San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  One morning (the honeymoon over now and Herbie out in the yard with Jimmie working at one thing and another the minute breakfast was cleared away) she was in the kitchen, rolling out the dough for an experimental cobbler to be made from canned peaches in heavy syrup, when Herbie burst through the door. “You mun see this,” he said, his voice spiraling up and away in his excitement.

  “Mun? Have you been reading Burns again?”

  “Aye. ‘To a Mouse.’” And he began reciting: “‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin tim’rous beastie, / O what a panic’s in thy breastie!’ But I forget the rest. How do you say mouse in French, anyway?”

  “La souris.”

  “Right, of course.” And he repeated it: “La souris. Well, anyway, I’ve got les souris to show you, les enfants d’une mère qui est morte.”

  It was then that she noticed the bulge in his shirt, his hand cupped there, the buttons undone. In the next moment the hand emerged and there they were displayed against the hardened callus of his palm: three hairless pink things no bigger than bugs. They had tails, whiskers, pale curled feet. Mice. Les souris.

  “Tell me they’re not cute,” he said.

  “They’re not cute.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched, but he held his smile. “Unbeliever,” he shot back. “You might not think so, but I find them beautiful, perfectly made, everything wrought in miniature—just look at them. They’re babies, Elise, babies.”

  She shrugged as if to say there were more perfect objects of beauty in the world, then turned back to the board, the rolling pin and the dough. She wasn’t squeamish, wasn’t indifferent, but they were mice, only mice. “What do you plan to do with them?” she asked after a moment, but she already knew the answer.

  “Raise them, of course. I can’t just let them die. I was in the shed, where the taproom’s going to be, you know, moving things around, clearing some space, and I guess I didn’t see the mother till it was too late. So I’m the responsible party here.”

  “And then?” she asked. “When they’re grown? Are you going to train them to sit up and bark and wag their tails?”

  She was watching his face—more banter—but he didn’t laugh or even smile. He seemed to be considering. “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” he said. “But for now, where’s the eyedropper? And would you bring me one of those cans of evaporated milk—you don’t think it’ll be too rich for them, do you?”

  He put the mice in an old sock and left them beside the stove, for warmth, then ducked back out the door and into the fog that showed no sign of burning off. She went about her business, careful where she stepped as she moved around the kitchen, the cobbler taking shape and the soup she’d prepared for lunch boiling furiously on the stovetop. Three times that morning he came in to check on the mice, patiently holding the eyedropper to their snouts, though whether they took any of the milk or not, she couldn’t say. After lunch he and Jimmie went out across the yard to work on repairing the fences they would use to funnel the sheep into the pens for shearing, or so he explained, and by the time it began to get dark it seemed he’d forgotten all about the sock in the corner and what it contained. But he hadn’t. Even before he washed up or put on the kettle for tea, he was kneeling there beside the stove, eyedropper in hand. “They’re eating!” he cried. “Or this one is, anyway. They’re going to make it. I really think they’re going to make it.”

  But, of course, they didn’t make it. He was in bed, snoring, while she brushed her teeth over the sink in the kitchen, the lantern burning low and the dark pressing at the windows. She thought to check on them before she turned in, if only for Herbie’s sake, and they were alive still, warm to the touch. The cobbler had been a success, even if it had dried out in the oven she was still trying to get the hang of, and she took a moment to cover what was left of it with a plate before going to bed. In the morning, the mice were cold, already stiffened, miniature satchels of shriveled leather bound up in a dirty sock. And the cobbler, the plate tipped back ever so slightly, bore the tracks of their cousins outlined in flour. As did the counter and the floor and the wall over the sink too.

  Blue

  That he took it hard was a testament to him, to his kindheartedness, his compassion and gentleness and his ability to see value in the smallest things, that was what she told herself. And yet the way he’d reacted, the way his face had fallen and his voice caught in his throat when he discovered them there at breakfast, was so bewildering she didn’t know what to think. She watched him come through the door, light on his feet, whistling and singing out a good morning to her, then watched him bend down beside the stove, fussing there a moment before he lifted his head to give her a numb stare. “They’re dead,” he said.

  She was at the sink, pumping water for the kettle. She looked out the window into the yard, where the fog closed everything in. “I know,” she said. “I discovered them first thing this morning.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “The way you’ve been working, I thought I’d let you sleep.” The kettle hissed as she set it on the stovetop. “I thought you’d want to find them yourself.”

  He rose heavily to his feet, the sock pressed to him. His eyes were flat, without sheen, his face bleached of color.

  She said his name then, moved, puzzled, making a question of it—“Herbie?”—and she wasn’t frightened, not yet, because he must have been joking, must have been pulling her leg. He was putting on an act, that was what it was, clowning for her. But he didn’t say a word. Just shuffled across the kitchen, shouldered his way through the door and out into the yard, the sock cradled in his hands.

  She went after him, waiting for him to swing round on her with his electric smile and deliver the punch line to the joke, this joke, this routine, and hadn’t April Fools’ Day passed already? Because he couldn’t be serious. Couldn’t. He’d had no qualms about killing the cat—and, apparently, all the cats before it—and he kept talking about shooting one of the elephant seals, one of the big bulls, so he could preserve the skeleton intact and sell it to the natural history museum in Santa Barbara. Once he’d redeemed his gun collection, that is. And he was going to do that any day now, as soon as he could raise the cash . . .

  “Herbie!” she called, but he wouldn’t turn round. When she caught up to him he was emerging from the shed with a shovel in one hand, the sock in the other.

  “You’re burying them?” she asked, because she had to say something.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, pushing past her. “You go on back in the house.”

  For a long while she watched him out the window. He stood there motionless at the far corner of the kitchen garden, or what passed for a kitchen garden. It was just weeds now. When she’d asked Jimmie about it he told her the wind and the birds would ravage anything they put in the ground, except maybe potatoes—potatoes they couldn’t get to. She thought about that and about the seed packets—peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, bell peppers—she’d carefully picked out at the store back in Santa Barbara, which she was going to plant first chance she got no matter what Jimmie had to say, because weren’t they going to have to make their own way out here? Or at least try? Fresh vegetables. Where were they going to get fresh vegetables?

  Finally, Herbie laid the sock aside—gently, gently—and slipped the blade of the shovel into the ground. Two scoops of dirt, three: it was nothing. The sock disappeared in the hole, the dirt closed over it. But then he stayed there for the longest time, his lips moving as if he were talking to himself—or praying, maybe he was praying.

  The whole business was odd, surpassingly odd, the first rift between them, the first thin trembling hairline fracture in the solid armature of them, husband and wife, joined forever, but she didn’t know that yet. She merely watched him till she grew calm, grew bored, and turned back to her chores. It wasn’t till later, till she was making dinner and happened to
go out into the yard to throw the slops on the pile there that she noticed the wooden marker. He’d fashioned it in the shape of a cross and carved an inscription into it with his penknife. She had to bend close to make it out. Wee Ones, the crosspiece read, and on the vertical, R.I.P.

  * * *

  She tried to be breezy about it when they sat down to dinner, but it was as if he couldn’t hear her. Normally he’d be spilling over with stories and jokes and reminiscences, so carried away she sometimes had to remind him his food was getting cold. Not tonight. Tonight he just sat there over his plate, chewing and staring off into the distance. “I probably made too much,” she said, sitting across from him. “Thinking of Jimmie, I mean. But I suppose I can just add the meat to tomorrow night’s pot, what do you think?”

  Jimmie was off on the other end of the island on some urgent mission or other and so they were alone, a state of tranquility she’d been looking forward to ever since he’d come back. Not that she had anything against him. He was a companion for Herbie, inoffensive, even likable, a fount of information about everything from the peculiarities of the stove to the ailments of the horses and what the breeze portended vis-à-vis the next week’s weather, and he did seem to pitch in without complaint—it was just that she hadn’t had her fill of her husband yet. That first week. She wanted to relive it all over again. And again.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

  “I’m sorry about the mice. These things happen, though, don’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You did all you could. And that was nice, the way you put up a marker for them.”

  He shot her a glance. “Yeah,” he said.

  It went on like that through the next day and the day after that, even after Jimmie came back to provide the conversation round the dinner table, and at night, when they undressed for bed, she could feel him slipping away from her. On the third night, after he’d barely spoken a word to her all day, let alone touched her or shown the least sign of affection or even recognition for that matter, she couldn’t hold back any longer. “What is it?” she murmured, easing into bed beside him. “It’s not the mice still, is it?”

  The room was cold, the stovepipe yet awaiting repair. She was dressed in a flannel nightgown, the peignoir folded away in the drawer now, and he didn’t seem to notice the difference. She breathed out and saw her breath hanging there in a cloud.

  “No,” he said, “it’s not the mice. The mice just—I don’t know what it is. I feel all closed in.”

  She took his hand, afraid suddenly, trying to think in French, because he was speaking another language now. Closed in? How could that be? She’d never felt freer in her life. “Chéri,” she whispered, “je t’aime. Je t’aime beaucoup.”

  His eyes swept over her, then came back into focus. “I don’t know what it is. I get like this. It’ll pass. It always does.”

  “You’re blue,” she said. “You’re just blue, that’s all.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding now, lifting his chin and dropping it as if it weren’t a part of him at all, “I’m blue.”

  Bob Brooks

  The shearers came at the end of April and they were a force of nature all their own, a human storm of wants and confusion and noise out of all proportion to their numbers. There was a dog that barked all the time. The sheep paraded through the yard. There was dust everywhere. They were four and they stayed a week, only a week, because the flock was so reduced now (twelve hundred, Herbie said, a quarter what it once was), but the week seemed like a month. She stood over the stove, which never went cold, even for a minute. She pumped water till her right arm was made of iron. Chopped stovewood. Washed dishes.

  Herbie was outdoors all day long, sweating and swearing along with them, and she barely saw him till he collapsed in bed at night, but it was all right, she kept telling herself, it was only for a week, and this was the way Bob Brooks paid his bills—if it weren’t for the shearing she and Herbie wouldn’t be here at all. The wool piled up while she soaked beans and boiled rice and made lamb in every conceivable way she could think of. The shearers slept in the back bedrooms, at the far end of the house, and they ate like twenty men. At night they played cards, drank red wine from gallon jugs, sang in high hoarse voices to tunes that thumped along to a rattling singsong beat. One of them played guitar.

  And then, as suddenly as the storm arose, it died away and they were gone. The sheep were let back into the pasture but for the ones going to market, the wool was stuffed into sacks and the shearers turned in their tokens (twenty-five cents for each ram shorn, fifteen cents for each ewe), received their pay from the bankroll Bob Brooks had handed Herbie the day after the wedding and took the boat back to shore. And Jimmie went with them, for a holiday, his own pay thrust deep in one pocket and a grocery list as long as his arm in the other. Peace descended. And Herbie, riding high on the hard physical labor and the satisfaction of seeing it to a successful conclusion—his first time as overseer and all had gone well—was her old Herbie, the Herbie who saw the joy in every form and example of God’s creation and took her by the hand out over the hills to point it all out to her.

  The sex came back. Came roaring back. He was insatiable. And it wasn’t just in bed, but anywhere he found her, whether it was the living room or the kitchen or once even out on the porch. We’re not going to become nudists, are we? she protested, toying with him, and he grinned his grin and pointed out that they were all alone with the sun and the sand and the sheep and if the sheep had anything to say about it, besides baa, that is, he’d let her know. One afternoon, a week after Jimmie and the shearers had left, he announced he’d be out till dark and not to wait dinner for him, and she just nodded, telling herself they couldn’t expect to be together every minute of every day and that she had plenty to do, all sorts of things, letters to write, books to read, knitting, sewing, crocheting. She watched him go out the door, then she finished up in the kitchen and sat at the table there, writing a letter to her mother. Half an hour later she was in the living room, lost in one of her books, when she glanced up and there he was, framed in the doorway, his chest bare and his shorts barely containing him. Before she could say a word he pulled her up out of the chair and pinned her to the wall, his mouth hot on hers and his hands at her breasts. The surprise of it, the erotic jolt, shot through her. She touched her tongue to his, felt him, moved against him, her hips in slow rotation. They were like that, in an embrace, intimate, an intimate moment, when suddenly the outer gate flung open with a sharp raking clatter.

  “Someone’s here,” she said.

  “It’s the wind.”

  She could feel his heart pounding against hers, both of them flushed, listening now. An instant later the gate crashed back again and he said, “See, I told you. I’ve got to fix that latch, damn thing’s always blowing open,” and that was fine, that was all right, until they heard the first footfall on the porch.

  A moment later—and she’d instinctively pushed herself away from him, without thinking, really, because it wasn’t as if they’d been caught in flagrante delicto and what if they had, they were husband and wife, weren’t they, and in the sanctum of their own home out in the middle of nowhere?—Bob Brooks’ face appeared in the window.

  “Bob!” Herbie shouted, breaking away from her and rushing pell-mell for the door so that she was left there to smooth down her dress and watch the shift in Bob Brooks’ expression as he began to register just what he’d interrupted. An instant, that was all it was, and then he was grinning and holding two fifths of Canadian Club whiskey up to the window for her inspection, the real thing, in real bottles with the actual label and the seal still intact. What could she do but smile back at him and fold over the fingers of her right hand in a complicit little wave?

  * * *

  The day was nice, the sun high still and the breeze down, so they sat outside and had their highballs, whiskey and rainwater ou
t of the cisterns at either end of the house, the rainwater preferable to what came out of the ground because it didn’t carry the heavy mineral aftertaste. “It’s swell whiskey, Bob,” Herbie said, clinking glasses with him, then with her. “Aces. The best. Where’d you get it?”

  He was sprawled out on the ground, his elbows propped on the step behind him, his feet splayed in the dirt. His Army boots were worn smooth and his legs, tanned by the sun, showed the pale flecked topography of his scars, shrapnel there and shrapnel in his side and scattered up into the muscle of his rib cage too. She and Bob Brooks were on either side of him, sitting in the only two good chairs they possessed, glossy teak deck chairs salvaged from the wreck of the SS Harvard. That was one of the benefits of living on an island that projected out into the shipping lanes, she supposed: the furniture came to you. They had the safe from the SS Cuba too, which had gone aground here in 1923, and it was a permanent feature of the living room, as familiar to her now as her books and pictures and the sofa Herbie had fashioned from what appeared to be a coffin (empty, he assured her) that had washed up on shore one morning, though how anybody had ever got the safe up that hill, sled or no, was a mystery to her. It must have weighed five hundred pounds.

  Bob Brooks just shrugged—and he was every bit as good-looking as Herbie, with the same boyish face and a full head of hair, none of which had turned gray, even though he was the same age as Herbie—forty-two, that is, a time when the average man has begun to show his age. “I have my secrets,” he said.

  “You’re not turning to rum running now, are you?”

  “No, but whiskey running, now there’s an idea. I’ll take this any day”—and he held the glass up to the sun to inspect it—“over rum. All the rum in the world, for that matter.”