The Edge of the Earth (21 page)

CHAPTER 32

C
OLD, STIFF, AND
spent, his leg paining him almost beyond endurance, Oskar limped into the house the next morning. I had not waited breakfast for him but was already eating a soft-boiled egg with a slice of real bread and plum jelly.

“Did you see her?” I rose to boil another egg. I was afraid that if I looked at him, my face would reveal what I knew—that although he had gone to the Indian, the Indian had come to me. Well, almost to me.

I need not have worried. Oskar took no notice of me, though I must have looked peculiar with my mismatched sleeve, sewn from what remained of Archie’s shirt.

He collapsed into a chair. “I suppose she spotted me. Or smelled me. It’s clear she doesn’t trust me.” His jacket bulged at his sides; the seams strained at his shoulders. The pockets were stuffed full.

“You took more!”

He began to pull items out and lay them on the table. “Damned heavy.”

They were stones, mostly. The jade-like necklace that I’d stopped him from taking the first time; a red rock, big as his palm, with an edge chipped away to make a blade; a white stone, smooth as kneaded dough, with a depression in its center, together with one that fitted comfortably into his hand—they seemed to work together like a mortar and pestle. There were more, some flat, some sharp, some worn smooth.

“Did you leave her anything?”

“Of course I did,” he said calmly. As if I were the one behaving outrageously. “I only borrowed a few representative pieces. I did take this, though.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Against his torso was a wad of blue silk. “It’s as bad to give her things as to take them away, you know. Worse. You make a mockery of her with this frippery.”

“Oskar,” I answered indignantly, snatching the silk from him, “I have no idea how she got this. I had nothing to do with giving it to her, although I wish I had!” I held my dress by its shoulders and tried to shake the wrinkles out. “You’ve smashed the bustle!” I was crying, although I cared nothing for the state of the dress. I was thinking of the girl I’d been only a year before, when I’d worn it to the panorama and believed that my life was about to flower. I looked at my husband in his unbuttoned shirt and sagging jacket, caressing the loot he’d spread before him on the table.

“Mrs. Swann, why do you have the mermaid’s dress?”

It was Jane’s piping voice. Oskar, in his exhaustion, had neglected to shut the door behind him, and the children had come straight in, expecting to start their lessons.

I wiped my eyes quickly on the silk sleeve. “The mermaid’s dress? This is my dress. Remember, I gave it to Mary to wear in our play?”

“I thought you said I could keep it.” Mary’s voice was slightly tremulous.

“I did. And you may. It’s only that somehow it ended up with . . . well, the mermaid.”

Oskar leaned toward them as if sharing a secret. I saw that his hair and beard had begun to grow into one another. “Do you know how this came to be in the cave?” he asked shrewdly.

“We gave it to her,” Nicholas said.

“It didn’t fit Mary very well, you know,” Edward added.

“We didn’t think you’d mind,” Mary said. “We thought you’d given it to me for keeps.”

“It was Jane’s idea,” Edward said.

“It seemed like the kind of dress a mermaid would wear,” Jane explained in a quiet voice. “All watery-like.”

“She was grateful to have it,” Nicholas said, defending his sisters. “She let it fly up over her head in the wind, like a flag. It’s much better as a flag than as a silly dress.”

“You saw her with it?” Oskar looked from face to face. “You gave it to her with your own hands?”

“We put it on the stones for her, but when she’d got it, she came to find us,” Jane said. “Like she always does.”

CHAPTER 33

T
HERE HAD BEEN
fog on and off since we’d arrived, but it had never been like what sat on us now, an opacity, clammy and cold, so thick that I tried more than once to sweep it aside with my arms. It was impervious to the sun, which was at best an exhausted glow behind the gray. The foghorn bellowed day and night, an insistent mourner.

Oskar cut pieces of fabric of various sizes from the articles in the mending basket and sewed them onto his jacket, inside and out, as pockets. “This way,” he explained, “my hands are free. And it’s better than a bag or a rucksack, because items don’t jumble together and break. Also, better balanced for the body. You ought to use something like this when you gather your specimens.”

He made several more trips to the cave with the modified jacket and came home with the pockets loaded with booty, which he arranged on a sheet spread on the floor of our bedroom. He painstakingly labeled each of Helen’s implements and baskets, her strings of nut- and seashells, even the bones that presumably were the remnants of her meals. He used English for this instead of code, because he planned eventually to show his display to Philip and other members of the university community.

When I tried to return some items, he was angry with me and fetched them back the following day.

“These are scientific evidence!” he snapped, matching labels to stones. “You might have destroyed a week’s work with your sentimentality.”

“You’re stealing her things!”

“I’m not stealing them. I’m studying them.”

“That distinction can mean nothing to Helen. You have the things; she does not.”

He shook his head impatiently. “You don’t seem to appreciate that these artifacts are evidence of her tribe, maybe the only evidence. She can sacrifice a few tools and ornaments to keep her people from disappearing into obscurity, entirely unmarked and unknown. Don’t you care whether people know that these Indians existed on this earth? These things are far too important for one woman to keep to herself.”

“What if she needs them?”

He went on about his work, as if my arguments were not worth answering. I suspected that he hoped she would come looking for her things, which might provide him an opportunity to observe her. She must have known where they were, since no one could have taken them but one of us from the light station. I was dismayed by the idea that she might think it was I who was betraying her by dismantling her home, and I was sharply aware that I’d introduced Oskar to her cave and that, though I had not carried them off, all of her treasures were spread at the foot of my bed.

It wasn’t long before Lighthouse Service tools began to go missing from the workshop. A hammer, a saw, a drill, and a clamp, implements made of iron and steel paid for those of stone. One morning a hen was missing. The windows kept breaking night after night, so many that we ran out of glass to replace them, and the precious lens was exposed to the sky. Luckily, the horn was most important in this weather, for every errant breeze blew the light out. The keeper had to sit in the lamproom, wrapped in a blanket and wearing the black spectacles, ready to relight the wicks.

∗ ∗ ∗

“She’ll only break this one, too,” Mr. Crawley said. “I don’t know what’s come over her.”

We were attempting to cut the windows that remained at the back of the tower, so as to move them to the front to block the wind off the ocean. It was risky, because the glass was likely to shatter either in the cutting or in the moving, and then we’d be worse off than ever, but Oskar had had to relight the wick two dozen times in the course of his shift the night before. At this rate, we would run out of matches.

The Crawleys and Archie Johnston were fatalistic about Helen’s behavior, as if it were a force of nature, like a bout of bad weather. But they worried about the damage to the lighthouse, especially because the inspector was likely to arrive on the next tender. In anticipation, every knob and ball bearing, every hinge and windowpane, every gear, wheel, pulley, lever, and handle, each and every screw, had to be made to shine; and the quantity of wicks and the frequency of trimming, the quality of the wood and the appetite of the boiler, the duration of each barrel of oil, the number of ships and steamers observed and their approximate distance from the land, the gallons of paint used and the number of brushes worn to a nub, all had to be accurately accounted for in the logbook. Both appearances and records were severely wanting, thanks to Helen’s recent activities.

“He’ll say we’re not managing properly,” Mr. Crawley fretted.

“We’re not,” Euphemia said.

We struggled for an hour, Mr. Crawley and Oskar delicately slicing the caulking away; Euphemia, Archie, and I supporting the glass with our palms and easing the pane from its frame. We managed to move two panes, but we broke two others. Mr. Crawley closed his knife, shaking his head.

“I’ve been thinking,” Oskar said in his old casually confident tone that seemed to brook no argument, “that the Indian ought to be in a place where others will take an interest in her, help her. Humans aren’t meant to live alone.”

“That’s impossible,” Euphemia said quickly. “She can’t live here.”

“No, I don’t mean here,” Oskar said.

“You mean find another tribe for her?” I suggested.

He shook his head. “No, that’s impossible, naive. Even if we could find an intact tribe somewhere, it would be as foreign to her as we are. I’ve been thinking that a scientific community would be best. Anthropologists would revere her culture and preserve it. I—well, Trudy and I—could take her to someone we know at the University of California in Berkeley.”

“Take her?” My voice came out choked, I was so shocked.

“Yes, I’ve been thinking,” he repeated coolly, “and it seems the reasonable course.” Oskar described Philip’s work with Mrs. Hearst’s collection and his interest in studying local Indians. “He’s associated with the university. He could introduce us to the right people, those who would understand her importance.”

The Crawleys were baffled. “It’s nothing to do with electricity, is it?” Mr. Crawley asked suspiciously. “We wouldn’t want her electrocuted.”

Oskar assured them that anthropology wasn’t dangerous. She would be a boon to humanity, he said. Instead of a nuisance to the light station.

And she would bring him the recognition he craved, I thought. I pictured him explaining the possible functions of various stones to a roomful of bearded scientists, and I knew he was imagining something much the same. With Helen, Oskar would dazzle them. I wondered how long he’d been planning it.

Archie Johnston nodded. “I’m going, too. I found her. I have a right.”

“You’ll not get within twenty paces of her,” Euphemia said.

“It’s only money he wants,” I said, remembering what he’d told me at the light. It occurred to me that Oskar might have given Archie an inkling of this scheme as long ago as those bedridden days after Christmas.

“There won’t be any money,” Oskar said. “What do you think? People are going to put down their pennies to get a glimpse of the wild woman? We’re not going to stick her in a cage and dress her in furs. She’ll help us to deepen our understanding of humanity. There’s no money in that.”

∗ ∗ ∗

“It’s your fault she’s destroying the light station,” I said, not for the first time, when we were alone.

He shrugged. “Maybe. But it can’t be helped.”

“You could return her things.” I was beginning to sound tedious even to myself. “Then she might stop.”

“She might not. I admit that I’ve angered her, but I don’t know that putting things back the way they were will assuage her.”

“We could try. After all, you already have so many notes and pictures.” Despite my objections to keeping the objects, I’d gone on drawing them. I’d believed that having such a record would make him more willing to return the things, as I was now suggesting, but if I were honest, I had to admit that I’d felt as excited as he by the project of compiling a catalog of the artifacts.

“Don’t you see that pictures and words aren’t enough? We must have the real things.”

He meant he had to have the real woman; I could see that clearly enough. Gradually, Oskar wore me down, just as he did the Crawleys.

“I’m sure she doesn’t want to live alone,” he repeated more than once. “It isn’t natural.” He told us that if the university couldn’t supply rooms immediately, Philip would know of a suitable place.

“She can’t pay for a room,” Mr. Crawley objected.

Oskar said he would pay for it himself out of banked wages. He said he knew the way universities worked. Within a month, the gears would be grinding and a cottage would be supplied. A lady scientist would live with Helen as a companion and friend; the Crawleys shouldn’t worry, Oskar said, the university wouldn’t try to turn the Indian into a white woman. There would be no dressing in muslin or eating of tarts, was how he put it.

“I think she’d like tarts,” Euphemia said.

“She did like sweets,” Mr. Crawley added.

I liked to think of Helen in the university’s cottage, even if it meant she would have to sit in a chair and eat with a knife and fork. I imagined a flower garden at the front, and I wondered if peonies grew in San Francisco.

“She would have stayed with the Crawleys if not for Archie,” Oskar said, pressing his case. “Obviously, she doesn’t want to live like a hermit.”

It was true that none of us knew that she wished to live by herself in the rocks, only that she didn’t leave. I believed her life would be better in many ways if she were in a safer, cleaner place. If she had a home and people who cared for her, as I was sure the lady scientist would.

“Do you think she’ll be happy in Berkeley?” I asked.

The question annoyed Oskar. “I can’t guarantee that. Do you think she’s happy here? Anyway, you’ll be there to get her settled. You can see to her happiness.”

“You mean that I would be the lady scientist?”

“No one could be more suited to the job.”

“I don’t know anything about anthropology.”

“That doesn’t matter! I know very little of anthropology specifically, but I observe and think as well as anyone trained in the discipline, so there’s no reason I can’t make an important contribution. That’s what all of science depends on, Trudy, close, thorough, and honest observation. And who observes with more care and honesty than you? Remember how you spotted the schooner?

“Besides,” he went on before I could respond that the discovery of the schooner had been no more than luck, “she trusts you. I doubt that anyone else could make her more comfortable than you could.”

So I would be the lady scientist, at least for a few months. I would make her at home, introducing her to her rooms and perhaps to the city, while Oskar arranged her role at the university. This idea soothed my fears, for I could protect Helen from anything that might make her unhappy. I admit that it intrigued me as well. I would be in a position to observe Helen more closely than anyone, then. Maybe I, too, would make a contribution to anthropology.

∗ ∗ ∗

Euphemia refused to take Oskar seriously, as if this plan were as far-fetched as his wireless telegraph. “It’s all well and good to say you’re going to take her to Berkeley,” she said with a laugh, “but I doubt you can get her to the boat.”

Oskar had a scheme, and I was its key. “She trusts you,” he repeated. “I think you can persuade her.”

“She doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak her language,” I protested. “How will I explain something so complex? It’s impossible.”

“You’ll take the children with you,” he said. “If they show her that they want her to come along with them to the lighthouse, don’t you think she might?”

“Deceive her? And use the children to do it? Oskar, think what you’re proposing! It’s horrible.”

“You’ve said yourself that there’s no way to explain things to her. This is clearly a case in which the ends justify the means. She’s like a child, Trudy. We’re doing this for her own good. Besides, all you’d be doing is bringing her to the longboat and presenting her with the option. You could get in first to reassure her, and she could follow if she chooses. If we can’t persuade her to come here, how can we give her the choice?”

“What about the children? Won’t they be upset to see her go?”

He shrugged. “She isn’t their pet. We can’t compromise her life so that they can go on exchanging their little gifts.”

“We’ll return her things to her? When she gets into the longboat?”

“Of course. We’ll be taking all of her things with us. She’ll see that we’re not making her abandon her home; we’re moving her home to a new place, a place that’ll be better for her.”

“And you think she’ll want to go?”

“For pity’s sake, I’ve already told you that I can’t know what she wants. I’m convinced that it’s best for her not to live like an animal, Trudy. You must agree with that. Anyway, a university’s not a jail. If she doesn’t like it, she can always come back. She can book her passage on the tender.”

He had an answer for every worry and objection. Childishly, I let him convince me, wanting the man I loved to be admirable, the husband to whom I’d yoked myself to know what was right and act accordingly.

∗ ∗ ∗

“Roberts always inspects in the fog,” Euphemia complained, as if the man himself had ordered the weather.

“Isn’t it exciting,” I asked, “to see someone new for a change?”

“Not him,” Mr. Crawley said. “Some inspectors try to help you do right, but Roberts is happy to find us in the wrong so he can write us up in his little book. He doesn’t miss a thing, and he won’t like them windows or all the missing tools.”

“Nor should he,” Euphemia said. “You can’t blame him for that.”

Euphemia and I planned a special lunch for Inspector Roberts. She’d kept a few choice cans aside for the occasion, as she had at Christmas; more, because there’d be no time for hunting or fishing. New barrels would arrive with the inspector, but we’d not have a chance to empty them before the meal. Anyway, they’d be saved for a barrel-opening ceremony after he’d gone; Roberts disapproved of bonfires. Lessons were put on hold in these days of preparation. We paid little attention to the children other than to order them to do small jobs and keep everything they touched tidy. Mostly, they careened in and out of the fog, consumed by their own inscrutable affairs.