CHAPTER 20
ONE AFTERNOON IN early November, I remained beside one of the tubs after I’d dismissed the children for lunch, sketching in a logbook a being that the children called a sea cradle and Some Species labeled a chiton. Had I noticed a chiton on my first day on the beach, I would have dismissed it as a small rough patch, not an animal but a defect of the rock. Now I understood it to be a single-footed creature whose simple plates of armor had served to protect its species since practically the beginning of the earth. Chitons came in different colors, and I wondered why some were red and some were brown and some were yellow or gray or green. I speculated as to whether the pigments in their food somehow tinted their skin and whether their colors camouflaged them from predators. They appeared to stay still, yet I knew from observing them in the tub that they somehow moved across the rock, leaving in their wake a path cleared of algae, which I supposed they must be eating. They were primitive creatures, but even so, they knew enough to curl their armor around their vulnerable undersides when they were pried away from their homes.
First I sketched the little creature as it flattened itself against a rock, and then I tried without success to tug it gently off its base, so as to make it roll up like a pill bug.
“What’re you doing?” Oskar had come up behind me.
Hastily, I pulled my fingers from the water and wiped them on my duster. “I’m sorry. You must want your lunch.”
“I’m all right. What were you doing?” he repeated.
“I was trying to get it to defend itself. The book only shows it flat.” I pointed to its picture in Some Species, which lay open beside me.
He studied the page. “Are you sure it’s the same? This says it’s supposed to be brown.”
As I described my own puzzlement over the colors, he slid his fingernail between the rock and the animal and, without hesitation, pulled it free, whereupon it gradually curled up, as I’d known it would.
“Perhaps you’ve discovered a new species. You ought to send one to your Miss Dodson. See what she makes of it.” He dropped the tiny balled creature back into the water and turned his attention to the log in which I’d been drawing. “Yours is better than the one in the book.” He touched my picture, leaving a wet circle on the page. Then he turned his intense gaze on me, as he’d not done in many weeks. “You should work up a catalog of your creatures. That’d be a real contribution to science.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I brushed futilely at the drop of water that had soaked into the page.
He shrugged. “If you’re done, let’s eat. I’m exhausted.”
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Since he’d given up electricity, Oskar had become the model of an assistant lighthouse keeper. He arrived at his shift on time and stayed late, meticulously if dully checking and cleaning the machinery and the building. He’d discovered, even before Mr. Crawley, that the mercury on which the Fresnel lens floated (without this lubricant, the massive glass prism would be far too heavy to turn) had evaporated dangerously. He’d put a new blowcock and pipe in the boiler without help from Mr. Crawley or Archie Johnston, and he’d tarred the smokestack in his free hours. He came home promptly for lunch and didn’t complain about the monotonous fare that remained in our stores—mostly beans and sprouted, rubbery potatoes. Immediately after lunch, he would take himself to bed and lie there wearing the black spectacles he’d brought home from the light, so I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed. He’d quit interrupting the children’s lessons, and had there been any writing paper left, we would have had it to ourselves. At first I’d been relieved that he was no longer so overexcited and preoccupied by his “real” work, but now I was anxious and unhappy, for he wasn’t himself, and though I tried to engage him with sprightly conversation and caresses, he rarely responded. It seemed we would not be returning in triumph after all.
I’d intended after lunch to see if Euphemia had some work for me, but today I stubbornly followed Oskar up to our bed. Although in the past, there had been plenty of afternoons when I’d wished he would leave me alone, I missed being the object of his desire. Admittedly, since I’d lost my corset, I hadn’t attempted to constrict myself to fit into my attractive clothes but went around every day in my loose duster. I took the shapeless thing off and stood naked except for my shift while I combed out my hair, a pose sure to interest him in the past. To my chagrin, he was asleep before I’d slipped between the sheets.
Discouraged, I dressed and made my way back to the tubs. In one of them, a small green crab, Pugettia producta—or was it Pugettia gracilis or Pugettia richii or, as Oskar had suggested, some other, unidentified Pugettia altogether?—worked its way busily over a ribbon of kelp. Its round black eyes reminded me of Miss Dodson’s—although hers were not on stalks. Perhaps I should send her a selection of starfish and crabs—they dried well—and a few nudibranches and chitons. Anemones would be nice, but without water in which to expose their tentacles, they were unimpressive, resembling wadded dirty rags.
I tore a page from my logbook:
Dear Miss Dodson,
I am sending you some dried specimens, along with drawings of some others that I fear would not make the journey well, in the hope that they might interest you. All of them can be found along the central coast of California, where I now live. They seem to me to be strange creatures, for the most part, but perhaps they are ordinary and strange just to me, who am not used to such things. I look forward to your response but can receive and send mail only every three or four months, so you’ll understand when I’m slow to reply.
I considered explaining how I came to be in California and concluded that such personal details were not the purpose of my communication with my former teacher. I signed the letter with my maiden name, realizing that she wouldn’t know me by any other. In a postscript, I mentioned the catalog and asked her advice. Did she think it might be a worthwhile pursuit?
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I spent a great deal of time on my drawings, considering how to illustrate the distinctions among the crabs, for instance, and including detailed renderings of the claws. I pondered how best to show scale and habitat, in which the distinctions most vividly came into play. And I recorded habits—as far as the children and I had been able to observe them—thinking that would be valuable information, too.
It was difficult to package the specimens. Resilient in their saltwater baths, they were fragile as glass once they’d been dried. The children helped me to gather grass in the wide meadows between our morro and the mountains, and I made a little nest for each creature and then laid the nests in a crate, smothered them with more grass and crumpled newspapers, and nailed it shut. In a barrel, I made a bed of sawdust for the nailed crate, along with a couple of gauges that we couldn’t repair by ourselves and were sending to San Francisco.
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The Madrone, the same tender on which we’d come, arrived on a hot, clear morning late in November. It was our first contact with the world beyond the morro since we’d arrived in July, and I waited, nearly holding my breath, for Euphemia to dole out the contents of the yellow mail pouch that the steam donkey trundled up. In the end, I had a precious stack of envelopes: a long letter each from three of my school friends, including Lucy; two from my father; and six from my mother. We also got a share of a smattering of San Francisco Examiners, seemingly selected at random, and Oskar got a letter from his father.
At the barrel-opening ceremony that evening, Euphemia set aside a number of choice cans—sweet potatoes and currant jam and such—not to be opened until Christmas dinner, for the tender wouldn’t return until after the New Year. I was pleased to discover Volume 3 of The Complete Works of Shakespeare in the fresh library and showed it to Oskar. He only nodded.
I’d paid to send a small package to Milwaukee College for Females in the same way I paid to send my letters, using credit drawn on Oskar’s paycheck, which the Lighthouse Service deposited quarterly in a bank account in San Francisco. A few years earlier, a chief keeper at a light up the coast had sunk like lead when his skiff capsized as he returned from the tender with his pockets stuffed with gold coins, half a year’s pay for himself and two assistants. That loss of both man and money had prompted the service to eliminate payment in cash. It was no great hardship to do without money at Point Lucia. There was nothing here on which to spend gold.
The following morning, I happened to see the letter from Oskar’s father in the kitchen pail, and I couldn’t help but skim the well-formed but anxious lines visible among the potato peels.
. . . understand that Philip was a help to you. I hope you were sufficiently grateful, for his time is no doubt very limited.
A slight shake of the pail revealed:
. . . hope you’re applying yourself steadily. I must say that I often envy those like you who have the satisfaction of practical work, work that dirties the hands and tires the back and forms the foundation upon which society—all societies—rest . . .
Your mother sends her best.
With sincere hopes for your happiness,
Papa
To make my own letters last, I allowed myself one per week and read very slowly, as if sucking a chocolate. Each began stiffly with good wishes for my journey and questions about my current life but soon began recounting activities that reminded me how far removed I was from my old world. Gustina was to have gone with me when I married Ernst, but my mother had promised that Lucy might have her, if Gustina agreed, which she surely would. My mother herself had already begun to train a new girl, Polish, somewhat fierce, and even more ignorant than Gustina had been. Also, Ernst had been spotted by a trustworthy source walking with a Miss Cynthia Davis on his arm. It was a relief but also a disappointment to learn that I wasn’t so important after all.
I thought often in the next few weeks of my little package of Pacific creatures tracing the journey that I had taken, only backward; the boat trip to San Francisco, where the barrel in which I’d packed my crate would be split open, spilling sawdust onto the loading area of the post office; and then the train trip across the western states; and finally, the second train from the terminal in Chicago to Milwaukee. I hoped I’d padded the specimens well enough to keep them whole. I imagined Miss Dodson opening my letter with surprise and reading with affection; my teachers had always liked me. Having read, she would pry open the crate with the curiosity, if not quite the fervor, of the children when they attacked the fresh barrels. I could picture Miss Dodson drawing her magnifying glass from its leather pouch, and the notion of this tangible thread between my old life and my new was a comfort to me. She would compare the names I’d listed to the ones she could find in her own books; and she would be especially interested in the specimens I couldn’t identify. I felt a shimmer of excitement at the thought that some might be new to her; that, as Oskar had suggested, the children and I might have found creatures unknown to the rest of the world.