The Edge of the Earth Read Online Free Page A

“I’ve sure never seen a fox. Have you seen a fox?”
    I informed her that I had.
    “I’ve seen eagles,” Jane went on. “They swoop down”—she made a huge gesture of wings with her arms—“and pluck the chicks right up.” Here she reached forward, fingers outstretched like talons, and made a grabbing motion in the air. “It’s gruesome.”
    “Ma says the eagles have to eat, too,” Mary said, and Jane nodded at this piece of wisdom.
    I was surprised to see a cow chewing its cud behind the barn.
    “Ma says children must have milk.” Jane squinted her eyes, sizing me up. “She said you’d churn us some butter. She said where you come from, everyone knows how to churn butter.”
    Apparently, Ma wasn’t always right.
    When we reached the workshop, Mary demonstrated the whetstone, hiking up her skirt so that she could work the pedals unencumbered. Then, still sitting on its seat, she slid her glasses, which had slipped low on her nose, back into place. “Might I ask you a favor?”
    I had to smile at her formality. “Of course.”
    “May I try your hat?”
    I unpinned my hat and arranged it on the girl’s head and folded the veil down for her.
    “Oh!” She was disappointed. “You can see out perfectly well.”
    “Let me see,” said Jane, so I had to settle the hat on her as well. “You’re right, Mary,” she said with similar dismay. “You can see out perfectly well.”
    Did they imagine that I’d been bumbling along blind?
    As I’d observed from the tender, the lighthouse was set at a little distance from the rest of the buildings and somewhat lower on the rock. Its upper third reached the top of the morro, and the catwalk that encircled the light was accessible from the level where we stood by way of a little bridge. Oskar was up there when we emerged from the workshop, but he seemed to be looking at something far out at sea. In any case, he didn’t notice the hand I raised.
    “That one is ours,” Mary said importantly, pointing at the southernmost entrance of the awful stone building where three apartments were clumped.
    “We get the biggest,” Jane announced, “because our father is the head.”
    The center house into which the girls led me was a sort of tunnel, a passageway pressed between the two other apartments; light could enter directly from the east at the back or the west at the front, but otherwise not at all. It was obvious from the smudges along the walls, the hard brown grease on the cooktop, and the skeins of dust against the baseboards that no one had prepared the place for us and that the previous tenant had been no housekeeper.
    I was amused to see evidence of squatters. In the parlor, Mary quickly gathered up a doll, several squares of inky paper, a tin pot, and some other detritus she gave me no time to identify. In the kitchen, both girls were proprietary, demonstrating the running water in the sink and drawing my attention to the heavy china, patterned with a small navy lighthouse, in the plate rack; the iron pot and skillet in the cupboard; and the drawer of silver-plated utensils.
    Upstairs were two little bedrooms. The front one was furnished with nothing but a bed.
    “This one,” Jane said, her palm pressed to the door of the back room, “is for your baby.”
    I laughed. “But I don’t have a baby.”
    “Ma says you will,” she insisted, “sooner or later. Mary and I are hoping for a girl, aren’t we?” She turned to her sister.
    Mary nodded. “In the meantime,” she said boldly, giving me a sideways look as she opened the door, “we’ve been using this room for our collection.”
    The floor looked like a beach. It was littered with shells and pieces of driftwood, dried and flattened seaweed, and what appeared to be bones. Washed up here and there were small creatures at once gorgeous and monstrous. Some were bristly, some pebbly, some curly, some knobby. Almost everything was strange to me: white tubes, brown disks, and opalescent cups; shapes of