The Edge Of The World Part 15

After all, she and I were not the same.

"She did like to sit and look out at the water," Euphemia said. "Well, I oughtn't to say she liked it-how could I know what she liked? All I can say is that's what she did, and she looked very strange doing it. I'd given her my red calico, but she wouldn't put it on. Just kept wearing my old nightdress. And her head was nearly bald. I'd tried to comb her hair out for her, but she wouldn't let me, kept pushing my hands away."

"She burned it," Mr. Crawley said with satisfaction. "Burned it all off. Now, that was a stink. And her ears stuck straight out!"

"It wasn't a bad idea, though," Mrs. Crawley said. "Who knows what disease was caught in all that hair? I appreciated her getting rid of it."

"Probably some sort of ritual," Oskar said. "I've read that some western tribes burn off their hair as a sign of mourning."

The excitement in his voice caught my attention, and I looked at him. His face was animated; he was beginning to resemble the old Oskar.

Euphemia nodded. "Maybe so."

"Remember how she liked the water, Phemia?" Mr. Crawley said. "Remember how we'd look down and see her rolling around in the waves, just like an otter?"

I thought of the dark head that had scared the seals off their rock.

"She was a great deal of trouble," Euphemia said, but her tone was fond, as if she were speaking of an exasperating child. "She was afraid of the light and especially of the foghorn. She wouldn't touch any of the canned food, only the pilot bread and the cornmeal."

"She caught fish, though," Mr. Crawley said. "And brought up abalones as big as this plate. Bigger. And she was good with the children. She's the one started them picking up all that junk, sh.e.l.ls and whatnot."

We didn't seem to be getting at the heart of the matter.

"Why isn't she here now?" I asked. "Why does she live-"

"Like an Indian?" Oskar broke in. "I imagine this life was uncomfortable to her. Indians can commune with nature, you know, in a way that we've lost. I would think she would have longed to return to her traditional way of life. Isn't that right?"

Henry, absorbed in his pipe, made no effort to reply. Euphemia, too, said nothing for some time. She kept her eyes on a stretch of tablecloth in front of one of the children's empty places. I a.s.sumed she was considering Oskar's suggestion.

"She just didn't take," she offered grudgingly. "She is, after all, a wild Indian, like Oskar said. One morning she was gone." She sighed. "It's true that she prefers her ways, and I believe it's best to leave her to herself. That's what she wishes. We can't force her to live here."

I thought of that first day on the beach with the children, when Euphemia had appeared, striding out of what I'd understood to be nowhere. "You visit her!"

Euphemia frowned. "I leave her a few things from time to time, yes."

The children visit her, too, I thought, but I kept quiet about this.

"We were docked for that blanket," Mr. Crawley grumbled.

Euphemia shrugged.

"Did Archie love her?" I asked recklessly. The idea of him rescuing her struck me as very romantic.

"If he did, it was a twisted sort of love," Euphemia said. She rose from the table, reverting to the stony and practical Mrs. Crawley who'd met us when we first arrived. "I did my best, but he ruined everything." She hoisted the large stack of plates she'd acc.u.mulated and went into the kitchen.

I stood to collect the gla.s.ses. Euphemia was already sc.r.a.ping slops into a bucket for the chickens when I stepped into the kitchen. The slump of her shoulders told me that it was she who had loved the Indian.

CHAPTER 24.

AS SOON AS we'd closed the door behind the Crawleys, Oskar turned to me. "You have to show me that cave."

"I told you she was interesting." I couldn't keep some irritation from my voice; he'd hardly paid attention when I first told him about her.

"You didn't say she was an Indian. A wild Indian. An Indian unsullied by contact with whites."

"She had contact!" I protested. "She was living here!" Exactly here, I thought, looking around the room with new understanding.

He waved one hand vaguely in the air, as if this fact were a fly he could brush away. "Before that."

"Before that, we have no idea how she lived." I began to gather the flotsam we'd scattered over the floor, separating the remains of the shipwrecks from the stuff of the sea.

"Exactly! Exactly! We have no idea. Don't you want to know? She may show us things about her people that no white man has ever seen. Can you find that cave again, do you think?"

I, too, wanted to go back to the cave, though the idea of bringing Oskar with me made me nervous. While his renewed energy pleased me, I knew that it was a beam to be focused with care, and the Indian woman seemed a fragile subject.

"I think I can find it," I said. "We'll have to wait for drier weather."

"Why? What's a little wet? Are you afraid you'll melt?" he teased.

"Oskar, please be careful!" He'd begun to help me tidy the room, but his hands on the delicate objects were far too eager and rough. Gently, I took from him a dried crab with all eight of its legs attached. "I just don't believe it's safe, that's all. Anyway, she's been there for years. I'm sure she'll be there when the rain stops."

Would she? It was difficult to see how she survived. I realized that until tonight I'd considered her almost a natural curiosity, more akin to the mussels and sea stars and octopi than a real human being who would feel the cold and grow hungry. Had she huddled in her cave for all these soaking days, much as we'd huddled in our houses? The logs I'd seen, tangled and bleached among the rocks, must have come sweeping down from the mountains like battering rams in churning rivers of rainwater, and I pictured them piling up at the entrance to the cave, trapping her. I could envision the water washing inside, the sealskin floor wet through, the acorns floating away, the pyramid of cans tumbled down, and a body, with the small black head that I'd glimpsed in the ocean, lying among abalone sh.e.l.ls and fish bones in one corner, nearly dead, as the baby otter had been.

I started when Oskar touched my shoulder. He let his hand slip down my arm until his fingers interlaced with mine. "We have a little time," he said, "before my shift."

In our bed-had this been her bed, too?-I could tell it was not contemplation of me that had brought this on but the thought of the Indian woman.

CHAPTER 25.

OSKAR DIDN'T COME home for breakfast after his shift the next morning. I took little notice, though his habits had been extremely regular since he'd given up electricity. Often repairs or maintenance required two keepers, and he would stay on at the tower. When he didn't appear at lunch, I wondered, but I wasn't alarmed, nor was I eager to go searching for him among the rain-lashed outbuildings. Our meal was cold duck. His portion could wait.

At three or four in the afternoon, the waning of what light had shimmied through the heavy clouds made me restless at last to know his whereabouts. Annoyed, I put on my Lighthouse Service oilskin and plunged into the rain. I splashed to the workshop and then to the barn, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, looked into the storeroom, and knocked on the Crawleys' and Archie Johnston's doors. I walked around the residence, checked to see whether the steam donkey had gone down the mountain, searched the upstairs of our house-in case he'd come back while I was out-and went back to the lighthouse. No one had seen him since the Crawleys had left us the night before. Anxiety began to press at me. It occurred to me that he might have tried to find the cave, and I was as uncomfortable with the idea of his drinking in its wonders without my supervision as I was with the worry that he'd gotten lost among the rocks.

Archie heard him finally from the catwalk, his call a thin bleat that the wind by some freakish turn happened to carry up from the beach. That morning, before his shift had officially ended, Oskar had started down the children's way, lost his footing on the rain-slick rocks and mud halfway down, and tumbled the rest of the way. He'd been lying in the rain for hours, water streaming down the morro around and over him, one leg twisted away from his body at an impossible angle.

"This is a merry Christmas," Euphemia said.

He gasped when I touched him.

"I'm no doctor," Euphemia said, "but I can a.s.sure you this will hurt." She turned to her brother. "Find me a bit of wood. About this big." She held up one hand, showing the spread between her index finger and thumb.

The storms had thrown up a good deal of driftwood; Archie didn't have to scrounge for long before he returned with a piece. "What's it for?" He handed it to Euphemia. "You can't make a splint out of that."

"To keep him from biting his tongue in two."

She pushed the stick into Oskar's mouth, which stopped his teeth from chattering, although it seemed to make the rest of his body shake more violently, despite the sodden blankets I'd tried to wrap him in. I squeezed his hand, which meant I couldn't press my palms to my ears to dull his screams.

I was frightened when he fell into a faint as Euphemia struggled to straighten his leg, but she said it was a mercy. She tied the leg to a pole with rags, and Oskar came to consciousness as Mr. Crawley and Archie, using a ladder to stand in for a stretcher, carried him around the bottom of the mountain to the steam donkey.

When we'd gotten him into our bed, Euphemia gave me from her stores a large bottle of laudanum with which to dose him.

"Keep it up regular," she warned. "Don't let the pain sneak up on him, or you'll have a d.i.c.kens of a time rooting it out." She turned to Oskar indignantly. "Where did you think you were going?"

"To the beach," he said between gritted teeth.

"You've caused a lot of trouble. And it's only just begun. You'll be in this bed for over a month, at least. Was it the electricity you were after?"

He shut his eyes so that she might believe he'd fainted again.

Later, when I was certain he was safe, I took my turn. "For heaven's sake! Why couldn't you for once in your life wait?"

"I must see her!"

"*I must! I must!'" I mocked. "You help yourself to whatever you please and never mind what I say or feel. I told you not to go!"

He bit his lip and turned away. He was badly hurt and helpless, and I felt ashamed of my anger. Nevertheless, although I had no clear idea of his intentions and neither, I believed, did he, I wasn't sorry that he'd have no chance of finding the Indian for a very long time.

For the next few weeks, my days were made of running: up the stairs with food and drink and down again with the chamber pot and soiled dishes. Every few hours, the laudanum had to be spooned and the pillows pounded, pencil shavings brushed from the bed, fallen books retrieved from the floor. In between, I kept up the children's lessons as well as I could, setting them tasks that I could oversee in spurts between the kitchen and the bedroom and the outhouse. We would start a chapter of history or some long division or a bit of Latin vocabulary, and inevitably, his voice would come through the door. Could he have more water? He'd finished his book. His back was uncomfortable; what could be done about it? He had some questions for Archie; would I find him?

Archie? I would have felt shy around Archie Johnston after the anger he'd revealed on Christmas Eve and the story that had come of it, but the confusion and worry and bustle over Oskar's accident had wiped that slate clean. He came, his gaze straying everywhere as he pa.s.sed through the parlor and climbed the stairs. He shut the bedroom door behind him, but his voice and Oskar's rumbled loudly enough to cause me to close the schoolroom door as well, so we could concentrate on the task of adding three-digit numbers. After that, Archie began to show up regularly around ten o'clock, his boots clumping up the narrow wooden steps.

I complained to Oskar as I rubbed his back with liniment to keep bedsores from forming. "I don't like it that he just lets himself in."

"That way he doesn't interrupt your lessons. Don't you have enough trips up and down as it is?"

"What do you talk about so long?" What difference did it make? I scolded myself. I ought to be relieved that someone else was seeing to Oskar for an hour or two.

"The Indian. I'm writing down everything he can remember. The circ.u.mstances under which he found her. Her clothing and habits. Her words and gestures." He touched the logbook beside him on the bed. "I'm not sure what'll turn out to be anthropologically significant, so I want to be thorough."

"Anthropologically significant?" I riffled through the pages with my thumb. To me, they were impenetrable, densely covered with his frenzied shorthand.

"You remember what Philip was saying? About California Indians being nearly extinct and the importance of gathering information about their culture and language, their whole way of life?"

"You think the people at the university would be interested in her?"

"Of course they would! I'm going to be the one to study her, though. She's my find."

"She's not a find, exactly, is she? I mean, she's a woman they all knew here. She's not, you know, a phenomenon of nature, like electromagnetism. You're not planning to do experiments on her, are you?"

He laughed. "I'm only learning what I can about her. I do think she must be approached scientifically. The way Franz Boas studied the Eskimos. She's a fantastic opportunity for science."

"And for you, I suppose."

"Well." He shrugged. "I'm not afraid to have greatness thrust upon me. Come, you can't say you aren't curious, too."

I could not, so I said nothing.

He yawned. "I'm awfully tired. It's more work than you'd imagine, trying to keep Archie focused on useful information. He keeps wanting to talk about how Euphemia made her go."

"Made her go? Why would she do that?"

He'd already closed his eyes. "I don't know. Maybe to spite her brother. That's what he seems to think. Anyway, I'm grateful to her. If that Indian had been living here all this time, she'd be pretty much spoiled."

I grabbed my own sleep here and there, because I had to cover Oskar's shift at the light, as well as care for him during the day. On stormy nights, Euphemia joined me, claiming that she wanted to be sure I didn't blow away. That did seem a real possibility. When we walked to the light, we had to bend nearly double against the wind that threatened to turn our skirts to sails, and pull ourselves forward hand over hand on the rail to cross the little bridge. Twice a shift, wearing the black spectacles, we edged our way around the outside of the gla.s.s cage that housed the light, one hand clutching a bra.s.s handhold, the other wiping salt streaks from the panes as strenuously as the tearing wind allowed. To release the handhold while on that narrow catwalk, with only the thin ribbon of an iron rail to interrupt a fall, would be flirting with suicide, but I was more invigorated than afraid. My hands were strong; I wouldn't let go. Most frightening was the walk home in the morning, when the wind pushed us along, shoving violently at our backs, as if it meant to sweep us right off the rock into the lashing water and black rocks below.

Euphemia was ecstatic. "This is why we're needed," she said more than once, gazing up at the light that seemed as much a beacon to us as to those at sea. "This is when the light does its real work."

I was grateful for her company not only when we were struggling through the wind and rain but also at the other extreme, when I was trying to stay awake in the warm boiler room.

"What was she like?" I asked tentatively one night, when we were seated with mending in our laps from the basket we kept handy to fill these odd hours. I'd come close to this question several times but backed away, afraid of Euphemia's annoyance. Clearly, the woman in the rocks was an uncomfortable topic.

"Who?"

"The Indian woman. Helen." Our conversation proceeded in fits and starts between blasts of the foghorn.

Euphemia's needle moved quickly, forming serviceable but sloppy st.i.tches. Neither my mother nor my domestic sciences teacher would have approved. "She wasn't much use," she said, repeating the a.s.sessment she'd given at Christmas.

"Did you like her company?" I insisted. "Was she a friend to you?"

She stopped sewing and tugged firmly on the patch, making certain it was secure. "Not a friend, exactly, no," she said slowly. The newly mended garment, a threadbare pinafore, covered her lap. It had a pink flower on the bib, obviously appliqued in her own loose style, and she began to pick those st.i.tches out. "Pink is Mary's color," she explained. "Janie likes blue."

She was quiet through two blasts of the horn, and I feared I would have to prompt her, but she went on, holding her work close to her face in the dim light. "She was afraid at first, of Archie and Henry especially. Who knows what had happened to her on that mountain, among all those screaming trees? No wonder she was afraid! Even from a distance, she would look at the men only out of the corner of her eye, and when they were close, she would look away and freeze, like a fawn hoping not to be noticed, waiting for them to pa.s.s.

"Archie had an idea, I think, that he was like some prince in a fairy tale. Because he'd found her, I suppose. He picked wildflowers for her once-you'd be surprised how many blooms come out of this rock in the spring. When she wouldn't take them from his hands, he laid them in her lap." She squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a moment, perhaps to refresh them for her sewing, although it seemed to me that she was trying to pinch off the painful scene she was remembering. "She kept her face turned away from him, willing herself elsewhere, it looked like. I should have called him away. But I hoped . . . well . . ." She stopped speaking and then started fresh. "When he'd gone, she stood and let the flowers fall from her lap. They shriveled in an hour. Blew away. Wildflowers aren't meant to be picked," she added with a touch of her old imperiousness.

"She was happiest with the children," she continued, speaking more lightly as she squinted to thread her needle with blue. "They were so much littler then, of course! Just babies. She was always rocking Nicholas, singing her peculiar songs. Such a harsh sound to my ears. I was a little alarmed when I saw her brown fingers on his soft skin. I wanted to take him away from her. But she was gentle with him, and he seemed to welcome her touch, so I let them alone. I considered that we must frighten her, our language and ways being as strange to her as hers were to us, and the baby, being much like any other baby, must have been a comfort. She played with Mary and little Edward, too, some game having to do with throwing stones and feathers into the air and another with pebbles. She would laugh as if she enjoyed it as much as they did. Or she would spin Mary-you know how you do, with your hands locked around each other's wrists. The children don't remember any of it.