CHAPTER 11
BUT WHERE WAS I to teach them? I assessed the possibilities of the sitting room. Our furnishings, supplied by the Lighthouse Service, were scant: a brown velvet settee, a chair with a wine-colored back and seat, two occasional tables, each supporting a kerosene lamp. Should I line the children up on the sofa and make them use one another’s backs as desks? The kitchen had advantages; I could perform some domestic tasks—bake bread, make soup, clean the ash from the cookstove, perhaps even learn to churn butter—while the children did sums and recited Longfellow. But I could hear my mother admonishing me to do one thing at a time. A schoolroom in the kitchen would make me both a poor teacher and a poor cook.
The nursery was the obvious choice. Except for the children’s collection of marine life, the room was entirely bare, which appealed to me, for I could make of it what I would. Oskar had carried the trunk to our bedroom, where it was serving as a bureau; I dragged it across the landing to use as a writing table. I would ask the children to bring the pillows from their beds to sit on. I took a few precious sheets from my store of writing paper, along with my sketchpad, and placed them at the center of the trunk. How long would my pencils last when four children were scraping away with them? Were writing implements ever in the barrels?
From the books in the traveling library, I selected a volume of Stevenson’s poems, a book written expressly for children called The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and The Battle of Mobile Bay, thinking it might be a means of introducing some study of history. I had pulled up in my reading of Voyage of the Paper Canoe at the Great Dismal Swamp, but I thought I might begin again and read it aloud to give the children some sense of the geography and communities of the eastern United States.
I didn’t go with Oskar to the light that night but slept instead, so as to be ready for my students in the morning. But they were not at my door at eight sharp nor even at nine. Maybe they’d gone to the beach again and hadn’t asked me along this time. Probably they’d gone to escape me and my lessons. To my surprise, this idea hurt me.
I decided to scan the beach from the lighthouse. If I spotted them, I would wash my hands of them for the day. Surely there were other tasks worth my while. I ought, for instance, to figure out how to remove the salt that coated the windows. It was nearly impossible to see through the panes that faced the ocean.
Mr. Crawley was stuffing the boiler at the base of the tower. He shrugged amiably when I asked about the children, although whether to indicate that he didn’t know their whereabouts or that he hadn’t heard my question was not clear.
At the top, I saw that the shattered pane had already been replaced and fresh paint industriously applied to all the frames, so you couldn’t tell which window had been broken. I stepped to the rail, which was no more than a narrow iron band about waist-high, intended more to suggest safety than to provide it. The sun was fiercely hot; the air seemed thinner here in the West than in Milwaukee, a substance too weak to intercede between the earth and that ball of fire. Far to the north, a steamship was churning through the waves, plying its way from one port to another and staying well clear of our treacherous rocks. As I watched its slow progress, the heaving ocean caught the sunbeams and threw them back at my eyes as white-hot needles. I wished I were wearing the black spectacles.
Yes, they were on the beach. Or at least some dark little forms moved along the far reaches of the sand. From here, they looked more like shorebirds or crabs than children. As before, they were venturing to the edge of the water and racing away when the waves came in to lick their toes. It would take me nearly an hour to reach them, and I wouldn’t have the heart to drag them back. I would have to occupy this day in some other fashion.
I was beginning to make my way around the catwalk to the bridge when a shape on the mountainside almost directly below the tower caught my eye. Hanging over the rail, I determined that it was a small pile of stones. Smooth and white, they almost glowed against the sharp brown and black rock upon which they lay. Baby Johnston born and buried, I thought. The idea of that fragile, helpless little being suspended in a place so grand and desolate made my eyes fill.
The cairn was clearly tended. An ornament lay on the stones, a sort of disk made of green-black feathers. Who had placed it there? The children? It was difficult to imagine Archie Johnston with a such a feathered bauble in his hands.
? ? ?
Oskar had come home while I’d been out, and I found him in bed—he had to rest in the afternoon, so as to be awake for his shift. He wasn’t sleeping, however, but taking notes on Electric Waves in a shorthand he’d developed years before, when he was a child bedridden with rheumatic fever and needed to amuse himself. Spread over the blanket and drifting onto the floor were pages covered with what were to me incomprehensible, frenzied, and somewhat juvenile lines of squiggles and arrows, pistols and stars, exclamation points, tiny tornadoes, and other symbols and designs that had once come readily to his ten-year-old brain, along with equations equally baffling to me.
As I gathered his papers, I told him about the cairn of smooth stones and the feathery thing on top of it.
“Poor Johnstons,” he said.
“I wonder what happened to the mother.” I imagined a woman boarding the tender on which we’d come, turning a bonneted head away from this place.
Oskar was finished with the subject. “Come here.” He lifted the blanket, inviting me in. “Let me tell you what I’ve learned about electric waves today.”
? ? ?
Long after Oskar had gone to his work, my afternoon in bed kept me awake. I sat for a while at the kitchen table, foolishly sipping coffee as though it were morning. I wrote some passages of a letter to my mother, not mentioning the cans, and several paragraphs to Lucy describing the cans in detail. Then I paged desultorily through The Battle of Mobile Bay. The room grew steadily colder, and I began to be aware of the darkness pressing around me. Through the wall, I could hear Mr. Johnston moving stealthily about his kitchen.
Restless, I lit our Aladdin lamp and roamed the house. I held the glow to the spines of the books we’d stacked on the occasional table, but none of the titles held my interest. I stood before the stove and considered emptying the ash. I went upstairs and studied our bedroom window. Perhaps I should look for some fabric to make a set of curtains that would block the setting sun. I decided that I might at least make a list of these tasks, so I sat down at the kitchen table again and pushed my hand into my apron pocket, feeling for a stub of pencil I remembered depositing there. When I removed my hand, it contained the bits from the sea I’d collected on that first day, when the children had taken me to the beach: the red sea star, its arms stiffened and its color slightly faded; a small black turban of a shell; a chip of mother-of-pearl colored with the gentle pinks, blues, and silvers of the sunrise; a rubbery splay of vegetation, like the horns of a tiny green reindeer. I went up to the schoolroom for Some Species of the Pacific Coast and turned its pages, searching for pictures of my specimens.
Somewhere between abalone and periwinkle, I came upon a spread of seabirds, their plumage brilliantly rendered in twelve colored plates. On the cormorant—“widespread marine bird, known for its dark, lustrous feathers”—I recognized the black feathers with the iridescent green undertone that made up the ornament I’d seen on the cairn.
I wanted a closer look at that feathered thing. I knew it was a foolish thought, but it gnawed at me, the way ideas will in the deep of the night. Silently, I carried my lamp out of the house. By now I’d wrapped myself in a shawl; nevertheless, the cold, damp air startled me. That the blazing heat could have been eradicated so completely in such a short time made me uneasy. It was almost as if the season had changed from summer to winter in a matter of hours. The sound of the water at the base of the rock had changed as well. It was far louder than it had been in the daylight. Even from so high above, I could hear the waves tumble the stones and claw them back, like gamblers raking coins.
A long streak of yellow shot across the black water; that would be Oskar, sending the signal into the dizzying void that was the endless churning water and the endless spangled sky. The gibbous moon washed rock and water in a ghostly light, inviting me to walk right off the morro into the air. As I made my way to the lighthouse, I stayed well back from the brink.
In a short time, I was standing at the base of the light tower, peering down toward the place where I knew the stones must be glowing. They were hardly visible from this vantage point, tucked under an outcrop of black rock, the hard edges of which the moonlight threw into relief. Perhaps I ought to have read this as a warning, but I chose to interpret it as evidence of solid ground on which I could plant my feet. I began to circle the tower, searching for a path or at least a gentler stretch of slope.
Yes, under the northern wall, where that structure met the side of the mountain, hidden from the usual entrances and exits one might make from the lighthouse, was a scraped bit of earth. I plunged right and snaked left, following the same sort of zigzag pattern the children had demonstrated for me a few days before, when we’d slid all the way to the beach. I didn’t want to go to the beach this time. Instead of allowing the slope to pull me down, I began to work my way west, to the part of the morro that extended far out over the water.
I wouldn’t have thought anything could have been more difficult to cling to than the slippery slope the children and I had negotiated, but soon enough, the way—for it could not be called a path—that I’d put myself on proved to be so. In only a few steps, I needed to use my hands to keep from falling. This ought to have been my cue to turn back, but I abandoned my lamp and crept on, away from its comforting flame, feeling more than seeing the texture of the rocks and brittle plants. How far I would have gotten, whether I would have reached the stones at last or given up or overshot them or lost my footing and handholds and fallen to my death, I will never know, because at this delicate point I was interrupted by a sharp voice coming from somewhere over my head.
“What are you doing there?”
It was Mr. Johnston. His voice roused Oskar, and I heard the upper door of the light tower, the one leading to the catwalk I’d been standing on that morning, bang open. “What’s going on?” Oskar called.
What was going on? How had I come to be nearly hanging by my fingertips over the crashing ocean, my skirt tangled about my legs, my face and arms scratched and bruised? It occurred to me to suggest that I’d been sleepwalking. There could hardly be another plausible explanation.
I said nothing while I picked my way back as well as I could. The two men had gotten as far as my lamp and were standing together in its feeble light, their faces as craggy and shadowed as the mountainside.
Oskar reached for me, his face a worried question. “Trudy, what . . . ?”
“What are you doing here?” Mr. Johnston repeated.
“I saw . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to be blunt. “Some stones,” I finished lamely. I turned my head to indicate them, but even that slight movement served to unbalance me, and I had to bend and grab for the rocks to steady myself.
“What were you going to do with them?”
“Nothing. I—”
“You were just curious,” Mr. Johnston said mockingly.
I stood silent. What he said was true.
“Those stones are our business. Not yours.”
“You needn’t be rude to my wife,” Oskar said. “She meant no harm.”
“Well, she might have come to plenty. It’s a very long way down and no good once you get there.”