children. Not much other than beans and fish tonight.”

With curiosity as frank as her offspring’s, she studied the contents of my trunk, strewn about the parlor.

“Look at this linen,” she clucked, holding up a scalloped-edged tablecloth. Her coarse fingers seemed likely to tear the dainty material. “I suppose you thought this was Pinos. Artist types visiting, painting vistas, writing poems, and whatnot. No need for fancy tablecloths here.” She refolded it without bothering to match up the edges. “No one comes here.” She appeared to take satisfaction in that alarming notion.

Were these people to be all of our community then? My mother’s warm eyes, my father’s enclosing arms, Lucy’s bright laugh, and Miss Dodson’s encouraging smile all came crowding suddenly into my mind, so that I had to make a little cough to mask the sob that threatened to escape me. I didn’t see how this flinty and imperious woman could solace me for the loss of those I’d abandoned, and obviously, this lonely place would offer no one else. Oskar would have to be all to me here, and I to him.

“All right. Well,” Mrs. Crawley continued briskly, dropping the linen back into my trunk, “the dinner is on. Get the men, why don’t you?”

At first I thought this command was intended for me, but the two boys responded, rushing out the door and racing away. They shouldered each other roughly as they went, and I didn’t know how a mother could live in such a place and not fear every moment that her children would fall over the edge and be killed.

Near the Crawleys’ front door, several long boards had been laid over trestles, and crude wooden benches had been aligned on either side of this makeshift communal table. One end was crowded with a stack of the same thick china that was in my kitchen, along with a heap of silver, tumblers, a pitcher, and several iron pots.

“This china pattern is charming,” I said. Where I came from, it was the sort of comment a woman might use to extend herself to another.

“Really?” Mrs. Crawley said. She narrowed her eyes at the plate I’d held up, as if something she hadn’t noticed might appear. “It’s the same at every lighthouse. Keeps people from stealing it.” She gave a brief laugh. “Small chance of that here.”

The meal was more stirred together than cooked, a stew of milk, salt pork, and the enormous fish we’d brought—ling cod, Mr. Crawley said it was—along with beans and cornbread, all swimming together on one plate. We were obviously expected to bow our heads while Mr. Crawley said grace, but it was hard to keep from raising my face to the wind, which seemed on this precipice to be sent directly from God Himself.

“Will there be fruit after?” Edward asked, rather too close on the heels of the prayer.

“Have we opened the barrels?” Mrs. Crawley countered.

Since this led to no further conversation, I introduced a topic of my own. “Where do the children go to school?”

“Oh, there’s no school at this post,” Mrs. Crawley said almost blithely.

“Closest school’s in Monterey,” Mr. Crawley said, removing a fish bone from between his lips. The plates were accumulating little piles of white needles. “That’d be a couple days’ ride on a horse. Each way. Assuming we had a horse. Which, at present, we do not.”

“What do they need with school?” Oskar said affably. He threw his arm out in a wide sweep, nearly knocking Mrs. Crawley’s tumbler off the table. “Nature herself should be their teacher. They should look up, like Whitman, ‘in perfect silence at the stars.’”

I thought of how very unstarlike was the nature the children had piled in our house.