T. Boyle - San Miguel

When Jimmie came back it was as if a marching band had clattered across the courtyard and into the house, cymbals crashing and horns blaring — she was that used to the quiet and the sound of their own two voices. The first night he talked their ears off about people she’d barely heard of, the Vails and Vickers and their families and hired hands and all the fine points of the little feuds and grievances of this one or that. Herbie had shot and dressed a sheep, the old spoiled carcass, or what was left of it, tossed out on the compost heap for the ravens and the dwarf foxes that trotted around the island like dogs, and she’d made a credible leg of lamb with mint jelly, roasted potatoes and peas out of the can fancied up with pearl onions.

“Bobby Burgos, that works the horses out there?” Jimmie was sunk into his chair at the table, waving his fork like a baton, as if he were about to get up and lead the band off in another direction. “Got thrown and broke his shinbone, clean snap you could of heard all the way over here — you notice the Coast Guard boat? They come for him three days later but he just waved them off, tough old bird—”

Herbie, her Herbie, fingertips drumming and feet tapping under the table, let out a sigh of resignation and sympathy both. He was handsome as an actor, his face smooth and unlined and his hair going to silver at the temples, and she could have sat there all night just watching him, though there were the dishes to clear up and coffee to brew and the dough for tomorrow’s bread to knead and cover and set aside to rise. He cut a slice of meat, chewed and bolted it, and now he was waving his own fork. “I suppose so,” he said, “but I don’t really know the man, since I haven’t had the chance to get out to Santa Rosa yet, or did you forget? Tough’s what you want out here, though, isn’t it?” He looked to her now, grinning his wide lit-up grin and giving her a wink of complicity. “But while you’ve been out there having your vacation—”

“Vacation? They worked me like a dog.”

“I potted that old tom you couldn’t seem to hit, though you must’ve gone through half a box of cartridges.”

“You got him? Where?”

“Out behind the barn. He was just sitting there licking himself and I slipped into the house, grabbed the.22 and let fly.”

“Tom?” she said. “What tom? You’re not talking about a cat, are you?”

“Feral cats.” Herbie had uncorked his last precious bottle of bourbon — or what somebody claimed was bourbon in this eleventh year of Prohibition — and he took a moment now to pour out a measure for each of them. “The last people out here before Bob, the people after the Russells? They let their cats go wild, and the cats went on breeding, of course. And then you’ve got your boaters coming out here with a litter maybe they don’t want, figuring they’ll set them free on the island instead of putting them in a sack and drowning them. Like any decent person would.” Another wink. The light of the lantern shone through the glass and the bourbon gave up its color. “Here’s to the memory of Old Tom!”

“Here, here!” Jimmie crowed.

The liquor went down all around, a burn in her throat and then in the pit of her stomach. “I don’t understand. Don’t you want cats here? To keep the mice down? You yourself said they were all over the place.”

“Ah”—he held up a finger—“that’s where you’re wrong. The mice belong here, they evolved here, this is their home. Who was that mouse man from the college, Jimmie?”

“Walter.”

“Right, Walter. Walter Franks. He came out here, I guess it was mid-January, studying them, you know? Well, guess what? They’re a distinct subspecies of the deer mouse, unique, found nowhere else. We can’t have cats killing them. Plus, have you seen how cute they are?”

“Cute? Mice, cute? They’re pests, they’re vermin. Whoever heard of a cute mouse?”

Herbie was watching her, grinning still, but his eyes seemed to harden ever so slightly — were they having a disagreement, their first disagreement, and over mice no less? “You wait,” he said, and he brought his hands together on the table, intertwining his fingers and leaning back to crack his knuckles, “you’ll see.”

* * *

A week slipped by. The wind came on, a two-day gale that picked up every grain of sand on the island and deposited it somewhere else, mostly in their clothes and the bed and the dishes on the shelf, so that she itched all night and whenever she chewed anything it had a fine grit to it, then the fog settled in and it was as cold and gray and damp as the night Scrooge saw Marley’s ghost, but it was all bliss to her. The days took on a rhythm all their own, a rhythm dictated not by the subway and the work schedule she’d kept at the New York Public Library these past ten years — nine to five, five and a half days a week — but by the sun struggling up out of the water in the morning and settling back into it at night.

One morning (the honeymoon over now and Herbie out in the yard with Jimmie working at one thing and another the minute breakfast was cleared away) she was in the kitchen, rolling out the dough for an experimental cobbler to be made from canned peaches in heavy syrup, when Herbie burst through the door. “You mun see this,” he said, his voice spiraling up and away in his excitement.

“Mun? Have you been reading Burns again?”

“Aye. ‘To a Mouse.’” And he began reciting: “‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin tim’rous beastie, / O what a panic’s in thy breastie!’ But I forget the rest. How do you say mouse in French, anyway?”

“La souris.”

“Right, of course.” And he repeated it: “ La souris . Well, anyway, I’ve got les souris to show you, les enfants d’une mère qui est morte .”

It was then that she noticed the bulge in his shirt, his hand cupped there, the buttons undone. In the next moment the hand emerged and there they were displayed against the hardened callus of his palm: three hairless pink things no bigger than bugs. They had tails, whiskers, pale curled feet. Mice. Les souris .

“Tell me they’re not cute,” he said.

“They’re not cute.”

The corners of his mouth twitched, but he held his smile. “Unbeliever,” he shot back. “You might not think so, but I find them beautiful, perfectly made, everything wrought in miniature — just look at them. They’re babies, Elise, babies .”

She shrugged as if to say there were more perfect objects of beauty in the world, then turned back to the board, the rolling pin and the dough. She wasn’t squeamish, wasn’t indifferent, but they were mice, only mice. “What do you plan to do with them?” she asked after a moment, but she already knew the answer.

“Raise them, of course. I can’t just let them die. I was in the shed, where the taproom’s going to be, you know, moving things around, clearing some space, and I guess I didn’t see the mother till it was too late. So I’m the responsible party here.”

“And then?” she asked. “When they’re grown? Are you going to train them to sit up and bark and wag their tails?”

She was watching his face — more banter — but he didn’t laugh or even smile. He seemed to be considering. “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” he said. “But for now, where’s the eyedropper? And would you bring me one of those cans of evaporated milk — you don’t think it’ll be too rich for them, do you?”

He put the mice in an old sock and left them beside the stove, for warmth, then ducked back out the door and into the fog that showed no sign of burning off. She went about her business, careful where she stepped as she moved around the kitchen, the cobbler taking shape and the soup she’d prepared for lunch boiling furiously on the stovetop. Three times that morning he came in to check on the mice, patiently holding the eyedropper to their snouts, though whether they took any of the milk or not, she couldn’t say. After lunch he and Jimmie went out across the yard to work on repairing the fences they would use to funnel the sheep into the pens for shearing, or so he explained, and by the time it began to get dark it seemed he’d forgotten all about the sock in the corner and what it contained. But he hadn’t. Even before he washed up or put on the kettle for tea, he was kneeling there beside the stove, eyedropper in hand. “They’re eating!” he cried. “Or this one is, anyway. They’re going to make it. I really think they’re going to make it.”