San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  A dog. A horse. Turkeys. Seals. She couldn’t begin to imagine what else would turn up in this embarrassment of riches—and what about the sun overhead, did she own that too? Or the effect of it, the power it radiated to the grass so the grass could sprout and the sheep could batten on it and frolic and grow out their coats? The dirt, the dirt was hers. Or half hers. Or no, a quarter, when you factored in Hiram Mills. And Mrs. Mills. She had a quarter interest too. They were like four gods, their own pantheon.

  She went to the front door—never mind how poorly hung it was—and pushed it open on the pale streaming sunlight. The wind had died. It was almost warm. All the scents of nature came to her at once like a dose of smelling salts—the barnyard and its ordure, the wildflowers blanketing the hills, sage, lupine, the sea—and it was as if she’d never been alive till this moment, because this wasn’t the exhausted sterile atmosphere of the parlor, the restaurant, the public library or the doctor’s office or any confined space, but something else entirely. It was primitive. Untainted. Fresh. Fresh air, the air that would cure her. It was true, everything Will had told her was true. How could she have doubted him?

  “Will!” she cried out and watched him turn away from the horse, a neutral look on his face because he didn’t know what to expect, complaints, demands, trouble, and before she could think she was coming across the yard to him, pinching her skirts to keep them out of the mud. The hired man and the boy stood there frozen. The dog lifted its eyes. “Will,” she said, “it’s glorious. Everything is. I’m just—didn’t you say you were going to take us for a ride?”

  * * *

  There were three chairs lashed to the sled this time—two rockers, for her and Ida, and a straight-backed chair for Jimmie, who was to drive the mule. “I’ve swapped out the mules,” Will said when they’d gathered there in the yard, all of them still in their traveling clothes because there hadn’t seemed much sense in changing into anything fresh, not till dinner, anyway. “General Meade here, I’ve hitched him to the sled because he’s stronger but less predictable than Plum”—and here he looked to Edith—“who as you can see I’ve saddled up for someone to ride. I’ll be on Mike”—he nodded toward the horse, which was poking its muzzle into the dirt around a poor sprout of yellowed weed—“and since Adolph’s going to stay behind to look after things, the turkey, in particular, isn’t that right, Ida?, I guess that elects you, Edith.”

  Edith gave him a look of surprise and then she flushed with pleasure.

  “Here,” he said, “let me help you up,” and Edith went to him and Will dropped one hand down so that he could take her foot, put an arm round her shoulder and ease her up and into the saddle. “Now, you’ll go sidesaddle today, till you get used to him, but we’ll have you riding astride in no time. You wait and see.”

  Then he mounted the horse, wonderfully agile for a man his age, commanding, erect, the hat raked down over one eye as if he were one of the cowboys in a dime novel, and Marantha realized she’d never seen him on a horse before, never even dreamed he had the skill of it. Maybe it was something he’d learned in the Army, before she knew him. Maybe that was it. It had to be. Because in the seven years they’d been married he’d never ventured beyond the hansom or cable car, not as far as she knew. “Are you comfortable there, Minnie?” he asked, using his pet name for her even as he leaned down and steadied the reins so that the horse’s hooves did a quick little dance and the mud exploded beneath them.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, though she dreaded the yawing and jolting that was to come. She gripped the arms of the rocker, braced her feet, made sure of her hat.

  “All right,” he said, nosing his horse around, “you go nice and easy now, Jimmie. This isn’t a race.”

  The boy didn’t respond. He merely flicked the switch at the stolid black rump of the mule—General Meade—and they were off, the dog darting on ahead with a high tremulous yelp while Ida swung anxiously round to shout over her shoulder to Adolph, who stood there in the yard like a post, his arms dangling and his face expressionless. “Don’t you let that turkey dry out,” she called. She was trying to add something else, some further admonition, something about basting, but the sled dropped into a hole and her voice got away from her.

  * * *

  They hadn’t gone two hundred yards before the sheep began to appear, wedge-faced aggregations of them staring stupidly from either side or lurching out of the way of the mule at the last second. Yellow eyes, the black slits of their pupils. Wool caked with filth. Sheep. If they’d looked vaguely romantic at a distance, like souls set adrift, up close they were anything but. The smell was stronger here, a working odor of massed bodies, of sweat, urine, excrement. All she could hear was the sound of their ragged mindless bleating like a perpetual complaint, and underneath it the pulsing indistinct chorus of the seals.

  Will led on, heading toward a bluff beyond, where apparently there was another canyon that gave onto the beach, another beach. The plan was to picnic by the shore, walk the strand and collect seashells while Jimmie went off to pry abalone from the rocks for a New Year’s chowder to complement the turkey and potatoes. That was fine, but this business of the sled was something else altogether. She held tight as it swayed side to side, lurched over stones and hissed through the long troughs of sand, Ida shouting with glee and the boy rising up out of his seat to coax the mule on. At first she was nervous about Edith, afraid her mule would bolt or throw her or step in a hole and go down atop her, but as they went on she saw how confident Edith was—and alert too—and how the mule really was gentle, ambling along like one of the ponies Edith used to ride at the park when she was little. She was thinking about that, about the time when there were just the two of them, before Will had come into her life, and how dense and rich those days had seemed, James dead and buried and Edith there to take his place, to be stroked, loved, supported, when Will, riding high above them, swung his horse round to come up beside the sled and lean down to her.

  “You see that, Minnie,” he crowed, waving his arm in a grand gesture to take in the whole scene, from the dwindling furrow the sled had cut behind them to the crown of Green Mountain and the far-flung clusters of sheep that seemed to be everywhere, palely glowing under the benediction of the sun. “That’s just a fraction of the flock, which Mills puts at four thousand, and that’s before the increase of this year’s lambs.”

  He was grinning down at her, looking more alive than she’d seen him in years, his excitement running on ahead of him. “I can see them,” she called back, the sled jolting so that she had to hang on with both hands. “Just look at the lambs trying out their legs. The way they kick.”

  Edith was on the opposite side of the sled, not twenty feet away, her shoulders swaying gracefully beneath the crown of her hat as the mule worked its haunches up and down, picking its slow deliberate way through the scrub that was alive with pale green shoots of new grass and wildflowers as far as you could see. She was about to call to her, to point out the lambs, when Edith pulled up short, tugging at the reins so that the mule jerked back its head and planted its feet, all motion gone out of it in an instant but for the slow metronomic swishing of its tail. Edith arched her back, raised a hand to shield her eyes. “Oh, look,” she said, pointing now, “look at that one all alone. Is that one alone? Over there?”

  The dog had already spotted it, scrambling his paws to bolt through the grass and circle it twice, his bark fluent and pitched high. The lamb, its umbilical still trailing away beneath it, merely blinked at him, as helpless as a fallen leaf. The ewe was nowhere to be seen.

  “You better shut that dog up or he’ll drive all the ewes off their lambs,” Will said, addressing Jimmie, who stopped the mule with a single guttural command, sprang down from the sled and began wading off through the vegetation, the dog dancing on ahead of him.

  “Nipper!” the boy called. “Nipper, heel!”

  It was too much for Edith. She slid
from the saddle as naturally as if she’d been doing it all her life and hurried after him, and in the next moment they were all on foot, the whole party, she and Ida and Will too, pushing through the scrub to where the lamb stood apart from the flock that spun out in all directions, each ewe with one or two lambs and sometimes three, lambs in the hundreds sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. There was that odor, that intense odor, as of things fermenting. Suddenly it was cold. She put a hand to her throat, pinching the collar of her coat to keep out the breeze that seemed to have come up out of nowhere. When she got to where the lamb was, the dog was sitting on its heels and Jimmie and Will were standing there gazing down at it as if it were some rare specimen. Edith, looking flushed, bent to it with a sprig of fresh grass. “Here,” she was saying. “Here, little thing, take this.”

  “It don’t want grass,” Jimmie said flatly. “Milk’s what it wants. Mother’s milk.”

  “Poor thing,” Marantha heard herself say, and at that moment the animal let out a bleat so hopeless and weak you’d have thought it was dying right there before their eyes.

  “They each of them has his own call and his own smell—that’s how the dam finds them,” Jimmie said. “But every once in a while, nobody knows why, the ewe’ll reject her own lamb.”

  “Can we keep it?” Edith pleaded. “Nurse it, I mean. Because if its mother—”

  Will was standing beside her, gazing down on the bony narrow skull, the ears slick with afterbirth, the slit yellow eyes, the lips opening and closing on nothing. He had his hands on his hips the way he did when he’d made up his mind about something and that irked her because she could see what was coming. “You can’t just blunder on an animal and assume it’s abandoned,” he said, and his voice was wrong, all wrong, too hard by half. “Because sometimes the ewe comes back—isn’t that right, Jimmie?—and that gives it a far better chance of survival than having to rely on somebody who, for all the height and heft of her, is still a child, feeding it six times a day from a warmed-over pan of milk.”

  Edith never even glanced at him. She just straightened up and turned to her, to her mother, and repeated herself: “Can we?”

  And what did she say? She said, “Of course, of course we can,” and she was looking at Will when she said it. “We can’t just leave the poor animal out here to starve, can we?”

  The Lamb

  Dinner that first evening was a homely affair, hardly festive, but it was better than it had a right to be considering where they were and the transformation that had taken place in the interval of just over twelve hours, from the time they pulled themselves out of bed on the mainland till now, with night freshly descended over the island. The table had been moved to the center of the room and covered with a cloth, there was a fire going in the potbellied stove to take the chill off the place and Will had lit a pair of lanterns that threw rollicking shadows across the walls every time somebody moved. She took a glass of wine when it was offered her and raised it to Will’s in a toast to her new life and her new family, all of them, even Adolph and Jimmie, who were seated at the foot of the table, looking abashed. For them, there was beer, and for Edith a bottle of sarsaparilla. Whatever had afflicted her earlier, whatever her fears, the day and the sun and the novelty of the moment had pushed it all away and she felt calm now, calm and steady and even grateful.

  The abalone chowder was a pleasant surprise, unexpectedly rich and flavorful, heavily peppered and simmered down in the cream from the milk of the cow Jimmie had led in from the pasture a week earlier after its calf had died—that and the butter they’d brought with them from the mainland. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought she was spooning up an oyster bisque at a candlelit table at Fior d’Italia in San Francisco. And Ida did a splendid job with the turkey, which, while it wasn’t as moist as it might have been, nonetheless hadn’t been scorched or dried to jerky either, which was quite a feat under the circumstances.

  On the other hand, they were eating off of a mismatched assortment of chipped plates she herself had found in a dirty cupboard in the kitchen after discovering they’d somehow forgotten the box of Wedgwood china that had once belonged to her first husband’s mother. Or that the cutlery had been left behind too, so that they had to alternate between an odd farrago of forks and spoons and pass round the two bone-handled knives that had been standing on the kitchen windowsill for God knew how long.

  That was crude. So crude it had almost brought tears to her eyes, but she’d held back—just as she’d held back that morning when the coughing started up again—because she didn’t want to spoil things for Will. This was his idea, his venture, his dream, and he’d talked it up so many times over the past months it had become a litany of success and increase and health abounding, and now the abstraction had been made concrete. He was beside himself, his eyes shining above the thick regimental mustache as he laid out his plans for the road, the outbuildings, the sheep and hogs and all the rest, even a boat—if they couldn’t build one out of scrap they’d save up and buy one of the working boats in the harbor at Santa Barbara, once the wool came in. She’d never seen him happier. He hummed to himself as he carved the turkey, then danced round the table as he served it out in great steaming slabs and all the while the talk never stopped. Increase, that was his theme. Increase and improvement and profit.

  Edith seemed in good spirits too, chattering away with Ida, giggling, shooting glances down the table at Jimmie, who blushed and turned his face away, and at Adolph, immovable Adolph, who sat there as if he’d been carved of stone. It was a relief. Especially after the way she’d fought against the move, throwing one tantrum after another, as if to leave her piano and dance lessons and the new friends she’d begun to make in town were the end of her life. There’s no choice in the matter, Marantha had told her. The deed’s signed, the money paid out. Think of someone other than yourself for a change. And Edith had thrown it right back at her: I am. I’m thinking of you.

  But now, in the flush of arrival and settling in, everything seemed to have changed. The mule ride had clearly thrilled her. The novelty of the place. The turkeys roosting in the grass, the lovely mother-of-pearl seashells she was already planning to work into beads for a necklace, the wildness and isolation of the hills and valleys that bled away in the mist as if they’d never been there at all.

  “It’s like Wuthering Heights,” she’d said as they were setting the table for dinner, “like the wild moors with their lowing herds and wandering flocks. Exactly like.” And then she’d looked beyond the window and into the yard where Jimmie and Adolph were cutting and stacking lengths of root and driftwood for the stove. “Only where’s my Heathcliff?” And then they’d both laughed, and that felt good, because it was the first time in weeks, at least since they’d begun the ordeal of organizing and packing and ordering supplies and foodstuffs from one shop and another, that Marantha felt the burden lift from her.

  And then there was the lamb. They could hear it bleating from the yard throughout the meal and it kept on bleating even after Edith had given it a bowl of stove-warmed milk, letting it suck the liquid from her fingers as if it were at the teat, and it bleated when they cleared the table for cards and the Ouija board and it kept on bleating when she and Will climbed the stairs to their bed with its fresh-washed sheets and dubious counterpane and the bed curtains that were still damp to the touch.

  For a long while she lay awake, listening to it, though she was exhausted and couldn’t have moved a finger even if the bed had caught fire. There were furtive scurryings in the dark—mice, as she was to discover, legions of them that overran the place and made it their own, as if she and Will were only leasing it from them—and an intermittent scraping she couldn’t place. It might have been the sheepdog scratching at the door or some other animal nosing round the house looking for a way in, seals lumbering up at night, seabirds, owls, what did she know? Or maybe it was her imagination, maybe she was hearing things
, her nerves at a pitch and the silence so uncompromising, so different from the way it had been on Post Street, where there were always voices, hoof beats, the creak and clatter of wagon wheels, distant music, life.

  Toward dawn—she must have dozed, because she started awake with the pain in her chest that felt as if some thing were living inside her and struggling to get out—there came a series of soft distant barks that weren’t like the barking of a dog at all, or the seals with their raucous eruptive cries she’d heard as clearly as if they were right out there in the yard. She listened for a long while, puzzled, until she realized that the sound must have been coming from the foxes Will had told her about, Lilliputian things the size of a house cat that stole through the night and made off with the turkeys and chickens and the eggs they laid in neat cups of grass and couldn’t defend in the dark. It was a dull sound, spaced at intervals, and after a while it dragged her back down into sleep.

  If she dreamed, it was of sunshine cascading off a vine-covered wall and the grapes hanging there plump with dew, but before it was full light she was awakened by a knock at the door that pulled Will up out of his sleep with a grunt of alarm. “Hush,” she murmured, reaching out a hand to him, “hush, Will.” And then she thought of Edith. “Is that you, Edith?” she called.