San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  A long moment passed between them. The bucket in the far corner began to drip again, the gutters rattled, the rain tore at the roof like a flail. Then he pushed himself up from the chair without a word, took the bottle by the neck and moved heavily up the hall toward the kitchen.

  The Road

  In the sequel, she stayed on in the dark, bringing the glass to her lips every so often, the rising chemical scent of the liquor in her nostrils, the taste of it on her tongue and in her mouth and the back of her throat. She meant to get up, light the lantern, help Ida set the table for dinner—rouse Edith; where was Edith?—but Will’s whiskey, which had pushed her so high, weighed her down. She shouldn’t have gone off on him the way she had and she regretted it now, already thinking of ways to make it up to him, to help rather than hinder. He was under a strain too. All the troubles of the place devolved on him, one worry chasing after the next—a week ago he was stalking through the corridors muttering darkly about the disaster they faced if the rains didn’t come and now here he was with his hands tar-stained and his back aching and the road washed out. He was fifty years old, soon to be fifty-one. This was no kind of life for him. He was an educated man, skilled in his trade, one of the few men in the country who could reliably run a big printing operation the way he had on his brother’s paper in Boston and the Morning Call up in San Francisco. He was a gentleman, not a common laborer. If he didn’t watch himself he was going to end up sick or injured or just plain out of luck, like the palsied ragtag troop he so proudly marched with on Decoration Day each year, banners waving, bands playing, and every other man with his sleeve hanging loose or his leg gone at the knee. You survived the war, Will, she told him, you don’t have to fight another one.

  She emerged from her reverie to the sound of voices leaching out of the steady background thrum of the rain: Will’s voice, Ida’s, call and response. It was some trick of the atmosphere—or her own ears—because suddenly she could hear them as clearly as if they were right there in the room with her.

  “Everything’s all over mud,” Ida said, complaining, but her tone wasn’t the tone of complaint—it was airy and light, as if she were with Edith and the two of them had their heads together, half a breath from dissolving in giggles. “Just look at this floor. How can anybody expect me to cook in conditions like this?”

  There was the sound of a chair shifting, the metallic groan of the hinges on the cabinet door, and then Will’s voice, companionable, intimate: “Oh, I don’t know, you seem to be doing a pretty fair job of it, even if you do have to wear a pair of gum boots under those skirts of yours. But you’re always . . . what I mean to say is you, you’re a very good”—he faltered, his words dense with whiskey—“really excellent. First-rate. But what’s that, what are you adding to that pot?”

  “Never you mind. You stay out of that now.”

  “Ida, Ida, Ida,”—denser yet, drawing out the vowels as if he were singing—“I know this is hard on you, but I swear I’ll be back up there on the roof to tar over this gap here as soon as, well, as soon as the rain stops. The very minute.”

  “Stops? You really think it means to stop?”

  “It’s got to. Law of averages.”

  “Well, I don’t. Not a bit of it. If anybody ever witnessed an example of God’s retribution on the sinners of the world, this is it—muck and rain, rain and muck, that’s all there is.” There was the sharp unmistakable click of glass on glass, and was he pouring for her, was that it? “And I’m just the sort of sinner to throw myself in the flood and be done with it, truly now, because I don’t think I can stand for another thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights of this, can you?”

  “So maybe I ought to see about putting a hull under the house, then—is that what you’re saying?”

  Ida, laughing: “Yes, that’s exactly it. And maybe you’d better start in pairing up the animals.”

  “Good advice, capital, the best in the world. I’ll do that just as soon as I’ve had my dinner. But beyond that, tell me, what sins could a girl of your age possibly have to atone for?”

  A sigh. The rattle of a spoon run round the circumference of a cooking pot. Ida’s voice, dropping low: “Oh, you’d be surprised.”

  And then there was a whole hurricane of noise, the back door flung open on the storm and slammed shut again, the floorboards groaning, feet stamping, and a new voice entering the conversation, Jimmie’s, thin and adenoidal: “Jesus, it’s cats and dogs out there.”

  She got up from the chair then and started down the hall. She could see them through the open kitchen door, framed there in the light of the lantern, the three of them, Will propped up on the table with his legs crossed, Ida at the stove, a glass of whiskey in one hand, stirring spoon in the other, and Jimmie, wet to the eyes and dashing the drenched cap against his thigh, moving into the circle of warmth. “What’s for dinner?” he asked, and if he glanced up when she entered the room—if any of them did—it was only vaguely, without recognition, as if she’d already ceased to exist.

  * * *

  It was still raining when Will brought out the cards after dinner—they were four at whist, she and Edith partnered against Will and Ida, Jimmie watching their every move from a chair in the corner as if he were going to be examined on it afterward and Adolph gone out to the bunkhouse to do whatever he did there, stare at the ceiling, fling shoes at the mice, stew in his odious thoughts—and when nine o’clock came round and they damped the lanterns and went off to bed, it was coming down every bit as steadily as it had all day. She’d sat through the cards in as good a humor as she could muster, the room warm, Will sluggish though he’d put the bottle away and taken nothing with dinner but coffee and a cigar after, and she wasn’t affected one way or the other when she and Edith wound up losing consistently, hand after hand, game after game, or at least that was what she told herself. Will was a master at cards and she wanted to be gracious about that, enjoying the game for what it was—an opportunity to escape the rain and the four walls and the endless yawning boredom of the place.

  After saying goodnight to Edith on the landing, she went into her room to light the lamp there and prepare for bed. It was cold—bitter, damp, like plunging into the ocean—and she hurried over her toilette, bending quickly to wash her face in the basin and trying not to think about the apartment on Post Street, with its running water, hot and cold both, and the claw feet of the bathtub propped on the black-and-white tiles of the floor. By the time Will came up the stairs she was already in bed, shivering, listening to the rain on the roof and in the gutters and counting off the intermittent dripping of the three buckets set round the room. Nothing had changed. There was the washstand, there the pot. The only novelty was the angle of view, since the bed had been moved three feet to the left to defeat the most persistent leak, the one that had soaked through the canopy. Everything smelled of mildew.

  She heard Will on the landing, in the hallway, each footfall descending like a blow, and then he was at the door, the door pushing partway open and his face hanging there in the gloom of the hallway—he was making an assessment of the prevailing conditions, of the leaks and the half-full buckets and the mood of his wife, and she couldn’t blame him for that. “Minnie?” he called softly. “Are you awake still?”

  She had a sudden urge to lash out at him—drinking whiskey with the help, with Ida, inflicting Adolph on her, ignoring her all evening except as an opponent to drub at cards while he built up Ida and tore down his own daughter as if to let her win a single game would annihilate him—but she checked herself. She was the one at fault. Everything had been so tranquil in the afternoon, the rain at the window, the fire giving up its heat, the neck of the bottle poised over her glass and then his and the two of them sitting down to a quiet chat for the first time in as long as she could remember, but then she’d had to spoil it. Had to nag at him. Truth told, she’d all but driven him from the room. Driven him to the kitchen. And
she was on the verge of taking the thought one step further—driven him to Ida—but the thought was inadmissible, a fantasy, a delusion, Will her husband, Ida the servant, a second daughter, family. A child. All but a child. “Yes,” she said, “I’m awake.”

  He edged into the room and shut the door gently behind him. He’d patted down his hair, though it had dried unevenly, and she could see that he’d scrubbed his hands to remove the tar, or most of it, anyway. “I see the leaks have stopped—or slowed at least.”

  “It’s an improvement, yes,” she said.

  “As soon as it stops, I’ll get back up there and fix it permanently.”

  She watched him move round the room, shrugging out of his jacket, unbuttoning his shirt, pulling the chair to him to sit and remove his trousers, a man getting ready for bed, the most pedestrian thing in the world, and intimate, deeply intimate, her man, her husband, and what had she been thinking? They were married. Man and wife. She loved him. He loved her. “If you like,” he said, stripped to his underwear now, the hard muscles of his legs flexed against the grip of the cotton cloth, his arms hanging loose at his sides and the heavy spill of his abdomen suspended before him, “I can empty these buckets. It won’t take but a minute.”

  “No,” she said, “no need to bother.” She sat up, pushed back the covers so he could see her there in her nightgown. Her throat was bare. Her hair ran loose over her shoulders. She was breathing steadily, easily, the cold and damp nothing to her, nothing at all—she was in Italy, that was where she was, and the sirocco had swept out of Africa to dry the ditches and scorch the fields. “Come to bed, Will,” she said.

  * * *

  Next morning, he was up before her, up and out the door, thundering down the stairs to the kitchen and breakfast and then to his gum boots and mackintosh and the shovel that roughened his hands and tore at the muscles of his back and shoulders till he was so stiff some evenings he could barely straighten up. She wanted to massage him, rub his shoulders, ease his burden, but more often than not she was asleep by the time he came to bed. Last night was different. She was awake and present and after he’d turned out the light and come to her, his weight straining the mattress and she slipping helplessly toward him as if down a gentle sloping hill, she’d tried to be a wife to him, tried to open up, feel him, but she couldn’t seem to let herself go. He groped at her, his fingers seeking her out, rucking up her nightdress, fastening on her breasts, the bulk of him rising up, pressing at her till she wasn’t so much aroused as embarrassed—her shrunken breasts, her ribs that were like the stony reefs the tide exposed, the poor wasted shanks of her legs—and all she could think was that he was embracing a corpse. You’re so thin, he murmured, working at her, working, kissing her throat, her ears, the parting of her hair, and in his moment of passion he actually took hold of her chin and pressed his mouth to hers until she spoke his name aloud, firmly, harshly, and turned her face away.

  She felt ashamed of herself. Felt weak and inadequate. And as she lay there now listening to the rain that still hadn’t let up, the rain that had become a burden, a weight that lay over everything, squeezing and compressing the air till it might have been raining inside her, raining in her lungs and her heart and her brain too, she thought of him out there on the road in the thick of it, his back aching, his shoulders on fire, plunging the shovel into the wet yielding earth as if it mattered, as if anything mattered. She forced herself out of bed, the first long spasm catching her by surprise. She coughed, heaved for breath, coughed. The pitcher, the glass, the little brown bottle, the spoon with its residue. And then her clothes. She took a long while dressing—no matter how low she might have been she had to think of Edith, of setting an example, because if she didn’t do it, who would?—and then she drew up a chair to the mirror, combed out her hair and pinned it up.

  The light was poor, but even so, even at a glance, she could see how reduced she looked. Her skin was porous, gray, stretched as tight as the lamb’s hide Adolph had tacked up on the side of the barn, while her eyes seemed larger, disproportionately so, as if her features had sunk into them. She pinched her cheeks to bring up the color, but nothing came, and she resorted to her rouge, twin dabs of it worked into the hollows of her cheeks, but the effect seemed worse somehow. No matter. She had a duty to perform and that duty involved Will, her husband, who was out there in the rain, working for increase and profit, working for her.

  It was ten-thirty in the morning by her pocket watch when she came downstairs, and it was past eleven by the time she’d brewed a full pot of coffee and wrapped up half a dozen sandwiches of lamb and onion in a towel she positioned beside the coffee in the depths of a straw basket. Then she put on her coat and hat, took up her parasol and went out the front door, down the steps and into the rain.

  The footing was bad, but she’d expected that—what she hadn’t expected was the feeling of release that swept over her as soon as the door pulled shut behind her. She was out of doors, only that, and it came to her that it was the first time she’d been out in days. The house loomed at her back, but she never turned her head. She was watching her feet, concentrating on keeping her balance in the roiling sepia mud that clung to the toes of her boots and sucked at her heels. The rain drummed at the parasol. Everything smelled of fresh-turned earth.

  She found Will just beyond the second outcrop, wielding his shovel in a torrent, Adolph and Jimmie pitching in beside him, and it was like the day of the lobsters, only the wheelbarrow was filled with a yellow soup of diluted mud and all three of them looked hopeless. “I brought hot coffee,” she said. “And sandwiches.”

  “You shouldn’t have come out here in this,” Will said even as he jammed the shovel into the ground and moved toward her, Adolph and Jimmie setting down their tools and moving too now, as if they’d been awakened from a dream.

  “I know how hard you’ve been working,” she said, her feet sliding in the muck, her shoes ruined and stockings soaked through, “and I just felt you could do with a boost, something to warm you, all of you.” She couldn’t set the basket down—it would have been washed away, sluiced over the side of the path and flung down into the ravine that was roaring now with its burden of crashing rock and churning yellow water—and she was having difficulty in trying to hold it out to Will and at the same time keep the parasol upright. In that moment she saw how absurd it was to have brought the basket to them—where would they drink their coffee or eat the sandwiches that would turn to paste the minute they took them up? There was no cover, no place to sit, the rain beating down without remit, everything in motion, gray above, dun below.

  But they came to her, crowding in under the poor protection of the parasol, and they held out the cups she provided so that she could pour for each of them in turn and they took the sandwiches and lifted them to their mouths, their eyes gone distant as they chewed.

  She wanted to say something about the conditions, how they really ought to think about giving it up for the day before someone got washed into the ravine or buried beneath a mudslide, but instead she turned to Will—Will, with his mustaches dripping and the crown of his hat collapsed round his ears—and clucked her tongue. “You poor man,” she said.

  He was chewing. He brought the coffee to his lips. “If you think this is bad, you should have seen it in the war.”

  Adolph’s eyes were dead, Jimmie looked as if he were asleep on his feet. “This isn’t the war,” she said.

  He gulped down the coffee, turned the cup over to drain the dregs and handed it to her. Then he rocked back on his heels, the rain driving at his face, and grinned. “I admit it,” he said, “conditions could be better.” And he looked to Adolph and Jimmie and then back to her again. “But at least nobody’s shooting at us.”

  The Cake

  Ida was first (her birthday was the eighth of February and Edith’s the twelfth) and everyone felt they should make the day special for her, so even though it was raining aga
in—still, forever, it seemed—and she’d barely slept and felt as if she’d been run through with a sword, Marantha was up early and shuffling round the kitchen, seeing to the flour, sugar, butter and eggs for the cake. Ida had already served breakfast, the men eating at the table in the parlor though she’d forbidden it, or thought she had, and now Ida was taking a mop to the floor there, everything smeared with mud and the very walls reeking of mold and rot and the sort of deep penetrating dampness no stove could ever hope to dry out. She’d given Ida a good dressing-down for serving the men in the house—and for the carpet too, because the carpet was hopeless after they’d got done with it. Ruined. Fit for the trash and nothing else.

  “Don’t be such a scold,” Will had said, hateful, lecturing her, taking Ida’s side, his eyes like pinpricks and his nose stabbing at her out of the tanned hide of his face. “You can’t expect the hands to take their plates all the way out across the yard in this kind of weather. That’s just unreasonable. Worse: it’s inhumane.” She’d felt mean and pinched and so she threw it right back at him: “Inhumane? What do you call serving up that poor child’s pet for dinner? What about forcing your own wife to live like some gypsy in a caravan? You tell me that.”

  For herself, she’d breakfasted in her room on tea and toast with a bit of jam while writing in her diary, as if there were anything to report but rain and tedium and more of the same, and when the men had gone out to their digging, she’d come down to the kitchen. The stove was hot still, at least there was that. The kettle boiled right away and she had herself a second cup of tea, with two full teaspoons of sugar stirred in (why not—it wasn’t as if she had to worry over her weight) and that gave her a lift. Of course, whatever she needed, whether it was a proper mixing bowl, a measuring cup or a whisk to beat the eggs, was either back in Santa Barbara or buried amongst the mouse pellets in some dismal back corner, but still she managed to find a suitable pan, grease it with the butter Ida had churned the day before yesterday and get things under way, using a teacup for measuring and one of the clay crocks in lieu of a bowl.