by Boyle, T. C.
She could hear them below, the heavy tramp of feet, boxes set down with a dull reverberant thump, a soft curse, the door slamming. She wouldn’t go down there. Wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t do anything at all but just sit here until Will came up the stairs with his doleful eyes and penitential face and gave her an explanation, courted her, saw to her needs instead of his own—or just held her, just for a moment. There was the slam of the door again, sharper footsteps, thinner, like the beating of a hammer against a sheet of tin, and then the girls’ voices rising to her in a pitched-high gabble that gave her no comfort at all. Edith said something. Ida responded. Edith went off again. She strained to hear, but the walls and floors distorted the sense of it till she couldn’t tell whether they were as heartsick and disoriented as she herself was or caught up in the novelty of the place and the day and the task ahead of them. There went Edith. There Ida. And then one of them was in the kitchen, a banging there, metal on metal, and it was Ida, it had to be, settling in.
It was only then that she lifted her eyes to the room, to see again where she was, to study the peeling whitewashed boards that ran up the walls and across the ceiling without differentiation, the window cut there like a dark demonic eye, the plain porcelain chamber pot set in one corner in advertisement of its function, the water-stained armoire in the other, its mirrored door dull as a sheet of lead. The next cough caught in her throat and she took a shallow wheezing breath and held it, then pushed herself up and went to the washstand. There was a pitcher of water there beside the basin and a chipped ceramic cup that seemed to have some sort of residue at the bottom of it. She breathed out, then in again, then once more, deeper now, expanding her lungs, and the cough didn’t come. How long the water in the pitcher had sat there she couldn’t say—was it from Will’s last visit? Or had the boy freshened it that morning? No matter. She lifted the pitcher to her lips and drank till droplets spilled down the front of her jacket.
The moment passed and she felt marginally better. She was going to have to get control of herself, will herself to get better and be the sort of wife she knew she could be if she could just get past this sinking feeling that had brought on the spasm as much as anything else because hadn’t she been breathing freely down there at the beach? Less than an hour ago? And wasn’t the air pure, just as Will had promised? That was when she turned and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. There was a figure trapped there beneath the dull sheen, a figure that mimicked her every motion though it didn’t look like her at all, and that was because the mirror was cheaply made, a pure lens of distortion like one of the mirrors in the fun house at the arcade. The woman staring back at her had a wasted filmy look, the flesh tightened at the jawline and raked back around the orbits of the eyes, and when she stood up straight in her traveling clothes and arched her back and threw out her chest, she saw nothing there, just a pinched descending line from the pale blotch of her face to the fixed hem of her brown twill dress.
She moved closer, ignoring the sounds from below—a clangor, a thump, Will’s voice raised in command—and took a good hard look. And then, without even knowing what she was doing, she was loosening the jacket and unbuttoning the shirtwaist to reveal her camisole and the white tatting that edged it. Her clavicle—was that what it was called?—shone in the weak light as a hard raised slash of bone over flesh so bloodless it might have been the flesh of a veal calf. Fascinated, she peeled the camisole down to the upper edge of her corset—never mind the cold—and there were her breasts revealed. What had been her breasts. Nothing there now but the nipples, as if she were a child all over again. She’d lost weight, of course she had, she’d known that all along. The first doctor had put her on a milk diet and then the second—Dr. Erringer, the one who’d auscultated her and listened and thumped and pronounced the inescapable diagnosis in his soft priestly tones—on red meat, and she tried to eat, she did, but what the mirror gave back was undeniable, unthinkable, fraught and ugly and pointing to one end only because this wasn’t the fun house but the real and actual.
I’ll tell Will, she was thinking, frightened all over again, terrified. Tell him it’s not going to work, tell him I need sun, not gloom, comfort, pampering, civilization, that this is all wrong, wrong, wrong. Tell him I can’t be his wife, can’t sleep in the same bed with him, can’t do what’s expected of a wife because my bones won’t stand it, my lungs, my breasts, my heart, my heart . . .
When was the last time they’d been husband and wife? Before her hemorrhage. Before December, anyway. And before that, after she’d begun to lose weight and Dr. Erringer had informed her that consumption was not hereditary as people had believed all these years but a disease caused by infectious agents, by microbes that were so small as to be invisible, she’d been afraid for Will, afraid of infecting him, and yet he was needful and she was too and their marital relations went on. With one proviso: she wouldn’t kiss him. Wouldn’t kiss anyone, not even Edith—not on the lips. That was her true terror—not that she herself would succumb, which on her bad days she saw as increasingly inevitable no matter how much Will tried to talk it away, but that she would infect the ones she loved the most.
She turned away from the mirror, buttoned herself up and crossed back to the bed. The chill of the place—of a room in a wind-besieged house that had been allowed to go cold because there was no one there to feel it, because it had been derelict, run-down, cheerless—set her to shivering, and she wouldn’t wrap herself in the filthy bedding no matter if she shivered to death, but she laid herself down on the mattress, using one arm for a pillow, pulled up her legs and curled into herself. Sleep, that was what she needed. If she could just rest a bit, she’d feel better, she knew she would. She closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. And the room, with its wheeling drift of dirt and the stained armoire in one corner and the chamber pot in the other, vanished into nothingness.
The Kitchen
She awoke to a distant thumping, as if to the beating of an outsized heart, a heart as big as the house itself. Thump, thump, thump. For the first moment, staring at the unfamiliar walls, she didn’t know where she was, and then it all came back to her in a rush: she was on an island raked with wind, an island fourteen miles square set down in the heaving froth of the Pacific Ocean, and there was nothing on it but the creatures of nature and an immense rolling flock of sheep that were money on the hoof, income, increase, bleating woolly sacks of greenback dollars—or at least that was the way Will saw it. Will, whose footsteps, heavy tread, were coming up the stairs to her, thumping, thumping. She held herself very still, counting off the intervals between her breaths, fighting back the urge to cough because one cough, the first one, would lead to another and then another, till the whole unraveling skein played itself out all over again.
The footsteps stopped outside the door. Then there was a knock and Will’s voice, soft and inquisitive: “Marantha, are you there? Are you asleep?”
She was gathering herself—it was New Year’s Day, they were in their new home, here now and no place else, and they were going to put things in order, celebrate the day, live and breathe and take in the air, the virginal air—but she wasn’t ready yet. She needed a minute. One more minute. She didn’t answer.
The door pushed slowly open and there he was, Will, standing in the doorframe peering in at her, his look poised between the elation she knew must have been surging through him and the duty he felt toward her. The duty to frown and commiserate and fold his big busy hands up in front of him as if he didn’t know what to do with them. “Is it bad?” he said, and he took a step forward, as if to come to her, but she didn’t want him, not yet.
She spoke without lifting her head. “We’re going to have to do the washing,” she said, her voice toneless and rasping, the voice of a woman shrinking into the grip of her own skin as if it were no more than a sack, a coat. “I hope you understand that. Right off. First thing.”
“Yes,” he said, snatching a look at her fa
ce before his eyes went to the wall, the window, anyplace but the space she occupied, “yes, of course. You’re right.” He was a big man, six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, solid, powerful, her man, her strength, and she felt sorry for him in that moment, sorry she couldn’t share in his enthusiasm, but one thought only was going through her head: They’d spent ten thousand dollars for this? The last ten thousand dollars she had to her name? What if things didn’t work out, what if the boat didn’t come, or what if it did and then went aground and wrecked under the load of the shorn wool that was the profit of the place? Then what would they do? Kill sheep and wear their skins and go around hooting like the Indians who’d given up on this lump of rock all those eons ago, who’d died of misery and want for all she knew?
“It’s all right,” he said, more softly now, and his eyes came back to settle on her. “We’ll have it all washed and dried out before bedtime, you’ll see.”
She didn’t respond for a long moment. “Send Ida up,” she said finally. “And Edith. Where’s Edith?”
* * *
And then everything shifted as if she’d turned the page of a book. Will eased the door shut. She heard his tread on the stairs, heard Ida’s voice, Edith’s. She sat up, setting both feet squarely on the floor and the floor didn’t move because it wasn’t the deck of a boat, everything fixed and solid now, this mineral world, this place where she lived. She took a tentative breath and held it, and in the next moment the weight was gone from her chest and she was breathing freely, thinking of all the things that needed doing, the wash, the clothes, the furniture, unpacking. She felt ashamed of herself. So what if the place was dirty? That was a temporary condition. It could be cleaned. Made presentable. Comfortable, even. Anyplace could.
She stood. Brushed at her skirt to smooth it down. And then she was out the door and in the upper hall, heat rising to her from the iron stove below and the damp lingering reek of sheep driven down by the scent of the coffee Ida was brewing on the kitchen stove, God bless her. She went to the kitchen first. Ida, a smear of something darkening one cheek—ash, grease?—gave her a frantic look. “I was just making up a tray for you—coffee, with two lumps, the way you like it, and buttered toast.”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” she said, “you’ve got enough to do, I can see that. I’ll take it here.”
“Here?”
There was a hutch in the far corner, the glass in the upper portion cracked, its paint (olive and cream, with dabs of yellow to represent the blooms of the flower pattern on the cupboard doors) stripped to the bare wood in random patches as if it had been gouged with a sharp implement or maybe even gnawed. An oilcloth-covered table with two chairs stood beside the back door, just beneath the window. On the wall behind it, running from the door to the stove, there were two lines of hooks, and from the hooks, blackened pans hung suspended. Along with a cleaver. A boning knife. What looked to be some sort of flail—or no, it was a flour mill. And beside that, in the corner where the stovepipe ran up into the unfinished eaves, a homemade calendar fastened to the wall with a single nail, its leaves curling at the edges. She moved closer, squinted her eyes. The calendar showed the month of March, 1886, almost two years ago, and she saw that one of the dates had been circled in black, the tenth.
“Ma’am?” Ida had lifted the tray from the counter and was holding it out before her in offering.
“Set it on the table, would you?”
She went up to the calendar, ran a finger over the neat circle of ink. Mrs. Mills. It must have been Mrs. Mills who’d marked the date as special, and what was it, an anniversary? A birthday? She’d met the woman only once, in the house at Santa Barbara, and she remembered her as graceless and plain, her clothes out of fashion and her hair gone gray, a woman not much older than herself who’d spent the better part of seventeen years on this island, in this house. Who’d sat at this table and laid out the days and months in a neat grid, who’d selected Wednesday the tenth and marked it in anticipation of an event that was long past now. History. Everything was history.
“Do you miss it?” Marantha had asked her. “The island? After so much time spent there, I mean?” It had taken the woman a moment, as if the thought had never occurred to her. Then she leaned back in the chair—the men were out of earshot, on the front porch, perched on the railing and jawing away like long-lost brothers, the afternoon grand, sun striping the carpet and carriages sailing by on the street as if they were boats on a stream—and let out a long sighing breath. “It does get lonesome out there, I’ll say that. But the quiet does you good. You don’t have all the dirt and noise of the city. The criminal population. Cheats, lawyers. Of course, my boys—Jack and William—was eager to get out. No females out there, you see?”
Seventeen years. Mrs. Mills. Call me Irene.
She didn’t sit—she felt full of energy suddenly, as if she were somehow in competition with the absent woman, a housewife herself, a farmwife, at least for the time being. Instead, she ate standing up, leaning over the table to sip from the cup and pick the toast up off a cracked plate she’d never laid eyes on before. One of Mrs. Mills’, no doubt. One of the sheepmen’s. She studied the unfamiliar cup in her hand, paused to chew, swallow. A quick image of Charlie Curner flitted through her head, his boat riding the waves and the mainland looming up on him. “Ida,” she said after a moment, “have you seen the crate with the dishes?”
“They must be in the yard yet. Or the front room.” Ida had already been out back, at the cistern, and the big laundry pot had been set to boil atop the stove. The sheets would go there, if anyone could find the soap they’d brought, and the bed curtains and the rest, and Will would have to string up a length of rope for a clothesline, or did they already have one here? They must have. Even sheepmen, even Jimmie, had to have washed their clothes, if only to keep them from rotting away to rags.
“Well, wouldn’t it be a good idea to have them brought back here so they can be sorted and put on the shelves? We can’t be expected to eat off a bare table, or, or”—she held up the cracked plate—“this rubbish.”
“I don’t know, ma’am, but there’s an awful load of boxes out there, just a jumble of things the men have gone and dropped down without bothering even to see what they are. I can’t make hide nor hair of them.”
“But I clearly labeled them—you saw me.”
Ida just shrugged. This was hard on her, she could see that. Everything was in chaos and there were a thousand things to do, not the least of which was to prepare the meal, the holiday meal, and here was the bird itself—how could she have missed it?—laid out on the counter beside the iron sink, neatly gutted and plucked, just as if it had come from the butcher.
“The turkey,” she said. “Was that from—?”
“The boy killed it this morning, while we were on the boat, is what I gather, because Captain Waters give him word when he was here before Christmas to make things ready for us. There’s a whole flock of them running about the yard, you know. Chickens too. You should go and have a look, you should. The sun’s just broke through and it’s a glorious day out there. It’ll lift your spirits, I’m sure.” She turned back to the stove, to the potatoes boiling there in an unfamiliar pot, a sheepmen’s pot, blackened and battered. “And Captain Waters says we’re to stop what we’re doing, all of us, by three o’clock, because it’s a holiday and he’s going to take us out and show us over the island.”
She couldn’t see much out the window, which was as clouded with abrasion as the ones in the front room. But she saw the outline of the pens there in the yard, the wooden slats of the fences, and beyond them the long gradually sloping rise that culminated in the high point of the island, Green Mountain, 831 feet above sea level, a measurement Will had taken himself with his transit. Eight hundred thirty-one feet. He was proud of that figure, inordinately proud, as if he’d captured one of the Alps and reduced it to fit here to scale on his own pri
vate domain.
“We’re all in a high state of excitement, so,” Ida said, turning to the chopping block now and the turkey that wanted stuffing. She chopped onions and celery, fragmented a heel of bread, her movements neat and circumscribed, her shoulders dipping and rising as she worked through her tasks, her feet sweeping through a graceful arc on the bleached-out floorboards till she might have been dancing in place. She was a pretty girl, pretty enough, though no match for Edith, and a good worker, solicitous, kind, dutiful above all else. Her parents were Mullinses, out of County Cork via Boston and the Gold Rush that had washed them up penniless in San Francisco. She was a poor girl, that was all, poor Irish, but after three years of having her in the house now Marantha considered her as much a daughter as Edith herself, or very nearly. “To see over the island, I mean,” Ida went on, glancing over her shoulder. “The flock. And the seals too. Can you hear them? That’s them barking in the distance.”
She caught her breath a moment. There was the creak and rustle of the stove, the hiss of water coming to a boil. Men’s voices, muffled, giving and taking orders. And something else too, an undercurrent of concerted vocalization that might have been the basso ostinato of a distant choir. Seals. Barking. Or no, singing, singing their own immemorial songs to the sea and the island, and to what else? Fish. They sang to fish, the god of fish, the provider and nurturer of all the flashing silver schools of the sea. She tried to picture them—she’d seen them in San Francisco, lying inert on the rocks at the edge of the Bay—dun things, black, tan, bleached white. Those seals belonged to no one. But these, strange to think it, the ones singing even now, belonged to her.
The Flock
From the kitchen she went down the hall to the main room (the parlor, she’d have to call it, the parlor cum dining room) and started sorting through the boxes, looking for her plates, the cutlery—and sheets, where were the sheets? The men had left everything in a jumble, just as Ida said, and things had gotten wet, unfortunately, so that the ink had bled and smeared on the boxes she’d so meticulously packed and labeled back in Santa Barbara, working through long punishing afternoons when she’d barely felt equal to getting out of bed. They were outside now, the men—she could see them through the window, their hats and shoulders glazed with sun, Will, Adolph and Jimmie—and they seemed to be fussing with the mule and the sled. But there were two mules now and a horse too and Will was bending suddenly to jerk a supple darkly shining object up off the fence post and clap it over the horse’s back—a saddle, the stirrups dangling and the horse flinching with the surprise of it. And then, speaking of surprises, she saw that there was a dog there with them, a sheepdog with a piebald coat and two mismatched eyes, its tail sweeping back and forth in the dirt.