The Edge of the Earth (17 page)

CHAPTER 24

A
S SOON AS
we’d closed the door behind the Crawleys, Oskar turned to me. “You have to show me that cave.”

“I told you she was interesting.” I couldn’t keep some irritation from my voice; he’d hardly paid attention when I first told him about her.

“You didn’t say she was an Indian. A wild Indian. An Indian unsullied by contact with whites.”

“She had contact!” I protested. “She was living here!” Exactly here, I thought, looking around the room with new understanding.

He waved one hand vaguely in the air, as if this fact were a fly he could brush away. “Before that.”

“Before that, we have no idea how she lived.” I began to gather the flotsam we’d scattered over the floor, separating the remains of the shipwrecks from the stuff of the sea.

“Exactly! Exactly! We have no idea. Don’t you want to know? She may show us things about her people that no white man has ever seen. Can you find that cave again, do you think?”

I, too, wanted to go back to the cave, though the idea of bringing Oskar with me made me nervous. While his renewed energy pleased me, I knew that it was a beam to be focused with care, and the Indian woman seemed a fragile subject.

“I think I can find it,” I said. “We’ll have to wait for drier weather.”

“Why? What’s a little wet? Are you afraid you’ll melt?” he teased.

“Oskar, please be careful!” He’d begun to help me tidy the room, but his hands on the delicate objects were far too eager and rough. Gently, I took from him a dried crab with all eight of its legs attached. “I just don’t believe it’s safe, that’s all. Anyway, she’s been there for years. I’m sure she’ll be there when the rain stops.”

Would she? It was difficult to see how she survived. I realized that until tonight I’d considered her almost a natural curiosity, more akin to the mussels and sea stars and octopi than a real human being who would feel the cold and grow hungry. Had she huddled in her cave for all these soaking days, much as we’d huddled in our houses? The logs I’d seen, tangled and bleached among the rocks, must have come sweeping down from the mountains like battering rams in churning rivers of rainwater, and I pictured them piling up at the entrance to the cave, trapping her. I could envision the water washing inside, the sealskin floor wet through, the acorns floating away, the pyramid of cans tumbled down, and a body, with the small black head that I’d glimpsed in the ocean, lying among abalone shells and fish bones in one corner, nearly dead, as the baby otter had been.

I started when Oskar touched my shoulder. He let his hand slip down my arm until his fingers interlaced with mine. “We have a little time,” he said, “before my shift.”

In our bed—had this been her bed, too?—I could tell it was not contemplation of me that had brought this on but the thought of the Indian woman.

CHAPTER 25

O
SKAR DIDN'T COME
home for breakfast after his shift the next morning. I took little notice, though his habits had been extremely regular since he’d given up electricity. Often repairs or maintenance required two keepers, and he would stay on at the tower. When he didn’t appear at lunch, I wondered, but I wasn’t alarmed, nor was I eager to go searching for him among the rain-lashed outbuildings. Our meal was cold duck. His portion could wait.

At three or four in the afternoon, the waning of what light had shimmied through the heavy clouds made me restless at last to know his whereabouts. Annoyed, I put on my Lighthouse Service oilskin and plunged into the rain. I splashed to the workshop and then to the barn, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, looked into the storeroom, and knocked on the Crawleys’ and Archie Johnston’s doors. I walked around the residence, checked to see whether the steam donkey had gone down the mountain, searched the upstairs of our house—in case he’d come back while I was out—and went back to the lighthouse. No one had seen him since the Crawleys had left us the night before. Anxiety began to press at me. It occurred to me that he might have tried to find the cave, and I was as uncomfortable with the idea of his drinking in its wonders without my supervision as I was with the worry that he’d gotten lost among the rocks.

Archie heard him finally from the catwalk, his call a thin bleat that the wind by some freakish turn happened to carry up from the beach. That morning, before his shift had officially ended, Oskar had started down the children’s way, lost his footing on the rain-slick rocks and mud halfway down, and tumbled the rest of the way. He’d been lying in the rain for hours, water streaming down the morro around and over him, one leg twisted away from his body at an impossible angle.

“This is a merry Christmas,” Euphemia said.

He gasped when I touched him.

“I’m no doctor,” Euphemia said, “but I can assure you this will hurt.” She turned to her brother. “Find me a bit of wood. About this big.” She held up one hand, showing the spread between her index finger and thumb.

The storms had thrown up a good deal of driftwood; Archie didn’t have to scrounge for long before he returned with a piece. “What’s it for?” He handed it to Euphemia. “You can’t make a splint out of that.”

“To keep him from biting his tongue in two.”

She pushed the stick into Oskar’s mouth, which stopped his teeth from chattering, although it seemed to make the rest of his body shake more violently, despite the sodden blankets I’d tried to wrap him in. I squeezed his hand, which meant I couldn’t press my palms to my ears to dull his screams.

I was frightened when he fell into a faint as Euphemia struggled to straighten his leg, but she said it was a mercy. She tied the leg to a pole with rags, and Oskar came to consciousness as Mr. Crawley and Archie, using a ladder to stand in for a stretcher, carried him around the bottom of the mountain to the steam donkey.

When we’d gotten him into our bed, Euphemia gave me from her stores a large bottle of laudanum with which to dose him.

“Keep it up regular,” she warned. “Don’t let the pain sneak up on him, or you’ll have a dickens of a time rooting it out.” She turned to Oskar indignantly. “Where did you think you were going?”

“To the beach,” he said between gritted teeth.

“You’ve caused a lot of trouble. And it’s only just begun. You’ll be in this bed for over a month, at least. Was it the electricity you were after?”

He shut his eyes so that she might believe he’d fainted again.

∗ ∗ ∗

Later, when I was certain he was safe, I took my turn. “For heaven’s sake! Why couldn’t you for once in your life wait?”

“I must see her!”

“‘I must! I must!’” I mocked. “You help yourself to whatever you please and never mind what I say or feel. I told you not to go!”

He bit his lip and turned away. He was badly hurt and helpless, and I felt ashamed of my anger. Nevertheless, although I had no clear idea of his intentions and neither, I believed, did he, I wasn’t sorry that he’d have no chance of finding the Indian for a very long time.

∗ ∗ ∗

For the next few weeks, my days were made of running: up the stairs with food and drink and down again with the chamber pot and soiled dishes. Every few hours, the laudanum had to be spooned and the pillows pounded, pencil shavings brushed from the bed, fallen books retrieved from the floor. In between, I kept up the children’s lessons as well as I could, setting them tasks that I could oversee in spurts between the kitchen and the bedroom and the outhouse. We would start a chapter of history or some long division or a bit of Latin vocabulary, and inevitably, his voice would come through the door. Could he have more water? He’d finished his book. His back was uncomfortable; what could be done about it? He had some questions for Archie; would I find him?

Archie? I would have felt shy around Archie Johnston after the anger he’d revealed on Christmas Eve and the story that had come of it, but the confusion and worry and bustle over Oskar’s accident had wiped that slate clean. He came, his gaze straying everywhere as he passed through the parlor and climbed the stairs. He shut the bedroom door behind him, but his voice and Oskar’s rumbled loudly enough to cause me to close the schoolroom door as well, so we could concentrate on the task of adding three-digit numbers. After that, Archie began to show up regularly around ten o’clock, his boots clumping up the narrow wooden steps.

I complained to Oskar as I rubbed his back with liniment to keep bedsores from forming. “I don’t like it that he just lets himself in.”

“That way he doesn’t interrupt your lessons. Don’t you have enough trips up and down as it is?”

“What do you talk about so long?” What difference did it make? I scolded myself. I ought to be relieved that someone else was seeing to Oskar for an hour or two.

“The Indian. I’m writing down everything he can remember. The circumstances under which he found her. Her clothing and habits. Her words and gestures.” He touched the logbook beside him on the bed. “I’m not sure what’ll turn out to be anthropologically significant, so I want to be thorough.”

“Anthropologically significant?” I riffled through the pages with my thumb. To me, they were impenetrable, densely covered with his frenzied shorthand.

“You remember what Philip was saying? About California Indians being nearly extinct and the importance of gathering information about their culture and language, their whole way of life?”

“You think the people at the university would be interested in her?”

“Of course they would! I’m going to be the one to study her, though. She’s my find.”

“She’s not a find, exactly, is she? I mean, she’s a woman they all knew here. She’s not, you know, a phenomenon of nature, like electromagnetism. You’re not planning to do experiments on her, are you?”

He laughed. “I’m only learning what I can about her. I do think she must be approached scientifically. The way Franz Boas studied the Eskimos. She’s a fantastic opportunity for science.”

“And for you, I suppose.”

“Well.” He shrugged. “I’m not afraid to have greatness thrust upon me. Come, you can’t say you aren’t curious, too.”

I could not, so I said nothing.

He yawned. “I’m awfully tired. It’s more work than you’d imagine, trying to keep Archie focused on useful information. He keeps wanting to talk about how Euphemia made her go.”

“Made her go? Why would she do that?”

He’d already closed his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe to spite her brother. That’s what he seems to think. Anyway, I’m grateful to her. If that Indian had been living here all this time, she’d be pretty much spoiled.”

∗ ∗ ∗

I grabbed my own sleep here and there, because I had to cover Oskar’s shift at the light, as well as care for him during the day. On stormy nights, Euphemia joined me, claiming that she wanted to be sure I didn’t blow away. That did seem a real possibility. When we walked to the light, we had to bend nearly double against the wind that threatened to turn our skirts to sails, and pull ourselves forward hand over hand on the rail to cross the little bridge. Twice a shift, wearing the black spectacles, we edged our way around the outside of the glass cage that housed the light, one hand clutching a brass handhold, the other wiping salt streaks from the panes as strenuously as the tearing wind allowed. To release the handhold while on that narrow catwalk, with only the thin ribbon of an iron rail to interrupt a fall, would be flirting with suicide, but I was more invigorated than afraid. My hands were strong; I wouldn’t let go. Most frightening was the walk home in the morning, when the wind pushed us along, shoving violently at our backs, as if it meant to sweep us right off the rock into the lashing water and black rocks below.

Euphemia was ecstatic. “This is why we’re needed,” she said more than once, gazing up at the light that seemed as much a beacon to us as to those at sea. “This is when the light does its real work.”

I was grateful for her company not only when we were struggling through the wind and rain but also at the other extreme, when I was trying to stay awake in the warm boiler room.

“What was she like?” I asked tentatively one night, when we were seated with mending in our laps from the basket we kept handy to fill these odd hours. I’d come close to this question several times but backed away, afraid of Euphemia’s annoyance. Clearly, the woman in the rocks was an uncomfortable topic.

“Who?”

“The Indian woman. Helen.” Our conversation proceeded in fits and starts between blasts of the foghorn.

Euphemia’s needle moved quickly, forming serviceable but sloppy stitches. Neither my mother nor my domestic sciences teacher would have approved. “She wasn’t much use,” she said, repeating the assessment she’d given at Christmas.

“Did you like her company?” I insisted. “Was she a friend to you?”

She stopped sewing and tugged firmly on the patch, making certain it was secure. “Not a friend, exactly, no,” she said slowly. The newly mended garment, a threadbare pinafore, covered her lap. It had a pink flower on the bib, obviously appliquéd in her own loose style, and she began to pick those stitches out. “Pink is Mary’s color,” she explained. “Janie likes blue.”

She was quiet through two blasts of the horn, and I feared I would have to prompt her, but she went on, holding her work close to her face in the dim light. “She was afraid at first, of Archie and Henry especially. Who knows what had happened to her on that mountain, among all those screaming trees? No wonder she was afraid! Even from a distance, she would look at the men only out of the corner of her eye, and when they were close, she would look away and freeze, like a fawn hoping not to be noticed, waiting for them to pass.

“Archie had an idea, I think, that he was like some prince in a fairy tale. Because he’d found her, I suppose. He picked wildflowers for her once—you’d be surprised how many blooms come out of this rock in the spring. When she wouldn’t take them from his hands, he laid them in her lap.” She squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a moment, perhaps to refresh them for her sewing, although it seemed to me that she was trying to pinch off the painful scene she was remembering. “She kept her face turned away from him, willing herself elsewhere, it looked like. I should have called him away. But I hoped . . . well . . .” She stopped speaking and then started fresh. “When he’d gone, she stood and let the flowers fall from her lap. They shriveled in an hour. Blew away. Wildflowers aren’t meant to be picked,” she added with a touch of her old imperiousness.

“She was happiest with the children,” she continued, speaking more lightly as she squinted to thread her needle with blue. “They were so much littler then, of course! Just babies. She was always rocking Nicholas, singing her peculiar songs. Such a harsh sound to my ears. I was a little alarmed when I saw her brown fingers on his soft skin. I wanted to take him away from her. But she was gentle with him, and he seemed to welcome her touch, so I let them alone. I considered that we must frighten her, our language and ways being as strange to her as hers were to us, and the baby, being much like any other baby, must have been a comfort. She played with Mary and little Edward, too, some game having to do with throwing stones and feathers into the air and another with pebbles. She would laugh as if she enjoyed it as much as they did. Or she would spin Mary—you know how you do, with your hands locked around each other’s wrists. The children don’t remember any of it.

“They brought her things—bits of ribbon, colored rocks, cans with pictures that they liked. What else did they have to give? She didn’t much like the food, but she stacked the cans on the table like a centerpiece. As Henry said, she brought the children things from the beach, little shells and suchlike. Well, you know their mess.”

Yes, I knew it. While Euphemia had been speaking, I’d been darning, repairing a hole in one of Oskar’s socks. I stroked the newly woven patch with my thumb, thinking that their mess was my mess now, and Helen had begun it. The idea made me feel close to her.

“No.” Euphemia shook her head as if she’d been reading my mind. “She wasn’t like you. When she was well and no longer haggard, I realized that she was very young, more of a girl than a woman. You are a friend to me, but she was more like a daughter, needing to be taught, oh, everything! How to set a table and how to brush her teeth. Even how to sit in a chair!”

“How could you make her go, then?” I didn’t mean to say it aloud and accusingly, but the notion that Euphemia could push away someone she regarded as nearly a daughter shocked me.

“Make her go?” she repeated with disgust. She stabbed at the pinafore with such force that I feared she would draw blood. “That’s what he says, does he? I’ll tell you something!” She threw down the mending and stared at me fiercely. “I wish I had made her go! I wish I’d pushed her right back down the morro the day he brought her up here. It would have been unthinkably cruel, but it would have been far better than what I did do. What I let him do.” She’d risen and began to pace the room, obviously tormented.