The Edge of the Earth Read Online Free

could be grouped into a genus, which in turn could be grouped into a family and so on, until the whole puzzle of life, theoretically, anyway, could be clearly mapped.
    Perhaps I would never attach myself to a man, I’d pronounced boldly, relaying Miss Dodson’s advice to Lucy.
    “You mean like Miss Gregor?” Lucy’s eyes were wide.
    I laughed. “Really, you don’t think much of me. Miss Gregor? What about Miss Dodson?”
    “Oh, Miss Dodson. Yes, well, she’s a special case, isn’t she? She manages to put all of her passion into her work. Yes, I do admire that. But Trudy.” She’d laid her hand earnestly on my arm. “Don’t you think that she’s a little sharp? She reminds me of one of those crabs that backs itself into a snail shell.”
    “And her eyes and forehead bulge so.”
    Lucy laughed. “But seriously, I don’t want you to become like Miss Dodson, however much we admire her. That’s not for you, is it? Don’t forget that when you marry Ernst and I marry Charles, we’re going to live next door and run in and out of the back door of each other’s houses.”
    The thought of remaining in those schoolrooms or ones like them, passing on what I’d learned to other girls so they could pass it along in turn, made me as weary as all the rest. As a teacher, I feared, I would be making myself into a link in the very chain that was constricting me, holding me back from a future that seemed to shimmer just beyond my ability to perceive it.
    What had I wanted? I’d been sure of only thing: I wanted something that I did not know. Well, I’d gotten it.

CHAPTER 3
    “M ARY’LL SHOW YOU around the place,” Mrs. Crawley said, and for a moment she rested her rough hand tenderly on her elder daughter’s shoulder. “Janie, would you like to go along?” The little girl was leaning her head against her mother’s hip. She nodded, and Mrs. Crawley smoothed the child’s hair behind two delicate ears that stuck straight out like the handles of a teacup, revealing inquisitive brown eyes. “You two,” the woman said to her sons, “better fetch wood. We’ll want a good bonfire tonight.”
    The boys went whooping off, and the look Mrs. Crawley sent after them was at once exasperated and fond. “I’ll be providing the dinner tonight,” she said, turning abruptly back to me. “Seeing as you haven’t had time to set up your kitchen.”
    Set up my kitchen! What did that mean? In school, we’d been taught to brown flour and keep it handy in a jar for thickening and coloring. I knew how to make a white sauce and a fruit salad and how to clean a cake pan. My mother had shown me how to bake a coffee cake with the bacon grease she collected in a green ceramic jar and how to gently encourage custard to mingle with clouds of beaten egg whites. I remembered some of the lessons she’d given our girl: how to store glasses and cups in the pantry—upside down, so as not to collect dust; how to clean the ash from the stove without spilling it on the floor; when to change the water in the reservoir. I feared that these random bits of knowledge wouldn’t be enough.
    Indeed, I felt much closer in station to Mary than to her mother, although I took pains to conceal it. My guide, who chewed at her thumbnail as we walked, was entering that awkward stage of a girl’s life when she is no longer darling but not yet pretty, and it was difficult to know whether she would become so. She was unformed, her freckled face a plump, boneless disk, and she had a habit of adjusting her small glasses by pushing at them with one finger.
    She took me first to the barn where several brown chickens strutted and poked about, entirely focused on the ground and uninterested in the fact that their patch of earth hung high over the ocean. A green-tailed rooster, suspicious, turned one black eye on us, rather in the way of Mr. Johnston.
    The little girl, Jane, was more forward. “Ma says the hens wouldn’t know a fox if it bit ’em,” she said.