The Edge of the Earth (2 page)

That last pronoun rankled, appearing as it did without an antecedent. But once I’d read, I believed I understood. I know what happened here. Or at least some version of it. As I say, she was a storyteller.

CHAPTER 1

W
E'D TRAVELED
days to reach California, and it takes only hours to steam from San Francisco to Point Lucia, but from the moment we heaved over the first of a thousand waves, I knew that this stretch would take me farthest from the home I’d so precipitously left behind. At first we pushed through a cold fog, guided only by the uneven clang of buoy bells. Standing on deck, I couldn’t make out even the surface of the water. But in an hour or so, the sun began to filter through, revealing a picturesque coast of soft hills and low bluffs.

Dolphins (not fish, my husband said, but mammals just like us) arched in and out of the water beside us, shifting direction miraculously as one, as if attached by strings. Oskar seemed to be racing along with them, one minute sitting beside me and holding my hand, the next, hurrying to the rail, then off to have a word with the captain, then back to me to point out some feature of the landscape or to inform me of some remarkable attribute of the vessel or to hold before me an enormous, toothy fish one of the sailors had caught off the stern, its eye still alert and admonishing. At last I had to beg him to be less solicitous and allow me to weather the wretched waves in peace.

Along one stretch, I spotted a lighthouse and a pretty white cottage glowing together on a lush green lawn. I was able to hope for a minute that it might be ours.

“No, that’d be Pinos,” a sailor said.

A woman kept that lighthouse, he told me, assisted by her Chinese manservant. The woman was from China, too, although she was white. The sailor claimed she kept racehorses, grew roses, spoke Italian, and played sonatas on the pianoforte.

“She doesn’t sing opera?” I was thoroughly seasick by this time, and so, although I meant to be amusing, I must not have hit the proper tone, for the sailor only frowned, considering whether the white Chinese lady might lay claim to this refinement as well.

Some distance on, the landscape changed, the soft hills shouldered aside by steep and ragged mountains that didn’t so much approach the sea as bang against it. Pieces of these mountains had broken off, littering the water with jagged black rocks and leaving wounds hundreds of feet high and gaping, impossible to heal.

“There’s Lucia,” the sailor said casually, politely ignoring the fact that I was bent over the rail.

I lifted my eyes for my first look at the lighthouse to which we’d been assigned, my new home. It stood three quarters of the way up the side of a small mountain—a morro, the sailor called it—a rough brown breast attached to the land by only a spit of sand. Point Lucia had no lawn, no white cottage, and no roses. Above the light, at the very top, stood a gray gabled hulk, built of the sort of blocks used for barracks and asylums and prisons. Around the main structure, a jumble of outbuildings was scattered. No trees grew on this mountain, and the stooped and stunted few that stood along the coast to either side reached inland with their branches, as though they would flee in that direction if they could.

I was loaded, along with our trunk and a number of wooden barrels and metal drums and the toothy fish, into a longboat and rushed through the surf until the ocean finally spat us onto the beach, where the sailors emptied the boat with remarkable speed. Some barrels—I could tell they were empty by the ease with which the sailors swung them—and a mail pouch, full, were waiting. Once the sailors had packed the boat with these, they pushed off into the surf again, leaving Oskar and me alone.

Oskar, who’d jumped into the waves to help steady us on the way in, was dripping.

“We look shipwrecked,” I said.

“Not you.”

It was true that no water had touched me. I felt wrecked nonetheless, standing there with my boots sinking into the sand. If appropriate dress exists for being stranded on a wild beach, my lavender gloves and dove-gray veil didn’t approximate it. While Oskar tramped toward the morro, shouting hellos with his hands cupped around his mouth, I stood by helplessly, clutching our valise and breathing in the stink. Thick snakelike coils lay scattered over the beach, as if an army of Medusas had been slaughtered there. Swarms of black flies, the rotting smell made visible, buzzed around the tangled piles.

Suddenly, a boy flew out from behind the mountain, his bare feet throwing off sand as he ran. I saw him shake Oskar’s hand vigorously and gesture in the direction from which he’d come.

When they came to me, the boy adjusted his cap by way of greeting. “I’m Edward,” he said. “We didn’t think the Service could get a lady to come.” He grinned in such a winning way that I couldn’t help but smile back.

He shouldered the fish and suggested that Oskar do the same with our trunk, explaining that the rest would be collected later. Then he led the way—a very long way, as it turned out—over the beach and around the back of the morro to a small open platform on wheels at the bottom of an impossibly steep track. We were to balance on this bit of wood as it climbed with painful, squeaking agony straight up the side of the rock.

I hadn’t expected children at all, but three more stood solemnly at the top, a girl of about ten with smudged eyeglasses and tight, unflattering braids, who seemed to curl in on herself; another boy who was a slighter, younger version of the first; and a small girl whose ragged hair obscured her face. Their skin was dyed brown from the sun, and each successive child seemed to have soaked in more pigment, so that the eldest, the girl in braids, was the color of weak tea, and the youngest was dark as an acorn. A man with the beginnings of a stoop emerged from an outbuilding, wiping his hands on a cloth. And then, as we mounted the last creaking yards, a woman rushed up the path. She was tall, with long legs and neck, like a heron or stork. Her hair was brushed with white and pinned up in a messy nest, and she was wearing men’s boots.

She smoothed her large, chapped hands over her soiled apron self-consciously, as Oskar handed me off the platform, and she rocked slightly while she stood, as if she couldn’t bring herself to stay entirely still. “Good to meet you,” she said with a sharp dip of her head. “Hope you can stick it.”

The man with the dirty cloth shook our hands, nodding in a friendly way, as if we’d turned out to be just what he’d ordered. “Henry Crawley,” he said, “chief keeper.” He was a head shorter than his wife and seemed to have been bleached by the sun and wind; he was so fair as to be nearly colorless. His pale eyes watered in the bright light.

Over Mr. Crawley’s shoulder, I saw the tender that had delivered us steaming unhesitatingly across the vast, restless plain of the ocean toward the northern horizon, and I felt an internal sinking so cold and overwhelming that I nearly cried out my dismay. But I held my chin high and didn’t reach for Oskar’s hand, for I was a grown girl who knew how to behave.

Another man was coming up the path. He was in no hurry to meet us but walked in a desultory way, his gait sinuous, his eyes turned mostly toward the ocean and the disappearing tender, as mine had been. The dark brown hair that showed below his bowler appeared to have been cut with a bowie knife.

“My brother, Archie Johnston,” Mrs. Crawley said, and she sighed, as if she wished he weren’t.

We greeted him, but he looked us up and down rudely before he responded. “I hear you’ve come from Wisconsin,” he said at last.

“Oh, yes.” I answered too eagerly, more than willing to overlook his poor manners for the comfort of some connection to my home. “Do you know it?”

“I know it’s a long way to come just to be second assistant at a lighthouse.”

Oskar laughed. “Do you suspect ulterior motives?”

Mr. Johnston stared at him. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Come now, Archie,” Mr. Crawley said. “Don’t make these good young people defend themselves. Most would jump at the chance for this post. Let’s show Mr. Swann the light, get him acquainted with his work.”

Archie Johnston was right to be suspicious, although the crimes for which we’d had to leave Milwaukee—shattering the fondest hopes of family and friends—were not the sort the law takes any notice of.

CHAPTER 2

M
Y PARENTS HAD
laid out a lovely future for me in Milwaukee with tender care, as if they were smoothing the white coverlet over my rosewood bed. When I was graduated from the Milwaukee College for Females, I was to marry Ernst Dettweiler. Our wedding had been planned, mostly as a joke, while our mothers aired us as infants in Juneau Park. But why not? Ernst was a sweet, straightforward boy who met life’s pleasures head-on and made clear that he believed I was among them. He was as dear to me as sunshine. As my mother said fondly, “You know what you’re getting with Ernst.”

We were to live on one of the newer streets west of downtown. Although a wedding date had not been set—indeed, Ernst had not yet formally proposed—my father and Uncle Dettweiler had looked at two or three possible houses, and my mother had selected the peonies she intended to transplant to my yard and the furnishings from her own house that would be mine. Of course, we young people were expected to have ideas of our own. Within certain boundaries, our parents were willing, even eager, to indulge us.

Despite all of this—or perhaps because of it?—I’d been vaguely but persistently discontent, as if a bit of straw had lodged itself in some unreachable spot under my clothing. Back in early September, that glowing time that promises such riches for the academic months ahead, our college president had given a speech in Menomonee Hall, exhorting us girls to be of service in the world. She’d drawn a loose but definite connection between a graceful translation of Ovid and a young woman’s ability to contribute to the uplifting of mankind. But the more I’d thought about it, the less convinced I was of that connection, or at least of my ability to make it in the ways others saw fit. President McAdams had stressed the contribution of home management to the good of society. She’d pointed to the teaching of home economics, the practice of philanthropy, and the creation of literature as suitable fields in which the college-educated woman might perform service. And there was Florence Nightingale to provide an example of more elevated ambition. But I knew I was no Miss Nightingale.

Miss Dodson, my teacher of home nursing and biology, had held me back after class one day. I’d assumed I was to be chastised for bandaging my friend Lucy’s head so carelessly, but Miss Dodson had pressed me to consider teaching.

“I believe it’s a good thing,” she’d said, unscrewing the limbs from the torso of her mannequin, “for a young woman to make her own way for a year or two before she attaches herself to a man.”

I admired Miss Dodson, with her bright brown eyes and uncompromising nose. She excited in her students—in me, at least—a sense of wonder at the functions of living things even as she exposed their secrets. She’d been afflicted with polio as a child and so walked with a bit of a hitch that seemed to keep time for her as she paced the front of the classroom, urging us to observe: “You must look, girls! Never assume; always examine!” While in everyday conversation she was rather reserved and dry, she had been known to rhapsodize over such things as “the clever lichen, which thrives where other plants would instantly wither.” We giggled, but only the most aloof among us could resist being caught up in her enthusiasm for and devotion to her subject. At her suggestion, I’d imagined myself presiding over my own classroom in a crisp white waist and black skirt, confidently sketching a heart and its attendant arteries with colored chalk on the blackboard.

“Why did you become a teacher?” I’d asked boldly.

Miss Dodson looked slightly startled. She was used, I think, to directing others, not to considering her own feelings.

“I suppose it’s because I liked school. It gave me license to live in my mind.” She gave a small, rueful laugh. “That was a far more interesting place than any other I seemed likely to have access to. Natural history obviously interests you,” she went on, setting the conversation back on terms more comfortable to her.

I did like the way that science, like Latin, seemed to make sense of the world (whereas history and literature, to my mind, were apt to muddle it). When we studied the plant and animal kingdoms, Miss Dodson was always calling our attention to examples of symmetry and efficiency and cooperation. And I dearly loved classification, the neat way in which the most unusual species had features it shared with others and thus could be grouped into a genus, which in turn could be grouped into a family and so on, until the whole puzzle of life, theoretically, anyway, could be clearly mapped.

Perhaps I would never attach myself to a man, I’d pronounced boldly, relaying Miss Dodson’s advice to Lucy.

“You mean like Miss Gregor?” Lucy’s eyes were wide.

I laughed. “Really, you don’t think much of me. Miss Gregor? What about Miss Dodson?”

“Oh, Miss Dodson. Yes, well, she’s a special case, isn’t she? She manages to put all of her passion into her work. Yes, I do admire that. But Trudy.” She’d laid her hand earnestly on my arm. “Don’t you think that she’s a little sharp? She reminds me of one of those crabs that backs itself into a snail shell.”

“And her eyes and forehead bulge so.”

Lucy laughed. “But seriously, I don’t want you to become like Miss Dodson, however much we admire her. That’s not for you, is it? Don’t forget that when you marry Ernst and I marry Charles, we’re going to live next door and run in and out of the back door of each other’s houses.”

The thought of remaining in those schoolrooms or ones like them, passing on what I’d learned to other girls so they could pass it along in turn, made me as weary as all the rest. As a teacher, I feared, I would be making myself into a link in the very chain that was constricting me, holding me back from a future that seemed to shimmer just beyond my ability to perceive it.

What had I wanted? I’d been sure of only thing: I wanted something that I did not know. Well, I’d gotten it.