T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The wife looked down at her feet and murmured that she was welcome and could make herself at home and that they were very honored to have her. “Here,” she said, “you just sit here,” and she indicated the bed. After that, no one said a word, the girls slipping out the door as soon as they could and the old man responding to Sarah’s questions and observations (“It must be solitary out here” and “Do you get into Stoningtown much?”) with a short sharp grunt of denial or affirmation. The dirt of the floor was pounded hard. The fire was meager. A draft flowed continuously through the gaps in the river-run boards that made the walls of the place. She was cold, hungry, tired, uncomfortable. She closed her eyes and endured.

  When she opened them, there was a new person in the room. At first she took him to be a wild Indian because there was no stitch of civilized clothing about him, from his moccasins to his buckskin shirt and crude hat tanned with the fur of some creature still on it, but she gathered from the conversation—what little of it there was—that he was the son-in-law of the old man and woman and living off in the deeper wild in a hovel of his own with their daughter, also named Sarah. No introductions were made, and the man all but ignored her, till finally Mr. Cotter rose to his feet and said, “Well, the river’ll be down now and I expect it’s time you wanted to go, Missus.”

  Sarah began to gather herself up, thanking them for their hospitality, such as it was, but then wondered aloud who was to escort her across the river? And beyond, on the road to Stoningtown?

  The old man gestured toward his son-in-law, who looked up at her now from out of the depths of his own cold blue eyes. “If you’d give him something, Missus, I’m sure George here could be persuaded.”

  Stoningtown to New London Ferry

  It was past dark when they limped into Stoningtown and her guide (no, he hadn’t murdered her along the road or robbed her or even offered up an uncivil remark, and she reminded herself the whole way not to judge people by their appearances, though she could hardly help herself) showed her to the Saxtons’, where she was to spend the night in the cleanest and most orderly house she’d yet seen since leaving Boston. Will Saxton was a kinsman on her mother’s side and he and his wife had been expecting her, and they sat her before the fire and fed her till she could eat no more. Oysters, that was what she was to remember of Stoningtown, dripping from the sea and roasted over the coals till the shells popped open, and a lobster fish as long as her arm. And a featherbed she could sink into as if it were a snowdrift, if only the snow were a warm and comforting thing and not the particles of ice flung down out of the sky by a wrathful God.

  She left at three the following afternoon—Thursday, her fourth day on the road—in the company of the Saxtons’ neighbor, Mr. Polly, and his daughter, Jemima, who looked to be fourteen or so. The road here was clear and dry but for the dull brown puddles that spotted the surface like a geographical pox, but they were easy enough to avoid and the weather was cool and fair with scarcely the breath of a breeze. They looked out to the sea and moved along at a reasonable rate—Mr. Polly, a man her own age and cultivated, a farmer and schoolmaster, setting a pace to accommodate his daughter. All went well for the first hour or so, and then the daughter—Jemima—began to complain.

  The saddle was too hard for her. The horse was lame and couldn’t keep to a regular gait. She was bored. The countryside was ill-favored—or no, it wasn’t just ill-favored but what you’d expect to see on the outskirts of hell. Could she get down and walk now? For just a hundred yards? Her backside was broken. Couldn’t they stop? Couldn’t they buy that man’s farm over there and live in it for the rest of their lives?

  Finally—and this when they were in sight of New London and the ferry itself—she got down from the horse in the middle of the road and refused to go a step farther.

  Sarah was herself in a savage mood, wishing for the hundredth time that she’d stayed home in her parlor and let Mrs. Trowbridge worry over her own affairs, and each second she had to sit on that horse without moving forward was a goad to her temper. Mr. Polly gave her a look as if to say What am I to do? and before she could think she said that if it was her daughter she’d give her a whipping she’d never forget.

  Jemima, big in the shoulder, with a broad red face beneath her bonnet, informed her that she wasn’t her daughter and glad of it too. “You’re an old hag from hell,” she spat, her face twisted in a knot, “and I wouldn’t live with you—or listen to you either—if I was an orphan and starving.”

  The trees stood still. In the near distance there was a farm and a pen and a smell of cattle. Then the father dismounted, took the daughter by the arm and marched into a thicket of the woods, where both their voices were raised in anger until the first blow descended. And then there were screams, raw, outraged, crescendoing, until you would have thought the savages had got hold of her to strip the skin from her limbs with their bloody knives. The blows stopped. Silence reigned. And Jemima, looking sullen and even redder in the face and probably elsewhere too, followed her father out of the thicket and climbed wearily back into the saddle. She didn’t speak another word till they arrived at the ferry.

  At New London

  She would just as soon forget about that careening ride over the Thames on the ferry, with the wind coming up sudden and hard and the horses jerking one way and the other and Jemima screaming like a mud hen and roaring out at her father to save her because she was afraid of going overboard and Sarah’s own stomach coming up on her till there was nothing left in it and the certainty that she would die stuck there in her throat like a criminal’s dagger, because here she was handsomely lodged at the house of the Reverend Gordon Saltonstall, minister of the town, and he and the Reverend Mrs. Saltonstall entertained her with their high-minded conversation and a board fit for royalty. Her bed was hard, the room Spartan. But she was among civilized people now, in a real and actual town, and she slept as if she were stretched out in her own bed at home.

  New London to Saybrook and on to Killingworth

  For all that, she awoke early and anxious. She felt a lightness in her head, which was the surest sign she was catching cold, and she thought of those long hours in the rain on the road to the Havenses’ and the unwholesome night airs she’d been compelled to breathe through the traverse of a hundred bogs and low places along the road, and all at once she saw herself dying there in the Reverend’s bed and buried in his churchyard so many hard miles from home. She pictured her daughter then, pale, sickly, always her mother’s child and afraid of her own shadow, having to make this grueling journey just to stand over her mother’s grave in an alien place, and she got up out of the bed choking back a sob. Her nose dripped. Her limbs ached. She was a widow alone in the world and in a strange place and she’d never felt so sorry for herself in her life. Still, she managed to pull on her clothes and boots and find her way to the kitchen where the servant had got the fire going and she warmed herself and had a cup of the Reverend’s Jamaica coffee and felt perceptibly better. As soon as the Reverend appeared, she begged him to find her a guide to New Haven, where she could go to her kinsmen and feel safe from all illness and accident.

  The Reverend said he knew just the man and went out to fetch him, and by eight o’clock in the morning she was back in the saddle and enjoying the company of Mr. Joshua Wheeler, a young gentleman of the town who had business in New Haven. He was educated and had a fresh look about him, but was crippled in the right arm as the result of a riding accident when he was a boy. He talked of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost and The Holy Bible as if he’d written them himself, and though her acquaintance with all three was not what it was once or should have been, she was able to quote him three lines of Milton—“And fast by, hanging in a golden chain, / This pendent world, in bigness as a star / Of smallest magnitude close by the moon”—and he rewarded her with a smile that made the wilderness melt away to nothing. He was like her own husband, the late, lamented Mr. Knight, when he was twenty an
d two, that was what she was thinking, and her nose stopped dripping and the miles fell away behind them without effort or pain.

  Until they came to the bridge near Lyme. It was a doubtful affair at best, rickety and swaybacked, and it took everything she had in her to urge her mount out onto it. The horse stepped forward awkwardly, the bridge dipped, the river ran slick and hard beneath it. Her heart was in her mouth. “Get on,” she told the horse, but she kept her voice low for fear of startling him, and the animal moved forward another five paces and froze there as if he’d been turned to stone. From the far side, where the trees framed him on his mount and the sun shone sick and pale off the naked rock, Mr. Wheeler called out encouragement. “Come ahead, Sarah,” he urged. “It’s as safe as anything.” If she hadn’t been so scared, suspended there over the river and at the mercy of a dumb beast that could decide to stagger sideways as easily as go forward, she might have reflected on how easy it was for him to say since he was already over on solid ground and didn’t have her fear of water. Or bridges. She gave him a worried glance and saw from the look on his face that he could have dashed across the bridge time and again without a thought and that he knew how to swim like a champion and trusted his horse and was too young yet to know how the hurts of the world accumulate. A long moment passed. She leaned close to the horse’s ear and made a clicking noise. Nothing happened. Finally, in exasperation, she resorted to the whip—just the merest flicker of it across the animal’s hindquarters—and the horse bucked and the world spun as if it were indeed hanging from a pendant and she knew she was dead. Somehow, though, she’d got to the other side, and somehow she managed to fight down her nerves and forge on, even to Saybrook Ferry and beyond.

  She must not have said two words to Mr. Wheeler the rest of the way, but when they disembarked from the ferry he suggested they stop at the ordinary there to bait the horses and take this opportunity of refreshment. It was two in the afternoon. Sarah had had nothing since breakfast, and that she couldn’t keep down for worry over falling sick on the road, and so she agreed and they found themselves at a table with one respectable diner and three or four local idlers. The landlady—in a dirty apron, hair hanging loose and scratching at her scalp with both hands as if to dislodge some foreign thing clinging there—told them she’d broil some mutton if they’d like, but as good as that sounded, Sarah couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. She kept thinking of the landlady’s hands in her hair, and when the dish did come—the mutton pickled, with cabbage and a bit of turnip in a sauce that was so ancient it might have been scraped together from the moss grown on the skulls of the Christian martyrs—she found she had no appetite. Nor did Mr. Wheeler, who tried gamely to lift the spoon a second time to his lips, but wound up pushing the dish to the corner of the table while Sarah paid sixpence apiece for their dinners, or rather the smell of dinner.

  They pressed on after that for Killingworth and arrived by seven at night. It was Friday now, the end of her fifth day on the road. She didn’t care about the bed or the food—though the former was soft and the latter savory, roasted venison, in fact—but only the road ahead and the sanctuary of Thomas Trowbridge’s house in New Haven. If she could have flown, if she could have mounted on the back of some great eagle or griffin, she would have done it without a second thought. New Haven, she told herself as she drifted off to sleep despite the noise and furor of the inn and the topers who seemed to have followed her all the way from Dedham Tavern, New Haven tomorrow.

  Killingworth to New Haven

  They set out early after a satisfactory breakfast, and though there were the Hammonasett, the East and West Rivers to cross and a dozen lesser waters, the fords were shallow and she barely hesitated. It was overcast and cool, the breeze running in off the sea to loosen her hair and beat it about her bonnet, Mr. Wheeler giving her a second day’s course in literature, the way relatively easy. And what did she see in that country on the far side of the Connecticut River? Habitations few and far between, a clutch of small boats at sea, two Indians walking along the roadway in their tatters with scallop shells stuck in their ears and dragging the carcass of some dead half-skinned animal in the dirt behind them. She saw shorebirds, a spouting whale out to sea, a saltwater farm on a promontory swallowed up in mist, and, as they got closer to their destination, boys and dogs and rude houses and yards chopped out of the surrounding forest, stubble fields and pumpkins still fat on the vine and scattered like big glowing cannonballs across the landscape. And then they were arrived and she was so relieved to see her cousin Thomas Trowbridge standing there outside his considerable stone house with his wife, Hannah, and a sleek black dog that she nearly forgot to introduce Mr. Wheeler properly, but they were all in the parlor by then and tea was brewing and something in the pot so ambrosial she could have fainted for the very richness of the smell.

  At New Haven

  She stayed two months, or one day short of it, having arrived on Saturday, the seventh of October, and leaving for New York on the sixth of December in the company of Mr. Trowbridge. In the interim, she vanquished her cold, wrote in her journal and prosecuted her business, at the same time taking advantage of this period of quiet to learn something of the people and customs of the Connecticut Colony, which to her mind at least, seemed inferior in most respects to the Massachusetts. The leaves brightened and fell, the weather grew bitter. She spun wool. Sat by the fire and chatted with Mrs. Trowbridge while the servants made a show of being busy and the slaves skulked in the kitchen to escape the cold of the fields. There were savages here aplenty, more even than at home, and they were a particularly poor and poorly attired lot, living on their own lands but suffering from a lack of Christian charity on the part of the citizenry. And the people themselves could have benefited from even the most rudimentary education—there wasn’t a man or woman walking the streets who was capable of engaging in a conversation that stretched beyond the limits of a sow’s indigestion or the salting of pilchards for the barrel.

  One afternoon she happened to be at a merchant’s house, looking to acquire a few articles to give the Trowbridges in thanks for their hospitality, when in walked a rangy tall bumpkin dressed in skins and Indian shoes and with his cheeks distended by a black plug of tobacco. He stood in the middle of the room, barely glancing at the articles on display, spitting continually into the dirt of the floor and then covering it over again with the sole of his shoe till he’d made his own personal wallow. The merchant looked inquiringly at him, but he wasn’t able to raise his eyes from the floor. Finally, after what must have been five full minutes of silence, he blurted out, “Have you any ribbands and hatbands to sell, I pray?” The merchant avowed he did and then the bumpkin wanted to know the price and the ribbons were produced; at that very instant, in came his inamorata, dropping curtsies and telling him how pretty the ribbon was and what a gentleman he was to buy it for her and did they have any hood silk and thread silk to sew it with? Well, the merchant did, and they bartered over that for half the hour, the bumpkin all the while spitting and spitting again and his wife—if she was his wife—simpering at his arm.

  That night, at supper, she remarked to Mrs. Trowbridge that some of her neighbors seemed to lack breeding and Mrs. Trowbridge threw her eyes to the ceiling and said she didn’t have to tell her.

  New Haven to Fairfield

  The saddle again. If she’d begun to harden herself to it on the long road from Boston to New Haven, now her layover with the Trowbridges had softened her and the pains that had lain dormant these two months began to reassert themselves. And it was bitter out of doors, a taut curtain of iron-gray cloud pinning them to the earth even as the wind stabbed at her bones and jerked loose every bit of chaff and ordure in the road and flung it in her face. The breath of the horse was palpable. Her fingers and toes lost all feeling and never regained them, not for two days running.

  There was a brief contretemps at the Stratford Ferry—water, more water—and she froze upright with fear and at first wouldn’
t budge from the horse, Thomas Trowbridge’s wide lunar face floating somewhere beneath her as he pleaded and reasoned and tried repeatedly to take hold of her hand, but in the end she mastered herself and the expedition went forward. The water beat at the flat bottom of the boat and she buried her face in her hands to keep herself from screaming, and then she thought she was screaming but it was only the gulls, white ghosts crying in the gloom. After that, she was only too glad to dismount at the ordinary two miles up the road and sit by the fire while the horses were baited and the hostess served up a hot punch and a pumpkin/Indian bread that proved, unfortunately, to be inedible.

  By seven at night they came to Fairfield, and lodged there.

  Fairfield to Rye

  They set out early, arriving just after noon at Norowalk, where the food, for once, was presentable and fresh, though the fried venison the landlady served up could have used more pepper in the seasoning and the tea was as weak as dishwater. The road from there to Rye was eight hours and more, a light snow swirling round them and the last four hours of the journey prosecuted in utter darkness, with only the faint tracks of a previous traveler to show them the way through the pale gauze of the night. And here she had a new sensation—her feet ached, aside from having gone numb with the cold, that is. For there was a prodigious high hill along the road, a mile or more in length, and they had to go afoot here, leading their horses behind them. Her legs took on all of her weight. They sank beneath her. She couldn’t lift them. Couldn’t breathe. And there was Thomas Trowbridge plodding ahead of her like a spirit risen in his winding sheet and his horse white too and the snow still falling as if it had been coming down since the beginning of creation and everything else—the sun, the fields, high summer and green crops—had been an illusion. “Is it much farther yet?” she asked, gasping for breath, and she must have asked a thousand times. “Na much,” came the reply, blown back in the wind.