by Boyle, T. C.
She’d creamed a cup of butter and was using a soupspoon to fold in a cup and two-thirds of sugar, as best she could measure, when Ida, mop and bucket in hand, pushed her way through the door. “Good morning, ma’am,” the girl sang out, eyeing the pan as she crossed to the far corner to lean the mop against the wall there. The rain slackened momentarily and then started in again with a heavy thump, as if a tree had fallen against the roof, but that was impossible, the Spaniards having taken the last tree down for lumber a hundred years ago and the sheep making sure in the interval that anything taller than six inches was chewed right on down to the dirt. Or mud. In the next moment, Ida had the back door open on the roar of it and on the stomach-wrenching reek of the flooded W.C., which now stood just two hundred yards from the house, and here was the dog, soaked to the skin and trying to dodge past her even as she flung the bucket of dirty water out into the yard and slammed the door shut on it.
Marantha was at the counter—a whitewashed plank projecting from the wall and propped up on two sticks of wood indifferently nailed to the floor—and she barely turned her head. The eggs were next—eggs she’d collected herself at first light, bent over in Will’s shroud-like mackintosh while the rain drummed at her back and the hens peered miserably at her from beneath the shed and the steps of the bunkhouse. She cracked three of them and carefully worked each into the mixture before adding the first cup of flour, feeling good, feeling competent and well, feeling useful, and she was so caught up in the process she entirely forgot about Ida, or that this was supposed to be a surprise.
“What are you doing, making an omelet?” Ida’s voice seemed to come at her out of the ether, and when she jerked her head round in surprise, Ida was right there, not a foot away, peering over her shoulder. “Or is it bread?”
“No,” she breathed, trying to mask what she was doing, “no, it’s not bread. I—everything’s fine. Just fine.” She gave it a moment, and then, as casually as she could, she cracked the final two eggs and beat them into the mixture while adding the second cup of flour, a trickle at a time.
“I wouldn’t want to speak where I’m not wanted, but isn’t that too many eggs?”
She didn’t know what to say. The kitchen felt very close suddenly. She could hear the dog whining at the door, and that was vaguely irritating because the animal was not allowed in the house and should have known better—let him go sprawl in the bunkhouse with Adolph and Jimmie. A moment drifted past. Ida hadn’t moved.
“You know, ma’am, I’d be more than willing to help if you like,” Ida said, and she was right there still, right behind her. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the parlor where you can rest by the stove while I finish up here?”
She could feel the strength radiating down from her shoulder to her forearm and wrist, the batter folding and folding again till she’d worked it smooth. Pound cake, the simplest thing in the world. She was working from memory, from her mother’s recipe, and her mother’s cakes had always been flawless, better than the baker’s, better than anything her aunts or grandmother or anybody in the neighborhood could ever hope to compete with. She had a vivid image of a morning long ago, snow cresting on the woodshed, a tray of gingerbread cookies cooling on the counter while the sweet wafting aroma of the cake her mother had just taken from the oven filled the house and they sat at the window over cups of chocolate and watched the snowstorm transfigure the world. “What ever became of the vanilla extract?” she asked, as if it were an idle question, and she wasn’t going to turn round, wasn’t going to give up the pretense. “I hope we remembered it. With the kitchen things, I mean.”
“You’re baking a cake.” Ida’s voice had gone soft.
“That’s right, yes.” She let the affirmation hang in the air between them a moment, her shoulders busy, the spoon clacking in the depths of the bowl, and then she couldn’t help but turn. Her smile—it was automatic, composed in equal parts of sympathy and embarrassment—wavered when she saw the look on the girl’s face. “We were hoping to surprise you.”
“You don’t have to go out of your way for me, ma’am,” Ida murmured, dropping her arms and folding her hands in her apron as if she meant to hide them. Marantha took her in at a glance: the men’s gum boots, the neat mauve dress with its white lace collar, the hair so woolly it defied the brush. Her eyes were wet. Her teeth worked at her lower lip. “Because I don’t usually—that is, we don’t . . . not in my family—”
“Nonsense,” she said, thinking of the Irish back at home in Boston, the eternal laundry, the ragged filthy children, the drunks and beggars. She set down the spoon and reached out her hand to take hold of Ida’s. “Happy birthday,” she said, running a thumb gently over the girl’s palm. And the valedictory words were on her lips—May you have many more—when the cough surprised her and she had to turn away, had to hurry across the room, bent double, a handkerchief pressed to her face, to find the stool in the corner and sit there till she could breathe again.
* * *
It was a long morning. Ida kept fussing round her—“Can I get you something? A cup of broth? Would you like to lay down a minute?”—but once the spasm passed she insisted on finishing the cake herself. Of course she was going to finish it—what kind of birthday would it be if Ida had to bake her own cake? She felt light-headed, maybe a bit flushed even, but she poured the batter into the pan and shooed the girl away. “But, ma’am,” Ida kept saying, “you don’t know this stove—it’s a neat trick to damp it just so—”
“I’m not helpless. I’ve been baking cakes since before you were born—believe me, I know what I’m doing.” She glanced up at Ida where she was stalled at the door to the hallway, looking tragic. “Go, go on! You must have something better to do than stand here worrying over me—what about the mending I gave you? What about Edith’s dress?” She turned away to pull open the door of the oven and felt the blast of heat in her face. And then the pan was in and the door shut and she straightened up and turned round to see that Ida hadn’t moved. “Where is Edith, anyway?”
“Out walking.”
“Walking? In this?”
“Yes, ma’am. She took her mackintosh and went out after she had her breakfast.”
“But where?”
A shrug. “Just for a walk, that’s all she said. Said she felt confined—you can hardly blame her.”
She fought down an impulse to damp the stove—it was too hot, she was sure of it—but she didn’t want to fiddle with it while Ida was watching. She said, “No, you’re right. It’s just that I worry.”
“Of course you do, ma’am.”
And that was that. Ida went off to her chores, and Marantha, though she felt overheated, though she felt the sluggishness invade her limbs and her lungs twist and tighten as if they were being wrung out like a pair of wet rags, sat by the stove and adjusted the damper and opened the door repeatedly to peer in at her cake though she knew she shouldn’t have. Perhaps she nodded off for just a moment, she couldn’t say. But the next thing she knew Will was there, the back door thrown open on the smoke issuing from the stove—and the cake, the cake that was blackened around the edges and as squat and hard and dry as a cracker—and her first thought wasn’t for the cake or the smoke but for him, for how common he looked, how like a vagrant in his filthy wet clothes and crumpled hat. “Jesus,” he said, his voice climbing the register, “what in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?”
There was the smoke, the rawness of the outdoors, the look of him. “Baking,” she said.
“Baking?” He threw it back at her, incredulous. “More like burning the place to the ground. Have you no sense at all? What do you think we took on Ida for?”
“Ida,” she spat. “Always Ida.”
“Well, isn’t she the cook?”
“It’s her birthday.”
He was towering, huge, the mustache clinging wet to his face like some sort of ble
ached-out fungus, and he was trying to balance on one leg and jerk the muddy boot from the other. “I don’t give a goddamn,” he started and then caught himself. In the yard, in the rain, the faces of Adolph and Jimmie appeared and now they were crowding in at the open doorway.
She didn’t care. She was angry, frightened, outraged. He couldn’t imagine what she felt, none of them could. They were healthy, they were going to live, and she wasn’t. Everything they saw before them was infused with the color of life, bright and shining even in the rain, but for her it was all dross. “You look common,” she said—or no, she threw it at him. “And these men, these, these hands, will not take their midday meal in this house. Will not, do you hear me?”
She paused for breath then and no one moved, no one said a word, though the smoke dodged and swirled and the cake blackened and her lungs rattled with the effort of drawing in the breath she so violently needed because she wasn’t finished yet. “And I wish the place had caught fire,” she said, but she was rasping now, all the resonance scoured from her voice by this thing with the claws, by the disease that plucked you up at random, that got inside of you and slowly strangled the life from you. “At least then we could leave this rat’s hole and go back to, to”—she was coughing suddenly, coughing till she felt the sputum dissolve in a hot rush of blood she tried to choke back even as it filled her mouth and broke free to redden her lips and douse the front of her dress in a spatter of bright red droplets—“to civilization. Civilization, Will.”
She held them with a look of fury until Adolph—and Jimmie, Jimmie following his lead—backed out the door and into the rain.
Will said her name once, softly.
“Don’t speak to me,” she said. “Don’t ever speak to me again.”
Edith’s Turn
Four days later, it was Edith’s turn. This time she let Ida do the baking, but she insisted on mixing the batter herself and sitting there in the kitchen till the cake came out of the oven plump and moist and perfectly browned across the top—she was Edith’s mother still, no matter her condition. And every year since Edith had come to her from the orphanage, helpless, impossibly small and vulnerable, this perfect shining infant whose natural mother had tossed her aside like so much refuse, she’d baked a cake on her birthday—and on Christmas too. A cake. The smallest thing. And on this day, the day of Edith’s fifteenth birthday—the twelfth of February, a day she’d marked with a star on the calendar the day they’d arrived—with the rain finally stopped and the sun burning bright in a cored-out sky, she’d risen from her bed with a fierceness of purpose. She didn’t need coffee or tea or any other stimulant, just the cake pan, just the batter, just Edith.
It was a wonder, really, considering how low she’d been these past days. Confined to her bed, weak, bored, feeling useless, she’d lain there staring at the stained canopy and the curtains that hemmed her in, imagining she was already in her grave, a damp place, wet, reeking, the raw earth pressing down on her without mercy or appeal. She was feverish. Her dreams were dense, clotted with images of grasping hands and spectral faces that loomed up out of nothingness and vanished again just as quickly. She’d lost blood, too much blood, and though the hemorrhage hadn’t been nearly as bad as the one she’d suffered in December, for which fact she was grateful, it had left her weak and disoriented all the same.
She’d forced herself to come downstairs that first night—for Ida’s sake, to help her commemorate the occasion and lift the pall that lay over the house—and everyone had been in good spirits, all things considered. The cake was a humiliation, of course, Ida having had to produce another while she herself lay supine on the bed with the smell of it drifting down the hallway and up the stairs to mock her in her weakness and debility, and she hadn’t been able to join in when Edith led a chorus of “Oh! Susanna,” substituting “Ida” for “Anna,” and yet still she felt fortunate to be there—moved, deeply moved—and couldn’t keep from thinking about the following year and the one after that and who would be sitting there in her place. She looked up at Edith, at her face luminous with the pleasure of watching Ida unwrap the gift she’d given her—ribbons, blue satin ribbons Edith had brought with her from the mainland and kept hidden all this time—and she began, very softly, to cry. Will had looked away—she was angry with him still, though at that moment she felt so soft and fragile she would have accepted anything from him—and when she woke in the night, he wasn’t there beside her in the bed.
It had taken her a moment, fumbling with the match and lantern, to understand why. “I don’t want you here,” she’d told him when he came to her at bedtime. He was hateful to her then, clumsy, shabby, the root and cause of all her troubles made flesh, his face hanging like a swollen pale fruit in the doorway. “Go sleep in the storage room,” she’d said, “go sleep in the bunkhouse. I don’t care. I don’t want you here. I’m weak. I’m in pain. I—” But he was already gone, the door pulling shut softly behind him.
That was over now, gone, done, past. She didn’t want to think of it or what it meant that he’d made his bed in the monk’s cell across from Ida’s room ever since and that she didn’t care a whit whether he came back to her bed or not, not today. Today the sun was shining, the floorboards were drying out, the lambs growing into their limbs and all the birds in the world singing in unison while the cake, Edith’s cake, sat cooling on the table. That was what mattered, that was all that mattered: the cake. And Edith. Edith’s birthday. She got up and busied herself around the kitchen, thinking of all the things that needed doing—sending Jimmie for abalone, cutting wildflowers for the bouquet, finishing up the trim on the new dress she meant to surprise Edith with—and she was just sitting down at the little table against the window there, stirring a bit of milk into the porridge Ida had made for breakfast, forcing herself to eat, when she happened to glance up and see Edith making her way across the yard.
And who was that with her? Jimmie. Jimmie trailing along behind her like a moonstruck calf, the big straw laundry basket clutched in both arms as if it were filled with rocks, and why wasn’t he at work? Why wasn’t he clearing the road or plowing or sowing the grain—hadn’t Will said they needed to get it in as soon as they had a break in the weather? Edith’s face was perfectly composed, though her hair was disordered beneath her hat and her skirts were muddy, as if she’d been tramping the hills again, and she was saying something over her shoulder to the boy. In the next moment they both pulled up short, right in the middle of the yard, no more than fifty feet from the house, and Jimmie set down the basket, which did seem to be filled with stones—or no, seashells. They’d been at the shore, that was what it was, and she was just trying to sort that out—the two of them, alone and unsupervised, Edith’s walks, her moods, the way the boy watched her at dinner as if her every word and gesture held some secret meaning, and what if it did, what if she’d been blind to what anyone could have seen as plain as day?—when Edith held out her hand and he went down on one knee in the mud to take hold of it. And then, without prompting, without taking his eyes from Edith’s, he brought her hand to his lips.
All her pleasure in the day dissolved in that instant and she couldn’t stop herself from rushing to the door and out into the festering wallow of the yard, her shoes muddied in an instant, her skirts blackened, all the blood left in her wasted body rising to her face and a strange yammering chorus of voices howling in her ears. Shock, that was what it was, ungovernable, unconscionable. She’d never . . . She couldn’t . . .
Jimmie sprang to his feet. Edith lifted her eyes, distant eyes, defiant, as if she hadn’t been caught out, as if she weren’t ashamed in the slightest. There were so many things wrong with that tableau Marantha couldn’t begin to list them. She tried to speak, tried to demand an explanation, but the words died in her throat.
The boy’s trousers, filthy as they were, showed a spreading wet stain in the left knee, where he’d gone down in the mud. He put on a look of innoce
nce. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said, but he wouldn’t meet her eye.
Edith said nothing.
She wasn’t going to cough. She wasn’t going to have a spasm. She was going to control her breathing, control herself. A cloud drifted across the sun so that a running sheet of darkness fell over the yard and raced up the far hill. The turkeys set up a gabble from their pen. She heard the sound of the dog barking at something somewhere. Finally—she wasn’t going to cough, she wasn’t—her voice came back to her. “Edith, you get out of that now,” she said, and knew it was wrong, knew it was inadequate to what she was feeling and the tone she should have taken. Don’t make a scene, she told herself. Not in front of the help.
“We’re only playing.”
“Playing? He—I saw him.”
“He’s my slave.” Edith turned to the boy, who wouldn’t raise his eyes. “Isn’t that right, Caliban? Isn’t it?”
Miserably, his voice hoarse with hopelessness, resignation, lust, he said, “Yes.”
“I’ve had him fetching seashells.”
Marantha tried to lift her feet from the mire, tried to edge closer, furious now, but it was as if she were frozen in place. “You’re not to go unsupervised, unchaperoned, that is—”
“It’s only a game, Mother.” Edith looked to the boy now, to where he stood beside her in the mud, shrunken, slope-shouldered, his features pinched in concentration. “He’ll do anything I say. Isn’t that right, Caliban?”