The Edge of the Earth

by Christina Schwarz

  “What is that?”

  Mr. Hatch was pointing at what I’d taken to be a heap of rags but which had begun to shift and shudder and now rose from the platform, supported unsteadily on two brown sticks. Above folded and flapping bits of cloth, a mat of hair took shape, half hiding a face brown and creased as damp leaves, split by a toothless red mouth. The Indian came at us, bending, swaying, dipping, reaching, spewing incomprehensible syllables in abject tones.

  Mrs. Hatch shrank from the window in horror. “Don’t look,” Mr. Hatch commanded.

  The creature’s eyes, slits between swollen lids, were as unsteady as the legs. Its gaze wandered over the cars but returned to me. The thing held out its appendages. “Mun-nee! Mun-nee!” it beseeched. Someone threw an object—maybe a roll—from one of the windows; it landed well back on the platform. The creature turned, exposing its back to the train.

  And there a baby rode. It was wrapped tight against a board, its round, dewy eyes in its dear new face gazing at us with confident dignity, as if we were its subjects, gathered to pay our respects.

  “Hey! Give you greenbacks for the papoose!” some lout shouted. “Sell us the papoose!”

  The rag creature looked back over her shoulder, but her aspect had changed. Contempt shaped her face, and derision sharpened her eyes. Her disdain—her loathing, even—raised her up. She was, after all, a woman. A mother.

  The train, refreshed with coal, pulled away from the platform, and with relief, we welcomed eggs and toast and bacon to our table, busying ourselves longer than was strictly necessary spooning sugar and spreading jam. We’d all been debased, I suppose, by what we’d witnessed at the station and were shy of facing one another in such a state.

  Finally, Oskar spoke. “You have to admit it wouldn’t be altogether a bad thing.”

  “What wouldn’t?” I asked, relieved that he’d shrugged off Mr. Hatch’s dismissal of his drawing.

  “For that unfortunate woman to sell her baby.”

  “What! Swann, that’s ridiculous!” Mr. Hatch sputtered.

  “When you think about it, it makes good sense,” Oskar said. “How will she raise that baby? Obviously, she can’t even take care of herself. He’s bound to suffer, and he’s likely to die.”

  “We’re not slaveholders anymore,” Mr. Hatch protested. “We don’t sell people. We never did in Indiana.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Hatch put in. “Now, if you were to suggest that some responsible group assume care for the child, some church, perhaps, or the town . . .”

  “Take him away and put him in an orphanage is what you’re suggesting?”

  “Yes, so some nice people can adopt him,” Mrs. Hatch said. “I’m sure it’s done all the time, when parents are drunk, for instance, or crazy.”

  “She isn’t crazy,” I said.

  “No?” Mr. Hatch asked. “What makes you say that? She looked crazy enough to me.”

  “Didn’t you see when she turned around?” I said. “She was disgusted with what she heard. With all of us, I’m afraid. She knew what she was about and what we’d done. That’s not crazy.”

  Mr. Hatch was shaking his head. “I don’t see why you say we did anything—”

  “But,” Oskar broke in, “if you just take him, then the mother is left with nothing, which isn’t fair. Because right now she does have something dear, something that people want.”

  “An Indian baby?” Mrs. Hatch scoffed. “I doubt there’d be many who’d sincerely want that child.”

  “Even such a little prince as that?” Oskar sighed. “I suppose you’re right. After all, we destroyed these people so that you Muncies can live wherever you please.”

  “Oskar!” I was shocked.

  “What are you talking about? We haven’t destroyed anyone!” Mr. Hatch said indignantly.

  “At least some of us,” Oskar went on, “are ashamed. We appreciate the horror of what’s been done in our name.”

  “And yet,” I said, determined to put my husband in his place, to pay him back for the discomfort he was causing me, “we ride the train, which, as I understand it, destroyed the Indian as much as anything.”

  “Yes,” he said irritably. “Of course we ride the train. What would be the point of not doing so?”

  I couldn’t blame the Muncies for leaving the table in a huff. In our parlor, I remonstrated with Oskar. I averred that some of what he said was true—the child was precious, and the Muncies were benighted—but he ought not to have run roughshod over them, and he ought not to set himself above them. Did he not see that we were hardly different? He would not agree. He made fun of Mrs. Hatch’s laugh and the way Mr. Hatch held his fork. He declared that he wouldn’t waste another minute on such people. I regretted this deeply, not so much because of any attachment to the Muncies themselves, although they’d been friendly to me, but for the fact that in breaking with them, Oskar had cut what I’d seen as our last tie to the East. It was strange to consider that, although all my life I’d lived in “the West,” Wisconsin had become “the East.”

  In the afternoon, we stayed in our compartment and ate the remaining hard rolls, now worthy of their name. Then, unusually exhausted, Oskar attempted to convert our sofa into a bed without assistance from the porter. He was asleep before the sun had set.

  We’re climbing into the Black Hills, an accurate name for these dark, stunted pines and tortured rocks . . .

  Unable to concentrate on my letter to my mother, I lifted my pen and stared at Oskar from my chair. He looked uncomfortable, his body contorted by the ill-constructed bed. Ernst never would have said what Oskar had said, any of it, anything like any of it. But then I hadn’t married Ernst, had I?

  The Union Pacific had furnished our parlor with a map of the nation’s train tracks so that passengers could mark their progress. I unfolded it and spread the whole of the country across my lap. Tomorrow we would reach a large depot in Ogden where many eastbound trains must stop. I imagined myself climbing down from this train and getting on one of those. In a couple of days I could be far from this wild, unsettling landscape and back in the comfortable streets I knew. I thought of my parents’ house—the blue velvet curtains, the kitchen worktable, the currant bushes in the backyard below my bedroom window, all dear and familiar. But if I returned to them, I would forever be the girl I’d always been.

  I refolded the map. As well as I could, I slid into the half-made bed with my husband and allowed the motion of the train to rock me to sleep.

  In the hours that remained of our journey, I wrote letters filled with descriptions of the Great Salt Lake and daylong sagebrush deserts and the mountains, all jagged rock and green pine pressing close and black gorges yawning open. I’d never seen anything remotely like any of it, and I wrote honestly of my pleasure in experiencing such variety and strangeness. But with each fresh stretch of landscape, I was more aware of how many new worlds imposed themselves between me and home, and when we came down into the valleys of California, I felt the Sierras close behind me like a door.

  CHAPTER 17

  WHEN I’D MARCHED a good distance up the beach, the steady rush and retreat of the surf, together with my own exhaustion, began to soothe me. I slowed my pace and took notice of my surroundings.

  Almost at once a sea star presented itself, stranded on the sand by a wave. I picked it up and balanced it on my palm. It seemed alive, its body not light and stiff like the ones in our schoolroom, but heavy and surprisingly fleshy. Such a strange creature, and yet its five arms were so like my five fingers. Over a year before, I had dissected a starfish in Miss Dodson’s biology class. I remembered the smell of the oiled wooden floors of Gruber Hall and the wash of the bright morning sun. I’d cut along the creature’s underside, as Miss Dodson had indicated, and duly observed the means by which the animal took food directly into its stomach without the intermediary of throat or esophagus. Miss Dodson limped from girl to girl, a magnifying glass in a leather pouch at her hip, her gold locket tucked into her blouse so that
it wouldn’t swing and knock against the specimens.

  “You see the madreporite, Miss Schroeder?” she’d asked, touching a small circle at the center of the star with her ink-stained finger, the place where the animal let seawater into its body. I’d nodded and noted all the structures, but the creature had been only the peculiar basis of an exercise to me; I couldn’t conceive of it as a living being. And yet here it was, far more at home than I. I drew back my arm and hurled it as far into the ocean as I could, hoping to give it a chance to survive.

  I wondered if Miss Dodson had ever seen a sea cradle or a nudibranch, the real live animals, not just pictures in a book.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The valleys and the soft hills of California had been thick with oats and fruits and, finally, humanity again. In Oakland, we were met by a good old steam tug and ferried across the bay to San Francisco. The dock at night was a confusion of shadows and shouts. Men stalked up and down, swinging lanterns, and women, terrified lest their children tumble into the bay, swatted little ones behind their skirts. Dazed by the people who seemed to swoop around me from all directions, I clung to Oskar’s arm as he arranged with a Chinese pushing a wheelbarrow for the transportation of our trunk and consulted with a colored man about the location of our hotel.

  I waited for a long time in a tin-ceilinged lobby while he talked to the man behind the desk. At last he turned to me, shaking his head. “We can’t stay here.”

  Though Oskar spoke matter-of-factly, I was alarmed. “We wrote ahead. I’m sure we reserved a room.”

  He shrugged. “They say there’s no place for us.”

  “But what should we do? Where should we go?”

  “The porter says he’ll store our trunk for us. I think we’d better do it. We can’t afford to have it trundled all over the city, and who knows where we’ll end up? We can come get it tomorrow.”

  Who knows where we’ll end up? That wasn’t encouraging, and, indeed, although we passed several other hotels, he barely glanced at them.

  “What’s wrong with these?” I asked, finally.

  “We haven’t got the money for these places. That parlor car wasn’t free, you know!”

  “You mean we couldn’t afford it?”

  “I paid for it, didn’t I? I wouldn’t say we couldn’t afford it.”

  “Now we’ll have to lie down on the street? I would far rather have used the sleeping berths and had something left over.”

  “Heavens, Trudy!” He put his arms around me. “We won’t have to sleep in the street. We’ll find a cheap room somewhere, and I’ll pawn my pocketknife in the morning. It’s only for a day or two, after all. In exchange for a little scrimping now, we had that wonderful parlor car all to ourselves. Wasn’t it worth it?”

  I felt foolish and cowardly. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In another two or three blocks, the hotels had become dark and shabby boardinghouses, and he said we might give one of them a try. The landlady, roused from her bed, came to the door without her teeth and with her hair tied up in rags. She led us up three flights of narrow stairs that smelled of damp and rodents to a room at the back. We wriggled out of our clothes in the tight space between the wall and the sagging rope bed and lay down on thin sheets turned edges to middle with a roughly sewn seam. Still, Oskar was merry, and I was easily infected with his optimism. He reached for me before my hair was properly undone, accidentally knocking my brush to the bare wooden floor in his impatience.

  Breakfast—sour bread and weak coffee—was included. Even in the morning, the house was dark, although that was as much the fault of the weather as of the placement of the windows hardly three feet from the next building. Only one other lodger sat at the dining table, a man who stared in response to my “good morning” before going back to his newspaper. From my own seat, I glanced at the headlines—counts of troops boarding ships for Manila, a report of an opium raid.

  Oskar nudged my arm and produced a little book from the pocket of his jacket. “Look what I found in our compartment.”

  It was the guide to San Francisco. “You stole it?” I was more shocked than accusing.

  “I’m sure we were meant to take it. What good does it do on a train?”

  Outside was nearly as dark as inside, the sky gray and heavy, as if before a snow. I could feel droplets of water thick on my skin and in the fabric of my dress.

  Oskar was ecstatic. “Feel the sea! We’re nearly walking in it!”

  The landlady, who, once her teeth were in, had become a cheery woman with her gray hair in ringlets like a little girl’s, had recommended a pawnshop on the next street. At first the ease with which Oskar walked into the place and presented his knife to the proprietor reassured me. Then I considered the significance of his being familiar with such procedures.

  The pawnbroker didn’t offer as much as Oskar had expected. “Pretty case, but out here,” he said, pressing his thumb to the blade critically, “they’re wanting something bigger. Not much call for apple paring and twig whittling.” He sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Maybe some woman will buy it.”

  “How about this?” Oskar said. He produced our silver pickle fork.

  The man turned it over. “Good. No monogram.”

  He gave Oskar a few worn bills and pieces of silver. Oskar pushed the money deep into his pocket and looked carefully up and down the street before stepping out of the shop in a way that made me walk close to him until we reached Western Union.

  We used some of the silver to send a telegram to my parents: arrived san francisco.

  “That’s only three words,” Oskar pointed out. “You could say three times as much for the same money.”

  I shook my head. Expressing my complicated feelings would require far more than six or seven extra words.

  After much studying of the maps in the guide (I had to admit it was useful), we clambered onto a cable car—for which we had to spend more silver—and its thrilling, lurching ride, crawling up the hills and barreling down the other side, lifted my spirits again. Our stop was in a district of buildings made of shining white stone that were tiered like wedding cakes, but the address listed in Oskar’s letter didn’t correspond to any of the confections. His interview and exam—the means by which some unknown person or persons would determine whether he would suit as an assistant lighthouse keeper—would be in a low gray rectangle. I could see that whoever worked there would care for nothing but straight answers and strict adherence to rules.

  The Customs Offices were just inside the door, as befitted their importance, and Philip spotted us at once. Since I knew no more about him than that Oskar’s father approved of him, I expected a youthful version of the great man (if such a being were possible), but Philip, a rumpled young man with a beaky nose and a large smile, was warm and welcomed us with a charming, self-deprecating manner.

  “But you won’t be finished until five o’clock, you know,” he said apologetically to Oskar.

  “That’s all right.” Oskar pulled the guidebook from his jacket. “Trudy’ll have a look at the city.”

  Philip frowned. “I don’t think she should wander around on her own. I mean, she doesn’t know the first thing about the place. The wharves are pretty rough, for instance, and you never know about Chinatown.”

  Oskar looked at me. “Stay off the wharves and away from Chinatown, all right?”

  I giggled. “Yes, sir!”

  Although I may have shared Philip’s trepidation, I dared not express it. In any case, I had no desire to spend my time in the Paris of the West sitting in our dirty little boardinghouse room. “I have the guide,” I said brightly.

  “We’ll meet at the house at half past six,” Oskar said. “And we’ll take Philip somewhere to celebrate.”

  The two of them went off down the corridor. I listened until their footsteps stopped and a door closed behind them. Then I took myself back out onto the street alone.

  I spent the morning marching through the gloom
on the most respectable, well-populated streets, gathering notes in my head for my letters, aware that I would enjoy the place more in the telling than in the somewhat tense experience. At the malodorous fishing docks, I turned west for a time and skirted the city, taking comfort in the water that was darker and greener but not so different from the water I knew well. Now that I wasn’t climbing, I had to walk briskly to stay warm—so strange to feel cold in July—and soon I turned inland to escape the chill and was faced with another hill.

  When I reached the top, the sun at last broke through, and suddenly, the day was blue and clear, the air fresher than I’d ever experienced. To the west, in a vast open space, I spotted soldiers massing, rows of tents, and whole herds of horses. With a thrill, I understood that they were readying themselves to board a ship to the Philippines. The events of the wide world were shaping themselves before my eyes.

  I watched them for a time and then began to walk in what I knew must be the general direction of our boardinghouse. The neighborhoods I traversed were ordinary in their makeup—the bakeries and butcher shops, greengrocers and saloons not so different from those in Milwaukee—but they seemed more interesting somehow, their signs more colorful, their wares more vibrant, simply by virtue of being in this place.

  I walked up and down more hills, past brightly painted, shingled, and sometimes turreted houses, and then through some neighborhoods without any paint at all. I heard people speaking a language I thought must be Spanish or Italian; maybe I heard both. Confident of my direction and sure that I must be within a mile or so of our boardinghouse, I stopped consulting the guide. If I didn’t happen upon the right street, I could always get my bearings again or inquire. I wasn’t such a ninny that I couldn’t find my way home. I was pleased with myself and eager to tell Oskar about all I’d seen.

  Then I made a mistake. I didn’t realize my error at first; the blocks along which I walked resembled those from which I’d come, the cobbled streets muddy, the houses two-story wooden structures. It was the writing on the signs that first caught my attention, slashing lines, jumbles of sticks and rods, more foreign to my eye than Spanish or Italian could ever be.