The Edge of the Earth (19 page)

CHAPTER 28

B
ETWEEN THE TIME
I’d spent among the rocks and the hours I’d devoted to examining the pendant with Oskar, I’d lost all opportunity for sleep. When I reported to the lighthouse for my shift, I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours. I finished my first round of chores—refilling the oil reservoirs, clipping the wicks, changing the mantles, and setting the chain at the top of the tower—and then pulled the table underneath the spot where the chain of the foghorn came inching down, climbed onto it, and folded a rag under my head. I counted on the chain’s cold, heavy touch to awaken me, knowing that then I would have the time it would take for the chain to travel the distance from the tabletop to the floor in which to run up the stairs and pull it to the top so as to keep the horn sounding its proper rhythm. The table was a hard bed, but I was asleep the moment I closed my eyes. In what seemed like minutes later, I was awakened not by the chain but by a hand on my arm.

“Dangerous,” Archie Johnston said, “sleeping by a burning lantern.” His breath was sharp with liquor, and he smelled unwashed. “I saw you today on the beach. Far down the beach. What were you doing there?”

“Drawing. I’m making a catalog of—”

He shook his head violently. “Not that. I don’t care about that.” He clutched my arm again. “What you had around your neck. It’s hers, isn’t it? Did she give it to you?”

“Yes. Well, I don’t know for certain,” I said, pulling my arm away and pushing myself into a sitting position on the table. “I found it.”

“So you haven’t seen her?”

I shook my head.

“It’s for scaring snakes,” he said. “She showed Euphemia once. The women wear them when they’re harvesting. The shell flashes in the sun—zing, zing!” He made a quick motion with his hands near my eyes, and I drew back, startled. “That keeps the snakes away.” He pushed his face as close to mine as he could. “Do you need protection from snakes?”

“She was mine, you know!” he said suddenly, pulling back and beginning to pace, propelled by anger. “‘Stay away from her,’ my sister says to me, as if she’s my keeper. But when she wanted something, she took it. She makes out like she’s so superior, but she’s no better than anyone else, my sister.”

He stopped speaking and looked into the distance, or perhaps toward the house where Euphemia presumably lay asleep, there being no reason on this calm night that I should need her help. Then he leaned toward me, his breath heavy on my face. I could see the black dots where his beard grew.

“Listen,” he hissed, “whatever you do with her, you and Swann, I get a share. She’s mine, after all. I found her.”

“What are you talking about? We’re not doing anything with her!”

The first link of the foghorn’s iron chain fell against my shoulder. “The horn!” I exclaimed, alarmed.

To my relief, he made no attempt to stop me as I slipped off the far side of the table and rushed upstairs. I stayed there a good while, calming myself by deliberately performing the tasks the light required. When I could find no more to do, I crept as quietly as I could halfway down and bent low to peek into the boiler room. Archie had gone.

∗ ∗ ∗

Oskar was sitting on the side of the bed when I came in the next morning, doing what he called his “strengthening exercises.” He’d put a can of green corn into our valise, hooked the handles over the ankle of his bad leg, and was lifting it, sweating with the effort. He counted quietly as I told him what Archie had said.

“And he was drunk! It was disgusting!” Archie’s smell lingered in my nostrils. I inhaled it with every breath.

“I wouldn’t take him too seriously . . . two, three, four . . . He’s obviously angry . . . two, three . . . frustrated . . . four . . . under the Dragon’s thumb.”

“I would have thought you’d be more concerned for my safety!” Weeks ago, I’d told him the gist of Euphemia’s story, and he’d been suitably appalled.

“If you’d screamed, I would have come,” he promised. “Broken leg or no. Obviously, he didn’t do anything terrible enough to make you scream.”

I shook my head, though it was true that Archie hadn’t hurt me, and I was far too tired to argue. I pulled the covers back and began to climb into the bed without bothering to change into my nightdress or let down my hair.

“What are you doing?”

“I told Euphemia there’d be no lessons today. I haven’t slept in so long!”

“No, no.” His hand was on my arm, as Archie’s had been. “You have to go back to where you found this.” He fingered the pendant hanging from the bedpost.

Later, I would tell him Archie’s story about its purpose, I thought, closing my eyes. Oskar had been right that it was more than a necklace.

“Trudy, I’m serious. If I could go, I would. I’d be there already.”

I was nearly asleep.

He shook me. “What if she left something else? She’ll be expecting you.”

He kept at it until his conviction that she might be waiting for me or have left some other object fully entered my mind and began to nag at me. I sat up and pushed my bare feet into my shoes.

“All right,” I said, stumbling around the room. “I should bring her something. A gift in exchange for the pendant. What do you think she’d like?” I thought of some of the loose items on the table in the parlor. A steel crochet hook? A thimble? A pen? What did I have that she might desire? I pulled a clean lace-trimmed handkerchief from my pocket. It was pretty, and she would have none like it.

Oskar snatched it from my hand. “No! Trudy! You mustn’t corrupt her! If she uses our things, how will she be different from us?”

∗ ∗ ∗

It was remarkable that I didn’t fall down the mountain, as Oskar had done, so unsteady was I on my feet. At the bottom, I kicked off my shoes and splashed into the freezing water, which, together with the stiff wind, braced me for a time. Soon I was barely plodding, nearly unconscious, hypnotized by the regular wash of the surf, too tired to turn back. More than once, I nearly lay down on the sand.

At last I reached my tide pool and saw that the stone where the pendant had been was bare. I circled the pool gamely, grabbing up a crooked stick of driftwood and a shattered shell. The first had obviously been tossed up by the sea or washed down by the rains; the second, dropped by a passing gull. There was nothing human in them. Disheartened, I lay on the sun-soaked rock to rest awhile before plodding back.

CHAPTER 29

I
WAS AWAKEN THIS
time by the slight sting of pebbles, like hail, striking my hand, my foot, my cheek. Abruptly, I sat up.

She was standing beside a large rock, and she was wearing a corset, my corset (although she hadn’t tied the laces), over a dress of gray and green rags. She held a slingshot before her face, cocked in my direction.

A pebble hit my neck.

“Ow!” I covered my throat with my hand.

I was afraid. Having heard her story—at least as much of it as Euphemia and the children could tell—and having seen her home, with its strange but obvious domesticity, and having received her gift, I’d had no thought that she might harm me. But I realized now that I was entirely at her mercy.

She lowered the slingshot. She was smiling, her face, with its sharp nose and cheekbones, an echo of the jagged copper-brown mountains to the east. She bent to lift something off the ground, then held whatever it was behind her back as she began to move slowly toward me. I sat motionless, almost without breathing, as though she weren’t a woman but a wild animal approaching. It occurred to me that the object she was hiding might be the spear the children had told me about.

When she’d come within a few feet, I perceived that the gray-green rags were seaweed, dried and somehow woven or knitted together. Around her neck was a whole loop of abalone shells, or pieces of shells, at any rate, like the string Mrs. Crawley had taken from Jane on our first night at the lighthouse. Around her waist on a cord was a kitchen knife precisely like the one in the drawer beside my sink.

I was startled to discover that it was I who wished to reach out my fingers. I wanted to feel the blackness that was her hair, hanging in long shanks over her shoulders, so that it looked like a hooded cape. I wanted to feel the lacy tangle that was her dress. I refrained, of course.

She brought her hand forward, revealing her surprise: my shoes. She held them out to me, and I took them. The leather was stiff, twisted, and rimed with salt from its tumble in the sea.

She moved her lips, and a voice emerged, rough and oddly inflected. Her expectant look, more than the syllables themselves, made me realize in a second or two that she’d said, “How do?”

“Very well,” I answered at last, aware that this mundane dialogue was strange, almost ludicrous, in this context. But how else should we proceed? “And how do you do?”

“Good.”

Or at least that’s what I assumed she said.

She sat down beside me, the woven weed dress bending to accommodate her movements. I was struck by what was obviously an offer of friendship and wished to offer something in return. Thanks to Oskar, I’d brought nothing.

I held out the boots that lay heavy in my lap. “Would you like to keep these?”

She took one from me and frowned with concentration as she set herself what must have been the unfamiliar task of opening the top and pulling forward the tongue. She bent to push her toes into it, as far as they would go, which was hardly any distance at all. The skin on her feet was rough, thick, and grayed, like the bark of a tree. The feet themselves were remarkably wide at the toes, nearly as wide as they were long, and so resembled . . . well . . . flippers. She waggled the shoe on the end of those toes and laughed, a rusty but mirthful sound that caused me to laugh, too, and then she took off the shoe and handed it back to me with a little toss of her raven head. My gift was useless to her.

She reached one hand toward me, her expression serious. Her face was weathered and her teeth yellow and worn to stubs. Her fingernails were sharp and ragged. A few nails were long, those on the littlest fingers especially, like the nails of the opium eaters I’d seen in Chinatown. Like claws. They scratched my neck. I began to lift my own hand, ready to push hers away with all the strength I could muster.

Gently, she lifted the coral necklace a few inches off my throat and bent, squinting, toward it. I saw grains of sand in the part of her hair. She smelled of smoke and grease and the green odor of the sea.

I believed she wanted the necklace, but I had so little left of the old life that I couldn’t give it up. I stayed still and waited, allowing her to examine it with her eyes and fingers, until she sat back on her heels.

She folded her forearms together under her breasts and moved them gently from side to side, as if rocking a baby. Was she rocking a baby? Was this a universal sign?

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I don’t have a baby.”

She held her hand palm down at about her waist and then moved it up, marking three more imaginary spots. Then she raked her fingers through the air toward her, like Jane imitating an eagle.

The children. She wanted me to bring the children. A burst of alarm traveled from my crown to my toes.

I scrambled to my feet, and she jumped at my quick movement, a wild animal again. Now that I was standing, I could see the water had already come up very far; I’d stayed too long. I pointed at the ocean. “I have to go.”

“Go,” she repeated. Or perhaps commanded. It was impossible to say which.

She disappeared more quickly than I, somehow absorbed by the landscape. I was reduced to sliding and scrabbling as before, my misshapen shoes clutched awkwardly to my chest. I’d grown more agile with practice. My toes understood how to grip the stone, and I knew which routes would be free of treacherous slime and dead ends. Still, by the time I reached the final stretch through the water that would take me back to the safety of the beach, the waves were swelling as high as my chest. I assumed I would have to abandon my ruined shoes again, so I could use my hands to keep my balance or perhaps to swim. In the end, I held them easily over my head as I pushed through the water. My elation at having at last encountered the woman in the rocks seemed to be all I needed to carry me through.

As I strode toward our mountain far in the distance, I congratulated myself on drawing the elusive mermaid from her hiding place. I had discovered the ultimate treasure of this natural world, a human being who was as comfortable living among the stones as a crab. Still more exciting, I had enticed for myself a friend, someone who was in at least one essential way like me; she’d been separated from her people and was having to make her life as best she could at the edge of the earth. It was not until I had walked the whole of the beach and begun to climb the morro that I was struck by another thought: had I lured her or she me?

∗ ∗ ∗

Oskar took copious notes on all that I reported about the woman’s appearance and gestures. He’d not been happy when I’d produced my shoes.

“It’s no good her giving you your own things back. What can we learn from that?”

“She knows who I am. She’s been watching me. That must be important.”

“That’s just personal,” he said. “Don’t you realize how much bigger she is than that? This woman is the remnant of a lost culture. You saw how it was from the train; people like us have spread all over this country like dandelions, choking out those who’ve lived here for tens of centuries. She may be all that’s left. The only evidence of a former, more primitive phase of humanity that can never be experienced again.”

He asked me to sketch her from memory. After his reaction to the shoes, I decided to omit the corset.

“I think she wants me to bring the children to her.” I said this tentatively, keeping my eyes on my sketch. I hoped his reaction might help me decide how to respond to this notion.

“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. We don’t want them influencing her, teaching her to behave like little Crawleys. On the other hand, it might be enlightening to see what she does with them.”

“What she does with them!” This sounded alarmingly like Archie.

He shook his head, impatient with my fright. “I’m not suggesting she’s going to cook and eat them. I mean observing her with them will help us discover aspects of her. Is she childlike—does she want to play with them? Or does she mean to teach them some skill? Does she plan to give something to them, some token of herself, or is there something they have that she wants? Those are just some possibilities.”

I thought of the way her fingers had worked through the air in the gesture of beckoning. Although I knew she possessed no real powers, there was something of the sorceress in her wild costume and her cape of hair, in her very existence. I imagined that somehow the children could feel the tug of her. I certainly could.