Wonder at the Edge of the World

by Nicole Helget

  I feel like my arms and legs want to go limp and slide off my body and fall onto the ground. I’m shuffling along with my face to the sky and trying not to cry until Eustace grabs me to keep me from tripping into a jackrabbit warren.

  “Watch where you’re going,” he warns.

  “Thanks,” I say. I’m embarrassed Eustace noticed the warren before I did. I wonder what my father would have said about my inattention. He always told me it was important to pay attention to everything, and I try to do that.

  Behind us, Fob falls right in, and his legs go four-up and kicking into the air. A jackrabbit bounds out of the hole and pounces at Fob. Its two ears flit like knives. Fob yowls, surprised and scared, but then rights himself, shakes the dust off his scrubby yellow coat, and slinks away from the rabbit.

  “Dumb, cowardly dog,” I say.

  But it was funny, and Eustace and I both smile.

  “That could have been you, upside down like a dummy,” Eustace says. “You must have been woolgathering. It’s not like you to be clumsy.”

  I almost get mad at Eustace for using the word “dummy,” but I don’t. “That sure was feather-brained of me,” I say.

  Since I’m training be a scientist, it’s my duty to notice everything, even things as subtle as slight depressions in the landscape. Usually, when I look across the plain and see a dip in it, I wonder about sinkholes and caves. That’s called being curious, which is a different thing than meddling. I’m like that because Father was like that, too.

  I scan the horizon. I know this place so well. That tuft of little bluestem grass. The patch of flax. That old cottonwood tree out there all by itself. A hole out yonder where the coyotes go. I know all of them.

  And I know exactly where my cave is.

  CHAPTER 5

  The cave, of course, is a secret. And even though it’s easy to find once you know where it is, it isn’t easy to know where it is. You could be practically standing on top of it and not know that right beneath your feet is a cave the size of two covered wagons.

  To find it, first we walk as though we’re going toward town, a half mile or so. Then we veer off onto the plain. There are no paths, no wagon trails, nothing. Like Eustace, Father used to say that someday every inch of Kansas and the rest of the West would be claimed, but when I look out here, I can’t imagine a single body seeing a place he’d want to call his own.

  We walk some more. Then I feel myself being propelled forward a tad bit faster, which means we’re walking downhill slightly, which means we’re close to the cave. I start to look for the ordinary gray rock that marks the entrance.

  “How you and your pa ever found this place surely amazes me,” says Eustace. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything out here but dirt and air.”

  I look ahead and see the rock. I spin all around to make sure no one else is nearby. Fob, as if to help, puts his nose in the air and acts like he’s sniffing.

  “It sure was a stroke of luck to find this cave,” says Eustace.

  “It wasn’t luck,” I correct. “Father knew what he was looking for, and he knew where to find it.”

  I kneel in the dry brown grass and tamp down some long green strands that grow beside the rock. Believe this or not, but I can smell the cave before I enter it. And I can feel a strange tingly sensation all over my body. A ghostly call seems to be coming from the cave, which, I think, must be the wind.

  I start to get excited just thinking about the trove of treasures down here. My father’s collections. My father’s life’s work. The artifacts and specimens he brought back from all over the world are hidden down here in a little old Kansas cave in the middle of nowhere.

  Father said his collection was better than any king’s, any sheikh’s, any emperor’s, and any chief’s in the entire world. He said it was the most interesting and diverse collection of scientific and cultural objects on earth. His eyes would get a little squinty and small when he talked about his treasures, and sometimes that would make Mother get a worried look on her face. The sides of her mouth would go down and her cheeks would sink. “A shame,” she’d say, “that the citizens can’t see what you’ve collected, my love. Wouldn’t it be nice if ordinary folk could see the fruits of your labors?” She’d wring her tiny hands, as though hesitant to say these things to him.

  Father would shake his head. He’d hunch over and mumble at the floor, talking to himself more than anyone in the room. “No one understands these things but me. No one else has spent months and years collecting and preserving these specimens.” Then, as though he’d been jarred out of a trance, he’d straighten up and say, “Yes, of course. A museum is a marvelous idea. When the time is right. When the specimens are carefully preserved.”

  Have you ever seen a carefully preserved specimen? A dead thing that looks like it’s still alive? I have. Lots of times. I’ve got lots of them down here. I’ve even seen an octopus, tentacles covered in suckers that look like buttercup petals, floating in a jar filled with alcohol.

  Animals and insects that died a long ways away and a long time ago can be studied elsewhere and forever after if they are stuffed into jars and preserved. Sometimes the skin of the animal peels off a little, and sometimes the eyes disintegrate, but for the most part, the liquid preserves them.

  I’ve also studied a tiny, knobby leg bone of a whale. Did you know that whales used to have legs? Well, Father said they did and that they used to walk on land. But the more time the whales spent in water, the less they needed the leg and the smaller and smaller the leg became, until it disappeared from the outside of the whales’ bodies. That’s what Father supposed, anyway. No one would listen to him about that, so he went on studying and collecting other things. But you can see for yourself that there are leg bones inside a whale. Sometimes, dead whales simply washed up on the shore in New Bedford, and you could walk right up to them and look at a whole skeleton, if you could stand the smell.

  No one around here believes me about whale legs or about whales washing up on shore. It sure does surprise me how so many people forfeit their curiosity just because they’re skeptical or stubborn. I like to keep my mind open to new information and ideas.

  Eustace taps me on the back, which startles me because it’s so unusual. He usually doesn’t touch me or any other white person. I guess it’s sort of against the rules, but I don’t care. “Lu?” he says. “Are you listening?”

  “To what?” I ask.

  “To me,” he says. “I asked if you were ready to go down.” He’s looking at me sideways.

  “Course I’m ready.” I push on the rock. It doesn’t budge at first. Then Eustace helps me. We push and slowly slide it off a hole in the ground that leads back and diagonally. I can smell the moist air. And I almost think I hear a strange song or chant of some kind.

  “Do you hear that?” I ask Eustace.

  “Hear what?” he says. He leans his ear toward the opening of the cave. “Oh, that. That’s just the fresh air moving through the cave.”

  “Oh,” I say. I swallow. “Let’s go in.” I lie flat on my stomach on the ground and wriggle my way into the cave like a snake. Getting into it can feel a bit scary, but before I know it, I’m at the end of the tunnel and dropping down about four feet onto solid ground. Then I can stand up with plenty of room above my head. I hear Eustace slithering in, too.

  Caves are the most interesting part of this country, in my opinion. Like I said, Kansas seems a lot more boring than where I’m from, and a person’s got to look hard to find interesting things to think about and study. Thank goodness for the caves.

  Kansas’s caves aren’t like the ones a regular person might think of when they first hear the word. Kansas caves are not hollowed out in the sides of mountains or hidden behind hundred-foot waterfalls. Kansas’s are mostly underground. You have to get into them by finding holes and sliding down. Most people might be scared to do this, but not me. As a scientist, I have to put my curiosity before my fear.

  “You scared?” I ask Eus
tace.

  “No, I’m not scared,” he says. “Are you?”

  “No,” I say.

  “I can’t believe I lived here my whole life and never discovered a cave on my own,” Eustace says. “I can’t believe a white girl from Massachusetts had to come and show me one when I been walking over them all this time. I tell you what, it’s a little embarrassing.”

  I’m flattered, but I can’t take the credit. “Well, I wouldn’t have found out about them without my father,” I say. “He discovered them.”

  I wonder if that makes Eustace wish he had a father who taught him things. He’s staring at the cave walls.

  “I sure miss your father,” says Eustace. “He was an uncommon man.”

  My throat gets tight. “I miss him, too,” I say. “All the time.” My lungs huff and puff, and I think I’m about to cry. But I really hate to cry and certainly don’t want to in front of Eustace. I start rummaging around all the crates of artifacts and talking instead.

  “One day, just after we moved here,” I say, “Father and I were in town buying cloth and sugar, when suddenly all the townspeople began buzzing, whispering, and hitching up their wagons and gathering up their youngsters to go out to Stanley Gummand’s farm, where, it was said, his herd of cows and pasture just suddenly fell away. As in, one minute the cows were grazing happily and mooing and swishing their tails, and the next minute they weren’t.”

  “Hey!” Eustace says. “I remember that!”

  “Hay is for horses,” I say to Eustace. “Now, don’t interrupt my story, or I won’t tell it.” Once in a while, I can’t keep myself from snapping at him. I’ve noticed that I do it most when I’m mad at someone or something else.

  “Lordy,” Eustace says. “Go on, then.”

  “It was said that the ground gave beneath them and a huge hole opened up and swallowed every one. Some of the townspeople were sure this was a sign from God, and others were sure the abolitionists or the slave owners were digging tunnels and had an accident.”

  I can tell that Eustace wants to butt in again and say something about the slave owners or the abolitionists, but I stop him by putting my finger to my lips.

  “But Father knew better. So while the whole town came to gape open-mouthed and wide-eyed and suspicious-feeling at the big cavity in the ground and tiptoe to the edge to see the mangled cows buried in rocks and gravel, Father and I went out to the plains and poked around.

  “He punched his stick at the earth here and there.” I pick up a South American staff decorated with paintings of constellations and moon phases and demonstrate with it by poking at the cave floor. “Finally, we came to a place where a natural slope plunged steeper than anywhere else. Father looked around. Then he pointed with his stick to a grassy ridge, which if we were birds would have looked like a huge bowl encircling where we stood.

  “‘This is a sinkhole,’ he said to me.

  “‘Where?’ I asked. All I saw was switchgrass, dry weeds, and some thorny thistles.

  “He tapped a stick on the ground. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘This used to be twenty, maybe thirty feet higher. We’re standing in it.’ Then he began looking around for rocks. He pointed to a purplish-pink outcropping. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Let’s look there.’

  “Father heaved one more rock to the side. A scent like a wet cellar filled the air. ‘Here it is,’ he said. He jabbed his stick in to measure. ‘This is going to suffice beautifully.’

  “‘What will?’ I asked.

  “‘This cave,’ he said. ‘Look. Smell it. Rock. Moisture. Ancient air.’

  “I looked down. And what looked like a place where an animal slides into his den opened up into a hollow room. I could hear rustling and squeaking inside.

  “‘Don’t worry,’ said Father. ‘Just bats. They’ll be gone hunting by the time we return.’

  “Within a couple of hours, we were moving through the dark with a horse, a lamp, and a cart full of crates tied up with ropes. We worked all night long to fill this place up with Father’s treasure.”

  Eustace and I look around at all the crates. The walls glisten with flecks of what looks like glass against pink stone. A fine dust floats in the air around us, and it, too, glistens, like fireflies. All around the room sit Father’s crates with their descriptions on the sides: ELEPHANT IVORY, EAST AFRICA, 1839; STUFFED KOALA, AUSTRALIA, 1839; SPICES, TIMBUKTU, 1841; SPERM WHALE TOOTH, SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN, 1840; and more and more and more.

  Eustace puts his palm flat on the cave wall. “These are granite,” he says real quiet. “One of the hardest rocks on the planet.” Just as I’m about to ask him how he knows that, he turns to me. “Your father told me about granite once while we were collecting stones for your hog fence.”

  “That’s a good memory,” I say. I try not to forget a single detail about times with Father. I love those memories. Memory is one kind of treasure. Most people don’t recognize that what they already have is treasure, not just gold coins and pearls and rubies and doubloons, and maybe mummies.

  I light the two oil lamps we keep in here. I hand one to Eustace even though there’s quite a bit of light coming in from the hole.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  “Fob coming down?” I ask. I look up and try to see him.

  Eustace laughs. “You know the answer to that.”

  I shake my head. Fob’s such a scaredy-cat, scared of the dark and scared of bright light, scared of small places and scared of big places.

  Eustace’s favorite things to look at in here are the geodes, so the first crate I move toward is the one full of the split rocks resting in straw. Every crate in this cave is secured with a length of rope and a tidy knot on top, tied by me just in case somebody ever finds this place. I can make a simple overhand knot, an oysterman’s stopper, a water knot, a fisherman’s knot, a bowline loop, an eye splice, a Portuguese bowline, and even a hangman’s noose, which I only practice in private and only imagine using on the man responsible for my father’s death.

  “You all right?” Eustace says to me.

  “I suppose,” I say. “Why?”

  “You got the look in your eye,” says Eustace. “The one makes you look like someone stepped on your tail.”

  I soften the look on my face. Streams of sunlight ignite the walls a deep pink color, but the temperature in the cave is cooler than it is aboveground.

  I loosen the knot, a simple fisherman’s knot, on top of the crate that says GEODES, AUSTRALIA, 1834, painted in my father’s handwriting. The rope ends slip off and onto the rock floor, where they land with a thump. Fine dust flies up, and Eustace sneezes. I pop off the top and swipe away the dust particles that float up from the dry straw inside the crate.

  Eustace comes over and pushes aside some straw. He sneezes again. Then he finds his favorite rock and lifts it out.

  “Careful,” I say.

  “I always am,” he says, which is true. He turns over what looks like a regular gray-and-brown rock and reveals a hollowed-out inside, which is loaded with purple gems, amethyst. In the center of the geode, where hundreds of crystals converge, the color is deep violet, almost red, like an open wound.

  “They’re beautiful,” Eustace says. He stares at the geode and moves it back and forth to let the light from the entry hit it at different angles. “Someday I’m going to give my mother just a tiny one of these kinds of gems. Where’d they come from again?”

  “Australia,” I say.

  “Then I got to get to Australia and find one of these for myself.”

  “You can find them anywhere,” I say. I bite at a sliver in my thumb. I pinch it between my teeth and spit. “America, even. They’re more common than you would imagine.” I think about telling him how geodes are formed, about how rainwater sometimes seeps inside volcanic rock and evaporates and leaves the crystals, but I doubt Eustace is going to be a scientist, so I don’t bother.

  “Eustace,” I ask, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  As soon as I say it, I rea
lize my mistake and wish I could take it back. Eustace doesn’t have any choice in the matter of his future.

  He doesn’t dwell on that fact, though, and responds quickly, as if he’s been thinking about all the possibilities for a long time. “If I could do whatever I want,” he says, “I’d be a cowboy. Or a buffalo hunter. Or maybe a soldier or a rancher. Or a train engineer or a sailor. Or an animal doctor.” He sighs. “Or a scientist like your father. I don’t know. I guess that’s foolishness.”

  I’m surprised. “That’s not foolish at all,” I say. “My father would have liked that you want to be a scientist, too.”

  And that’s true. Father would have. Whenever Eustace was around, my father just talked to him the same way he talked to me. He liked having students or apprentices. Or maybe he liked having anyone around who would listen to what he was saying.

  I try to imagine Eustace and me all grown up. I get sad when I think that maybe we’re not going to be able to see each other much if I’m a scientist doing lots of traveling around the world and making important discoveries and he’s stuck here in the most boring place anyone can imagine, doing hard work he doesn’t even get paid for.

  I’ve had enough of the geodes, so I turn my back to Eustace and his box of rocks. I shuffle a couple of crates around, pushing aside a small one that contains the long, rolled-up skin of a thirty-foot crocodile that Father got in Africa. I tighten a loose end on a knot around a crate with hundreds of seed envelopes from the plants of East Africa. They are safe in their envelopes but make noises like a dried-up gourd or a rattlesnake tail when I push the box aside to get to the crate I’m after.

  When I see it, I say, “Here it is!” and hold it up.

  Eustace groans. “Ah. Not that one. That one is creepy.”

  I slip the rope off the top, pop the cover, and reach in and take hold of a large jar. I lift, very, very carefully.