San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  It wasn’t till she’d lit the kitchen stove, filled the kettle with water and set it there on the stovetop to boil that she turned and came up the hall to the main room with the notion of stoking the fire there too. Only then did she think of the lamb. And she thought of it only because it was lying there stiff on the floor, the cord twisted round its throat where it had fought against it in the dark—twisted, and twisted again.

  Jimmie

  By the end of the first week she’d begun to feel stronger, so that she was able, at least for a few hours each day, to oversee the household and even take on some of the cooking herself—by way of a change and to free Ida for other tasks, not the least of which was to scour some of the sheepmen’s dirt out of the place. The floors were the most objectionable, pocked as they were with the impress of a generation of shearers’ boot heels and stained with grease and lanolin and worse. It went without saying that the kitchen was filthy, but she put Ida and Edith to work on it and before long it was almost tolerable, though it would never be what anyone, even a blind man, would call clean, not unless the walls and floor and fly-spotted rafters were torn out and set afire and the carpenters came in and started all over again. For the most part, she left dinner to Ida—she was to avoid all exertion if she had any hope of recovery, or so the doctors claimed, and by evening she was always at her lowest ebb—but when Jimmie and Adolph came up to the house one morning with a dozen lobsters from the pots they’d put out, she took it on herself, as a daughter of New England, to show them how they should be prepared.

  Will had finished the shed and repaired some of the fences, and now he had the men working on the preliminaries of converting the path down to the harbor into a serviceable road. The day was overcast and cold, though the air, for once, was still. After examining each of the lobsters carefully to be sure they were sound, she went out the front door and across the yard to where the men were working. Will was in his shirtsleeves, slinging a pick. Adolph was filling the wheelbarrow with dirt and Jimmie was standing there with his hands in his pockets, waiting to dump it over the side and down into the canyon. “Jimmie,” she called, “would you come here a minute? I have something I’d like for you to do.”

  She watched him exchange a look with her husband.

  “I’ll just need him for a bit,” she said, though it wasn’t the truth.

  Will set down the pick and took a minute to wipe his face with his handkerchief. She could see that he wasn’t happy about it, but he nodded to Jimmie and Jimmie crossed the yard to her.

  “I want you to go down to the shore and bring me back some seaweed.”

  He tugged at his cap, brushed the hair out of his eyes and shot a single look over his shoulder in Will’s direction, but Will had already turned back to his work. “Seaweed?” he echoed.

  “You’ll need the mule.”

  It took him the better part of an hour and when he returned he had enough kelp with him to bury the sled twice over. She was at the window with her sewing when he came up the road and she saw that Will and Adolph said something to him as he led the mule on past them, and then she was out in the yard and waving him around back of the house where she’d selected the spot for the pit in a stretch of sandy soil. “I want you to dig here,” she said.

  “Dig, ma’am?”

  “A firepit,” she said, and he gave her a blank look. “For the lobsters?”

  He repeated her words, very slowly, and she could see that he thought she’d gone mad—or no, he was just confirming the conclusion he’d reached on that first day when he’d hauled her up the hill behind the mule.

  She couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t you worry,” she said, “I know what I’m doing. Now, I’m going to want it roughly here”—she bent to project an imaginary line with the tip of her forefinger—“and it should be, oh, maybe three feet deep and at least that many long. Once it’s done, I’m going to want you to fill it with wood and build the biggest fire you can, understood?”

  He simply nodded and slouched off to get the shovel, and if Will was going to complain—and she knew he would, taking the boy off the job like that—well, she had no doubt the result would be worth it.

  She had Ida serve the lobsters with the last of the butter they’d brought over from the mainland and there were roasted potatoes to go with them. Edith lit a candle. Ida brought out a pot of beans and a plate of fried dough. Will said grace, a few murmured words, and then the two knives went round as everyone pried at the shells of the lobsters to get at the sweet white meat that had cost them nothing but effort, meat as free as the air and the salt seawater that surrounded them. “Good, isn’t it?” she said, trying a bite of it herself, though these weren’t the lobsters she knew because they lacked claws and the claws held some of the most succulent morsels, but then none of them would have known that but Will, and Will just said, “Yes, delicious.”

  There was a silence, the only sounds the cracking of the shells and the play of their utensils. Edith was struggling to crack hers with a fork only, as Adolph had one of the knives and Will the other, and she wasn’t speaking to either of them because of the way they’d reacted to the death of her lamb. Will had been especially harsh. “You see what comes of your willfulness,” he said, as if Edith hadn’t been distraught already, blaming herself over and over. He’d looked down at it, at the staring eyes and the ragged red line at its throat where the cord had dug in, its legs splayed and tongue like some black wedge of meat it had tried to swallow. “Take that thing out in the yard where it belongs,” he said, or no, he was practically snarling, and then he turned his back on her and stamped down the hall to the kitchen. And Adolph, as if it were any of his business, had not only criticized her at breakfast that morning so that she left the table in tears, he’d insisted on dressing the carcass for its meat and then tacking the hide out on the wall of the shed to dry in the wind. “And why?” Marantha had demanded. “Why would you want to do that?” He’d looked up at her insolently, chewing around the heel of bread he’d just shoved into his mouth, a hired hand who should have been taking his meals out of doors—and would have, but for Will’s democratic feelings. “For gloves,” he said. “Kid gloves. The softest thing in this world.” He’d hesitated, looking her dead in the eye across the expanse of the table. “But for one other thing I can think of.”

  Will had been in the kitchen, out of earshot, and lucky for Adolph, but she hadn’t forgotten the incident—and neither had Edith. And since that morning, at her pointed request, the hands had been taking breakfast and luncheon in the kitchen or out in the bunkhouse, but Will—she’d never told him what the man had said, not in so many words, for fear of Will’s temper and what he might have done—still insisted on all of them taking dinner together.

  And so here they were, cracking lobster and passing round the plate of potatoes like one big family, and when Ida came into the room with her own plate and took a seat beside Jimmie, it was Marantha who broke the silence. “Ida,” she said, and this had been prearranged between them, “aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Lord yes, ma’am,” Ida said, tapping her forehead in pantomime and jumping up as if the chair were a bed of hot coals. “How ever could I have forgotten?” They all watched her cross the room and head down the hall for the kitchen.

  “What’s all this?” Will asked, looking up at her.

  “Oh, nothing much,” Marantha said, trying to keep her expression even. “Just a treat, a little something extra—for Jimmie.” The boy’s eyes jumped to hers. “Because he was the one who did all the work and it’s only right—”

  And here was Ida, hoisting the big platter over one shoulder like a waiter in the finest restaurant, only to set it down before Jimmie, still steaming and redolent of the sea.

  “Go ahead,” Marantha said, and now it all came out, now she was laughing, now she was a girl again, as the boy, with a look of bewilderment, plucked one of th
e long pale wet strands of kelp up off the platter and held it out before him on the tines of his fork. “Go ahead—it’s the best part.”

  * * *

  When Charlie Curner did finally arrive from Santa Barbara—two days late—she was the first to spot the sail in the harbor. She’d been sitting at the window in the bedroom, working at her scrapbook, feeling faintly nauseated after the few bites of luncheon she’d forced herself to swallow (the last of Edith’s lamb, which Ida had stewed with carrots and potatoes till it had lost its consistency and melted away into the gravy, though Edith still wouldn’t touch it, subsisting exclusively these past days on eggs and porridge), and she’d glanced up from the nameless pink flower she was pressing flat between two sheets of paper, and there it was. She had to look twice to be sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her, and then she lifted Will’s binoculars down from the hook beside the window and focused in on the boat till it came clear and she could see that it was Charlie Curner standing at the helm and not some Chinese abalone fisherman or a poacher come to rob them of the odd sheep when their guard was down.

  Her blood was racing. She stood abruptly from the chair, spilling the scrapbook to the floor, and then she was out the door and down the stairs crying out the news. They all dropped what they were doing—Ida emerging from the kitchen with her hands white with flour, Edith closing her novel on one finger and darting out the front door to call to the men, who were already laying down their tools—and it was as if they’d been marooned a year instead of just a week and a half. Edith ran on ahead, the afternoon glowing around her in the sun that climbed up out of the mist like a hot-air balloon, her arms pumping and the heels of her shoes shining with a thin skin of mud. Marantha was hurrying too, thinking of the letters everyone had promised—her mother back home in Boston, Carrie and the others in San Francisco—and of her plates and cutlery and whatever else Charlie Curner had managed to bring to brighten the dull round of their days. Not two weeks yet and it seemed as if there were nothing else, no other world, no place but this. Even then, even in her excitement, she knew she would never last here, no matter what she’d promised or how hard she tried.

  She ran out of breath before she was halfway down, and so she stopped herself and found a rock to sit on while below her, in the bay that stretched away to the flat gray nullity of the ocean, Charlie Curner pulled at the oars of his skiff and Edith stood at the scalloped edge of the breakers, waving her handkerchief high over her head. She watched the rest of them emerge from the canyon in miniature, their heads bobbing and shoulders weaving, Will and Adolph bringing up the rear while Ida and Jimmie sprinted past them to splash into the surf with Edith and haul the bow of the skiff up out of the surge as if it weighed nothing at all. It was a moment of high excitement: What had he brought them? What news? Had he remembered the flour, the sugar, the pickles she’d asked for specifically on Edith’s account? The calico? The gingham?

  She watched them unload the packages, wishing she’d thought to bring the binoculars with her—though she squinted her eyes, she really couldn’t make out much detail at this distance. Was that the crate she’d packed her dishes in? She couldn’t be sure. All she wanted—she’d give anything—was to be down there with them, to race Edith all the way, but her legs wouldn’t carry her and her breath wouldn’t come. She’d been a strong runner once, the fleetest girl in her school, but that was a long time ago. Before James, before Will. Before the first annunciatory cough.

  Below her, she saw them gathered now around the gesticulating figure of Charlie Curner, the news of the world come to them in a pantomime she couldn’t decipher and words she couldn’t hear. She hoped he’d remembered to bring the newspapers. And magazines. She’d expressly told him . . . but then she caught herself. If he brought her china, that would be enough. And the letters. The letters above all else. She told herself not to expect too much, because Charlie Curner wasn’t their personal agent but only another hired hand, after all, and the process of getting and ordering—of itemizing, of caring—was far from perfect. After a while, long before Jimmie came dashing up the trail for the mule and sled and the others began carrying the crates and sacks and brown-paper parcels up from the beach, she turned and started back up the hill, head down, moving deliberately, counting each of her breaths as if they were the only form of news that mattered.

  * * *

  She was up all that night, feeling feverish but refusing to admit it, her cough shallow but steady, the pain beneath her breastbone a dull intermittent thing she drove down with the patent medicine that was forty percent alcohol and no fooling herself about that and cup after cup of hot tea leavened with milk. The parlor was hers alone, no sound but for the ticking of the cast-iron stove and the patter of the mice on their nightly foray into the cupboard—and how she wished she had Sampan with her now, not only to put the fear of retribution in them but to feel him warm in her lap and listen to the soft grateful catch and release of his purring as she stroked his ears and the downy chocolate fur of his face and tail and delicate curled-up paws. She’d read through all her letters twice—two from her mother, whose news of home seemed almost exclusively of weather reports and funerals (How I envy you, dear, out there in sunny California, because it’s been the bitterest winter here anybody can remember since your grandmother’s time), one from her cousin Martha in Brookline and one each from Carrie Abbott and Susannah Kent in San Francisco—and now she was busy answering them. Charlie Curner—and she didn’t at all like the kind of looks he’d kept giving Edith at dinner, a married man of forty, forty at least—was asleep in his berth on the schooner he’d named for his wife and would be setting sail after breakfast, and so she had no choice but to get the letters finished and addressed before he left. Either that or wait God knew how long.

  She was still in the wooden chair by the stove when the sky began to lighten outside the window. She’d written twenty-two pages to her mother and every one of them, every line, was as sunny as her mother supposed the weather to be. Her health was fine, the air bracing, Will working like ten men to improve on their investment and Edith growing into a fine young lady who could not only play the piano and sing and dance like an angel, but also ride as well as any woman in the country—and here was her joke—Annie Oakley excepted. With Carrie she was more forthcoming, if not entirely honest, and if she complained of the weather and the difficulty of setting up a household in such a wild place, she put a brave face on it too, as if everything—the dirt, the cold, the bare planks of the floor and the crippling pain in her chest—were as easy to put right as snapping your fingers. When she heard Ida stirring, she sealed the letters, left them on the table where they’d be sure to be noticed and tiptoed up the stairs to slip into bed beside Will.

  She awoke to an empty bed and a sudden brutal squalling that cut through her like a jolt of electricity. One moment she’d been floating in her dream (the grapes again, the wall of the villa, the sun), and in the next she was lurching awake to this shriek, these shrieks, one mounting atop the next, as if a whole tribe of the Indians that had once lived here were having their throats cut, one by one. For a minute she didn’t know where she was, the bed curtains like the walls of a tomb, the light crepuscular, the air damp, refrigerated, foul with her own breath, and then she was coughing and at the same time trying to fight the thing inside her and flinging back the curtains on the world she lived in now, the world circumscribed by the bare walls, the washstand, the chipped ceramic pot and the water-stained armoire. And all the while the shrieking went on, spiraling up and up until it broke in a squeal of pure immitigable outrage.

  Coughing, clutching her nightdress at her throat, she went to the window and there he was, Jimmie, in the yard below, in the pen where the pigs were kept. He was doing something to them, torturing them—torturing her—and before she could think she thrust open the window and shouted out his name. He looked up in bewilderment. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The schooner had left the harbor. There was t
he banging of Will’s pick from somewhere down the path that would become a road. And the wind, the wind of course. “What are you doing?” she demanded, but her voice had lost its timbre and it wasn’t a human voice at all but the squawk of some reiterant bird.

  “Ma’am?”

  “That noise. You get away from those animals. Shame on you.”

  He was a hundred feet away. The pigs—they were six, the boar, two sows and three shoats left from the last litter—had backed away from him, pressed in a moil against the fence. “The Captain’s orders, ma’am. He says they got to have rings struck through their noses to stop them digging.”

  She was outraged, weak, pale, stripped down to nothing, coughing and coughing again. A shade drew across her eyes. It was the contagion and it took hold of her tongue and lodged a wad of phlegm in her throat so that she thought she was going to gag. The boy didn’t know. He didn’t care. She watched him turn back to his work. Finally it came up, a hard ball of sputum that was like the gristle cut from a piece of meat, and she clenched it there in her handkerchief until her voice returned to her. “I don’t care what Captain Waters says, you stop that now, do you hear me?” Whether he heard or not, she couldn’t say, but the next pig was already screaming.