T. Boyle - San Miguel

Marantha was at the counter — a whitewashed plank projecting from the wall and propped up on two sticks of wood indifferently nailed to the floor — and she barely turned her head. The eggs were next — eggs she’d collected herself at first light, bent over in Will’s shroud-like mackintosh while the rain drummed at her back and the hens peered miserably at her from beneath the shed and the steps of the bunkhouse. She cracked three of them and carefully worked each into the mixture before adding the first cup of flour, feeling good, feeling competent and well, feeling useful, and she was so caught up in the process she entirely forgot about Ida, or that this was supposed to be a surprise.

“What are you doing, making an omelet?” Ida’s voice seemed to come at her out of the ether, and when she jerked her head round in surprise, Ida was right there, not a foot away, peering over her shoulder. “Or is it bread?”

“No,” she breathed, trying to mask what she was doing, “no, it’s not bread. I — everything’s fine. Just fine.” She gave it a moment, and then, as casually as she could, she cracked the final two eggs and beat them into the mixture while adding the second cup of flour, a trickle at a time.

“I wouldn’t want to speak where I’m not wanted, but isn’t that too many eggs?”

She didn’t know what to say. The kitchen felt very close suddenly. She could hear the dog whining at the door, and that was vaguely irritating because the animal was not allowed in the house and should have known better — let him go sprawl in the bunkhouse with Adolph and Jimmie. A moment drifted past. Ida hadn’t moved.

“You know, ma’am, I’d be more than willing to help if you like,” Ida said, and she was right there still, right behind her. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the parlor where you can rest by the stove while I finish up here?”

She could feel the strength radiating down from her shoulder to her forearm and wrist, the batter folding and folding again till she’d worked it smooth. Pound cake, the simplest thing in the world. She was working from memory, from her mother’s recipe, and her mother’s cakes had always been flawless, better than the baker’s, better than anything her aunts or grandmother or anybody in the neighborhood could ever hope to compete with. She had a vivid image of a morning long ago, snow cresting on the woodshed, a tray of gingerbread cookies cooling on the counter while the sweet wafting aroma of the cake her mother had just taken from the oven filled the house and they sat at the window over cups of chocolate and watched the snowstorm transfigure the world. “What ever became of the vanilla extract?” she asked, as if it were an idle question, and she wasn’t going to turn round, wasn’t going to give up the pretense. “I hope we remembered it. With the kitchen things, I mean.”

“You’re baking a cake.” Ida’s voice had gone soft.

“That’s right, yes.” She let the affirmation hang in the air between them a moment, her shoulders busy, the spoon clacking in the depths of the bowl, and then she couldn’t help but turn. Her smile — it was automatic, composed in equal parts of sympathy and embarrassment — wavered when she saw the look on the girl’s face. “We were hoping to surprise you.”

“You don’t have to go out of your way for me, ma’am,” Ida murmured, dropping her arms and folding her hands in her apron as if she meant to hide them. Marantha took her in at a glance: the men’s gum boots, the neat mauve dress with its white lace collar, the hair so woolly it defied the brush. Her eyes were wet. Her teeth worked at her lower lip. “Because I don’t usually — that is, we don’t… not in my family—”

“Nonsense,” she said, thinking of the Irish back at home in Boston, the eternal laundry, the ragged filthy children, the drunks and beggars. She set down the spoon and reached out her hand to take hold of Ida’s. “Happy birthday,” she said, running a thumb gently over the girl’s palm. And the valedictory words were on her lips— May you have many more —when the cough surprised her and she had to turn away, had to hurry across the room, bent double, a handkerchief pressed to her face, to find the stool in the corner and sit there till she could breathe again.

* * *

It was a long morning. Ida kept fussing round her—“Can I get you something? A cup of broth? Would you like to lay down a minute?”—but once the spasm passed she insisted on finishing the cake herself. Of course she was going to finish it — what kind of birthday would it be if Ida had to bake her own cake? She felt light-headed, maybe a bit flushed even, but she poured the batter into the pan and shooed the girl away. “But, ma’am,” Ida kept saying, “you don’t know this stove — it’s a neat trick to damp it just so—”

“I’m not helpless. I’ve been baking cakes since before you were born — believe me, I know what I’m doing.” She glanced up at Ida where she was stalled at the door to the hallway, looking tragic. “Go, go on! You must have something better to do than stand here worrying over me — what about the mending I gave you? What about Edith’s dress?” She turned away to pull open the door of the oven and felt the blast of heat in her face. And then the pan was in and the door shut and she straightened up and turned round to see that Ida hadn’t moved. “Where is Edith, anyway?”

“Out walking.”

“Walking? In this?”

“Yes, ma’am. She took her mackintosh and went out after she had her breakfast.”

“But where?”

A shrug. “Just for a walk, that’s all she said. Said she felt confined — you can hardly blame her.”

She fought down an impulse to damp the stove — it was too hot, she was sure of it — but she didn’t want to fiddle with it while Ida was watching. She said, “No, you’re right. It’s just that I worry.”

“Of course you do, ma’am.”

And that was that. Ida went off to her chores, and Marantha, though she felt overheated, though she felt the sluggishness invade her limbs and her lungs twist and tighten as if they were being wrung out like a pair of wet rags, sat by the stove and adjusted the damper and opened the door repeatedly to peer in at her cake though she knew she shouldn’t have. Perhaps she nodded off for just a moment, she couldn’t say. But the next thing she knew Will was there, the back door thrown open on the smoke issuing from the stove — and the cake, the cake that was blackened around the edges and as squat and hard and dry as a cracker — and her first thought wasn’t for the cake or the smoke but for him, for how common he looked, how like a vagrant in his filthy wet clothes and crumpled hat. “Jesus,” he said, his voice climbing the register, “what in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?”

There was the smoke, the rawness of the outdoors, the look of him. “Baking,” she said.

“Baking?” He threw it back at her, incredulous. “More like burning the place to the ground. Have you no sense at all? What do you think we took on Ida for?”

“Ida,” she spat. “Always Ida.”

“Well, isn’t she the cook?”

“It’s her birthday.”

He was towering, huge, the mustache clinging wet to his face like some sort of bleached-out fungus, and he was trying to balance on one leg and jerk the muddy boot from the other. “I don’t give a goddamn,” he started and then caught himself. In the yard, in the rain, the faces of Adolph and Jimmie appeared and now they were crowding in at the open doorway.

She didn’t care. She was angry, frightened, outraged. He couldn’t imagine what she felt, none of them could. They were healthy, they were going to live, and she wasn’t. Everything they saw before them was infused with the color of life, bright and shining even in the rain, but for her it was all dross. “You look common,” she said — or no, she threw it at him. “And these men, these, these hands, will not take their midday meal in this house. Will not, do you hear me?”