T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Never you mind. You stay out of that now.”

“Ida, Ida, Ida,”—denser yet, drawing out the vowels as if he were singing—“I know this is hard on you, but I swear I’ll be back up there on the roof to tar over this gap here as soon as, well, as soon as the rain stops. The very minute.”

“Stops? You really think it means to stop?”

“It’s got to. Law of averages.”

“Well, I don’t. Not a bit of it. If anybody ever witnessed an example of God’s retribution on the sinners of the world, this is it — muck and rain, rain and muck, that’s all there is.” There was the sharp unmistakable click of glass on glass, and was he pouring for her, was that it? “And I’m just the sort of sinner to throw myself in the flood and be done with it, truly now, because I don’t think I can stand for another thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights of this, can you?”

“So maybe I ought to see about putting a hull under the house, then — is that what you’re saying?”

Ida, laughing: “Yes, that’s exactly it. And maybe you’d better start in pairing up the animals.”

“Good advice, capital, the best in the world. I’ll do that just as soon as I’ve had my dinner. But beyond that, tell me, what sins could a girl of your age possibly have to atone for?”

A sigh. The rattle of a spoon run round the circumference of a cooking pot. Ida’s voice, dropping low: “Oh, you’d be surprised.”

And then there was a whole hurricane of noise, the back door flung open on the storm and slammed shut again, the floorboards groaning, feet stamping, and a new voice entering the conversation, Jimmie’s, thin and adenoidal: “Jesus, it’s cats and dogs out there.”

She got up from the chair then and started down the hall. She could see them through the open kitchen door, framed there in the light of the lantern, the three of them, Will propped up on the table with his legs crossed, Ida at the stove, a glass of whiskey in one hand, stirring spoon in the other, and Jimmie, wet to the eyes and dashing the drenched cap against his thigh, moving into the circle of warmth. “What’s for dinner?” he asked, and if he glanced up when she entered the room — if any of them did — it was only vaguely, without recognition, as if she’d already ceased to exist.

* * *

It was still raining when Will brought out the cards after dinner — they were four at whist, she and Edith partnered against Will and Ida, Jimmie watching their every move from a chair in the corner as if he were going to be examined on it afterward and Adolph gone out to the bunkhouse to do whatever he did there, stare at the ceiling, fling shoes at the mice, stew in his odious thoughts — and when nine o’clock came round and they damped the lanterns and went off to bed, it was coming down every bit as steadily as it had all day. She’d sat through the cards in as good a humor as she could muster, the room warm, Will sluggish though he’d put the bottle away and taken nothing with dinner but coffee and a cigar after, and she wasn’t affected one way or the other when she and Edith wound up losing consistently, hand after hand, game after game, or at least that was what she told herself. Will was a master at cards and she wanted to be gracious about that, enjoying the game for what it was — an opportunity to escape the rain and the four walls and the endless yawning boredom of the place.

After saying goodnight to Edith on the landing, she went into her room to light the lamp there and prepare for bed. It was cold — bitter, damp, like plunging into the ocean — and she hurried over her toilette, bending quickly to wash her face in the basin and trying not to think about the apartment on Post Street, with its running water, hot and cold both, and the claw feet of the bathtub propped on the black-and-white tiles of the floor. By the time Will came up the stairs she was already in bed, shivering, listening to the rain on the roof and in the gutters and counting off the intermittent dripping of the three buckets set round the room. Nothing had changed. There was the washstand, there the pot. The only novelty was the angle of view, since the bed had been moved three feet to the left to defeat the most persistent leak, the one that had soaked through the canopy. Everything smelled of mildew.

She heard Will on the landing, in the hallway, each footfall descending like a blow, and then he was at the door, the door pushing partway open and his face hanging there in the gloom of the hallway — he was making an assessment of the prevailing conditions, of the leaks and the half-full buckets and the mood of his wife, and she couldn’t blame him for that. “Minnie?” he called softly. “Are you awake still?”

She had a sudden urge to lash out at him — drinking whiskey with the help, with Ida, inflicting Adolph on her, ignoring her all evening except as an opponent to drub at cards while he built up Ida and tore down his own daughter as if to let her win a single game would annihilate him — but she checked herself. She was the one at fault. Everything had been so tranquil in the afternoon, the rain at the window, the fire giving up its heat, the neck of the bottle poised over her glass and then his and the two of them sitting down to a quiet chat for the first time in as long as she could remember, but then she’d had to spoil it. Had to nag at him. Truth told, she’d all but driven him from the room. Driven him to the kitchen. And she was on the verge of taking the thought one step further— driven him to Ida —but the thought was inadmissible, a fantasy, a delusion, Will her husband, Ida the servant, a second daughter, family. A child. All but a child. “Yes,” she said, “I’m awake.”

He edged into the room and shut the door gently behind him. He’d patted down his hair, though it had dried unevenly, and she could see that he’d scrubbed his hands to remove the tar, or most of it, anyway. “I see the leaks have stopped — or slowed at least.”

“It’s an improvement, yes,” she said.

“As soon as it stops, I’ll get back up there and fix it permanently.”

She watched him move round the room, shrugging out of his jacket, unbuttoning his shirt, pulling the chair to him to sit and remove his trousers, a man getting ready for bed, the most pedestrian thing in the world, and intimate, deeply intimate, her man, her husband, and what had she been thinking? They were married. Man and wife. She loved him. He loved her. “If you like,” he said, stripped to his underwear now, the hard muscles of his legs flexed against the grip of the cotton cloth, his arms hanging loose at his sides and the heavy spill of his abdomen suspended before him, “I can empty these buckets. It won’t take but a minute.”

“No,” she said, “no need to bother.” She sat up, pushed back the covers so he could see her there in her nightgown. Her throat was bare. Her hair ran loose over her shoulders. She was breathing steadily, easily, the cold and damp nothing to her, nothing at all — she was in Italy, that was where she was, and the sirocco had swept out of Africa to dry the ditches and scorch the fields. “Come to bed, Will,” she said.

* * *

Next morning, he was up before her, up and out the door, thundering down the stairs to the kitchen and breakfast and then to his gum boots and mackintosh and the shovel that roughened his hands and tore at the muscles of his back and shoulders till he was so stiff some evenings he could barely straighten up. She wanted to massage him, rub his shoulders, ease his burden, but more often than not she was asleep by the time he came to bed. Last night was different. She was awake and present and after he’d turned out the light and come to her, his weight straining the mattress and she slipping helplessly toward him as if down a gentle sloping hill, she’d tried to be a wife to him, tried to open up, feel him, but she couldn’t seem to let herself go. He groped at her, his fingers seeking her out, rucking up her nightdress, fastening on her breasts, the bulk of him rising up, pressing at her till she wasn’t so much aroused as embarrassed — her shrunken breasts, her ribs that were like the stony reefs the tide exposed, the poor wasted shanks of her legs — and all she could think was that he was embracing a corpse. You’re so thin, he murmured, working at her, working, kissing her throat, her ears, the parting of her hair, and in his moment of passion he actually took hold of her chin and pressed his mouth to hers until she spoke his name aloud, firmly, harshly, and turned her face away.