by Boyle, T. C.
“Yes.”
“Speak up. I can scarcely hear you.”
Louder now: “Yes.”
“And what’s my name?”
“Edith.”
Edith snaked her hand out and slapped him so quickly he didn’t have time to flinch. “What’s my name?”
“Miranda.”
“That’s better. Now pick up that basket, take it around the house and arrange the shells on the porch there—and make sure you put the prettiest ones in front.”
The boy bent to the basket without a word, lifted it—it was heavy, she could see that—and braced it on one hip. Then, the mud sucking at his boots, he struggled round the corner of the house and out of sight.
“You see, Mother?” A faint imperious smile, a cruel smile, a smile of superiority and willfulness. “He’ll do anything I say.”
* * *
That night, for the birthday dinner, Ida served an abalone chowder that was even better than the one she’d made on New Year’s, followed by a pair of stuffed and roasted chickens (a special treat, since the flock had been decimated by the foxes and, Will claimed, an eagle that had made off with one of their best layers right before his eyes) with a side dish of rice and beans and a puree made from the last of the turnips Charlie Curner had carried over the previous month. She herself lit the candles and brought out the cake. Edith, in the new green dress that just exactly caught the color of her eyes, leaned over the table to make her wish and blow out the candles and everyone applauded.
“A toast!” Will proposed. He was at the head of the table, dressed in his best shirt and jacket, his hair newly washed and combed and his mustache neatly trimmed for once, and he reached down under his chair and came up with a magnum of the Santa Cruz Island wine he was always singing the virtues of, as if they too could establish a winery just by snapping their fingers, as if it were just one more money-making venture the island would give up to them in good time, though to her mind, the wind—and here it was again, picking up, rattling the panes and keening under the eaves like a chorus of the drowned dead—would blow the whole business, vines, trellises and grapes, right on out to sea. Everyone watched him draw the cork in silence as if it were a rare operation and he a magician in cape and top hat and she couldn’t help notice Jimmie’s eyes wandering to Edith, but then how could he resist—how could any boy, deprived or not, unless he was blind? Edith had never looked more beautiful. Maybe, she was thinking—and here the cork eased from the bottle with an audible sigh—maybe there was something healthful about the outdoor life after all.
Will made his way around the table, filling each of the glasses in succession, starting with her own, then Ida’s, Adolph’s and even Jimmie’s—Jimmie’s—and finally stopping at Edith’s place. She wanted to say something, wanted to interfere—it wasn’t right that a girl of Edith’s age should take intoxicating beverages—but Will was already pouring. Edith had been animated all night, in high spirits, but she went silent now. Will poured the glass full, then poured for himself and lifted his glass high. “To the prettiest girl on this or any other island in the world! Or no,” he said, correcting himself, “to the prettiest young lady!”
Marantha watched her daughter bring the glass to her lips, watched her sip and make a face before trying it again, emboldened, and taking a long greedy swallow. “You’re not to go off with that boy alone,” she’d lectured her the moment Jimmie had vanished round the corner of the house that morning. “It’s not proper.” Her heart had been beating wildly. The sun, so welcome a moment ago, hit her like a hammer. “Do you really imagine I have any interest in him?” Edith said, looking her straight in the eye. “He’s a boy, a child, a weakling. And he’s ignorant, as stupid as the stupidest sheep in the flock. Stupider.” And what had she felt? Relief, certainly. But she had to stop herself from making a lesson out of this too, from reminding her daughter that there was no need to be cruel, that every person, no matter his station, deserved to be treated with dignity and respect, that—but what was the use? Edith was growing away from her, growing up, and here she was drinking the wine, drinking it greedily, and already holding out her glass for more. Which Will poured. And still her mother said nothing.
Edith led off the singing with “Blue-Tail Fly” and then Will sang his favorite, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in his strong cascading baritone, and everyone joined in. Ida got up to sing “The Rose of Tralee” and when they all applauded—was she tipsy?—she sang it through again. Jimmie was next. He rose to sing “Men of Harlech” in a voice so reduced you had to strain to make out the lyrics (“Men of Harlech, stop your dreaming / Can’t you see their spear points gleaming?”), after which Edith excused herself and came back a moment later in a new costume altogether, in a loose flowing skirt without her corsets, and before Marantha could object, Edith announced that she was going to perform one of the dances she’d learned at school that went to the tune of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
“Since we don’t seem to have a piano”—Edith was pushing back the chairs now and arranging the lamps for dramatic effect on the shelf behind her—“or anyone to play accompaniment even if we did have, I’m going to hum the melody myself.” She paused to glance round the room. “Unless we can borrow a piano from one of the neighbors. And a pianist.”
They were all watching her intently—Adolph, unfathomable Adolph, with his heavy brow and hooded eyes; Jimmie, with a faint fading smile pressed to his lips; Will, grinning proudly; Ida, sloppy suddenly, slouching, her mouth hanging open. Edith made as if to look out the window, the hem of the skirt rising daintily round her ankles as she bent forward and put a hand up to shade her eyes. “Do you think there are any wandering pianists out there?” She held the moment, bathing in the attention, and then looked directly at her. “Could you find one for me, Mother?”
Will let out a laugh and said to no one in particular, “Charming girl, isn’t she?”
And then the dance began, shakily at first, Edith clearly having trouble coordinating her movements to the tune she had to produce herself, but she got stronger as she went on, so that even after Ida rose discreetly and vanished into the kitchen and the men passed round the bottle till there was nothing left, even after her voice faded away and the only sounds in the room were the rhythmic tapping of her feet and the wind in the eaves, she kept moving across the floor in a slow graceful arc, her limbs swaying to the music only she could hear.
The Eagle
All the talk was of the shearers—the shearers were coming, the shearers—until she began to think they were some messianic tribe bent on redeeming them all. She pictured men in silken beards and turbans, an oriental squint to their eyes and their shoes turned up at the toes, bearing gifts of spices and speaking in a strange tongue, but Will was having none of it. Will was in a state. He couldn’t sit still, couldn’t rest, working furiously at the road, scanning the horizon every morning for the telltale sail in the harbor, jumping up from the card table in the evening to pace back and forth until she thought the floorboards would wear through under his weight, and all the while lecturing Edith and Ida—and her too—about the state of the house. It had to be homelier, cleaner, more orderly—and why? Because it wasn’t only the shearers who were coming, but Mills too. And not simply Mills, who was getting out, but the new man who was to buy in as half-partner, and it was their duty to show the place at its best. What would Mills think if he saw the state of the house as it was right this minute? Or the new man. Think of him. The real shame of it—and Will wouldn’t leave it alone—was that they didn’t have the wherewithal to buy out Mills themselves and set up as sole owners and proprietors and let the rest of the world go to hell.
“Imagine it, Minnie,” he said. “Just imagine it. Our own island—our own country—and nobody to answer to. We could pull up the drawbridges and man the battlements. I could be king. And you—you, Minnie—you could be queen.”
Wh
at could she say? She tried to be accommodating, tried to soothe him, tried even to scrub the place into submission, but the idea was a living death to her—the world was in San Francisco, in Boston, in Santa Barbara, not here. Queen? Queen of what? The sheep?
He put an arm round her waist, drew her to him and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “It’s what I’ve always dreamed of,” he murmured.
Then one night, after dinner, as she was going down the hall to the kitchen with the notion of brewing a pot of tea, she found him in his room—the former storeroom—changing into his work clothes. “You’re not going back out there, are you?” she’d asked, incredulous.
The room was cramped and cheerless, but neat enough, she supposed, in a military sort of way. It was like an encampment on a battlefield, the bed no more than a cot with a single thin blanket drawn tight, his gear—a canteen, various tools and implements, his tripod and transit—arranged on various hooks projecting from the walls. He was sitting on the cot, pulling on a pair of stained and worn trousers she’d already mended more times than she could count. His socks were dirty, his shirt, even his braces. He didn’t say anything.
“It’s the dark of night. It’s raining.”
He shrugged. He was lacing up his boots now, though she’d asked him time and again to put them on and remove them on the porch so as to minimize the dirt in the house he was suddenly so very interested in keeping clean. “Seems like it’s always raining.”
She was silent a moment. “I’m sorry we haven’t got the money, Will,” she said. “I know how much this venture means to you, this place, I mean. You know if I had the money I’d give it to you”—she’d meant to keep any note of resentment out of her voice because he was her husband and she loved him and here he was sleeping separately from her because she was too weak to bear him—“but I’ve already given everything I have.”
The room was close, windowless, lit only by a candle on a dish he’d set on an overturned crate by the side of the bed. “You’re a martyr, a regular Christian martyr.”
“Don’t, Will.”
He was busy with the other boot now, but he took time to glance up and hold her gaze. “Do you want to lose everything, is that it? Somebody’s got to do the work around here, somebody’s got to persevere. Yes, I want this place. Is that a crime? You can’t know what I went through in the war—or after either, working the printing presses for my brother and then those idiots at the Morning Call. Dirty, demeaning work. Always somebody crabbing at you. Up in the morning, to bed at night, and for what? I want something of my own and if I have to work myself to death I’m going to get it.”
She was standing in the doorway still, one hand on the frame as if she were a visitor in her own house. But then this wasn’t her house and never would be—it was foreign to her, harsh and unacceptable, and so was this windblown island that might as well have been in the middle of the Amazon for all the diversion it offered. “You promised me we wouldn’t stay past the first of June if I . . . if I don’t improve. And I’m not improving, Will. It’s too cold. Too damp.” She felt a sadness so intense it was as if some machine had hold of her, some infernal engine, crushing the spirit out of her. “Too hopeless, Will, hopeless, do you hear me? If I’m going to die I want my things around me, I want society, comfort—not this.” She lifted her hand to take in the room, the house in which it stood, the island and the sea and the distant cliffs of the coast beyond.
“You’re not going to die.”
It was a lie and they both knew it.
He was on his feet suddenly, brisk, towering, on his way past her and out into the night to work his precious road. “Goddamn it, Marantha,” he said, his face so close to hers she could smell the stewed lamb they’d had for dinner on his breath—or his mustache, which he never even bothered to wipe properly—“it’s not my fault. I didn’t give you the disease.”
“No,” she said very quietly, “no, you didn’t.”
He was edging past her, nervous on his feet, guilty, ashamed of himself—and he should have been. He should have gone down on his knees the way he had when he proposed marriage to her in the front parlor on Post Street, Sampan a kitten in her lap and Edith curled up asleep with her china doll. Should have taken her in his arms and comforted her. Tried to imagine, for just an instant, what it was like to see the whole world fading to nothing all around you and none but the mute dead to understand or sympathize.
“Goddamn it,” he said, cursing again, though he knew she hated it, “we have to go on, don’t you see that?” His eyes were huge, apoplectic, his face flushed. “Life goes on, and what does life mean? Life means work, Marantha, work. And work is what I intend to do.”
* * *
The rain stopped sometime overnight. She was awake, unable to sleep, racked with night sweats and thoughts of the beyond, when the thrumming on the roof abruptly ceased and in rushed the silence, shaping itself to fit the void—silence that was somehow worse than the rain, which was at least alive, or in motion at any rate. She stared into the darkness, too exhausted to light the lantern and take up her book, thinking of Will sleeping in his narrow bed in the room below her and sharing in the darkness that was general over the island and the sea and the continent beyond and would even now, on the eastern coast, where her mother would be getting breakfast in the kitchen of the house she’d been a girl in, be giving way to the light. Did she sleep? She supposed so. Eventually there was a period of blankness, but if rest was the purpose of sleep, then she didn’t get much.
In the morning she felt so weak she could barely lift her head from the pillow. Outside the window the sky seemed a second roof, flat and gray and uninterrupted. Why she was alive, why she was breathing, why she’d been born on this earth only to suffer the way she had, she couldn’t say. She lay there a long while before propping herself up with a pillow so that she could see out to the bay, to see if there was a sail there, but there wasn’t. The shearers hadn’t come. They were still on the next island over, plying their mobile trade, eating, drinking, taking their time. The shearers are coming, the shearers are coming. But not yet.
Ida brought a tray with breakfast: tea, toast, fried meat, but no eggs—eggs were suddenly precious, what with the exigencies of the cakes and the mortality amongst the flock. By the time she finished and washed, dressed and put up her hair, it was nearly noon by the clock on the shelf Will had erected for her on the wall beside the bed. That was an advantage of a house constructed willy-nilly of railway ties and whatever else washed ashore from the wrecks that ringed the island, she supposed—if you needed a shelf, you just nailed a board to the wall, aesthetic considerations notwithstanding. She took a moment to gather up her needlework, then went down to sit by the stove in the parlor. Ida was in the kitchen, baking bread and adding whatever came to hand—potatoes, flour, canned tomatoes, salt pork left over from breakfast—to invigorate last night’s lamb stew. Will and Adolph were at work on the road, so far down now you couldn’t see them unless you went to the second turning and peered over the edge there, tracing the line of the canyon to where the road switched back again and the raw earth gave up the fractured shells of its dynamited rocks. Jimmie was in the fenced-in field behind the house, sowing grain in the furrows he’d plowed the past three days. And Edith? Edith was out walking.
In the next hour, she got up twice to feed wood into the stove, and she was just easing back into her chair, thinking only of the pattern of the tea cloth she was working on—the figure of a scintillant red cardinal, seen in full flight, on a field of pale blue, just that, nothing more—when a movement across the yard caught her eye. What was it? Men, two men, first their faces, then their shoulders and torsos emerging from beneath the slope of the hill in gradual accretion, legs now, full figures, moving toward the house. One of them was Will, unmistakable in his patched clothes and seesawing gait even at a distance, and the other—this came as a shock—a stranger altogether. Had the shea
rers come? Was this a shearer, this lean, tall, fresh-faced man with a rifle in one hand and the clenched feet of what looked to be an enormous trailing bird locked in the grip of the other? She saw feathers, the reanimated flap of dead wings writhing in the dirt.
She set aside her embroidery, a single pulse of excitement shooting through her—Someone new!—and went to the door. The air was brisk, smelling more of the sea than of the flock. The pigs grunted from their pen. She could hear the chorus of the seals on the distant snapping cable of the wind.
“Minnie!” Will was calling, and here he was, coming round the corner of the house, the stranger at his side. “Come look at this.”
She was wearing her carpet slippers, and despite herself, despite her excitement over seeing a new face, she didn’t want to come down off the porch into the muddy yard, and so she held back.
The stranger—he was in his twenties, early twenties, she guessed, Ida’s age—stopped in his tracks to gaze up at her with a look of wonderment on his face. He was unshaven, his beard the same nearly translucent color as the hair that trailed away from the brim of his hat and coming in irregularly, as if he weren’t quite sure yet how to grow it.
“Are you—?” she began, then turned to Will. “Is this one of the shearers?”
The man let out a laugh. “Hardly, ma’am,” he said, and came forward to tip his hat in a show of greeting. “My name’s Robert Ord, ma’am, and I’ve done come out to these islands after the seals.”
Will was grinning. “And guano. Don’t forget the guano.”
“Guano?” she echoed.
The stranger seemed to color, though she couldn’t be sure because of the beard and his sunburn. “The leavings of the seabirds,” he said, ducking his head and exchanging a glance with Will. “The white stuff. Very valuable to the farmers back on shore.”
“White gold, they call it. Isn’t that right, Robert?”
