The Edge of the Earth

by Christina Schwarz

  As I gathered his papers, I told him about the cairn of smooth stones and the feathery thing on top of it.

  “Poor Johnstons,” he said.

  “I wonder what happened to the mother.” I imagined a woman boarding the tender on which we’d come, turning a bonneted head away from this place.

  Oskar was finished with the subject. “Come here.” He lifted the blanket, inviting me in. “Let me tell you what I’ve learned about electric waves today.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Long after Oskar had gone to his work, my afternoon in bed kept me awake. I sat for a while at the kitchen table, foolishly sipping coffee as though it were morning. I wrote some passages of a letter to my mother, not mentioning the cans, and several paragraphs to Lucy describing the cans in detail. Then I paged desultorily through The Battle of Mobile Bay. The room grew steadily colder, and I began to be aware of the darkness pressing around me. Through the wall, I could hear Mr. Johnston moving stealthily about his kitchen.

  Restless, I lit our Aladdin lamp and roamed the house. I held the glow to the spines of the books we’d stacked on the occasional table, but none of the titles held my interest. I stood before the stove and considered emptying the ash. I went upstairs and studied our bedroom window. Perhaps I should look for some fabric to make a set of curtains that would block the setting sun. I decided that I might at least make a list of these tasks, so I sat down at the kitchen table again and pushed my hand into my apron pocket, feeling for a stub of pencil I remembered depositing there. When I removed my hand, it contained the bits from the sea I’d collected on that first day, when the children had taken me to the beach: the red sea star, its arms stiffened and its color slightly faded; a small black turban of a shell; a chip of mother-of-pearl colored with the gentle pinks, blues, and silvers of the sunrise; a rubbery splay of vegetation, like the horns of a tiny green reindeer. I went up to the schoolroom for Some Species of the Pacific Coast and turned its pages, searching for pictures of my specimens.

  Somewhere between abalone and periwinkle, I came upon a spread of seabirds, their plumage brilliantly rendered in twelve colored plates. On the cormorant—“widespread marine bird, known for its dark, lustrous feathers”—I recognized the black feathers with the iridescent green undertone that made up the ornament I’d seen on the cairn.

  I wanted a closer look at that feathered thing. I knew it was a foolish thought, but it gnawed at me, the way ideas will in the deep of the night. Silently, I carried my lamp out of the house. By now I’d wrapped myself in a shawl; nevertheless, the cold, damp air startled me. That the blazing heat could have been eradicated so completely in such a short time made me uneasy. It was almost as if the season had changed from summer to winter in a matter of hours. The sound of the water at the base of the rock had changed as well. It was far louder than it had been in the daylight. Even from so high above, I could hear the waves tumble the stones and claw them back, like gamblers raking coins.

  A long streak of yellow shot across the black water; that would be Oskar, sending the signal into the dizzying void that was the endless churning water and the endless spangled sky. The gibbous moon washed rock and water in a ghostly light, inviting me to walk right off the morro into the air. As I made my way to the lighthouse, I stayed well back from the brink.

  In a short time, I was standing at the base of the light tower, peering down toward the place where I knew the stones must be glowing. They were hardly visible from this vantage point, tucked under an outcrop of black rock, the hard edges of which the moonlight threw into relief. Perhaps I ought to have read this as a warning, but I chose to interpret it as evidence of solid ground on which I could plant my feet. I began to circle the tower, searching for a path or at least a gentler stretch of slope.

  Yes, under the northern wall, where that structure met the side of the mountain, hidden from the usual entrances and exits one might make from the lighthouse, was a scraped bit of earth. I plunged right and snaked left, following the same sort of zigzag pattern the children had demonstrated for me a few days before, when we’d slid all the way to the beach. I didn’t want to go to the beach this time. Instead of allowing the slope to pull me down, I began to work my way west, to the part of the morro that extended far out over the water.

  I wouldn’t have thought anything could have been more difficult to cling to than the slippery slope the children and I had negotiated, but soon enough, the way—for it could not be called a path—that I’d put myself on proved to be so. In only a few steps, I needed to use my hands to keep from falling. This ought to have been my cue to turn back, but I abandoned my lamp and crept on, away from its comforting flame, feeling more than seeing the texture of the rocks and brittle plants. How far I would have gotten, whether I would have reached the stones at last or given up or overshot them or lost my footing and handholds and fallen to my death, I will never know, because at this delicate point I was interrupted by a sharp voice coming from somewhere over my head.

  “What are you doing there?”

  It was Mr. Johnston. His voice roused Oskar, and I heard the upper door of the light tower, the one leading to the catwalk I’d been standing on that morning, bang open. “What’s going on?” Oskar called.

  What was going on? How had I come to be nearly hanging by my fingertips over the crashing ocean, my skirt tangled about my legs, my face and arms scratched and bruised? It occurred to me to suggest that I’d been sleepwalking. There could hardly be another plausible explanation.

  I said nothing while I picked my way back as well as I could. The two men had gotten as far as my lamp and were standing together in its feeble light, their faces as craggy and shadowed as the mountainside.

  Oskar reached for me, his face a worried question. “Trudy, what . . . ?”

  “What are you doing here?” Mr. Johnston repeated.

  “I saw . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to be blunt. “Some stones,” I finished lamely. I turned my head to indicate them, but even that slight movement served to unbalance me, and I had to bend and grab for the rocks to steady myself.

  “What were you going to do with them?”

  “Nothing. I—”

  “You were just curious,” Mr. Johnston said mockingly.

  I stood silent. What he said was true.

  “Those stones are our business. Not yours.”

  “You needn’t be rude to my wife,” Oskar said. “She meant no harm.”

  “Well, she might have come to plenty. It’s a very long way down and no good once you get there.”

  CHAPTER 12

  MRS. CRAWLEY MUST have admonished the children, for they began to appear at our front door every morning, their pillows clutched to their chests. In the first week or so, we looked at one another with trepidation, and our steps on the narrow stairs to the schoolroom sounded a doleful and dutiful march. They were forced to make various accommodations with their legs to sit beside the trunk—the top, for instance, came to the chins of the littler ones if they sat fully on their pillows—and then we addressed ourselves to the unnatural tasks that make up the usual school day.

  They were shockingly uneducated. None of them could read more than his or her name, and only the two eldest could add and subtract and that not beyond what they could count on their fingers. They knew nothing of history or geography, not to mention science, art, and music. The two youngest didn’t even know how to hold a pencil properly.

  My mother had taught me all of these rudimentary skills. I struggled to remember how she’d done it. It had helped, I’m sure, that she’d had a great deal of authority over me. Jane, in this regard, being the littlest, was the most tractable and receptive, but she looked to her older siblings for her models, and they didn’t see the point.

  “We know how to keep the light,” Mary objected.

  “And I can fix the steam donkey,” Edward added. “I’ve done it thousands of times.”

  “Don’t you want to know about other places?”

  “You mean
like Cuba?” Edward asked.

  “Yes, I suppose Cuba would be good to know about.”

  “That’s where Mr. Finnegan’s gone!” Nicholas put in. “He’s going to kill the Butcher!”

  This seemed to be a signal to aim imagined guns at each other and make explosive noises. I told them about the troops I’d seen massing in the Presidio and used several sheets of my sketchbook to draw a map first of the line of coast along which Oskar and I had come on the tender—were they not curious to know where the tender came from?—and then of the whole of North America, adding a broken line from Milwaukee to San Francisco to indicate our train journey. By placing some pebbles Nicholas took from his pockets on the trunk at some distances from the map, I showed them where the Philippines and Cuba lay in relation to the rest, although, truth be told, my own grasp of world geography was rather loose.

  Then we used pebbles to mark all of the places we—really, I—could think of: Paris, London, New York, Peking. I wondered how I might procure a globe.

  “Where is Salinas?” Mary wanted to know. I couldn’t even pretend to guess.

  I printed the word HORSE in large letters—there went another piece of paper—and taught them to read it. But then I had to draw a horse as well, for they’d never seen one, or at least couldn’t remember doing so. They were amazed that the steam donkey had the name of an animal like a horse. I tried writing DONKEY then, but it was clear by the avidity with which Edward tried to capture a fly under his cupped hand and by the fact that Jane had laid her head upon her pillow seat that they’d already learned plenty for one day.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “They’re entirely ignorant,” I marveled to Oskar.

  We were kneeling before our store cupboards, which were stuffed so full of cans that I’d had to tie the doors closed with bits of ribbon to keep them from popping open.

  “You choose and then I’ll choose,” he said.

  I selected oysters in cream, and he pulled out venison cooked in port wine, as well as sweet potatoes, green beans, and cherries in thick syrup.

  “No.” I laughed, but I was serious. Some quality of the air here had increased Oskar’s appetite, and we were consuming far more than was prudent. “Really, we must put at least one of these away. You don’t seem to realize that this is all we’ll have until the next tender. That’s months away.”

  “Oh, please. I’m so hungry today. Tomorrow I promise I’ll make it up. I’ll eat stones and cornbread. Or I’ll get Crawley to go down and catch us a whale.”

  Against my better judgment, I gave in and built up the fire in the stove. Then, while I held each can firm, Oskar set the chisel as close to the edge as he dared and gave it sharp taps with the hammer.

  It was difficult to keep from pulling away. “What if you slip?”

  He grinned. “Maybe you’d best use your left hand.”

  Watching translucent gravy melt around chunks of meat and a froth of white bubble up around the oysters, I knew my mother would frown at this method of “cooking.” The food did not taste good, but the novelty charmed us both. I made him close his eyes and held a bit out to him on my fork—oyster or venison?

  “Tomorrow,” he declared, “we try the goose and the plum pudding.”

  He was increasingly excited about Electric Waves, and he tried to get me to apply equivalent enthusiasm, as well as the scientific method, to my own work.

  “Don’t you see that the children’s ignorance is wonderful? They’re like a primitive people. You could do all kinds of experiments to find out how they think. Let’s ask them to explain things—how far the ocean goes, say—and see what stories they’ve devised for themselves.”

  As he embroidered these ideas, he reached to push his fork into my bowl; he’d already eaten all of his portion.

  “But Oskar,” I protested, “they’re children. They’re not aborigines. They know how to fix the steam donkey, for heaven’s sake.”

  Nevertheless, he remained convinced that the children presented a rare opportunity for study and if I were not to mine it, he would. Every few days, he set aside his research into “electrical transference,” as he’d begun to call it, and came bounding up the steps to the schoolroom with a lesson he thought we ought to try.

  “Never mind those letters,” he announced one day, pushing aside the pages on which the children had been laboring for at least a quarter of an hour. “Here, Trudy, give them fresh sheets. Now,” he went on when each had a new piece of my creamy writing paper before him or her, “I would like you to write a message without words.”

  They stared at him uncertainly.

  “I see that already some damage has been done.” He shook his head, but he was smiling, his expression kindly and patient. “We can undo it. Listen to me. Pretend you’ve never been taught a word of English. You possess no worn-out, conventional, mindless phrases. You’ve just come into this world,” he went on, entrancing them, “and now you must sort it out on your own. You will experience it directly with your senses without intervention from teachers.” He paused and looked around our schoolroom. “No, wait. I have a better idea. There’s too much distraction here. These books . . . and what is this? A map? No, no, this won’t help. What we’ll do is go outside. We’ll go into nature itself and get away from these sullying influences. Come on.”

  “Oskar—” I began to protest. It had been so difficult to collect and keep the children in this room, and he was working against all I’d accomplished. Also, I’d done my best with very little in choosing those books and drawing that map; I didn’t like him to say they were sullying.

  He held up his hand and shook his head. “Trudy, don’t interrupt. Let’s try a real experiment. We might all learn something.”

  And so, Pied Piper–like, he led them down the stairs, out the door, and from one spot to another around the top of the morro. He had them brush their palms over the bright lichens and press the soles of their bare feet into the sharp rock. He took them to the boiler room and told them to smell the oil. He filled a bucket with water and had them plunge their heads into it one by one. He encouraged them to lie on their stomachs at the very edge of the mountain, with their heads nearly hanging into the air, and then he told them to close their eyes. “Imbibe the rhythm of the ocean!” he ordered, while I surreptitiously clutched the hem of Jane’s pinafore with one hand and Nicholas’s heel with the other.

  When we trooped back to our little schoolroom at last, he said he wanted them to show him on paper what they’d experienced, though he cautioned them again not to use words.

  “If you didn’t know the words ‘ocean,’ or ‘sea,’ or even ‘water,’ for instance,” he said, “how would you tell me what lies out there?” He gestured toward the west.

  They obediently scrubbed away at their pages until Euphemia began to ring the bell that stood outside her door, signaling them to abandon their studies in favor of lunch and chores.

  Oskar was disappointed in the results. “I thought they’d draw pictographs,” he said after glancing at the well-covered pages. “Like the ancient Egyptians. These are only pictures.”

  “They’re revealing, though. Look.” Mary’s was an orderly landscape with everything in proportion. She’d even thought to include the clothesline and the steam donkey. Edward appeared in his own picture, looking as if he’d just conquered the morro and was using it as a vantage point from which to further command troops. Nicholas had filled a sky with birds and an ocean with creatures of all forms. Jane’s sketch resembled Impressionist paintings, all shades and strokes and feeling, the boundaries between water, mountain and air indistinct. Perhaps she was too young to, as Oskar had said, “sort it out.”

  “Mmm,” Oskar agreed, although he wasn’t really looking. “I was hoping for something else. These are all so . . . idiosyncratic. We can’t extrapolate anything from them about the way primitive man perceived the world. Maybe mathematics would reveal something more basic and universal. Next time let’s see what they do if we give them a mathema
tical problem and some dry beans to help them with the numbers.”

  I admired the way Oskar seemed able to translate the most mundane circumstances into opportunities for study, and the children were clearly delighted with his methods, but I saw that he was more interested in what he could learn from the children than he was in teaching them, so I was relieved that he was often too busy with his electrical investigations to bother with us.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  My sheaf of writing paper was disappearing quickly, eaten up by the children’s scratches and smudges. Oskar was also using a great deal, even pinning sheets together to give himself room for extended diagrams.

  “Imagine,” he said one afternoon, chiseling open some rhubarb and spooning it right from the can, “if I were the one who figured out how to send a signal on an electrical wave.”

  “You mean like a telegraph?”

  “A telegraph uses wires. I’m talking about a signal that could reach where no wires will ever come, to a place like this. Or out to sea, to a moving ship. Right through the air.”

  “Do you really think you could manage something so . . . ambitious? I mean, you’ve only just learned about these waves, haven’t you? From that book?”

  “You have to be ambitious,” he said, “or you’ll never get anywhere. But I am going to start with something more limited.” He tipped the can so the last of the juices could run into his mouth. “I’m going to send a signal from our parlor to the light tower.”