The Edge of the Earth
Page 25
Euphemia had remembered to put my letter to the Chicago Scientific Company into the mail pouch. Although it must have been dampened by its time in the ocean, it was obviously legible, since the jars and chemicals arrived on the next tender. Our business slowly grew much in the way we’d envisioned it during those nights we’d kept the light together; we were careful to cull only a few specimens, the way my mother had taught me to cut flowers from her garden, so that there would always be more.
Within the first year, it was clear that we were observed at our work, because prettily woven baskets full of whatever we were hunting appeared on the cairn. I wondered what Helen imagined we were doing with these things, but I was grateful less for the specimens themselves than for the evidence that she was alive and considered herself a friend to us.
Euphemia drove us to expand, scouring the journals to which I was soon subscribing, picking out biologists who might be interested in our “authentic Pacific Coast specimens,” as she put it in the letters she sent. Our lighthouse logo, a duplicate of the china print, was her idea, and she affixed it with great satisfaction to each crate.
After what seemed a very few years, Mary went to San Francisco to enroll in business college, and the boys, one after the other, joined the navy. They wanted to see some of the places we’d marked with pebbles on my trunk. I had hope that Jane would stay to work with me. She’d developed a keen interest in biology and had always taken pleasure in her drawing. I thought together we might produce a finer, more comprehensive edition of the catalog. But she was infected with the longing to make her own life or create her own destiny or some such youthful nonsense. One day she left on the tender that took her to the train in San Francisco that took her to a normal school in San Jose. I never saw her again.
Only a little time later, the Crawleys left me, too, following their youngest daughter to San Jose. Although we did not, in the end, provide urchins to Switzerland, we were by that time supplying enough colleges and universities in the United States and Canada with specimens “dried and preserved” that Euphemia and Henry could afford to retire from the Lighthouse Service and open a grocery store.
Oskar’s ambitions had made me fear the consequences of anyone else discovering Helen, and so that I might keep the world away from Point Lucia, I fought for permission to tend the light without assistants when I became chief lighthouse keeper. The new inspector, Mr. Roberts’s successor, understood that I couldn’t easily be replaced, especially since he himself wasn’t familiar with all the procedures at the light station, and when he saw that I was capable of making life unpleasant for whomever was sent to assist me, he agreed to give me a fair chance—a week’s observation—to prove myself. In his later years as chief, Mr. Crawley had built an ingenious system of pulleys and platforms so that the oil could be transported to the light with little effort, and the mechanism that controlled the foghorn had been improved so that it could go hours longer without resetting. (That Oskar might have engineered such advancements, had he been less concerned with dazzling, wasn’t lost on me.) In the end, the Lighthouse Service wasn’t sorry to save itself a great deal of money in salaries and supplies. They set me up with a radiotelegraph—apparently, electricity was in the air—and told me to study the code so that I could communicate with a passing ship in case of emergency.
Since the Crawleys have gone, I’ve collected fewer specimens, having become uncomfortably aware that I’m doing to these helpless creatures precisely what Oskar wished to do to Helen. I concentrate on my own studies instead. My hours of gazing into the tide pools have made me think of these tiny bodies of water as simplified versions of the world at large, and so as convenient opportunities to examine the ways in which each species, and perhaps each individual organism affects the others with which it shares its limited world. It’s a romantic notion, I admit, but I’ve written a handful of articles on the subject, and the scientific community has been for the most part gratifyingly receptive.
My parents did visit. I had not, after all, crossed an ocean in the nineteenth century, as they had done. They urged me to return “home” now that, as my mother said, nothing held me “to the edge of the earth.” I declined, obviously, and by now my old world is mostly a shimmer of memory beyond the mountains, although Lucy and I correspond still. She can’t imagine my life nor I hers, and her descriptions of concerts and cookery and her work at the Settlement House have the same fairy-tale quality that my mother’s stories of the gilt-legged tables and ceramic shepherdesses of Hamburg had for me as a child. I once asked Philip to visit the shop in San Francisco where we had pawned our things. The silver toilet set and the pocketknife were gone. He sent me a pickle fork, but I don’t think it was the right one.
I’ve recently begun a new project—although Euphemia would laugh—a sort of collage affixed to the tower. I pretend it’s a monument, a way of melding the lighthouse with its surroundings, but it’s a means of preserving the last of what I can’t bear to lose, the detritus and wonders the children collected, the occupants of my nursery.
I have not been entirely alone. Not long after the baskets of specimens appeared on the cairn, the children began meeting Helen again among the rocks. The space between us began to dissolve. It may have been because Archie had gone, although I like to think that my coming, too, had a hand in it. First she met us openly on the beach. Eventually, she and I taught the children to swim, and then she took them farther out and taught them how to dive for abalone. At last she showed herself at the top of the morro, delivering her offerings in person, rather than leaving them on the cairn, and she stayed to eat with us at the plank table above the sea. She would never move into the empty house, although the Crawleys and I did our best to make clear she was welcome. At the end of an evening, she would always go back down the mountain.
So even after all the others had gone, I had a friend who helped me gather plants and animals from deep water where I feared to dive, who arranged my cans in pyramids when she came to visit me, for whom I named a crab in my catalog—Pugettia Helena—although, as Oskar would have pointed out, that wasn’t her real name.
She lived for twenty-six more years, and I suspect she knew when her life was nearly over, for she spent many months carefully fashioning a dress of fully feathered bird skins. I have more than once displayed it to Oskar in my dreams. When I found her lying still and cold, she was wearing the dress along with the coral necklace that I’d given her at last some years before. If her body is ever disinterred, I wonder what theory will arise from the discovery of a California Indian in a necklace made of Florida coral. No one will guess that it came to her by way of Wisconsin.
I’m free to go now, I suppose, but I believe I’ll stay. Here, I’ve experienced a world beyond my imagining; here, I’ve walked on my own feet. Here, at the edge of the earth, I am content.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’M GRATEFUL TO the resolute Jennifer Rudolph Walsh for her toughness and kindness, as well as for her insightful and generous reading. Because of her, I can make a living writing books. I’m grateful to the warm Greer Hendricks for her acute perception, meticulous care, and bolstering enthusiasm. It seems that I can’t write a novel without Caitlin Flanagan to prop me up. In this case, I was particularly demanding and she met the almost daily challenge with her characteristic big-heartedness and dazzling creative instincts. So many friends honored drafts of this manuscript with their time, attention, and honest and helpful reactions: I thank Jennifer Stuart Wong, Jenny Kowal, Abigail Deser, Gina Hahn, Barbara Faculjak, Sonja Alarr, Cindy Davis Stephenson, Linda Rudell-Betts, and Alan and Kathy Buster. For help with German translations and spellings, I thank Belinda Cooper and Nick Meyer, who also explained some facts about electromagnetism. The scene on the western train platform owes much to Helen Hunt Jackson’s poetic and lively account of her trip across the United States, Bits of Travel at Home, published in 1878. I’m indebted to Ben and Nicky Schwarz for their willingness to survive on pizza for weeks at a time. Above all,
I trust Ben to tell me when I’ve gone wrong and when I’ve got it right. I’m grateful for his inflexible expectations, his unstinting commitment, and his uncompromising editorial eye. He is the best reader I know.
CHRISTINA SCHWARZ is the author of three previous novels, including the Oprah Book Club pick Drowning Ruth. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, she lives in Southern California.
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AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY Deone Jahnke
ALSO BY CHRISTINA SCHWARZ
Drowning Ruth
All Is Vanity
So Long at the Fair
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First Atria Books hardcover edition April 2013
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ISBN: 978-1-4516-8367-7 ISBN: 978-1-4516-8372-1