T. Boyle - San Miguel

She was bent over the open door of the stove, her lips pursed, fanning the ghost of a flame and blowing softly till it quivered and rose and died again, when the back door swung open and Jimmie came in out of the dark. Crouched there on her knees in the dirt, her hair in her eyes and her skirts and petticoat filthy already, she could only scowl at him. “It won’t light,” she said.

“Won’t light?” He gave her a smile that was like a tic, formed and fled before it registered. His arms hung loose, his jaw went slack. This was the first good look she’d had of him since they landed, and if she was miserable, if she hated the sight of this place and of him too because he was part and parcel of it, the presiding spirit, Caliban, she was curious at the same time. He’d changed in the year and a half since she’d seen him last. There seemed to be more to him. More breadth to his shoulders, a firmness to the legs she remembered as being so scrawny and shapeless she wondered how they’d managed to keep him upright. He wore the spotty beginnings of a mustache over his lip, twists of dark hair like plants stuck randomly in the soil of a frost-killed garden. His hair crawled down his neck. His clothes were worn to threads. Jimmie. He was Jimmie all the same.

“I’ve been trying for the past ten minutes.” She stood, brushing her hands on her skirt. “I twisted the flue back and forth and I’m sure it’s open—”

“Let me have a look,” he said, going to his knees so fast it was as if he were diving for cover. Balancing on one hand, he thrust his head through the open gap of the stove, peering upward. “I don’t see nothing,” he said, his voice echoing in the pipe. In the next moment he was on his feet again, standing beside her, and she felt a pulse of satisfaction: he was still shorter than she was.

“Could it be the pipe? Is the pipe stopped up?”

“Could be,” he said, bending to pluck a length of stovewood from the box. “I couldn’t say, really, because I’ve been doing my cooking out in the bunkhouse since Mr. Reed that was here come out to the island. Here, let me try this”—and before she could think to slam shut the door he hammered the pipe with the length of wood, the pipe gave back a corresponding thump and rattle, and there was soot everywhere. “There,” he said, and he sneezed three times in rapid succession, “that ought to do it. Go ahead and light it now.”

She waited a moment till the air cleared, then bent again to the stove and the kindling there and put the match to it. This time it took and the next thing she knew she was feeding the fire with progressively thicker sticks and it was already rising and snapping and throwing off heat. “Thank you,” she said. “I should have thought to do that myself.”

There was a silence. She warmed her hands at the fire and he moved in beside her, holding out his palms to the blaze. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello? What do you mean, ‘hello’?”

“Well, we didn’t have a chance — I saw you at the beach, of course, when you came in, but I didn’t, not till now… What I mean is, we haven’t seen each other in such a long while and I thought I’d just say hello. Again. After all this time. How are you? Are you well?”

“I was well,” she said, “till I came out here.”

“You look beautiful.”

She heard him as if from a great distance, as if she were in the dining hall at school and his voice was carrying across the waves all the way up the coast and over the rooftops, and she despised him, she did, but she was already thinking of what he might be worth to her and what he might do for her and how she could use him as an ally in the war she was already engaged in, whether she was ready for it or not. She brought her eyes up. Her voice went soft. “Hello,” she said. And then: “It’s nice to see you again.”

So she became a cook. Not a dancer, not a singer, not a student, but a cook. On an island that was known, if it was known at all, for its wrecks, for the fogs that sucked it into invisibility, the winds that sheared round Point Conception to snap masts and tatter sails and drive ships up on its rocks, for the shriek of rending wood. People called it the Graveyard of the Pacific. She called it Nowhere. At night, when she lay in her damp bed — everything damp, always damp, mold creeping over the mattress like a wet licking tongue and the walls beaded with condensation — she listened to the wind, to the distant tolling of ship’s bells and the fading ghostly cries of the foxes that were no bigger than a cat, and her mind spun away into fantasies of escape. She wished she had a boat. Wished she could swim like a fish. Or just walk across the water like Jesus, but then Jesus never faced such surf in the Sea of Galilee. Or wind. Or sharks. Or the ghost of the Chinaman you could hear wailing on nights when the moon was dark because he’d had to sever his own hand with a rusty knife and leave it there wedged between two rocks or drown with the tide.

Her first efforts in the kitchen were clumsy and inadequate, everything tasteless, burned, the beans hard as gravel and the soup so salty it was like spooning up seawater. She was at a loss. The stove was too hot, then it wasn’t hot enough. Pots boiled over, meat blackened in the oven. She served the three men at table through breakfast (overcooked eggs and chalky gruel), luncheon (lamb or salt pork fried in lard, with hot sauce, Mexican beans, fried potatoes and bread that was like hardtack because it wouldn’t rise) and dinner (more of the same), and sat at the far end of the table with her own plate and watched their faces as they lifted one forkful after another to their lips. They grimaced, sluicing the meat into the beans and the potatoes into the meat, mashing the whole business together and drowning it in grease, hot sauce and pepper, but no one complained, or at least not to her face. In fact, during those first weeks everyone seemed to tiptoe around her, Adolph vague and elusive, Jimmie solicitous, her stepfather going out of his way to conciliate her now that he’d seen she was going to be compliant, if not exactly reconciled to her lot — but then what choice did she have?

He did the slaughtering and showed her how to sharpen the knives and cut chops and sear them in the pan or rub a leg of lamb with thyme and rosemary and bake it so that the juices flowed and it didn’t taste like wood pulp. When they had turkey — or more rarely, chicken — Jimmie cornered the bird, took off its head with a stroke of the hatchet and hung it by its feet to bleed out, but it was up to her to scald and pluck and gut it, the wet eviscera steeping her hands and getting up under her nails so that she was forever picking at them and running her orange stick over her cuticles. The first time, she tried to spare herself, poking gingerly at the pale stippled skin with the tip of her knife until Jimmie took it from her and ripped the bird open from the slot at its rear all the way to the breastbone, and when she tried to dislodge the organs with a knife and spoon rather than her fingers, Jimmie just reached in and tore them out. “There’s nothing to be squeamish of,” he said. “It’s just animals. Meat, that’s all it is.”

The days tumbled past. Her hands toughened. She cut herself or burned her palm on the stove or the handle of the frying pan two or three times a day and learned to ignore it. Out of boredom — and a sense of standards, that too — she cleaned up the kitchen till it was as orderly as when Ida and her mother had been in charge, and very gradually, as a matter of self-preservation as much as anything else, she began to find that she did have a way with cooking after all. Not that there was much range for variation — the meals were standardized to the point of ritual and the household was forever running short of one thing or another so that she had to improvise more often than not — but at least things seemed to taste better, or at least she thought they did. She never did get the knack of baking — her loaves were like wheaten bricks, her bread pudding dense and unpliable. And when she fried abalone steaks, no matter how often she shifted the pan around the stovetop, they were invariably sodden, tasteless and tough. After a while, even though abalone were her stepfather’s favorite dish (at least in the abstract, since they cost nothing), he stopped bringing them to her.