by Boyle, T. C.
He’d been poised there in the doorway, urgent and impatient, and his face told her what should have been evident from the moment they boarded the ship or before that even, when Ida had come to her to say she was leaving because she was going to have a baby nobody wanted. There were three men in the household and one girl. Or woman. She was a woman now, by default. And he didn’t care if she never saw the inside of a schoolroom again. He needed a cook. And she was elected.
But the stove wouldn’t light and the food hadn’t been sorted or the dishes washed or the floor swept. She looked round her grimly. There was no water. No apron. Every pot and pan was blackened and crusted over and what was she to scrub them with? Where was the soap? The washcloth?
And cook? Cook what? She’d never cooked a thing in her life, not even an egg. For as long as she could remember, they’d had a cook in the house. Before Ida it had been Mrs. Hedges, who’d served as nanny as well, and on the cook’s day off her mother would boil a handful of potatoes to go with the cold roast Mrs. Hedges had set aside the night before. If she was hungry, there was always food, and sometimes, when she was little, Mrs. Hedges would indulge her by allowing her to climb up on a stool and use the spatula to turn her own cheese sandwich in the pan so that it browned evenly on both sides. She’d baked cookies with her mother, of course, like any other girl, and after her mother fell ill she liked to sit in the kitchen feeling blessed and warm and protected while Mrs. Hedges fussed about and the smell of baking bread or corn muffins filled the room, and then later, when Ida took over, she’d drift into the kitchen to gossip as Ida stood at the counter rolling out dough or peeling potatoes or measuring out rice in a cup, but that hardly qualified her as a cook or even a cook’s helper. And Ida was gone. And so was her mother.
She got to her feet and wiped her hands on her coat. The kindling just wouldn’t seem to catch, each match igniting a ball of paper in a quick crackling bloom that sent up pale snaking tendrils of flame and then died as it reached the wood above, and now it had become a challenge, a contest between her and the powers of the universe. She was angry, frustrated, cold, lonely, hateful, but she set her brain to it. She tried the handle on the flue—it should be straight up and down, shouldn’t it? Another ball of paper, another match. Nothing. She crumpled more paper, opened the vents and separated the individual sticks of kindling to widen the gaps and admit more air, blew on the wavering tentative flame till she ran out of breath, and still nothing. Maybe the kindling wasn’t dry enough, maybe it had somehow absorbed the dampness of the house. She removed it all, stick by stick, set it beside her on the floor and reached into the box beside the stove for more—and this was dry, certainly it was, dry as the paper itself. Painstakingly, she set one stick across the other, beginning with the smaller ones and working her way up.
She was bent over the open door of the stove, her lips pursed, fanning the ghost of a flame and blowing softly till it quivered and rose and died again, when the back door swung open and Jimmie came in out of the dark. Crouched there on her knees in the dirt, her hair in her eyes and her skirts and petticoat filthy already, she could only scowl at him. “It won’t light,” she said.
“Won’t light?” He gave her a smile that was like a tic, formed and fled before it registered. His arms hung loose, his jaw went slack. This was the first good look she’d had of him since they landed, and if she was miserable, if she hated the sight of this place and of him too because he was part and parcel of it, the presiding spirit, Caliban, she was curious at the same time. He’d changed in the year and a half since she’d seen him last. There seemed to be more to him. More breadth to his shoulders, a firmness to the legs she remembered as being so scrawny and shapeless she wondered how they’d managed to keep him upright. He wore the spotty beginnings of a mustache over his lip, twists of dark hair like plants stuck randomly in the soil of a frost-killed garden. His hair crawled down his neck. His clothes were worn to threads. Jimmie. He was Jimmie all the same.
“I’ve been trying for the past ten minutes.” She stood, brushing her hands on her skirt. “I twisted the flue back and forth and I’m sure it’s open—”
“Let me have a look,” he said, going to his knees so fast it was as if he were diving for cover. Balancing on one hand, he thrust his head through the open gap of the stove, peering upward. “I don’t see nothing,” he said, his voice echoing in the pipe. In the next moment he was on his feet again, standing beside her, and she felt a pulse of satisfaction: he was still shorter than she was.
“Could it be the pipe? Is the pipe stopped up?”
“Could be,” he said, bending to pluck a length of stovewood from the box. “I couldn’t say, really, because I’ve been doing my cooking out in the bunkhouse since Mr. Reed that was here come out to the island. Here, let me try this”—and before she could think to slam shut the door he hammered the pipe with the length of wood, the pipe gave back a corresponding thump and rattle, and there was soot everywhere. “There,” he said, and he sneezed three times in rapid succession, “that ought to do it. Go ahead and light it now.”
She waited a moment till the air cleared, then bent again to the stove and the kindling there and put the match to it. This time it took and the next thing she knew she was feeding the fire with progressively thicker sticks and it was already rising and snapping and throwing off heat. “Thank you,” she said. “I should have thought to do that myself.”
There was a silence. She warmed her hands at the fire and he moved in beside her, holding out his palms to the blaze. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello? What do you mean, ‘hello’?”
“Well, we didn’t have a chance—I saw you at the beach, of course, when you came in, but I didn’t, not till now . . . What I mean is, we haven’t seen each other in such a long while and I thought I’d just say hello. Again. After all this time. How are you? Are you well?”
“I was well,” she said, “till I came out here.”
“You look beautiful.”
She heard him as if from a great distance, as if she were in the dining hall at school and his voice was carrying across the waves all the way up the coast and over the rooftops, and she despised him, she did, but she was already thinking of what he might be worth to her and what he might do for her and how she could use him as an ally in the war she was already engaged in, whether she was ready for it or not. She brought her eyes up. Her voice went soft. “Hello,” she said. And then: “It’s nice to see you again.”
Graveyard of the Pacific
So she became a cook. Not a dancer, not a singer, not a student, but a cook. On an island that was known, if it was known at all, for its wrecks, for the fogs that sucked it into invisibility, the winds that sheared round Point Conception to snap masts and tatter sails and drive ships up on its rocks, for the shriek of rending wood. People called it the Graveyard of the Pacific. She called it Nowhere. At night, when she lay in her damp bed—everything damp, always damp, mold creeping over the mattress like a wet licking tongue and the walls beaded with condensation—she listened to the wind, to the distant tolling of ship’s bells and the fading ghostly cries of the foxes that were no bigger than a cat, and her mind spun away into fantasies of escape. She wished she had a boat. Wished she could swim like a fish. Or just walk across the water like Jesus, but then Jesus never faced such surf in the Sea of Galilee. Or wind. Or sharks. Or the ghost of the Chinaman you could hear wailing on nights when the moon was dark because he’d had to sever his own hand with a rusty knife and leave it there wedged between two rocks or drown with the tide.
Her first efforts in the kitchen were clumsy and inadequate, everything tasteless, burned, the beans hard as gravel and the soup so salty it was like spooning up seawater. She was at a loss. The stove was too hot, then it wasn’t hot enough. Pots boiled over, meat blackened in the oven. She served the three men at table through breakfast (overcooked eggs and chalky gruel), luncheon (lamb or sa
lt pork fried in lard, with hot sauce, Mexican beans, fried potatoes and bread that was like hardtack because it wouldn’t rise) and dinner (more of the same), and sat at the far end of the table with her own plate and watched their faces as they lifted one forkful after another to their lips. They grimaced, sluicing the meat into the beans and the potatoes into the meat, mashing the whole business together and drowning it in grease, hot sauce and pepper, but no one complained, or at least not to her face. In fact, during those first weeks everyone seemed to tiptoe around her, Adolph vague and elusive, Jimmie solicitous, her stepfather going out of his way to conciliate her now that he’d seen she was going to be compliant, if not exactly reconciled to her lot—but then what choice did she have?
He did the slaughtering and showed her how to sharpen the knives and cut chops and sear them in the pan or rub a leg of lamb with thyme and rosemary and bake it so that the juices flowed and it didn’t taste like wood pulp. When they had turkey—or more rarely, chicken—Jimmie cornered the bird, took off its head with a stroke of the hatchet and hung it by its feet to bleed out, but it was up to her to scald and pluck and gut it, the wet eviscera steeping her hands and getting up under her nails so that she was forever picking at them and running her orange stick over her cuticles. The first time, she tried to spare herself, poking gingerly at the pale stippled skin with the tip of her knife until Jimmie took it from her and ripped the bird open from the slot at its rear all the way to the breastbone, and when she tried to dislodge the organs with a knife and spoon rather than her fingers, Jimmie just reached in and tore them out. “There’s nothing to be squeamish of,” he said. “It’s just animals. Meat, that’s all it is.”
The days tumbled past. Her hands toughened. She cut herself or burned her palm on the stove or the handle of the frying pan two or three times a day and learned to ignore it. Out of boredom—and a sense of standards, that too—she cleaned up the kitchen till it was as orderly as when Ida and her mother had been in charge, and very gradually, as a matter of self-preservation as much as anything else, she began to find that she did have a way with cooking after all. Not that there was much range for variation—the meals were standardized to the point of ritual and the household was forever running short of one thing or another so that she had to improvise more often than not—but at least things seemed to taste better, or at least she thought they did. She never did get the knack of baking—her loaves were like wheaten bricks, her bread pudding dense and unpliable. And when she fried abalone steaks, no matter how often she shifted the pan around the stovetop, they were invariably sodden, tasteless and tough. After a while, even though abalone were her stepfather’s favorite dish (at least in the abstract, since they cost nothing), he stopped bringing them to her.
She’d heard it said that people could get used to anything, like the Arctic explorers who had to butcher their dogs just to keep from starving and then wear their coats around as if the animals who’d inhabited them had never been their companions and confidants, or the prisoners in solitary confinement who made do with a rat or roach for company—or even Robinson Crusoe, who got so inured to his island he didn’t want to leave it—but to her way of thinking adaptability was a curse. She sank into the usual and the usual had nothing to do with her life. The evenings were hardest. During the day she was so busy with the chores she hardly had time to think and when she wasn’t cleaning up after one meal and preparing the next she made time to get out and away from the house, tramping the dunes and ridges of the island till she became as strong and fit as an Alpinist and her mind ran free. (If she saw a lamb that had been abandoned she left it where it lay bleating and if Jimmie or her stepfather came across it, they butchered it and ate spring lamb and she didn’t think twice about it. She wasn’t a sentimentalist, not anymore.) But in the evenings, after the meal had been served and the dishes washed, the emptiness overwhelmed her.
She made a fourth for whist most nights, glad for the distraction, and more often than not chose Jimmie as her partner (“Excellent choice,” her stepfather would say, always in his best humor at the card table, “pitting the young folks against the old once again, isn’t that right, Adolph? And who do you think’ll win this time?”). Jimmie wasn’t much use as a player, though—he was too busy gaping at her or gazing off across the room as if he’d been hypnotized and he never gave a thought to protecting his cards so that her stepfather always seemed to know what suit Jimmie was going to bid before he did himself. Still, once in a while they did win a hand, and on rare occasions a game or two, and when they did she couldn’t help taking satisfaction in the way her stepfather’s face froze up with disappointment. There was the Ouija board too, but without her mother there to guide them, the messages seemed bland and obvious (Spirits abide; Sheep money; Treasure comes horizon) and though they were all eager to hear from the beyond, her mother’s spirit never entered the room. The men didn’t much care for the game in any case and after two or three attempts, she put the board away and never retrieved it again.
But God in heaven was she bored! She took up with Jimmie where they’d left off—she the mistress, he the slave—but it wasn’t the same. She’d seen what life was now, Ida exiled, her mother dead, her stepfather set in place to rule over her and all her prospects rubbed off the board as if her own life were a game she’d already lost, and their play-acting seemed to take on an intensity she hadn’t felt before. Jimmie had changed. He wasn’t content to be her foil, not the way he once was. He was stronger, more sure of himself, and he understood perfectly well that her pool of companions had drawn down to one. “I’m the ram,” he said, giving her a look. “And what does that make me,” she said in return, “the ewe?” His eyes jumped away and then came back to her again. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the single syllable as if this were a philosophical proposition he was mulling over at length, “that’s right. That’s it exactly.” She was bored. He was bored too. And when her stepfather tried to discourage them from spending time together, from hiking, beachcombing, swimming—anything out of his sight and control—they came together all the more determinedly.
It began almost at once, in the very first week. Jimmie was in the kitchen, helping her put things in order—she had him up on the stepladder driving nails into the high beam so that she could hang things there and get them out of the way—and she’d just handed him the cast-iron stewpot when he sprang down off the top step, laughing aloud in a sudden excess of spirits, took her in his arms and danced her across the room to a madcap rhythm all his own. The first few steps were awkward, almost as if they were grappling, but she let herself go and followed him and they went round the room two times, three, both of them laughing now. Everything had been grim—everything was grim—and here was this burst of exhilaration to take her by surprise. She was alive after all, giddy suddenly. And when she pushed him away—pushed hard, as if they were children roughhousing on the playground—and then pulled him to her so that they were breast to breast and their faces inches apart, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to kiss him. On the lips. And this was a different sort of kiss altogether, qualitatively different, nothing at all like when he kissed her hand like a courtier or she’d made him press his lips to her feet, her ankles, her calves and thighs—this was mutual, a partnership, ram and ewe, and she could feel the heat of him burning and burning as if she’d gone right inside of him to live there like Jonah in the belly of the whale.
After that, they began meeting whenever they could, when her stepfather was out riding with Adolph or when he’d sent Jimmie into the fields on one pretext or another and she sneaked away to meet him there. At first, they explored each other through their clothes, fumbling and inexact, stroking and squeezing and feeling what each had to offer, and then she wanted to see him—see what it was, the male organ—and she made him strip naked before her. It was in February, three weeks after she’d arrived, and conditions were hardly ideal. The ground was wet, the day steely and brisk, with a low clo
ud cover and a wind that sang through the chaparral. They’d found a protected place, deep in one of the ravines, where the rocks hemmed them in and the bushes that had escaped the sheep had begun to flower and sweeten the air. “I want you to remove your clothes,” she said, “all your clothes.”
He dropped his jacket on the ground, making a sort of bed of it, and he pulled his shirt up over his head, eager, grinning at her, his eyes focused and daring. Off came his boots, then his trousers, so that he was standing there in his union suit and stocking feet. “Everything? Even my socks?”
“Go on,” she said, and her eyes were fixed on his. “No malingering. What are you waiting for?”
He reached behind him for the buttons, his arms elbowing out, then pulled the garment down to his waist so that she saw the black tangled hair at his nipples and his navel—a sort of Christ’s cross of it there—and then he was bent over, stripping the fabric from his groin and legs as if it were a second skin. When he rose back up to stand before her in a confusion of limbs and a torso bleached white as flour where the sun had never touched it, there it was, the male organ, standing out rigidly from the dark nest of his groin as if it were an arrow that had been shot into him and stuck there, wooden and hard. But it wasn’t hard. Or it was, but it was soft too. She took it in her hands, chafed it, squeezed, rubbed, slid her fingers beneath it, at the root, thinking of Ida. This was what Ida had taken inside her, this quivering veiny blood-engorged thing that was like an animal itself—that had been how the baby came to grow there, and even then, even with Jimmie standing before her and moving to her touch with his mouth hanging slack and his eyes pressed shut, she refused to admit or even consider who had been the second party involved, though she knew, she knew.
