“I can.”
The girl, who at first had sat trustingly in her uncle’s arms, an elbow hooked around his neck, bent away from him like a drooping flower and reached for her mother.
“I have a right,” Archie said. “She’s mine.”
He’d been undone, I saw, by grief and unhappiness. I understood the power of these emotions now.
“She’s not yours,” I insisted calmly and firmly. “Your baby died.”
Helen’s voice came from the boat. She was speaking in her own tongue, a stream of urgent, incomprehensible syllables.
“She’s right.” Oskar let go of my hand and stepped toward Archie tentatively, as if approaching a madman. “I’m sorry, but your child died years ago. You know that.”
Archie didn’t look at us. He kept his eyes on Euphemia, sister and mother both to him, and she looked steadily back. She held her arms out. “Please, Archie, think of Janie. Give her to me.”
I thought I saw his shoulders shift, as if he were readying his arms to do as she asked.
“That’s right,” Inspector Roberts broke in. “Your baby is dead, Johnston. Yes, it was recorded in the logbook. It was some time ago, but I have a memory for these details. ‘Baby Johnston born and buried.’”
Jane had straightened herself. Anxiously, she rubbed the blue appliquéd flower on the bib of her pinafore with sandy fingers.
Archie gave her a little shake so that her head bobbed up and down. “Jane is Baby Johnston,” he snapped. “She belongs to me.”
Inspector Roberts looked from Archie to the Crawleys. “I suppose you expect me to order that the child be cut in half.” He shook his head in disgust. “We’ve got to go before this fog gets any thicker, or we’ll miss our chance. We’ll sort this out in San Francisco and send her back, if need be.” He wiped his palms together briskly, ridding himself of the last grains of sand, the dirt of this place, and climbed into the boat.
As the two sailors heaved at the hull with their shoulders, its flat bottom began to slide along the wet sand.
“Goddammit, Archie. Put Jane down!” Mr. Crawley lunged for his brother-in-law, but Archie was too quick. He dropped Jane onto one of the seats and jumped in after her.
“Trudy! Come on!” Oskar was sitting on the gunwale, one leg in and one leg out of the boat. He stretched out his hand to me.
Jane was howling piteously; Helen’s face was hidden by her hands and her hair. The thought of being any part of this kidnapping revolted me, but I knew that I’d already caused enormous damage, and I wouldn’t compound it by abandoning them. I grasped Oskar’s fingers and let him pull me into the boat.
Immediately, Jane scrambled into my lap. “I don’t want to go on the boat!” she cried. “I want my mama!”
I tried to soothe her as the sailors pushed us away from the shore. They held the boat steady until they were nearly shoulder-deep in the water, and then they hoisted themselves over the gunwales with practiced ease and each grabbed an oar. The surf was breaking directly before us. The trick, I saw, was to get the boat over the foaming curl without being forced back to shore or, worse, capsized. To me, the feat seemed impossible, and the inspector, who was struggling to control the tiller, looked as if he agreed.
“We’re too heavy,” he barked. “Too low in the water.”
We yawed suddenly, caught by the force of the break, and our bow slipped north. I could feel the wave catching hold, lifting the starboard side high, tilting the port gunwale dangerously close to the water.
Jane shrieked, her mouth against my neck.
“For God’s sake, can’t you shut her up?” Archie said.
Oskar scrambled over the seats to the back of the boat and shouldered the inspector brusquely aside. He tucked the tiller under his arm and hugged it against his chest. Once I might have admired the skill with which he encouraged the boat to nose over the top of the wave and then steadied it as it collapsed into the trough, but now the way he controlled our course struck me as arrogant and his confidence unnatural.
The bow teetered upward as another wave, traveling just behind the first, caught us. I clutched Jane with one hand, grasping the edge of my seat as well as I could with the other to keep from tipping backward off the bench. As the wave passed beneath us, we tottered forward, and I braced my feet against the floor, buckling at the waist, trying to keep from spilling headfirst onto Helen and the empty barrels in the bow. Spray shot in all directions, pummeling our faces with cold, salty wet.
Beside me, our steamer trunk rocked on its end. The sailors had loaded it into the boat while I had been focused on Helen and Jane. I understood what its presence meant. Oskar was going back in triumph; we wouldn’t come here again.
Helen’s face was still buried in her hands. All I could see were her fingers and her hair, which hung heavy and tangled as kelp. I’d reduced her to this, a hopeless, faceless thing.
Over and over we plunged, I assumed toward the tender, which must have been anchored not too far from the shore, although I could see nothing but gray fog and darker gray water. The boat shuddered with every fall as the waves punished us for this journey and tried to drive us back. Sickness, my own internal waves, rose high in my throat, sickness at what we were doing, ripping this woman up by the roots. And what about Jane? Oskar had promised to take her back when we reached the tender, but I no longer believed he would do anything that didn’t suit his purposes.
I turned and shouted over my shoulder. “Oskar! Go back! Turn back!”
“What?”
“I want to go back!”
A blast of water, cold as if there’d been no spring, hit me in the face.
“No!” he shouted. “Look! We’re nearly there!”
Indeed, the fog had momentarily thinned, and I could differentiate the dark form of the tender from the thick air. We were nearly there. The hideous sickness rose in me again. I knew the inspector was right. Helen would die; she would be a subject, a specimen, delivered to other Oskars and other Archies to be examined under a microscope until she succumbed to tuberculosis or measles or one of the other ills our civilization harbored. I had delivered her. I may as well have popped her into a jar of embalming fluid.
And what would happen to Jane?
“I’m sorry.” My voice was drowned out by the wind; my tears were indistinguishable from the ocean water that ran down my face. My sorrow was compounded by the futility of my apology. Neither of them would understand me anyway.
And then, as we lurched over the crest of yet another wave, a buffet of wind lifted a hank of Helen’s hair, and I saw that she was not bent over herself in despair. She was biting, gnawing steadily, with her yellow, worn teeth on the rope that bound her wrists.
“Helen!”
I heaved myself to my feet, Jane wrapped tightly around me, and began to stagger awkwardly toward the bow.
“What are you doing? Sit down!” the inspector snapped.
The boat dipped and I with it, nearly losing my balance. Another dose of cold water flew over the gunwale, soaking the front of my dress and the back of Jane’s.
“Sit down, Trudy!” Oskar yelled. “What are you doing? You’ll tip the boat!”
What was I doing? I felt as if I were yanking myself free of a current in which I’d been caught. I had loved him, joined him, gone with him, followed him, but now I could think of nothing but stopping the destruction we two had set in motion.
“Sit down!” Archie made a lunge at me.
“No! We’re going back! We’re going back!”
Helen had freed her hands, and she bent over her feet, tugging at the ropes, trying to find the weak points. The tender stood out clearly, only about fifty yards away. The captain had seen us and was calling to the boilerman to stoke the engine.
Archie’s arms closed around Jane and me together, as if we were one of the barrels. He dragged at us, trying to force me back onto the bench. Then Helen rose. I can’t say there was understanding between us, but we were bent to a common cause. When th
e next swell began to lift the boat, we leaned together, Helen, Jane, and I, concentrating our combined weight against the gunwale that was already dipping dangerously low. We leaned together, and we overturned the boat.
It’s one thing to have cold water splash your skin and another to be submerged in it. I remember the shock and the freezing rush around my ears as I plunged. Little Jane was like a stone around my neck, and my heavy skirt tangled around my legs like a mermaid’s fingers. I buried my fingers in the crossed straps of Jane’s pinafore to hold her tight against my chest, and then I kicked and kicked, drawing my legs together, as I’d seen little octopi do in our tubs.
Jane and I surfaced as a two-headed creature, gulping the breathable air. For a moment I could see nothing but the gray-green slope of the next wave that bore down upon us, but rather than break over us, it lifted us to its crest along with a small, empty kerosene keg over which I easily threw my free arm. The tender had dropped its lifeboat, and within minutes I was twisting Jane’s straps around a boat hook that the captain himself held out to us.
They’d come to our rescue first, but the rest were close by. While the captain wrapped Jane in a blanket, I looked anxiously for Helen’s dark head among the men. She wasn’t beside the two sailors who’d heaved themselves over the hull of the capsized longboat, nor near the inspector who’d grabbed one of the floating oars. Nor was she with Archie, who clung to a large barrel. I craned my neck, but in every direction I could see only waves, riding relentlessly toward the shore now shrouded in murk. I was hopeful; I didn’t think a woman who could dive for abalones and spear fish while swimming was likely to drown when the shore was in reach.
I searched for Oskar, too, and when I didn’t spot him at once, I assumed that he was beyond the next wave or on the far side of the capsized boat or hidden by one barrel or another. After all, he had no reason to swim away. But soon I was screaming his name, standing on the seat to extend my view and trying to scrape at the fog with my eyes. This time no one tried to make me sit down.
We rowed in widening circles for an hour while the foghorn moaned. Jane was shaking with cold and I with a fear that made me vomit over the side. We found the mail pouch and all of the barrels, but Oskar, along with our valise and our trunk, was gone.
“A drowned man ought to float,” the captain insisted stubbornly.
It was then I remembered all he’d sewn into his pockets—the ax head; the pestle; the flat rock “possibly for grinding acorns”; the scraper “perhaps used to clean hides or peel bark”; the smaller version of the same “likely used for scaling fish”; the pieces of jade, bored through and strung on a twenty-six-inch length of braided hair, “ornamental, ceremonial, or spiritual”; among many others, more than enough to drag him to the bottom.
At last the captain would search no longer, and we rowed back to the beach. The captain and the inspector rode the platform with us to the top, and they waited while Archie packed his things. The inspector said he’d overlook the kidnapping, since the child had been returned, but he couldn’t allow a man who’d been insubordinate to his superior to keep a post at a lighthouse. Archie muttered that he was done with the place anyway and couldn’t wait to be quit of it.
Euphemia told me later that the captain had come to her and Henry. “I may know what happened to the young man,” he’d said. “But it’s a raw thing for the widow to hear.” He told them that from the deck of the tender, before he’d stepped into the lifeboat, he’d seen Helen, or as he described her, “a strange beast with a human head and arms but a fish’s tail”—she’d not, apparently, been able to untie her feet in time—cutting through the waves like a porpoise in the direction of the beach. Such a creature, he maintained, might easily have consumed a man.
Jane
1977
WE’VE SEEN ALL through the buildings, watched the filmstrip and drunk the cocoa, and been encouraged to buy a key chain or a mug or a postcard of the Fresnel lens. The teenagers are beginning to slouch back down the morro of their own accord, their faces hidden in the wings of their hair. The little boy is hanging off his mother’s hand, suspending himself at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. It’s time to go.
As we’re making the turn at the base of the light tower, I think of one last thing. I walk to the edge and lean out to take a look at the cairn. Although it had always been difficult to see from this angle, I know just where to stand. But there’s nothing there except more brown rock.
Lydia gives a little gasp, hurries over, and begins to pluck at my arm. “Please. You’re far too close to the edge.”
I step back as I turn to her. I don’t want to give her a heart attack. “I was looking for the stones.” I hadn’t known it was a grave before I’d read Trudy Swann’s story. To me, it had been more like an altar.
“What’s that, dear?” Lydia’s raincoat is folded over her arm. She holds a hand against her brow to shield her eyes from the sun as she squints at me, puzzled and a little impatient.
“The pile of smooth stones. It used to be below the light tower here.”
“Oh, you mean the baby. Yes, I don’t like to mention it if there are, you know, children in the group. It might upset them.”
She doesn’t ask how I know. Some people have no sense of curiosity.
“Someone threw the stones away. Probably the same who shot the windows up. You know how people are. It’s better, I think, that the little body is unmarked. Who knows what people might do in a place like this?”
“So there’s still a body there?”
“Oh, yes. Lucius Crawley. The name was carved right into the tiny coffin. I like to think of him as a little angel now. The angel of the lighthouse.”
We were walking down, and I had to take Danny’s arm and concentrate on where I was placing my feet and on not thinking about the pain in my knees. Then, too, at my age it takes a long time for understanding to bubble up through years of sludgy assumptions. It wasn’t until I’d packed myself into his Japanese box and we were bowling along what I still think of as the “new” highway, looking west at the brave stand of buildings and that breast of a mountain upon which I’d been raised, that I realized that the little Crawley grave confirmed the suspicion I’d formed when I’d read Mrs. Swann’s story. I was the mermaid’s daughter.
Trudy Swann had written that she wanted “someone to know how she lived.” The mermaid, I believed she meant, the woman she had saved. But now I saw how I, too, had lived. Three times I’d been delivered into the world, first by the one who had birthed me, then by the one who had raised me, and then by the one who had restored me to them both.
“Let me tell you,” I said to Danny as we rounded a bend and Point Lucia was no more, “about Trudy Swann. I want someone to know how she lived.”
EPILOGUE
FOR SOME MONTHS, I was in a dark state and unable to pick up my old routine of schoolteaching and housework. Nevertheless, the lighthouse had to be tended, and only the Crawleys and I remained to do it, so I took my turn there, insisting on covering Oskar’s night shift. Sleep was impossible for me, anyway. Through the long stretches in the boiler room, I tried to read or develop new lessons for the children, but my mind wouldn’t take hold of the words or figures. I couldn’t even sew. An hour after I’d taken a garment into my lap, I would discover myself sitting idle, having added only two loose stitches to a seam or a patch.
Nightly, I was drawn to the catwalk, where I would stand with my waist pressed against the slender rail, leaning into the blackness, looking. Although I didn’t dare articulate my yearning, I wished fiercely for both Oskar and Helen to materialize again. I imagined so vividly each lying on the sand or caught in the rocks, in need of me, that I often thought I heard a human cry below or sensed a human movement on the moonlit beach, and I strained my ears and eyes for more. Inevitably, I had to admit that these signs had been created by my own mind, not by them. In the light of day, I had no hopes or illusions.
Euphemia, kindly, left meals in my kitchen, fro
m which I swallowed a little soup or chewed a bit of pilot bread while standing among the cans and sacks and bottles of provisions that had come with the inspector. Euphemia had stacked them as neatly as possible but, being strict about the organization of her own kitchen, thoughtfully left the putting away for the time when I was ready to face it. Two of our three store cupboards had been entirely bare by the time the tender had arrived, and at last I began with these, thinking to wipe them out with warm water and vinegar before filling them. When I opened the first, I discovered my mother’s linen tablecloth rolled into a bundle. I lifted it—it was surprisingly heavy—and unrolled it on the kitchen table. One by one appeared the tools from the workshop that we’d believed Helen had stolen. Her insistent “no,” when I’d gestured to her about the wholesale breaking of the windows, I now saw had been a denial.
∗ ∗ ∗
Philip sent a letter of condolence.
But what is this about a woman? he added in a postscript. I understand that she drowned as well, but was she really an Indian, as Roberts seems to think? No one has reported a local native, you know, for at least a quarter century. Should I come and investigate?
I replied that Oskar had indeed believed her to be an Indian, but who could say for sure? Oskar, I reminded him, had been imaginative and prone to enthusiasms. I implied that she might have been an eccentric, like the Yale man people talked about. Along with my letter, I sent a few primitive items that I’d asked the children to make—an awkward grass basket, a pinecone and mussel-shell “scraper,” a tool made of driftwood and a sharp bit of tin can. I claimed that we’d found these in the woman’s hut. Did he think they were, as Oskar had speculated, evidence of her Indianness? It hurt me to betray Oskar in this way, making him look a fool, but I’d learned to do what needed doing. Though Philip and I corresponded for many more years, he never mentioned the Indian again.
The Edge of the Earth Page 24
