The Road
In the sequel, she stayed on in the dark, bringing the glass to her lips every so often, the rising chemical scent of the liquor in her nostrils, the taste of it on her tongue and in her mouth and the back of her throat. She meant to get up, light the lantern, help Ida set the table for dinner — rouse Edith; where was Edith? — but Will’s whiskey, which had pushed her so high, weighed her down. She shouldn’t have gone off on him the way she had and she regretted it now, already thinking of ways to make it up to him, to help rather than hinder. He was under a strain too. All the troubles of the place devolved on him, one worry chasing after the next — a week ago he was stalking through the corridors muttering darkly about the disaster they faced if the rains didn’t come and now here he was with his hands tar-stained and his back aching and the road washed out. He was fifty years old, soon to be fifty-one. This was no kind of life for him. He was an educated man, skilled in his trade, one of the few men in the country who could reliably run a big printing operation the way he had on his brother’s paper in Boston and the Morning Call up in San Francisco. He was a gentleman, not a common laborer. If he didn’t watch himself he was going to end up sick or injured or just plain out of luck, like the palsied ragtag troop he so proudly marched with on Decoration Day each year, banners waving, bands playing, and every other man with his sleeve hanging loose or his leg gone at the knee. You survived the war, Will, she told him, you don’t have to fight another one.
She emerged from her reverie to the sound of voices leaching out of the steady background thrum of the rain: Will’s voice, Ida’s, call and response. It was some trick of the atmosphere — or her own ears — because suddenly she could hear them as clearly as if they were right there in the room with her.
“Everything’s all over mud,” Ida said, complaining, but her tone wasn’t the tone of complaint — it was airy and light, as if she were with Edith and the two of them had their heads together, half a breath from dissolving in giggles. “Just look at this floor. How can anybody expect me to cook in conditions like this?”
There was the sound of a chair shifting, the metallic groan of the hinges on the cabinet door, and then Will’s voice, companionable, intimate: “Oh, I don’t know, you seem to be doing a pretty fair job of it, even if you do have to wear a pair of gum boots under those skirts of yours. But you’re always… what I mean to say is you, you’re a very good”—he faltered, his words dense with whiskey—“really excellent. First-rate. But what’s that, what are you adding to that pot?”
“Never you mind. You stay out of that now.”
“Ida, Ida, Ida,”—denser yet, drawing out the vowels as if he were singing—“I know this is hard on you, but I swear I’ll be back up there on the roof to tar over this gap here as soon as, well, as soon as the rain stops. The very minute.”
“Stops? You really think it means to stop?”
“It’s got to. Law of averages.”
“Well, I don’t. Not a bit of it. If anybody ever witnessed an example of God’s retribution on the sinners of the world, this is it — muck and rain, rain and muck, that’s all there is.” There was the sharp unmistakable click of glass on glass, and was he pouring for her, was that it? “And I’m just the sort of sinner to throw myself in the flood and be done with it, truly now, because I don’t think I can stand for another thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights of this, can you?”
“So maybe I ought to see about putting a hull under the house, then — is that what you’re saying?”
Ida, laughing: “Yes, that’s exactly it. And maybe you’d better start in pairing up the animals.”
“Good advice, capital, the best in the world. I’ll do that just as soon as I’ve had my dinner. But beyond that, tell me, what sins could a girl of your age possibly have to atone for?”
A sigh. The rattle of a spoon run round the circumference of a cooking pot. Ida’s voice, dropping low: “Oh, you’d be surprised.”
And then there was a whole hurricane of noise, the back door flung open on the storm and slammed shut again, the floorboards groaning, feet stamping, and a new voice entering the conversation, Jimmie’s, thin and adenoidaclass="underline" “Jesus, it’s cats and dogs out there.”
She got up from the chair then and started down the hall. She could see them through the open kitchen door, framed there in the light of the lantern, the three of them, Will propped up on the table with his legs crossed, Ida at the stove, a glass of whiskey in one hand, stirring spoon in the other, and Jimmie, wet to the eyes and dashing the drenched cap against his thigh, moving into the circle of warmth. “What’s for dinner?” he asked, and if he glanced up when she entered the room — if any of them did — it was only vaguely, without recognition, as if she’d already ceased to exist.
* * *
It was still raining when Will brought out the cards after dinner — they were four at whist, she and Edith partnered against Will and Ida, Jimmie watching their every move from a chair in the corner as if he were going to be examined on it afterward and Adolph gone out to the bunkhouse to do whatever he did there, stare at the ceiling, fling shoes at the mice, stew in his odious thoughts — and when nine o’clock came round and they damped the lanterns and went off to bed, it was coming down every bit as steadily as it had all day. She’d sat through the cards in as good a humor as she could muster, the room warm, Will sluggish though he’d put the bottle away and taken nothing with dinner but coffee and a cigar after, and she wasn’t affected one way or the other when she and Edith wound up losing consistently, hand after hand, game after game, or at least that was what she told herself. Will was a master at cards and she wanted to be gracious about that, enjoying the game for what it was — an opportunity to escape the rain and the four walls and the endless yawning boredom of the place.
After saying goodnight to Edith on the landing, she went into her room to light the lamp there and prepare for bed. It was cold — bitter, damp, like plunging into the ocean — and she hurried over her toilette, bending quickly to wash her face in the basin and trying not to think about the apartment on Post Street, with its running water, hot and cold both, and the claw feet of the bathtub propped on the black-and-white tiles of the floor. By the time Will came up the stairs she was already in bed, shivering, listening to the rain on the roof and in the gutters and counting off the intermittent dripping of the three buckets set round the room. Nothing had changed. There was the washstand, there the pot. The only novelty was the angle of view, since the bed had been moved three feet to the left to defeat the most persistent leak, the one that had soaked through the canopy. Everything smelled of mildew.
She heard Will on the landing, in the hallway, each footfall descending like a blow, and then he was at the door, the door pushing partway open and his face hanging there in the gloom of the hallway — he was making an assessment of the prevailing conditions, of the leaks and the half-full buckets and the mood of his wife, and she couldn’t blame him for that. “Minnie?” he called softly. “Are you awake still?”
She had a sudden urge to lash out at him — drinking whiskey with the help, with Ida, inflicting Adolph on her, ignoring her all evening except as an opponent to drub at cards while he built up Ida and tore down his own daughter as if to let her win a single game would annihilate him — but she checked herself. She was the one at fault. Everything had been so tranquil in the afternoon, the rain at the window, the fire giving up its heat, the neck of the bottle poised over her glass and then his and the two of them sitting down to a quiet chat for the first time in as long as she could remember, but then she’d had to spoil it. Had to nag at him. Truth told, she’d all but driven him from the room. Driven him to the kitchen. And she was on the verge of taking the thought one step further—driven him to Ida—but the thought was inadmissible, a fantasy, a delusion, Will her husband, Ida the servant, a second daughter, family. A child. All but a child. “Yes,” she said, “I’m awake.”