T. Boyle - San Miguel

All the talk was of the shearers — the shearers were coming, the shearers — until she began to think they were some messianic tribe bent on redeeming them all. She pictured men in silken beards and turbans, an oriental squint to their eyes and their shoes turned up at the toes, bearing gifts of spices and speaking in a strange tongue, but Will was having none of it. Will was in a state. He couldn’t sit still, couldn’t rest, working furiously at the road, scanning the horizon every morning for the telltale sail in the harbor, jumping up from the card table in the evening to pace back and forth until she thought the floorboards would wear through under his weight, and all the while lecturing Edith and Ida — and her too — about the state of the house. It had to be homelier, cleaner, more orderly — and why? Because it wasn’t only the shearers who were coming, but Mills too. And not simply Mills, who was getting out, but the new man who was to buy in as half-partner, and it was their duty to show the place at its best. What would Mills think if he saw the state of the house as it was right this minute? Or the new man. Think of him. The real shame of it — and Will wouldn’t leave it alone — was that they didn’t have the wherewithal to buy out Mills themselves and set up as sole owners and proprietors and let the rest of the world go to hell.

“Imagine it, Minnie,” he said. “Just imagine it. Our own island — our own country — and nobody to answer to. We could pull up the drawbridges and man the battlements. I could be king. And you — you, Minnie — you could be queen.”

What could she say? She tried to be accommodating, tried to soothe him, tried even to scrub the place into submission, but the idea was a living death to her — the world was in San Francisco, in Boston, in Santa Barbara, not here. Queen? Queen of what? The sheep?

He put an arm round her waist, drew her to him and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “It’s what I’ve always dreamed of,” he murmured.

Then one night, after dinner, as she was going down the hall to the kitchen with the notion of brewing a pot of tea, she found him in his room — the former storeroom — changing into his work clothes. “You’re not going back out there, are you?” she’d asked, incredulous.

The room was cramped and cheerless, but neat enough, she supposed, in a military sort of way. It was like an encampment on a battlefield, the bed no more than a cot with a single thin blanket drawn tight, his gear — a canteen, various tools and implements, his tripod and transit — arranged on various hooks projecting from the walls. He was sitting on the cot, pulling on a pair of stained and worn trousers she’d already mended more times than she could count. His socks were dirty, his shirt, even his braces. He didn’t say anything.

“It’s the dark of night. It’s raining.”

He shrugged. He was lacing up his boots now, though she’d asked him time and again to put them on and remove them on the porch so as to minimize the dirt in the house he was suddenly so very interested in keeping clean. “Seems like it’s always raining.”

She was silent a moment. “I’m sorry we haven’t got the money, Will,” she said. “I know how much this venture means to you, this place, I mean. You know if I had the money I’d give it to you”—she’d meant to keep any note of resentment out of her voice because he was her husband and she loved him and here he was sleeping separately from her because she was too weak to bear him—“but I’ve already given everything I have.”

The room was close, windowless, lit only by a candle on a dish he’d set on an overturned crate by the side of the bed. “You’re a martyr, a regular Christian martyr.”

“Don’t, Will.”

He was busy with the other boot now, but he took time to glance up and hold her gaze. “Do you want to lose everything, is that it? Somebody’s got to do the work around here, somebody’s got to persevere. Yes, I want this place. Is that a crime? You can’t know what I went through in the war — or after either, working the printing presses for my brother and then those idiots at the Morning Call . Dirty, demeaning work. Always somebody crabbing at you. Up in the morning, to bed at night, and for what? I want something of my own and if I have to work myself to death I’m going to get it.”

She was standing in the doorway still, one hand on the frame as if she were a visitor in her own house. But then this wasn’t her house and never would be — it was foreign to her, harsh and unacceptable, and so was this windblown island that might as well have been in the middle of the Amazon for all the diversion it offered. “You promised me we wouldn’t stay past the first of June if I… if I don’t improve. And I’m not improving, Will. It’s too cold. Too damp.” She felt a sadness so intense it was as if some machine had hold of her, some infernal engine, crushing the spirit out of her. “Too hopeless, Will, hopeless, do you hear me? If I’m going to die I want my things around me, I want society, comfort — not this.” She lifted her hand to take in the room, the house in which it stood, the island and the sea and the distant cliffs of the coast beyond.

“You’re not going to die.”

It was a lie and they both knew it.

He was on his feet suddenly, brisk, towering, on his way past her and out into the night to work his precious road. “Goddamn it, Marantha,” he said, his face so close to hers she could smell the stewed lamb they’d had for dinner on his breath — or his mustache, which he never even bothered to wipe properly—“it’s not my fault. I didn’t give you the disease.”

“No,” she said very quietly, “no, you didn’t.”

He was edging past her, nervous on his feet, guilty, ashamed of himself — and he should have been. He should have gone down on his knees the way he had when he proposed marriage to her in the front parlor on Post Street, Sampan a kitten in her lap and Edith curled up asleep with her china doll. Should have taken her in his arms and comforted her. Tried to imagine, for just an instant, what it was like to see the whole world fading to nothing all around you and none but the mute dead to understand or sympathize.

“Goddamn it,” he said, cursing again, though he knew she hated it, “we have to go on, don’t you see that?” His eyes were huge, apoplectic, his face flushed. “Life goes on, and what does life mean? Life means work, Marantha, work . And work is what I intend to do.”

* * *

The rain stopped sometime overnight. She was awake, unable to sleep, racked with night sweats and thoughts of the beyond, when the thrumming on the roof abruptly ceased and in rushed the silence, shaping itself to fit the void — silence that was somehow worse than the rain, which was at least alive, or in motion at any rate. She stared into the darkness, too exhausted to light the lantern and take up her book, thinking of Will sleeping in his narrow bed in the room below her and sharing in the darkness that was general over the island and the sea and the continent beyond and would even now, on the eastern coast, where her mother would be getting breakfast in the kitchen of the house she’d been a girl in, be giving way to the light. Did she sleep? She supposed so. Eventually there was a period of blankness, but if rest was the purpose of sleep, then she didn’t get much.

In the morning she felt so weak she could barely lift her head from the pillow. Outside the window the sky seemed a second roof, flat and gray and uninterrupted. Why she was alive, why she was breathing, why she’d been born on this earth only to suffer the way she had, she couldn’t say. She lay there a long while before propping herself up with a pillow so that she could see out to the bay, to see if there was a sail there, but there wasn’t. The shearers hadn’t come. They were still on the next island over, plying their mobile trade, eating, drinking, taking their time. The shearers are coming, the shearers are coming. But not yet.