T. Boyle - San Miguel

She was still in the wooden chair by the stove when the sky began to lighten outside the window. She’d written twenty-two pages to her mother and every one of them, every line, was as sunny as her mother supposed the weather to be. Her health was fine, the air bracing, Will working like ten men to improve on their investment and Edith growing into a fine young lady who could not only play the piano and sing and dance like an angel, but also ride as well as any woman in the country — and here was her joke — Annie Oakley excepted. With Carrie she was more forthcoming, if not entirely honest, and if she complained of the weather and the difficulty of setting up a household in such a wild place, she put a brave face on it too, as if everything — the dirt, the cold, the bare planks of the floor and the crippling pain in her chest — were as easy to put right as snapping your fingers. When she heard Ida stirring, she sealed the letters, left them on the table where they’d be sure to be noticed and tiptoed up the stairs to slip into bed beside Will.

She awoke to an empty bed and a sudden brutal squalling that cut through her like a jolt of electricity. One moment she’d been floating in her dream (the grapes again, the wall of the villa, the sun), and in the next she was lurching awake to this shriek, these shrieks, one mounting atop the next, as if a whole tribe of the Indians that had once lived here were having their throats cut, one by one. For a minute she didn’t know where she was, the bed curtains like the walls of a tomb, the light crepuscular, the air damp, refrigerated, foul with her own breath, and then she was coughing and at the same time trying to fight the thing inside her and flinging back the curtains on the world she lived in now, the world circumscribed by the bare walls, the washstand, the chipped ceramic pot and the water-stained armoire. And all the while the shrieking went on, spiraling up and up until it broke in a squeal of pure immitigable outrage.

Coughing, clutching her nightdress at her throat, she went to the window and there he was, Jimmie, in the yard below, in the pen where the pigs were kept. He was doing something to them, torturing them — torturing her —and before she could think she thrust open the window and shouted out his name. He looked up in bewilderment. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The schooner had left the harbor. There was the banging of Will’s pick from somewhere down the path that would become a road. And the wind, the wind of course. “What are you doing?” she demanded, but her voice had lost its timbre and it wasn’t a human voice at all but the squawk of some reiterant bird.

“Ma’am?”

“That noise. You get away from those animals. Shame on you.”

He was a hundred feet away. The pigs — they were six, the boar, two sows and three shoats left from the last litter — had backed away from him, pressed in a moil against the fence. “The Captain’s orders, ma’am. He says they got to have rings struck through their noses to stop them digging.”

She was outraged, weak, pale, stripped down to nothing, coughing and coughing again. A shade drew across her eyes. It was the contagion and it took hold of her tongue and lodged a wad of phlegm in her throat so that she thought she was going to gag. The boy didn’t know. He didn’t care. She watched him turn back to his work. Finally it came up, a hard ball of sputum that was like the gristle cut from a piece of meat, and she clenched it there in her handkerchief until her voice returned to her. “I don’t care what Captain Waters says, you stop that now, do you hear me?” Whether he heard or not, she couldn’t say, but the next pig was already screaming.

She slammed the window shut and went to the door, calling down the stairwell to Edith, Edith who would go out there and give that boy a piece of her mind and get him to stop this, this insolence, this cruelty, but her voice failed her again. “Edith,” she called, croaking now, croaking because the disease was consuming her from the inside out, strangling her, taking her voice away, syllable by syllable, “Edith!”

A moment. Then Edith was there at the bottom of the stairs, her face pale and insubstantial in the shadows that infested the place. “Yes, Mother?”

She couldn’t catch her breath.

“Are you—? Can I get you anything?”

“Tell that boy”—and now the shrieking rose again, uncontainable—“to stop that this instant… I’m not — I need rest. Today. Just today. Tell him—”

She watched Edith turn abruptly, heard her footsteps on the scuffed wooden planks of the lower hallway and then the parlor, heard the door creak open and slam shut again. Then she moved to the window and threw up the sash and Edith appeared in the yard below.

“Mother says to stop that. You, Jimmie. Mother says—”

The boy had dropped his tool — and what was it, some sort of clamp to drive the hard metal ring through the animal’s flesh? — and he was staring at her out of his black expressionless eyes. “The Captain said to.”

Edith crossed the yard to him. Even from here Marantha could see that her corsets were unfastened again. She was wearing an apron over her skirts. Her hair flowed down her back in a tangle because she hadn’t bothered to put it up. She was hatless. “I don’t care what he said, Mother’s not feeling well and you’re to stop that now.”

“You can’t boss me.”

“I can. And I will.” Edith put her hands on her hips, cocked herself on one leg as if she were posing for a movement in one of her dances. Then she slowly unfolded one hand and gestured to him with her index finger. “Come here,” she said.

The boy looked around him to see if anyone was watching, then he swung the gate aside, pulled it shut behind him and came to where she stood in the yard. “What do you want with me?” he asked, looking her in the face for the first time.

Her voice was soft, so soft Marantha could barely hear it. “Anything I feel like,” she said.

He took a step back, dropped his eyes. “You can’t boss me,” he repeated. “You’re only fourteen.”

“Fifteen. In a week and a half. Which is older than you.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Liar.”

There was a silence. Marantha could hear the pick ringing still in the distance, tempered steel essaying rock. “Eighteen, anyway.”

“Liar. When’s your birthday?”

“Don’t know.”

“How can you not know your own birthday? Are you that stupid?”

“I’m not stupid. I’m as smart as anybody. Smart as you.”

“Then how is it you don’t even know when you were born?”

“Because my mother’s dead. And she never—” He was working the toe of his boot in the dirt, his characteristic gesture. “I mean, I never… I’m eighteen years old.”

“Liar.”

The pigs were watchful. The sun was wrapped in gauze. The pick rang. And then Edith pulled the boy to her, their heads so close they might have been kissing, and Marantha felt a shock go through her. “Edith!” she called, though she didn’t hear what Edith said next, but she heard Jimmie, his voice pitched low yet clearly audible as he recoiled from Edith’s grip and took an awkward step back. “All right,” he said, “I’m fifteen. But that’s still older than you.”

It came in the night without preliminary, a sudden crashing fall against the shingles of the roof that woke her, gasping, from a dreamless sleep. At first she thought it was the wind, another sandstorm churning across the island to bury them like Ozymandias, but then she heard the gutters rattle and the swift plunge of the cisterns and knew that the real rain, the rain they’d been waiting for, had arrived. All she could think was that Will would be pleased — and she should have been pleased too, rain like money in the bank, but she hated the dampness it brought because dampness was the ally of the thing inside her. And of the mold. The mold that crept over every stationary object in the house like a biblical plague, the furniture spotted with it, clothes greasy to the touch a day after they’d been washed, the pages of her books marked and sullied, eaten away from the inside out, rotted, decayed. But she had to stop herself. The rain was the important thing and the rain was a blessing. She repeated the thought aloud, as if to convince herself, her voice a dying whisper in the dark, lost in the susurrus of the rain. For a long while she lay there listening to the trill of the gutters, everything adrift, until finally her thoughts floated free and she fell asleep again.