by Boyle, T. C.
But Jimmie, Jimmie was her plaything. He was no ram, he was only Jimmie—Jimmie with a whole new set of needs and weaknesses—and she’d been fooling herself to think their relationship had changed. He did whatever she said. Did it gladly, beseechingly, abjectly, no humiliation he wouldn’t endure for her sake. As the weeks fell away she became expert in manipulating him till the white fluid came spurting out of him and very gradually she allowed him favors too, though she would expose only one part of herself at a time and never removed her dress or underthings no matter how furiously he stroked or how deeply he kissed her or how much he begged. She was curious. Of course she was. And he satisfied her curiosity—and more: the touch of him made her blood race, though she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself—but this wasn’t a pact and it wasn’t reciprocal and she was the mistress, always, and he was the slave.
Mrs. Caliban
At the end of July, on a fine high clear day that brought the mainland so close it was as if the channel were a tranquil little pond you could swim across in fifteen minutes, she found herself on Charlie Curner’s schooner once again. Her stepfather was taking her to Santa Barbara for three days. On business. She was to stay at a boardinghouse for women presided over by someone called Mrs. Amelia Cawthorne and she was not to leave the house for any reason except under her stepfather’s or Mrs. Cawthorne’s supervision. That was the promise she’d made, and what choice did she have?—it was either promise and go or refuse and be left behind. I want your solemn oath, he’d said, and she’d given it, gladly, humbly, with shining eyes and a smile of fawning gratitude. She’d all but curtsied—and would have, would have done anything—except that it might have aroused his suspicions, and she didn’t want that. The fact was that in the past three months her stepfather had been twice to the mainland without her—he’d taken Jimmie the second time, as if to rub salt in her wounds, and she’d been left alone with Adolph and the sheep and a misery so deep and all-abiding she couldn’t get out of bed the whole time and if Adolph complained to her stepfather because he’d missed his three square meals a day she never knew of it. Or cared. So she made a promise, swore it to his face, On my soul, on the Bible, as God is my witness, a promise she had every intention of breaking the moment she was clear.
Mrs. Cawthorne was a large woman, a matron sunk in fat whose husband, a boatwright, had been lost at sea in one of his own creations twenty years past. She had pinched narrow eyes—squinting, always squinting—and a way of claiming all the space in any room she happened to be occupying. The other boarders—there were three—were spinsters in various stages of decrepitude. Her stepfather paid in advance and informed the landlady that he’d be back in the morning to fetch his daughter and take her with him on the rounds of his errands. In the meanwhile—and here he’d given her a significant look before turning back to Mrs. Cawthorne, who stood there in the center of the parlor working one swollen hand in the grip of the other—she was exhausted from the journey and would no doubt want to go up to her room directly after dinner. The landlady had squinted at her, giving her a long look of appraisal. One of the spinsters, ancient, with claws for hands, who’d been napping in an overstuffed armchair by the fire, came awake with a snort and glanced up sharply. Her stepfather said, “Isn’t that right, Edith?” Stupefied—he wasn’t even going to let her look in the shop windows or take her to dinner or his hotel or anyplace at all?—she just nodded dumbly.
In the night she awoke in the dark to a whole symphony of strange noises, of water shifting through the pipes and the house creaking and groaning as the hours chipped away at it, the barking of the neighbor’s dog, a soft hiss from beyond the windows as if a giant were sweeping the streets with a broom made from an upended tree. Her stepfather had given her a single dollar in spending money, as if to say, Let’s see how far you can get on that, but what he didn’t know about, what no one knew about, not even Ida, who’d handed her the envelope, was the bracelet her mother had left her. She had it with her now, wrapped in tissue paper and secreted in her purse. For a long moment she lay listening to the sounds of the house, then she rose from the bed and dressed in the dark.
The suitcase she would leave behind. She needed to be unencumbered, needed to get out, into the streets, and hide herself somewhere until the pawnshop opened, and then she would go there to give over her mother’s bracelet and take money in return. And then what? Then she would start walking—on the road out of town that ran up through San Marcos Pass to Cold Spring Tavern, where she would catch the stage north after it left Santa Barbara, and if anyone should come along the road in a wagon or buggy or on horseback, she would hide herself in the bushes till they passed. It would be a long walk—ten miles, fifteen?—and most of it uphill. But it was nothing to her—all she’d done on the island was walk.
The house was as dark as the inside of a closet, the windows shut tight and the shades drawn. She felt her way along the corridor and down the stairs, spots floating before her eyes in random patterns, straining to see and seeing nothing. There was a rustling, a moan, the faint whisper of one of the old women snoring in her bed behind an invisible door. Shuffling her feet, one step at a time, afraid of stumbling into a chair or table and giving herself away, she read the wainscoting with her fingertips like one of the blind. She bumped into something—wood, cloth there, the coat tree?—and then finally she was at the door. She felt for the doorknob, gripped it, twisted it, but the door wouldn’t open. The latch, where was the latch? She ran her fingers over the smooth wooden plane, feeling for the latch, but there was no latch, only a keyhole, and the keyhole was empty. She was trying to come to grips with that—had the landlady actually locked them all in? What if there was a fire? An earthquake? But there must have been a back door and that couldn’t be locked too, could it?—when there was a noise behind her and the room came to sudden life.
Mrs. Cawthorne, in her nightgown, her feet bare and her expression blank, was standing there at the edge of the carpet, a candle held aloft in a pewter dish. “What’s going on here? Who is it now?” she demanded.
She was a very fat woman, fat and lazy and old, and Edith felt a surge of contempt for her. She said nothing.
The light wavered as the landlady took a step closer, her eyes lost in the dark tumid contours of her face. “Is that the new boarder? Edith, is it?”
“Yes. I was looking for a glass of water. I was thirsty.”
For a long moment the landlady merely squinted at her, breathing heavily, a gasp and wheeze that scratched away at the silence of the sleeping house. Then she said, “There’s a glass and pitcher on the table in your room.” Another silence. “Right next to the lamp.”
* * *
During the course of the next three days, Edith’s stepfather took her out for a meal exactly once, at a cheap restaurant where men with snarled whiskers and bad teeth sat sucking at one thing or another and everything stank of sour milk and chili beans, and he took her to the shops exactly twice, to buy toilette things, cloth for a new dress to replace the ones that were so worn and stained they’d become an embarrassment, and, of course, to lay in supplies at the grocer’s—more sacks of beans, more rice, more flour. Each sack, as the clerk checked it off in his ledger and she stood there at the counter trying to keep from screaming, was a weight drawing her down, another link in the chain she had to drag behind her like Marley’s ghost, dead in life, dead on her feet, dead to the world.
She was up in her room, plotting frantically, when her stepfather came to take her back to the ship. She’d seen no one, seen nothing, and now she was to go back. It wasn’t fair. It was criminal. An insult. Hadn’t Lincoln freed the slaves? Wasn’t this America? For three days she’d watched for her opportunity, even measuring the distance from the second-story window to the nearest tree, but Mrs. Cawthorne was like a watchdog and her stepfather was worse—he was Argus of the hundred eyes, keen to her every movement. Mechanically, she paced from the dresser to the bed, packing he
r suitcase and listening to the voices rising from below.
“I want to thank you,” her father was saying, and then he paused and she imagined them nodding at each other in satisfaction, the prisoner in her hole and a job well done. “I appreciate your keeping an eye on her.”
And then Mrs. Cawthorne, her voice level and hard: “Yes, but I’m afraid I won’t be available to her next time round.”
“And why is that—you’re not thinking of closing down, are you?”
“No, it’s not that, not that at all. It’s just—well, a young girl needs a mother, and I’m sorry to say it. She doesn’t look after herself, that’s what I mean to say. Her clothes, her hair, her shoes, her corsets. She’s ragged. Not at all what I expect from a young lady.”
Her stepfather made some sort of meliorating comment—the island, the weather, rough conditions—but the landlady wouldn’t be swayed. “It’s to do with standards,” she said. “My boarders, I’ve got to think of my boarders. And my own reputation too.”
And that was it. She was condemned. Her stepfather called up the stairs to her—“Edith, will you put a hurry on, for God’s sake? We can’t keep Charlie waiting all day”—even as she stepped to the mirror, pushed her hair back and gave herself a good hard look. It was true. Her hair was dirty, her dress no better than a patchwork quilt. Her face had taken the sun till it looked as if it had been stained in a barrel. Her eyes stared out like a madwoman’s. She was like a savage, like Jimmie, like Caliban—or no, even worse, because she’d let him touch her as if he and she were the same, as if she were his wife, not Miranda, not even Sycorax, but worse, far worse, Mrs. Caliban herself.
The Shearers
The shearers came back in August and this time there was a new face amongst them. At first she didn’t notice—she glanced up one afternoon and there they were, outside the window, milling around in the yard with their bedrolls flung over their shoulders and that greedy craving look in their eyes, and all she could think of was the extra work they would cost her. Five of them—or no, six—and each one going through three pounds of meat, a stack of tortillas and half a gallon of wine every day, though the wine was to be watered and doled out a glass at a time till they sat down to dinner so as to prevent a general riot, and her stepfather was absolutely strict on that score. They wore straw hats—sombreros, they called them—that were as stiff as tin and finger-greased till they’d taken on a dull gray sheen, Mexican boots that cocked them up off their heels and stained bandannas knotted jauntily round their throats to lend them the only bit of color they seemed able to support. She recognized most of them at a glance, lean reticent stripped-back men in their thirties and forties who spoke a garble of Spanish, Italian, English and Portuguese and maybe Indian too, she couldn’t say—all she knew was that it wasn’t French and it wasn’t German and the thought made her ache all the more for the life that had been taken away from her.
Of course she recognized them—she ought to, since they’d worked her nearly to death when they’d come out at the end of February. There was Luis, in a pair of leather chaps, and next to him Rogelio, quietly spitting in the dirt, and who was that, the one with a concave face like the blade of a shovel? The Italian. They just called him El Italiano. And—but here she caught her breath—there was a new man amongst them, young, with a smooth unseamed face and a guitar strapped over his shoulder atop the bedroll. He was standing there with the others, taking everything in, the chickens, the barn, the bunkhouse and the pigpen and the hills dotted with sheep that must have been replicas of the sheep-dotted hills on all the other islands, nothing new under the sun, and what was he doing here with these old men? Was he somebody’s son? Rogelio’s maybe? Luis’? That was when he suddenly glanced up at the house, at the window behind which she was standing, and they locked eyes till she was the one to turn away.
That night, when she served at table, he sat up rigidly the minute she came into the room, as if her mere presence had turned some switch in him. The other shearers broke off their conversation and stared down at their plates out of respect, but he fixed on her every movement. Her stepfather was addressing Adolph and Jimmie as usual and he was saying the usual things about the flock and the weather and the turpentine they would dip the sheep’s noses in and the whale he’d seen off Prince Island just that afternoon, raising his voice to let the sense of it drift down the table to include the shearers in the conversation. He was feeling convivial, the prospect of another crop of wool before him, and while the shearers—and Jimmie—raised glasses of watered wine to their lips, his own tin cup was filled with whiskey. As was Adolph’s, judging from the dazed look on his face.
She set out the two big pewter platters of roast lamb, one at each end of the table, then went out to the kitchen for the pot of beans, the tortillas and the hot sauce Jimmie had helped her concoct from chopped tomatoes, rendered grease and the dried habanero peppers the shearers had brought with them. She was flipping tortillas on the stovetop when the door to the kitchen pushed open and the new man stepped into the room as if he’d lived there all his life. His name was Rafael, he was twenty-six years old and he was a Spaniard (not a Mexican, he’d insisted during the brief introduction she’d had to him out on the porch before dinner), with glass-green eyes and long black hair he slicked back with a scented pomade she could smell all the way across the room.
“I am thinking if I am able to assist,” he said, and he was the first man—with the exception of Jimmie and Jimmie didn’t count—ever to offer to help. On a ranch, men worked in the dirt and women in the kitchen, their paths never to cross. On a ranch, there were no gentlemen or ladies—there was just life lived at the level of dressed-up apes tumbled down from the trees. If you wanted to talk of poetry or drama or music or have a man open a door for you or get up when you entered a room, then you’d better die and come back in a new life.
She was stunned. She didn’t know what to say, but he’d found a pair of dish towels to cushion the handles of the cast-iron pot of beans and was already lifting it from the stove, and then he was gone, backing out the door and down the hall to a chorus of jeers from the others. Mujer, someone shouted. Pícaro! cried another. A moment later she flipped the last of the tortillas onto a platter, took up the tureen of hot sauce and followed him down the hall, but instead of putting the platter in front of her stepfather or even in the center of the table, she set it down beside Rafael, as a sign of favor. “Oh-ho,” Luis crowed, “you see?” and everyone laughed, but for Jimmie, who set his mouth and lashed his eyes at her.
Did she care? No, not in the least. Jimmie had had his chance.
For months now she’d pleaded with him to help her engineer an escape from the island and he’d made vague promises about contacting this fisherman or the other when they anchored in the harbor, but nothing had come of it. The first time she’d mentioned it to him—while they were alone, in their secret spot, after she’d let him kiss her lips and suck endlessly at one bared nipple like the oversized infant he was—he gave her a long look she couldn’t quite dissect, at least not at first. “Please?” she’d whispered, and she’d moved her hand to his groin, to stroke him there through the fly of his trousers. “Pretty please?”
“The Captain wouldn’t like it,” he said after a moment.
“No,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t. But do it for my sake. Please?”
He looked away, though he’d begun to move his hips to the rhythm of her hand. “I could maybe . . . but then, what about me? I’d be here all alone without you. I’d miss you something terrible, because, well, I’ve only said it a thousand times, I love you. You know that.”
There was nothing to say to this. She wasn’t about to exchange vows with him, not if she had to stay there on the island for the next three centuries. She stopped her friction until he laid his hand atop hers and began to guide her. “Will you talk to the fishermen?” she said after a moment.
“What
fishermen?”
“Any fishermen.”
“The Captain won’t like it.”
“No,” she said, staring into his eyes and working her hand deeper, “no, he won’t.”
Since then she’d seen any number of sails in the harbor or farther out at sea, ships riding north, fishing boats, sealers, the private yachts of people from San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara who sailed from island to island for the pleasure of it because they had the means and the occasion to go wherever they wanted whenever the whim took them. But not her. No. And every time she mentioned it to Jimmie he gave her that look she had no trouble reading now, a look of greed and fear and self-serving obstinacy—he didn’t want her to go any more than her stepfather did. What did she do? She cut him. Cut him dead. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t touch him—wouldn’t let him touch her—and if he spoke to her she ignored him, and yet still he never gave in. Oh, he pleaded with her and made up all sorts of stories about how he’d hailed a boat but it was full of Chinamen or maybe they were Japanese and she wouldn’t want to go with them, would she? or how he’d just about talked Bob Ord into it, but then Bob’s boat had run aground on a shoal off Anacapa and he’d had to have it towed into Oxnard for repairs and never did come back, but it was just more of the same and all worth nothing. He’d had his chance and he’d failed the test. Now she looked where she could and when Rafael had strolled through the kitchen door nice as you please, she saw the way.