San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  She was in the kitchen one interminable afternoon two months later, taking a cleaver to the unyielding carcass of the wether Adolph had shot the day before, her brain gone as dull as the blade she had to keep sharpening over and over, when there came a tap at the door. She looked up from the chopping block, the cleaver poised above the twisted red mass of muscle, skin and tallow. The stove creaked. The faintest distant rumor of the seals barking for the sheer pleasure of it inserted itself into the silence. She thought she must have been hearing things, but then came the second tap and she set down her cleaver. Caught her breath. Wiped her hands, very slowly, on the apron, her eyes fixed on the window set in the door.

  There was a figure on the back porch, a hovering shadow, indistinct behind the drizzled panes of scoured glass. It took a moment to understand that this wasn’t her stepfather. That it wasn’t Jimmie or Adolph. That it was someone else altogether, someone new, a new face and form to align with the only three she knew because in all these hills and gullies and sea-battered coves, there were just the four of them, no one else, but for the shearers who weren’t due back till winter or the odd fisherman who came ashore to feel something beneath his feet besides swaying planks and the elastic give-and-take of cold salt water. And now a voice was attached to the form, a voice calling her name softly, a man’s voice—“Edith? Edith, is that you in there?”—and she knew that voice, didn’t she? Of course she did. It was, it was—

  She was already moving toward the door, wiping her hands furiously now, the stink of the dead animal in her nostrils, the apron filthy, her hair a mess—and she couldn’t pat it in place, wouldn’t dare, not till she washed the offal from her hands—when it came to her: Robert. It was Robert Ord. The sealer. The jack-of-all-trades. The man—the young man—who possessed a boat, his own boat, a craft with a rudder, a sail and a hull that could slice the waves like its own kind of cleaver and carry anything or anybody all the way to the pale indented shore that hovered there on the horizon like a mirage. One more wipe of the hands and she pulled open the door, his name on her lips: “Robert, Robert, what a surprise. How are you?”

  He was tall, levitating right up out of his sealskin boots, taller than she remembered, and he was grinning down at her with such burning intensity she wondered if he hadn’t been drinking. “Me?” A pause. “I’m just, well, I got a bad sore on my foot, the right one?” He held out his leg and shook it for her, his heavy cotton twill trousers spattered with white blotches that might have been paint, but then what would he have been painting out here—the cabin of his boat? “It don’t smell too good, but it’s nothing to worry over, nothing I ain’t seen before, though I told myself I should of took that splinter out of there the minute it went in, just pus, that’s all, and I guess that’ll teach me to go walking around in my bare feet . . . but what I mean to say is, how are you?”

  She wanted to give him the conventional response, wanted to say she was fine, but instead she pulled the door wide for him and ushered him in, saying, “Crushed with boredom, because nothing ever changes here, you ought to know that. But come, sit at the table and I’ll fix you something. Are you hungry? Would you like tea? I can make you toast—and we’ve got some strawberry jam left from the last time the boat came in.” If there was a flutter in her voice, it had nothing to do with calculation, not yet, anyway. She was excited, that was all—transported—because here was something new, a break in the routine, the vast towering wall of the day suddenly crumbling to dust around her.

  “Don’t go to any trouble,” he murmured, hovering, awkward, a bedroll under one arm and his coat patched at the elbows. In the next moment he was trying to ease himself into the chair at the stained table by the window, the space cramped, his legs too long, the slant roof of the kitchen angling down to confine him, and then he was seated. “I fried up some abalone on the boat this morning, so I . . .” He trailed off, then patted his pockets till he came up with what he was looking for—a bottle—and set it on the table. “Want a drink?”

  “A drink?” Her stepfather didn’t allow her to take spirits. He didn’t allow her to associate with the opposite sex or go to school or pursue her musical studies or experience anything anyone would call living because he wanted her under his wing, wanted her to cook and clean and make his bed for him while he went horseback over the hills and sat playing cards at night and drinking from his own bottle. “What is it,” she asked, “whiskey?”

  “Rum,” he said, pulling the cork with his teeth. “Fetch a glass. Two glasses.”

  He watched her, grinning, as she eased down in the chair across from him and lifted the glass to her lips. So this is rum, she was thinking, the rising vaporous odor tearing her eyes, caustic, poisonous, like nothing so much as a solvent, and then the liquid itself burning her lips, her tongue, the back of her throat. She clamped her jaws tight. Let out a gasp of surprise. Next thing she knew she was blotting her eyes with the corner of her apron.

  He laughed aloud. “No, no,” he said, “you don’t sip it, you just toss it down like this, watch.” He sat up straight in the chair and jerked his head back, draining the glass in a single gulp. “Go ahead, try it again.”

  She laughed too because it was funny, tossing rum in the kitchen at four in the afternoon—he was a tosspot, that’s what he was. She’d always wondered where that expression came from and now she knew. It was funny. Hilarious. And then she followed suit, a tosspot herself, and the shock of it very nearly seized her up—it was as if a rake had gone down her throat, or one of those enameled back-scratchers they sell in Chinatown, and the heat was inside of her now. Again she felt her jaws clamp. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come.

  “Good stuff, huh?”

  “It’s horrible. I don’t understand how anyone could drink it.”

  He shrugged, his eyes gone vague. “It’s a taste,” he said, acknowledging the point. “You get used to it.”

  “Used to it?” She could feel the effects already, at least she thought she could, a lightening of her limbs, the flutter of some organ deep inside her she never knew she had, a sense that the air had grown dense around her so she could get up and walk on it if she wanted. “I thought you were supposed to like it.”

  “Here,” he said, and he was pushing himself up from the table in a scramble of limbs and holding out a hand to her, “let’s try flavoring it for you.” She followed his lead as he pulled her across the room to where she kept the basket of oranges, grapefruit and lemons Charlie Curner periodically brought out from shore and stood beside him, watching, while he shoved the carcass of the lamb aside with the palm of one hand and sliced two oranges and a lemon in half. The carcass didn’t seem to trouble him, nor the blood on the board either. He gathered up the fruit in one hand and spun round as if he were on a holy mission—and this was funny too, everything comical suddenly—before darting back to the table for her glass and making a show of squeezing the juice into it. “Now,” he said, tipping the bottle over the glass to fill it to the brim, “try it this way. And maybe, if it’s still too strong, mix a spoon of sugar in.”

  If the light changed when the sun pulled back from the house and the barn threw its shadow across the yard, she hardly noticed. There was nothing in the world but Robert Ord and the glass before her, though she knew in a vague way that she would have to get up and see to the stove and dinner and set an extra place at some point. All in good time. In the meanwhile, there was Robert Ord and Robert Ord was a gentleman, or the best succedaneum the island could provide, and he let her sit there at her own table as if she were the guest—he insisted on it—while he got up to squeeze the bright orange and yellow rinds over her glass and tint the mixture with the dark burnt sugarcane rum, lovely rum, beautiful rum, rum that no longer smelled of chemicals but of tropical isles and the faraway. The rum was a breeze. It fanned her. Lifted her. She felt as if she were floating.

  Then, somehow, her stepfather was there, Adolph
peering over his shoulder and Jimmie there too, goggling at her from the open doorway. “Bob!” her stepfather bawled, striding across the room to slap him on the back even as Robert struggled unsteadily to his feet. In the next moment they were crowding into the room, handshakes all the way around, and if Robert was slow with his speech, no one noticed, at least not at first. They were all too enraptured by the novelty of seeing him there where they’d expected no one, firing one question after another at him: What news? How long had he been out? Had he seen Nichols last time he was ashore? He hadn’t brought any newspapers with him by any chance? A bottle? Did he have a bottle?

  It was this last inquiry that caused him to reach down to the table, take up the bottle of rum by its neck and hold it to the light. Dark stuff, dark as molasses, and only an inch of it left to swish round the heel of the bottle. “I’ve got,” he began slowly, so very slowly, “this one . . . and then”—he swayed over his feet and spread a palm on the wall to steady himself—“there’s a couple more on the boat.”

  That was when they all four looked down at her where she sat entrenched in the chair that was pushed up so tightly to the table she could scarcely move, not that she wanted to move. Her elbows were propped on the tabletop and her hands formed a brace for her chin, which suddenly seemed impossibly heavy. The silence pounded in her ears. Her stepfather looked to Robert, then to the bottle, and then, finally, to her. “What’s in that glass?” he said.

  “Juice.”

  “Juice, my eye.”

  She clarified: “Orange juice. And lemon.”

  He was drawing himself up. His hands were dirty, his forearms, dirt up under his nails and worked into his hair, his trousers stained with dried-up mud and his shirt feathered with trail dust. They’d been out riding to the far end of the island, checking the stock there, seeing to things in the season when there wasn’t much to see to. His eyes narrowed. A look of fury came over his face. And when he lunged forward to snatch the glass from her hand and lift it to his nostrils, sniffing, it was no more than she’d expected. “You’re drunk,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Don’t you lie to me. You, you—you’re disgusting.”

  “She—” Robert began, and it was as if his mouth were full of cornbread and he couldn’t risk forming his words properly, “I mean to say she was, or I did, I offered her a little drink—”

  Her stepfather swung round on him. “You stay out of this.” And then he leaned over the table so that his face was so close to hers she could smell the rankness of his breath that was no different from the smell of the meat on the chopping block where the flies had begun to dance and settle. “You’re drunk,” he said again.

  Something flashed in her then, a single whipcord of rebellion. “So what if I am. You’re drunk half the nights of the week. You were drunk when my mother—”

  “You shut your mouth. Shut it.” He bit off the words. “Right now. And you get yourself up from that table and go straight up to your room, or I’m warning you—” He didn’t finish the thought. His finger. He was wagging his finger in her face. “You’re a disgrace,” he spat, and she was already pushing back from the table, already gathering her feet to flee—how she hated him, the hypocrite, the tyrant, and who was he to boss her like a slave?—when the finger curled back into his fist and the fist slammed down on the table. “Now get! Do you hear me? Out of my sight!”

  * * *

  She was sick in her stomach all night, once the liquor wore off, that is, because it was the liquor—she understood this now—that killed the pain. That was its use. That was why the men drank it and women too, even her mother, who used to take a glass of her stepfather’s whiskey from time to time and sit sipping it in the corner, her eyes bright and her face gone slack, cradling the glass in her entwined hands as if to extract the last emollient heat of it. Twice in the night she had to get up and vomit in the chamber pot while everything seemed to swirl round her in the dark as if the earth had slipped off its track since she’d laid her head on the pillow. What they ate that night, she didn’t know. Or care. At some point the odor of frying onions and seared meat had seeped up through the floorboards, which only made her feel sicker, and she’d heard them carousing below till it was full dark and well beyond.

  She was sick. She was weak. Her head ached. But Robert Ord was leaving first thing in the morning because he had three living barking seals tied up in his nets on the deck and he didn’t want to risk losing them to death or sickness or starvation before he got them back to Santa Barbara and the man from the circus who’d put in the order for them, and she meant to intercept him when he left the bunkhouse at first light. He’d told her he wouldn’t be staying to breakfast—there were the seals, in addition to the fact that his hold was full of the guano he’d shoveled all the morning and afternoon before and there were the friable white streaks on his trousers to prove it, not paint, not paint at all—and at first she’d begged him to stay on. “I’m starved for the company,” she said, moving in closer to him at the table under the spell of the rum and the way the light sat in the windows and the whole world that had been so dreary and dull seemed suddenly magical, but then, though her brain was fuddled and the connections came slowly, she began to see the situation in a whole new light. She wrapped her hand around the muscle of his upper arm and leaned in close to him so that their faces were inches apart. “No need to stay on my account,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t mean nothing like that,” he said. “I wouldn’t—I like being here with you. Hell, I’d stay a week if I could, if I was welcome . . .”

  She would have let him kiss her, guano or no, and it didn’t smell, or not hardly, but he didn’t seem to take the hint. Maybe he was shy, maybe that was it. She held her face there, as close to his as she dared, and when he flushed and looked away, she dropped her voice to a whisper and said, “You can’t know how long it’s been since I was off the island.”

  He lifted the glass to his mouth and jerked his chin—tossing—and then turned back to her. His eyes seemed to swell and recede and swell again. The lines bunched in his face. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time. Very slowly, very tenderly, he brought his lips to hers and they did kiss, almost chastely, as if he were afraid to go too far, and it was the sort of kiss she’d practiced on Jimmie, who had the annoying habit of trying to worm his tongue into her mouth, a dry kiss. He pulled back and stared at her a moment and then she kissed him and she was the one who worked her tongue and when they broke apart this time she didn’t ask a question of him or beg a favor—she merely said, “I’m going with you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and her heart sank—he was just like the others, gutless and weak, afraid of her stepfather, afraid of the law. But then he looked her in the eye, just holding her gaze, and she could feel him working through the tangle, objection by objection, before he let out a sigh and said, “She’s riding pretty low in the water, what with all that weight. And those animals aren’t exactly the pleasantest things to be around.”

  “I don’t mind.” She gestured at the carcass of the lamb, the crude kitchen, the door that gave onto the barnyard.

  “And the guano. That’s shit, you know, gull shit.”

  “I know.”

  “It can smell something awful when it’s all packed in like that.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” she said.

  “Makes your eyes water. And it’s bound to be rough, what with her riding low, and I don’t know if you can . . . or you’ll want to—”

  “Hush,” she said, and then she leaned in and kissed him again.

  * * *

  This time, though she felt cored out and her head throbbed and she’d hardly slept, she was there to make sure of him when the door to the bunkhouse swung open beneath the pale fading screen of stars. If he was surprised to see her there, he hid it well. She’d been sitting atop her suitcase and when the door
opened she rose and came to him and he took both her hands in his and accepted the kiss she brushed against his cheek. He had his bedroll thrown up over one shoulder and a leather satchel over the other. He looked blunted and pale, his eyes heavy in his head, and she wondered about the aftereffects of the rum on him—if she felt this bad how must he have felt? Was he capable of piloting his ship? Rowing out to it? Even walking down to the beach?

  It was then that the door of the bunkhouse swung open again and her heart froze till she saw the shadow of the dog there. She watched it lift a leg to the steps of the porch, then shake itself and go off round the back of the barn, and still she stood there, waiting for what she couldn’t say.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I guess that’s your suitcase, is it?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, and they were both turning toward it now, walking in stride. And the thing was, he never hesitated, but just bent to it, took it up by the handle and continued on across the yard and down the road, moving so swiftly on his long legs she had to hurry to keep up. The day brightened around them, just perceptibly, and then, in the distance, the cock began to crow and she could picture it perched atop the shed where she’d seen it spring in a single claw-pedaling leap every morning for as long as she could remember and her only thought was that she would never have to hear it again in all her life.