San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  For one mad moment her only thought was of stowing away, of following a family up the gangplank, pressing close to them until they were aboard—if she was going to be taken for a child, she’d act like one—and then hiding somewhere overnight, in one of the lifeboats, in a closet or the head or under a table in the saloon. She had money. She could buy herself dinner, tea, sit there as long as she liked, tell the waiter her parents were indisposed, seasick, green around the gills—anything, anything to get away from here—but she knew she was fooling herself. Very slowly, squaring her shoulders and taking up the suitcase and parasol, she turned away from the ticket office and began making her way back down the pier as if she’d just arrived, ignoring the men in carriages and the fishermen and all the rest of them with their pat stupid expressions and leached-out eyes.

  By the time she reached the end of the pier, she knew what she was going to do, though it was risky, riskier even than the boat. She didn’t dare try to take a coach—that would be the first thing her stepfather would expect and there was no guarantee that the agent there would take her money any more than the idiot at the steamship office would—but the railway was another thing altogether. Anyone could take the train. Of course, rail service was new to Santa Barbara and she’d never been on the train herself, yet Becky Thorpe had and that was good enough for her. The problem was that the train didn’t go to San Francisco, it went south, south only. To Los Angeles. If she boarded the train, she’d be on her own, without a room or roommate or meals in the dining hall or piano lessons with Mr. Sokolowski or Miss Everton’s guiding hand, not that Miss Everton had ever guided her personally, but she was there, like a monument, in loco parentis, a buffer between the girls and the harsh hard world they all knew from Zola and Dickens. She’d have to find her way all alone in a city she’d seen only once, with her mother, years ago—she’d have to take rooms, but who would rent to her? And once her money was exhausted, how would she pay?

  No matter. She strode into the station, went up to the window and booked passage on the next train for Los Angeles and the only question the agent asked was Will that be round trip or one way? and without hesitation she answered: One way. She took a seat on a bench in the far corner and settled in to wait. The train was at five-thirty and it would be past dark then. Her stepfather would be sure to come looking for her if she wasn’t home by dark, no question about it, but then he’d never imagine she’d try to get away to Los Angeles—to school, yes, to San Francisco, where she belonged, but not Los Angeles. Los Angeles was a place he scarcely knew. Still, it was just past one-thirty in the afternoon and who knew but that Ida would have sent up the alarm by now? She could imagine her stepfather sitting down to luncheon after a morning of laying in supplies against returning to the island—the big sacks of rice and beans and flour she’d come to loathe the sight of, farm equipment, tools—and saying Where the devil’s Edith got herself to? and Ida saying I haven’t seen her all day and I know she’s not in her room or the yard either.

  She tried to read to pass the time, but her eyes kept jumping to the door, people going in and out, a garble of voices, inquiries about the timetable and fares and did the five-thirty stop at San Buenaventura? At some point she dozed off, the book spread open in her lap, and then the door slammed and she was awake again. She smelled boot blacking, coal dust, leather. The ticket agent was eating a corned beef sandwich and she smelled that too, hungry suddenly and wishing she’d taken more at breakfast. She started thinking of food, of the places along State Street where she could get cheese and bread or a hamburger sandwich, but she was afraid to leave her seat though it was only just four and the train wasn’t due for another hour and a half. Even so, she couldn’t risk being seen on the street in any case. They must have known she was gone by now. What would her stepfather think—that she was with Becky Thorpe, though she hardly knew her anymore? Out for a walk? Haunting the shops? But no, that wasn’t what he’d think at all. He’d know in an instant—he’d always been suspicious of her, of her relations with boys, though they were practically nonexistent, never satisfied, always maligning her—and it was only a matter of time before he came after her.

  The thought frightened her and she shrank into herself. She tried to focus on the future, on the good things that surely awaited her. When she got back to San Francisco—and she would, she knew she would no matter what it cost her—she wouldn’t return to Miss Everton or Mr. Sokolowski or to lessons of any kind. She was grown now. She’d had enough lessons. No, she would go directly to the stage door and audition for every part in every play there was and though she’d have to start as an understudy or with one of the subsidiary roles—a walk-on—she would shine and people would take notice and soon, with hard work and luck, she’d be offered the leading roles, the ingénue, the princess, the young love of the count or senator. And when people called out to her, shouted acclaim from the balcony and in the lobby afterward, she wouldn’t answer to Edith. Edith was the name of no one she knew. She had a new name to go with her new identity, a name that had come to her in a waking dream after she’d rejected a dozen others, a name that was simple and direct and yet exotic too in the way that Edith Waters or even Lillian Russell could never be. Inez. They would call her Inez, Inez Deane.

  At quarter of five the waiting room began to fill up. A woman with a wicker basket brimming with oranges sat beside her, along with her little boy, who kept saying “We’re going on a train” over and over and turning periodically to his mother for confirmation, “aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, “yes, we’re going to Pasadena. To see your nana.” She smiled at Edith. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “It’s his first rail trip.”

  “Oh, he’s no bother at all.” Edith leaned forward, bringing her face level with his. “And what’s your name?”

  He looked away, rocking on the balls of his feet, his shoulders swaying back and forth. “Go ahead,” his mother said. “Tell her your name.”

  Still swaying, a look for his mother, then the quick proud glance at Edith: “Jimmie.”

  “Jimmie?” she repeated, taken by surprise, and for an instant she was back out on the island, the day wrapped round her like an unwashed sheet and Jimmie crouching there before her with his warm wet mouth sucking at the flesh of her inner thigh as if he were trying to extract juice from an orange . . .

  “Would you like one?” the woman was saying. “I’ve got a whole basket here. I’m taking them down to my mother. Go ahead, have one.”

  It was then, just as she took the orange from the woman’s hand, that the door swung open for the hundredth time that afternoon. Almost casually, as if she’d known all along how events would unfold, she glanced up into the faces of her stepfather and the stranger in the high-crowned hat beside him, who, as it turned out, wore the six-pointed star just above his shirt pocket for a very good reason. She didn’t start, didn’t protest, just handed the orange back to the woman, took up her suitcase and walked quietly to the door.

  The Stove

  And so she was on a boat again, but it wasn’t a steamer and it wasn’t the Santa Rosa and it wasn’t bound for San Francisco. If there was a cruel irony in all this, she couldn’t begin to fathom it. She sat stiffly, staring straight ahead, her back pressed to the wall and her feet planted firmly on the floor of the cabin that stank of tobacco, bacon grease, fish leavings and sweat, men’s sweat, in the very seat her mother had occupied, and she might have been her mother’s ghost, dead and disembodied, caught between one world and the next. The men were above, in the wheelhouse, drinking whiskey, their eyes tense with excitement. “We’re going home,” her stepfather had crowed, slapping Adolph on the back as they hauled their provisions aboard, and Adolph, a sack of pinto beans suspended between him and Charlie Curner on the deck below, had given him his tight immutable smile in return. Charlie Curner grinned. It was a good day, with a fair breeze, and he was getting paid.

  For her part, s
he refused to look anyone in the eye, refused even to lift her head, and she didn’t bother with a parasol or her stays or anything else, staring first at the planks of the pier, then the deck and the steps going down to the cabin, and she wouldn’t speak to anyone even if she was addressed directly—if they were going to make her a prisoner, she would act like one. She was mute and she might as well have been deaf too. The boat lurched. There were the waves, the gulls, the mainland that sank behind her like a stone.

  It was mid-January, somewhere thereabout, anyway. She wasn’t even sure of the date, but what did it matter? The only thing she was sure of was that her will meant nothing, that she was captive, body and soul, no better than an animal in a cage. The man with the badge had searched her and handed over her money—and the ticket, the useless ticket—to her stepfather, who forbade her to leave the house till they were safely aboard the Evangeline, and he’d gone with the sheriff to the offices of the stagecoach, the steamship line and the railway to make sure of his prohibition.

  “It isn’t fair,” she said. “You have no right.”

  “Your place is with your father.”

  “You’re not my father.”

  “I am. And you’re a willful, ungrateful child, and if you don’t come to your senses I swear I’ll take off this belt and strap you till you do.”

  “Never! I won’t do it. I won’t go.”

  And suddenly the belt was in his hand, jerked through the loops with a snapping ominous hiss, and she turned and bolted across the room and up the stairs and into her bedroom before he could grab hold of her. She heard his heavy tread on the stairs and locked the door, but he put his shoulder to it and the door flew open and he stalked into the room, his eyes as cold as any murderer’s, the belt snaking from one clenched fist. “Will you listen? Will you listen now?”

  She was on the bed, clutching at her pillow. Her mother was dead and there was to be no quarter between them, she saw that now. “Yes,” she said.

  “What was that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

  She didn’t venture out of her room for the next two days and she didn’t care whether she starved or not. She heard them below, going about their business. The sun striped the wall behind her, faded, came back in the morning and faded again. At dinner on the second day, there was a knock at her door and Ida was there, a tray in her hand and the aroma of tomato and barley soup running on ahead of her. Her face was unreadable, as if she’d paused to slip on a mask in the hallway, and whose side was she on in this? What had he told her? Had he sent her? “Here,” Ida said, setting the tray down on the night table, “you just take a taste of this now.”

  But she wouldn’t, though she hadn’t eaten in nearly three days, not since the morning of her aborted flight. Her stomach rumbled. She swallowed involuntarily.

  “Sure you’re going to have to eat something if you intend to remain amongst the living.”

  “I don’t. I just want to die. I want to be with my mother.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “I hate him,” she said. “I hate him with all my heart.”

  Ida was standing there in the middle of the room, the light from the hallway spilling her shadow across the floor till it reached the foot of the bed and climbed up the wall beside it. She didn’t say anything in response, but after a moment she went to the lamp on the table by the window and lighted it.

  “He killed my mother. And now he wants to kill me too.”

  If she expected Ida to contradict her, she was mistaken. Instead, Ida came round the bed and eased herself down beside her. “Edith,” she murmured, the lamplight feathering her hair and settling in her features so that she took on its glow. “Here,” she said, “put your hand here,” and she took hold of Edith’s hand and laid it palm down on her stomach. The room was very still. Edith could feel the warmth there beneath the fabric of her dress and her stays and underthings, Ida’s flesh, the beat of her heart: it was the most intimate thing that had ever happened between them. “Do you feel that?”

  She was confused. Ida’s face was right there, inches from her own. She could smell the powder she wore, count the minute divisions of her lashes. “What do you mean? Feel what?”

  “I’m going to have a baby.”

  “A baby?” She was joking, she had to be—she wasn’t even married. “But how, how can that be?”

  Ida only shook her head, very slowly, side to side. She began to say something, then caught herself. “I’ll be going back north, to my mother,” she said finally, and she dropped her eyes.

  And why was she thinking in that moment of herself, only herself? Because she was going down in a darkening swirl of wind-beaten waves and clutching at anything to pull herself back up and out, because she was a girl still whose only experience of the world was a stolen kiss with a boy from St. Basil’s by the name of Thomas R. Landon and the feel of Jimmie’s lips on her thigh and the way it made her blood rush, but Jimmie was nothing and she was nothing too. Ida was going to have a baby. There was a male organ, that was how it started—she knew that, everyone did, the girls whispering in the dark after lights out, one lewd thing paraded after another—but nothing could happen without the sacrament of marriage, no babies, that is . . . but then she herself had been an orphan and how had that come about? Had her parents died? Or had her mother, her true mother, been someone like Ida, who just somehow happened to have a baby in a time like this when everything was confusion and all the world had a dark shade thrown over it?

  “You’ll be coming back,” she said, and she was breathing hard now, as if she’d been running uphill, “after, that is, once the baby . . . and the father, the baby’s father . . .”

  But Ida kept on shaking her head. In a whisper so soft she had to strain to hear: “The baby’s father doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want the baby.”

  Then the bed rocked beneath her and Ida was on her feet, her shoulders hunched and her hair looping free of the bun at the back of her head. Then she was framed in the doorway and then the door pulled shut and Edith refused to think of the nights on the island or in this very house—this house, this one—when there were noises in the dark, the faintest watery sigh and suck of movement in the rippling depths, as if the dolphins were at play beneath the moonlit waves. She thought of herself, of herself only. And when the door had closed, she picked up the spoon and began to eat.

  * * *

  She came up on deck when the anchor dropped in the harbor, feeling as if she’d been singled out and sentenced for some crime as yet unnamed. The sky was overcast, the island a dun fortress hammered out of the waves. Wind drove at her on a stinging whiplash of spray, and even then, even in the first moments of her sentence that could stretch on for months or years even, it carried the stink of sheep to her and the distant racketing of the seals and sea elephants. Nothing had changed. Miss Everton’s Seminary had never existed, nor her mother, nor San Francisco, nor the rented rooms or the house in Santa Barbara. This was all there was, world eternal, the quality of mercy is not strained, but it is, it is.

  Jimmie there on the beach with his leering eyes and the mule perched like a statue behind him. Harsh words from her stepfather, commands, and no, she wouldn’t be riding the sled up the hill, she would be walking—and carrying her own load too. Then there was the house, the paint all but gone, the smell of it, cold grease, colder ash, five p.m. and almost dark and her stepfather taking her by the arm and thrusting her into the kitchen. “There’s the food,” he said. “There’s the stove.”

  Jimmie

  She stood just inside the door, slumped against the wall. The cold was in her feet, in her bones. She could hear her stepfather pounding through the house in a rage, cursing the one-armed man and his wife for the state of the place, everything in disarray, every step he took and corner he turned a fresh outrage and an affront and a keen winnowing disappointment that
set him off all over again. He shouted at Jimmie and Adolph. Gutter language. Goddamn and Jesus Christ. Fuck this, fuck that. They ran the mule up and down the road that had washed out so many times it was just a glorified gulley now and they crashed through the door at regular intervals to dump the foodstuffs on the kitchen floor in a heap of crates, sacks, cans and bottles. The house boomed and echoed. The gutters rattled in the wind.

  For a long while she merely stood there, sunk in despair. The place reeked like a garbage dump—it was a garbage dump, trash heaped to the windows and every stained and cracked cup, plate, saucer and bowl crammed into the washbasin in a cold puddle of swimming grease and putrid water, in the center of which the corpses of two drowned mice floated with their naked feet clenched on nothing. It was disgusting. Degrading. She wanted to sit, wanted to use the toilet, but her body was paralyzed and her mind had shut down, the past colliding with the present till she hardly knew where she was. Still, when the light faded out of the windows she found herself crossing the room to light the lantern and clear a space for it on the table. And then she went down on her knees and tried to light the stove too, if only to take the chill off, but the flue must have been stuck or the pipe stopped up because every time she touched a match to the crumpled paper and sticks of kindling, it wouldn’t draw.

  Her arm—her left arm, just above the elbow—gave a sudden sharp stab of pain where her stepfather had taken hold of her to shove her through the door in his impatience, this hulking bellicose red-faced man who was the only father she’d ever known and who’d been wounded in the war and never let anyone forget about it. Captain. That was what people called him. Not Mister, but Captain. And he expected her to call him father, yet he wasn’t acting like a father but a coward and a bully and all she could think was that if she had a gun she would press it to her temple and shoot herself right there on the spot—or no, shoot him, shoot Jimmie and Adolph too, and then all the sheep, every last stupid staring one of them. “Cook,” he’d demanded. “But I don’t know how,” she’d protested, talking now, talking finally, if only to get the words out no matter how deaf the world around her might be. “Then learn by doing,” he said.