T. Boyle - San Miguel

She woke to a persistent drip. It took her a moment, a wand of feeble gray light caught in the crack of the bed curtains, the world coming back to her in all its preordained dimension, before she realized that the blankets were wet — not damp, but wet, soaking. She looked up and saw that the canopy above her was bellied with water, and here came the drip, exploding on the pillow beside her. And then another and another. She called Will’s name — twice — but he didn’t move, his breathing slow and heavy. Then she was shoving him, heaving against the dead weight of him until he came up sputtering as if the waters had already closed over them.

“What is it? What?”

“The roof’s leaking.”

“What do you mean?”

She tore back the bed curtains, angry suddenly, furious, and thrust the wet blankets at him. “The bedclothes are wet, that’s what I mean — can’t you feel it? The whole bed—” That was when the breath went out of her and the first hacking cough of the morning snatched the words from her mouth.

And what did he do? Did he put his arm around her, fetch her a glass of water or the bottle of medicine and her teaspoon? No. Cursing — predictably, as if Jesus Christ had anything to do with it — he heaved himself out of bed and slammed round the room, pulling on his clothes in a frenzy of hate. “Jesus Christ, can’t I have a minute’s peace? Can’t I even get a goddamned night’s sleep when I’m so worn I can barely— Edith! Where’s Edith?”

“Let her be,” she said, fighting down the cough. She was out of bed now, crossing the room in her nightgown to the stand that held the water pitcher and her medicine, and the roof was leaking here too, a steady drool of dun-colored water trickling down to splash the floor at her feet. The medicine was useless, she knew that, but it deadened the sting of her throat and fought down the pain in her chest, at least temporarily. She measured out a teaspoon and took it, wincing at the taste — bitter herbs in a tincture of alcohol that turned the inside of her mouth black — and then she took a teaspoon of cod — liver oil and washed it down with a glass of water, and all the while her feet were getting wet.

Ignoring her, Will tore open the door on the corridor and shouted for Edith. He was in shirtsleeves, his braces dangling, his pale calloused heels naked to the thin seep of light coming in through the window. “Goddamn it, where is she? Edith!” In the next moment he snatched the chamber pot out of the corner, threw up the sash and flung the contents out into the yard, not even bothering to rinse the thing out before heaving himself across the room to position it under the leak. Where it immediately began to splash over. On the floor. Filthy. Everything filthy. And then Edith was at the door, barefoot, in her nightgown, rubbing at her eyes.

“Don’t just stand there,” he snapped. “Can’t you see what’s happening here? Help me move this bed — your mother’s wet, the bed’s wet. Here, take this corner — no, no, here, this way, push .”

She wanted to say something — Edith wasn’t decent, he was too harsh with her, too bullying, there was filth on the floor — but she didn’t. Instead she pulled her wrap tight around her, eased on her slippers and went out into the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen, where she knew it would be warm at least and the coffee she could already smell was brewing in the pot.

* * *

It rained without relent throughout the morning and into the afternoon and showed no sign of slacking. The windows steamed over. Water came in under the front door, a great lapping tongue of it, so that she had to lay a towel there — and then get up and wring it out every twenty minutes. Anything that could hold liquid — pots, pitchers, dirt-rimmed buckets dragged in from the barn, the dishpan — lay scattered across the floors, upstairs and down, ringing maddeningly with a persistent tympanic drip. And of course they had to be emptied too. It was a new job, a full-time occupation, and it took her out of herself: she didn’t have pause to feel weak or sick and if she coughed she hardly noticed.

Luncheon was a subdued affair, Edith half-asleep, Will brooding over the leaky roof and the damage to the road — he’d been out there in his mackintosh three times already, plying his shovel uselessly in the muck — and it was a struggle to keep up a conversation. Ida was no help. She was having her own trial in the kitchen, where the jointure of the slant roof and the back wall of the main house gave up a flood like Niagara, the floorboards soaked through, mud everywhere, and so she took her meal at the kitchen table with the hands. There was a stew of mutton — the eternal dish — three-days-old bread, the last of the wheel of cheese Charlie Curner had brought them. Marantha talked just to hear herself, but nobody was listening.

Afterward she tried to interest Edith in sewing or a game of cards or reading aloud from Dickens or Eliot, but Edith just gave her a look and went upstairs to shut herself in her room. And Will — Will was up on the roof with a bucket of tar he’d heated over the stove and nothing she could say about the danger could dissuade him. “You’ll break a leg,” she shouted at him as he went out the door. “Or your neck. Then where will we be?” She kept glancing out the window, expecting to see him splayed in the mud under the eaves, thinking of the time he’d broken his foot stepping off the curb in front of the apartment and how savage he was with her through every waking hour of his convalescence, as if she’d somehow been to blame. He was impossible. Demanding. Insulting. She’d very nearly left him then. She’d actually gone down to the station, Edith in tow, and inquired about the price of two tickets to Boston before she came to her senses.

She sat and rose again, sat and rose. The pans filled, she emptied them. At one point, she settled in by the stove with a book but she couldn’t concentrate. The rain hissed at her, mocked her, erected a solid gray wall beyond the windows, one more barrier between her and where she longed to be.

It was past four when Will finally gave it up. There were two abrupt thumps from the direction of the front porch — one for each boot — and then he came through the door in his stocking feet, the wet mackintosh hanging from him like sloughed skin. His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped in exhaustion. He looked defeated, looked old — older than her father was when he died. The thought complicated the moment — her father had been nearly seventy, sick for years with a malady no one was able to diagnose, all his vitality reduced to the effort of staying alive — and she had to fight it down before rising from the chair and hurrying across the room to him. “Here,” she said, taking hold of his wet sleeve, “let me help you off with that.”

He didn’t offer any resistance. He merely stood there, dripping, so depleted he could barely raise his arms. He smelled of the outdoors, of the workings of his body, wet hair, sweat gone stale — and of tar, the odor faintly sweet and strong as any perfume. His hands were blackened with it, as if he’d pulled on a pair of mourner’s gloves on his way to a funeral. “I did the best I could,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that now, we’ll manage.” She folded the mackintosh over one arm and led him to the chair by the stove, where he sat heavily, and then she was fussing over him. “I’ll get you some dry clothes — and tea, I’ll have Ida brew you some tea. Or would you like something stronger?”

“I’ll have a drop of that whiskey — if you’ll join me. Will you?”

Her first impulse was to say no, because what had she become but a crabbed miserable thing who said no to everything, to every pleasure and delight no matter how small or meaningless? Whiskey. She hadn’t tasted whiskey in so long she couldn’t remember what it was like — and then, suddenly, she could. In the old days, the early days of the apartment when Edith was little and the evening sun striped the walls and lingered over her potted geraniums as if each leaf and flower were lit from within, Will would come home from work and she’d fetch the bottle and the siphon and they would sit at the window sipping whiskey sodas and watching the life of the street below. She smiled, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Yes,” she murmured, “I’d like that.”