The Edge of the Earth (16 page)

CHAPTER 22

T
HAT NIGHT THE
rain began to fall so thickly and heavily, it seemed as though the bowl of the ocean had risen into the sky and upended itself. It went on for weeks, the deluge pausing only to reveal more vast columns of gray to the west, their winds screaming as they advanced, so that the chickens had to be staked to the ground with a bit of string around one leg to keep them from being blown right off the morro. I diverted the children by reading The Tempest to them, from the Shakespeare the tender had delivered, and together, we loosely adapted it into a piece they could perform at Christmas.

To my surprise, Euphemia abandoned an afternoon’s work to help us fashion the costumes, and these delighted the children more than the story itself. As Ariel, Jane got two lace handkerchiefs tacked to the shoulders of her dress to suggest wings. Every few minutes she would jump into the air to make them flutter. Edward assumed a dignified expression in Oskar’s wedding jacket and didn’t look ridiculous with my muff tied over his chin as a beard. Archie Johnston donated a sheepskin rug for Nicholas to wear as Caliban, and Mr. Crawley’s indigo nightshirt, together with a crown Euphemia constructed from empty tin cans, was his costume as the prince. I had the perfect dress for Mary’s Miranda.

Though I’d not opened our steamer trunk since the day I’d feverishly collected laundry, now I stood it up on its end and parted its halves, allowing the colorful fabric of my former life to spill forward, crushed but still lovely.

“So pretty.” Jane unself-consciously stroked the sleeve of the blue silk I’d worn to the panorama.

“Yes, that’s the one.” I held it up to Mary’s scrawny chest.

“Not really!” Mary covered her mouth with her hand. She looked almost terrified at the thought.

I floated the dress over her head. The garnet buttons met far too easily at the front, and both girls giggled at the bustle, but when I’d loosened Mary’s braids, I could glimpse the woman she would become.

“She’ll trip over the thing,” Euphemia said, shaking her head. As she combed her fingers through the girl’s hair, I saw that her dismissal disguised both pride and sorrow at her daughter’s maturation.

Little Jane insisted on trying the dress, too. She looked absurd, drowning in silk, but Euphemia indulged her, patiently arranging the folds of material around her feet, making her look as if she were standing in a pool of water.

“I’m a mermaid princess!” the little girl announced.

Our Christmas party, Euphemia hinted, would be an occasion worthy of the fine table linen stored in my trunk, unused since it had left Milwaukee. We would gather, we decided, in my parlor, since it was less crowded with furnishings and bric-a-brac than the Crawleys’, and we would need space for the plank table and for the entertainment. From her hoard of provisions, Euphemia produced a bottle of tawny liquor. We would make rum balls and a large rum cake from her mother’s recipes.

Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, the men rode the steam donkey down the morro in the rain, and by early afternoon, they returned with their quarry. Johnston dangled three ducks by the neck; Mr. Crawley had strung two large rockfish together through the gills; and Oskar had his arms around a sweet-smelling pine that he crowded into one corner of our parlor. Although popping corn was among our stores, Euphemia had never taught the children to string it nor to make paper chains out of strips of old catalog pages. I set them to work on these decorations while Euphemia and I erected the table, covering it with two of my mother’s fine white cloths and laying out the full set of lighthouse china. It was a simple spread, without the niceties of compote dishes or pickle forks, but inviting nonetheless. A bottle of wine glowed in the center with a ruby luster.

At the other end of the room, the children and I strewed evidence of a shipwreck, courtesy of their mother’s collection, and arranged some of the larger rocks and specimens, lengths of driftwood, and coils of dried kelp from our own stash to suggest the island. The players hid in the hall, whispering and giggling as the audience took their seats, while Mr. Crawley went around with the rum that remained after our baking.

“Must you pour so much, Henry?” Euphemia was wearing more than one petticoat under her skirt—she couldn’t know that it was a style long out of date—and it made her appear even larger than usual.

She was right that the tumblers were overfull, given the strong nature of the drink. Mr. Crawley was clearly not in the habit of serving liquor.

“Now, Effie,” Archie said placatingly. “It’s only one night a year.”

“Effie” was so incongruous a name for Euphemia Crawley that I didn’t dare to meet Oskar’s eye for fear I would burst out laughing.

The show itself was both charming and tedious, as children’s performances must be, and as I’d hoped, it took the sting out of a Christmas so far from the ones I remembered. We dimmed the lights, and Janie and Nicholas made a fine storm, drumming with spoons on pots and running back and forth with my dark shawl held over their heads to suggest the tossing wind and the waves. Prospero relinquished his magic stoutly, if a bit stiffly. Miranda handled her gown with surprising grace. Ariel sucked on the strings of her long dark hair—though we’d tied it in rags overnight, it wouldn’t hold a curl—while she delivered her song about coral bones and pearl eyes with only a few whispered prompts, and Caliban growled with delightful fierceness. I’d given Nicholas some lines from the famous speech about the sweet noises of the night, and he spoke them with an appropriately wistful air.

When he’d finished, Archie turned to me. “I see I was right about your being a good teacher,” he said disarmingly. “Although,” he added, glancing at his sister, “you chose the wrong one to play the wild thing.”

Euphemia’s face hardened. “You see, Henry?” she said, plucking the bottle of rum from the floor where it had wandered.

“I only gave him a glass, same as everyone,” Mr. Crawley said.

“Why didn’t you include ‘Be not afraid of greatness’?” Oskar murmured.

“Wrong shipwreck play,” Euphemia said with her usual efficiency.

I admit I was as surprised as Oskar that she would know such a thing. I hoped it didn’t show on my face as it did on his.

“One reads,” she said.

The players, luckily, took no notice of their audience’s inattention, but entertained themselves to the finish, and then we all sat down to eat. Euphemia, with uncharacteristic attention to aesthetics, had added to the table a series of short candles whose flames dipped and straightened in the draft that seeped through the windows. This time it was she who took the bottle around, splashing a few dark drops of wine into each of our glasses.

“Now, Effie, don’t deprive us of our Christmas cheer,” Archie coaxed.

Euphemia frowned. “You don’t always wear it well.”

“I’ve been a good boy all year. Haven’t I, Henry? Tell my sister how good I’ve been, now, c’mon.”

“He hasn’t caused any trouble, Euphemia,” Mr. Crawley said. “It’s true.”

“And I’m entertaining,” Archie said. “Look!” He’d hung his spoon from the end of his nose, and it dangled there ludicrously, making the children scream with laughter and begin applying their spoons to their own noses with clattering results.

“Well,” Euphemia acquiesced, tipping the bottle, “I suppose if you must have it, now’s the time.”

She poured a bit more into each of our glasses while Mr. Crawley served the duck with a fairly steady hand and Oskar, Mr. Crawley, and I lavishly praised the meat and its currant glaze, to appease both brother and sister. Soon we were all festive, the men enjoying themselves by loudly reviling Spain as Euphemia and I peeled oranges and cracked walnuts for the children without insisting that they first finish their peas.

There were no curtains in our parlor windows, and happening to catch a glimpse of my reflection in the dripping glass, I was conscious of how we would appear if anyone—a passing angel, perhaps—could see us from the outside. Much like the lighthouse itself, we, gathered in this little room, were a warm and bright spot in a vast space of cold blackness. I scanned the flushed and happy faces of the people I’d come to know this half-year, grateful that I had a part in this family now that I could no longer be with my own.

Oskar must have been feeling much the same, for he raised his glass, which had been refilled a second or perhaps even a third time, since Mr. Crawley had produced a second bottle of wine, seemingly from under the table. “To Christmas!”

Archie raised his own glass with unwarranted energy, and the liquid in it sloshed alarmingly. “We’ve not heard anything about the noble experiment in a great while,” he said with a smack of his lips. “What’s happened to all the electricity around here? Have we lost it?”

Cravenly, I kept my eyes on my plate, wondering how Oskar would respond. Archie Johnston was rude, and I didn’t like to see my husband embarrassed, but I, too, wished for answers to questions somewhat like these.

“Lost it?” Oskar said. “No, it’s just . . .” He shrugged in the defeated way that had become familiar. “Just that I can’t find it, I guess. But it’s here. Electricity can never be lost. It remains even after we die.”

Mr. Crawley nodded as he picked a bit of orange pulp from between his teeth. Euphemia looked as if she were waiting for something mildly unpleasant to cease. But Archie seemed sincerely interested. “Are you talking about the spirit world, then?”

“Not in the sense of table-turning or any of that nonsense,” Oskar said. “That’s been thoroughly debunked. But certainly, electromagnetism is the life force that never dies.”

“So electromagnetism is God?” Euphemia said dryly.

“You mock, Effie, because you don’t understand a man’s need to do something more than trudge around and around like a donkey in harness. It’s all right for you and old Henry here, tending that light like a couple of nursemaids. But some of us want more. Isn’t that right, Oskar?”

“The light saves lives,” Euphemia said calmly. “It’s important work.”

“For women, maybe. Women like that sort of thing, keeping things tidy and on schedule.”

“Well, now!” Mr. Crawley clapped his hands. “Don’t you have a little surprise in the kitchen, Euphemia?”

Euphemia gave her brother a long look, clearly reluctant to give up the argument without having the last word, but she placed both palms on the table and pushed herself dramatically to her feet.

The surprise was a honeycomb she’d been squirreling away, and the children were as excited by the sweet as she’d anticipated. They reached with their butter knives as soon as she’d set it on the table, and Jane, in her excitement, brought her little arm too close to one of the candles. She dropped her knife and howled as if her hand had been sliced clean away.

Instantly, Archie snatched the girl from her chair and pulled her into his lap. The roughness with which he handled her made her wail all the harder, and she reached for her mother. He let her go reluctantly.

“For heaven’s sake,” Euphemia said, disentangling the child’s arm from her neck to study the skin, “it’s only a little burn. Look, it’s hardly pink.”

In fact, it was impossible to tell any color in that dim light.

Euphemia touched her lips to Jane’s inner arm, and the child stopped crying. “Bedtime,” Euphemia said.

“Yes, children,” Archie said, “if your mother says it doesn’t hurt, then there’s no pain, and if she tells you to go to bed, you must drop off immediately. So go to bed. Go to bed!” he roared.

“Now, Archie,” Mr. Crawley began, his voice like thin milk. He put one hand on his brother-in-law’s arm. “Exercise some self-control.”

Euphemia had shooed the children out. We could hear them running up the stairs of their house. She came to stand beside her brother. He looked puny and weak in his chair beneath her great height and beside her wide skirt.

“You’d best see to the light, Archie,” Euphemia said. Her voice was like iron. I, for one, could not have stood up to it.

“She thinks she can boss me,” he said, keeping his eyes on Oskar. “She’s got me stuck up here, keeps my woman in the rocks, rations my liquor.”

I may have emitted an audible sound of surprise when he mentioned the woman. Archie and Euphemia so thoroughly commanded everyone’s attention that no one noticed.

Archie, pretending that he controlled the scene, raised his glass and drained it ostentatiously. He turned his head to look up at Euphemia. “Always in the right, aren’t you?”

She stood silent, unwavering, holding his gaze, a pillar of rectitude.

At last he looked away, almost sheepish. “Oh, yes, the damned light. You’d think it was the star of Bethlehem.” But obediently, he went out.

CHAPTER 23

E
UPHEMIA BEGAN NOISILY
to clear the dishes. I was afraid she’d snap at me, but I had to ask the question that beat furiously inside me like a fly against a window.

“The woman in the rocks—”

“That he blames me!” She crashed one lighthouse plate down upon another. “It’s . . . ”

She banged a few more plates together, mere words apparently being inadequate to express her feelings. Desperate with curiosity as I was, I was also uncomfortably conscious of possible chipping and was relieved when she ceased her crashing and sat down with a sigh.

“Perhaps a little more cheer,” Oskar said, tipping the bottle over each of our glasses in turn. Euphemia didn’t object.

“Archie’s always depended on Euphemia, you see,” Mr. Crawley began. “That’s why we got him the place here along with us.”

“He’s no good on his own!”

“No, you’re right, my dear,” Mr. Crawley said soothingly. “He gets funny, you know,” he explained. “Desperate-like and mean. Well, you saw him.”

He reached to pat the back of his wife’s hand. She was pressing salt to a purple wine stain beside Archie’s plate and took no notice of his comfort. Finally, seeing that her ministrations were doing no good, she sank back into her chair, like a pillow that had lost its stuffing, and put her hands over her face in an attitude I would not have believed her capable of.

“Archie was so delicate once,” she said, speaking through her fingers at first, “like a sweet baby bird. He could practically fit in my mama’s shoe when he was born; he was that little! Mama’d had quite a few that went wrong between him and me, so when he was born so small and fragile, Mama and I smothered him up with cooing and coddling. Maybe it was our fault that he turned out the way he did.”

“Now, Euphemia,” Mr. Crawley said, “I wouldn’t say you did wrong.”

“We had to build him up, you see, with special foods. Always honey on his oatmeal and sugar in his tea, extra butter for his bread. When my mother cooked a chicken, he got the livers fried in oil. And he loved buttermilk! He would bang his little cup on the table and shout, ‘Mo! Mo!’” She sighed. “We were so pleased when he was greedy.”

“Euphemia was like a mother to him, really,” Mr. Crawley said. He’d lit a pipe and puffed at it with great concentration to get it burning. “Their mother ran off when he was just a little thing, and Euphemia was so much older. She took on the care of him, you see.”

“He didn’t thank me for it, though,” Euphemia said. “ ‘You’re not my mama,’ he would scream, and then he would kick and bite like I aimed to torture him.”

“Gave her a good poke once with a fork. Show ’em, Euphemia.”

She shook her head; nevertheless, she pulled the collar of her dress a little way from her neck and tilted her head so that we could see in the dim candlelight the four pale dots on her skin.

“He had the most terrible cry,” she said. “A wail as if he’d lost everything dear to him in the world and even the birds must bear witness. It drove my father mad.”

I thought of Janie’s cries. Yes, I could well imagine little Archie’s sounds of pain and alarm and outrage. I didn’t understand how a mother could run off. But there was a more pressing question.

“The woman in the rocks,” I broke in.

“What I’m trying to say,” Euphemia went on, “is that I did my best.”

I couldn’t tell whether she was answering or ignoring me.

“A lighthouse keeper can choose his own assistant,” Mr. Crawley said, circling back. “That’s how we got him this place.”

“Henry and I were at Pigeon Point,” Euphemia said, “but then Archie—he’d been working on one of the steamers—pulled a knife on his captain.”

“He only let him see a bit of the blade,” Mr. Crawley said. “He didn’t hurt him.”

Euphemia took a drink of her wine, neatly swallowing what I could well imagine might have been a retort.

“Henry got the judge to turn Archie over to us,” she said, “but we had to agree to take him with us to this post and swear to keep him out of trouble. What trouble could a person get into here?” She made a sound like a laugh, tight and bitter.

“So this was an exile?” I suggested.

“Not for us!” Mr. Crawley said. “It was an honor, an appointment. It was a new station. They needed someone trustworthy and capable to get it going.”

Euphemia nodded proudly. “It was quite a bit different around here then.” She spoke more easily now that the talk had turned from her brother. “The lumber companies had just built a landing a little ways down the coast—had to dig a tunnel to get to it, but that didn’t stop them when there was money to be made. They started bringing in men by the dozen, and they worked their way into the mountains, chopping and sawing and generally stirring up country that hadn’t felt a man’s boot for, oh, more than a century, I’d say, since the padres had come through. You’d be surprised at what we could hear all the way out on this morro. The axes thunking and thunking, the saws rasping. Did you know that trees scream when they fall?”

“It’s the wood tearing apart,” Mr. Crawley explained. “It’s not really screaming.”

Euphemia hardly paused. “After months of that, it got quiet all of a sudden. It was the strangest thing.”

“Somebody found gold,” Mr. Crawley said, nodding. “That’s why. Gold beats trees.”

“He’d been washing up in the creek, that’s the story we heard, this fellow—who knows his name—and he hadn’t sense enough to keep it quiet; he ran yelping high and low that the stuff was there for the taking,” Euphemia said. “We couldn’t hear that, but Henry went down to see why the trees had stopped falling, and that’s what they told him. They’d followed the flecks upstream and discovered nuggets big enough to pay.”

“The men were trying to use their ax heads as shovels. They wanted to know did we have shovels and picks up here!” Mr. Crawley clucked his tongue indignantly at the idea of using Lighthouse Service tools for such a task.

“Archie wanted to try his luck,” Euphemia went on disdainfully. “That didn’t surprise us. It was no use arguing that he had a duty here when it looked like easy riches just over the ridge. He took a hammer and a screwdriver and the kitchen sieve, and he was gone within an hour after Henry got back. Didn’t bother to pack himself a blanket or a knapsack of food, just rode the steam donkey down the mountain and was gone.”

“Did he find gold?” Oskar asked.

“Not an ounce!” Mr. Crawley said.

“He didn’t find gold.” Euphemia paused with dramatic flair. “What he found was a woman.” She said it straightforwardly, but her look was rueful.

“Where did she come from?” I asked. “Was she a gold rusher?” I’d never imagined a woman panning for gold, but why not? “I mean, a prospector?”

“I doubt she cared about the gold,” Euphemia said. “She showed up one morning in his camp, deranged with fever, weak from disease that was no doubt dysentery, among other things, caught from those dirty men using the creek as a toilet.”

“She was lucky it was Archie who found her,” Oskar said. “Who knows what some men might do in those circumstances?”

“Yes,” Euphemia said dryly. “It’s always surprising what some men will do.”

No one said anything for a long time, thinking, I supposed, of the horrors that might have been.

“Archie traded the lighthouse tools for the use of a wagon,” Euphemia said. “And he brought her up here.”

“She was a sight!” Mr. Crawley said. “Hardly a woman at all, really, when she first come. Her hair was like black seaweed matted up, and she didn’t have a stitch of clothes on! Not proper clothes, anyway.”

“She was wearing a skirt made of soft bark—it was quite clever, really,” Euphemia explained, “and a little apronlike shirt sewn from rabbit pelts. They were perfectly good clothes, considering. Of course, I had to dispose of them. If they weren’t full of disease, they were filthy beyond cleaning.”

“Where had she come from?”

Euphemia shrugged. “From somewhere in the mountains. She was obviously an Indian.”

“An Indian!” Oskar’s eyes were wide. “A wild Indian? No one has seen Indians here for decades.”

“Yes, we read that in the Lighthouse Service pamphlet,” I said, ever the earnest schoolgirl.

“That may be true,” Mr. Crawley said. “Before the loggers, who was here to do the seeing? Anyone might have been living there.”

“Obviously, she was,” Euphemia finished.

“Do you think there are others?” Oskar asked eagerly.

“We don’t believe so,” Mr. Crawley said.

“I thought she might have people to go to. But she didn’t,” Euphemia added sadly.

“That’s terrible!” I burst out.

“The last of her tribe,” Oskar breathed.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Oh, her words were impossible!” Euphemia said. “I can’t even repeat them. She sounded lots of them low in her throat, like growling.”

“You mean her language was guttural? Like German?” I asked.

“I don’t know German.” Euphemia dismissed my suggestion with a wave of her hand. “There was some sound like an ‘h’ and something like an ‘n.’”

“So we called her Helen,” Mr. Crawley finished.

“This house, your house, was empty,” Euphemia went on. “So we made up a bed for her here, and we treated her ailments as well as we could.”

“Euphemia did it,” Mr. Crawley said. “She’s the one fixed her up.”

Euphemia brushed off his pride. “There’s no cure for dysentery. You either get better or you don’t, so I don’t credit myself with her recovery except that I gave her fresh water to drink. Obviously, she did get better after a time. One day she came sniffing her way out, real cautious, like an animal creeping out of a den, and there she stood, blinking in that doorway.” She pointed at our door.

“That’s right! I remember she smelled the air. Like a dog,” Mr. Crawley said.

I wanted to say that of course she did. These people had grown so used to the smells of the sea and the beach that they no longer registered them. I was no longer assailed by their sharpness, but to one who’d just arrived, the very air was strange.

“Her tribe had probably used the resources of the coast,” Oskar said. “I suppose she was remembering other journeys here.”

After all, she and I were not the same.

“She did like to sit and look out at the water,” Euphemia said. “Well, I oughtn’t to say she liked it—how could I know what she liked? All I can say is that’s what she did, and she looked very strange doing it. I’d given her my red calico, but she wouldn’t put it on. Just kept wearing my old nightdress. And her head was nearly bald. I’d tried to comb her hair out for her, but she wouldn’t let me, kept pushing my hands away.”

“She burned it,” Mr. Crawley said with satisfaction. “Burned it all off. Now, that was a stink. And her ears stuck straight out!”

“It wasn’t a bad idea, though,” Mrs. Crawley said. “Who knows what disease was caught in all that hair? I appreciated her getting rid of it.”

“Probably some sort of ritual,” Oskar said. “I’ve read that some western tribes burn off their hair as a sign of mourning.”

The excitement in his voice caught my attention, and I looked at him. His face was animated; he was beginning to resemble the old Oskar.

Euphemia nodded. “Maybe so.”

“Remember how she liked the water, Phemia?” Mr. Crawley said. “Remember how we’d look down and see her rolling around in the waves, just like an otter?”

I thought of the dark head that had scared the seals off their rock.

“She was a great deal of trouble,” Euphemia said, but her tone was fond, as if she were speaking of an exasperating child. “She was afraid of the light and especially of the foghorn. She wouldn’t touch any of the canned food, only the pilot bread and the cornmeal.”

“She caught fish, though,” Mr. Crawley said. “And brought up abalones as big as this plate. Bigger. And she was good with the children. She’s the one started them picking up all that junk, shells and whatnot.”

We didn’t seem to be getting at the heart of the matter.

“Why isn’t she here now?” I asked. “Why does she live—”

“Like an Indian?” Oskar broke in. “I imagine this life was uncomfortable to her. Indians can commune with nature, you know, in a way that we’ve lost. I would think she would have longed to return to her traditional way of life. Isn’t that right?”

Henry, absorbed in his pipe, made no effort to reply. Euphemia, too, said nothing for some time. She kept her eyes on a stretch of tablecloth in front of one of the children’s empty places. I assumed she was considering Oskar’s suggestion.

“She just didn’t take,” she offered grudgingly. “She is, after all, a wild Indian, like Oskar said. One morning she was gone.” She sighed. “It’s true that she prefers her ways, and I believe it’s best to leave her to herself. That’s what she wishes. We can’t force her to live here.”

I thought of that first day on the beach with the children, when Euphemia had appeared, striding out of what I’d understood to be nowhere. “You visit her!”

Euphemia frowned. “I leave her a few things from time to time, yes.”

The children visit her, too, I thought, but I kept quiet about this.

“We were docked for that blanket,” Mr. Crawley grumbled.

Euphemia shrugged.

“Did Archie love her?” I asked recklessly. The idea of him rescuing her struck me as very romantic.

“If he did, it was a twisted sort of love,” Euphemia said. She rose from the table, reverting to the stony and practical Mrs. Crawley who’d met us when we first arrived. “I did my best, but he ruined everything.” She hoisted the large stack of plates she’d accumulated and went into the kitchen.

I stood to collect the glasses. Euphemia was already scraping slops into a bucket for the chickens when I stepped into the kitchen. The slump of her shoulders told me that it was she who had loved the Indian.