San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  The House

  Getting the boat to shore without overturning it in the surf was no small thing, but Adolph, grim as a soldier under fire and with the long muscles of his arms straining beneath the fabric of his jacket, managed it. For a long while they’d simply sat there, just outside the line of breakers, and she’d begun to grow impatient—and the girls had too—because here was the beach laid out before them and there the path up to the house, and what was he doing, this clod, this Adolph, when they were all so eager to set foot on terra firma and see what the house had to offer? Finally, though, she realized what it was—he was timing the surf, looking for an opening, the interval between a set of waves that would allow them to shoot in atop the previous one before the next came to smash them against the shore. She counted wave after wave, the seabirds screeching and the boat lurching beneath her, and then suddenly Adolph was at it, rowing furiously, the oarlocks protesting and the spray flying in their faces, and in the next moment they were ashore and leaping from the boat to tug at the painter and pull it high up the beach, and never mind their shoes or skirts or the way the wind beat the brims of their hats round their faces.

  To the girls, it was a lark, both of them wet to the knees and laughing in great wild hoots even as she herself managed to save her boots, skipping on ahead of the sheet of white foam that shot up behind her and fanned out over the beach as far as she could see, though the hem of her dress was dark with wet and sprinkled with the pale flecks of sand already clinging there. She was breathing hard from the exertion, but deeply, and without restraint. If she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t hemorrhaged just last month, she might have thought there was nothing wrong at all.

  The sand gave beneath her feet. Tiny creatures, translucent hopping things, sprang all around her. The smell was wonderful—sea wrack, salt spray, the newborn air—and it brought her back to her own girlhood in Massachusetts and the sultry summer days when her father would take the whole family to the shore. But it wasn’t sultry here. Far from it. The temperature must have been in the low fifties and the wind made it seem colder even than that. “Edith!” she cried out. “You’ll catch your death in those wet clothes,” and she couldn’t help herself, though she should have let it go.

  Edith wasn’t listening. Edith was fourteen years old, tall and handsome, as physically mature as a girl two or three years older, and she had a mind of her own. She deliberately went back into the surf under the pretext of unloading the bags from the rear of the boat when she could just as easily have started at the front, and she and Ida—who should have known better—were making a game of it, snatching up this parcel or that and darting up the beach to tumble everything in a random pile even as Adolph trudged through the sand, a bag under each arm and dragging two of the oak chairs behind him without a thought to the finish or the cushions she’d sewn for the seats. In the meantime, the steamer trunk she’d so carefully packed with her personal things—letters, stationery and envelopes, writing implements, her jewelry, the clothes she’d folded and tamped into place—was still in the boat, its leather surface shining with wet. She wanted to shout for him to fetch it before it was ruined, but she didn’t know how to command him, barely knew him, and the sour look he gave her didn’t help matters.

  Flustered—and cold, shivering—she glanced round her in irritation, wondering where the boy was with the mule and the sled to take them up to the house. And that was another thing: she couldn’t for the life of her imagine what sort of sled they were talking about. The sleds she knew were for coasting down snowy hillsides or they were horse-drawn sleighs, with runners, for snowbound roads, but this, as Will had tried to explain, was a sort of travois—the path was too narrow and rough for a cart and so things had to be dragged up and down from the house. The house that was invisible from here, though she craned her neck till the muscles there began to throb. All she could see were pocked volcanic cliffs fringed with a poor sort of desert vegetation.

  “I’ll race you!” Edith shouted, waving a pair of hatboxes high over her head, as Ida, her face lit with the purest pleasure, sprinted up the beach with her suitcase.

  “Girls!” she cried. “Stop it now. Show some dignity.”

  Ida, dutiful, slowed to a walk, but Edith kept on, her skirts dark with wet and her heels kicking up sand, and she didn’t stop till she mounted the ridge that marked the high-tide line. She might have gone on running all the tortuous way up the path to the plateau beyond and right on into the house, if the boy hadn’t appeared at that moment, mule and sled in tow. For an instant, Edith just stood there, staring, and then she dropped the hatboxes, turned on her heels and came running back, giggling, while the boy—Jimmie—stood there gaping as if he’d never seen a girl before in his life, and maybe he hadn’t. Marantha gave a wave of her hand and made her way up the crest of the dune to him while he bent to the boxes Edith had dropped.

  As she got closer she could see that the sled was a crude affair, constructed of the salvaged railway ties that composed one of the chief sources of building material here on this treeless island, two lengths forming the struts across which sawed portions had been nailed into place to create a slanted bed. In the center of it, lashed firmly down, was a rocking chair, and that must have been for her, so that she could ride behind the mule, an innovation of Will’s, no doubt. And that was touching, it was, the way he cared for her, the way he thought matters through so as to make things easier on her. She caught her breath and then climbed up over the lip of the dune that traced the margin of the beach, the wind snatching at her hat so that she could feel the pins giving way and had to use her free hand to hold it in place, all the while clutching her overstuffed handbag in the other, the fingers of which had already begun to go numb under the pressure. To make matters worse, she caught her shoe on something, a loop of kelp or a scrap of driftwood, and stumbled so that she had to go down on one knee in the sand.

  The boy just stood there as if he’d grown roots, staring from her to the retreating form of Edith and back again. He looked—this was her first impression and she wanted to be charitable—not stupid, really, but amazed or maybe hypnotized, a short, slight, dark-haired boy with sunburned skin, a retreating chin and eyes as black as the mud at the bottom of a pond. When he saw her stumble a second time, it startled him into action, and he came running to her, his arms flung out awkwardly for balance. Without a word, he reached a hand to help her as if she were an invalid already, and she wondered how much Will had told him.

  “You must be Jimmie,” she said, trying to mold her face into a smile of greeting.

  He ducked his head. Colored. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “I’m Mrs. Waters.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I reckoned that.”

  She turned her head to direct his gaze toward the beach. “And that’s my daughter, Edith, in the azure hat, and the serving girl, Ida. And the man—”

  “That’s Adolph, ma’am. I know him. We—he—well, he come out already once to help me work the sheep and suchlike . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, rubbing her hands together against the cold. “Well, I hope you’ll all get on nicely.” And then, looking to the sled and the mule with its skittish eyes and ears standing up as straight as two bookends and the path that wound its way through the chaparral and up the hill to where the mysterious house awaited her, she added, “The chair—I presume that’s for me?”

  He nodded, stabbing at the sand with the toe of one boot. His hair was too long, she could see that, greasy strands of it hanging in his eyes beneath one of those caps the Irish workmen favored. His fingernails were filthy. And his teeth—she’d have to introduce him to a toothbrush or he’d be gumming his food by the time he turned twenty.

  But here came the wind again, gusting now, and the sand driven before it like grapeshot. “Very well, then,” she said, and again he just stared. A long moment unfolded. “What I mean to say is, what, exactly,
are we waiting for?”

  * * *

  There was no room for Edith on the sled once they’d loaded it with everything it could carry, and so she stayed behind on the beach to help Ida and the men unload the skiff on its successive trips to the schooner and back. Edith had pestered her—she wanted to go now, wanted to see the house and her room and the sheep, and why couldn’t she just walk up on her own?—but Marantha was firm with her. She was needed below, on the beach, and she’d see the house in good time. Jimmie stared at his feet throughout this colloquy, which, given Edith and her temperament, lasted longer than it should have, and when Edith finally turned and stalked off he gave the mule a swat and they started on up the path.

  The boy led the mule by the reins, walking in a loose-jointed way, sauntering as if he were out for a stroll, but the grade was steep and the mule was laboring. Within minutes its flanks were steaming. A cascade of mud and stones flew out from beneath its hooves and she was twice spattered, three times, four. She could smell the animal’s breath, rank and ragged, careening down the length of it on the wind that grew stronger as they rose in elevation. Her neck ached. Her mouth was dry. Steeling herself, she gripped the arms of the rocker as it jerked from side to side and the heavy struts of the sled scraped along the path, gouging two deep furrows behind them.

  As they climbed, she saw that the path wove its way through a natural canyon, which fell away to the thin muddy margin of a creek some thirty or forty feet below. The sky was a uniform gray. Birds started up from the scrub and shot at a diagonal across the gap of the canyon to vanish out of sight. The mule wheezed and sighed. She felt a cough coming on and fought it, breathing fiercely through her nostrils and holding herself as rigidly as she was able. The rocker groaned, the sled chafed. And then, just when she thought they were going to go on forever, up and up till they circumvented the clouds and reached a whole new continent in the sky, they emerged on a plateau in a blast of wind-driven sand and the house was there.

  It took her a moment to get her bearings, the mule kicking up clods, the boy swinging the sled in a wide arc across the yard so that it was facing back down the canyon even as he reached up for the hame of the animal’s collar and jerked it to a stop. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, some sort of quaint ivy-covered cottage out of Constable or Turner, hedges, flowerbeds, a picket fence—a sheepman’s place—but this was something else altogether. This couldn’t be it, could it? She looked to the boy, expecting that he’d let her in on the joke any second now—this was the barn or the servants’ quarters or bunkhouse or whatever they called it and in the next moment he’d be chucking the mule and leading her on to the house itself, of course he would . . . but then it occurred to her that there were no other structures in sight, no other structures possible even in all that empty expanse. Jimmie was watching her. A gust caught her like a slap in the face. The mule shuddered, lifted its tail and deposited its droppings on the barren ground. She pushed herself up from the chair, stepped down from the sled and strode across the yard.

  Her first impression was of nakedness, naked walls struck with penurious little windows, a yard of windblown sand giving onto an infinite vista of sheep-ravaged scrub that radiated out from it in every direction and not a tree or shrub or scrap of ivy in sight. There was nothing even remotely quaint or cozy about it. It might as well have been lifted up in a tornado and set down in the middle of the Arabian Desert. And where were the camels? The women in burnooses? She was so disappointed—stunned, shocked—that she was scarcely aware of the boy as he pushed open the rude gate for her. “You want I should put the things in the parlor?” he asked.

  She was in the inner yard now, moving as if in a trance toward the door, which even from this distance she could see had been sloppily cut and hung so that there was a wide gap running across the doorstep like a black horizontal scar. The windowsills were blistered, the panes gone milky with abrasion. A jagged line of dark nailheads ran the length of the clapboards, climbing crazily to the eaves and back down again as if they’d been blown there on the wind, the boards themselves so indifferently whitewashed they gave up the raised grain of the cheap sea-run pine in clotted skeins and whorls that looked like miniature faces staring out at her—or no, leering at her. She recognized this as a delusion and delusions only came when the fever settled on her, but she didn’t feel feverish at the moment, just weak, that was all. Weak and disordered. As if that weren’t enough, just as she was about to lift her foot to the front steps, in the very instant, a quick darting shadow—snake, lizard, rodent?—whipped out in front of her and she had to stifle a scream, but the boy was right there, doing a quick two-step, bringing the heel of his boot down on the thing, which was only gristle and blood in the sequel.

  “Ma’am?” The boy was fumbling to pull open the front door for her, wearing a puzzled look—she was the invalid, acting strange, an animated wraith like Miss Havisham, a harpy, a witch, and she knew she had to snap out of it, embrace the positive, be strong and assertive. She willed herself to pass through the door and into the front room, thinking at least there were two stories, at least there was that, and then she was staggered all over again.

  Will couldn’t expect her to live here—no one could. The room was uninhabitable, as crude and ugly a place as she’d ever seen in her life. The floorboards were innocent of varnish or even oil and they were deeply scuffed and scoured by the sand, which seemed nearly as comfortable here as in the yard. There were no curtains on the windows. The furniture, such as it was, consisted of half a dozen wooden chairs, a long bare table etched with the marks of heavy usage and a bleached-out sideboard that looked as if it had been salvaged off a ship—which, she would learn, was in fact the case. No rug. No paintings, no china, no decoration of any kind. Worst of all, no one had bothered to cover the walls, which had been crudely whitewashed, apparently from the same bucket that had been put to use on the exterior. This wasn’t a room—it was just an oversized box, a pen, and at the rear of it were two bedrooms the size of anchorites’ cells and an even cruder door that gave onto a lean-to addition that served as the kitchen. Everything smelled of—of what? Sheep. That’s what the place smelled of, as if the whole flock had been using it as a barn.

  “Ma’am?”

  She came back to herself suddenly—the boy was there still, wanting something. He gave her a pleading look—he was only trying to help, she could see that, only trying to be efficient, to unload the sled and bring it back down for Will and the girls and Adolph to load up again and again so that all they’d brought with them could be arranged here in this sterile comfortless rat-hole of a house that no amount of hope or optimism or good cheer could begin to make right, and she realized, for the second time in as many minutes, that she was making him uneasy. Worse: she was frightening him.

  “Yes?”

  “Should I—? I mean, do you want that I should—because Captain Waters is going to be wondering where I got myself to and he can be awful sharp sometimes . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice sounded strange, as if her air passages had been choked off, and she had to struggle to command it. “Go ahead. Do what you must. Shoo, go on!”

  The coughing didn’t start till he’d ducked out the door and into the wind-whipped gloom of the day and it carried her to the unfinished stairs that were like the steps in a child’s tree house and on up them to the carpetless bedroom she would share with Will and the sad four-poster bed with its greasy curtains and the counterpane that smelled not of her husband but of sheep—only, and inescapably, of sheep.

  The Bedroom

  It was anger—and despair, that too—that gave her the strength to strip the bedding and tear the bed curtains from their hooks, to ball them up and fling them on the floor for Ida, because what was he thinking, how could he ever imagine she’d regain her strength in a freezing hovel like this as if she were some sort of milkmaid in a bucolic romance? They could have gone to Italy and
baked in the sun till her chest was clear, the lesions dried like figs on a tin sheet and the flesh come back to her limbs, her breasts, her hips and abdomen—or even Mexico. A tropical place. A desert. Anyplace but this. His own selfishness was at work here, she knew that in her heart. Even as she sat there on the stained mattress trying to fight down her feelings, coughing and coughing again till her throat was raw, she couldn’t help accusing him. But then she’d been guilty too. She was the one who’d given him the last of her savings, the last of the money left from James’ estate, to buy in here as equal partner with Mills because she knew if she didn’t she would lose him. He was an enthusiast, he wanted to better himself, saw his chance and took it, but he was her husband too and he’d loved her once, loved her still, though she knew she wasn’t much use to him anymore—not beyond what her money could bring, anyway. The thought—and it wasn’t the first time it had come to her—shrank her down till she was nothing, a husk like one of those papery things you saw clinging to the bark after the imago unfurls its wings to beat away on the air.