by Boyle, T. C.
Will assured him that it was—and so did Mills. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Mills told him, and then repeated himself, “Once-in-a-lifetime. And as I think I’ve explained to you, the only reason I’m willing to sell is that I’m just too old anymore to be fussing around with boats and tracking sheep up in the hills.”
She’d managed to catch herself, her eyes watering from the effort, a thin wheeze of regurgitated air rattling in her throat. Mills kept talking. He was a salesman, that was what he was. But his logic was faulty: he was no older than Will. And what did that have to say about this little transaction, not to mention their lives here? She wanted to step in, change the subject—couldn’t they see they were pressing too hard, scaring him off?—but it was all she could do just to breathe at the moment. She held the wineglass to her lips, sipping, breathing, sipping, breathing, the first withering cough lurking just below the surface.
“No,” Mills sighed, taking up his glass and setting it down again, “this is a young man’s game, I’m afraid, though either partner could certainly run the place. Lord knows I did it, all on my own—till Will came in, that is—and for seventeen of the best years of my life. This place,” he said, revolving one hand as if it contained a miniature crystal globe of the island and everything on it, “is a kind of paradise. Paradise right here on earth.”
A silence descended over the table. Nichols dropped his eyes, no doubt calculating just how far that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would take him. The pudding went round. Ida produced the coffee cups. The shearers looked sated, drowsy, ready to find their way out to the bunkhouse amidst the explosion of stars overhead and the yeasty warm wind-borne odor of the flock.
It was Edith who finally spoke up. “Yes,” she said, her eyes fixed on Nichols, “it’s all that, just as my father and Mr. Mills say, but I don’t know if you realize how dreadful the weather can be. You’ve had sunshine today, and very little wind—”
“A little harsh weather can’t put me off,” he said, that faint smile lifting the corners of his mustache.
“But you can’t begin to imagine,” Edith went on, using her hands to elaborate. “It seems like we’re living in the eye of a hurricane here—or not the eye, what do you call it? The edge, the outer edge.” She shot Will a glance and Marantha recognized her look, a combination of the coquettish and satiric, as if this were all a grand joke. Was she trying to undercut him, was that it? Defy him? Squash the deal? It was her father who’d taken her out of school, disrupted her life, and now she was getting her own back, pushing the limits, needling him when he was most vulnerable. It was spite, pure meanness. “Edith,” she heard herself say. “Edith, wouldn’t you like another helping of the pudding? It’s your favorite—”
Edith ignored her. “Mother’s come here for the air, you know, and I can’t think we’ve had three days of sunshine in all the time we’ve been here. It’s damp, Mr. Nichols, damp and cold and unhealthy.”
“Edith.”
“And the wind.” Edith had her dramatic face on, conscious that everyone was looking at her, even the shearers. “It’s so fierce, so loud and hateful”—a pause, another look for Will, for her father, only him—“it just makes you feel so lonely you want to die.”
* * *
And then there were the sleeping arrangements. Mills volunteered to take a place in the bunkhouse with Adolph, Jimmie and the shearers, but Will protested—“Good God, Hiram, you built the place yourself, worked it, raised your family in this house, and we can’t have you crawling off out there like a hired hand”—and Mills, as if to show how magnanimous he was, just shook his head side to side in denial. “If it’s good enough for Jimmie”—and here he shot a look down the length of the table to where the boy still lingered in the hope of a glance from Edith, though the pudding was long gone and Adolph and the shearers vanished into the night—“then it’s good enough for me, isn’t that right, Jimmie? And it’s your house now, Will, and I wouldn’t want to upset you or your family.”
“That’s very generous of you, but still it wouldn’t be an inconvenience to us, not at all, wouldn’t you say so, Minnie?”
She and Edith had stayed on, glad for the company. They each had a cup of coffee before them, but the coffee had grown cold. In the interim, Nichols had produced three Cuban cigars and Will had brought out a bottle of brandy he’d been saving for a special occasion—unlike the whiskey.
They were all watching her. What had Will said? No matter. She shook her head and flashed her eyes as if nothing could please her more than having her house invaded, then raised the handkerchief to her mouth and coughed, just once, choking back the residue. She was tired. Exhausted. She hadn’t realized until that moment just how much the evening had cost her. “We thought,” she said, struggling to clear her voice, “that Mr. Nichols might want to take the spare room on this floor, across from Ida’s—Ida can always share with Edith—and that would leave Ida’s room for you, Mr. Mills, Hiram . . .” She attempted to cover herself with a laugh, but that was risky the way she was feeling, because a laugh, the slightest tickle in her throat, could bring on a coughing fit. “That is”—she snatched a breath—“if you really don’t mind giving up all those bedbugs out there in the bunkhouse.”
The detail she didn’t mention was that her husband would in that case be sleeping in the master bedroom, if you could call it that, at least until the business had been transacted and the guests were safely out of sight.
“I wouldn’t want to put you out,” Mills said, softening. He knew what the bunkhouse was like, knew better than anyone, except maybe Jimmie.
“Or me either.” Nichols had set down his glass and was giving her that faint smile, the gold outline of his tooth glinting in the light of the candles, which were guttering now in pools of wax.
“Oh, no,” she said, her voice so husky she might have been growling, “it’s no trouble at all.”
But of course it was, as her husband was to discover when he came plodding up the stairs after the others had gone off to bed. She was lying there waiting for him, propped up on the pillows, and she wasn’t reading or knitting or doing anything at all except watching for him to come through the door. The handle clicked, rose, fell, and there he was, unsteady on his feet, tipsy with wine, with brandy, looking needy, looking hopeful. “I hope you won’t mind,” she said, her eyes leading him to the pallet she’d made up in the corner, on the floor beneath the window: sheet, blanket and pillow, the thinnest of horsehair mattresses salvaged from the bunkhouse.
He stood there a long moment, rocking ever so slightly over the twin fulcrums of his hips, and then he began to unbutton his shirt, his hands clumsy, his fingers thick as blocks of wood. She almost went to him, almost slipped from bed to help him out of his clothes as if he were a child, almost relented, but it was all too much, all her resentments rushing back at her on a howling icy internal wind that chilled her to the marrow, to her soul, to the bottom of everything.
“I’m sorry, Will. It’s just that I can’t bear the weight of you beside me. Not the way I am now. I’m sorry. I truly am.”
Nichols
Whether it was because of the excitement of having company in the house she couldn’t say, but during the week that Mills, Nichols and the shearers were there, she began to feel stronger, day by day. The coughing tapered off. The phlegm she brought up, especially in the mornings, seemed looser and there was no tinge of blood. She began helping Ida and Edith with the meals and even found time to work in the flower garden she’d planted up against the fence in the front yard. And once, out of curiosity, she’d gone out to the corral to watch the shearers at their work.
It must have been the second or third day of the shearing. The weather was clear for a change, the wind soft, almost balmy. When Will saw her making her way across the yard after breakfast with her parasol and knitting basket, he swung open the gate and came to her, his face lit with a smile of
the purest pleasure. He’d wanted her to take an active interest, and here she was, out of the house, in the sunshine, interested. “Minnie,” he called, holding a hand out to her, “come and watch. You’ll like this, I think.”
He was in his work clothes, his trousers spattered with mud, chaff in his hair and all down his sleeves and the front of his shirt as if he’d been out haying. But he hadn’t been haying—that was months off yet. He’d been wrestling with the sheep, that was what it was, as she was soon to see, helping the shearers pin them down while they clipped the fleece from their bodies in continuous sheets so neatly proportioned it was as if the animals had been wearing jackets that only needed to be unbuttoned and slipped off. “I hope so,” she said. “The whole business seems so mysterious to me.” She let out a laugh. “I never imagined wool came from anyplace other than a shop.”
His smile died and then fluttered back into place. “Listen,” he said, “let me get you a chair and you can sit over there, just outside the corner of the corral, and see what we’re about. This is all new to me too, you know.”
And so he found her a chair and she sat there, out of range of the mud the animals kicked up when they were flipped over on their backs and their legs pinioned so that the shearers, one man to a sheep, could transform them from squat comfortable-looking things to puny bleating sacks of skin that careened off to huddle in the next pen as if they were embarrassed by their own nakedness. Will waded right in, and it lifted her to see his enthusiasm, the way he snatched up an animal the minute Jimmie or Adolph, whose job it was to go on horseback and round them all up, released one through the gate. And Mills, Mills too. Mills and her husband were working in concert, making sure the shearers were fed a new animal the moment they finished with the previous one, then taking the fleeces and stuffing them into the huge canvas sacks that bloated out like sausages as the morning went on.
The sun was pleasant—heat, for a change, real heat—and she stayed there perched on the chair long after she’d grown bored with the process unfolding before her, the sheep bleating out their terror and broadcasting their hard black pellets of excrement even as the men fought to hold them until they went lax and submitted, then the fleece lying there in the dirt and the naked animal scurrying away to hide itself amongst the naked others. Across the yard, in their pen, the pigs were silent, as if contemplating what lay in store for them. Even the chickens and turkeys, usually so active around the barnyard, were keeping out of sight. She was thinking about that, about how the animals seemed to know what was going on though they weren’t conscious in any rational way, or at least that’s what she’d always believed, when Nichols emerged from the house and came strolling across the yard to her.
He held himself stiffly, as if he were uncomfortable in his clothes, but his voice was pleasant enough as he called out a greeting to her. “Good morning, Mrs. Waters,” he intoned, coming up to stand beside her so that his shadow momentarily took away the sun. “Are you enjoying the shearing? The process, I mean?”
She studied him a moment, a tall man, nearly as tall as Will, and dressed impeccably, as if he were on his way to a gentlemen’s club instead of coming out to peer into a muddy pen full of terrified sheep on an island stuck fast in its own solitary sphere. “Yes,” she said, smiling up at him, and she was glad she’d powdered her face and put on a bit of rouge, though most mornings she didn’t bother, not anymore, not out here. “Or no, truthfully. For the first couple, it’s interesting, I suppose, to see how it’s done, but I feel sympathy for the poor animals. They seem so terrified.”
He made as if to prop one elbow on the rail of the pen—or corral, as it was called here—but then seemed to think better of it. “But they’re not actually hurt in any way, are they?”
“No,” she had to admit. “Aside from the odd nick and scratch, I suppose. I’m told that the shears get dull quickly here because there’s so much sand caught in the wool. Sand,” she said, letting her eyes drift beyond the rail and the commotion of bodies there to the distant rising slopes. “It’s the curse of the place. It’s in everything—your clothes, the bedding. Set the table half an hour before dinner and you’ve got to wipe the plates clean again before you can sit down to eat.”
There was a shout from one of the men, something in Spanish, a curse, and she saw that one of the sheep had managed to kick the shears from the man’s hand and break free. It came toward them, trembling, wild-eyed, until her husband, his face reddened with the exertion, managed to seize it from behind and drag it back to the dark little man who was still cursing in his own hermetic language. Puta, he spat. Puta. La reputa que lo parió.
“You see?” she said. “And the lambs must have their tails docked, of course. I couldn’t watch that. It seems so cruel.”
“So why do it at all?”
“Something to do with the meat.” She glanced up at him then. It came to her that he didn’t know the first thing about this, knew even less than she did. Either that or he was testing her. And if he was, she was destined to fail. “It would grow into the tail instead of on the body itself, where—”
“Where you want your lamb chops to be.” He gave her his thin smile. “You seem quite well versed.”
“Oh, no, not really. I’ve only been listening to what Will tells me, that’s all.” She let out a laugh. “I’m hardly a farmwife, or not yet, anyway. In fact, until now, I’ve never really been outside a city in my life.”
“I’d never have guessed,” he said, and it took a moment to realize he was making a joke. But was it a joke? Or a criticism?
More shouting from the pen, another animal breaking free to rush pell-mell from one side to the other, giving up its terror in a ragged choking cry of despair.
“All right,” he said, turning back to her, and again he made as if to prop an elbow on the rail and again thought better of it, “I concede your point. But each of these animals will live on for years, whereas with cattle or hogs the whole animal has to be sacrificed in order to get any value out of it. And there’s very little loss out here, or so I’m told. No wolves or dogs or bears or anything like that. No catamounts. And the only fences you need are to guide the animals in for shearing and keep them out of the pasture until the hay is mowed, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” And then it came to her that she should be praising the place, trying to sell him on it so that he would come in as partner and she could go back to town and her things and live like a human being and either get well or not. She wouldn’t want to die out here, that much she knew. It was already like being a soul in limbo. She was bored. She was afraid. She wanted release, only that. “It’s a remarkable place,” she said. “Truly remarkable.” And she almost added, A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but caught herself.
He was studying her out of eyes that were too close-set, too small, as if his face had been pinched in the womb. His heavy mustache masked the expression of his mouth, but he might have been smiling, or at least she thought he was. “Seems like you’re trying to sell me on the place,” he said.
She wanted to deny it, but she gave him a smile instead, if only to cover herself. “I suppose I am. But it’s worth it, worth everything we’ve invested—the opportunity. I couldn’t be happier. I couldn’t.”
And now he was grinning, the mustache levitating above a set of stained lower teeth. “I’m flattered,” he said, “but there’s really no need. Hiram, Will and I signed the transfer papers last night.”
“Yes,” she said, “yes,” and she didn’t know what she was assenting to, her heart pounding, the blood rushing to her face. He shifted again and the full glare of the sun struck her so that she had to raise a hand to her eyes. There was a long expiring gasp from the pen as one of the sheep was released to clatter away on unsteady legs. “When—?” she asked, but couldn’t finish the question.
“Your husband hasn’t told you?”
“We
ll, I—he was up especially early this morning, because of the shearing, that is, and I must have overslept . . .”
“Everything’s fine,” he said, and he held out a hand to her as if to conclude a bargain, but she merely stared at it in bewilderment. “I’m pleased to be your new partner, yours and your husband’s. I’m sure we’ll all prosper together.”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m delighted. Truly delighted.” She was soaring suddenly, so elated she hardly noticed his embarrassment as he dropped the hand to his side, rebuffed, but then wives didn’t conclude bargains, husbands did. “It’s just—when will you be coming out to take over?”
“Oh, I won’t be coming out. I don’t think your husband would stand for it, do you? No, no, you misunderstand me: I’m to be a silent partner only.”
“Silent?” she echoed, and she couldn’t hide her disappointment.
“Yes,” he said, “in name only.” And here was that look again: was he mocking her, was that it? Was he intentionally trying to drive a stake through her, torture her, bring her crashing to earth like one of Ord’s wing-shot eagles? “Don’t worry,” he said, “you can plan on staying as long as you like.”
The Fog
And then they were all gone and the household went back to normal. The wool—a bumper crop of it, or so Will claimed—was stored in the barn, safe in the overstuffed canvas sacks, awaiting the completion of the final section of the road and the return of Charlie Curner’s schooner, promised vaguely for two or three weeks on. Ida put away the big stewpot and went back to setting the table for six, baking every third day instead of every morning. They saw the last of the tortillas, as if anyone had wanted them in the first place—tasteless scorched things as dull as the unleavened corn mush they were shaped from. Evenings were tranquil. No more watching Will, Nichols and Mills sit around jawboning at one another, no more pretense or show. They went back to the Ouija board, to whist, muggins, euchre, to the long silences and the quiet ticking of the stove.