T. Boyle - San Miguel

Still swaying, a look for his mother, then the quick proud glance at Edith: “Jimmie.”

“Jimmie?” she repeated, taken by surprise, and for an instant she was back out on the island, the day wrapped round her like an unwashed sheet and Jimmie crouching there before her with his warm wet mouth sucking at the flesh of her inner thigh as if he were trying to extract juice from an orange…

“Would you like one?” the woman was saying. “I’ve got a whole basket here. I’m taking them down to my mother. Go ahead, have one.”

It was then, just as she took the orange from the woman’s hand, that the door swung open for the hundredth time that afternoon. Almost casually, as if she’d known all along how events would unfold, she glanced up into the faces of her stepfather and the stranger in the high-crowned hat beside him, who, as it turned out, wore the six-pointed star just above his shirt pocket for a very good reason. She didn’t start, didn’t protest, just handed the orange back to the woman, took up her suitcase and walked quietly to the door.

And so she was on a boat again, but it wasn’t a steamer and it wasn’t the Santa Rosa and it wasn’t bound for San Francisco. If there was a cruel irony in all this, she couldn’t begin to fathom it. She sat stiffly, staring straight ahead, her back pressed to the wall and her feet planted firmly on the floor of the cabin that stank of tobacco, bacon grease, fish leavings and sweat, men’s sweat, in the very seat her mother had occupied, and she might have been her mother’s ghost, dead and disembodied, caught between one world and the next. The men were above, in the wheelhouse, drinking whiskey, their eyes tense with excitement. “We’re going home,” her stepfather had crowed, slapping Adolph on the back as they hauled their provisions aboard, and Adolph, a sack of pinto beans suspended between him and Charlie Curner on the deck below, had given him his tight immutable smile in return. Charlie Curner grinned. It was a good day, with a fair breeze, and he was getting paid.

For her part, she refused to look anyone in the eye, refused even to lift her head, and she didn’t bother with a parasol or her stays or anything else, staring first at the planks of the pier, then the deck and the steps going down to the cabin, and she wouldn’t speak to anyone even if she was addressed directly — if they were going to make her a prisoner, she would act like one. She was mute and she might as well have been deaf too. The boat lurched. There were the waves, the gulls, the mainland that sank behind her like a stone.

It was mid-January, somewhere thereabout, anyway. She wasn’t even sure of the date, but what did it matter? The only thing she was sure of was that her will meant nothing, that she was captive, body and soul, no better than an animal in a cage. The man with the badge had searched her and handed over her money — and the ticket, the useless ticket — to her stepfather, who forbade her to leave the house till they were safely aboard the Evangeline, and he’d gone with the sheriff to the offices of the stagecoach, the steamship line and the railway to make sure of his prohibition.

“It isn’t fair,” she said. “You have no right.”

“Your place is with your father.”

“You’re not my father.”

“I am. And you’re a willful, ungrateful child, and if you don’t come to your senses I swear I’ll take off this belt and strap you till you do.”

“Never! I won’t do it. I won’t go.”

And suddenly the belt was in his hand, jerked through the loops with a snapping ominous hiss, and she turned and bolted across the room and up the stairs and into her bedroom before he could grab hold of her. She heard his heavy tread on the stairs and locked the door, but he put his shoulder to it and the door flew open and he stalked into the room, his eyes as cold as any murderer’s, the belt snaking from one clenched fist. “Will you listen? Will you listen now?”

She was on the bed, clutching at her pillow. Her mother was dead and there was to be no quarter between them, she saw that now. “Yes,” she said.

“What was that?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

She didn’t venture out of her room for the next two days and she didn’t care whether she starved or not. She heard them below, going about their business. The sun striped the wall behind her, faded, came back in the morning and faded again. At dinner on the second day, there was a knock at her door and Ida was there, a tray in her hand and the aroma of tomato and barley soup running on ahead of her. Her face was unreadable, as if she’d paused to slip on a mask in the hallway, and whose side was she on in this? What had he told her? Had he sent her? “Here,” Ida said, setting the tray down on the night table, “you just take a taste of this now.”

But she wouldn’t, though she hadn’t eaten in nearly three days, not since the morning of her aborted flight. Her stomach rumbled. She swallowed involuntarily.

“Sure you’re going to have to eat something if you intend to remain amongst the living.”

“I don’t. I just want to die. I want to be with my mother.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“I hate him,” she said. “I hate him with all my heart.”

Ida was standing there in the middle of the room, the light from the hallway spilling her shadow across the floor till it reached the foot of the bed and climbed up the wall beside it. She didn’t say anything in response, but after a moment she went to the lamp on the table by the window and lighted it.

“He killed my mother. And now he wants to kill me too.”

If she expected Ida to contradict her, she was mistaken. Instead, Ida came round the bed and eased herself down beside her. “Edith,” she murmured, the lamplight feathering her hair and settling in her features so that she took on its glow. “Here,” she said, “put your hand here,” and she took hold of Edith’s hand and laid it palm down on her stomach. The room was very still. Edith could feel the warmth there beneath the fabric of her dress and her stays and underthings, Ida’s flesh, the beat of her heart: it was the most intimate thing that had ever happened between them. “Do you feel that?”

She was confused. Ida’s face was right there, inches from her own. She could smell the powder she wore, count the minute divisions of her lashes. “What do you mean? Feel what?”

“I’m going to have a baby.”

“A baby?” She was joking, she had to be — she wasn’t even married. “But how, how can that be?”

Ida only shook her head, very slowly, side to side. She began to say something, then caught herself. “I’ll be going back north, to my mother,” she said finally, and she dropped her eyes.

And why was she thinking in that moment of herself, only herself? Because she was going down in a darkening swirl of wind-beaten waves and clutching at anything to pull herself back up and out, because she was a girl still whose only experience of the world was a stolen kiss with a boy from St. Basil’s by the name of Thomas R. Landon and the feel of Jimmie’s lips on her thigh and the way it made her blood rush, but Jimmie was nothing and she was nothing too. Ida was going to have a baby. There was a male organ, that was how it started — she knew that, everyone did, the girls whispering in the dark after lights out, one lewd thing paraded after another — but nothing could happen without the sacrament of marriage, no babies, that is… but then she herself had been an orphan and how had that come about? Had her parents died? Or had her mother, her true mother, been someone like Ida, who just somehow happened to have a baby in a time like this when everything was confusion and all the world had a dark shade thrown over it?