T. Boyle - San Miguel

Six of the eggs in the top carton were broken, but she was able to spoon them out of their shells and set them aside in a blue ceramic mixing bowl she found on a shelf above the sink. Then she set about putting the rest of the groceries away in the pantry and the cold-storage room beyond it: the eggs, milk, cheese and vegetables went here, alongside a hanging slab of bacon and a whittled sheep carcass that looked — and smelled — none too fresh. The canned goods, sacks and sacks of them, were down at the beach still, but the basics were here on the shelf, tomatoes, pork and beans, sauerkraut and a line of big brown crocks set against the wall that contained, as she was to discover, sugar, flour, spaghetti, noodles and the like. After she’d put everything away she went to the bedroom to unpack her clothes.

The walls were dark — natural wood — and damp to the touch and the room smelled of cold ash and boards bleached and pounded by the sea. The kerosene lamp gave off its own astringent odor, the wick blackened but the globe wiped as clean as if it had just come off the shelf at the hardware store. There was a dresser in the corner — the top two drawers empty and with clean oilcloth laid down for her, Herbie’s clothes neatly folded in the bottom drawer — and it took her no more than a minute or two to arrange her own things and tuck them away, since the majority of what she’d brought along was still down below. In the dark. She lingered over the bed, hesitating over which side was his, before deciding to lay her sheerest — her only — peignoir over the pillow on the left. It was a gift from Anna for her wedding night, the sort of thing she wasn’t really comfortable with, or hadn’t been, but Herbie — as if he needed encouragement — had really come alive when he’d seen her in it that first night. And then she’d switched off the light and he’d come to her and after that it wouldn’t have mattered what she was wearing.

She was thinking about that, about Herbie and their first night together and the nights since, studying herself in the mirror, wondering if she should put on a dab of lipstick, rouge, perfume, and trying to do something with her hair — it was a mess, flattened across the crown by the kerchief and teased out on the ends by the wind — when she heard the sound of the horses in the courtyard. She wasn’t much for makeup in any case — she was plain and she knew it and makeup just made her look like a circus clown, or that was how she felt, anyway — and it was almost a relief to duck away from the mirror and slip out to help him haul the things up off the sled and onto the covered porch that ran the entire length of the building.

“It looks like I’m going to have to make two more trips,” he said, sliding a cardboard carton of books across the dried-out planks and bending immediately for another. “I guess”—the cardboard giving up a sharp frictive whine as it rushed across the planks—“we brought more than I’d bargained for”—bending again, lifting, sliding—“but it’s all to the good because you never know when the next boat’s going to come by and it’s nice to think you’ve got what you need when you’re on your own. We won’t be starving. Not anytime soon.”

She was working right beside him, unloading books, canned goods, bedding, a pair of matching suitcases her mother had given her as a wedding gift, the exhaustion she’d felt earlier gone now in the excitement of the moment, his things and hers — theirs, conjoined. “Couldn’t you leave some of it for the morning?”

He stood up, stretching, and gave her a look. “The fog comes in, it can leave things pretty wet.”

“What about a tarp? You must have a tarp of some sort. And if we bring up the perishables, the food, all the food, then the rest can wait. Can’t it?”

He was still standing there, the night opening up to infinity behind him. “I didn’t even carry you over the threshold,” he said. “Shame on me. Shame on us.” And then, before she could protest — there was so much to do and what about the horses, what about his back, with all this lifting? — he was tipping her backward into the embrace of his arms and kicking through the door and he didn’t set her down till they were in the bedroom and he was pressing her to him for a long lingering kiss. “You’re right,” he said finally. “Absolutely. Our first night in our new house and here I am worrying about, what — baggage! What am I thinking? Have I gone nuts?”

So he went on out to the barn to unhitch the horses and drag a dusty and somewhat perforated canvas tarp — Army issue — out of the rafters and haul it down to the beach and when he came back the table was set in the kitchen, a candle burning there in a saucer and the aroma of her omelets riding the air. They sat a long while over supper, Herbie chattering on, his internal motor spinning and spinning again and no neutral on the shift lever, praising the house, the island, her cooking, her —her most of all — and so what if the omelets were scorched on the bottom and the fines herbes had been reduced to salt and pepper and ketchup out of the bottle? He didn’t care and she didn’t care either. It was enough to be there together with no place to go and no one to please but themselves, and when she rose to clear up he wouldn’t hear of it. “Not tonight,” he said, his voice sunk to a whisper. “We’ve got other things to do tonight. Better things.”

And then he took her by the hand and led her out of the kitchen and through the house to the bedroom, where the foot of the sleigh bed rose up like an undulating wave and the black silk peignoir lay limp across the pillow. The house was utterly still. There was no sound, nothing, not even the wind. He held up the peignoir to her and kissed her, kissed her deeply. He wouldn’t let her go into the other room to change and when she’d changed he wouldn’t let her turn the lamp off either. Not yet, anyway.

That first week was an idyll, the two of them alone in an untamed place and nothing in the world to intrude on the slow unfolding of a peace and happiness so vast she couldn’t put a name to it. She woke each morning exhilarated, everything new, the hills enfolded in fog and the fire going in the big cast-iron stove in the kitchen, Herbie there already with the pot of coffee, and she, in her robe, bending to kiss him before seeing to the flapjacks and bacon or French toast layered with butter and awash in maple syrup, breakfast, breakfast for two. Then there were the walks. Each morning, after breakfast, he took her out over the island, showing it off, the cliffs falling away to the churn of the sea, Prince Island rising out of the waves like the humped back of a whale — and whales too, actual whales, spouting right out there in the harbor. There were the caves up on Eagle Cliff with their Indian pictographs worked into the rock, the elephant seals stretched out on the beach like enormous stuffed sausages, the caliche forest with the haunting twisted shapes of its petrified trees. Wildflowers. Open space. And the sheep, the raison d’être of the place, running off wild in every direction.

In the afternoons, he would see to his chores and she turned her attention to putting the house in order, no hurry, no compulsion, just a long slow descent into the drifting rootless pleasure of arranging things, moving what little furniture there was, seeing what chair or table looked best beside the window or set against the wall in the far corner. She took a long while arraying her books according to category on the shelves in the living room, hung her pictures, washed every jar she could find and filled them with the stalks of dried flowers for the simple beauty of them. Nights, there were the dinners she prepared for him — mutton and rice, a fish he’d caught, mussels marinière —and then the quiet time when they sat before the stove reading aloud to each other, and finally, bed, and the dark and the feel of him there beside her. She called him Adam, he called her Eve.