T. Boyle - San Miguel

But wasn’t that a daughter’s task? Shouldn’t she be there beside Ida, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, hip to hip, stripping the bloody sheets, stripping the corpse, washing the crusted black blood from her own mother’s lips? Ida had said no. Ida wouldn’t hear of it. Ida had wrapped her in her arms and led her away from the disordered bed and the effigy of her mother — and the blood, the blood that was everywhere, even on the bedstead, the floor, the wall — and gently pulled the door shut behind her.

Her mother was dead. That was the fact. And the worst thing, worse even than the loss of her, was that she hadn’t got to see her before the Lord took her away, and though she tried to imagine her mother in repose, in a better place where there was no coughing, no blood, where there were no sleepless nights spent sweating in a thin gown and spitting mucus into a cup, tried to picture the field of lilies, the wisps of cloud, Jesus radiant on His throne, she could find no relief. If the Lord was so merciful why had He let her die without her own daughter there at her side? Why had He let her die when that daughter was so close, when she was standing confused on the pier in the rain or struggling up the street with the gutters clogged and her heart pounding and no one to offer her a ride?

It had been so close, a matter of minutes, mere minutes. If the boat had only been swifter, if there hadn’t been a storm, if the telegram had come a day earlier, just a day, she would have been there to take her mother in her arms, no matter the blood or her coughing or frailty, to bless her and hold her and receive her blessing in return. Instead, she came home to a corpse. And worse: she didn’t shed a tear or beat herself like Heathcliff in his grief over Catherine, but just stood there frozen because she couldn’t accept that this was her mother, this dead inert thing in its frieze of blood. It’s the shock of it, Ida had said. Now come away from there, come, and Ida led her out the door and down the hall to bed, this bed, her own bed, where when the whisperings finally stopped and the house settled into silence, she fell away into a black and fathomless sleep.

* * *

The funeral service was held in the parlor the following afternoon. Her mother lay rigid in the coffin, her eyelids drawn down as if she were asleep and the faintest smile painted on her lips by the mortician. The mortician stood at the back of the room, two small boys in black at his side. They held black silk top hats in their hands and studied the floor. The minister was a stranger — her mother wasn’t a churchgoer and she supposed her stepfather must have contracted with the mortician to bring the man along. There were no mourners but for her, her stepfather, Adolph and Ida. Tapered white candles and vases of cut flowers — Ida’s doing — gave the room the feeling of a chapel, and the minister, with his sweep of silver hair and crisp clerical collar, stood grave and erect before the coffin. The service was brief — the usual comfortless words, the words she’d heard twice before in her life when friends of her mother had died in San Francisco and they’d gone to services in a great lofty cathedral with a hundred mourners and a choir singing and incense streaming from polished censers — and then they were out on the street, in a light rain, following the mortician’s hearse to the cemetery on the hill overlooking the ocean.

There were more words, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, black umbrellas, black horses, the seabirds rotating overhead and crying out their indifference. Her stepfather took the shovel from the grave digger and threw the first symbolic spattering of dirt on the coffin. Ida, in a dress that had once belonged to Edith’s mother, hung her head and sobbed, and Edith watched her stepfather put an arm around her shoulder to steady her. Edith herself, though she was stricken to the core and would recollect every detail of that day for the rest of her life as if they’d been seared into her brain with a hot iron, didn’t break down and cry. Anyone could cry. Anyone could rage to the heavens and tear out her hair. But she was an actress — or she became one that day — and she held herself apart so that she could see and feel and hear and take all the credit away from the kind of God who would do this to her, her face ironed sober and her shoulders slumped under the weight of her unassailable grief. There was a funeral supper, but she didn’t taste it. And, finally, there was bed, but she didn’t sleep.

The next day sheared away like the face of a cliff crashing into the ocean and then there was another day and another. Her stepfather put a wreath on the door, but it wasn’t a Christmas wreath and when Christmas Day came there was no celebration, no exchange of gifts or singing of carols or even a special dinner. Ida put something on the table and sat with them and they ate in silence. In the days that followed, Edith locked herself up in her room though the weather was soft and inviting, clear days giving way to star-filled nights, the trees in perpetual leaf and the flowers along the front walk waving bright orange banners as if to deny the toll every living thing has to pay, and then it was New Year’s, a bitter time, the bitterest, the two-year anniversary of their move to the island. It was that move that had killed her mother, she was sure of it. If only they’d stayed in San Francisco — or here, even here — everything would have been different. Did she blame her stepfather? Did she watch him chewing his meat, chewing with his mouth open and one hand clenching his knife and the other his whiskey (he was drowning his sorrow, that was what he claimed) and accuse him in her heart? She did. Yes. Resoundingly.

She didn’t like to talk to him, didn’t like to talk to anyone, not even Ida, not the way she was grieving, but when New Year’s had passed and the new term at Miss Everton’s was about to commence, she came to him where he was sitting by the fire, a book open in his lap and the glass on the table at his side, and handed him the printed schedule for the Santa Rosa . “I thought tomorrow morning’s boat would be best,” she said. “Classes start Monday and this way I’d have Sunday to settle in at the dormitory. We could wire ahead to Miss Everton to have someone meet me at the pier — and I don’t have much with me, so I can walk to the boat if you like and save the expense of a carriage…”

Patches of peeling skin traced the margin of his side whiskers, yellow-edged flakes that dusted his shoulders and clung minutely to his mustache. He’d worn a beard on the island for at least part of the time — too much trouble to shave, he’d said, though her mother had hated it — and the beard had hidden the flaws of his skin. She looked at him now in the lamplight and saw the pits and eruptions run rampant there, his whole face aflame as if all his sorrow had bled out of him and settled in the pores of his face, and she felt a wave of affection for him: he was grieving, grieving every bit as much as she was herself. He looked up from the book. His eyes shifted to her, gray eyes, eyes the color of smoke drifting over open water. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said.

She said nothing. She stood there in the pool of light cast by the lamp, looking down at his blistered face, the stippled beak of his nose, the pink revelation of his scalp where the white hair was thinning, giving him her attention.

“Well,” he said, closing the book on one finger to mark the place, “the long and short of it is that I’ve decided — and your mother, before she died, agreed with me on this — that you’ll not be going back.”

“Not going back? What do you mean? It’s school, my school, I must go back.”