T. Boyle - San Miguel

But, of course, they didn’t make it. He was in bed, snoring, while she brushed her teeth over the sink in the kitchen, the lantern burning low and the dark pressing at the windows. She thought to check on them before she turned in, if only for Herbie’s sake, and they were alive still, warm to the touch. The cobbler had been a success, even if it had dried out in the oven she was still trying to get the hang of, and she took a moment to cover what was left of it with a plate before going to bed. In the morning, the mice were cold, already stiffened, miniature satchels of shriveled leather bound up in a dirty sock. And the cobbler, the plate tipped back ever so slightly, bore the tracks of their cousins outlined in flour. As did the counter and the floor and the wall over the sink too.

That he took it hard was a testament to him, to his kindheartedness, his compassion and gentleness and his ability to see value in the smallest things, that was what she told herself. And yet the way he’d reacted, the way his face had fallen and his voice caught in his throat when he discovered them there at breakfast, was so bewildering she didn’t know what to think. She watched him come through the door, light on his feet, whistling and singing out a good morning to her, then watched him bend down beside the stove, fussing there a moment before he lifted his head to give her a numb stare. “They’re dead,” he said.

She was at the sink, pumping water for the kettle. She looked out the window into the yard, where the fog closed everything in. “I know,” she said. “I discovered them first thing this morning.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“The way you’ve been working, I thought I’d let you sleep.” The kettle hissed as she set it on the stovetop. “I thought you’d want to find them yourself.”

He rose heavily to his feet, the sock pressed to him. His eyes were flat, without sheen, his face bleached of color.

She said his name then, moved, puzzled, making a question of it—“Herbie?”—and she wasn’t frightened, not yet, because he must have been joking, must have been pulling her leg. He was putting on an act, that was what it was, clowning for her. But he didn’t say a word. Just shuffled across the kitchen, shouldered his way through the door and out into the yard, the sock cradled in his hands.

She went after him, waiting for him to swing round on her with his electric smile and deliver the punch line to the joke, this joke, this routine, and hadn’t April Fools’ Day passed already? Because he couldn’t be serious. Couldn’t. He’d had no qualms about killing the cat — and, apparently, all the cats before it — and he kept talking about shooting one of the elephant seals, one of the big bulls, so he could preserve the skeleton intact and sell it to the natural history museum in Santa Barbara. Once he’d redeemed his gun collection, that is. And he was going to do that any day now, as soon as he could raise the cash…

“Herbie!” she called, but he wouldn’t turn round. When she caught up to him he was emerging from the shed with a shovel in one hand, the sock in the other.

“You’re burying them?” she asked, because she had to say something.

“I’ll do it,” he said, pushing past her. “You go on back in the house.”

For a long while she watched him out the window. He stood there motionless at the far corner of the kitchen garden, or what passed for a kitchen garden. It was just weeds now. When she’d asked Jimmie about it he told her the wind and the birds would ravage anything they put in the ground, except maybe potatoes — potatoes they couldn’t get to. She thought about that and about the seed packets — peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, bell peppers — she’d carefully picked out at the store back in Santa Barbara, which she was going to plant first chance she got no matter what Jimmie had to say, because weren’t they going to have to make their own way out here? Or at least try? Fresh vegetables. Where were they going to get fresh vegetables?

Finally, Herbie laid the sock aside — gently, gently — and slipped the blade of the shovel into the ground. Two scoops of dirt, three: it was nothing. The sock disappeared in the hole, the dirt closed over it. But then he stayed there for the longest time, his lips moving as if he were talking to himself — or praying, maybe he was praying.

The whole business was odd, surpassingly odd, the first rift between them, the first thin trembling hairline fracture in the solid armature of them, husband and wife, joined forever, but she didn’t know that yet. She merely watched him till she grew calm, grew bored, and turned back to her chores. It wasn’t till later, till she was making dinner and happened to go out into the yard to throw the slops on the pile there that she noticed the wooden marker. He’d fashioned it in the shape of a cross and carved an inscription into it with his penknife. She had to bend close to make it out. Wee Ones, the crosspiece read, and on the vertical, R.I.P.

* * *

She tried to be breezy about it when they sat down to dinner, but it was as if he couldn’t hear her. Normally he’d be spilling over with stories and jokes and reminiscences, so carried away she sometimes had to remind him his food was getting cold. Not tonight. Tonight he just sat there over his plate, chewing and staring off into the distance. “I probably made too much,” she said, sitting across from him. “Thinking of Jimmie, I mean. But I suppose I can just add the meat to tomorrow night’s pot, what do you think?”

Jimmie was off on the other end of the island on some urgent mission or other and so they were alone, a state of tranquility she’d been looking forward to ever since he’d come back. Not that she had anything against him. He was a companion for Herbie, inoffensive, even likable, a fount of information about everything from the peculiarities of the stove to the ailments of the horses and what the breeze portended vis-à-vis the next week’s weather, and he did seem to pitch in without complaint — it was just that she hadn’t had her fill of her husband yet. That first week. She wanted to relive it all over again. And again.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

“I’m sorry about the mice. These things happen, though, don’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“You did all you could. And that was nice, the way you put up a marker for them.”

He shot her a glance. “Yeah,” he said.

It went on like that through the next day and the day after that, even after Jimmie came back to provide the conversation round the dinner table, and at night, when they undressed for bed, she could feel him slipping away from her. On the third night, after he’d barely spoken a word to her all day, let alone touched her or shown the least sign of affection or even recognition for that matter, she couldn’t hold back any longer. “What is it?” she murmured, easing into bed beside him. “It’s not the mice still, is it?”

The room was cold, the stovepipe yet awaiting repair. She was dressed in a flannel nightgown, the peignoir folded away in the drawer now, and he didn’t seem to notice the difference. She breathed out and saw her breath hanging there in a cloud.

“No,” he said, “it’s not the mice. The mice just — I don’t know what it is. I feel all closed in.”

She took his hand, afraid suddenly, trying to think in French, because he was speaking another language now. Closed in? How could that be? She’d never felt freer in her life. “Chéri,” she whispered, “je t’aime. Je t’aime beaucoup.”

His eyes swept over her, then came back into focus. “I don’t know what it is. I get like this. It’ll pass. It always does.”