The Edge of the Earth

by Christina Schwarz

  The potatoes browned. The peas warmed and cooled again. The eggs and pineapple beamed up at me from their bowls. The crown prince lay drugged or drunk in Ruritania. Still Oskar didn’t come.

  Exasperated and unable to sit any longer, I wandered through the parlor and upstairs to the bedroom. Eventually, I found myself in the “nursery,” where I began examining one by one the items I’d stored in the crates. A few things—a bit of pressed seaweed, a mussel shell—resembled the plants and animals of Lake Michigan, but most were entirely foreign to me. I touched their surfaces, some sticky, some rough, others as smooth as the water itself.

  A few items clearly hadn’t come straight from the sea. There was a cracker tin, for instance. Its contents rattled. I hadn’t peeked in earlier; after all, it belonged to the children. Now, with nothing pressing to do, I couldn’t resist opening it. Inside were a tiny, intricately woven basket painted with black slashes that suggested diving birds; a bone with a well-sharpened point at one end and a small hole at the other; a piece of green rock cunningly carved in the shape of a fish; and a length of leather with feathers worked through it. I knew at once that the children hadn’t fashioned these things. How had they come by them, then?

  I was fully absorbed by these treasures when I finally heard Oskar’s footfall on the path outside. It wasn’t hurried or even brisk. In fact, he stopped for some minutes before climbing the steps to our door. Doing what, I couldn’t imagine.

  I went down the stairs, sure that at any moment the door would open. Finally, I pulled it open myself and looked out.

  “Look at the moon.” He pointed, not shifting his eyes from the sky.

  I would not. “Where have you been? Your dinner has been ready for two hours!” I’d not allowed myself to feel angry while I waited, but now my impatience burst forth. I understood why my mother fretted about my father coming home on time. I’d organized a tableau that was to have established us, husband and wife, in our cozy home, but he’d not played his part.

  “Oh!” He looked sincerely surprised and puzzled. “You shouldn’t have waited for me. If you were hungry, you should have eaten.”

  “Should have eaten!” I stopped myself. He’d not promised me the rituals of home, a Milwaukee bourgeois existence transplanted to a new world.

  He didn’t notice my indignation. He went to the sink and began washing his hands industriously. “I was just going through the workshop, seeing what tools we’ve got. It’s astonishingly well equipped. I suppose it would have to be—you can’t run to the neighbors if you need a drill or a handful of nails. And there’s plenty of wood to work with.” He put his arms around my waist and drew me to him in an obvious effort to appease me. “I could easily make a chest of drawers or a night table, a vanity, whatever you’d like.”

  I weakened. It was not that I wished for any carpentry, only that I didn’t want to be angry with him. “How about some shelves?” I suggested. “For the children’s rocks and things. That would be useful.”

  “The children’s rocks? I thought we were getting rid of that stuff.”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  “Shelves are too easy,” he protested. “I could do something much more elaborate than shelves.” He sat down at the table and speared a cold potato with his fork.

  “I’m sure you could,” I said indulgently, ladling peas first onto his plate, then onto mine. I felt better now that at least some version of my domestic picture was taking shape. “Nevertheless, shelves are what I want.”

  CHAPTER 10

  IN A FEW days, when Oskar had learned his tasks, he was assigned a shift of his own. Just as we, the last to arrive, got the dark house in the middle, so he was given the least convenient hours, eleven at night to seven in the morning. I went along, wanting to be with him, wanting to see the light, wanting, in a general sort of way, not to be left out. We became accustomed to that unnatural, upside-down feeling that comes from being up all night and sleeping through much of the day.

  Tending a lighthouse turned out to be not so different from tending the lamps at home, although the wicks and the oil reservoirs were of a scale fit for a giant. They needed trimming and filling every four hours, and if you fell asleep and let the light go out, it might mean ships on the rocks, men dead, and profits spilled. The fog signal worked like the mechanism that ran the grandfather clock in my parents’ parlor, though obviously much bigger and more important; the chain was as long as the light tower.

  We spent most of our time waiting for the wicks to burn down or the oil to get low or the chain to drop to the bottom so we could race to the top of the stairs and rectify the situation. With the night pressing in from all sides, it was a close space, but not that different from any of the other confined places that Oskar and I had experienced together so far—the train’s parlor car and the hotel room in San Francisco—and we were far from tired of each other. This was a honeymoon of sorts.

  To amuse ourselves, I’m afraid we spent some of our time mocking the adults on the rock, especially Mrs. Crawley, whom Oskar called “The Dragon.” We played Authors. We tried on the black spectacles that keepers wear to protect their eyes and groped around, pretending to be blind. We read the rest of The Prisoner of Zenda aloud. We told each other more about the lives we’d had before we’d known each other.

  Along about the fifth night, Oskar brought a book into which he kept stealing glances as we talked. At last, in exasperation, I snatched it from his hand and examined the title page: Electric Waves: Being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Finite Velocity Through Space.

  “You’ve decided to work on your engine again.” I was relieved at this notion, not that I cared so much about electric engines, but because it had been his ambition as long as I’d known him. His newly declared lack of interest in the subject on the night we’d arrived had disturbed me a little. It made him seem . . . well, flighty.

  He dismissed my remark with a wave of his hand. “That’s only a practical application. This is much bigger. It explains the behavior of electrical waves themselves. Listen.”

  He began to read, and I did my best to follow, but though these were clearly only introductory statements, I was almost instantly lost in a maze of polarizations and oscillations, insulators, conductors, and dielectric efficiency.

  “It’s intriguing, isn’t it?” he said, pausing at last.

  “What is?” I asked hopelessly.

  He laughed. “The idea that electromagnetic current can be transmitted without wires from one point to another.”

  “Is that what it said?” To be honest, I hardly understood his translation better than I’d understood the original.

  “Of course, it can’t compete with The Prisoner of Zenda.”

  “You’re right about that.” I was vaguely disappointed in myself and annoyed with him for creating the circumstances that made me feel so. “I’m afraid I’d rather read the logbooks.”

  I meant that he should set his book aside, but he seemed to think that I intended sincerely to pursue this course, and that he was therefore free to devote himself without inhibition to the behavior of electrical waves.

  With nothing else to occupy myself, I did go to the logbooks, which were arranged by year along an oily shelf on the boiler room wall. They contained a record, if not of all the work done at the light station, at least of each day’s major task, along with the ships that had been sighted and often a description of the weather. Oskar had read aloud from one of them on a previous night, imitating Mr. Crawley’s gentle drawl, Mrs. Crawley’s imperious tones, and Mr. Johnston’s sneer, depending on the hand in which the entry had been written and delivering phrases like “changed burners” and “repaired boiler gauge” in dramatic tones that made me laugh.

  I selected a year at random and wandered haphazardly through the matter-of-fact lines. “Weather fine. Replaced screw set in valve. Two ships, one schooner, one steam.” “Cleaned clock machinery. Rain: four inches.” “Mixed whitewash. Russian
schooner, three masts.” “Packed south siren with sheet lead and canvas. Repaired blown gasket. Sun.” “Stacked wood.” “Stacked wood.” “Stacked wood.” After some ten pages, I believed I had a good sense of the Sisyphean life of the place; nearly every day something broke or became dirty. Keeping a light station was like running a house, albeit with a fine view of the sea. “Repaired broken window. Morning fog. Scrubbed floors.” Buried among the mundane was an occasional momentous event. Here were a dozen whales and here the purchase of the cow. An inspection went well; I thought I could see the satisfaction in the dot of ink that closed Henry Crawley’s sentence. I skimmed pages and pages, gobbling the bits of human interest strewn among them as if I were a bird pecking up seeds. “Assistant under the weather with piles.” “First batch of whitewash ruined by curious hands.” “Baby Johnston born and buried.”

  “Oh!” I must have exclaimed aloud, for Oskar looked up from his Electric Waves. I brought it to him and put my finger on the entry. “What do you think it means?”

  “I guess he had a baby and it died, poor fellow.”

  “If he had a baby, then he had a wife.”

  “I suppose.” His eyes were straying back to his book, to which his mind had returned already.

  “But where is she?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe the Dragon ate her. Or maybe she ran off. If I were a wife of Archie Johnston’s, that’s what I’d do.”

  I paged haphazardly through a few more of the logs, but it was tedious going. A month or so before the Johnstons’ loss, I discovered the birth of a baby who completed the Crawley family, but I could find no mention of a Mrs. Johnston taking ill or leaving the light station among the pages of lens cleanings and lamp burner repairings.

  Finally, Oskar pulled his watch from his pocket, stretched, and set his book aside. “Time to trim the wicks.”

  We tromped around and around the circular stairs in our black spectacles, and when we’d finished this simple task—actually, when he’d finished; I only stood companionably about—we stepped onto the catwalk, where we hung our heads back to admire the brilliant, glittering sky. Unlike in Milwaukee, the night air here retained none of the heat of the day, and I shivered and pressed my body against his.

  He put his arm around me, but he did so absently, and he didn’t turn his face to mine but toward the impersonal spangle that dominated the sky. So I looked up, too. The stars seemed to throb at me, and soon I had to turn away.

  He quit the heavens and peered down at the heaving blackness that was the sea, leaning so far out over the spindly iron railing that I couldn’t help putting my hand on his back, as if he were a child. “Oskar! Be careful, please!”

  “I’m not going to fall,” he said impatiently. When he stood up again, he softened. “I’m sorry,” he said, and this time, when he put his arms around me, it was I who commanded his attention.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The next night I brought two new books of my own, Some Species of the Pacific Coast, which Mary had lent me, and Voyage of the Paper Canoe: A Geographical Journey of 2500 Miles from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, which I’d found in the library, and when Oskar settled into his Electric Waves, I had my own reading.

  In the background, the surf threw itself against the rocks and the foghorn’s clockwork clicked. Both sounds were lulling, and the paper canoe traveled slowly, so I was half asleep when, from upstairs in the lamproom, a crash sounded. I thought first of Gustina dropping a tray of wineglasses, but of course there were no wineglasses in the lamproom, only windows all the way around. We ran up the stairs, Oskar first and me after him, forgetting our black glasses.

  We kept our eyes on the floor, away from the turning light. Knifelike shards glittered there.

  “A spontaneous explosion,” Oskar said. “It must have been the heat of the light on the window, meeting the coldness of the air. Or maybe a bird smashed into it.”

  “No, it was this.” I picked up from the floor a jagged brown rock the size of my fist.

  “Come down,” he said, tugging my arm. “It’s too dangerous without the glasses.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Mrs. Crawley confirmed that it had been a bird. “It’s the light that attracts ’em, although why they want to fly straight into the sun is beyond me. Some twist of your precious Nature, I suppose. Generally, they’re just stunned, although you’ll find dead ones now and again on the catwalk in the mornings.”

  “But what about the stone?” I insisted. “How could it have come there?”

  “Oh, the children are always leaving stones and the like lying about. It’s time you start those lessons and give them something more constructive to do than forever collecting things that would better remain where nature left them. They slipped down to the beach again this morning, you know.”

  “All right,” I said meekly. To the extent that I’d thought about the teaching, I’d expected it not to begin until the summer was well over.

  “I’ll send them to you tomorrow morning. Eight sharp.” She stepped back inside her house and closed the door.

  Clearly, I had work to do. I resolved to make a teacher of myself by breakfast time.

  CHAPTER 11

  BUT WHERE WAS I to teach them? I assessed the possibilities of the sitting room. Our furnishings, supplied by the Lighthouse Service, were scant: a brown velvet settee, a chair with a wine-colored back and seat, two occasional tables, each supporting a kerosene lamp. Should I line the children up on the sofa and make them use one another’s backs as desks? The kitchen had advantages; I could perform some domestic tasks—bake bread, make soup, clean the ash from the cookstove, perhaps even learn to churn butter—while the children did sums and recited Longfellow. But I could hear my mother admonishing me to do one thing at a time. A schoolroom in the kitchen would make me both a poor teacher and a poor cook.

  The nursery was the obvious choice. Except for the children’s collection of marine life, the room was entirely bare, which appealed to me, for I could make of it what I would. Oskar had carried the trunk to our bedroom, where it was serving as a bureau; I dragged it across the landing to use as a writing table. I would ask the children to bring the pillows from their beds to sit on. I took a few precious sheets from my store of writing paper, along with my sketchpad, and placed them at the center of the trunk. How long would my pencils last when four children were scraping away with them? Were writing implements ever in the barrels?

  From the books in the traveling library, I selected a volume of Stevenson’s poems, a book written expressly for children called The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and The Battle of Mobile Bay, thinking it might be a means of introducing some study of history. I had pulled up in my reading of Voyage of the Paper Canoe at the Great Dismal Swamp, but I thought I might begin again and read it aloud to give the children some sense of the geography and communities of the eastern United States.

  I didn’t go with Oskar to the light that night but slept instead, so as to be ready for my students in the morning. But they were not at my door at eight sharp nor even at nine. Maybe they’d gone to the beach again and hadn’t asked me along this time. Probably they’d gone to escape me and my lessons. To my surprise, this idea hurt me.

  I decided to scan the beach from the lighthouse. If I spotted them, I would wash my hands of them for the day. Surely there were other tasks worth my while. I ought, for instance, to figure out how to remove the salt that coated the windows. It was nearly impossible to see through the panes that faced the ocean.

  Mr. Crawley was stuffing the boiler at the base of the tower. He shrugged amiably when I asked about the children, although whether to indicate that he didn’t know their whereabouts or that he hadn’t heard my question was not clear.

  At the top, I saw that the shattered pane had already been replaced and fresh paint industriously applied to all the frames, so you couldn’t tell which window had been broken. I stepped to the rail, which was no more than a narrow iron band about waist-high, intended more to su
ggest safety than to provide it. The sun was fiercely hot; the air seemed thinner here in the West than in Milwaukee, a substance too weak to intercede between the earth and that ball of fire. Far to the north, a steamship was churning through the waves, plying its way from one port to another and staying well clear of our treacherous rocks. As I watched its slow progress, the heaving ocean caught the sunbeams and threw them back at my eyes as white-hot needles. I wished I were wearing the black spectacles.

  Yes, they were on the beach. Or at least some dark little forms moved along the far reaches of the sand. From here, they looked more like shorebirds or crabs than children. As before, they were venturing to the edge of the water and racing away when the waves came in to lick their toes. It would take me nearly an hour to reach them, and I wouldn’t have the heart to drag them back. I would have to occupy this day in some other fashion.

  I was beginning to make my way around the catwalk to the bridge when a shape on the mountainside almost directly below the tower caught my eye. Hanging over the rail, I determined that it was a small pile of stones. Smooth and white, they almost glowed against the sharp brown and black rock upon which they lay. Baby Johnston born and buried, I thought. The idea of that fragile, helpless little being suspended in a place so grand and desolate made my eyes fill.

  The cairn was clearly tended. An ornament lay on the stones, a sort of disk made of green-black feathers. Who had placed it there? The children? It was difficult to imagine Archie Johnston with a such a feathered bauble in his hands.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Oskar had come home while I’d been out, and I found him in bed—he had to rest in the afternoon, so as to be awake for his shift. He wasn’t sleeping, however, but taking notes on Electric Waves in a shorthand he’d developed years before, when he was a child bedridden with rheumatic fever and needed to amuse himself. Spread over the blanket and drifting onto the floor were pages covered with what were to me incomprehensible, frenzied, and somewhat juvenile lines of squiggles and arrows, pistols and stars, exclamation points, tiny tornadoes, and other symbols and designs that had once come readily to his ten-year-old brain, along with equations equally baffling to me.