San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  “I’m sure you’ll be just what we’re looking for,” she said, “and I’m sure too that you’ll find this place everything you could want. It’s—” Here she faltered, struggling to present things in a positive light. “It’s very peaceful out here. Isn’t it, Edith? Quiet. Tranquil.”

  “Oh, yes,” Edith said, shooting her a glance, “very quiet.”

  “If that’s what you want, that is.”

  He took a step forward, snatched the cap from his head—the same sort of cap Jimmie favored, though this one was clean, or appeared to be. “A farm’s a farm, missus, and if you’ve seen one—” He finished the phrase with his hand. “Peace and solitude, that’s what a man wants, doubtless. And please don’t think that this”—pointing to the empty sleeve—“will slow me in any way or keep me from my duties because I can do the work of two men all on my own and what I can’t manage I’ve got my boys, Cuthbert and Thomas, of sixteen and fourteen years, to pull along with me.”

  She wanted to reassure him—he was a treasure, her savior, the one man to lift her out of this, and she didn’t care how scrawny and hungry and crippled he was just so long as he was standing on two feet and drawing air—but she didn’t have the chance because Curner spoke up then. “Ma’am,” he said, indicating the crate he’d set down on the porch, “where do you want I should put this?”

  If she didn’t recognize it in the exhilaration of the moment, who could have blamed her? “What is it?” she asked, Curner nodding and shuffling, Reed sober-faced, Edith burning up with her own barely contained joy—they were free, free at long last, already on their way!

  A shrug. A grimace. “The plates,” he said. “You know, that you been asking after?”

  * * *

  She wasn’t privy to the conference Will had with the man—she’d gone up to bed early, too overwrought to hide her feelings or preside over the dinner table—but every time she’d looked up for the remainder of the afternoon she’d seen them crossing the yard together or tramping the fields or examining the railway ties that supported the barn as if they were rare works of art. She had a plate sent up, though she was too excited to eat, and when Edith brought it to her they were close as thieves. “Three more weeks,” she said, and Edith, giggling, repeated it to her: Three more weeks. Then she’d settled in with the back copies of the Santa Barbara newspaper Curner had brought her, the cat—they’d named him Marbles, for his coloring—curled up in her lap, where she could stroke the silk of his ears in a steady, easy, unconscious way. It was past nine and dark beyond the windows when she heard Will’s tread on the stairs, his steps uncertain, as if he’d been drinking—and he had, she knew he had, with Curner and the new man, her one-armed savior. She didn’t begrudge them. Let them celebrate. She would have celebrated herself but she was afraid of hexing things.

  Will was on the landing. He was at the door. And then, oddly, he was knocking, the soft rap of his knuckles whispering through the wooden panels so politely, so reticently, you would have thought they were strangers to each other. “Come in,” she said, the door pushed open, and there he was, her husband, looking sorrowful and shaking his head back and forth in negation, and at first she thought he’d lost at cards and then that he’d offered up the bed in the storeroom to the one-armed man instead of installing him in the bunkhouse where he belonged and that now he’d come to her, to be close with her, to sleep in the same bed with her despite all that had come between them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, shuffling unsteadily across the room, the hateful room, her prison cell, and he had been drinking, of course he had. She watched him go to the corner by the window for the straight-backed chair there and laboriously lift it and bring it round to her side of the bed, where he set it down on the dried-out floorboards and sat heavily facing her.

  “Sorry for what?”

  He was still shaking his head. “The new man,” he said. “Reed. One-Arm. Whatever you want to call him.”

  “What about him?” She pictured the man, so reduced he couldn’t have weighed much more than Edith, and what was the weight of a human arm? A fifth your body weight? A sixth?

  “He’s not”—his voice heavy and slow—“going to work out.”

  She’d been lying flat and now she sat up so precipitously she startled the cat, which came up out of its sleep with a sudden lurch before it could see that it was only her, its mistress, stirring to action. “What do you mean?”

  “Just look at him. He’s weak, deformed. He looks half-starved.”

  “He’s no worse off than the men you march down Market Street with come Decoration Day—”

  “That’s different. They’re veterans. And we’re not hiring any of them to keep us from bankruptcy.”

  “But I thought, I assumed—” But how stupid of her. It was the Revolutionary War the British fought, and on the wrong side, at that, not Will’s war. And if any of them did fight in the Civil War it would have been for the South.

  “He lost it in a threshing machine, a farm accident, and who’s to say who was to blame. He drinks, though, that’s for sure—”

  “So do you.”

  “But that isn’t the point. Or maybe it is: I don’t trust him to do the work. I don’t think he’s capable.”

  “He is, Will, I know he is.” She was pleading now and she hated herself for it. “He has two sons, nearly grown, and they—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry? Are you actually going to sit there and tell me you don’t intend to hire that man?”

  “We can’t take the risk. What if the ranch were to go bust, where would our investment be then?”

  “Investment?” She threw it back at him. “Is this your idea of an investment?”

  “We can’t simply—”

  “We can. And we will.”

  “I want to stay on, that’s the long and short of it. If even for a month or two more. It’s summer, Minnie, summer coming on—the air, think of the air.”

  She let out a laugh then, incredulous, tainted, more a dog’s bark than any human sound, and then, though her throat was closing up on her, she dropped her voice to the pitch of absolute certainty, of threat and irrevocability: “If you do, it will be on your own. I’m finished here. Finished. Do you understand me? And you will hire that man and I don’t care if we have to beg in the streets and every last ram and ewe falls over dead and rots in its hide. Just get me out of here. Get me out!”

  Departure

  Will wanted to leave the cat behind, but she was adamant on that score too—in the short time she’d had it, the animal had become her chief source of comfort, along with Edith, that is—and now, as General Meade jerked at his harness and Jimmie fought the reins and the rocker pitched and yawed with each violent shudder of the sled, Marbles concentrated his weight in the basket in her lap till he was as heavy and inert as a stone. There was wind, of course, a gale of it blowing full in her face so that she had to squint her eyes to keep the grit out of them. Everything had dried up, just as Will had said it would, but that was small consolation to her now. In fact, it was nothing but an annoyance, her dress sheathed in a pale yellow patina of dust before they’d gone a hundred yards and the handkerchief she pressed to her face filthy all the way through. And her gloves—her gloves looked as if she’d been using them to dig up potatoes by hand. She focused on her breathing. Held on as best she could. And entertained herself with the notion that in a few hours—mere hours—she’d be at sea.

  The road was much improved, she had to admit it, though it still wasn’t wide enough for a wagon to go up and down without risk, but that was Mr. Reed’s concern now, Mr. Reed with his pinned-up sleeve, listless children and skeletal wife, though who was she to criticize? Still, the woman—she claimed to be thirty, though she looked ten years older, her shoes worn down at the heels, her dress washed so many times it was as colorless as the spring water
in the kitchen basin and her eyes a crazed flaring assault of cobalt blue—seemed to her a fellow sufferer. She didn’t cough, or not that Marantha had heard or noticed, but then she’d barely spent a moment with her, consumed as she was with the final details of packing up and leaving. The woman—Mrs. Reed, and Marantha never did catch her Christian name—had stood watching from the porch of the bunkhouse, where the family had been temporarily installed, as Jimmie hitched up the mule, lashed the rocker to it and half a dozen crates of things, the unopened dishes amongst them, that were to go back on Charlie Curner’s schooner. Mrs. Reed was eager to get herself settled in the house, and who could blame her for that? Good use of it, Marantha thought, welcome to it, and if she ever laid eyes on the place again it would be from above, high up, out of reach even of the eagles.

  Slowly, step by tentative step, the mule worked its way through the turnings and switchbacks and down the final stretch to the beach, braking with its hooves and its big sweating flanks against the downward impetus of the sled with its rocking chair and piled-up cartons and the all but negligible weight she and her cat brought to bear. Jimmie didn’t say a word the whole way down, bent on focusing on the task at hand, which was to keep the mule from running out of control and pitching over the side of the canyon. She had nothing to say to him in any case. She’d washed her hands of him and she was glad he’d be staying behind. Where he belonged. He wasn’t fit for society, not after what he’d done to Edith—with Edith—and Edith was hardly innocent herself.

  It had been just after Reed had gone back with Charlie Curner, hired on and prepared to return at the end of the month, as contracted. The day was typically gloomy, the fog lingering well into the afternoon before giving way to a pale high sun that crept by stages through the windows while she sat mending by the stove, determined to repair every last tear in the sheets, bedding and underclothes before they were packed away for the trip back home. It might have been the influence of the sun or just the desire to get out of doors and away from the house, but at some point she set aside her work, put on her hat, took up her parasol and strolled out the door, thinking she’d walk as far as the cliffs and see if she could make out the shore from there. She moved awkwardly, the muscles of her legs gone lax from disuse, yet the day was pleasant and she needed the exercise and before long she began to feel better, stronger, and though it might have been no more than a childish indulgence she was looking forward to a glimpse of the coastline, if only to reassure herself that it was still there.

  When she came up the path to where the headland narrowed and the cliffs gave way to the churn of the sea below, she was disappointed. Though the sun was shining above her, the coastline was wrapped in fog, nothing visible but a motionless band of gray thrown up across the horizon. She was standing there, looking out on nothing, when the wind shifted and the sound of voices came to her. Edith’s voice—she heard it plainly—and another voice, a man’s. Or no, a boy’s. Jimmie’s. But where were they?

  She edged toward the drop-off and peered over. A second ledge jutted out below her, not thirty feet down, a patch of rock and scrub suspended over the ocean like the crow’s nest of a ship, and Edith was there, with Jimmie, playing at one of their games. Edith was perched on a rock, hatless, in an old green shirtwaist she’d long since outgrown, and she was so close Marantha could make out the parting of her hair. “I’ll bet you’re afraid,” Edith said.

  “I’m not afraid.” From this angle, all she could see of the boy was his cap, the thin spike of his nose, two ears, his shoulders.

  “Then go ahead, Caliban. Go ahead and kiss me.”

  And he would have, or he was going to, but as soon as he leaned into her Edith pushed him away, even as the sea below them slashed at the rocks and sucked away again. “No,” Edith said, “not there,” and she was lifting her skirts so that the sun glanced off the perfect unblemished flesh of her calf, her knee, the hem of her undergarments, Jimmie kneeling, down on his hands and knees, groveling like an animal, and Edith bunching the material till she was exposed all the way up the long white slant of her legs. “Here,” she said. “Kiss me here.”

  And now there was the mule and the boy’s narrow shoulders and the canyon that was opening up before her for the very last time. She felt no nostalgia, only regret. And if she’d confined Edith to her room for an entire day and banned Jimmie from the table at dinner—banned him permanently—it was small punishment for the shock she’d received. What had she been thinking when she’d consented to bring Edith out here? No matter how much it would have cost or how much the separation would have hurt, she should have sent Edith to boarding school—and if she had it to do over again, she would have. And Jimmie. She wished she’d never laid eyes on him.

  As they emerged from the canyon and started across the beach, the sled gliding over the sand with a soft continuous hiss and the mule going easier now, she saw that the sea was alive with birds, an enormous squalling convocation of them—gulls, shearwaters, pelicans, all of them bobbing and wheeling and plunging into the careening froth of the waves so that the boat, the schooner, was almost lost in the storm of them. This was one of their banquets, the sardines and anchovies driven to the surface by larger fish and the birds there to collect their due, the scene as elemental as it must have been all those eons ago when the mammoths stalked across the countryside and the glaciers stood rigid and taller than the mountains they crushed beneath them. She might have appreciated it in another context, might have enjoyed it—wild nature, a scene Winslow Homer might have depicted—but she’d had her fill of nature. She dropped her eyes to the basket in her lap and the moment the mule came to a halt she got down from the chair and made her way to the skiff even as Curner came up the strand to help Jimmie with the crates. And no, she didn’t want to wait on shore for the others—she wanted only for someone to take up the oars and row her out to the boat, where she meant to sit on the bench in the saloon and stare at the walls till she heard the rattle of the anchor chain paying out in the harbor at Santa Barbara.

  * * *

  This time Ida didn’t come down to comfort her or see to her needs or even to show her face at all, not for the entire trip, and Edith, having had her fill of the sea, was no company either—she was asleep in one of the berths before they’d left the island. Since Will and Adolph were occupied on deck, tugging at one line or another and sharing valedictory swigs from a bottle Charlie Curner had provided, Marantha had the saloon to herself. She and the cat, that is. She’d kept him confined in the basket till she was aboard and then she let him roam free, though he didn’t go far—one circuit around the cabin, a quick stiffening over the scent of the rodents cowering in their holes, and then he was back in her lap, purring himself to sleep. He’d proven a superior mouser in his short time with them, roaming the house at night and presenting her with the headless corpses of one mouse after another, though it was too little too late. By that point she didn’t care if the mice overran the place, piled their droppings up to the ceiling and whittled the walls to splinters. The mice were behind her now. Everything was. The boat rocked gently under her, the sea as smooth as the sheets she’d mended and folded and packed neatly away for the journey home. There was the susurrus of the spray against the bow. It was very quiet. Before long, she found herself dozing.

  And then—she had no notion of how much time had passed—Will was there, nudging her awake. “Minnie,” he said, his voice soft and apologetic, “Minnie, wake up, we’re almost there.”

  Through the fog of her sleep and the dullness of the thing inside her that was just starting to rise and yawn and unsheathe its claws, she had to take a moment to stare up at him, blinking, and ask him, “Where?”

  “Where?” he echoed. “Santa Barbara. Don’t you want to come out on deck and see the shoreline?”

  And now she was awake, fully awake, for the first time in months. “Yes,” she said, not coughing, not yet, and she lifted the cat from her lap and stood f
irmly, planting her feet against the motion of the ship. She touched her hands to her hat, smoothed down her dress—and then, spontaneously, as though she couldn’t help herself—she gave him a smile that was as pure and uncomplicated as the evening coming to life around her. “I’d like that,” she said, and she could already picture the view from the deck, the boats bobbing in the harbor, the carriages ashore, palm trees, streets and lanes and avenues, and in the houses that ran back from the sea in neat orderly rows, people already lighting lamps against the coming of the dark.

  PART II

  Edith

  Homecoming

  Though she slept through the entire voyage back, slept like an Egyptian mummy in the narrow berth that smelled of bilge and hair oil and the private sloughings and parings of the man whose bed it was—Curner, Mr. Curner, Captain Curner—she rose the moment her mother came to her and whispered, “We’re here.” After that, she couldn’t sleep at all, not for the next two nights running, for sheer excitement. It was as if she’d never in her life seen or heard or felt or tasted, as if she’d been color-blind, as if her ears had been stuffed with wax and her tongue coated in magnesia. She’d been deprived, that was what it was, locked away on an island like some fairy princess, everything drab and changeless and the only sound the keening of the wind and the weak disjointed cries of the sheep, the seals, the birds. The world had been stilled, and now—in a sudden explosion of color and noise, glorious noise—it had come careering back to life.