The Edge of the Earth

by Christina Schwarz

  I was relieved that Oskar had finished his talks with Archie. I didn’t want Archie Johnston coming into our house again.

  CHAPTER 26

  EVENTUALLY, THE RAIN and wind faltered, and for stretches of days the sky was a clear, washed blue and the sun burned steadily. It was foreign weather to me, the air being cold but the sun fierce, so that both extremes of temperature made themselves felt at once. The gold-tinged landscape I’d grown accustomed to in the fall had become vivid with greens and blues. Shoots pushed up between cracks in the rock and seemed to spread by the hour until the morro had bejeweled itself in orange paintbrush and yellow lupine. I thought of Archie piling flowers in Helen’s lap.

  I’d begun to look askance at Archie Johnston. I couldn’t decide whether he’d hoped she might love him or whether he was simply a monster, so I kept well clear of him.

  The pain in Oskar’s leg lessened, and he became restless. He complained that he’d read through all of the library and that he was tired of pilot bread and bully beef. Indeed, we were all sick of the sailors’ rations to which we’d been reduced. Though we joked about scurvy, constant expectation and repeated disappointment had made us all, even mild Mr. Crawley, irritable by the time a longboat landed on the beach on a gray and dripping day in February. I eagerly opened a bulky package addressed to me in a familiar slanted hand.

  Dear Trudy—

  I’m delighted to hear from you. What fascinating experiences you must be enjoying. It was most kind of you to send these specimens. Some are well known to me from pictures, but some I’ve never seen before. I wonder if you might be willing to ship more of these creatures to Milwaukee so that I could use them in my class. We could study the external features of dried specimens—in that case, variety is wanted—but I would also like at least thirty of a single type preserved in a flexible state. Since I don’t know in what quantity these items present themselves, I must leave the choice as to which in your hands.

  I’ve enclosed some issues of a magazine that prints, among its last pages, advertisements from companies that sell preserving alcohol and appropriate containers. I’ve also taken the liberty of enclosing a check for ten dollars from my college account to act as a down payment. If this proposition is of no interest to you, simply tear it up.

  Your drawings are very fine, and I do encourage you to continue with them, with an eye toward eventual publication as a catalog of Pacific tidal life. I can find no record of several of the organisms you’ve represented, so you would be doing biology a great service, indeed, were you to commit all of your discoveries to paper.

  Yours very truly,

  Cecelia Dodson

  I read the letter twice. Admittedly, the flatness of the first few lines was a disappointment. I’d hoped, I saw now, for a livelier interest in my life and a more intimate correspondence. Still, I experienced a frisson at the signature. I’d been aware of Miss Dodson’s first name but had never presumed to think of her as anything other than “Miss.” And her proposal—the idea that things I collected could become a part of Miss Dodson’s class, that girls in Milwaukee, even Miss Dodson (Cecelia Dodson!) herself, would examine them, marking down what they observed in their laboratory books—delighted me. Even more exciting was the thought that a catalog I could devise would interest my teacher, not in the condescending way she would note the efforts of a student but as work that would truly expand her knowledge.

  Since Euphemia and I had grown closer, I’d realized that she’d been starving for friendship. Now I saw that whether she’d been aware of it or not, she’d also been in need of a means by which to reach into the world beyond our mountain, for she was as animated as I by Miss Dodson’s plan. In the lighthouse at night, I paged through the scientific journals Miss Dodson had sent and read out choice bits. One of our favorite articles involved experiments performed on my old friend the sea urchin. It seemed that a fellow in Switzerland had divided an urchin egg in two, and from each half egg, he’d grown half an urchin.

  “What was the point,” Euphemia said, laughing, “of growing half an urchin?”

  I explained that if only half a creature grew from a divided egg, it would mean that every cell, even in the tiniest of eggs, had been assigned from the moment of its existence—maybe before—to be a crumb of the heart or the stomach and, in the case of more complex creatures, the fingers, toes, ears, or tongue. Each cell had its role, and that role was preordained, maybe not by God, exactly, but by its nature. It would be impossible to change that nature, no matter how hard one might try.

  Then a second scientist said the first was dead wrong. When he repeated the experiment, the half-eggs grew into whole urchins. I found this notion pleasing, believing it meant that if something were damaged—even cut entirely in two—it might adapt and, given time enough to grow, become whole again. In a leap of the kind Oskar might make between the physical and philosophical realms, I conceived of myself as a being that had been severed in two when I’d left the place that had formed me and come to this world where so little was familiar. I was beginning to feel filaments start to grow from the half that remained, and I sensed I was adapting and becoming whole again.

  We also studied the advertisements. Before I could collect any specimens to preserve “in a flexible state,” I’d have to procure containers that would neither corrode nor easily break—heavy glass, probably—and enough ethanol or some such chemical to act as a preservative. I liked the serious sound of the Chicago Scientific Company, “supplier of reliable apparatus and chemical glassware,” along with “a complete line of reagents, stains, lacquers, and cements.” I could make over Miss Dodson’s check to them and ask them to send thirty jars.

  “Better make it thirty-five,” Euphemia said. “Some are bound to break.” She then did the figures in the margin of our logbook and determined that I had enough money for seventy jars and the alcohol to fill them. “If we’re going to have a business,” she said, “we’d best be prepared for future orders.”

  The avidity with which she tackled what had almost immediately become our endeavor surprised me. She’d always been energetic, but in a grim, dutiful way. Now she brightened and bubbled; it was as if the idea of organizing a business had opened some long-dammed passage inside her, and her enthusiasm and ideas rushed forth. Through night after stormy night in the lighthouse, collecting and selling biological specimens became our electromagnetism. The long, dark stretches of time between the trimming and the filling, together with our awareness of the long, dark stretches of space that surrounded us, encouraged us to lose perspective as we bandied our plans about. “How many colleges would you say this country has?” Euphemia asked one night. “Wouldn’t all of ’em need specimens?”

  We decided that the children could help gather. It was what they did, anyway. I must handle the chemicals, because they could be flammable and, Euphemia suspected, dangerous in other ways as well. She wouldn’t want to see any of her children pickled!

  We would pack the jars of preserved specimens and the boxes of dry ones in grass and sawdust, as I’d done with my samples. Henry Crawley could be doing plenty more sawing, Euphemia said. The animal pens needed repair; the steam donkey could use a new platform. Oskar could make those shelves he’d promised. That would generate packing material for a good while.

  “And we always have plenty of empty barrels,” I added.

  Even figuring shipping into our costs, we determined that in two or three years, we likely would have built up a profitable business, supplying schools and laboratories all over the continent with crates of specimens preserved and dried.

  When our empire began to spread to Europe—“Think,” Euphemia said, “what the Swiss could do with our urchins!”—I reminded her that we must first compose an order to the Chicago Scientific Company.

  Without hesitation, she opened a fresh logbook, ripped a page from it, and handed it to me. “Write it on this.”

  CHAPTER 27

  ALTHOUGH OUR ORDERwas soon ready and the check enclos
ed, it had to await the tender, which would have to come twice before we could begin collecting specimens to preserve. In the meantime, I determined to work on the catalog. I surveyed the basic sketches I’d done of the creatures in our tubs. They were competent and detailed, reasonably good as far as they went, though I understood little about what I’d drawn and each picture stood alone, unrelated to the others. Bestowing some meaningful organization on a comprehensive volume would be difficult. I was irritated with myself for my lack of attention in my biology classes and wished for a more complete taxonomy than Some Species provided.

  What I was sure I could produce, and probably render better than nearly anyone else Miss Dodson knew, were studies that would show an entire tide pool and the arrangement of the creatures within it, perhaps indicate how they coexisted. I began to send the children to Oskar, so he could conduct morning lessons from his bed, while I went to the beach with one of the purloined logbooks under my arm.

  My custom was to wear shoes (my kid leather pair, because my work shoes were in the Indian’s care) until I’d slithered down the side of the morro, since its stones were sharp, but abandon them along with my stockings as soon as I reached the sand. I acquired the knack of walking on the packed stuff at the water’s edge, where my feet seemed to skim the surface, leaving a trail that vanished in the space of a wave. When I reached the rocks, I tucked the skirt of my duster into my bloomers—no one would see me, after all—and plunged into the froth, working my way around the spit of rock that marked the end of our beach and the beginning of what I thought of as “her” territory.

  The pool lined with urchins was my favorite. I could spend two hours there easily, perched on a certain comfortable rock, drawing and turning in my mind the problems Nature set for me. I asked myself what business these creatures had being bright and beautiful—the dark red and the brilliant blue starfish, the violet sea urchins, the aqua anemones. It seemed dangerous for them to call attention to themselves; it must make them easy prey for those that might want to pluck them out and eat them. Surely it would be safer to meld with the gray and black of the rocks or the green of the weeds. I tried to observe what frightened these creatures and what tempted them forward, the means by which they moved and the ways in which they protected themselves. I thought about their small scope, whole lives passed in a basin, neither knowing nor caring what lay beyond the rock wall beside them. While they stayed still, their surroundings changed; with every tide, old water seeped away and a fresh supply replaced it. Whatever the waves carried in was invisible to me, but it was obviously essential to these creatures.

  Inevitably, while I was in this place, my mind would stray to thoughts of that other being who made her home here. As a child, I’d read that Indians could become nearly invisible, so completely could they blend with their surroundings. I often studied the shadows between the rocks, trying to determine whether a dark curve might be a hank of black hair or whether a flutter of light was the movement of the hem of a bark skirt.

  More than once, pretending even to myself that I was merely searching for new pools, I made my way down the narrow passage to her cave and stood again in the doorway, examining the silky floor and the shell bowls and the tightly woven baskets. As far as I could tell, the place hadn’t changed since the children had shown it to me. I worried that, wary of our smell, she’d abandoned it, like a bird its nest. I felt inexplicably desolate at the thought.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  One afternoon I saw that she had come to my tide pool before me. Arranged in a perfect circle on my rock was a single abalone shell on a leather thong. I knew it was a gift for me.

  That day I did no drawing but wandered in widening rings, peering half hopefully, half fearfully into hidey-holes between the rocks and among the piles of logs. I longed to see her; at the same time, I shrank from an encounter. I was terrified that she might be like the Indian I’d seen from the train, shuffling and gaping, dirty and debased. Perhaps she would beg, as that woman had. I wondered if I would appear marvelous and strange to her, and whether she would want to touch my fine hair and the refined fabric of my dress, the way Indians did in books. I searched as long as I dared, knowing that the tide would come in relentlessly and the sun would inevitably dart below the horizon. I found no other sign of her.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I arrived home much later than usual, and I let more time ebb away while I built up the fire in the stove and absently stirred some sort of meat and vegetable in a pan for our supper. When I came into our bedroom with the tray at last, Oskar was standing beside the bed. He’d begun recently to test his leg, hobbling between the two rooms upstairs. He feared it had lost a little of its length in the healing, but since it wouldn’t bear his full weight, he couldn’t tell.

  He lowered himself onto the mattress, closing his eyes briefly with the pain of that movement. “Where’ve you been?”

  I’d used those same words and peevish tone months before, when he’d not shown up for dinner at the time I’d expected. How changed I was as I stood here wearing my duster, my hair as carelessly pinned as Euphemia’s, barefoot, with an Indian’s amulet hanging from my neck. The only evidence of the Milwaukee girl that my family and friends might have recognized was the coral necklace that had been my Christmas present over a year before. The necklace he’d taken so as to feel close to me.

  I’d tucked the abalone shell into my dress while I’d heated our dinner, unsure whether I wished to share it. But the sight of Little O, hurt and helpless, moved me. I remembered following his fingers down the pages of his books as he opened the world for me. I remembered how his eager eyes had appreciated me as no one else’s had. I remembered the rapture of his hand on mine.

  “I went to the rocks. Look.” With the care that seemed to befit its import, I lifted the thong over my head and held it out to him.

  “What’s this? Something the children made?”

  “No. It’s from her. She left it for me.”

  His eyes brightened, as I’d known they would. He turned the abalone over several times and ran his fingers along the leather.

  It was nothing, really. The children could have made it. Abalone shells come equipped with breathing holes, so she’d needed to do nothing more than thread the leather through one of them and tie a knot. What had impressed me was that she’d given it to me.

  But Oskar was curious about the object itself. “What is it used for, I wonder. Is it spiritual or practical?”

  “Isn’t it just a necklace?” I reached to take it back. He ignored my hand.

  “I doubt it. It may not be meant to be worn around the neck.” He frowned. “Give me your notebook.”

  I passed him my catalog-in-progress. He flipped haphazardly through the pages until he found a clean one.

  “I’ll need a pencil as well.” He was impatient to begin. “Get me a ruler from the workshop, would you?”

  I obliged him in this, too, wondering what information he might glean. What I saw as a token from one woman to another, he perceived as an artifact that might reveal a sliver of humankind’s very nature.

  While I looked on, Oskar measured, weighed, described, and traced; he noted that one edge had some dirt clinging to it and another appeared worn. In the end, however, his rendition of the thing on paper didn’t much resemble the actual object.

  “Here,” I said. “Let me draw it.” I couldn’t capture the iridescence of the abalone, but my sketch recorded the correct shape and size and the relative roughness and smoothness of the surfaces. In other words, I drew a convincing picture of a shell on a string.

  “Do we know anything more?” I asked, returning to the bedroom sometime later with the dinner I’d reheated. He’d apparently finished his examination, and the pendant hung from one of the knobs at the head of the bed.

  “I suppose not.” He shrugged. “It’s just one piece, completely out of context. We need a much fuller picture if we’re going to make anything of it.”

  CHAPTER 28

  B
ETWEEN THE TIME I’d spent among the rocks and the hours I’d devoted to examining the pendant with Oskar, I’d lost all opportunity for sleep. When I reported to the lighthouse for my shift, I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours. I finished my first round of chores—refilling the oil reservoirs, clipping the wicks, changing the mantles, and setting the chain at the top of the tower—and then pulled the table underneath the spot where the chain of the foghorn came inching down, climbed onto it, and folded a rag under my head. I counted on the chain’s cold, heavy touch to awaken me, knowing that then I would have the time it would take for the chain to travel the distance from the tabletop to the floor in which to run up the stairs and pull it to the top so as to keep the horn sounding its proper rhythm. The table was a hard bed, but I was asleep the moment I closed my eyes. In what seemed like minutes later, I was awakened not by the chain but by a hand on my arm.

  “Dangerous,” Archie Johnston said, “sleeping by a burning lantern.” His breath was sharp with liquor, and he smelled unwashed. “I saw you today on the beach. Far down the beach. What were you doing there?”

  “Drawing. I’m making a catalog of—”

  He shook his head violently. “Not that. I don’t care about that.” He clutched my arm again. “What you had around your neck. It’s hers, isn’t it? Did she give it to you?”