T. Boyle - San Miguel

And then Mrs. Cawthorne, her voice level and hard: “Yes, but I’m afraid I won’t be available to her next time round.”

“And why is that — you’re not thinking of closing down, are you?”

“No, it’s not that, not that at all. It’s just — well, a young girl needs a mother, and I’m sorry to say it. She doesn’t look after herself, that’s what I mean to say. Her clothes, her hair, her shoes, her corsets. She’s ragged. Not at all what I expect from a young lady.”

Her stepfather made some sort of meliorating comment — the island, the weather, rough conditions — but the landlady wouldn’t be swayed. “It’s to do with standards,” she said. “My boarders, I’ve got to think of my boarders. And my own reputation too.”

And that was it. She was condemned. Her stepfather called up the stairs to her—“Edith, will you put a hurry on, for God’s sake? We can’t keep Charlie waiting all day”—even as she stepped to the mirror, pushed her hair back and gave herself a good hard look. It was true. Her hair was dirty, her dress no better than a patchwork quilt. Her face had taken the sun till it looked as if it had been stained in a barrel. Her eyes stared out like a madwoman’s. She was like a savage, like Jimmie, like Caliban — or no, even worse, because she’d let him touch her as if he and she were the same, as if she were his wife, not Miranda, not even Sycorax, but worse, far worse, Mrs. Caliban herself.

The shearers came back in August and this time there was a new face amongst them. At first she didn’t notice — she glanced up one afternoon and there they were, outside the window, milling around in the yard with their bedrolls flung over their shoulders and that greedy craving look in their eyes, and all she could think of was the extra work they would cost her. Five of them — or no, six — and each one going through three pounds of meat, a stack of tortillas and half a gallon of wine every day, though the wine was to be watered and doled out a glass at a time till they sat down to dinner so as to prevent a general riot, and her stepfather was absolutely strict on that score. They wore straw hats — sombreros, they called them — that were as stiff as tin and finger-greased till they’d taken on a dull gray sheen, Mexican boots that cocked them up off their heels and stained bandannas knotted jauntily round their throats to lend them the only bit of color they seemed able to support. She recognized most of them at a glance, lean reticent stripped-back men in their thirties and forties who spoke a garble of Spanish, Italian, English and Portuguese and maybe Indian too, she couldn’t say — all she knew was that it wasn’t French and it wasn’t German and the thought made her ache all the more for the life that had been taken away from her.

Of course she recognized them — she ought to, since they’d worked her nearly to death when they’d come out at the end of February. There was Luis, in a pair of leather chaps, and next to him Rogelio, quietly spitting in the dirt, and who was that, the one with a concave face like the blade of a shovel? The Italian. They just called him El Italiano. And — but here she caught her breath — there was a new man amongst them, young, with a smooth unseamed face and a guitar strapped over his shoulder atop the bedroll. He was standing there with the others, taking everything in, the chickens, the barn, the bunkhouse and the pigpen and the hills dotted with sheep that must have been replicas of the sheep-dotted hills on all the other islands, nothing new under the sun, and what was he doing here with these old men? Was he somebody’s son? Rogelio’s maybe? Luis’? That was when he suddenly glanced up at the house, at the window behind which she was standing, and they locked eyes till she was the one to turn away.

That night, when she served at table, he sat up rigidly the minute she came into the room, as if her mere presence had turned some switch in him. The other shearers broke off their conversation and stared down at their plates out of respect, but he fixed on her every movement. Her stepfather was addressing Adolph and Jimmie as usual and he was saying the usual things about the flock and the weather and the turpentine they would dip the sheep’s noses in and the whale he’d seen off Prince Island just that afternoon, raising his voice to let the sense of it drift down the table to include the shearers in the conversation. He was feeling convivial, the prospect of another crop of wool before him, and while the shearers — and Jimmie — raised glasses of watered wine to their lips, his own tin cup was filled with whiskey. As was Adolph’s, judging from the dazed look on his face.

She set out the two big pewter platters of roast lamb, one at each end of the table, then went out to the kitchen for the pot of beans, the tortillas and the hot sauce Jimmie had helped her concoct from chopped tomatoes, rendered grease and the dried habanero peppers the shearers had brought with them. She was flipping tortillas on the stovetop when the door to the kitchen pushed open and the new man stepped into the room as if he’d lived there all his life. His name was Rafael, he was twenty-six years old and he was a Spaniard (not a Mexican, he’d insisted during the brief introduction she’d had to him out on the porch before dinner), with glass-green eyes and long black hair he slicked back with a scented pomade she could smell all the way across the room.

“I am thinking if I am able to assist,” he said, and he was the first man — with the exception of Jimmie and Jimmie didn’t count — ever to offer to help. On a ranch, men worked in the dirt and women in the kitchen, their paths never to cross. On a ranch, there were no gentlemen or ladies — there was just life lived at the level of dressed-up apes tumbled down from the trees. If you wanted to talk of poetry or drama or music or have a man open a door for you or get up when you entered a room, then you’d better die and come back in a new life.

She was stunned. She didn’t know what to say, but he’d found a pair of dish towels to cushion the handles of the cast-iron pot of beans and was already lifting it from the stove, and then he was gone, backing out the door and down the hall to a chorus of jeers from the others. Mujer, someone shouted. Pícaro! cried another. A moment later she flipped the last of the tortillas onto a platter, took up the tureen of hot sauce and followed him down the hall, but instead of putting the platter in front of her stepfather or even in the center of the table, she set it down beside Rafael, as a sign of favor. “Oh-ho,” Luis crowed, “you see?” and everyone laughed, but for Jimmie, who set his mouth and lashed his eyes at her.

Did she care? No, not in the least. Jimmie had had his chance.

For months now she’d pleaded with him to help her engineer an escape from the island and he’d made vague promises about contacting this fisherman or the other when they anchored in the harbor, but nothing had come of it. The first time she’d mentioned it to him — while they were alone, in their secret spot, after she’d let him kiss her lips and suck endlessly at one bared nipple like the oversized infant he was — he gave her a long look she couldn’t quite dissect, at least not at first. “Please?” she’d whispered, and she’d moved her hand to his groin, to stroke him there through the fly of his trousers. “Pretty please?”

“The Captain wouldn’t like it,” he said after a moment.

“No,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t. But do it for my sake. Please?”

He looked away, though he’d begun to move his hips to the rhythm of her hand. “I could maybe… but then, what about me? I’d be here all alone without you. I’d miss you something terrible, because, well, I’ve only said it a thousand times, I love you. You know that.”