by Boyle, T. C.
She washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen while the shearers filed out to the bunkhouse, Jimmie tagging along behind, then waited till her stepfather and Adolph had settled in at the card table before taking a chair out into the yard to sit there with a book in the declining light of the evening. The book was Wuthering Heights, which she’d read so many times the pages had worked loose from the binding. She’d come to hate it, actually, all that rural misery and star-crossed romance she’d once found so exotic and appealing but was now just a burden to her because it was one thing to picture the scene from a sofa in a San Francisco apartment and another to see it out the window, but that didn’t matter. The book was a prop. As was the chair. She’d combed out her hair and tied it back with a new red sateen ribbon she’d bought on the visit to Santa Barbara and though her dress was out of fashion it was the best one she had and it was clean and ironed and she’d dabbed perfume under the arms and in the pleats of her collar.
The breeze was light for once, blowing across the yard and carrying the stench of the pigs away with it. Overhead, long ghosting trails of vapor went from gray to pink with the setting sun. She turned the pages of the book, staring down at the words but making no sense of them, working at the trick of shifting her eyes to the porch of the bunkhouse and the clot of dark figures gathered there without giving herself away. For the longest while, nothing happened. She held herself rigid, the light softened, fell away. It was almost dark now and she wouldn’t be able to keep up the imposture much longer. She was about to give it up and go back into the house when there was movement on the porch, a figure separating itself from the others, and suddenly it was as if she’d been transported to another world altogether because she was hearing music, music out here in the barrens—a guitar, the elided figures, the strummed chords—and she couldn’t help but turn her head.
It was Rafael. He was standing at the base of the bunkhouse steps, one leg lifted to the bottom riser and the guitar resting on his thigh, the fingers of one hand tensing and releasing over the neck of the instrument while he strummed slow emphatic chords with the other. The rest of the shearers were lined up like statues on the benches along the wall, Jimmie amongst them. Rafael was looking down at his hands, deep in concentration. The others—to a man—were looking at her.
The rhythm quickened, beating steadily toward some sort of release, and then Rafael lifted his head, looked across the yard to her and began to sing:
Si tu boquita morena
Fuera de azúcar, fuera de azúcar,
Yo me lo pasaría,
Cielito lindo, chupa que chupa.
She didn’t know the song or what the words meant, but when the chorus rang out in soaring full-throated abandon—Ay, ay, ay, ay—she knew he was singing not for his compatriots lined up along the wall or for her stepfather immured in the house or the sheep in their coats or the rolling broken dusty chaparral, but for her, for her only.
* * *
The shearers were to be there for two weeks and then the boat would collect them and they’d go back to wherever they’d come from till the sheep’s coats grew out and they made their rounds once more. It was her intention to be on that boat with them. She didn’t know how she was going to manage it, but she looked to Rafael, encouraging him in any way she could, making sure to brush by him in the doorway when he came in for meals, letting her eyes jump to his and then away again, lingering outside each evening to hear him raise his voice in song till her stepfather went out on the porch to spit and light a cigar and call her in. She had to tread carefully—her stepfather was more vigilant than ever with men on the property and Jimmie shadowed her like a spy. Jimmie. Jimmie was the enemy now and no doubting it.
Rafael didn’t offer to help after that first night, and yet it wasn’t that he didn’t want to—he was polite and well bred, she could see that—but because the others wouldn’t allow it. They’d heckled him at the table and what they must have said to him in private she could only imagine. Let them have their fun. They were crude men, ignorant, unlettered, and what they’d seen of the world was limited to bunkhouses and sheep pens. He was different. And she knew he liked her. There was a sympathy between them—or no, a current as powerful and jolting as anything a magneto and a copper wire could generate. He was handsome, what the Mexicans call guapo, with his unexpected eyes and the way he stood out from the others like a prince amongst peasants, taller, straighter, his forearms corded with muscle beneath the fringe of his rolled-up sleeves and his secretive smile that was reserved for her alone.
Near the end of the second week, on the final day of the shearing—and she was counting the days off, tense and impatient, sick to her stomach with the thought of the opportunity passing her by—he slipped her a note as he came in for dinner with the others. She’d rung the bell on the porch as usual and stayed there to greet the men as they came up the steps, and he’d been last, holding back purposely. His hand flitted toward hers as he shifted past her and there was the quick hot touch of him and then the note was in her hand, a twice-folded scrap of paper that fit her palm like a holy wafer. She went straight through the room, down the hall and into the kitchen with it. Come to me, it read. Midnight. Behind the privy.
It was nothing to slip out of the house. Her stepfather, exhausted from the exertions of the roundup and shearing—nearly two weeks into it now and he an old man no matter his protestations to the contrary—had forgone his cards and whiskey and retired early. By nine, when she damped the lights and went up to bed, she could hear him snoring thunderously from down the hall and he was still at it at quarter to twelve when she crept back down the stairs and out into the night. She eased the door shut behind her and stood there a moment on the back porch, listening. Nothing moved. All was silence.
It was chilly, and the minute she stepped off the porch she wanted to go back for a wrap, but didn’t dare risk it. She was wearing the dress she’d put on that morning, though she’d been prepared to change into her nightdress if her stepfather had been up and about—he was in the habit of easing open her door to wish her a good night, especially if he saw the light on, and she wouldn’t want him to suspect there was anything out of the ordinary. A fog had set in, but it was thin and diaphanous, the three-quarters moon shining through it to light the way. Not that it would have mattered: she knew the yard as intimately as a convict knows his cell and could have found her way even in the pitch dark.
There were stirrings in the brush. The fog sifted down and it was as if the darkness itself had come to life, pulsing and fluctuating in a tincture of moonlight. Before she’d gone a hundred feet she was out of breath, and it wasn’t because she was weak or tired—it was nerves, that was all. She tried to keep her composure, telling herself to proceed with caution, to go slowly with him, to let him see and value her for what she was before she let him kiss her, touch her, but all night she’d felt herself racing as if he were pulling her to him on that thin hammered thread of wire. The W.C. was a black monolith, a shadow amongst shadows. The smell of it stabbed at her. She circled round back of it, thinking how clever he was—if anyone should see her, she had her excuse, just going to the privy, that was all. The call of nature. She smiled to herself.
But where was he? All she could make out were the dark hummocks of rock giving back a faint glow under the moonlight and the scraps of ragged vegetation bunched up round her like discarded clothing. Had he forgotten about her? Led her on? Played a joke on her? And if he had—and here she pictured him lying in the darkened bunkhouse with a smirk on his face—she’d spit on his eggs in the morning, slap him right there at the table in front of everyone, tell her stepfather he’d . . . but then one of the dark hummocks before her unfolded suddenly and there he was.
“Cariña,” he whispered, taking her by the hand and swinging round to lead her through the brush without so much as a kiss or caress, moving swiftly. His grip was tight, too tight, as if he was afraid she’d break away f
rom him, but she didn’t hold back, didn’t protest, just followed him, stumbling, her breath coming quick and hard. They moved swiftly, no time for thought or hesitation, and when they came to the fence he stopped to shift his hands to her waist and lift her over into the dried-up field where the hay had long since been cut and the sheep let in to browse the stubble to bare dirt. And then, like Jimmie, he shrugged out of his jacket—or no, it wasn’t a jacket but a kind of blanket, what they called a serape—and spread it out on the ground.
She watched the shadow of him bend to the blanket and then he was pulling her down beside him, twisting her round so that her feet went out from under her and she came down hard and all she could think of was a lamb flipped over for shearing. Without a word he began to dig at her, at her skirts, her legs, his hands rooting there, and he pressed his face to hers, not for a kiss but to strain against her. His cheek was a wire brush. His hands were stone. She wanted him to stop, wanted to talk, wanted a promise, and now that it was too late she saw how naive she’d been to think he’d be satisfied with kisses and the kind of manipulation she’d practiced on Jimmie. He dug at her, tore her undergarments, and still he didn’t kiss her. His cheek chafed against hers, he rocked and tensed and shoved himself into her and now she was the one made of stone, and not just her hands but the whole of her, as if the weight of him had petrified her.
Afterward, when he was done and he pulled out of her and sat there in the dark whispering Cariña, cariña, she lay rigid watching the stars poke holes in the torn fabric of the night, and then he wanted her again and if he did what he liked what did it matter? When it was over, finally and absolutely, and she felt everything begin to dry and tighten and tug at her skin like so many tiny crepitating hooks, she pushed herself up. He was sitting there beside her, burning something—a cigarette, he was smoking a cigarette, the smoke harsh and stinging. She couldn’t see his eyes. She could barely make out his face, a dark oval hung there on a hook of nothing. “Rafael,” she said, and it was the first word she’d spoken since he’d pulled her down, “I want you to take me away.”
He said nothing.
“Please.” Her voice seemed foreign to her own ears, a thin tensile rope of sound drawn out of some deep place inside her. She thought she might begin to cry.
“Away to where?” he said finally.
“Anywhere. Just away.”
He was silent a long moment. He inhaled and the cigarette flared and still she couldn’t see his face.
“On the boat,” she said. “When you go tomorrow with the others.”
“Captain Waters,” he said, his voice low and disconnected, “he will oppose it.”
“He won’t know,” she said, and though she was made of stone and could barely work her muscles or lift her arm from her lap, she took hold of his hand in the dark and stroked it, her thumb moving against the callus of his palm, the gentlest friction, over and over. “Take me,” she said. “Just take me.”
* * *
By the time the first tremulous sliver of light appeared on the horizon she was already up and stirring about the kitchen. Her movements were slow and mechanical, her feet tracing the floorboards by rote as she bent to the stove, put on water for coffee, mixed the batter for flapjacks and set the pot of beans, eternal beans, on the stovetop. Everything was ordinary, everything in its place. If she paused a moment and held her breath she could hear the distant ratcheting of her stepfather’s snoring as if some metallic creature were patiently boring through the walls, but there was no other sound. She ground coffee beans and told herself she didn’t feel appreciably different, though she was truly a woman now—and here a voice in her head that might have been her mother’s took the thought a step further: a fallen woman, ruined, like the heroine of one of the Hardy novels her parents wouldn’t let her read. She didn’t care. She was numb to it. Something had happened and now it was over. She’d washed herself in the basin after she’d crept into the house at one in the morning and then sat in front of the mirror for the longest time, staring into her own eyes, and there was nothing different there, not a trace—she was Edith Waters, still and always, a very pretty girl, consummately pretty, who was going to go onstage and acknowledge the applause of hundreds and hundreds of elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen with a deep bow and a flush of modesty.
The water came to a boil. The first bird began to call. And then there was a thump at the back door, the dog nosing there to be let in and fed, and the day, which for all appearances was like any other day, started in. She didn’t so much as glance in Rafael’s direction at breakfast for fear of giving herself away—or of breaking down, or no, choking, actually choking over the emotion wadded in her throat that was so dense and heartbreaking she could barely swallow—and she took her own breakfast out in the kitchen to avoid his eyes, their eyes, the eyes of the men. He’d made her his solemn promise and the plan had been set in motion. She’d packed her suitcase and laid out her best clothes and gloves and hat. When the men were at work—only a half day today, clearing up the odds and ends, hauling the sacks of wool to the barn, packing up their shears and knives and bedrolls—she would conceal the suitcase in a clump of rocks just off the road that led to the harbor and then, after luncheon, instead of washing and stacking the dishes and scrubbing the counter and sweeping the floor, she would go upstairs and dress and then steal away to wait for Rafael.
Yes. And then, when the others had gone out to the schooner (it was Lawrence Chiles’ boat, not Charlie Curner’s, thank God, because there was no telling what Charlie Curner would have done when he discovered her aboard), Rafael would claim he’d forgotten something—his guitar, which he’d have purposely left behind one of the rocks at the beach, nothing to it, just ten minutes at the oars, and they’d wait, they’d have to. She’d crouch in the bow, hidden beneath his serape, and when they got out to the ship she’d do her best to slip aboard unnoticed but if they knew and saw it would be nothing to them because this was between her and Rafael and nobody else. She was almost eighteen. She was a woman. She could do what she wanted in this world.
Luncheon. There was extra wine, unwatered, because it was a kind of celebration, the work concluded and the men on their way home, and maybe they had families to go to, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, sons. She served at table, then kept herself apart, and though she felt Rafael there like a fire burning in the center of her being, she didn’t look at him, no more than she had at breakfast. There were handclasps and farewells that traveled from the parlor and across the yard, the dog excitedly barking and the chickens scattering, and then they were gone. Jimmie and Adolph went off into the fields and she waited at the kitchen door to see what her stepfather would do, praying he wouldn’t take it in his head to walk down to the harbor to see them off. He’d lingered with the Italiano, who was the last of the shearers to start down the road, but finally he’d turned and come back into the house. She heard him go up the stairs, then there was the sound of his door easing shut and finally the groan of the bedsprings. He’d drunk wine, a quantity of it—she’d made sure to keep his glass full—and now he was having his siesta.
By the time she got to the place where she’d stowed her suitcase, she looked out to sea and saw that the shearers had reached the schooner, which sat the waves as if it had been propped there on wooden pillars, scarcely shifting with the action of the water. The sun was abroad. The sea shone. The men were like stick figures in the distance. She snatched up the suitcase and hurried down the road even as the dinghy swung back round with a single figure at the oars.
As she followed the switchbacks down the road the dinghy floated in and out of view, now present, now obscured by the sharply raked hillside. The suitcase dragged at her—she’d packed it with everything she could, even her books, and she’d had to kneel atop it to force the latch shut—but she kept on as best she could, her blood high, shifting the load from hand to hand till it swung like a pendulum and hurried her on. A
nd then she was there, coming round the final turning, and she saw Rafael in the boat, working hard at the oars, but it took her a moment even to begin to comprehend what she was seeing. He wasn’t heading in to shore. He was on his way out. Back out. And from the stern of the boat she could see, quite clearly, the sun-burnished neck of his guitar poking out from the nest of the serape.
She dropped the suitcase and began to run, unencumbered, her arms churning. The dinghy was a hundred yards from shore and he was facing her, leaning into the oars, but he had the sombrero pulled down low so that his features were lost to her. She called out his name. Jerked her skirts high and bolted into the surf—she would swim, swim or drown—but he kept pulling at the oars, pulling harder and harder. The sea swept in. She was wet through, her skirts wound round her legs like the twisted chain of an anchor. She called out again. Twice, three times, bleating his name till the syllables ran up against one another and made no more sense than the inarticulate cry of an animal. The surf slammed at her, drove her down and jerked her back again till she was flung shivering on the beach in a white surge of foam and Rafael slid smoothly over the rail and melted away in the depths of Lawrence Chiles’ boat.
Then the sails unfurled and caught the wind and the boat was gone.
Inez Deane
Does life go on? It does. Though she sank low enough to consider the alternative, even going so far as to take her stepfather’s rifle down from its hook and caress the trigger where it shone silver from use, and she spent one dismal fog-haunted afternoon suspended over the ocean on a fragment of rock no wider around than the seat of a chair, daring herself to jump. She could hear the crash of the waves, taste the salt-sting of the spray. The damp penetrated her hair, slicked the rock till it might have been greased. There was a cold drip from above. She pressed her back to the wall, closed her eyes and let her mind wheel away from the voice that whispered, Let go, let go, let go. She saw herself dancing then, saw herself at the piano, and presently she imagined her fingers moving over the keys, working her way through the melody bar by bar as if it were an exercise and Mr. Sokolowski seated beside her on a platform of cloud beating out the time, and it was the music that held her there. And when finally she removed her shoes so that her naked feet could anchor her and she climbed back up the rock face above her, up to the plateau beyond and the sheep scattered there in all their blank-eyed placidity, she tested each handhold as if it were her last.
