T. Boyle - The Women

In the rain that seemed to have started up the minute the train left them on the platform in a volcano of smoke and cinders, Julian struggled with the weight of the steamer trunk and Gertrude’s overstuffed suitcase and when she went to help him, with that struck-dumb frog-eyed look of sympathy and hopefulness on her face, that look he hated because it demeaned him, made him into a puny slack little boy all over again, he shrugged her off. “I can handle it myself, woman. I don’t need a bit of your help. Now you just stand over there at the wagon and then you climb in and see if you can’t open that umbrella.” That was what he heard himself say, simple instructions, but his voice was choked with a kind of awakening rage she recognized in the space of one second and she stepped lively and that was that.

And what had this dishwater man come to fetch them in when any fool could see it was going to rain like the deluge itself? An open wagon pulled by a little sorrel team that looked as spoiled as household pets — a wagon, as if this was the nineteenth century still, and here he’d been telling Gertrude how they were improving themselves by going to work for a rich man in the country. He’d had enough of Chicago, where the black people acted just like they were slaves still and the whites were as ignorant and tightfisted and blunted as the Hunkies and Polacks and dumb doughy Irish Micks they were. The country. That was what he’d yearned for, thinking of the island, where at least you could get away into a field of sugarcane and talk to the sky when you had to.

But this country was different, he could see that already, see it before he climbed down off the train and hauled the trunk and suitcase to the wagon and settled in beside the dishwater man and watched the horses grind their pretty flanks. This country was desperate. Wild. They’d tried to break it with their mules and plows and axes, but it was a very hell pit of trees and bristling hilltops that ran all the way back as far as you could see, a place where bears roamed and wolves howled and the spirits of the red Indians murmured through the ghost hours of the night. And where the only black face he’d see besides Gertrude’s was when he looked into the mirror and he never looked into the mirror because he didn’t particularly like what he saw there.

So they went up the road past the blood-colored barns and planted fields in the rain that chopped and drove and hissed against the inadequacy of the umbrella, across a bridge with the river spread out under it like a mother’s lap and right into the reek of hogs. He saw the place before she did, a collection of stained sheds and a little clapboard house, a man out there in the downpour with his shovel trying to open up a ditch so the discolored waste of the animals could flow out of the pen, and he felt his heart sink when the dishwater man tugged at the reins and they started through the yard. “Is this the place?” he heard himself say, and he wouldn ’t turn his head to the dishwater man but just let the words tumble out of his mouth like something he was afraid of losing.

Here were the hogs poking their mud-crusted snouts through the slats of the fence, the stink cataclysmic, Gertrude looking woebegone and trying to keep herself from taking in a single breath, and the dishwater man let out a laugh. A laugh. As if any of this was comical. “No,” the man said. “No, this is Reider’s place.” And he pointed on up the hill through the web of the trees and there it was, the biggest house in the world creeping out of the hillside like a wounded beast, like the tail of a big golden dragon, and then they rocked through the ruts and the house came at them and Julian stepped out into the mud boiling up round the flagstones of the courtyard and ruined the shine of his new leather shoes even as his best suit of clothes drank in the wet and clung to his flanks and lay bloated and heavy across his shoulders.

“Hey, Billy!” A voice stabbed at them out of the shadows of an open stall and he saw the man whose voice it was and the motorcar at the same time, a fine expensive machine pulled up safe from the rain and painted just exactly the color of a boatload of bananas. The man was tall, with broad shoulders and a waist narrow as a girl’s, with the swollen lips and wet eyes of a sensualist. Maybe he was thirty, maybe that, no more. “Mrs. Borthwick told me to tell you to take them to their quarters to get settled and then have them come into the house so she can show them what needs to be done.”

The dishwater man was standing in the mud himself now, as unhurried as if he were bathed in sunshine. “Yeah, sure, Brodelle, just as soon as we unload here and I can get the horses unhitched — but it’s a hell of a glorious day, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” the other man said and he never moved to lend a hand, never even acknowledged that there were two people here, a man and his wife, strangers in need of assistance, “I guess so — as long as you’re a duck.”

They both of them had a laugh over that, Gertrude trying to climb down out of the wagon without getting her skirts wet and what did she think, he was going to carry her? Well, he would have, just to show them, but then she was down in the mud, trying to shield him with the umbrella, and he had hold of the trunk with everything they owned inside and they were following the dishwater man across the courtyard and into a room that smelled of old lye soap the mold had got the better of and he was so furious with himself for ruining his shoes and letting his wife down he just dumped the trunk on the floor and stalked back out across the courtyard for the suitcase and when he got back the dishwater man was gone out into the rain to see to the horses and still nobody had offered a word of kindness or welcome or even bothered to introduce themselves. They were cold haughty people, that was what they were — even the lowliest cum rum-shop Bajan idler would have got up and lent a hand. And nobody on the island would have let a stranger walk by without calling out a good day to him. Nobody. It was the smallest courtesy and if you didn’t have courtesy then you were no better than an animal. 167

“Ah, Julian, honey, you all soaked t’rough.” Gertrude was standing in the middle of the room, her muddy shoes already wiped clean and set neatly against the wall. She’d found a towel in the drawer of a bureau that stood half-open and was working it at the nape of her neck where her hair had fallen loose. “Here, honey, you take it and dry yourself,” she murmured, handing him the limp towel, which he took without seeing it or feeling the nap of the cloth because for just an instant there the novelty of the situation took him out of himself and he was thinking I don’t know this place or these people and nothing smells right here, nothing smells, nothing smells at all except for lye soap and mold and the dead cold ashes in the hearth, and then he was running it over the crown of his head so furiously it was as if he was trying to rub the hair right off his scalp.

There was a white service jacket hanging on a hook on the inside of the bathroom door — rich man’s plumbing, toilet and sink, at least there was that — and if it was two sizes too big for him, he didn’t give a damn. “Let me put de iron to dat,” Gertrude said, fussing over him, and first he said no but then he relented because he was going to go in there ramrod straight and no wrinkle on him and show this rich mistress of the house that he was no shuffling black fool like half the niggers in Chicago but an educated man with his diploma from Combermere School in Bridgetown, Island of Barbados — Little England, they called it, Little England —and an accent as cultivated as the late King himself, even if his wife did speak like a barefoot Bajan peasant and that was no fault of his. They wanted a proper butler, he would give them a proper butler. So yes, put de iron to it, woman.