by Boyle, T. C.
Neither man moved. They were watching him closely, watching his lips, their expressions blank.
“Now!” Will shouted, wheeling round on the horse. “Don’t you understand English? I said, Get out!” Mike stamped, blew, his sides heaving. The sun made everything look hard and unreal.
“Will, it’s all right,” she said, calling to him from the porch, though she could barely project her voice. She felt the relief wash over her: this had nothing to do with Edith. He’d seen the boat. He’d come to protect her, to rescue her. “They’re harmless. They don’t know what you’re saying, they don’t understand, they—they want to trade. They want meat, that’s all, Will.”
But her husband wasn’t listening. He was in one of his rages. “Poachers!” he shouted, and he made as if to drive the horse at the old man. There was a scramble of legs, the old man frantically backpedaling until his feet got tangled and he went down hard in the mud. She exchanged a look with the first Chinaman in the instant before he stepped off the porch and took to his legs. What she saw there in his face, the hurt and surprise, the fear, made her feel ashamed.
“Will,” she said again.
He jerked the horse round and leaned down to glare at her. “You keep out of this,” he said. “They have no right, no right!”
She watched till they were out of sight, Will squared up on the horse and driving the two men before him down the road to the harbor, the water shining in the distance, the embankment looming over them like a dark jagged cloud. At some point she realized she was still holding the string of abalone at her side. She could smell them, fruit of the sea, an astringent smell, a smell of iodine and what’s left behind when the life is gone. Across the yard, the chickens had gathered to fight over the second string, the one the old man had dropped in the mud. “Here, chick-chick,” she said, coming down the steps. “Here, chick, here.”
Bones
She slept late the following morning, slipping in and out of her dreams, vaguely aware of a dull intermittent banging from below, as if Will were rebuilding the house from the inside out. Her dreams were of flight, of escape, eagle dreams, but each time she soared the banging brought her back down again. It was maddening. She’d lain awake through the small hours, unable to sleep, the pain in her chest speaking to her in an intimate whisper of the place beyond, all her fears for Edith and her husband and her own dwindling self concentrated in the shadows the lamp couldn’t touch.
She went through the motions of dressing, her limbs heavy as spars—she had a vision of the wrecks spread across the bottom of the ocean, the tide shifting them twice a day, timbers lifting and falling again in silent protest—and then she went down the stairs to the kitchen. Ida was sitting at the table there, leafing through a magazine, a cup at her elbow. “Oh,” she said, “you’re up.” And then: “Can I fix you something—eggs, flapjacks? Toast? Would you like some toast?”
It was gray beyond the windows. The wind was blowing. There was a smell of coffee gone cold in the pot. “Toast,” she said. “And make me some coffee. Fresh. I don’t want anybody’s dregs.” She stood there a moment in the doorway, running her eyes over the room, everything dirty, irredeemably dirty, the pans blackened inside and out, the cupboards finger-smeared, breakfast dishes piled up on the counter in a pool of whitening grease. It was disgusting. Life was disgusting. “I’ll take it in the parlor,” she added, already turning to make her way down the hall, and if there was no please and thank you in the exchange, so much the worse. Ida had begun to irritate her. The way she simpered. The way she made up to Will as if he were some sort of terrestrial god, the sole authority on every matter, president, general and chief justice all wrapped up in one. Even the way she looked with her smooth wide brow and the hair that trailed down her neck no matter how many times she pinned it up, her pursed little doll’s mouth and sharp green eyes that never missed a thing. And besides, did prisoners in the jailhouse worry about rules of comportment? Survivors of a shipwreck? Where was the please and thank you in that?
She was in a mood and she couldn’t help herself. In the parlor—gloomy, damp, cold as ever—she went straight to the stove and saw that the basket beside it, the wood basket, was empty because Ida was too busy with The Ladies’ Home Journal to bother with anything so trivial as keeping the house above the temperature of a tomb. She flung back the cast-iron door—barely warm to the touch—snatched up the poker and stirred the coals angrily before settling into her chair. And where was Edith? Why couldn’t she help? Because she was out walking or riding or hunting seashells, because she was locked in her room reading Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey for the sixth time instead of applying herself to her lessons, because she was thoughtless, that was why. She was about to call out to her, to shout her name up the stairwell no matter the strain on her voice, when she happened to glance across the room and catch herself.
It took her a moment to register what she was seeing. Shelves. Will had built a series of shelves into the far wall while she lay struggling for sleep, which explained the banging, but she couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t waited till she was up and about. What was the hurry? And why would they need shelves in the first place? They couldn’t have had more than two dozen books with them and nothing to display, no curios or drawings or sculpture, not even a mantel clock. But there was something there already, she saw that now, vague shapeless forms splayed across the top two shelves as if they’d washed up in a flood, as if the water had rushed through the room while she lay sleeping, or trying to sleep, and left its detritus behind. Puzzled, she got to her feet and crossed the room for a closer look.
At first she thought she was examining a rock collection, thinking Will had suddenly developed some sort of geological fervor, but then she understood: these were artifacts, Indian things, the fruits of yesterday’s expedition, arrowheads, a stone knife blade, shell beads, a mortar and pestle, what looked to be a serving bowl scooped from smooth gray stone and tilting ever so slightly away from its uneven base. She was fingering one of the arrowheads—or no, it must have been a spearhead, as long and tapered as a letter opener, and sharp, still sharp after all this time—when she heard footsteps in the hallway behind her. It was Edith, stepping carefully, cradling something in her arms. She was in her charcoal gray skirt and a light shirtwaist, looking pretty, looking groomed for a change, and she seemed to be wearing some sort of ornament, a pale concave object that dangled from her throat on a thin silver chain.
“How do you like it, Mother?” Edith asked, crossing the room to her.
“What is it?”
“A pendant. An Indian pendant. You see?” Edith set down what she was carrying on the corner of the table—more artifacts, dirty things, things that had lain forgotten in the earth, bits of rock and shell and bone—and lifted the pendant on its chain so she could have a closer look.
It was a worked section of abalone shell with a hole drilled dead-center so that it hung perfectly, mother-of-pearl, catching the light and shining as if it had been shaped yesterday. “Very pretty,” she said.
“Jimmie found it.”
“Jimmie? And he gave it to you?”
“Mother. He couldn’t very well wear it himself, could he?”
She was about to say something, to raise some sort of objection—Jimmie—when Edith bent to the table, scooped up a handful of the fragments there and held them out to her, cupped in one palm. “Do you know what these are?”
She did. They were shells, grape-colored, chestnut-colored, the shells of the littoral snails you found when you were wading at low tide. “Snail shells?”
Edith had superior knowledge. She was grinning. Enjoying herself. “Look closer—do you see these holes? Do you see that each one of these has been drilled through so they could be strung on a bit of cord? They’re money, Mother—this is what the Indians used for money!”
“Really? Then I suppose we’re rich—where on earth will we sp
end it all?”
Edith laughed and it was good to hear. She’d been moping lately—for weeks, it seemed—and if she wasn’t immured in her room she was roaming out of doors like the lost and brooding heroine of one of her romances. She was barely civil at meals, peevish and sour-faced, endlessly complaining about being stifled and bored, as if she were the only one suffering, as if they could just snap their fingers and go back to the apartment they could no longer afford, at least till the wool went to market. If it ever went. If Will ever finished the road and Charlie Curner ever brought his boat back and the world stopped cranking round its axis and the oceans went still as the water in the dishpan.
“How I wish it were true,” Edith said. “Even more, I wish the Indians had made things out of gold instead, but Jimmie says they didn’t have any gold, only shells. Still, they’re pretty, don’t you think? I could make a necklace if I could find enough of them.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, warming to the idea, though the things seemed common enough. “We could use a bit of ribbon to string them, don’t you think? Black. Or navy, navy would be nice. Maybe Ida could part with just the smallest length of what you gave her—”
A noise from the direction of the porch made them both look up. In the next moment the front door swung open on Will, in his stocking feet—a flash of light, his thrown shadow—then fell shut behind him. “Minnie,” he boomed, “you see what we’ve done here, Edith and I?” He had a sack slung over one shoulder and she could see that it was weighted, mysterious bulges gathering and shifting as he moved. “And there’s more, much more—we really hit the mother lode yesterday, but because of those damned Chinamen I had to leave the better part of it behind. But here,” he said, setting down the bag with a click and rustle of the contents within, “see for yourself.”
“We went up to Eagle Cave and there were paintings there on the rocks and all sorts of things just lying around,” Edith put in. “And then, on one of the bluffs”—turning to Will—“where was it?”
“Harris Point.”
“On Harris Point we found a place where there was a whole mountain of shells, thousands and thousands of them, mussel shells, clamshells, abalone, everything the Indians must have been eating since the dawn of time—and there were pits there, depressions in the ground where they’d made their fires, and that got us looking until finally we found where they were buried.”
“Under the sand. Probably three or four feet of it just to get to the dirt beneath. But we kept probing, didn’t we, Edith? Because we knew we were on to something.” Will was reaching into the bag, a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, and the thing he produced—naked and white and fissured with age—was no artifact. It was a bone. A human bone. He laid it on the shelf beside the rest of the things and then he bent to the sack again, rummaging, its sides swelling and deflating as if the contents had come to life.
She took a step back. She felt flushed suddenly.
Edith said, “I found a bone too. This one, I think”—she held up her right arm and pulled back the sleeve. “Or Jimmie thinks it’s this one—the little bone here?”
And now Will: “Here,” he said, “here’s the prize,” and he was holding a skull aloft, a human skull, a skull so small and compact and with teeth so reduced it could only have come from a child.
“But you didn’t—those were their graves. Graves, Will. Hallowed ground.”
He set the skull carefully down on the top shelf, shifting the stone bowl to one side so that the skull was centered in the middle of the display. “Yes,” he said over his shoulder, “they were graves of a sort, I suppose. But certainly not hallowed ground. Not unless one of the Spanish friars took time to consecrate it, but then why would he? In truth, no one really knows much about what went on out here, aside from legends and that sort of thing.” And now he turned to her, holding out his palms in extenuation. “They were Indians, that’s all. Just Indians.”
* * *
The rains came back again. The hills got greener, the ocean grayer. The sheep grew into their coats. Coffee ran short, sugar, flour. The wind was a constant. March crept by so slowly she began to score off the days on the calendar, leaning so heavily into her pencil she tore through the paper, and then it was April, April Fools’, and she was the fool because Curner hadn’t come and the wool hadn’t gone and there was no word from Nichols as to whether he’d been able to engage a manager to take over operations and set them free. They’d had plenty of rain, too much rain, a superabundance, and yes, this was an unusual year, Will kept saying, but the dry season was coming because while April might have been the rainiest month back in the east, it wasn’t so out here. She felt better, then she felt worse, better again, worse. She spent most of her time sitting by the stove, wrapped in a blanket.
One night, when the thing inside her wouldn’t let her sleep, she pushed herself up from the bed, lit a candle and went downstairs to the kitchen, thinking to stoke the fire and put the kettle on. The house was quiet but for the little sounds, the creaking and groaning of the inanimate, the rush of the wind along the outside walls, the patter of mice. When the light of the candle swept over the kitchen in a glancing arc, she saw movement there, a hurried retreat, the creatures vanished in the time it took to recognize them for what they were. Mice. They were nothing to her, one more annoyance, and she’d given up on nagging Will to trap them—what was the use? They were infinite. They belonged here. And she didn’t.
She lit the lamp and blew out the candle. Stirred the coals and laid fresh lengths of driftwood in the firebox. The water jug was full, a small blessing, and she tipped it to the kettle, set the kettle atop the stove, then eased herself into a chair at the kitchen table. There was a stack of old magazines and newspapers on the corner of the table, artifacts themselves, long out of date, and though she’d read every page of them twice, twice at least, she picked up a newspaper and settled in to read of events that had transpired in the real world in a time that might as well have been a century ago for all they signified now.
The water came to a boil. She got up and poured out a cupful, flavored it with vanilla extract and a pinch of sugar so as to conserve the last of the tea, and was just about to sit back down at the table when she heard a noise from the hallway. Or no, not the hallway, but Ida’s room. It was a cloaked, furtive sound, starting, then stopping, then settling into a rhythmic give and take, slow friction, as if two things, two objects, two bodies, were being rubbed together. She froze in place, straining to hear. There it was, there it was again. And then she caught her breath to still the whistling of her lungs and the pain came at her in a sudden triumphant rush, all the air gone out of her, and though she didn’t want to give herself away, though she tried to suppress it, she began to cough. It started gently, almost as if she were learning a new kind of respiration, as if she were embracing it, but then it accelerated, harsher and harsher, until her face was aflame and her lungs throbbed and she had to brace herself against the table and spit in the cup and then see it there, her own issue, the only thing she’d ever given birth to, the hard yellow lump of sputum revolving in a wash of tinctured water.
The house had gone silent. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Even the wind died. This was a silence of another quality altogether—she could feel it—a deeper silence, a listening silence. Her heart was pounding. Her throat ached. It took her a moment to straighten up, to square her shoulders and catch her breath. Then she started down the hall, very slowly, one step at a time. The floorboards didn’t groan—they wouldn’t dare—and the ugly whitewashed walls stood mute. When she came to the door of Will’s room, the storeroom, the monk’s cell, she took an eternity just to lift the handle because she wouldn’t make a sound, she refused to, and when the door eased open inch by inch and the uncertain light spilling down the hall from the lamp in the kitchen began to spill here too, she saw the bed pushed up against the wall, Will’s bed, and saw that it was empty.
/> The Weight
After that, things seemed to move forward in a new kind of way, as if the elaborate machinery of the place had been stuck in gear all this time and now it was free to revolve unimpeded. Spring—the drying out—came in the second week of April, just as Will had said it would, fog giving way to a succession of sun-warmed days that seemed to set the island on fire, birds nesting everywhere, the pigs cavorting in their pen, a warm breeze riding up out of the south on a scent of citrus and jasmine. Insects hung over the flowers in the front yard, hummingbirds materialized out of the air and the sheep—mercifully—shifted farther afield, taking their ammoniac reek with them. Will finished the final section of his road and Charlie Curner came at long last to deliver supplies and letters—a whole carton of letters—and stow the sacks of wool in the hold of his schooner, and then the Evangeline, her sails gilded with sun and casting a long morning shadow over the waves, made for Santa Barbara, where the market was, where the money was, where Nichols was waiting to get the best possible price and then freight them to the mills all the way across the country. Better yet, Adolph went with him to oversee the transfer, and so they were spared his sourness, at least till the next boat brought him back.
The days lengthened. Sun shone on the porch in the afternoons. She had Edith throw open the windows and doors to let the fresh air scour the mold and carry off the accumulated odors of the place, the reek of ancient grease and cold ash, of dried mud and mouse droppings and people confined through a long wet winter in a house that was no house at all. If she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun, she could almost imagine she was in Italy.