T. Boyle: San Miguel

“The turkey,” she said. “Was that from—?”

“The boy killed it this morning, while we were on the boat, is what I gather, because Captain Waters give him word when he was here before Christmas to make things ready for us. There’s a whole flock of them running about the yard, you know. Chickens too. You should go and have a look, you should. The sun’s just broke through and it’s a glorious day out there. It’ll lift your spirits, I’m sure.” She turned back to the stove, to the potatoes boiling there in an unfamiliar pot, a sheepmen’s pot, blackened and battered. “And Captain Waters says we’re to stop what we’re doing, all of us, by three o’clock, because it’s a holiday and he’s going to take us out and show us over the island.”

She couldn’t see much out the window, which was as clouded with abrasion as the ones in the front room. But she saw the outline of the pens there in the yard, the wooden slats of the fences, and beyond them the long gradually sloping rise that culminated in the high point of the island, Green Mountain, 831 feet above sea level, a measurement Will had taken himself with his transit. Eight hundred thirty-one feet. He was proud of that figure, inordinately proud, as if he’d captured one of the Alps and reduced it to fit here to scale on his own private domain.

“We’re all in a high state of excitement, so,” Ida said, turning to the chopping block now and the turkey that wanted stuffing. She chopped onions and celery, fragmented a heel of bread, her movements neat and circumscribed, her shoulders dipping and rising as she worked through her tasks, her feet sweeping through a graceful arc on the bleached-out floorboards till she might have been dancing in place. She was a pretty girl, pretty enough, though no match for Edith, and a good worker, solicitous, kind, dutiful above all else. Her parents were Mullinses, out of County Cork via Boston and the Gold Rush that had washed them up penniless in San Francisco. She was a poor girl, that was all, poor Irish, but after three years of having her in the house now Marantha considered her as much a daughter as Edith herself, or very nearly. “To see over the island, I mean,” Ida went on, glancing over her shoulder. “The flock. And the seals too. Can you hear them? That’s them barking in the distance.”

She caught her breath a moment. There was the creak and rustle of the stove, the hiss of water coming to a boil. Men’s voices, muffled, giving and taking orders. And something else too, an undercurrent of concerted vocalization that might have been the basso ostinato of a distant choir. Seals. Barking. Or no, singing, singing their own immemorial songs to the sea and the island, and to what else? Fish. They sang to fish, the god of fish, the provider and nurturer of all the flashing silver schools of the sea. She tried to picture them — she’d seen them in San Francisco, lying inert on the rocks at the edge of the Bay — dun things, black, tan, bleached white. Those seals belonged to no one. But these, strange to think it, the ones singing even now, belonged to her.

From the kitchen she went down the hall to the main room (the parlor, she’d have to call it, the parlor cum dining room) and started sorting through the boxes, looking for her plates, the cutlery — and sheets, where were the sheets? The men had left everything in a jumble, just as Ida said, and things had gotten wet, unfortunately, so that the ink had bled and smeared on the boxes she’d so meticulously packed and labeled back in Santa Barbara, working through long punishing afternoons when she’d barely felt equal to getting out of bed. They were outside now, the men — she could see them through the window, their hats and shoulders glazed with sun, Will, Adolph and Jimmie — and they seemed to be fussing with the mule and the sled. But there were two mules now and a horse too and Will was bending suddenly to jerk a supple darkly shining object up off the fence post and clap it over the horse’s back — a saddle, the stirrups dangling and the horse flinching with the surprise of it. And then, speaking of surprises, she saw that there was a dog there with them, a sheepdog with a piebald coat and two mismatched eyes, its tail sweeping back and forth in the dirt.

A dog. A horse. Turkeys. Seals. She couldn’t begin to imagine what else would turn up in this embarrassment of riches — and what about the sun overhead, did she own that too? Or the effect of it, the power it radiated to the grass so the grass could sprout and the sheep could batten on it and frolic and grow out their coats? The dirt, the dirt was hers. Or half hers. Or no, a quarter, when you factored in Hiram Mills. And Mrs. Mills. She had a quarter interest too. They were like four gods, their own pantheon.

She went to the front door — never mind how poorly hung it was — and pushed it open on the pale streaming sunlight. The wind had died. It was almost warm. All the scents of nature came to her at once like a dose of smelling salts — the barnyard and its ordure, the wildflowers blanketing the hills, sage, lupine, the sea — and it was as if she’d never been alive till this moment, because this wasn’t the exhausted sterile atmosphere of the parlor, the restaurant, the public library or the doctor’s office or any confined space, but something else entirely. It was primitive. Untainted. Fresh. Fresh air, the air that would cure her. It was true, everything Will had told her was true. How could she have doubted him?

“Will!” she cried out and watched him turn away from the horse, a neutral look on his face because he didn’t know what to expect, complaints, demands, trouble, and before she could think she was coming across the yard to him, pinching her skirts to keep them out of the mud. The hired man and the boy stood there frozen. The dog lifted its eyes. “Will,” she said, “it’s glorious. Everything is. I’m just — didn’t you say you were going to take us for a ride?”

* * *

There were three chairs lashed to the sled this time — two rockers, for her and Ida, and a straight-backed chair for Jimmie, who was to drive the mule. “I’ve swapped out the mules,” Will said when they’d gathered there in the yard, all of them still in their traveling clothes because there hadn’t seemed much sense in changing into anything fresh, not till dinner, anyway. “General Meade here, I’ve hitched him to the sled because he’s stronger but less predictable than Plum”—and here he looked to Edith—“who as you can see I’ve saddled up for someone to ride. I’ll be on Mike”—he nodded toward the horse, which was poking its muzzle into the dirt around a poor sprout of yellowed weed—“and since Adolph’s going to stay behind to look after things, the turkey, in particular, isn’t that right, Ida? I guess that elects you, Edith.”

Edith gave him a look of surprise and then she flushed with pleasure.

“Here,” he said, “let me help you up,” and Edith went to him and Will dropped one hand down so that he could take her foot, put an arm round her shoulder and ease her up and into the saddle. “Now, you’ll go sidesaddle today, till you get used to him, but we’ll have you riding astride in no time. You wait and see.”

Then he mounted the horse, wonderfully agile for a man his age, commanding, erect, the hat raked down over one eye as if he were one of the cowboys in a dime novel, and Marantha realized she’d never seen him on a horse before, never even dreamed he had the skill of it. Maybe it was something he’d learned in the Army, before she knew him. Maybe that was it. It had to be. Because in the seven years they’d been married he’d never ventured beyond the hansom or cable car, not as far as she knew. “Are you comfortable there, Minnie?” he asked, using his pet name for her even as he leaned down and steadied the reins so that the horse’s hooves did a quick little dance and the mud exploded beneath them.