San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  A muffled voice. “Yes, Mother. May I come in?”

  Edith had taken the smaller upstairs room, just behind theirs, and Ida had been installed in one of the anchorites’ cells below. Jimmie and Adolph, thankfully, had their own bunks in a long squat one-room outbuilding where the hired shearers stayed when they came out twice a year to collect the wool for shipment back to the mainland.

  Will was already sitting up in bed, heavy-chested and pale in a nightshirt that could have been cleaner, his feet placed firmly on the floor and one hand scratching vigorously at the thinning hair of his scalp. “Just a minute,” she said. “I’ll come to you.” And then, though she still felt weak from yesterday, felt as if all the blood had been drained from her, she got up, wrapped a robe round her and went across the bare floorboards to the strange door that opened on a house she barely knew.

  Edith was just outside the door, already dressed, though the first thing she noticed was that she’d been slipshod with her corsets, always slipshod, as if proper attire didn’t matter. It looked as if her dress were sagging off her in the rear, which was inexcusable. She might not have been conscious of it, though she’d been told a thousand times, but it made her look no better than a charwoman or one of these immigrant wives with their greasy hair and the faint line of a mustache darkening their upper lips. She was irritated, and before she could catch herself, she began to cough, not in a spasm, it wasn’t as bad as that, but her throat closed up on her again and Will, pulling on his trousers, roared, “Get her a glass of water—can’t you see she’s having a spasm!”

  “No,” she heard herself say, her eyes tearing now, “no, I’ll be all right,” but it was as if some clawed creature had hold of her throat and wouldn’t let go. It took a long moment, Edith rushing into the room to snatch up the water glass despite the fact that Will was half-dressed, and then she had it to her lips and she felt the claws ease their grip. She took a deep wheezing breath. And then, standing there in the doorway, feeling light-headed and weak, endured another long spiraling moment before she could ask her daughter what the matter was.

  “It’s Ariel,” Edith said, and suddenly her eyes were brimming.

  “Ariel? Who’s Ariel?”

  Will’s voice came down like a hammer, hard and disapproving: “The lamb.”

  She didn’t understand. “Lamb?” she repeated stupidly.

  “Mother, he’s cold. He’s been bleating all night. He’s shivering.”

  She became aware then of the sounds of the morning, of birdcall from beyond the window, of Ida, below, slamming the door of the stove, of a low murmur of voices from the yard—Jimmie and Adolph—and beneath it all, faint as the creak of a door’s hinge, the weak trailing bleat of a motherless lamb left out in the cold of the night. Then she was following Edith down the stairs and out the door into the wind that tirelessly skimmed the frigid air off the surface of the ocean and drove it over the island. The lamb was there, tethered in the yard, its eyes dull and unfocused. It had been curled into itself on the ground, but when they came out in the yard it stood shakily and made as if to bleat, yet no sound came out.

  Jimmie and Adolph, sipping coffee out of dented tin cups, looked on indifferently.

  “Do you see, Mother?”

  It was Edith’s idea to carry the animal into the house and set it down beside the stove, where it could be warmed, though that didn’t seem sensible, not at all. You didn’t bring barnyard animals into the house, not unless you were an animal yourself. The creature was going to die, she could see that in an instant, anyone could, but the look on Edith’s face, the way she took charge and insisted, melted her. “All right,” she said, following her daughter through the front door and into the parlor cum dining room of the house that was like a barn itself, “but you’ll have to tether it to the stove, because I will not have that thing running through the rooms and, and, relieving itself, do you understand?”

  Edith was already bending to the stove, the animal held fast in her arms, and she was rocking it like a baby, like her own child. “Yes, Mother,” Edith said mechanically, not bothering to glance up at her.

  “And any mess it makes”—she held it a beat—“you are responsible for. Solely responsible. Do you hear me?”

  The Wind

  Why she was always expecting the worst, she couldn’t say, except that her illness had colored her view of the world, dragged her down, made her see for the first time in her life what lay beneath the surface of things. People made plans, invested their money, educated themselves, raised children—and for what? For the promise of an afterlife? For the glory of God? To forge another link in the chain of being? She didn’t want to be a cynic, not with Edith to worry over, not with Will and the household and all the rest of the responsibilities that bore down on her day and night. She truly wanted to believe that her life had purpose, that they would make money out of this venture instead of losing the last capital she had, wanted to believe that living out here on this island would repair the damage to her lungs and that Edith’s pet would recover and grow stronger by the day—and she would have prayed for it if she hadn’t lost the habit.

  The day flew at her, full of complications. Every time she came into the parlor, there was the lamb, tethered to the stove, and Edith nursing it. It smelled of urine and the pellets it scattered across the horse blanket Edith had spread beneath it. Frail, withered, its skin sack-like and loose, it stood shakily and then fell back into the bundle of its limbs. Still, by dinnertime that night she had to admit that the animal seemed to have taken a turn for the better, gazing up alertly out of its resinous eyes as Edith patiently fed it, one sopping finger at a time. “Do you see, Mother?” she said, running a hand down the length of it while it strained forward, pressing itself to her.

  “It’s certainly an improvement,” she said, “don’t you think so, Will?”

  Will had just come in from the yard, where he was building a toolshed with the help of Adolph, a kind of make-work in advance of plowing and sowing the fields and widening the road when the seed and sticks of dynamite arrived on Charlie Curner’s boat, promised for the second week of the month. His face was sunburned. There was dirt under his nails. “Yes,” he said absently, but then he glanced down at Edith and the lamb and his eyes came into focus. “Damned foolishness, if you ask me.”

  Edith’s shoulders tensed. The lamb let out a soft bleat, as if in protest.

  Marantha didn’t tolerate profane language in the house, because it was cheap and it lowered them all, not just the profaner but the household itself, and Will knew it. She drilled him with a look. “That was a harsh thing to say, Will. If you’d like to know, Edith sat up with that animal half the night and she’s been entirely diligent about feeding it and cleaning up after it too. Give credit where credit is due.”

  He didn’t bother to respond. He just stalked through the room and down the hall to the kitchen, where the washbasin was. She could hear him saying something to Ida and then Ida’s voice, fluttering back at him.

  Edith glanced down the hall, tucked her skirts under her and sat lightly on the floor beside the lamb, pulling it to her. She stroked its ears, whispering to it, her chin trembling with her emotion. “I don’t understand why anything I do, no matter what, is always wrong,” she said finally. “Am I wrong? Am I always wrong?”

  What she wanted to say was something along the lines of Mind your skirts, now, or You’ll get filthy down there, but instead she just shook her head and said, “No, not at all.”

  * * *

  The following morning the house awoke to sunshine. It was warm enough for the lamb to go out into the yard and Edith went with it, though as the day wore on Edith was in and out of the house a dozen times, helping Ida roll out the one decent carpet they’d managed to bring with them, hanging pictures and rearranging the furniture in an effort to make the room more homely. Twice, driven to distraction by the animal’s in
cessant bleating, Marantha had to remind her to go out and feed it, and by late afternoon Edith, her feet up on a stool and a novel propped open in her lap, seemed to have forgotten about it entirely. Night fell. They were in the kitchen, helping Ida prepare the meal. Ida was talking about the mainland, about what people would be doing back there right at that moment and how strange it was to think of it. “They’d be going out,” Edith said. “To the concert hall. To hear music. To see a play.”

  “And to the restaurant after,” she put in. She could picture it, the tablecloths, linen napkins, fruit piled high on the sideboard, cheeses, a steak buried in onions and mushrooms and the waiter there at your elbow. A glass of sherry. The murmur of voices. May I bring you anything else, madame?

  Ida paused a moment—she was dredging chicken parts in flour while the oil snapped in the pan before her—and gazed over her shoulder at the darkened window as if she could see all the way across the channel to the coast beyond. “Or the sweetshop,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be the thing?”

  And then the meal was served, chicken fricassee, fried potatoes, beans in tomato sauce and cornbread. Will said grace and the platter of cornbread was making its way round the table when the background palaver of the wind fell away for an instant and a thin plaintive cry inserted itself into the silence. At first she didn’t know what to make of it—was it a bird brought down in the wind? The mice? A fox? Or was it the dog, whining at the door of the bunkhouse? Will didn’t seem to have heard. He was going on about the schedule for the coming weeks, how once they’d plowed the fields and got the seed in they would turn their efforts to converting the path into a legitimate road so as to facilitate bringing supplies up from the harbor, the same theme he’d been stuck on through the course of every meal thus far. She was about to ask if anyone had heard anything, when Jimmie spoke up.

  “That’ll be your lamb,” he said, flicking his eyes round the table.

  Will looked up in irritation. “That is,” he went on, and he was addressing Adolph now, Adolph alone, “if Curner ever gets back here with the things we need. And that’s another thing—he might be a good man at sea, Curner, but he can’t begin to make the grade when it comes to giving attention to what people order in plain English or even reading a simple itemized list, if you want to know the truth.”

  The lamb. It was out there in the dark and if Edith had forgotten about it so had she. She pictured it huddled against the fence under the vault of bleak glittering stars, the wind probing, hunger settling in like a disease.

  “The thing of it is”—Jimmie snatched a quick glance at Edith—“a newborn lamb has no more protection against the cold than a naked baby.”

  Edith set down her fork and looked wildly round her. “We can’t leave him out there—he’ll die, he will.”

  No one said a word. The windows were black, the stove hissed and creaked with the fire in its belly, Ida glided in from the kitchen with the coffee pot in one hand and a second platter of bread in the other. “Mother?” Edith was appealing to her, her eyes stricken and her inflection rising. Their first crisis, she was thinking, the first sour note to spoil Will’s idyll. And Edith would have her way. Edith always had her way.

  But not yet. Let her learn to wait. Let her learn that her mother wouldn’t always give in, or at least not without a struggle. She took a sip of water—mineral-heavy and sulfurous—patted her lips with her napkin, took up her fork. Though the chicken was excellent, really first-rate, she found she didn’t have much appetite. She’d meant to force herself to eat—the sight of herself in the mirror had frightened her more than anything any doctor could have told her—but tonight she just didn’t feel equal to it.

  “Mother?” Edith repeated.

  She didn’t want to play peacemaker, didn’t want to quarrel, but she could see Will was spoiling for a fight and she had no choice. “Couldn’t we put it in the barn—to get it out of the wind?” she offered. “And—oh, I don’t know, find it some old blankets or straw or something? How difficult would that be?” She looked past Will to where Jimmie sat beside Adolph at the end of the table, forking up beans as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.

  The boy just shook his head. He was the authority here—he knew the flock like no one else. “No, ma’am,” he said, his eyes on his plate, “there’s no amount of blankets that’ll keep that animal alive through a night like this.” He gave her a tentative smile, clearly pleased with the attention. “You hear that wind?” he said. And she did, they all did, the noise of it overwhelming the ticking of the stove, their collective breathing, the rattle of utensils against porcelain. “There’s a gale coming,” Jimmie said, dropping his eyes to the plate again and shoveling up a quick mouthful of beans. “And this,” he said, chewing, “is just the announcement of it.”

  That was enough for Edith. Without asking permission to get up from the table, she rose from her chair, darted across the room, out the door and into the night. A moment later the door was flung back again, the salt tang of the ocean rushing in on the wind, and here was Edith, her mouth set, leading the lamb into the room. Will let out a low curse, a crude epithet he must have picked up in the Army, and this wasn’t the first time Marantha had heard it, but it humiliated her now, here in company, angered her, and she called out his name sharply, even as Edith knotted the animal’s tether round the legs of the stove and slid back into her seat at the table without a word. The hired men never lifted their heads. Will fumed, but held his tongue. And the lamb, as if wiser than she would have credited, didn’t make a peep. Or bleat, that is.

  There was a long moment of silence, in which the wind once again became the dominant feature, and then she looked to Edith and said one thing only: “Do you mean to tell me, young lady, that you’re not even going to wash your hands?”

  * * *

  The wind kept up all night, just as the boy had said it would. It was furious, unrelenting. She’d never experienced anything like it, not even the hurricane that had come raging up the eastern seaboard to uproot the big weeping willow in the front yard of the house she’d grown up in. Every time she thought the wind was dying, it seemed to come back all the more furiously, rattling the windowpanes and rushing under the eaves in a sudden violent blast. Will had warned her about the weather here—San Miguel was the northernmost link in the chain that made up the Channel Islands, the first landfall for the storms sweeping down the coast—but the warning had been buried so deeply beneath layers of praise for the pastures and the views and the romance of the place (and the air, never forget the air) she’d barely heeded it.

  Until now. Now, as she lay there in the dark, the thing in her chest quiet for once, she was afraid. The wind kept beating, keening, unholy, implacable, and it was as if it were aimed at her and her alone. As if it had come for her. Come to blow her away across the waters and force her down beneath the waves, down and down and down to the other place, darkness eternal. The roof heaved, the house rocked and groaned beneath the joists. Everything seemed to compress, as if waiting to blow like the cork from a bottle. She wanted to waken Will, wanted to cling to him and feed off the low consoling murmur of his voice, but she didn’t because she knew he needed his rest—now more than ever—and there was nothing he could have done in any case, nothing anyone could do except God, and God had deserted her. Will was right there beside her, but she’d never felt more alone. She couldn’t sleep. She’d never sleep again. And though she needed to get up and relieve herself she was afraid to move, as if even the slightest perturbation would upset the balance and bring the whole ramshackle structure crashing down around her.

  Finally, the pressure on her bladder became too much to bear and she pushed back the blankets and got out of bed, the floorboards cold beneath her feet and the air a shock. The darkness was absolute and she had to feel her way, expecting at any moment to trip over the chair or the steamer trunk or pitch headlong into a yawning black pit. She wasn’t one to complain—all
she wanted was what was best for Will and Edith—but wasn’t it supposed to be warm here, wasn’t that how it had been advertised? Or warmer, at any rate? That was what she was thinking, muttering to herself, and then her outstretched fingers came in contact with the wall and the wall led to the corner, but she couldn’t find the pot because it was the wrong corner, and by the time she got done fumbling blindly around and understood her mistake the pain in her abdomen was so insistent she was afraid she was going to wet herself, wet right through her nightgown like an incontinent child, and how would she explain the stains on the floor or the reek of the soiled garment? Frantic now, she moved to her right, and here was the door and its cold iron handle and beside it a new wall altogether. She worked her way along this wall, step by step, her feet frozen, the wind screaming and screaming again, and then her shin struck something solid and the pot clattered in protest.

  She tried to be quick about it, lifting the lid and positioning herself as best she could in the darkness, but then, perversely, her flow wouldn’t come. She was thinking of the W.C. and how astonished she’d been to learn that it was a full three miles and more from the house (to keep the sewage downhill from the spring, Will had claimed, though he’d clearly been ashamed of himself for having overlooked the matter now that there were women in the house, and he’d promised to move it closer, much closer, as soon as he was able) and how utterly barbaric that was, when finally it came in a sudden hot rush and she cleaned herself quickly and climbed back into bed.

  In the morning, it was still blowing. Outside—and she wouldn’t realize this till later—the sand was mounding its drifts against anything that stood erect in the yard, the walls of the house and outbuildings, the fences, even the flagpole, so that the men would have to spend the whole morning shoveling it away. Will was asleep still, breathing deeply. There was no other sound but for the wind. After a while she eased herself out of bed, put on her slippers and wrapper and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea to soothe her nerves. She wasn’t thinking of Ida sleeping behind the flimsy door of the windowless room at the bottom of the stairs or of the kitchen stove that had gone cold in the night or the wood to stoke it—and she wasn’t thinking of the other stove, the one in the main room behind her or of the lamb tethered to its legs. No, she was thinking of the wind and how it was a wonder it hadn’t shattered the panes of the windows and crushed the walls like paper, thinking how cold the house was, how alien, and wondering for the hundredth time in the past three days just what she’d gotten herself into.