CHAPTER 26
EVENTUALLY, THE RAIN and wind faltered, and for stretches of days the sky was a clear, washed blue and the sun burned steadily. It was foreign weather to me, the air being cold but the sun fierce, so that both extremes of temperature made themselves felt at once. The gold-tinged landscape I’d grown accustomed to in the fall had become vivid with greens and blues. Shoots pushed up between cracks in the rock and seemed to spread by the hour until the morro had bejeweled itself in orange paintbrush and yellow lupine. I thought of Archie piling flowers in Helen’s lap.
I’d begun to look askance at Archie Johnston. I couldn’t decide whether he’d hoped she might love him or whether he was simply a monster, so I kept well clear of him.
The pain in Oskar’s leg lessened, and he became restless. He complained that he’d read through all of the library and that he was tired of pilot bread and bully beef. Indeed, we were all sick of the sailors’ rations to which we’d been reduced. Though we joked about scurvy, constant expectation and repeated disappointment had made us all, even mild Mr. Crawley, irritable by the time a longboat landed on the beach on a gray and dripping day in February. I eagerly opened a bulky package addressed to me in a familiar slanted hand.
Dear Trudy—
I’m delighted to hear from you. What fascinating experiences you must be enjoying. It was most kind of you to send these specimens. Some are well known to me from pictures, but some I’ve never seen before. I wonder if you might be willing to ship more of these creatures to Milwaukee so that I could use them in my class. We could study the external features of dried specimens—in that case, variety is wanted—but I would also like at least thirty of a single type preserved in a flexible state. Since I don’t know in what quantity these items present themselves, I must leave the choice as to which in your hands.
I’ve enclosed some issues of a magazine that prints, among its last pages, advertisements from companies that sell preserving alcohol and appropriate containers. I’ve also taken the liberty of enclosing a check for ten dollars from my college account to act as a down payment. If this proposition is of no interest to you, simply tear it up.
Your drawings are very fine, and I do encourage you to continue with them, with an eye toward eventual publication as a catalog of Pacific tidal life. I can find no record of several of the organisms you’ve represented, so you would be doing biology a great service, indeed, were you to commit all of your discoveries to paper.
Yours very truly,
Cecelia Dodson
I read the letter twice. Admittedly, the flatness of the first few lines was a disappointment. I’d hoped, I saw now, for a livelier interest in my life and a more intimate correspondence. Still, I experienced a frisson at the signature. I’d been aware of Miss Dodson’s first name but had never presumed to think of her as anything other than “Miss.” And her proposal—the idea that things I collected could become a part of Miss Dodson’s class, that girls in Milwaukee, even Miss Dodson (Cecelia Dodson!) herself, would examine them, marking down what they observed in their laboratory books—delighted me. Even more exciting was the thought that a catalog I could devise would interest my teacher, not in the condescending way she would note the efforts of a student but as work that would truly expand her knowledge.
Since Euphemia and I had grown closer, I’d realized that she’d been starving for friendship. Now I saw that whether she’d been aware of it or not, she’d also been in need of a means by which to reach into the world beyond our mountain, for she was as animated as I by Miss Dodson’s plan. In the lighthouse at night, I paged through the scientific journals Miss Dodson had sent and read out choice bits. One of our favorite articles involved experiments performed on my old friend the sea urchin. It seemed that a fellow in Switzerland had divided an urchin egg in two, and from each half egg, he’d grown half an urchin.
“What was the point,” Euphemia said, laughing, “of growing half an urchin?”
I explained that if only half a creature grew from a divided egg, it would mean that every cell, even in the tiniest of eggs, had been assigned from the moment of its existence—maybe before—to be a crumb of the heart or the stomach and, in the case of more complex creatures, the fingers, toes, ears, or tongue. Each cell had its role, and that role was preordained, maybe not by God, exactly, but by its nature. It would be impossible to change that nature, no matter how hard one might try.
Then a second scientist said the first was dead wrong. When he repeated the experiment, the half-eggs grew into whole urchins. I found this notion pleasing, believing it meant that if something were damaged—even cut entirely in two—it might adapt and, given time enough to grow, become whole again. In a leap of the kind Oskar might make between the physical and philosophical realms, I conceived of myself as a being that had been severed in two when I’d left the place that had formed me and come to this world where so little was familiar. I was beginning to feel filaments start to grow from the half that remained, and I sensed I was adapting and becoming whole again.
We also studied the advertisements. Before I could collect any specimens to preserve “in a flexible state,” I’d have to procure containers that would neither corrode nor easily break—heavy glass, probably—and enough ethanol or some such chemical to act as a preservative. I liked the serious sound of the Chicago Scientific Company, “supplier of reliable apparatus and chemical glassware,” along with “a complete line of reagents, stains, lacquers, and cements.” I could make over Miss Dodson’s check to them and ask them to send thirty jars.
“Better make it thirty-five,” Euphemia said. “Some are bound to break.” She then did the figures in the margin of our logbook and determined that I had enough money for seventy jars and the alcohol to fill them. “If we’re going to have a business,” she said, “we’d best be prepared for future orders.”
The avidity with which she tackled what had almost immediately become our endeavor surprised me. She’d always been energetic, but in a grim, dutiful way. Now she brightened and bubbled; it was as if the idea of organizing a business had opened some long-dammed passage inside her, and her enthusiasm and ideas rushed forth. Through night after stormy night in the lighthouse, collecting and selling biological specimens became our electromagnetism. The long, dark stretches of time between the trimming and the filling, together with our awareness of the long, dark stretches of space that surrounded us, encouraged us to lose perspective as we bandied our plans about. “How many colleges would you say this country has?” Euphemia asked one night. “Wouldn’t all of ’em need specimens?”
We decided that the children could help gather. It was what they did, anyway. I must handle the chemicals, because they could be flammable and, Euphemia suspected, dangerous in other ways as well. She wouldn’t want to see any of her children pickled!
We would pack the jars of preserved specimens and the boxes of dry ones in grass and sawdust, as I’d done with my samples. Henry Crawley could be doing plenty more sawing, Euphemia said. The animal pens needed repair; the steam donkey could use a new platform. Oskar could make those shelves he’d promised. That would generate packing material for a good while.
“And we always have plenty of empty barrels,” I added.
Even figuring shipping into our costs, we determined that in two or three years, we likely would have built up a profitable business, supplying schools and laboratories all over the continent with crates of specimens preserved and dried.
When our empire began to spread to Europe—“Think,” Euphemia said, “what the Swiss could do with our urchins!”—I reminded her that we must first compose an order to the Chicago Scientific Company.
Without hesitation, she opened a fresh logbook, ripped a page from it, and handed it to me. “Write it on this.”