The Edge of the Earth (4 page)

“Did you learn from nature, Mr. Swann?” Mrs. Crawley asked, pinning a large chunk of cod to her plate with her fork.

“Judging from the number of books Mrs. Swann has seen fit to heave as far as this rock,” Mr. Johnston put in as he rose to his feet, “I would guess she’s the educated sort. Maybe she could play schoolteacher.”

Everyone, including the children, turned to look at me with new interest.

“Are you a teacher, Mrs. Swann?” Mrs. Crawley asked.

“Oh, no. I’m afraid I have no experience. I doubt I would be much good.” My tongue tested the bit of salt pork in my mouth; it seemed to be mostly gristle.

“But you’ve had enough schooling to be a teacher?” Mrs. Crawley persisted.

“Well, I haven’t been to normal school, if that’s—”

Oskar interrupted me. “Trudy would be an excellent teacher!”

“You think it likely you know more than the children do?” Mrs. Crawley said.

“Well, I wouldn’t—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Trudy. You’ve been to college!” Oskar said.

“That should be adequate,” Mrs. Crawley said, nodding. She wiped the milk that remained on her plate with a sponge of cornbread. And so the matter was apparently settled.

Perceiving the irony of having traveled thousands of miles only to do what I might have done in a more elevated way in Milwaukee, I quietly swallowed my gristle.

Oskar’s mood, however, continued to be expansive. He waved a hand at the golden and green flanks that rose so abruptly to the east. “There’s no one in those mountains?”

Mrs. Crawley nodded her approval. “You’ve read the Service booklet, I see.”

“Lighthouse Service don’t know everything,” Archie Johnston said. His sister gave him a stern look.

“There’s that crazy Yale fellow,” Mr. Crawley put in, trying to lift the conversation again. “Lives in a hollowed-out tree.”

“Do you enjoy living up here, Mrs. Crawley?” I was flustered by what had turned out to be my employment interview, but this was the sort of polite question I’d been taught so well to ask that I didn’t need to think about the words.

“It’s a decent post,” she said, lifting her chin. “A good deal of work about the place, and no Chinese servant to do it, I can tell you that. With the animals, the children, the men, and the boiler, someone or something’s always demanding to be fed.”

“Euphemia’s been keeping lights with me for over a dozen years,” Mr. Crawley said. “She knows the job well as I do.”

“Two for the price of one,” Mrs. Crawley said dryly.

By now the sun had grown weary of us and turned a cold shoulder on our gathering. The children, who’d bolted their food, had already slipped away, and the boys brought a banjo and a guitar out onto the front steps and began to pick some old tunes. I thought I might join them with my violin.

Mrs. Crawley stood and began to reach around the table, stacking the dirty plates on top of her own. “Mrs. Swann and I will clean this mess up,” she said, reminding me that I wasn’t among the children here.

In the dark scullery, Mrs. Crawley instructed me not unkindly but firmly, and I found myself nodding, eager to please. I must not waste water; I must not chip china (or the inspector would dock Oskar’s wages); soda crystals didn’t grow on trees.

“Even if they did,” I said, “there are no trees.”

My mother would have laughed at this, but Mrs. Crawley did not. When we’d finished, however, she invited me into her parlor to see her “collection.” Did everyone here have a such a thing?

“Our father was a whaler,” Mrs. Crawley explained, stroking with one finger half a set of wooden teeth displayed on a length of red satin. “Archie and I grew up at a station up the coast. It was a treacherous stretch. Well, so many of ’em are. And the storms! You’ll see,” she said ominously, moving from the teeth to a swollen book that had obviously been soaked through, its pages printed in an alphabet I didn’t recognize. There was a length of black fringe from a lady’s shawl or a table covering; a knife with a wooden handle; a string of blue beads; a whole brown earthenware jug; shards of glass in every color; a basket of the sort a housewife might carry over her arm to go to market; a dented cigar tin and a coconut shell. “Sometimes we didn’t even see the ship go down, but Archie and I would walk the beach with my mother, and we’d find things. You’d be surprised at what makes its way back to shore. There’s not so much of it nowadays,” she added wistfully, “now that we’ve got so many lighthouses.”

As Mrs. Crawley touched her precious items with a smile as shy and proud as her daughters’, I thought of my mother, pressing a fold of our drapes to her cheek as she shut them against the early darkness of a northern winter evening. She was proud to have good velvet, not, as she would say, the stiff stuff they sold over on Clybourn. I understood that the draperies’ rich blue conjured for her the well-appointed rooms of her own childhood, with their gilt-legged tables and ceramic shepherdesses, rooms so faraway and foreign that when she told me stories about them, they sounded as magical and impossible as a fairy tale.

“Ma! We’re ready!” One of the children—I couldn’t yet tell their voices apart—had opened the front door and was shouting into the parlor.

They’d piled driftwood winched up from the beach, along with staves from broken barrels and any other combustible stuff they could gather, and the men must have gone down for the new barrels, for they stood nearby. Mrs. Crawley brought out rugs and invited me to sit beside her as Mr. Crawley lit the heap, and Mr. Johnston, to my surprise, delighted the children by pretending that he had no notion how to open the barrels. Finally, though, the lids were off, and the children, reaching inside to pull out whatever their hands grasped, behaved as though it were Christmas morning. Their “gifts” were mostly things like nails and canned produce. They squealed over fruit—pineapples, blueberries, blackberries, plums, and applesauce—groaned at peas and carrots, and were indifferent to green corn.

“This is excellent,” Mrs. Crawley said, passing a can of roast veal and gravy for my inspection. “These cans are about the greatest invention of mankind, although they’re the dickens to open.”

I made a little pyramid of oysters and beef stew, remembering my mother’s disappointment—“But it tastes so gray!”—when she’d sampled some canned good my father had brought home as a novelty.

There were boxes and boxes of a sort of cracker they called pilot bread, bottles of vinegar, jars of molasses and pickles, sacks of green coffee, onions and potatoes and dried apples. At the bottom of the barrels, too heavy for the children to fish out, were sacks of rice, flour, sugar, beans, and cornmeal, and salted cod, wrapped in waxed paper. There were newspapers, too—several months’ worth of old news—and then the men pulled out a large wooden box.

“There’s for your school,” Mrs. Crawley said cryptically.

They set the box on one end and opened its wooden flaps. It became a bookcase with four shelves, each tightly packed with volumes.

“We get a new one of these every time the tender comes,” Mr. Crawley said, running his oil-stained finger along the spines. “It’s our library.”

It was fully, almost densely dark now, and I had to stand close to catch the titles of the books in the glow of the fire. Whoever had collected them must have assumed that lighthouse keepers were partial to accounts of men on water, for the titles—A Christmas at Sea, Memoir of Commodore David Porter, The Battle of Mobile Bay, a translation of The French Lighthouse Service—leaned heavily that way. While I studied the shelves, Mrs. Crawley organized the new supplies according to which house or shed they ought to be stored in.

“Ready for the wagon,” she said at last, but the children had stolen away.

“Mary! Edward! Nicholas! Jane!” Her voice thundered over the morro, and she peered sharply in the direction of the ocean, although, as nothing was there but black air and, far below, black water, it seemed an unlikely place for the children to be.

They did seem somehow to emerge from that place, however. We heard them running up the dirt path from the lighthouse, and they came panting into the firelight. Something swinging around the little girl’s neck glinted silver, pink, and blue.

“Janie,” Mrs. Crawley admonished. She looked quickly around as she pulled the girl to her. “How many times must I tell you?”

I stepped toward them for a closer look. The necklace was made of shells or bits of shell, like nothing I’d ever seen. “What is it?”

Deftly, Mrs. Crawley pulled the loop over her child’s head. “It’s not for her.”

Jane let out a shriek to wake the dead, but Mrs. Crawley ignored it. She marched with the necklace into the darkness at the edge of the mountain and flung it in a wide arc, releasing it over the ocean.

“It was mine.” The girl was crying softly but heartbreakingly. “It was my turn.”

I stepped uncertainly toward the girl, wanting to soothe her but worried that I might interfere. Archie Johnston reached her first. He squatted beside her and opened his arms to offer her comfort.

CHAPTER 4

W
HEN THE BONFIRE
had been doused and Oskar and I came into our own rooms, I went directly for my writing paper and pen. I didn’t know when I might have a chance to send letters, but I longed to talk with the people I’d left, if only in my head. I elevated our situation in a letter to Lucy, describing the vista as being what Mr. Edmund Burke would call sublime, exciting terror and admiration in equal measure, although I felt far more terror than admiration that night. And I wasn’t sure what was more disquieting, the emptiness in all directions or the people who shared my isolation.

The closed windows dampened the crash of the waves far below us, but the sounds of life at the top of the rock remained distinct. There were footsteps on the path; someone heading toward the light, then someone coming back. Archie Johnston, that must be. Yes, I could hear him climbing the steps to his front door and coughing as he passed through his sitting room to his kitchen. On the opposite side, the children’s feet pounded up the stairs to their bedrooms; doors slammed exuberantly.

I let Oskar show himself around our house. The noises he made as he galloped through the place, opening the cupboards and windows to peer in and out, were similar to the children’s banging.

“Jesus! What’s this mess?” he shouted down.

“It belongs to the children. I . . . they’ll . . . we’ll get rid of it.”

“Looks like they dragged half the beach up there,” he said, seating himself beside me at last.

“Their mother has a collection, too. It’s awful! Some poor sailor’s teeth!”

He’d put his hand in my lap and was beginning to stroke my thigh, but I stopped his fingers and held his hand firmly between my own. “Up here, I feel so . . . exposed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone can hear us. Mr. Johnston. Listen.” The cough came again from the apartment next door. “The Crawleys. God.”

“Oh, God!” He laughed. “I’m not worried about Him. But I agree that Mrs. Crawley is a different matter. She’s daunting, isn’t she? And the way she enlisted you to teach her children. I wouldn’t like to cross her.”

“You were on her side! Telling her what a wonderful teacher I would be!”

“You would!”

“I suppose I must try.”

“Well, what else are you to do?”

“There’s a good deal of work about this place,” I mimicked, “and no Chinese servant to do it.”

But he was right. Who was I here? Not Trudy Schroeder, pampered daughter, lively friend, bright student, all but affianced to steady Ernst Dettweiler. Here I would be a disappointment because I didn’t know how to make butter.

“Will you like your work?” I asked.

“It’ll be easy enough.” He imitated Mr. Crawley’s slightly nasal tones. “Scrape the rust, clean the lenses, keep the rollers and the air compressor running at the proper speed. Paint and polish. Check the boiler. Reset the pendulum every six hours, so the foghorn sounds on schedule. It’s only maintaining machinery,” he concluded. “I could do it in my sleep.”

“If you don’t like it, maybe we could go back. Maybe not to Milwaukee, but to Chicago or Cincinnati. Somewhere not at the edge of the earth.”

“Go back? No! This place is exactly as I’d hoped it would be.” He rose from the sofa and began to range about as he spoke, testing the slide of the windows, studying the pattern of the wallpaper. “I’ll be able to do some real work here. When we go back, it’ll be in triumph.”

“Work on your electric engine, you mean?”

Oskar was among those who thought that electricity might be an efficient alternative to steam power. He’d built a small electric engine in Milwaukee and attached it to a canoe, which attracted a good deal of attention on the river. The problem, as he’d explained it to me, was how to make such a machine large enough to move a craft as heavy as a ship. When we’d learned that we’d be going to a lighthouse, he’d hoped it would provide a useful place for experiments in this line, but halfway here he’d stopped talking about such plans. I was pleased to hear them revived, although to me such work seemed impracticable in this setting. It was far more isolated than we’d imagined.

“You know, I don’t believe that interests me anymore,” he said. “So many others are already beavering away at electric engines. I’m going to do something new here. Something no one else has got hold of yet.”

“That’s wonderful, Oskar. What is it?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure yet, but something will present itself. For a curious person, the world is full of opportunities.” He threw open the large parlor window with a bang and leaned out of it, drawing the air loudly into his lungs. “Don’t you think this place is inspiring?”

“No,” I admitted, wrapping my shawl tightly around my shoulders. The temperature seemed to have dropped twenty degrees since the afternoon. “It frightens me. I don’t think people are meant to be here.”

“What’s to be afraid of?”

“Everything! The wind that’s trying to blow us off, the rocks that are waiting to spear us! If we were to step off this mountain one night, how would anyone even know what had happened to us? Being here, it’s like we’ve disappeared.”

At last, he turned and focused his disconcertingly bright blue eyes on me. “But don’t you see? It’s not we who’ve disappeared. It’s they. We’ve got rid of all those people who would tell us what to do, who to be. Except,” he added slyly, “for Mrs. Crawley. Now, if she were to step off this mountain . . .”

“Oskar!” But he’d made me laugh, and I was grateful for it.

“And now, Mrs. Swann,” he said, extending his hand, “if it would please you to accompany me to our own bed in our own house, we’ll do whatever we like.”

∗ ∗ ∗

It may have been our own bed in our own house, but when I awoke later in the night, it was nevertheless an unfamiliar place, full of unfamiliar shadows and, aside from the sheets that smelled comfortingly of home, strange odors. Oskar had opened the bedroom window, and in the dark, the ocean seemed to rise to me. I could smell it, its greenish, half-growing, half-decaying scent laced with salt and an unwashed animal stink. Or perhaps the smell was coming from the children’s collection. I got up and closed the door to the second bedroom and our door and the window as well.

Except for the bed, our room was empty, so different from the fullness of my parents’ house. I thought of the vanity in my mother’s room at home—no, not at home, this was home now—where she’d brushed my hair not so very long ago and eons ago in preparation for my wedding. I thought of the silver-backed brush and mirror engraved with the swooping initials of the mother my own mother had left behind in Hamburg, a set surrendered to a dusty pawnshop in San Francisco.

I sniffed. The smell had been coming not from the open window nor from the next room but from Oskar. The sea had marked him with its briny green odor and its underlying scent of rot.