by Boyle, T. C.
Unfortunately, it all came too late, at least for her.
She wouldn’t blame Will, though it was the night she’d found his bed empty that the disease came back to claim her all over again, the microbes striking when she was weakest, when she was heartsick, devastated, when sleep was an impossibility and she sat in the chair by the stove and coughed till the house rang with the propulsive ascending notes of it. She wouldn’t blame him, not for the disease, but she would never forgive him that night. He’d crept out of Ida’s room at first light—she heard the soft click of the latch, the faintest wheeze of the hinges, felt his heavy tread radiating through the floorboards all the way down the hall and across the parlor to where she sat staring out into the ashen dawn. She waited till he opened his own door, shut it behind him and settled into his bed with a single fierce groan of the wooden supports. Then she got up from the chair, light-headed, her breathing harsh and ragged, each indraft roaring in her ears, and made her way across the room and down the hall to his door, but this time she didn’t hesitate.
In a single motion she flung back the door, slipped inside and pulled it shut. The room was gray, crepuscular, everything indistinct, and for a moment she thought she was dreaming, that nothing had happened, that she was asleep and well and that her husband loved her and she loved him in turn. But then he lifted his head from the blankets, his torso braced on the twin props of his elbows, his neck craning, his face a pale lump of meat with his features molded in the center of it, and she was living in the moment. “You pig,” she said, her voice low and calm, a flesh-cutting voice, cold as a surgeon’s knife. “Adulterer. Cheat. You thought I was Ida, didn’t you? Ida slinking across the hall for one last embrace?”
He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything, not a word.
“A servant, Will. A serving girl. How could you demean yourself? And with Edith in the house, Edith in the room above you while you—” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t name what they were doing, what they’d done, though she could feel it stirring inside her, deep in her own body, in the place where she’d opened her legs for him in the time when he wanted her and she wanted him.
The bed shifted beneath him. He let out a soft moaning curse and dropped his head back on the pillow. It came to her that he wasn’t going to defend himself, wasn’t going to plead or extenuate or attempt to comfort her—or lie, he wasn’t even going to bother to lie. The thought enraged her. What was he, anyway? A blustering hateful overgrown adventurer who didn’t care a fig about her or Edith either, the island king, William G. Waters, Rex et Imperator.
“Poor Irish,” she said. “Shanty Irish.” Oh, and now her voice rose up till it was like the rattling of husks, like dead cane beating on a dead shore. “A girl half your age, a girl we took in as if she were our own daughter. And you, you—”
“Shh!” he hissed, sitting up with a jolt. “She’ll hear.”
“Who?” she demanded. “Who’ll hear?”
A whisper: “Ida.”
“Ida? Ida’s already corrupted. You corrupted her, Will, you did. And you dirtied me in the doing of it.”
“Edith, then. For Edith’s sake.”
And that was where reason left her—that he should dare to put this on Edith, to mention her in the same breath with that, that slut! She found Edith’s name on her own lips then, found it as if it were a blessing, a salve, but by the time he threw himself out of the bed and took hold of her, shaking her in the grip of his two calloused clumsy hands that were like talons, exactly like, she was screaming it.
* * *
This time the blood wouldn’t stop. It erupted from her as she fought free of his grip and staggered out into the hallway. She tried to contain it, swallowing mechanically, swallowing till she thought she would drown on her own blood, but the cough shook her harder than Will could ever have and the cough was awash in it. She spattered the grubby white wall, spattered the floor, the front of her dressing gown. So bright, her living blood. And the cough. The cough. Will was right behind her, muttering, pleading, but she fought him away and then Edith was there and she clamped a hand to her mouth and her hand came away red. Everything went dark, the whole world folded up and sucked away from her, and then it wavered and came back again. She was on her feet still and how could that be?
Somehow, with Edith’s help, with Edith’s arms wrapped around her and her feet finding the stairs one at a time and all the breath squeezed out of her as if she were climbing the highest mountain anyone had ever known, she managed to make it up to her room. The door flung open, clapping against the wall. Ten steps to the bed, and then she was down, but she couldn’t lie flat. The thing wouldn’t let her. Pillows, she needed pillows to prop her up, and here they were, stony and cold, bunched at the small of her back. Edith, her face drawn down to nothing, ran for a towel and when that was soaked through she ran for another.
She thought of Poe and his story of the Red Death, death that comes in a fountain of blood, and she was ready to let go, so weak, so disappointed, infected after all, fatally infected, and what did it matter how she’d lived her life? Will, Ida. Iron pills, plein air, doctors. James. Edith. Her own mother a continent away. Beyond the window the day was closed up like a fist. Edith sat beside her. She fell out of consciousness, then fell back in. “My medicine,” she pleaded, bleeding, still bleeding, tasting it, swallowing it down, soaking the towel till the towel hung at her throat like a skinned carcass. She took the bottle from Edith’s hand, put it to her mouth and drank it down as if it were water, and then she dropped away again and didn’t wake till it was dark and saw that Edith was still there at her side and that the blood had stopped flowing.
That was when the weight settled on her, the stone as big as the biggest boulder Will had shattered with his dynamite—or no, bigger, bigger still, as big as the island. It was the island, the island was crushing her, she’d known it all along and she might have said it aloud, cried it out, might have said anything, cursing and raving in her throes, thinking This is what death is like, this weight, this crush, and then she fell one more time down the long shaft of her dreams.
The Cruelest Thing
But this was the thing, the cruelest thing: she didn’t die. She was going to die, she’d nearly died, and when she came back to herself on a day as colorless and changeless as the day she’d taken to bed, she wished she had—there was only so much blood in the human body, only so much weight that anyone, even the saints and martyrs, could be expected to bear. The bed was cold. She couldn’t feel her toes. The tips of her fingers, though she rubbed them together, rubbed them furiously, felt numb. She called out for Edith because she wouldn’t have Ida in the room with her, never again, never, and the first thing she heard was the sigh of Edith’s mattress from the room down the hall and then footsteps and then the door was opening and Edith was there, laboring under a frightened smile and asking her how she felt.
And so it was Edith who nursed her, Edith who helped her comb out her hair and brought her her medicine and the bowls of broth Ida sent up from the kitchen, and when Will came in from his work to stand there in the doorway gazing down at her like a mourner at a funeral, she looked back at him as if he were a stranger. There was no need for speech—speech only complicated things. He came and went. She opened her eyes and he was there or he wasn’t. Her breath grated, her lungs rattled. It must have been the third or fourth time he came that she felt strong enough to address the situation, to lift her head and shape words around the emotions stabbing at her. She’d dozed off and woken again to the same pewter light at the window and saw him sitting there in the chair, his hat clenched in one hand and a book open in the other. “I want to go back,” she said.
His eyes shot to her. He looked startled, as if the walls had begun to speak. He closed the book, his thumb marking the place, and drew up his legs so that his knees swelled against the thin worn fabric of his trousers. “I know,” he said. “And I’m sorr
y for it. Sorry for everything.”
The room seemed to whirl as it had that first day, everything in motion, as if she were looking at him through a kaleidoscope. It took her a long moment to push herself up to a sitting position, her arms sapped, the breath caught in her throat.
“Adolph’s back,” he said. “I sent him to meet with Nichols, and they think—we think—we may have a man to take over here, a hired man who’ll come with his family, a manager, that is . . .” He rose from the chair and whether he was smiling or not she couldn’t say, his skin so chapped and burned and his features so reduced she scarcely recognized him—and he looked old, old all over again. “And he brought something for you, something to cheer you—”
“Who?”
“Adolph.”
“Adolph brought something for me?” She saw the man then in quick relief, the clod, heavy-faced, humorless, lewd, The softest thing in this world but for one other thing I can think of.
“Shall I go get it? Would you like to see it now?”
What Adolph had brought her—and she froze when Will led him into the room in his filthy work clothes and out-at-toe stockings until she saw it there in his arms—was a cat. Not a Siamese like Sampan, but a silver and black tabby with great all-seeing eyes and a swirl of markings on either side that made her think of marble cake. Adolph came across the room to her, nimble enough for a man almost Will’s age, his eyes downcast—he wouldn’t look at her though she’d caught him stealing glances at the dinner table, and she could only imagine what she must have looked like now, skeletal, bone-white, her eyes huge and luminous and snatching at the light as desperately as the cat’s. He didn’t say a word. Just held the animal out to her—an old tom, docile, loving, she saw that in a flash—and then she had it pressed to her so she could feel the engine of its purring through her robe and her nightgown and down into the thin drawn tegument of the skin stretched across her ribs. A cat. Purring. It was a small miracle. “Thank you,” she whispered, and smiled at him for perhaps the first time since the day they’d met—and that had been a smile of civility, not of gratitude.
And Adolph? She didn’t like him, she would never like him, but here he had his moment of grace, lifting his eyes to hers for just the briefest instant before nodding in acknowledgment, turning on his heels and slipping out the door.
* * *
So there was the cat. The cat that had come from shore, where Adolph had been just days ago, mere days, and now there was the promise—or the hope, the hope at least—that they would all be going there, going home, as soon as Will was able to fix things with Nichols and the manager in waiting. In the meanwhile, there was a new cycle beginning, the strength coming back to her in increments and everything revolving around that soaring promise—she forced herself from bed after a full week of inactivity, forced herself to pull open her steamer trunk and hatboxes and begin packing her clothes and hats for the trip back, overseeing things, and when she couldn’t put it off any longer, even going downstairs, to the kitchen, where Ida was.
She came down the stairs that first day on silent feet, in her carpet slippers, the cat padding noiselessly behind her. She was walking, moving, but she couldn’t feel her legs. They seemed fiberless and weak, as if they’d become detached from her body, as if she were walking on someone else’s legs, someone feeble, impossibly old, etherealized already. Ethereal, that was what she was. A spirit. A thing of the air. And if she had reason to doubt it, she saw that the walls of the corridor had been washed free of the taint of her blood, as if she’d never passed this way at all.
She found Ida in the kitchen, bent to the washing, the windows steamed over, heat radiating from the stove, the usual smells at war. For a long moment she stood there in the doorway, hesitating. What would she say to her? How could she look her in the face? How could she live under the same roof without exploding from within like one of Will’s shattered boulders? Before she could think, the cat gave her away. He paraded into the room, tail held high, and Ida, her hair in a long frizzled braid that dangled over one shoulder, glanced up at the motion and in that instant they were staring into each other’s eyes. “Ma’am,” Ida blurted, “oh, ma’am, I don’t know what to say—”
Steel, she was made of steel, unbendable, unbreakable, and now she could feel her legs, the muscles tightening there, everything in her gone rigid suddenly. “Then don’t say anything at all.”
“But I—” Ida’s face crumpled. She was in tears before she could draw her hands from the soapy water and rub them spasmodically on her apron.
The table was Marantha’s destination. She wanted only to cross the room, sit at that table with a cup of tea and a slice of buttered bread and gaze round her at something other than the four walls of her bedroom, no matter how shabby or disordered, but she never got there because Ida backed away from the washbasin and came gliding to her as if she’d been drawn on a string. Marantha almost held out her arms to her, almost took hold of her and drew her to herself like the child she was, but that wasn’t natural, that wasn’t right. “No,” she said, shaking her head side to side while the girl slumped her shoulders and dropped her chin to her chest in mortification. And though she saw then that what had happened wasn’t the fault of Ida, but of Will—of Will and herself too, for allowing him to bring them all out here to this desolate place where there was no society and no affection or manners or common human decency and where the disease could have its way with her—she turned away, went to the table and pulled out the chair there. “Bring me a cup of tea,” she said over her shoulder. “And a sandwich. Make me a sandwich.”
One-Arm
April faded into May. Her steamer trunk, packed and ready to go, stood just inside the front door, positioned there so Will could see it every time he came in or out, and no, she wasn’t going to decorate it with a cloth or a vase of flowers or attempt to disguise it in any way. It was her trunk. And it stood by the door. He could make of that what he would.
She was on the porch with Edith one afternoon, the balls of her feet rising and falling with the motion of the rocker, her breathing shallow but steady, the sheet she was mending spread across her lap in a series of gentle undulating folds and the cat asleep in a golden puddle of sunlight beside her, when the one-armed man made his appearance, entirely unannounced. Edith was the first to spot him. She’d been rocking too, absorbed for once in her studies, Will and the hands nowhere to be seen—mending fence, collecting driftwood, who knew where they were?—when suddenly she let out a low exclamation and jumped to her feet so abruptly the rocker pitched back against the clapboards behind her. “It’s, it’s Captain Curner, Mother, look! And who’s that with him?”
She had to blink twice to be sure she wasn’t seeing things. Two figures had just crested the hill, rising up out of the haze that hung in the distance though it was past two in the afternoon and should have burned off by now. There was Curner, sure enough, his face the color and texture of smoked ham under his grimy seaman’s cap and with a wooden crate propped up on one shoulder, and how had they missed his sail in the harbor? The fog, that was what it was. It still hovered over the water, as if the sea had pulled the sky down like a shade and left nothing in between. But who was the other man?
It all came clear in the next moment, Curner lumbering across the yard to set down the crate on the edge of the porch while the stranger, following along in his wake, pulled up short at the base of the steps to peer up at her and Edith with a narrowing look of appraisal. He was a slight man, no bigger than Jimmie, in patched and faded work clothes, and his left sleeve hung empty so that he looked as if he were leaning to one side when in fact he was standing straight on, as erect as a soldier. “Good afternoon, missus,” he said, his face drawn down to its underpinnings of bone and the straight slash of an oversized nose, an English nose, as it turned out. “And good afternoon to you, miss. Am I correct in assuming that I have the pleasure of addressing Miss and Missus Waters?
”
“Yes,” she heard herself murmur, even as Curner mumbled a greeting of his own, and Edith, for once at a loss for words, echoed her.
The new man—and suddenly she knew who he was, the apprehension striking her so suddenly she almost cried out in rapture—gave her a horse’s smile, all teeth and no lips. “I’m Horace Reed, missus,” he said, eliding the h, “at your service.”
“He’s come out for the day—and the night, that is, because we’ll be leaving first thing in the morning,” Curner said.
“Just to get acquainted,” Reed put in. “To see if I’m acceptable to your husband. And you—you, of course.”
Another attempt at a grin. And then he was fumbling in the breast pocket of his coat for something, a sealed envelope, which he extracted and handed across to her. It was from Nichols and addressed to her husband, but she was so excited in that moment, so carried away, she couldn’t help tearing it open and snatching a look at the letter within.
This is to introduce Mr. Reed, a man who has had large experience in the field of ranching in general and sheep in particular, mostly in his native country but on a ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley as well. I took the trouble of communicating with the owner there, who holds him in high regard. He is eager for the job here, as he has six children and a wife to feed and is currently out of work, his previous employer having sold the ranch to new interests. He assures me that in spite of his small stature and his obvious disfigurement, he is fully capable of managing our operations on the terms you and I fixed upon—that is, he will supply his own needs and receive one-third the value of the flock’s increase per annum. If he meets with your approval, he means to take over from you on the twenty-ninth of this month.
She folded the letter carefully and returned it to the envelope, and it was all she could do to keep herself from running off into the fields shouting for Will, because he had to see this, had to read the letter and take a look at the man and sign him on without delay. Her hand trembled as she clutched the letter to her. The new man, Reed, was studying her face, his eyes taking everything in. She’d opened a letter addressed to her husband right in front of him, and if it was a serious breach of etiquette—what would her mother have said?—she dismissed it, because husband and wife were one before the law and she and Will were equal partners in this enterprise, no matter what anyone might think or expect.