The Edge of the Earth

by Christina Schwarz

  “I think this is dead,” I managed.

  “I suppose we ought to throw it away, then,” Mary said regretfully.

  “What can we do with all this?” I would speak to their mother.

  “I don’t know.” Mary’s tone was bright, as if the problem didn’t concern her.

  “You won’t tell Ma, will you?” Jane said. “She don’t like us keeping this stuff.”

  “No, she don’t,” said a deep voice from the doorway. I was so startled that I almost dropped the jar again, but it was only Mr. Johnston, who’d somehow crept up the stairs without our knowing. “Here,” he said, his tone unexpectedly kind as he dipped one hand into his shirt pocket. “I picked this up the other day.” He handed Jane a twisted tube of a shell, hollow as a drinking straw, while the two boys, who’d come up the stairs after him, crowded in.

  “Thank you!” Jane handed the shell ceremoniously to one of the boys, who placed it with care, although seemingly randomly, among the other flotsam and jetsam on the floor.

  Mr. Johnston hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “What’s in the trunk? Rocks?”

  “Did you really bring rocks?” the littler boy asked eagerly.

  “It must be our books,” I said. “I’m sorry it was difficult to move. We ought to have packed more novels and verse. The lighter stuff.”

  The children looked baffled, and Johnston, too, frowned at me for a moment before he raised his eyebrows. “Huh,” he said, and smiled as if he’d discovered something he’d not anticipated that pleased him.

  “Let’s see!” All of the children piled down in a rush, so I felt obliged to follow. Archie Johnston came after us in a leisurely way, as if the place were more his than mine.

  “Thank you, Mr. Johnston,” I said.

  I’d meant it as a dismissal, but he merely nodded. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  I might have begged off, said that I’d misplaced the key or wished to wait for Oskar, but the children were so expectant, I hadn’t the heart. At least my night things were secure in our valise, I thought as I parted the two halves of the trunk, exposing my personal possessions to Archie Johnston.

  The children’s pleasure soon overwhelmed my discomfort. Opening my trunk before them had the quality of Sir Richard Burton’s accounts of displaying matches and pocket watches to the Africans. My violin was stroked and plucked; my sketchpad admired, more, I fear, for its being nearly a whole volume of rich, blank pages available for marking than for the few stiff still lives, portraits, and landscapes I’d rendered. My pencils and pens were painstakingly tested. My feathered hat (only slightly crushed) and my paisley shawl were modeled; my rose geranium oil was sniffed. There was much scuffling and grabbing and shoving and poking, and when curiosity was sated, many items were grubby and disheveled. I supposed such behavior was typical of little boys, and the little girl was, after all, too young to know better, but I was surprised at Mary, who might be expected to fold a pair of stockings.

  For me, the greatest treasure were the bedsheets between which my mother had slid the same sachets she used in her own linen cupboard. By the time we reached them, Johnston had become bored and wandered out, so I was able to open them wide without self-consciousness. I took them upstairs, turned the mattress to what I hoped was its freshest side, and slid the sheets over it. Then I lay facedown on the bed, breathing in the dear, lost scent of home. This was a mistake, however, for almost immediately, the rank odor of the mattress bullied its way through. I rose quickly and hurried back down the stairs.

  “Is there anything to eat?” Jane asked. She was wearing my lavender gloves.

  “I wish there were.” Fully recovered from my ocean voyage, I was conscious of a keen hunger.

  “Ma might give you some raisins,” Edward said doubtfully.

  Just then, as if he’d summoned her, Mrs. Crawley appeared at the open door. “Edward, you know we haven’t got raisins.” She turned to me and said, as if in explanation, “We never open the new barrels until after supper. Sort of a ceremony for the children. Not much other than beans and fish tonight.”

  With curiosity as frank as her offspring’s, she studied the contents of my trunk, strewn about the parlor.

  “Look at this linen,” she clucked, holding up a scalloped-edged tablecloth. Her coarse fingers seemed likely to tear the dainty material. “I suppose you thought this was Pinos. Artist types visiting, painting vistas, writing poems, and whatnot. No need for fancy tablecloths here.” She refolded it without bothering to match up the edges. “No one comes here.” She appeared to take satisfaction in that alarming notion.

  Were these people to be all of our community then? My mother’s warm eyes, my father’s enclosing arms, Lucy’s bright laugh, and Miss Dodson’s encouraging smile all came crowding suddenly into my mind, so that I had to make a little cough to mask the sob that threatened to escape me. I didn’t see how this flinty and imperious woman could solace me for the loss of those I’d abandoned, and obviously, this lonely place would offer no one else. Oskar would have to be all to me here, and I to him.

  “All right. Well,” Mrs. Crawley continued briskly, dropping the linen back into my trunk, “the dinner is on. Get the men, why don’t you?”

  At first I thought this command was intended for me, but the two boys responded, rushing out the door and racing away. They shouldered each other roughly as they went, and I didn’t know how a mother could live in such a place and not fear every moment that her children would fall over the edge and be killed.

  Near the Crawleys’ front door, several long boards had been laid over trestles, and crude wooden benches had been aligned on either side of this makeshift communal table. One end was crowded with a stack of the same thick china that was in my kitchen, along with a heap of silver, tumblers, a pitcher, and several iron pots.

  “This china pattern is charming,” I said. Where I came from, it was the sort of comment a woman might use to extend herself to another.

  “Really?” Mrs. Crawley said. She narrowed her eyes at the plate I’d held up, as if something she hadn’t noticed might appear. “It’s the same at every lighthouse. Keeps people from stealing it.” She gave a brief laugh. “Small chance of that here.”

  The meal was more stirred together than cooked, a stew of milk, salt pork, and the enormous fish we’d brought—ling cod, Mr. Crawley said it was—along with beans and cornbread, all swimming together on one plate. We were obviously expected to bow our heads while Mr. Crawley said grace, but it was hard to keep from raising my face to the wind, which seemed on this precipice to be sent directly from God Himself.

  “Will there be fruit after?” Edward asked, rather too close on the heels of the prayer.

  “Have we opened the barrels?” Mrs. Crawley countered.

  Since this led to no further conversation, I introduced a topic of my own. “Where do the children go to school?”

  “Oh, there’s no school at this post,” Mrs. Crawley said almost blithely.

  “Closest school’s in Monterey,” Mr. Crawley said, removing a fish bone from between his lips. The plates were accumulating little piles of white needles. “That’d be a couple days’ ride on a horse. Each way. Assuming we had a horse. Which, at present, we do not.”

  “What do they need with school?” Oskar said affably. He threw his arm out in a wide sweep, nearly knocking Mrs. Crawley’s tumbler off the table. “Nature herself should be their teacher. They should look up, like Whitman, ‘in perfect silence at the stars.’”

  I thought of how very unstarlike was the nature the children had piled in our house.

  “Did you learn from nature, Mr. Swann?” Mrs. Crawley asked, pinning a large chunk of cod to her plate with her fork.

  “Judging from the number of books Mrs. Swann has seen fit to heave as far as this rock,” Mr. Johnston put in as he rose to his feet, “I would guess she’s the educated sort. Maybe she could play schoolteacher.”

  Everyone, including the children, turned to look at me with new
interest.

  “Are you a teacher, Mrs. Swann?” Mrs. Crawley asked.

  “Oh, no. I’m afraid I have no experience. I doubt I would be much good.” My tongue tested the bit of salt pork in my mouth; it seemed to be mostly gristle.

  “But you’ve had enough schooling to be a teacher?” Mrs. Crawley persisted.

  “Well, I haven’t been to normal school, if that’s—”

  Oskar interrupted me. “Trudy would be an excellent teacher!”

  “You think it likely you know more than the children do?” Mrs. Crawley said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Trudy. You’ve been to college!” Oskar said.

  “That should be adequate,” Mrs. Crawley said, nodding. She wiped the milk that remained on her plate with a sponge of cornbread. And so the matter was apparently settled.

  Perceiving the irony of having traveled thousands of miles only to do what I might have done in a more elevated way in Milwaukee, I quietly swallowed my gristle.

  Oskar’s mood, however, continued to be expansive. He waved a hand at the golden and green flanks that rose so abruptly to the east. “There’s no one in those mountains?”

  Mrs. Crawley nodded her approval. “You’ve read the Service booklet, I see.”

  “Lighthouse Service don’t know everything,” Archie Johnston said. His sister gave him a stern look.

  “There’s that crazy Yale fellow,” Mr. Crawley put in, trying to lift the conversation again. “Lives in a hollowed-out tree.”

  “Do you enjoy living up here, Mrs. Crawley?” I was flustered by what had turned out to be my employment interview, but this was the sort of polite question I’d been taught so well to ask that I didn’t need to think about the words.

  “It’s a decent post,” she said, lifting her chin. “A good deal of work about the place, and no Chinese servant to do it, I can tell you that. With the animals, the children, the men, and the boiler, someone or something’s always demanding to be fed.”

  “Euphemia’s been keeping lights with me for over a dozen years,” Mr. Crawley said. “She knows the job well as I do.”

  “Two for the price of one,” Mrs. Crawley said dryly.

  By now the sun had grown weary of us and turned a cold shoulder on our gathering. The children, who’d bolted their food, had already slipped away, and the boys brought a banjo and a guitar out onto the front steps and began to pick some old tunes. I thought I might join them with my violin.

  Mrs. Crawley stood and began to reach around the table, stacking the dirty plates on top of her own. “Mrs. Swann and I will clean this mess up,” she said, reminding me that I wasn’t among the children here.

  In the dark scullery, Mrs. Crawley instructed me not unkindly but firmly, and I found myself nodding, eager to please. I must not waste water; I must not chip china (or the inspector would dock Oskar’s wages); soda crystals didn’t grow on trees.

  “Even if they did,” I said, “there are no trees.”

  My mother would have laughed at this, but Mrs. Crawley did not. When we’d finished, however, she invited me into her parlor to see her “collection.” Did everyone here have a such a thing?

  “Our father was a whaler,” Mrs. Crawley explained, stroking with one finger half a set of wooden teeth displayed on a length of red satin. “Archie and I grew up at a station up the coast. It was a treacherous stretch. Well, so many of ’em are. And the storms! You’ll see,” she said ominously, moving from the teeth to a swollen book that had obviously been soaked through, its pages printed in an alphabet I didn’t recognize. There was a length of black fringe from a lady’s shawl or a table covering; a knife with a wooden handle; a string of blue beads; a whole brown earthenware jug; shards of glass in every color; a basket of the sort a housewife might carry over her arm to go to market; a dented cigar tin and a coconut shell. “Sometimes we didn’t even see the ship go down, but Archie and I would walk the beach with my mother, and we’d find things. You’d be surprised at what makes its way back to shore. There’s not so much of it nowadays,” she added wistfully, “now that we’ve got so many lighthouses.”

  As Mrs. Crawley touched her precious items with a smile as shy and proud as her daughters’, I thought of my mother, pressing a fold of our drapes to her cheek as she shut them against the early darkness of a northern winter evening. She was proud to have good velvet, not, as she would say, the stiff stuff they sold over on Clybourn. I understood that the draperies’ rich blue conjured for her the well-appointed rooms of her own childhood, with their gilt-legged tables and ceramic shepherdesses, rooms so faraway and foreign that when she told me stories about them, they sounded as magical and impossible as a fairy tale.

  “Ma! We’re ready!” One of the children—I couldn’t yet tell their voices apart—had opened the front door and was shouting into the parlor.

  They’d piled driftwood winched up from the beach, along with staves from broken barrels and any other combustible stuff they could gather, and the men must have gone down for the new barrels, for they stood nearby. Mrs. Crawley brought out rugs and invited me to sit beside her as Mr. Crawley lit the heap, and Mr. Johnston, to my surprise, delighted the children by pretending that he had no notion how to open the barrels. Finally, though, the lids were off, and the children, reaching inside to pull out whatever their hands grasped, behaved as though it were Christmas morning. Their “gifts” were mostly things like nails and canned produce. They squealed over fruit—pineapples, blueberries, blackberries, plums, and applesauce—groaned at peas and carrots, and were indifferent to green corn.

  “This is excellent,” Mrs. Crawley said, passing a can of roast veal and gravy for my inspection. “These cans are about the greatest invention of mankind, although they’re the dickens to open.”

  I made a little pyramid of oysters and beef stew, remembering my mother’s disappointment—“But it tastes so gray!”—when she’d sampled some canned good my father had brought home as a novelty.

  There were boxes and boxes of a sort of cracker they called pilot bread, bottles of vinegar, jars of molasses and pickles, sacks of green coffee, onions and potatoes and dried apples. At the bottom of the barrels, too heavy for the children to fish out, were sacks of rice, flour, sugar, beans, and cornmeal, and salted cod, wrapped in waxed paper. There were newspapers, too—several months’ worth of old news—and then the men pulled out a large wooden box.

  “There’s for your school,” Mrs. Crawley said cryptically.

  They set the box on one end and opened its wooden flaps. It became a bookcase with four shelves, each tightly packed with volumes.

  “We get a new one of these every time the tender comes,” Mr. Crawley said, running his oil-stained finger along the spines. “It’s our library.”

  It was fully, almost densely dark now, and I had to stand close to catch the titles of the books in the glow of the fire. Whoever had collected them must have assumed that lighthouse keepers were partial to accounts of men on water, for the titles—A Christmas at Sea, Memoir of Commodore David Porter, The Battle of Mobile Bay, a translation of The French Lighthouse Service—leaned heavily that way. While I studied the shelves, Mrs. Crawley organized the new supplies according to which house or shed they ought to be stored in.

  “Ready for the wagon,” she said at last, but the children had stolen away.

  “Mary! Edward! Nicholas! Jane!” Her voice thundered over the morro, and she peered sharply in the direction of the ocean, although, as nothing was there but black air and, far below, black water, it seemed an unlikely place for the children to be.

  They did seem somehow to emerge from that place, however. We heard them running up the dirt path from the lighthouse, and they came panting into the firelight. Something swinging around the little girl’s neck glinted silver, pink, and blue.

  “Janie,” Mrs. Crawley admonished. She looked quickly around as she pulled the girl to her. “How many times must I tell you?”

  I stepp
ed toward them for a closer look. The necklace was made of shells or bits of shell, like nothing I’d ever seen. “What is it?”

  Deftly, Mrs. Crawley pulled the loop over her child’s head. “It’s not for her.”

  Jane let out a shriek to wake the dead, but Mrs. Crawley ignored it. She marched with the necklace into the darkness at the edge of the mountain and flung it in a wide arc, releasing it over the ocean.

  “It was mine.” The girl was crying softly but heartbreakingly. “It was my turn.”

  I stepped uncertainly toward the girl, wanting to soothe her but worried that I might interfere. Archie Johnston reached her first. He squatted beside her and opened his arms to offer her comfort.

  CHAPTER 4

  WHEN THE BONFIRE had been doused and Oskar and I came into our own rooms, I went directly for my writing paper and pen. I didn’t know when I might have a chance to send letters, but I longed to talk with the people I’d left, if only in my head. I elevated our situation in a letter to Lucy, describing the vista as being what Mr. Edmund Burke would call sublime, exciting terror and admiration in equal measure, although I felt far more terror than admiration that night. And I wasn’t sure what was more disquieting, the emptiness in all directions or the people who shared my isolation.

  The closed windows dampened the crash of the waves far below us, but the sounds of life at the top of the rock remained distinct. There were footsteps on the path; someone heading toward the light, then someone coming back. Archie Johnston, that must be. Yes, I could hear him climbing the steps to his front door and coughing as he passed through his sitting room to his kitchen. On the opposite side, the children’s feet pounded up the stairs to their bedrooms; doors slammed exuberantly.