by Boyle, T. C.
Now here was an animal she could get behind—too small to annoy the sheep and always on the prowl for the mice that plagued the main house, their droppings ubiquitous, scattered over everything in dark little gift packets of filth and disease. She made a kissing noise and watched the fox’s ears come erect. Then, very slowly, she bent to the pile to unearth the fresh scraps till she found a wet red fragment of bone and gristle and tossed it to him. It landed with a soft thump in the wet earth at his feet and he took it gingerly, as a dog would, but without fear or concern—people were no threat to him. He’d been here longer than they had and he went on eating his mice, insects, the occasional bird, and if people left food around (or variously, Francisco’s briar pipe that went missing from the porch one evening, a half-burned candle, sweated socks hung out on the rail to dry and concentrate the salts of the body), he would oblige them by expanding the range of his diet. She watched him worrying the bone a moment, pinning it with his paws and working it with his teeth, his fur slicked with the rain and his eyes casting her adrift as if she had no significance at all, and then she went back in the house to see to the stew and slide the loaves into the oven.
Francisco had set the dishes aside to dry and was plying the mop on the concrete floor now, shifting the mud from one corner to the other in long yellowish streaks. The floor was always dirty, forever dirty, but that was a matter of degree—until she’d nagged Bax to have the supply barge off-load a hundred sixty-pound bags of concrete and until that concrete was loaded ten bags at a time in the back of the pickup and brought up here to be mixed in the wheelbarrow, poured, tamped and smoothed in place, the floor had been actual dirt, literal dirt, trodden and compacted by how many generations of sheepherders’ boots she couldn’t begin to imagine. The other substantial building on the property—the eight-room bunkhouse—was of wood-frame construction and as far as she knew had always had a pine floor, which was, if anything, even dirtier than the old dirt floor of the main house, but nothing to worry over. The hands took turns sweeping it and every once in a long concatenation of weeks even took a mop to it. They had their own communal room, a few rough chairs, a card table and a potbellied stove, but the main house was where they gathered for their meals and where they felt—at least in her presence—as if they’d come home, the talk at supper of mothers long dead, of haciendas that no longer existed in the mind-clouded valleys of Arizona, New Mexico and Old Mexico too.
She was enveloped in the sweet hot fragrance of the stew as soon as she stepped in the door, the windows steamed over, the big open space that served as kitchen, dining room and gathering place suddenly dense with it, the released molecules of the lamb she’d chunked and the spices she’d crumbled between her palms combining and rising and drifting till even Bax, frowning over his reading glasses in the whitewashed bedroom upstairs, must have been aware of them. Shifting the big pot to the right of the stove, she took out the frying pan, greased it and cracked half a dozen eggs in a bowl. She added a spot of condensed milk and a handful of grated cheese, beat the mixture to a froth and poured out the makings of two thin omelets, spiced only with salt and pepper. Then she laid out four slices of bread, slathered two of them with her own fiery homemade pico de gallo, eased the first omelet between them and poured out a fresh mug of coffee. “Francisco, when you have a minute,” she called, and no irony intended here either, because things were easy on the ranch, “would you take this up to Bax?”
He nodded and gave her a grin. “Yes,” he said, “sure, no hay problema .” They were both aware of the subtext here: she was making use of Francisco as intermediary for the very good reason that if she’d taken the plate up herself she would have had to listen to Bax’s dammed-up torrent of advice, complaints and animadversions, not to mention the mental list of chores, niggling worries and very pressing matters he was composing even now and had been composing ever since he took to bed.
She used ketchup on the second sandwich (Anise had been crazy for ketchup since she was a little girl, smearing it on anything, saltines, pretzels, bananas, fresh-sliced cucumbers and even, at least once she knew of, on a Hershey bar), wrapped it in tinfoil and filled the thermos with hot chocolate. Then she pulled on her rain slicker and the sombrero Francisco’s cousin Manuel had brought her back from Tijuana the previous year after a week-long post-shearing debauch, and went back out into the rain. She skirted the wash, which had begun to flow now with the reanimated Scorpion River, and headed up through the grove of eucalyptus to the meadow beyond, where the sheep stood sodden and gray, like so many heaps of dirty rags scattered across the new grass as far as she could see. It was a scene out of some immemorial past and she couldn’t help thinking of the first naked primitives who ran down the first wild ram and killed and cooked and ate it and sat round with swollen bellies thinking how nice it would be to have something like that tethered to the nearest tree so you could have meat and offal and a good warm fleece anytime you wanted it. Here was the ur-industry, as old as the tribes themselves. And Cain slew Abel because Abel followed the herds and Cain put seeds in the ground and what kind of sacrifice to the greedy God above was a mound of peas and squash compared to the haunch of a freshly slaughtered lamb?
Anise’s tarp—fireman’s red, or red-orange, a color you didn’t find in nature, at least not on the West Coast—shone wetly on the far edge of the field. Rita could see her sprawled legs, her hunched shoulders, the black-and-white dog with his head in her lap, the book propped up against the dog’s back and her daughter doing what she did all on her own without hassle or reminder, studying, learning, making herself a better person. Anise had already advanced beyond anything she or Bax could help her with, aside from guitar lessons, and the correspondence course, with its weekly standards and monthly planner, couldn’t begin to keep up with her. She wasn’t yet fifteen and she was already doing work equivalent to what they’d expect of a college freshman, and all on her own. Rita was amazed anew each time she saw her bent to her work—the discipline and determination she showed, which was nothing at all like what she’d experienced herself, not with academics anyway. She’d been too edgy, too eager to throw it all over and steal away to the Village and haunt the cafés and clubs, and what had that led to? To nothing. To a false life and false hopes. Anise was different. Anise had a future. And the longer she stayed away from the trouble of the world, the better.
“Hey, Buttercup!” she heard herself call, rain on her hat like a spastic drumbeat, the ewes all around her licking their newborns, and here was Bumper, streaking through the grass to her even as her daughter lifted her head and gave her a faraway look.
In the next moment she was easing down beside her under the tarp and offering the egg sandwich, which Anise, setting aside the book, ignored in favor of the hot chocolate. There was a wet thrashing of paws and tail and then the dog was crowding in beside them, sniffing at the warm ripples of the foil. “You better eat that before it gets cold,” she said.
“What is it? Not lamb?”
“Fried egg. With a ton of ketchup.”
She watched her daughter unscrew the cap of the thermos and pour out a cup of chocolate, drop by drop, as if it were wine of rare vintage. And now she pushed the sandwich on her again and Anise took it and laid it in her lap, where it balanced precariously between the dog’s probing wet nose and the damp sleeping bag she was perched on. Anise was tall, like Toby—already five-eight—and as she shifted position, she folded her legs under her, long legs, legs she could grow into, and rescued the sandwich at the last minute, as if it were an afterthought. Sipping, her eyes dropping to the glossy cover of the book (Studies in the American Story, From Hawthorne to Hemingway, $25.95, an amount they’d had to scrape to come up with), she murmured, “I really like this one story in my book? It’s called ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener.’ You ever read it?”
It sounded familiar, but if she had read it, it would have been back in high school. “Maybe,” she said. “But a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It doesn’t have sheep
in it, does it?”
“Please.” Anise froze up, irritated suddenly, and gave her a hard look. She could see her daughter was in a mood, ready to open up on her about how bored she was and how much she hated sheep and sheep ranches and islands, and if you came right down to it, life, life itself. She watched that skein of complication run through her eyes in a cold accusatory flash, but then Anise just shrugged and let it go. “I mean, I don’t know if you could care, but it’s about an office and a scrivener—he copies things by hand, I guess, because they didn’t have Xerox machines or anything like that back then. And whenever the boss asks him to do something he says, ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”
“Uh-oh, am I in trouble here?”
Anise gave her a bitter smile, and yet her eyes lit with something like pleasure over the exchange. She needed to talk, to respond to someone in the flesh about what she was feeling, thinking, reading, and not the faceless instructor who graded her papers in a tight rigid hand and in lettering so minuscule he might have been copying out the warning label on a bottle of prescription pills.
Keep it light, she told herself. Go easy.
“Because if I ask you if you want to sit out here in the rain by yourself for a few more minutes while I go back in to take the bread out of the oven, you’re going to say—what was it?”
“ ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”
She wanted to help ease the burden—and she tried as best she could, tried to anticipate, cajole, keep things moving forward—but she was stretched to the limit through every minute of every day and right now the lambs needed her more than her daughter did. And there was bread in the oven and stew on the stove and Bax up in bed with his foul mouth and a temper like a nest of hornets somebody’s just whacked with a stick. She didn’t want to argue. She didn’t want to nag. But she couldn’t help herself. “How about eating that egg sandwich before it goes cold?”
“I would prefer . . . oh, shit. To go to the mall, to see somebody, anybody, except you and Bax and a bunch of stupid sheep. Like all my life. Like every day. I might as well be in prison.”
And here came the guilt. The weight of it that was like a physical thing because she was guilty, guilty of everything Anise could throw at her and more. She shut her eyes to drive it away, but it did no good. She saw Anise as a little girl, the look on her face when she told her she was pulling her out of class three weeks before the close of the school year and taking her out to an island nobody had ever heard of. Fifth grade. Three weeks from the end. What about all my friends? What about summer vacation? We’ll have our vacation on the island, she’d told her. You’ll love it. Beaches—there’s a beach right there, your own private beach right in front of Scorpion Ranch. I’m not going. And then she’d repeated herself—You’ll love it—chanting it so many times it became a litany, and Anise, stubborn, unconvinced, adamant, throwing it back at her: I will not love it, I’ll hate it. And I don’t want to go to any scorpion place, I hate scorpions. Don’t you? She’d wondered about that herself, but as it turned out there were no scorpions, or only the smallest little dull brown things you sometimes saw clinging to the underside of one of the logs in the woodpile, and she’d promised her—promised her and believed it herself—that it would only be for the summer. Yes, sure, and now Anise wouldn’t know the inside of her old school—of any school—if it opened up right here in the pasture in front of her.
“You see any problems out there this morning?” she said, keeping her voice flat. She was staring off across the meadow now, and there were lambs everywhere, bright as cotton wool, and the ewes licking, licking.
“Uh-uh.” And then, reluctantly, because they were both on the same page again: “Twins right over there, see—like right by that red rock. There? See?”
“Did she—?”
“Yes, she licked them both.”
“And did you—?” With twins, it was a good idea to bind them together so the stronger, dominant one, would pull the other along to the teat.
“I’m reading, okay? I have an assignment due. Not that you would care.”
“Okay, babe, okay,” she said. “There’s plenty of time. We just don’t want them to get separated, is all.”
As if on cue, a raven began to croak from the screen of trees behind them, and then another joined in. A dark scribble of them marred the clouds overhead and there was a black patch on the ground a hundred yards away where two of them were trying to lure a ewe away from her lamb, but the ewe was having no part of it. “Keep your eye on that, hon,” she said, pushing herself up. “And keep Bumper with you—we don’t want him out there herding anybody, not this morning. I’ll be back”—she twisted her wrist for a look at her watch—“in like twenty minutes. And then I’m going to walk the perimeter here all day, right till dark, and you can go back to your room and your books, anything you want. Okay?”
Her daughter’s eyes, illuminated by the sheen of the rain, were as changeable as well water, the palest finest transparent gray shading to blue, not Toby’s eyes and not hers either. She was trying to picture her own mother, her mother’s eyes, but as hard as she tried to superimpose that vision on Anise, she couldn’t quite manage it. Folding her arms round her knees and leaning forward, she watched as her daughter unwrapped a corner of the sandwich and lifted it to her mouth for an exploratory sniff. “Okay?” she repeated.
“Yes, already, yes!! I mean, what do you want me to say? What do you think, I’m like three years old? I’m here, okay? And if any of those frickin’ birds even thinks about it I’m going to be on him like glue.”
Frickin’. On him like glue. She heard Bax in the mix and maybe Arturo, the youngest of the hands, thirty-one and retired from rodeoing with a right leg that looked as if it had come out of a laundry wringer. She heard it and felt the guilt all over again, as if someone had switched on a circuit inside her—Anise needed to be with kids her own age, her peer group, kids she could go to the movies with and window-shopping in the mall and all the rest of it. Girlfriends. Maybe even a boyfriend. Or somebody to moon over anyway. She pushed herself up and ducked back out into the rain, which seemed to be slackening a bit. Or was it her imagination?
“You do that, honey,” she said, thinking, even as she said it, of the kind of ache that would open up inside her if Anise ever did go back to shore, to Toby and Toby’s mother in New York, where she spent a couple of weeks in the summer, at least when Toby remembered to send tickets for the plane. She’d already shifted toward the house when she swung round again, the dog looking up at her in expectation, Anise chewing her egg sandwich and regarding her warily. “And when you get ’em all glued down,” she added, the rain drooling from the big bowl of the sombrero, “pluck out all their feathers for me, will you?”
Francisco was just coming out the door, wearing a heavy leather poncho over his workshirt and a faded red baseball cap that carried the legend Trojans in once-yellow letters across the crown, a legend that always made her think of the condoms she and Toby were so careful to use even when they both felt they were about to burst wide open with the fierceness of their need but which hadn’t stopped her from getting pregnant at just exactly the wrong time. Twice. Once when the band (Tobrita, her inspiration, their names intertwined in the way of forever, as if forever meant anything) was just taking off and then again when the record company sent them out on tour. The first time he made her get an abortion. The second time she refused. That was Anise. And could she even imagine life without her? “I go to watch now,” Francisco said. “¿Todo bien?”
She was standing there braced against the doorframe, trying to kick off her muddy boots, the rain scent at her back, the dense complex odor of cooking coming at her through the open door. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice harsh in her own ears. “Jesus God, sometimes I just want to give up, throw it all over and go live in a motel someplace and collect welfare like everybody else, you know what I mean?” He didn’t know. Sheep were what he knew, sheep and nothing else. One boot sucked free, then the other
, and she reached out to steady herself against the wall. “But maybe you want to make a circuit and see what you can see—especially across from where Anise’s set up.” She gave him a softening smile. “You know me, always worried.”
He would have smiled back at her, but he only smiled when he was drunk. He might have said yes or nodded his head, but he just stared at her, numb-faced, the cap already wet through with the rain.
She kicked her boots aside, snatched the sombrero from her head and beat it twice against her thigh to knock the rain from it. “Well, go on then, don’t stand here gaping,” she said, and then she smelled the bread and took it from the oven and set it aside to cool while she rotated the spoon round the depths of the stewpot and went absolutely still when Bax called down from above, “Rita? Rita, is that you?”
Ten minutes later she was back out in the field, striding through the grass to Anise and scanning the meadow for Francisco. A breeze had come up in the interval, sheeting the rain, and at first she couldn’t make him out. She was almost to Anise when finally she spotted him, all the way across the field on the far perimeter, moving along briskly, his own variation of the shepherd’s staff—PVC pipe, with a squared-off crook cemented to the end of it—bobbing along in front of him like a bleached white antenna. He would have been more comfortable on horseback—they used the horses at roundup and for day-to-day operations and just to get out in the hills and away from the ranch—but this morning Diablo, Moreno and Jonesy were back in the corral, rubbing their backsides against the rails or lifting their muzzles to snuff at the rain, because she felt it was better not to risk even the smallest, most usual perturbation of the sheep at a time like this. So Francisco was on foot. And so was she.
