The Edge of the Earth Page 2

  “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

  MY 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.

  CHAPTER 3

  “MARY’LL SHOW YOU around the place,” Mrs. Crawley said, and for a moment she rested her rough hand tenderly on her elder daughter’s shoulder. “Janie, would you like to go along?” The little girl was leaning her head against her mother’s hip. She nodded, and Mrs. Crawley smoothed the child’s hair behind two delicate ears that stuck straight out like the handles of a teacup, revealing inquisitive brown eyes. “You two,” the woman said to her sons, “better fetch wood. We’ll want a good bonfire tonight.”

  The boys went whooping off, and the look Mrs. Crawley sent after them was at once exasperated and fond. “I’ll be providing the dinner tonight,” she said, turning abruptly back to me. “Seeing as you haven’t had time to set up your kitchen.”

  Set up my kitchen! What did that mean? In school, we’d been taught to brown flour and keep it handy in a jar for thickening and coloring. I knew how to make a white sauce and a fruit salad and how to clean a cake pan. My mother had shown me how to bake a coffee cake with the bacon grease she collected in a green ceramic jar and how to gently encourage custard to mingle with clouds of beaten egg whites. I remembered some of the lessons she’d given our girl: how to store glasses and cups in the pantry—upside down, so as not to collect dust; how to clean the ash from the stove without spilling it on the floor; when to change the water in the reservoir. I feared that these random bits of knowledge wouldn’t be enough.

  Indeed, I felt much closer in station to Mary than to her mother, although I took pains to conceal it. My guide, who chewed at her thumbnail as we walked, was entering that awkward stage of a girl’s life when she is no longer darling but not yet pretty, and it was difficult to know whether she would become so. She was unformed, her freckled face a plump, boneless disk, and she had a habit of adjusting her small glasses by pushing at them with one finger.

  She took me first to the barn where several brown chickens strutted and poked about, entirely focused on the ground and uninterested in the fact that their patch of earth hung high over the ocean. A green-tailed rooster, suspicious, turned one black eye on us, rather in the way of Mr. Johnston.

  The little girl, Jane, was more forward. “Ma says the hens wouldn’t know a fox if it bit ’em,” she said. “I’ve sure never seen a fox. Have you seen a fox?”

  I informed her that I had.

  “I’ve seen eagles,” Jane went on. “They swoop down”—she made a huge gesture of wings with her arms—“and pluck the chicks right up.” Here she reached forward, fingers outstretched like talons, and made a grabbing motion in the air. “It’s gruesome.”

  “Ma says the eagles have to eat, too,” Mary said, and Jane nodded at this piece of wisdom.

  I was surprised to see a cow chewing its cud behind the barn.

  “Ma says children must have milk.” Jane squinted her eyes, sizing me up. “She said you’d churn us some butter. She said where you come from, everyone knows how to churn butter.”

  Apparently, Ma wasn’t always right.

  When we reached the workshop, Mary demonstrated the whetstone, hiking up her skirt so that she could work the pedals unencumbered. Then, still sitting on its seat, she slid her glasses, which had slipped low on her nose, back into place. “Might I ask you a favor?”

  I had to smile at her formality. “Of course.”

  “May I try your hat?”

  I unpinned my hat and arranged it on the girl’s head and folded the veil down for her.

  “Oh!” She was disappointed. “You can see out perfectly well.”

  “Let me see,” said Jane, so I had to settle the hat on her as well. “You’re right, Mary,” she said with similar dismay. “You can see out perfectly well.”

  Did they imagine that I’d been bumbling along blind?

  As I’d observed from the tender, the lighthouse was set at a little distance from the rest of the buildings and somewhat lower on the rock. Its upper third reached the top of the morro, and the catwalk that encircled the light was accessible from the level where we stood by way of a little bridge. Oskar was up there when we emerged from the workshop, but he seemed to be looking at something far out at sea. In any case, he didn’t notice the hand I raised.

  “That one is ours,” Mary said importantly, pointing at the southernmost entrance of the awful stone building where three apartments were clumped.

  “We get the biggest,” Jane announced, “because ou
r father is the head.”

  The center house into which the girls led me was a sort of tunnel, a passageway pressed between the two other apartments; light could enter directly from the east at the back or the west at the front, but otherwise not at all. It was obvious from the smudges along the walls, the hard brown grease on the cooktop, and the skeins of dust against the baseboards that no one had prepared the place for us and that the previous tenant had been no housekeeper.

  I was amused to see evidence of squatters. In the parlor, Mary quickly gathered up a doll, several squares of inky paper, a tin pot, and some other detritus she gave me no time to identify. In the kitchen, both girls were proprietary, demonstrating the running water in the sink and drawing my attention to the heavy china, patterned with a small navy lighthouse, in the plate rack; the iron pot and skillet in the cupboard; and the drawer of silver-plated utensils.

  Upstairs were two little bedrooms. The front one was furnished with nothing but a bed.

  “This one,” Jane said, her palm pressed to the door of the back room, “is for your baby.”

  I laughed. “But I don’t have a baby.”

  “Ma says you will,” she insisted, “sooner or later. Mary and I are hoping for a girl, aren’t we?” She turned to her sister.

  Mary nodded. “In the meantime,” she said boldly, giving me a sideways look as she opened the door, “we’ve been using this room for our collection.”

  The floor looked like a beach. It was littered with shells and pieces of driftwood, dried and flattened seaweed, and what appeared to be bones. Washed up here and there were small creatures at once gorgeous and monstrous. Some were bristly, some pebbly, some curly, some knobby. Almost everything was strange to me: white tubes, brown disks, and opalescent cups; shapes of orange and pink, blue and violet; branches and coils, spines and nubbins and surfaces that appeared glassy smooth. Confined in jars were more creatures, some sluglike, some waving tentacles. Presumably, they’d been plucked live from their homes (although most appeared to be dead, despite the attempt to provide them with an appropriately watery environment). I lifted one jar, half full of cloudy water, for a closer look and nearly dropped it again in horror. Inside, a blobbish thing floated and stank.