San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  She heard his scream and then the barrage of curses that followed it, and she was out the door of the schoolhouse and running, knowing it was bad—he was howling now, howling like an animal—and when she got there she saw him clutching the mutilated hand to the shirt that was dyed red from his chest to his belt. She saw the chopping block and the way it had gone red too. And she saw the detached fingers, two of them, lying there curled and useless beside the slick blade of the flung-down hatchet.

  The Spider

  This time he was gone a month, a full month, even longer than when he’d had his operation all those years ago. Infection had set in and they’d had to dose him with sulfa, to which he’d had a bad reaction. Like the last time, the drug had affected his eyes—and, as she learned from the medical encyclopedia, there was the risk of other side effects too, including depression, anemia and various skin disorders—but there really was no choice. Penicillin was then in its infancy and it would be two years yet before streptomycin came into use, so it was either sulfa or risk losing the hand to gangrene or even dying of septicemia. The fingers—the middle and index fingers of his left hand—were lost. By the time he arrived at the hospital, blanched from loss of blood, they were nothing more than an afterthought.

  She didn’t know any of that in the moment. All she knew was that he was hurt, hurt desperately, and the shock of it flared up and burned through her. She was on him in an instant, fighting for his hand, thinking only to pull it away from him and stop the bleeding, to heal him and put everything back the way it was. He wouldn’t have it. He lurched away from her, protecting the hand, stamping and crying out and fending her off with his hips and shoulders. “Stop it! Stop it right this instant!” she commanded, and then she dropped her voice the way she did with Marianne or Betsy when they fell and bumped their heads or took a splinter from the porch in their bare pattering feet: “Let me see, Herbie, let me see. I won’t hurt you.”

  She grabbed hold of him and spun him round, surprised at her own strength, and then she tore at his shirt till she had a strip of cotton cloth to wind round his arm just above the elbow. She cinched it tight, then thought to bend to the chopping block and scoop up the dying fingers before heaving her full weight into him and pushing him toward the house, and if that was strange, his fingers clenched in her hand like meat on the bone, she put it out of her mind because her mind was racing and she could think only of getting him inside so she could stop the bleeding. She kept pushing, thumping at him as if she were kneading bread—he was in shock, that was what it was—and he staggered forward and then they were on the porch and through the door, where she sat him down in a chair and bound up the wound as best she could with a bandage cut from one of the bath towels. “Keep it elevated,” she admonished, “over your head. Your head, Herbie, do you hear me?” Then she went to radio for help.

  The day was thick, visibility poor, not at all the sort of conditions a pilot would welcome, but the Navy scrambled a plane and the plane was touching down in the sheepcote within the hour. But what an hour it was. If she ever missed ice, it was then. As it was, she wrapped the stiffening fingers in gauze and stuffed them into the pocket of the jacket she helped him work first over his good arm and then up over the bad one, though she knew there was no way to reattach them. The girls, their faces as bloodless as his, insisted on being there with him. She kept trying to reassure them even as she fed him aspirin and whiskey, pouring out one shot after another till his head lolled back and his eyes began to flutter. By the time the pilot arrived, he was groggy, but he was able to walk out to the field and climb into the cockpit unassisted—and then, as the door pulled shut and she and the girls and the dog stood huddled there in a scene Goya might have rendered in ink, he raised his right hand in a thumbs-up, the propeller snatched at the air, the wings shuddered and the plane slammed across the field and vanished into the gray curtain of fog.

  He came back a different person. There was no other way to put it. She told herself he’d come around, that it would take time, but he seemed wooden, stripped of emotion, as if he’d never been Herbie at all, as if they’d put somebody else inside of him in some macabre experiment. There had been letters—first from Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara and then the Veterans’ Hospital in Los Angeles, where they’d taken him to recuperate—but the letters were nothing more than notes, really, distracted and disjointed (I hope you are fine, the children too; The nights are dark here; Jell-O, they feed me Jell-O). He never said he missed her, never asked how she was getting along without him, never mentioned the ranch at all. Still, it wasn’t till he stepped off the plane that she saw what a toll the whole business had taken on him.

  The children rushed for him, but he didn’t swing them in the air the way he normally did, just stood there passively and let them cling to his legs, while the dog, careening toward him in a frenzy of rapturous barking, might have been somebody else’s dog for all the response he showed. He spread open his arms for her and she fell into them but it was wrong, all wrong, and she could feel the alien thing in him beating like an irregular pulse. He was thin. They’d cut his hair too short, she saw that right away. And while she’d expected him to be pale, the bleached-white cotton shirt only made him look paler, as if his skin had been bleached and pressed too. The oddest thing—the thing her eyes jumped to—was the black leather glove on his left hand. He didn’t mention it, didn’t say a word about it, but he wouldn’t take it off, not to eat dinner or even to change his clothes for bed. “I’m mutilated,” he said finally, sitting slumped in the chair in the corner of the bedroom, one sock in his hand, the other still on his foot. “That’s all there is to it.” They went to bed that night like strangers.

  The next few days were an agony. He claimed he couldn’t see what he was eating—“Dark spots, that’s all I see, dark floating spots”—and kept wandering from room to room in constant search of one thing or another, a nail file, his pipe, the tobacco. “Elise,” he kept calling, “where the hell’s the tobacco? Elise, where’re my slippers? Elise?” He ignored the sailors completely. They would address him at the table or out in the yard and it was as if he didn’t hear them. He showed no interest in the radio programs he used to adore and spent hours staring into the fire. If she asked what was wrong, he said, “Nothing.” When she commiserated over the problems he was having with his eyes, trying to get at the source of it, find a solution, assuage him, cheer him—“What about glasses? Couldn’t you get glasses?”—he cut her off. “It’s not correctable. It’s degenerative. My eyes are shot, Elise. Shot.”

  It wasn’t until the end of the first week he was back that he went out to the barn to have a look at the new horse—Hans, a black three-year-old gelding Bob Brooks had sent out on the Vaquero—and when he did he was out there so long she went looking for him, afraid suddenly, though of what she couldn’t say. The barn door stood open. The muted light of late afternoon made inroads into the shadows of the interior so that she could make out the sharp ribs of the rafters and the soft hummocks of the baled hay they had to ship in for the horses. The smell was dull, grassy, as if all the fields she’d ever known had been enclosed and concentrated here beneath the sloping wood-shingled roof. It was very still. She found him in the back stall, brushing Hans and talking quietly to him. She almost backed away to tiptoe out of the barn and leave him to himself, but it was getting late and she’d have to put dinner on the table soon, so she called his name softly, barely breathing it. At first there was no reaction and she was afraid he hadn’t heard her, but then he turned to her, his good hand working over the horse’s flank as if he were smoothing a blanket, and gave her a trace of his old smile. “Fine animal,” he said.

  The next morning he saddled up Hans and went out riding. He didn’t come back for lunch and that started up the anxiety in her again, but she told herself it was the best thing for him, just to get out and see over the island and let it come home to him. It was nearly dark when he got back. She’d held d
inner for him—his favorite, spaghetti with meatballs fashioned of ground lamb and bread crumbs, with beaten egg to bind them and a good splash of Worcestershire and a sprinkle of dried red pepper for bite—and he came into the kitchen with his head thrown back, making a show of sniffing the aroma. “Just what I want,” he sang out. “No more Jell-O for me, eh?” And he came to her and hugged her and she felt the burden lift ever so perceptibly.

  They danced in place for a long moment, Herbie crooning a snatch of a song from the radio in a low moan, his breath hot on her ear. “‘So much at stake, and then I wake up,’” he sang. “‘It shouldn’t happen to a dream.’” She could feel him pressing into her, down below, where he was hard. She swiveled round in his arms, the relief flooding her in a quick erotic jolt. “You had a good ride?”

  “The best, the very best. What a piece of horseflesh that Hans is. He—but we’re not missing old Buck now, are we?” And then he pulled her close and kissed her for the first time since he’d stepped off the plane.

  The mood carried him through dinner. He joked with the girls, crowed at the sailor boys (“I didn’t see a single Nip out there today—you must have scared them all away”), insisted on pouring out half a water glass of whiskey for each of the adults and even proposed a toast. “To San Miguel, fortress of the Pacific!” But then, just when she thought he’d finally shaken off his anomie or the blues or the effects of the drug or whatever it was, he raised his gloved hand and said, “How about a little striptease? You know what a striptease is, girls? No? Well, watch this.”

  He worked the glove off by measures, playing to his audience, and then at the last moment tore it off with a flourish and laid the damaged hand on the tablecloth. It was a shock, something the girls didn’t need to see, or not in that way, not as if he were rubbing their noses in it. The two fingers were gone almost to the knuckle and the skin there—the stump—was burnished and red as if the flesh had been scalded. “Look, girls,” he said, splaying his good hand out beside it and then curling the fingers under, “eight of them. And how many legs does a spider have? You know, Marianne?”

  Marianne looked as if she were about to cry.

  “Come on, you know.”

  In a very small voice: “Six?”

  “No,” he said, “not six. Eight. Look”—and he bunched the fingers and moved both hands forward so they crept across the tablecloth—“I’m a spider now. Do you like spiders?”

  “That’s enough, Herbie,” she heard herself say. Both girls had gone pale. The sailors shifted their eyes.

  “I’m a spider,” he repeated. “But I don’t guess I’ll be spinning any webs soon, do you?”

  * * *

  The shearers appeared a week later and Bob Brooks and Jimmie with them. The Navy had opened up the channel to commercial boats after the initial scare—they had no choice if the wartime economy was to go on—and the Vaquero had been given permission to go about its business. She and Herbie had always looked forward to shearing, despite the tumult and the burden of extra work. It brought society to their little corner of the world twice a year, at least for a week or so, and it not only marked time in the way of the seasons and the great global shifting of the tides and the orbit of the moon round the earth and the earth round the sun, but reaffirmed their purpose—it was necessary, profitable, undeniable. This was what they were here for, to earn a living for themselves and for Bob Brooks and Jimmie and the shearers too. And if she looked forward to it more than ever this time, almost as if it were a holiday, she told herself it was for Herbie’s sake, but that wasn’t the whole truth of it. The truth was that she needed help, desperately.

  At first, Herbie threw himself into the work in his onrushing manic way, shouting and jeering and joking, delighted with himself and with his old friends, flying so high she thought he’d never come down. But as the week wore on, she could feel the enthusiasm leaching out of him, the poles of his temper drifting toward equipoise and then tipping off-balance again, sinking, sinking. He complained of the dust—“I can’t see the hand in front of my face out there,” he said, and then let out a bitter truncated laugh. “But I guess it’s not really a hand, anyway, is it?” And then he found he couldn’t grip the lambs properly, not with one hand inoperable. And he was exhausted, worn, out of shape. She watched him sink down beside Bob Brooks at the long plank table she’d set up in the courtyard to accommodate everybody at lunch. “I’m just no good, Bob,” he said. “I guess you can’t expect to lie up in a hospital for a month and then go out and wrestle sheep, can you?” By the fourth day he was merely looking on. On the fifth, he mounted Hans and went off into the hills, turning his back on them all.

  Bob Brooks took her aside that night after dinner. Herbie hadn’t been there to preside over the table and everyone had tried to keep up the pretense that everything was all right, but the raucous ongoing fiesta atmosphere of the first few nights had settled into an ordeal of silences and polite requests for the salt or the hot sauce, and as soon as the plates were cleared the four shearers and Jimmie disappeared into their room and the sailors—displaced temporarily—into the tent they’d set up in the far corner of the courtyard.

  Brooks came to her in the living room where she was listening to the radio sotto voce after having put the girls to bed. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  “No, please,” she said, indicating the chair nearest the fire, Herbie’s chair.

  He sat heavily—he was exhausted too—and the dog came up to him and put his head in his lap. “I just wanted to know if everything’s all right,” he said after a moment.

  She looked up. “You mean Herbie?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s still recovering, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “He told me he had to go patrol for Japs,” Brooks said.

  “Yes, he does a lot of that. He takes it very seriously.”

  “But isn’t that what the sailors are here for? Especially at a time like this, when we need every man we’ve got—”

  “He doesn’t trust them. They’re just boys, he says.”

  “Yeah, well, we were just boys too when they sent us marching through France and we came out all right. Can’t he let it go?”

  “You know Herbie.” She waited for an affirmation, but he didn’t say anything. He was stroking Pomo’s ears, rubbing them between his forefingers as if he were assaying a grade of fine fabric. She wanted to open up to him, to tell him how strange Herbie had become, how worried she was, how she couldn’t sleep thinking about it, how every day seemed to close like a fist on any hope she had, but she drew back. He was the boss here and as sympathetic as he was, he still expected a return on his investment, expected everything to be in order—he wasn’t running a nursing home, but a ranch, a working ranch. He was the boss and to say anything more would have been a betrayal. “It was the accident,” she said. “The drugs they gave him. And this business of the war has him on tenterhooks”—she gave a laugh—“all of us, really. Who wouldn’t be? But he’s getting better by the day. And Hans, Hans has been a godsend.” She drew in a breath and lifted her eyes to his. “It’s just a matter of time and he’ll be back to his old self, believe me.”

  “You can’t keep old Herbie down.”

  “No,” she said, “no, you can’t.”

  The smile he gave her was odd, barely there, as if he hadn’t meant to smile at all. “You know,” he said, bent forward still, still stroking the dog’s ears, “I was thinking maybe when we come out in June for the wool, you might like to have Jimmie stay on for a bit. What do you think?”

  * * *

  And then, very gradually, things began to settle. If Herbie still wasn’t his old self, his moods altering so quickly she never knew whether to expect a joke and a kiss or a long impacted stare, at least he’d come awake. There was a ranch to run, and the necessity of it, of seeing to the accumulation of details the whole ente
rprise depended on, from tinkering with the generator and the windmill to providing meat for the pot and looking after the horses and the far-flung water sources for the sheep, seemed to speak to him in a way she wasn’t able to. He was up before dawn each morning, pounding the floorboards in his hobnailed boots, the stove lit, the coffee brewing and the kitchen swept by the time she joined him for breakfast. Then he went out on morning patrol, careful to be back by noon for lunch, and when he returned, the panniers he’d made for Hans were heavy with the wood he’d collected along the way. In the afternoon, he’d see to the house, moving from one project to another. It was his idea to build a lookout on the highest peak of the roof so the sailor boys could have a vantage over this part of the island and he made sure they were manning it (or boying it, as he said just to needle them) throughout the daylight hours. In the evening, he took Hans out and patrolled again, and when he came back he sat with the girls in the living room while they read aloud to him from their storybooks. Then it was the radio, then bed.