San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  The only thing that was off was the weather. It had held for the shearing, and she thanked God for that, but as soon as the schooner pulled out of the harbor it turned dismal, days of continuous rain giving way to a fog so opaque you couldn’t see ten feet ahead of you. When she went out to scatter feed for the chickens, one of the few tasks she actually enjoyed, she had to wait till they emerged from nothingness like the ghosts of chickens, which, she supposed, was what each of them would become in time, their eggs stripped from them, then their feathers and the sweet meat that clung to the bone—pecking ghosts, squawking dismally in the ether of another world. Ida got lost on the way to the spring, which couldn’t have been more than three hundred yards away, just above the spot where the road began to dip down into the canyon. The men went off to work the road and as soon as they stepped from the front porch they vanished like coins dropped into a well. Just finding the W.C. was a trial, and she trained herself to keep her eyes on the ground so as to pick out the thin muddy ribbon of a path leading away from the back steps and across the yard, through the gate and into the field where eventually the blistered vertical plane of the latrine’s door would loom into view. If your luck held. Two or three times, in the urgency of her need, she’d found herself lost in a damp dripping void, nothing visible but her skirts and shoes and a pulp of slick dark vegetation crushed beneath her feet.

  On this particular morning—it was the first of March, two months into her exile—she felt well enough to help Ida clean up after breakfast, standing at the counter and drying the plates as Ida fished them from the dishwater. She put them back in the cupboard as neatly as she could, though what she really wanted was to smash them on the floor, but that wouldn’t have been practical, not unless they were going to set up a potter’s wheel and start from scratch. The fact was that she’d all but given up on her own crockery coming now. It was lost somewhere, lost in transit—or in Charlie Curner’s hold. She didn’t want to think of him leaving it behind on the pier or pitching it overboard in a heavy sea. She could picture the box, the newspaper with which she’d wrapped each plate, each cup and saucer and the gravy boat and all the rest, in order to protect them from rough handling, but in the end, she supposed, it hadn’t really mattered. What mattered was this: Ida handed her a dish, one of these dishes, chipped and cracked and ugly, and she wiped it dry and set it atop the others. It was something to do. A sop to the boredom. As they worked, Ida did most of the talking, chattering away about anything that came into her head, but it was pleasant enough, calming, the whole house hushed and peaceful in the grip of the fog. Afterward, she sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, basking in the warmth of the stove, then took a thumbed-over copy of Harper’s Bazaar, which she’d already read twice through, and went out the back door to the W.C.

  She wasn’t really paying attention, thinking about Edith, how she was falling behind in the lessons they’d set out for her—reading mostly, in literature and history both, but some maths and sciences too and the exercises in the French text the teacher at the school in Santa Barbara had thrust on her the week before they’d left—because she lacked discipline and her mother hadn’t been able to summon the energy to bear down on her, for which her mother was feeling guilty. Before she knew it, she’d lost the path, one clump of crushed weed looking much like the next and a gray impenetrable cocoon of fog spun all around her. There were no landmarks. The house was gone. The fences. The field. Green Mountain. She kept on, watching her feet, her steps shuffling and cautious. She could step in a hole, turn an ankle, break a leg, and where was the blessed thing? It was in this direction, wasn’t it? But no, it couldn’t have been because she would have caught the odor of it by now, the latrine, the stink-hole, and why couldn’t she have a flush toilet like everybody else in the world? A bathroom, a door that locked behind you, tile on the floor and a sink to wash up after? She paused to sniff the air, but the fog was like a wet rag pressed to her face and all she could smell was the familiar odor of rot drifting up from the shoreline. Then she stopped altogether. Stood still. Listened. There was nothing, no sound at all, not even the droning of the seals.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been wandering, the magazine clutched in a tight roll in one hand, her insides churning, when she gave up. It was like that night in the bedroom, the night of the lamb, when finally she’d found the chamber pot, but there was no pot here, no toilet, nothing but dirt and weed and the fog that was strangling her till she found herself beginning to cough before she was even conscious of it. Miserable, shamed, she lifted her skirts, squatted there in the void like some barnyard animal and released her bowels.

  Nothing but grass to clean herself with. Everything wet, cold, filthy. She tore a page from the magazine, but that was filthy too, the touch of it on her skin, on her privates, like an electric shock. She stood, gathered herself. How had she come to this, this humiliation, this barbarity? Was this what was visited on the dying, this tearing away from the life lived and worth living? This deracination? And here was her epitaph: Marantha Scott Waters, 1850–18——? Deracinated.

  She was cold. She coughed, kept on coughing, a spasm sweeping over her so immediately, so desperately, she didn’t have time to brace herself, and then the phlegm was coming up inside her and where was she to spit it? On the ground. In the dirt. And why not? She’d paid ten thousand dollars for the privilege, hadn’t she?

  She spat, wiped her lips on the back of her hand. She couldn’t catch her breath. The coughing wouldn’t stop, each cough crashing down atop the next like bricks falling from a cliff. Then she was down on her knees in the wet, pounding at her breastbone, and what had Dr. Erringer told her? That phthisics like her (he wouldn’t call his patients consumptives, never, because the term gave too much agency to the disease) could more often than not expect a complete cure simply from living quietly, exercising moderately and above all taking in the untainted air of the countryside. Yes, and where was he now? Sitting by the fire in his offices, his feet propped up on an embroidered footstool, the wainscoting glowing behind him, anything he could possibly want just a tap of the bell away, a sandwich, a steak, hot cider, a nurse to come in and ease the tension in his shoulders after a long day of dismissing one patient after another with smiles and promises and the medicines that did nothing but make you feel as if you were dead already. Morphia. Morpheus. Sleep and Poetry.

  By the time Ida found her—“Mrs. Waters? Ma’am? Are you out there?”—she was sprawled in the grass like a broken umbrella, chilled through and coughing so violently it felt as if her lungs had been turned inside out. How much time had gone by she couldn’t say—she’d been elsewhere, in her mother’s arms, racing her sister down the sun-dappled sidewalk to the drugstore, reading aloud from the Book of Revelation (“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more”) while the pastor and her mother looked on as if she’d just reserved her place in heaven—but it seemed as if she’d heard Ida calling for hours. She tried to respond, tried to cry for help, but her voice wouldn’t come. She’d asked Dr. Erringer about that, about the huskiness of her voice, its weakness, the way it failed her at crucial times, and he’d given an abrupt little nod of his head. “Nothing to worry over,” he told her. “A symptom of the disease, that’s all. The sort of thing all phthisics have to confront to one degree or another.”

  “Mrs. Waters?” There seemed to be a light in the distance—a lantern, Ida’s lantern—and she gathered her legs under her and laid one palm in the cold muck to push herself up, so weak suddenly she sank back down again as if her legs had been cut out from under her. She might have stayed there until the ravens came to pluck out her eyes and the beetles surged up out of the earth to reduce her, to consume her, but for the shadow that came hurtling out of the void to fall on her in a rush of churning paws and frantic barking.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I’m here,” she whispered, the dog nosing at her, licking her face, muddying her dre
ss till it was no better than a rag.

  Ida’s face loomed up out of the void, weirdly illuminated by the lantern she held out before her. “Ma’am? Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  It took her a moment. The coughing came in waves, like breakers hitting the beach. She pushed the dog away. Cleared her throat. And finally, though Ida was right there, seeing her at her weakest and worst, she leaned over to spit in the grass because she couldn’t help herself, the sputum grainy and discolored, the taste in her mouth so foul it was as if she’d tried to swallow some dead thing. But then the dead thing was already inside her, wasn’t it?

  “I’m all right,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m just—I seem to have lost my way.”

  Bao Yu

  The days fell away like the skin of a rotten fruit. She was in bed, waiting for the hemorrhage to come on while the household tiptoed round her, Will grave, Edith so white-faced it was as if she were wearing a mask. But then the hemorrhage didn’t come—she had a cold, that was all, her eyes itching and her nose running and a bronchial cough compounding the problem, yes, but it was a cold and nothing more, the sort of thing anyone was susceptible to. A cold, that was all.

  The fog lifted. It rained. There was a day of sun. And then she was up on her feet again, sniffling perhaps, weakened, humiliated (she’d had to do her business in the chamber pot and it was Ida who had to see it there and dispose of it), but able to work at sewing the lambrequins for the shelves and go out of doors to feed the turkeys and chickens and walk round the yard and even partway down the road for exercise.

  She was alone in the house, a Sunday afternoon, the sun high and everyone else taking the day off—or the afternoon, anyway—to go out hunting Indian artifacts, pottery shards, arrowheads. Edith was on horseback, Will on one mule, Adolph on the other, Jimmie and Ida following along on foot. They’d begged her to come in order to make her feel a part of things—at least Will and Ida had, Edith so swept up in the excitement of the horse and the treasure hunt she didn’t even try to hide her indifference—and that was thoughtful and she was touched, but she told them she wasn’t feeling up to it. Ida made a little moue of sympathy. Or pity. Will had just nodded.

  For once, the house was warm. Will had built up the fire before he left, very solicitous—Can I get you anything? Are you sure you don’t want to come? It’ll be an adventure—and with the sun shining and the wind down it was pleasant, even in the corner by the front window where there always seemed to be a draft. She brought her crocheting into the parlor and sat there at the window, where the light was good, thinking to work on the shirt she was making for Edith, but as soon as she got settled she laid it aside. She was bored. Profoundly bored. It was the fault of this place, of course, each day identical to the next, nothing to do but work at sewing, knitting, cooking, cleaning, and the same faces to look into and the same unchanging conversation every night. The same cards even. The four walls. The bowed ceiling. Will would make a comment about the sheep, the barn, his dynamite sticks. Jimmie would say something in return, Adolph staring across the room as if he were working out the metaphysics of sheep dip or the broken haft of a spade. Edith, she would say, just to hear herself, what are you reading? Edith, looking up from her book: Nothing. A novel.

  She got up from the chair and drifted across the room to the table where Edith had left her latest book, the one she’d insisted on buying before they’d left the mainland, and idly picked it up. It was by E. R. Roe, a name she vaguely recognized. Light reading, she supposed. Harmless enough. The author had written a preface to this, his fourth novel, and it really wasn’t so much a preface as an advertisement. Her eyes fell on the last line: “A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes—not elsewhere—I believe that woman can best rule and save the world.”

  Rule and save the world. She closed the book and set it back on the table, angry suddenly. If only they’d stayed in San Francisco. If only she’d resisted. Rule? She ruled nothing. And as far as saving the world, she’d give everything she had if she could only just save herself, for Edith’s sake if nothing else, because what would Edith do without her?

  It was then that something made her look up, some sixth sense, and she caught her breath: there was a face in the window, a man’s face, staring back at her. If she’d been home, in the apartment or even the rented house in Santa Barbara, she wouldn’t have been so startled—this man, he was a Chinaman, she saw that now, a Chinaman holding something up to the glass as if to offer it to her, would have been a delivery boy from the laundry or a yardman or some such, and Will would have dealt with him. But here, his appearance was so unexpected, so impossible, it was as if he were an apparition from another realm, and it jolted her. She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Just stood there staring like an animal in the zoo.

  His eyes were fixed on hers. He reached out and tapped at the glass with his index finger, very softly, politely, and gave a discreet shake to the object—objects—he was holding aloft in his other hand. Dun things, flattened, gathered together on a loop of wire. And what were they? Slabs of meat? Fish of some sort? He smiled suddenly, his eyes lost in their creases, his face shining and hopeful. It came to her that he was harmless, a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck, a man in need, perhaps hungry and thirsty, maybe even injured. She went to the door, pulled it open and stepped out onto the porch.

  The man widened his grin, gave an abbreviated bow. He was short, shorter than she, wearing an embroidered skullcap and a long silk tunic over a pair of ordinary twilled cotton trousers. His hair was braided in a queue. On his feet, gum boots smeared with the residue of one sort of oceanic creature or another. “Bao yu,” he said, holding the dun things out to her.

  “Are you thirsty?” she asked. “Hungry? Has your ship gone down, is that it?”

  “Bao yu,” he repeated. “You take.”

  He handed her the loop of wire and she had no choice but to take it from him. What she was holding—and it was heavier than it had looked—was dried abalone, that was what it was, and this man was one of the coolies Will had told her about, men brought out to the deserted islands off the Pacific Coast to live in crude huts for months at a time, collecting, boiling, pounding and drying abalone for shipment back to China. And here he was, presenting her with abalone she didn’t want, abalone he might very well have taken from these very shores, from her own private stock, stolen abalone. He was watching her closely. This wasn’t merely a gift—he wanted something in return.

  “You give,” he said.

  She was no longer feeling generous. “Where did you get these?” she demanded, imagining some hidden encampment infesting the surface of the island like an open sore.

  He lifted his chin, still smiling, and shot his eyes in the direction of the harbor. There was a boat there, and how had she missed it? His boat. A sprawling low-slung junk with sails furled and a triangular red-bordered flag gyrating in the breeze atop the middle mast. She’d seen boats like it in the harbor at San Francisco, boats that brought Chinese goods and spices and the coolies to work the railroads and live one atop the other on Grant Avenue as if that was the way they preferred it. She was amazed all over again—had this man actually come all the way across the sea from China to stand here on the porch of her assumed house and bargain with her? The thought was staggering. No, it was comical, absurd. What did she have that he could possibly want?

  “What do I give?” she asked. “What do you want?”

  “You give meat,” he said, and it all became clear. He wanted mutton, wanted lamb, of course he did. If you ate nothing but fish, fish three meals a day, you’d want anything else, anything you could get, viands especially—but to offer her abalone, dried abalone, no less, when she lived atop a trove of it, was ridiculous. And he wanted lamb in return?

  “N
o, I do not give meat,” she said, unconsciously aping his fractured syntax. “And I thank you for this”—and here she tried to return the abalone but he took a step back, thrusting both hands in his pockets and shaking his head in denial—“but I’m afraid we really have no use for it.” His eyes were wide, his smile gone. “You see,” she began, and she was going to explain that they had all the fresh abalone they wanted, that they owned it and owned the land he was standing on and that he was welcome, as a visitor, to a cup of tea and perhaps some cornbread or the platter of cookies Ida had baked just that morning, but there would be no trading in the offing, especially of meat, which they needed for themselves, for their own benefit and welfare and profit, when she was startled by a movement at the gate across the yard—there was a second Chinaman now, dressed identically to the one on the porch, and he too had a string of dried abalone. The second man—he was older, much older, a thin white beard trailing away from his chin—came across the yard to her, the chickens rushing his ankles in the hope of feed and then scattering just as quickly when they saw their mistake, and he was smiling too.

  “No,” she was saying, holding up the palm of one hand to discourage him, when both men turned their heads at the rhythmic clatter of hooves thundering up the road. In the next moment, Will came hurtling across the yard in a storm of flying clods, even as the second Chinaman, the old one, froze in place. Will was riding Mike, the horse Edith had left on, and the first thing that went through her head was that Edith was injured, thrown in a ditch somewhere, her leg broken, her arm—or maybe she’d suffered a concussion, maybe she’d been disfigured or worse, much worse.

  The horse was lathered. Will’s face showed nothing. “You,” he said, pointing first to the man in the yard and then swinging round to indicate the one on the porch, “and you. Both of you.” He’d raised his voice by degrees and he was shouting now, red-faced and angry. “I want you to clear out of here, go back to your boat.”