CHAPTER 19
OUR BABY CAME to nothing.
For some weeks, we’d lived in happy anticipation, expecting, despite Euphemia’s warning. Without electrical experiments to distract him, Oskar was enthusiastic again about furnishing our house. He built a cradle and a night table. “So I can bring you coffee in bed,” he said.
If it was a girl, he hoped we might name her Amelia, for his sister. He pressed his palm to my belly, which, in truth, had hardly grown. Had I felt it quicken? he wondered.
I had not. What I did feel one afternoon was a faint echo of the familiar tightening I’d known for a day or two every month since I’d been a high school girl. In an hour, I was gasping, holding my breath, curling myself into a crouch in a vain effort to push away the relentless, wringing grip.
“What is it?” Oskar asked desperately, standing over me as I rolled myself into a ball on our bed, trying to escape from my own insides.
“It’s nothing,” I said, my voice taut and small. “Nothing.” It was, I believed, the old monthly pain making up with a vengeance for the time it had lost. “Only Euphemia was wrong after all.”
I begged for it to release me, and after some hours it did, but Euphemia hadn’t been wrong, for within the river of blood that gushed from between my legs was a miniature figure, unquickened but nevertheless human. Its few inches included a tiny head and limbs. It hung from me, attached to my insides by a cord so fine that I could and did pinch it in half with my fingers. Later I would wish that I’d held the being who was not to be more tenderly, and at the same time, I would wish that I’d not dared to look at its haunting form at all.
Oskar had fetched Euphemia, and she whisked it away and led me to the bed. She fitted folded cloth after folded cloth between my legs to stanch the blood.
“Poor dear,” she said, and I didn’t know whether she meant me or the other.
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“It’s nothing.”
To buck me up, Euphemia told me that she herself had had three such experiences, one even further along. “If it’s going to happen, the sooner the better. You’re lucky.”
Euphemia said I ought to stay in bed, but lying there thinking about nothing made me cry, so as soon as I was able, I took myself outside to tend the tubs.
? ? ?
Our collection had steadily swelled. Recognizing the cruelty and futility of trapping a living being in a few inches of dirty water, as the children had been doing with their jars, I’d asked Mr. Crawley to saw some empty barrels in half to make tubs in which the animals and plants we gathered might thrive. He’d hesitated. The barrels were Lighthouse Service property. We were required to return empty as many as we’d received full, unless we put them to another purpose. This was another purpose, I’d insisted.
“I’d not relish being the one to explain these shenanigans to Inspector Roberts,” he’d said, but his saw had been poised for the first cut.
As best as we could, we created the world of the tide pools in the tubs, arranging rocks to which anemones and mussels clung, making caves in which crabs could hide. One of the key ingredients, naturally, was salt water. We carried several buckets up at a time on the steam donkey, refreshing the tubs every few days. Our aquariums attracted gulls, so we had to build a scarecrow beside them, which pleased Euphemia, since it also discouraged the eagles from swooping down on the chickens.
The tubs helped to make sense of what we found. We began to understand how some of these animals grew and changed, who ate whom, which preferred shade and which craved the sun, which liked to live near one another and which couldn’t abide certain neighbors. I was impressed by the sheer range of life that the whole mess represented, but I was also beginning to recognize an order in it. Altogether, it was thoroughly satisfying work, even if some of the creatures, despite our best efforts, couldn’t adapt to the artificial environment and died.
It was so satisfying that adding to and organizing the collection became pretty much the focus of our school. In the classroom, while dried specimens continued to cover the floor, they were no longer a jumble. Using Some Species of the Pacific Coast, as well as our own observations and reason, we’d arranged our finds into distinct categories, the pressed seaweeds in one portion of the room, the bivalves in another, and so on.
Prime real estate under the window was devoted to the unusual man-made objects, among them the cormorant-feather disk that I’d seen on the cairn. The children had recently added some new things: one morning when I’d opened the door, I’d found Mary standing with her two cupped hands before her, forming a nest for four little bundles. I thought they must be mice or fledglings, but they were not living creatures. Rather, they were little twists of the rubbery plant called kelp.
By this time I’d discovered kelp to be a fascinating substance, monstrously long and tough, but also beautiful if viewed in the right way, with its strange hollow stems, its pale green bulbs like enormous pearls, and its trailing leaves that rose and fell like hair on the undulating water. To the children, though, it was as unremarkable as grass, so I couldn’t see why Mary cradled it with such care and why the rest gathered around so eagerly.
“We should each open one,” Edward said. “Jane chooses first.”
The kelp only served as a wrapper. “What are these things?” I asked. “Where did you get them?”
They didn’t answer, only went on pulling at the leaves, which fell quickly away to reveal four objects carved of soft gray driftwood, each about two inches high: a crab, a pelican, a dolphin, and a seal, the last sitting cunningly on its own little rock.
“Where did these come from?” I asked again.
“From the mermaid,” Jane said finally. “She left them on the stones for us.”
Baby Johnston’s grave. I felt a personal pain in thinking of it now that I’d experienced my own loss. Archie Johnston must have left the figures, I thought, as offerings for his dead child. Did he know that the living children took them for themselves? Remembering him giving Jane the worm shell on my first afternoon, I believed he did. Probably he guessed, and perhaps it gave him some comfort to play fairy godfather. Poor Mr. Johnston.
To be sure, we kept on with our sums and our passages. And we worked at our Latin—mostly to assign appropriate “scientific” names to beings we couldn’t identify in Some Species. But we would hurry through these lessons, and often in the afternoons, instead of climbing into bed with Oskar, I would scour the beach with the children, searching for new species and fine examples of those with which we were already acquainted, with a good deal of larking about thrown in. I explained to Euphemia that on these afternoons I was teaching my students to observe astutely, to handle wildlife with respect, to understand natural history and scientific classification, and to draw. (Having long ago exhausted my sketchbook and all of my writing stock, we were filling blank logbooks that I’d pilfered from the lighthouse.)
“As long as their chores are done, I don’t mind,” Euphemia said. “But,” she added, looking sternly at the children, “you must stay on the beach.”
They nodded solemnly and promised. I wondered if she feared they would swim away or disappear into the mountains. Of course we’d stay on the beach. There was nowhere else.