San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  She slammed the window shut and went to the door, calling down the stairwell to Edith, Edith who would go out there and give that boy a piece of her mind and get him to stop this, this insolence, this cruelty, but her voice failed her again. “Edith,” she called, croaking now, croaking because the disease was consuming her from the inside out, strangling her, taking her voice away, syllable by syllable, “Edith!”

  A moment. Then Edith was there at the bottom of the stairs, her face pale and insubstantial in the shadows that infested the place. “Yes, Mother?”

  She couldn’t catch her breath.

  “Are you—? Can I get you anything?”

  “Tell that boy”—and now the shrieking rose again, uncontainable—“to stop that this instant . . . I’m not—I need rest. Today. Just today. Tell him—”

  She watched Edith turn abruptly, heard her footsteps on the scuffed wooden planks of the lower hallway and then the parlor, heard the door creak open and slam shut again. Then she moved to the window and threw up the sash and Edith appeared in the yard below.

  “Mother says to stop that. You, Jimmie. Mother says—”

  The boy had dropped his tool—and what was it, some sort of clamp to drive the hard metal ring through the animal’s flesh?—and he was staring at her out of his black expressionless eyes. “The Captain said to.”

  Edith crossed the yard to him. Even from here Marantha could see that her corsets were unfastened again. She was wearing an apron over her skirts. Her hair flowed down her back in a tangle because she hadn’t bothered to put it up. She was hatless. “I don’t care what he said, Mother’s not feeling well and you’re to stop that now.”

  “You can’t boss me.”

  “I can. And I will.” Edith put her hands on her hips, cocked herself on one leg as if she were posing for a movement in one of her dances. Then she slowly unfolded one hand and gestured to him with her index finger. “Come here,” she said.

  The boy looked around him to see if anyone was watching, then he swung the gate aside, pulled it shut behind him and came to where she stood in the yard. “What do you want with me?” he asked, looking her in the face for the first time.

  Her voice was soft, so soft Marantha could barely hear it. “Anything I feel like,” she said.

  He took a step back, dropped his eyes. “You can’t boss me,” he repeated. “You’re only fourteen.”

  “Fifteen. In a week and a half. Which is older than you.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “Liar.”

  There was a silence. Marantha could hear the pick ringing still in the distance, tempered steel essaying rock. “Eighteen, anyway.”

  “Liar. When’s your birthday?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “How can you not know your own birthday? Are you that stupid?”

  “I’m not stupid. I’m as smart as anybody. Smart as you.”

  “Then how is it you don’t even know when you were born?”

  “Because my mother’s dead. And she never—” He was working the toe of his boot in the dirt, his characteristic gesture. “I mean, I never . . . I’m eighteen years old.”

  “Liar.”

  The pigs were watchful. The sun was wrapped in gauze. The pick rang. And then Edith pulled the boy to her, their heads so close they might have been kissing, and Marantha felt a shock go through her. “Edith!” she called, though she didn’t hear what Edith said next, but she heard Jimmie, his voice pitched low yet clearly audible as he recoiled from Edith’s grip and took an awkward step back. “All right,” he said, “I’m fifteen. But that’s still older than you.”

  The Rain

  It came in the night without preliminary, a sudden crashing fall against the shingles of the roof that woke her, gasping, from a dreamless sleep. At first she thought it was the wind, another sandstorm churning across the island to bury them like Ozymandias, but then she heard the gutters rattle and the swift plunge of the cisterns and knew that the real rain, the rain they’d been waiting for, had arrived. All she could think was that Will would be pleased—and she should have been pleased too, rain like money in the bank, but she hated the dampness it brought because dampness was the ally of the thing inside her. And of the mold. The mold that crept over every stationary object in the house like a biblical plague, the furniture spotted with it, clothes greasy to the touch a day after they’d been washed, the pages of her books marked and sullied, eaten away from the inside out, rotted, decayed. But she had to stop herself. The rain was the important thing and the rain was a blessing. She repeated the thought aloud, as if to convince herself, her voice a dying whisper in the dark, lost in the susurrus of the rain. For a long while she lay there listening to the trill of the gutters, everything adrift, until finally her thoughts floated free and she fell asleep again.

  She woke to a persistent drip. It took her a moment, a wand of feeble gray light caught in the crack of the bed curtains, the world coming back to her in all its preordained dimension, before she realized that the blankets were wet—not damp, but wet, soaking. She looked up and saw that the canopy above her was bellied with water, and here came the drip, exploding on the pillow beside her. And then another and another. She called Will’s name—twice—but he didn’t move, his breathing slow and heavy. Then she was shoving him, heaving against the dead weight of him until he came up sputtering as if the waters had already closed over them.

  “What is it? What?”

  “The roof’s leaking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She tore back the bed curtains, angry suddenly, furious, and thrust the wet blankets at him. “The bedclothes are wet, that’s what I mean—can’t you feel it? The whole bed—” That was when the breath went out of her and the first hacking cough of the morning snatched the words from her mouth.

  And what did he do? Did he put his arm around her, fetch her a glass of water or the bottle of medicine and her teaspoon? No. Cursing—predictably, as if Jesus Christ had anything to do with it—he heaved himself out of bed and slammed round the room, pulling on his clothes in a frenzy of hate. “Jesus Christ, can’t I have a minute’s peace? Can’t I even get a goddamned night’s sleep when I’m so worn I can barely— Edith! Where’s Edith?”

  “Let her be,” she said, fighting down the cough. She was out of bed now, crossing the room in her nightgown to the stand that held the water pitcher and her medicine, and the roof was leaking here too, a steady drool of dun-colored water trickling down to splash the floor at her feet. The medicine was useless, she knew that, but it deadened the sting of her throat and fought down the pain in her chest, at least temporarily. She measured out a teaspoon and took it, wincing at the taste—bitter herbs in a tincture of alcohol that turned the inside of her mouth black—and then she took a teaspoon of cod – liver oil and washed it down with a glass of water, and all the while her feet were getting wet.

  Ignoring her, Will tore open the door on the corridor and shouted for Edith. He was in shirtsleeves, his braces dangling, his pale calloused heels naked to the thin seep of light coming in through the window. “Goddamn it, where is she? Edith!” In the next moment he snatched the chamber pot out of the corner, threw up the sash and flung the contents out into the yard, not even bothering to rinse the thing out before heaving himself across the room to position it under the leak. Where it immediately began to splash over. On the floor. Filthy. Everything filthy. And then Edith was at the door, barefoot, in her nightgown, rubbing at her eyes.

  “Don’t just stand there,” he snapped. “Can’t you see what’s happening here? Help me move this bed—your mother’s wet, the bed’s wet. Here, take this corner—no, no, here, this way, push.”

  She wanted to say something—Edith wasn’t decent, he was too harsh with her, too bullying, there was filth on the floor—but she didn’t. Instead she pulled her wrap tight around her,
eased on her slippers and went out into the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen, where she knew it would be warm at least and the coffee she could already smell was brewing in the pot.

  * * *

  It rained without relent throughout the morning and into the afternoon and showed no sign of slacking. The windows steamed over. Water came in under the front door, a great lapping tongue of it, so that she had to lay a towel there—and then get up and wring it out every twenty minutes. Anything that could hold liquid—pots, pitchers, dirt-rimmed buckets dragged in from the barn, the dishpan—lay scattered across the floors, upstairs and down, ringing maddeningly with a persistent tympanic drip. And of course they had to be emptied too. It was a new job, a full-time occupation, and it took her out of herself: she didn’t have pause to feel weak or sick and if she coughed she hardly noticed.

  Luncheon was a subdued affair, Edith half-asleep, Will brooding over the leaky roof and the damage to the road—he’d been out there in his mackintosh three times already, plying his shovel uselessly in the muck—and it was a struggle to keep up a conversation. Ida was no help. She was having her own trial in the kitchen, where the jointure of the slant roof and the back wall of the main house gave up a flood like Niagara, the floorboards soaked through, mud everywhere, and so she took her meal at the kitchen table with the hands. There was a stew of mutton—the eternal dish—three-days-old bread, the last of the wheel of cheese Charlie Curner had brought them. Marantha talked just to hear herself, but nobody was listening.

  Afterward she tried to interest Edith in sewing or a game of cards or reading aloud from Dickens or Eliot, but Edith just gave her a look and went upstairs to shut herself in her room. And Will—Will was up on the roof with a bucket of tar he’d heated over the stove and nothing she could say about the danger could dissuade him. “You’ll break a leg,” she shouted at him as he went out the door. “Or your neck. Then where will we be?” She kept glancing out the window, expecting to see him splayed in the mud under the eaves, thinking of the time he’d broken his foot stepping off the curb in front of the apartment and how savage he was with her through every waking hour of his convalescence, as if she’d somehow been to blame. He was impossible. Demanding. Insulting. She’d very nearly left him then. She’d actually gone down to the station, Edith in tow, and inquired about the price of two tickets to Boston before she came to her senses.

  She sat and rose again, sat and rose. The pans filled, she emptied them. At one point, she settled in by the stove with a book but she couldn’t concentrate. The rain hissed at her, mocked her, erected a solid gray wall beyond the windows, one more barrier between her and where she longed to be.

  It was past four when Will finally gave it up. There were two abrupt thumps from the direction of the front porch—one for each boot—and then he came through the door in his stocking feet, the wet mackintosh hanging from him like sloughed skin. His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped in exhaustion. He looked defeated, looked old—older than her father was when he died. The thought complicated the moment—her father had been nearly seventy, sick for years with a malady no one was able to diagnose, all his vitality reduced to the effort of staying alive—and she had to fight it down before rising from the chair and hurrying across the room to him. “Here,” she said, taking hold of his wet sleeve, “let me help you off with that.”

  He didn’t offer any resistance. He merely stood there, dripping, so depleted he could barely raise his arms. He smelled of the outdoors, of the workings of his body, wet hair, sweat gone stale—and of tar, the odor faintly sweet and strong as any perfume. His hands were blackened with it, as if he’d pulled on a pair of mourner’s gloves on his way to a funeral. “I did the best I could,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about that now, we’ll manage.” She folded the mackintosh over one arm and led him to the chair by the stove, where he sat heavily, and then she was fussing over him. “I’ll get you some dry clothes—and tea, I’ll have Ida brew you some tea. Or would you like something stronger?”

  “I’ll have a drop of that whiskey—if you’ll join me. Will you?”

  Her first impulse was to say no, because what had she become but a crabbed miserable thing who said no to everything, to every pleasure and delight no matter how small or meaningless? Whiskey. She hadn’t tasted whiskey in so long she couldn’t remember what it was like—and then, suddenly, she could. In the old days, the early days of the apartment when Edith was little and the evening sun striped the walls and lingered over her potted geraniums as if each leaf and flower were lit from within, Will would come home from work and she’d fetch the bottle and the siphon and they would sit at the window sipping whiskey sodas and watching the life of the street below. She smiled, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Yes,” she murmured, “I’d like that.”

  For the next hour she sat there with him, just the two of them, and she felt a great peace settle over the house. The rain kept up, but the dripping was intermittent now, the tar having done its job—or mostly so—and she left the door of the stove open so they could watch the play of the flames. Ida was in the kitchen, busy with the meal, Edith shut in her room still, the hands out in the bunkhouse—she could see the soft glow of their lantern in the window there and it was as if they were miles away, as if they were on a ship and the ship was a beacon at sea. When the dark came down, she didn’t bother to get up and light the lantern on the table.

  “It’s pleasant, isn’t it?” she said. “To sit here like this. Everything’s been such a mad rush.”

  “I know,” he said, “I know. But things are settling down now. I feel like we’re actually making some progress—on the road especially. Or at least we were until this damned rain came along.”

  The whiskey eased the rawness of her throat. She’d expected it to be harsh, but it was just the opposite—it was silken and cool and had the placatory effect of her medicine, only it tasted so much better. And it wouldn’t turn her tongue black. At least she hoped not. “Damned?” She tossed the epithet back at him, but lightly, because she was feeling good and she didn’t want to nag at him, but really, how could something soulless, an element at that, be damned?

  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t be thankful for the rain—it’s just what we want if we expect the animals to thrive, and it’ll replenish the spring and fill the cisterns, and that’s all to the good. It’s just that I expected something more gradual, a good soft soaking rain—”

  “Not a deluge.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and reaching for the bottle. She watched him pour himself a measure, then lean forward to pour for her too. “The devil of it is to think of the work we put into that road, and all for nothing—it’s washing out right this minute, the banks caving in, rocks strewn everywhere, worse than it was when we started on it. Much worse. I tell you, I’m half-mad just thinking about it.” He took a long sip of the whiskey. “At least Curner brought the dynamite. At least there’s that.”

  “But not the dishes.”

  “It’s just like the war,” he said, waving a hand in disgust. “The Engineering Corps was bloated with men like Curner, half-wits and incompetents who couldn’t follow a requisition form if their lives depended on it—matériel would be wanted for an assault and it was sitting useless on one loading platform or another somewhere up the line and no one could say where or why. And none to take responsibility, you could wager on that. It was always the fault of Sergeant Such-and-Such or maybe his brother. Or some officer sitting behind a desk somewhere. But don’t worry—we’ll spell it out for him, make a list, item by item. And what do you think we’ll put right at the top?” He gave her a grin. “Minnie’s dishes.”

  “And cutlery. And my linens—where are my linens, I’d like to know?”

  “Yes,” he said, tilting his head back to drain the glass, “all that.” In the light of the fire he looked solid, looked young again. Or younger than he had when he came thro
ugh the door. “But the dynamite’s the thing. Because without it we’re never going to be able to make a road of that footpath before the shearers come, there’s just too much rock. And Mills lectured me on the subject, you know that—those wool sacks can weigh three hundred pounds apiece and they’re apt to catch on any of the turnings and take the whole lot over the side of the ravine, mule, sled, driver and all. I wouldn’t want an accident,” he said, shifting in the chair so that his wet socks left two broad dark stripes on the floorboards. “Especially not out here, with the nearest doctor eight hours away.”

  The nearest doctor. She meditated on that a moment, seeing herself prostrate in the saloon of Charlie Curner’s schooner, all sensation gone from her fingers and toes, the blood trailing away from the corner of her mouth and the black waves beating like fists at the hull. Did Will even know what he was saying?

  There was a smell of cooking from the kitchen. Everything was still. She could feel the liquor inside her, a new kind of medicine, medicine that lifted you up instead of driving you down. “I don’t like that man,” she said.

  “Who? Mills?”

  “No,” she said, and the mood was soured now, “Curner. Did you see the way he looked at Edith? He was leering, Will, that’s what he was doing: leering. A man his age. It was obscene. I don’t want him in this house, ever again, and I don’t care what he does with my plates.”

  He said her name, whispered it, pleadingly: “Marantha.”

  “And Jimmie,” she went on because she couldn’t stop herself, all the worries she’d bottled up spewing out of her now, “he’s no companion for Edith. Have you seen them together? Have you seen the way they, the way he—?” It was all too much, too mean and petty and low. “She doesn’t belong here, Will, that’s the truth of it. And neither do I.”