T. Boyle - San Miguel

There was nothing to say to this. She wasn’t about to exchange vows with him, not if she had to stay there on the island for the next three centuries. She stopped her friction until he laid his hand atop hers and began to guide her. “Will you talk to the fishermen?” she said after a moment.

“What fishermen?”

“Any fishermen.”

“The Captain won’t like it.”

“No,” she said, staring into his eyes and working her hand deeper, “no, he won’t.”

Since then she’d seen any number of sails in the harbor or farther out at sea, ships riding north, fishing boats, sealers, the private yachts of people from San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara who sailed from island to island for the pleasure of it because they had the means and the occasion to go wherever they wanted whenever the whim took them. But not her. No. And every time she mentioned it to Jimmie he gave her that look she had no trouble reading now, a look of greed and fear and self-serving obstinacy — he didn’t want her to go any more than her stepfather did. What did she do? She cut him. Cut him dead. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t touch him — wouldn’t let him touch her — and if he spoke to her she ignored him, and yet still he never gave in. Oh, he pleaded with her and made up all sorts of stories about how he’d hailed a boat but it was full of Chinamen or maybe they were Japanese and she wouldn’t want to go with them, would she? or how he’d just about talked Bob Ord into it, but then Bob’s boat had run aground on a shoal off Anacapa and he’d had to have it towed into Oxnard for repairs and never did come back, but it was just more of the same and all worth nothing. He’d had his chance and he’d failed the test. Now she looked where she could and when Rafael had strolled through the kitchen door nice as you please, she saw the way.

She washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen while the shearers filed out to the bunkhouse, Jimmie tagging along behind, then waited till her stepfather and Adolph had settled in at the card table before taking a chair out into the yard to sit there with a book in the declining light of the evening. The book was Wuthering Heights, which she’d read so many times the pages had worked loose from the binding. She’d come to hate it, actually, all that rural misery and star-crossed romance she’d once found so exotic and appealing but was now just a burden to her because it was one thing to picture the scene from a sofa in a San Francisco apartment and another to see it out the window, but that didn’t matter. The book was a prop. As was the chair. She’d combed out her hair and tied it back with a new red sateen ribbon she’d bought on the visit to Santa Barbara and though her dress was out of fashion it was the best one she had and it was clean and ironed and she’d dabbed perfume under the arms and in the pleats of her collar.

The breeze was light for once, blowing across the yard and carrying the stench of the pigs away with it. Overhead, long ghosting trails of vapor went from gray to pink with the setting sun. She turned the pages of the book, staring down at the words but making no sense of them, working at the trick of shifting her eyes to the porch of the bunkhouse and the clot of dark figures gathered there without giving herself away. For the longest while, nothing happened. She held herself rigid, the light softened, fell away. It was almost dark now and she wouldn’t be able to keep up the imposture much longer. She was about to give it up and go back into the house when there was movement on the porch, a figure separating itself from the others, and suddenly it was as if she’d been transported to another world altogether because she was hearing music, music out here in the barrens — a guitar, the elided figures, the strummed chords — and she couldn’t help but turn her head.

It was Rafael. He was standing at the base of the bunkhouse steps, one leg lifted to the bottom riser and the guitar resting on his thigh, the fingers of one hand tensing and releasing over the neck of the instrument while he strummed slow emphatic chords with the other. The rest of the shearers were lined up like statues on the benches along the wall, Jimmie amongst them. Rafael was looking down at his hands, deep in concentration. The others — to a man — were looking at her.

The rhythm quickened, beating steadily toward some sort of release, and then Rafael lifted his head, looked across the yard to her and began to sing:

Si tu boquita morena

Fuera de azúcar, fuera de azúcar,

Yo me lo pasaría,

Cielito lindo, chupa que chupa.

She didn’t know the song or what the words meant, but when the chorus rang out in soaring full-throated abandon— Ay, ay, ay, ay —she knew he was singing not for his compatriots lined up along the wall or for her stepfather immured in the house or the sheep in their coats or the rolling broken dusty chaparral, but for her, for her only.

* * *

The shearers were to be there for two weeks and then the boat would collect them and they’d go back to wherever they’d come from till the sheep’s coats grew out and they made their rounds once more. It was her intention to be on that boat with them. She didn’t know how she was going to manage it, but she looked to Rafael, encouraging him in any way she could, making sure to brush by him in the doorway when he came in for meals, letting her eyes jump to his and then away again, lingering outside each evening to hear him raise his voice in song till her stepfather went out on the porch to spit and light a cigar and call her in. She had to tread carefully — her stepfather was more vigilant than ever with men on the property and Jimmie shadowed her like a spy. Jimmie . Jimmie was the enemy now and no doubting it.

Rafael didn’t offer to help after that first night, and yet it wasn’t that he didn’t want to — he was polite and well bred, she could see that — but because the others wouldn’t allow it. They’d heckled him at the table and what they must have said to him in private she could only imagine. Let them have their fun. They were crude men, ignorant, unlettered, and what they’d seen of the world was limited to bunkhouses and sheep pens. He was different. And she knew he liked her. There was a sympathy between them — or no, a current as powerful and jolting as anything a magneto and a copper wire could generate. He was handsome, what the Mexicans call guapo, with his unexpected eyes and the way he stood out from the others like a prince amongst peasants, taller, straighter, his forearms corded with muscle beneath the fringe of his rolled-up sleeves and his secretive smile that was reserved for her alone.

Near the end of the second week, on the final day of the shearing — and she was counting the days off, tense and impatient, sick to her stomach with the thought of the opportunity passing her by — he slipped her a note as he came in for dinner with the others. She’d rung the bell on the porch as usual and stayed there to greet the men as they came up the steps, and he’d been last, holding back purposely. His hand flitted toward hers as he shifted past her and there was the quick hot touch of him and then the note was in her hand, a twice-folded scrap of paper that fit her palm like a holy wafer. She went straight through the room, down the hall and into the kitchen with it. Come to me, it read. Midnight. Behind the privy .

It was nothing to slip out of the house. Her stepfather, exhausted from the exertions of the roundup and shearing — nearly two weeks into it now and he an old man no matter his protestations to the contrary — had forgone his cards and whiskey and retired early. By nine, when she damped the lights and went up to bed, she could hear him snoring thunderously from down the hall and he was still at it at quarter to twelve when she crept back down the stairs and out into the night. She eased the door shut behind her and stood there a moment on the back porch, listening. Nothing moved. All was silence.