T. Boyle - San Miguel

“You’ll be coming back,” she said, and she was breathing hard now, as if she’d been running uphill, “after, that is, once the baby… and the father, the baby’s father…”

But Ida kept on shaking her head. In a whisper so soft she had to strain to hear: “The baby’s father doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want the baby.”

Then the bed rocked beneath her and Ida was on her feet, her shoulders hunched and her hair looping free of the bun at the back of her head. Then she was framed in the doorway and then the door pulled shut and Edith refused to think of the nights on the island or in this very house — this house, this one — when there were noises in the dark, the faintest watery sigh and suck of movement in the rippling depths, as if the dolphins were at play beneath the moonlit waves. She thought of herself, of herself only. And when the door had closed, she picked up the spoon and began to eat.

* * *

She came up on deck when the anchor dropped in the harbor, feeling as if she’d been singled out and sentenced for some crime as yet unnamed. The sky was overcast, the island a dun fortress hammered out of the waves. Wind drove at her on a stinging whiplash of spray, and even then, even in the first moments of her sentence that could stretch on for months or years even, it carried the stink of sheep to her and the distant racketing of the seals and sea elephants. Nothing had changed. Miss Everton’s Seminary had never existed, nor her mother, nor San Francisco, nor the rented rooms or the house in Santa Barbara. This was all there was, world eternal, the quality of mercy is not strained, but it is, it is.

Jimmie there on the beach with his leering eyes and the mule perched like a statue behind him. Harsh words from her stepfather, commands, and no, she wouldn’t be riding the sled up the hill, she would be walking — and carrying her own load too. Then there was the house, the paint all but gone, the smell of it, cold grease, colder ash, five p.m. and almost dark and her stepfather taking her by the arm and thrusting her into the kitchen. “There’s the food,” he said. “There’s the stove.”

She stood just inside the door, slumped against the wall. The cold was in her feet, in her bones. She could hear her stepfather pounding through the house in a rage, cursing the one-armed man and his wife for the state of the place, everything in disarray, every step he took and corner he turned a fresh outrage and an affront and a keen winnowing disappointment that set him off all over again. He shouted at Jimmie and Adolph. Gutter language. Goddamn and Jesus Christ. Fuck this, fuck that. They ran the mule up and down the road that had washed out so many times it was just a glorified gulley now and they crashed through the door at regular intervals to dump the foodstuffs on the kitchen floor in a heap of crates, sacks, cans and bottles. The house boomed and echoed. The gutters rattled in the wind.

For a long while she merely stood there, sunk in despair. The place reeked like a garbage dump — it was a garbage dump, trash heaped to the windows and every stained and cracked cup, plate, saucer and bowl crammed into the washbasin in a cold puddle of swimming grease and putrid water, in the center of which the corpses of two drowned mice floated with their naked feet clenched on nothing. It was disgusting. Degrading. She wanted to sit, wanted to use the toilet, but her body was paralyzed and her mind had shut down, the past colliding with the present till she hardly knew where she was. Still, when the light faded out of the windows she found herself crossing the room to light the lantern and clear a space for it on the table. And then she went down on her knees and tried to light the stove too, if only to take the chill off, but the flue must have been stuck or the pipe stopped up because every time she touched a match to the crumpled paper and sticks of kindling, it wouldn’t draw.

Her arm — her left arm, just above the elbow — gave a sudden sharp stab of pain where her stepfather had taken hold of her to shove her through the door in his impatience, this hulking bellicose red-faced man who was the only father she’d ever known and who’d been wounded in the war and never let anyone forget about it. Captain. That was what people called him. Not Mister, but Captain. And he expected her to call him father, yet he wasn’t acting like a father but a coward and a bully and all she could think was that if she had a gun she would press it to her temple and shoot herself right there on the spot — or no, shoot him, shoot Jimmie and Adolph too, and then all the sheep, every last stupid staring one of them. “Cook,” he’d demanded. “But I don’t know how,” she’d protested, talking now, talking finally, if only to get the words out no matter how deaf the world around her might be. “Then learn by doing,” he said.

He’d been poised there in the doorway, urgent and impatient, and his face told her what should have been evident from the moment they boarded the ship or before that even, when Ida had come to her to say she was leaving because she was going to have a baby nobody wanted. There were three men in the household and one girl. Or woman. She was a woman now, by default. And he didn’t care if she never saw the inside of a schoolroom again. He needed a cook. And she was elected.

But the stove wouldn’t light and the food hadn’t been sorted or the dishes washed or the floor swept. She looked round her grimly. There was no water. No apron. Every pot and pan was blackened and crusted over and what was she to scrub them with? Where was the soap? The washcloth?

And cook? Cook what? She’d never cooked a thing in her life, not even an egg. For as long as she could remember, they’d had a cook in the house. Before Ida it had been Mrs. Hedges, who’d served as nanny as well, and on the cook’s day off her mother would boil a handful of potatoes to go with the cold roast Mrs. Hedges had set aside the night before. If she was hungry, there was always food, and sometimes, when she was little, Mrs. Hedges would indulge her by allowing her to climb up on a stool and use the spatula to turn her own cheese sandwich in the pan so that it browned evenly on both sides. She’d baked cookies with her mother, of course, like any other girl, and after her mother fell ill she liked to sit in the kitchen feeling blessed and warm and protected while Mrs. Hedges fussed about and the smell of baking bread or corn muffins filled the room, and then later, when Ida took over, she’d drift into the kitchen to gossip as Ida stood at the counter rolling out dough or peeling potatoes or measuring out rice in a cup, but that hardly qualified her as a cook or even a cook’s helper. And Ida was gone. And so was her mother.

She got to her feet and wiped her hands on her coat. The kindling just wouldn’t seem to catch, each match igniting a ball of paper in a quick crackling bloom that sent up pale snaking tendrils of flame and then died as it reached the wood above, and now it had become a challenge, a contest between her and the powers of the universe. She was angry, frustrated, cold, lonely, hateful, but she set her brain to it. She tried the handle on the flue — it should be straight up and down, shouldn’t it? Another ball of paper, another match. Nothing. She crumpled more paper, opened the vents and separated the individual sticks of kindling to widen the gaps and admit more air, blew on the wavering tentative flame till she ran out of breath, and still nothing. Maybe the kindling wasn’t dry enough, maybe it had somehow absorbed the dampness of the house. She removed it all, stick by stick, set it beside her on the floor and reached into the box beside the stove for more — and this was dry, certainly it was, dry as the paper itself. Painstakingly, she set one stick across the other, beginning with the smaller ones and working her way up.