T. Boyle - San Miguel

The road was much improved, she had to admit it, though it still wasn’t wide enough for a wagon to go up and down without risk, but that was Mr. Reed’s concern now, Mr. Reed with his pinned-up sleeve, listless children and skeletal wife, though who was she to criticize? Still, the woman — she claimed to be thirty, though she looked ten years older, her shoes worn down at the heels, her dress washed so many times it was as colorless as the spring water in the kitchen basin and her eyes a crazed flaring assault of cobalt blue — seemed to her a fellow sufferer. She didn’t cough, or not that Marantha had heard or noticed, but then she’d barely spent a moment with her, consumed as she was with the final details of packing up and leaving. The woman — Mrs. Reed, and Marantha never did catch her Christian name — had stood watching from the porch of the bunkhouse, where the family had been temporarily installed, as Jimmie hitched up the mule, lashed the rocker to it and half a dozen crates of things, the unopened dishes amongst them, that were to go back on Charlie Curner’s schooner. Mrs. Reed was eager to get herself settled in the house, and who could blame her for that? Good use of it, Marantha thought, welcome to it, and if she ever laid eyes on the place again it would be from above, high up, out of reach even of the eagles.

Slowly, step by tentative step, the mule worked its way through the turnings and switchbacks and down the final stretch to the beach, braking with its hooves and its big sweating flanks against the downward impetus of the sled with its rocking chair and piled-up cartons and the all but negligible weight she and her cat brought to bear. Jimmie didn’t say a word the whole way down, bent on focusing on the task at hand, which was to keep the mule from running out of control and pitching over the side of the canyon. She had nothing to say to him in any case. She’d washed her hands of him and she was glad he’d be staying behind. Where he belonged. He wasn’t fit for society, not after what he’d done to Edith— with Edith — and Edith was hardly innocent herself.

It had been just after Reed had gone back with Charlie Curner, hired on and prepared to return at the end of the month, as contracted. The day was typically gloomy, the fog lingering well into the afternoon before giving way to a pale high sun that crept by stages through the windows while she sat mending by the stove, determined to repair every last tear in the sheets, bedding and underclothes before they were packed away for the trip back home. It might have been the influence of the sun or just the desire to get out of doors and away from the house, but at some point she set aside her work, put on her hat, took up her parasol and strolled out the door, thinking she’d walk as far as the cliffs and see if she could make out the shore from there. She moved awkwardly, the muscles of her legs gone lax from disuse, yet the day was pleasant and she needed the exercise and before long she began to feel better, stronger, and though it might have been no more than a childish indulgence she was looking forward to a glimpse of the coastline, if only to reassure herself that it was still there.

When she came up the path to where the headland narrowed and the cliffs gave way to the churn of the sea below, she was disappointed. Though the sun was shining above her, the coastline was wrapped in fog, nothing visible but a motionless band of gray thrown up across the horizon. She was standing there, looking out on nothing, when the wind shifted and the sound of voices came to her. Edith’s voice — she heard it plainly — and another voice, a man’s. Or no, a boy’s. Jimmie’s. But where were they?

She edged toward the drop-off and peered over. A second ledge jutted out below her, not thirty feet down, a patch of rock and scrub suspended over the ocean like the crow’s nest of a ship, and Edith was there, with Jimmie, playing at one of their games. Edith was perched on a rock, hatless, in an old green shirtwaist she’d long since outgrown, and she was so close Marantha could make out the parting of her hair. “I’ll bet you’re afraid,” Edith said.

“I’m not afraid.” From this angle, all she could see of the boy was his cap, the thin spike of his nose, two ears, his shoulders.

“Then go ahead, Caliban. Go ahead and kiss me.”

And he would have, or he was going to, but as soon as he leaned into her Edith pushed him away, even as the sea below them slashed at the rocks and sucked away again. “No,” Edith said, “not there,” and she was lifting her skirts so that the sun glanced off the perfect unblemished flesh of her calf, her knee, the hem of her undergarments, Jimmie kneeling, down on his hands and knees, groveling like an animal, and Edith bunching the material till she was exposed all the way up the long white slant of her legs. “Here,” she said. “Kiss me here.”

And now there was the mule and the boy’s narrow shoulders and the canyon that was opening up before her for the very last time. She felt no nostalgia, only regret. And if she’d confined Edith to her room for an entire day and banned Jimmie from the table at dinner — banned him permanently — it was small punishment for the shock she’d received. What had she been thinking when she’d consented to bring Edith out here? No matter how much it would have cost or how much the separation would have hurt, she should have sent Edith to boarding school — and if she had it to do over again, she would have. And Jimmie. She wished she’d never laid eyes on him.

As they emerged from the canyon and started across the beach, the sled gliding over the sand with a soft continuous hiss and the mule going easier now, she saw that the sea was alive with birds, an enormous squalling convocation of them — gulls, shearwaters, pelicans, all of them bobbing and wheeling and plunging into the careening froth of the waves so that the boat, the schooner, was almost lost in the storm of them. This was one of their banquets, the sardines and anchovies driven to the surface by larger fish and the birds there to collect their due, the scene as elemental as it must have been all those eons ago when the mammoths stalked across the countryside and the glaciers stood rigid and taller than the mountains they crushed beneath them. She might have appreciated it in another context, might have enjoyed it — wild nature, a scene Winslow Homer might have depicted — but she’d had her fill of nature. She dropped her eyes to the basket in her lap and the moment the mule came to a halt she got down from the chair and made her way to the skiff even as Curner came up the strand to help Jimmie with the crates. And no, she didn’t want to wait on shore for the others — she wanted only for someone to take up the oars and row her out to the boat, where she meant to sit on the bench in the saloon and stare at the walls till she heard the rattle of the anchor chain paying out in the harbor at Santa Barbara.

* * *

This time Ida didn’t come down to comfort her or see to her needs or even to show her face at all, not for the entire trip, and Edith, having had her fill of the sea, was no company either — she was asleep in one of the berths before they’d left the island. Since Will and Adolph were occupied on deck, tugging at one line or another and sharing valedictory swigs from a bottle Charlie Curner had provided, Marantha had the saloon to herself. She and the cat, that is. She’d kept him confined in the basket till she was aboard and then she let him roam free, though he didn’t go far — one circuit around the cabin, a quick stiffening over the scent of the rodents cowering in their holes, and then he was back in her lap, purring himself to sleep. He’d proven a superior mouser in his short time with them, roaming the house at night and presenting her with the headless corpses of one mouse after another, though it was too little too late. By that point she didn’t care if the mice overran the place, piled their droppings up to the ceiling and whittled the walls to splinters. The mice were behind her now. Everything was. The boat rocked gently under her, the sea as smooth as the sheets she’d mended and folded and packed neatly away for the journey home. There was the susurrus of the spray against the bow. It was very quiet. Before long, she found herself dozing.