T. Boyle - San Miguel

She felt ashamed of herself. Felt weak and inadequate. And as she lay there now listening to the rain that still hadn’t let up, the rain that had become a burden, a weight that lay over everything, squeezing and compressing the air till it might have been raining inside her, raining in her lungs and her heart and her brain too, she thought of him out there on the road in the thick of it, his back aching, his shoulders on fire, plunging the shovel into the wet yielding earth as if it mattered, as if anything mattered. She forced herself out of bed, the first long spasm catching her by surprise. She coughed, heaved for breath, coughed. The pitcher, the glass, the little brown bottle, the spoon with its residue. And then her clothes. She took a long while dressing — no matter how low she might have been she had to think of Edith, of setting an example, because if she didn’t do it, who would? — and then she drew up a chair to the mirror, combed out her hair and pinned it up.

The light was poor, but even so, even at a glance, she could see how reduced she looked. Her skin was porous, gray, stretched as tight as the lamb’s hide Adolph had tacked up on the side of the barn, while her eyes seemed larger, disproportionately so, as if her features had sunk into them. She pinched her cheeks to bring up the color, but nothing came, and she resorted to her rouge, twin dabs of it worked into the hollows of her cheeks, but the effect seemed worse somehow. No matter. She had a duty to perform and that duty involved Will, her husband, who was out there in the rain, working for increase and profit, working for her.

It was ten-thirty in the morning by her pocket watch when she came downstairs, and it was past eleven by the time she’d brewed a full pot of coffee and wrapped up half a dozen sandwiches of lamb and onion in a towel she positioned beside the coffee in the depths of a straw basket. Then she put on her coat and hat, took up her parasol and went out the front door, down the steps and into the rain.

The footing was bad, but she’d expected that — what she hadn’t expected was the feeling of release that swept over her as soon as the door pulled shut behind her. She was out of doors, only that, and it came to her that it was the first time she’d been out in days. The house loomed at her back, but she never turned her head. She was watching her feet, concentrating on keeping her balance in the roiling sepia mud that clung to the toes of her boots and sucked at her heels. The rain drummed at the parasol. Everything smelled of fresh-turned earth.

She found Will just beyond the second outcrop, wielding his shovel in a torrent, Adolph and Jimmie pitching in beside him, and it was like the day of the lobsters, only the wheelbarrow was filled with a yellow soup of diluted mud and all three of them looked hopeless. “I brought hot coffee,” she said. “And sandwiches.”

“You shouldn’t have come out here in this,” Will said even as he jammed the shovel into the ground and moved toward her, Adolph and Jimmie setting down their tools and moving too now, as if they’d been awakened from a dream.

“I know how hard you’ve been working,” she said, her feet sliding in the muck, her shoes ruined and stockings soaked through, “and I just felt you could do with a boost, something to warm you, all of you.” She couldn’t set the basket down — it would have been washed away, sluiced over the side of the path and flung down into the ravine that was roaring now with its burden of crashing rock and churning yellow water — and she was having difficulty in trying to hold it out to Will and at the same time keep the parasol upright. In that moment she saw how absurd it was to have brought the basket to them — where would they drink their coffee or eat the sandwiches that would turn to paste the minute they took them up? There was no cover, no place to sit, the rain beating down without remit, everything in motion, gray above, dun below.

But they came to her, crowding in under the poor protection of the parasol, and they held out the cups she provided so that she could pour for each of them in turn and they took the sandwiches and lifted them to their mouths, their eyes gone distant as they chewed.

She wanted to say something about the conditions, how they really ought to think about giving it up for the day before someone got washed into the ravine or buried beneath a mudslide, but instead she turned to Will — Will, with his mustaches dripping and the crown of his hat collapsed round his ears — and clucked her tongue. “You poor man,” she said.

He was chewing. He brought the coffee to his lips. “If you think this is bad, you should have seen it in the war.”

Adolph’s eyes were dead, Jimmie looked as if he were asleep on his feet. “This isn’t the war,” she said.

He gulped down the coffee, turned the cup over to drain the dregs and handed it to her. Then he rocked back on his heels, the rain driving at his face, and grinned. “I admit it,” he said, “conditions could be better.” And he looked to Adolph and Jimmie and then back to her again. “But at least nobody’s shooting at us.”

Ida was first (her birthday was the eighth of February and Edith’s the twelfth) and everyone felt they should make the day special for her, so even though it was raining again— still, forever, it seemed — and she’d barely slept and felt as if she’d been run through with a sword, Marantha was up early and shuffling round the kitchen, seeing to the flour, sugar, butter and eggs for the cake. Ida had already served breakfast, the men eating at the table in the parlor though she’d forbidden it, or thought she had, and now Ida was taking a mop to the floor there, everything smeared with mud and the very walls reeking of mold and rot and the sort of deep penetrating dampness no stove could ever hope to dry out. She’d given Ida a good dressing-down for serving the men in the house — and for the carpet too, because the carpet was hopeless after they’d got done with it. Ruined. Fit for the trash and nothing else.

“Don’t be such a scold,” Will had said, hateful, lecturing her, taking Ida’s side, his eyes like pinpricks and his nose stabbing at her out of the tanned hide of his face. “You can’t expect the hands to take their plates all the way out across the yard in this kind of weather. That’s just unreasonable. Worse: it’s inhumane.” She’d felt mean and pinched and so she threw it right back at him: “Inhumane? What do you call serving up that poor child’s pet for dinner? What about forcing your own wife to live like some gypsy in a caravan? You tell me that.”

For herself, she’d breakfasted in her room on tea and toast with a bit of jam while writing in her diary, as if there were anything to report but rain and tedium and more of the same, and when the men had gone out to their digging, she’d come down to the kitchen. The stove was hot still, at least there was that. The kettle boiled right away and she had herself a second cup of tea, with two full teaspoons of sugar stirred in (why not — it wasn’t as if she had to worry over her weight) and that gave her a lift. Of course, whatever she needed, whether it was a proper mixing bowl, a measuring cup or a whisk to beat the eggs, was either back in Santa Barbara or buried amongst the mouse pellets in some dismal back corner, but still she managed to find a suitable pan, grease it with the butter Ida had churned the day before yesterday and get things under way, using a teacup for measuring and one of the clay crocks in lieu of a bowl.

She’d creamed a cup of butter and was using a soupspoon to fold in a cup and two-thirds of sugar, as best she could measure, when Ida, mop and bucket in hand, pushed her way through the door. “Good morning, ma’am,” the girl sang out, eyeing the pan as she crossed to the far corner to lean the mop against the wall there. The rain slackened momentarily and then started in again with a heavy thump, as if a tree had fallen against the roof, but that was impossible, the Spaniards having taken the last tree down for lumber a hundred years ago and the sheep making sure in the interval that anything taller than six inches was chewed right on down to the dirt. Or mud. In the next moment, Ida had the back door open on the roar of it and on the stomach-wrenching reek of the flooded W.C., which now stood just two hundred yards from the house, and here was the dog, soaked to the skin and trying to dodge past her even as she flung the bucket of dirty water out into the yard and slammed the door shut on it.