T. Boyle - San Miguel

Yes. And then, when the others had gone out to the schooner (it was Lawrence Chiles’ boat, not Charlie Curner’s, thank God, because there was no telling what Charlie Curner would have done when he discovered her aboard), Rafael would claim he’d forgotten something — his guitar, which he’d have purposely left behind one of the rocks at the beach, nothing to it, just ten minutes at the oars, and they’d wait, they’d have to. She’d crouch in the bow, hidden beneath his serape, and when they got out to the ship she’d do her best to slip aboard unnoticed but if they knew and saw it would be nothing to them because this was between her and Rafael and nobody else. She was almost eighteen. She was a woman. She could do what she wanted in this world.

Luncheon. There was extra wine, unwatered, because it was a kind of celebration, the work concluded and the men on their way home, and maybe they had families to go to, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, sons. She served at table, then kept herself apart, and though she felt Rafael there like a fire burning in the center of her being, she didn’t look at him, no more than she had at breakfast. There were handclasps and farewells that traveled from the parlor and across the yard, the dog excitedly barking and the chickens scattering, and then they were gone. Jimmie and Adolph went off into the fields and she waited at the kitchen door to see what her stepfather would do, praying he wouldn’t take it in his head to walk down to the harbor to see them off. He’d lingered with the Italiano, who was the last of the shearers to start down the road, but finally he’d turned and come back into the house. She heard him go up the stairs, then there was the sound of his door easing shut and finally the groan of the bedsprings. He’d drunk wine, a quantity of it — she’d made sure to keep his glass full — and now he was having his siesta.

By the time she got to the place where she’d stowed her suitcase, she looked out to sea and saw that the shearers had reached the schooner, which sat the waves as if it had been propped there on wooden pillars, scarcely shifting with the action of the water. The sun was abroad. The sea shone. The men were like stick figures in the distance. She snatched up the suitcase and hurried down the road even as the dinghy swung back round with a single figure at the oars.

As she followed the switchbacks down the road the dinghy floated in and out of view, now present, now obscured by the sharply raked hillside. The suitcase dragged at her — she’d packed it with everything she could, even her books, and she’d had to kneel atop it to force the latch shut — but she kept on as best she could, her blood high, shifting the load from hand to hand till it swung like a pendulum and hurried her on. And then she was there, coming round the final turning, and she saw Rafael in the boat, working hard at the oars, but it took her a moment even to begin to comprehend what she was seeing. He wasn’t heading in to shore. He was on his way out. Back out. And from the stern of the boat she could see, quite clearly, the sun-burnished neck of his guitar poking out from the nest of the serape.

She dropped the suitcase and began to run, unencumbered, her arms churning. The dinghy was a hundred yards from shore and he was facing her, leaning into the oars, but he had the sombrero pulled down low so that his features were lost to her. She called out his name. Jerked her skirts high and bolted into the surf — she would swim, swim or drown — but he kept pulling at the oars, pulling harder and harder. The sea swept in. She was wet through, her skirts wound round her legs like the twisted chain of an anchor. She called out again. Twice, three times, bleating his name till the syllables ran up against one another and made no more sense than the inarticulate cry of an animal. The surf slammed at her, drove her down and jerked her back again till she was flung shivering on the beach in a white surge of foam and Rafael slid smoothly over the rail and melted away in the depths of Lawrence Chiles’ boat.

Then the sails unfurled and caught the wind and the boat was gone.

Does life go on? It does. Though she sank low enough to consider the alternative, even going so far as to take her stepfather’s rifle down from its hook and caress the trigger where it shone silver from use, and she spent one dismal fog-haunted afternoon suspended over the ocean on a fragment of rock no wider around than the seat of a chair, daring herself to jump. She could hear the crash of the waves, taste the salt-sting of the spray. The damp penetrated her hair, slicked the rock till it might have been greased. There was a cold drip from above. She pressed her back to the wall, closed her eyes and let her mind wheel away from the voice that whispered, Let go, let go, let go . She saw herself dancing then, saw herself at the piano, and presently she imagined her fingers moving over the keys, working her way through the melody bar by bar as if it were an exercise and Mr. Sokolowski seated beside her on a platform of cloud beating out the time, and it was the music that held her there. And when finally she removed her shoes so that her naked feet could anchor her and she climbed back up the rock face above her, up to the plateau beyond and the sheep scattered there in all their blank-eyed placidity, she tested each handhold as if it were her last.

She was in the kitchen one interminable afternoon two months later, taking a cleaver to the unyielding carcass of the wether Adolph had shot the day before, her brain gone as dull as the blade she had to keep sharpening over and over, when there came a tap at the door. She looked up from the chopping block, the cleaver poised above the twisted red mass of muscle, skin and tallow. The stove creaked. The faintest distant rumor of the seals barking for the sheer pleasure of it inserted itself into the silence. She thought she must have been hearing things, but then came the second tap and she set down her cleaver. Caught her breath. Wiped her hands, very slowly, on the apron, her eyes fixed on the window set in the door.

There was a figure on the back porch, a hovering shadow, indistinct behind the drizzled panes of scoured glass. It took a moment to understand that this wasn’t her stepfather. That it wasn’t Jimmie or Adolph. That it was someone else altogether, someone new, a new face and form to align with the only three she knew because in all these hills and gullies and sea-battered coves, there were just the four of them, no one else, but for the shearers who weren’t due back till winter or the odd fisherman who came ashore to feel something beneath his feet besides swaying planks and the elastic give-and-take of cold salt water. And now a voice was attached to the form, a voice calling her name softly, a man’s voice—“Edith? Edith, is that you in there?”—and she knew that voice, didn’t she? Of course she did. It was, it was—

She was already moving toward the door, wiping her hands furiously now, the stink of the dead animal in her nostrils, the apron filthy, her hair a mess — and she couldn’t pat it in place, wouldn’t dare, not till she washed the offal from her hands — when it came to her: Robert. It was Robert Ord. The sealer. The jack-of-all-trades. The man — the young man — who possessed a boat, his own boat, a craft with a rudder, a sail and a hull that could slice the waves like its own kind of cleaver and carry anything or anybody all the way to the pale indented shore that hovered there on the horizon like a mirage. One more wipe of the hands and she pulled open the door, his name on her lips: “Robert, Robert, what a surprise. How are you?”

He was tall, levitating right up out of his sealskin boots, taller than she remembered, and he was grinning down at her with such burning intensity she wondered if he hadn’t been drinking. “Me?” A pause. “I’m just, well, I got a bad sore on my foot, the right one?” He held out his leg and shook it for her, his heavy cotton twill trousers spattered with white blotches that might have been paint, but then what would he have been painting out here — the cabin of his boat? “It don’t smell too good, but it’s nothing to worry over, nothing I ain’t seen before, though I told myself I should of took that splinter out of there the minute it went in, just pus, that’s all, and I guess that’ll teach me to go walking around in my bare feet… but what I mean to say is, how are you?”