by Boyle, T. C.
“Yes, sir, they do.”
But where were her manners? He was a sealer, a collector of—of excrement—but he was a guest for all that and a new soul, a new face and voice and figure to drive down the tedium and bring news of the outside world. “Mr. Ord,” she said, ignoring the fact that he still clutched the rifle in one hand and had just dropped the bird’s blood-wet feet to employ the other in tipping his hat, “would you like to come in and sit by the stove? We were just going to brew a fresh pot of coffee and Ida’ll have luncheon ready any minute now—”
“Yes,” Will said, his voice drawn-down and dismissive, as if her invitation counted for nothing at all, “we’ll be in directly. But look at what Robert’s brought us.” He gestured to the deflated bundle of feathers and claws at his feet, and she saw now what it was: an eagle. One of the fierce predatory birds that seemed to sail overhead as if they’d been propelled, their wings motionless as they caught the currents of the air and rose or plunged as they saw fit, fish eaters, opportunists, killers of lamb, turkey, chicken and shoat alike. She was stunned at the size of it—and the color, from the deep iridescent umber of its wings and torso to the perfect unalloyed white of its crown and tail feathers. Its talons were reptilian, the feet scaled like a chicken’s and big as a man’s hand. She hated it. It stole from Will, stole from her, but it was a complex kind of hate, hate that had awe mixed in with it, and a kind of love too.
“Nearly eight feet from wing tip to wing tip,” Ord said, looking down at the massive spill of the bird. He nudged it with the toe of his boot, its head splayed awkwardly against the compacted mud, the talons clenched on nothing. “One of the biggest I’ve ever went and shot. And I tell you, I’ve shot plenty.”
She studied the leathery slits of the eyes, locked shut now, and wondered what they’d seen from their vantage, so high up. What had the house looked like? The hogs? The turkeys? They themselves, with their explosives and guns and their figures that dwindled from the pyramidal crowns of their hats to the twin dots of their shoes.
Will’s voice intruded on her reverie: “This one won’t trouble us anymore.”
It took her a moment. They were both watching her, smiling, proud, another obstacle out of the way and the evidence of it spread across the barren dirt at their feet. “But whatever will we do with it?” she asked.
“Do with it?” Will let out a laugh, and the stranger—Ord—joined in. “Bury it. Or maybe string it up over the barn as a warning to the others.”
She felt cold. The smell of the sea seemed to concentrate itself suddenly, the fermenting odor of all the uncountable things washed up out of the waves coming to her as powerfully as if she were standing down there amongst them. And then a gust rose up out of the canyon, knifing through her, and in the instant she turned to retreat into the house she saw it fan the dead bird’s wings till they rasped and fluttered and strove to take flight one last time.
The Shearers
If the shearers were late, if they were unpredictable, appearing when it suited them as they worked their way successively from one island to the other, it was beyond anyone’s control, least of all hers. According to Will, Ord had heard from one of the fishermen that they were on the next island over, but nobody could be sure, since they could hardly send a cable, could they, and then Ord was gone with the seals he’d shot for their skins and a hold full of the guano he’d shoveled off the island in the mouth of the harbor, which looked to be no lighter for the lack of it. Twenty times a day she gazed out the window to the sea and there it was, its slopes so blindingly white with the leavings of the seabirds they might have been glaciated, Prince Island, and why they called it that she couldn’t say. San Miguel had been discovered by a Portuguese named Cabrillo, she knew that much, and that he’d been sailing for the king of Spain, hence the Spanish name, but then everything was Spanish here, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, California itself. Maybe the king had a son, but if so then why the English name? There must have been a word for “prince” in Spanish, though she didn’t have an inkling as to what it might be. Of course, all that was more than three hundred years ago and there must have been a whole succession of kings and princes in the interval. If it were up to her—if she were the queen—she’d name the place for its chief attribute: Guano Island. Or better yet, Heap. Guano Heap.
In any case, the shearers were late. Mornings came and went, afternoons wrapped themselves in a swirl of mist, the nights dropped like a curtain—breakfast, luncheon, dinner, the washing, the dishes, cards, seashells, walks to the beach and back—and still no sail appeared in the harbor. “Where are they?” Will kept wondering aloud, his voice strained and pleading, but he wasn’t addressing her or anybody else because no one had the answer except God above or maybe Ord’s mysterious fisherman, but his sail never showed itself either. “What’s keeping them? How can we ever hope to make a profit if there’s no one to clip the wool and take it to market?” Too anxious to sit in a chair for more than ten seconds at a time, he paced from one end of the room to the other, flinging out his hands in dumb show, and she would have offered him a whiskey just to calm him, but the whiskey was gone. He’d finished it. With Ida.
“They’ll come,” she said, trying to make the best of it, trying to assuage him, because his fears were hers and she could picture the sheep growing shaggier, dirtier, their wool so tangled and stringy it dropped off of its own accord, the shrubs decorated with it, the stripped stinking tracked-over mud bandaged in white, not a penny made and everything lost. Still, in a way, the delay was a blessing. Each day the shearers held off was a day Will could place his dynamite, blast his rocks, work the mule and the shovel and Jimmie and Adolph till the road began to take shape. He’d been driving himself furiously, the fences repaired, the barley and alfalfa in the ground and already sprouting, the shed erected and the roof of the house patched against the next deluge, and yet the road was little better than when they’d first started in on it—and the road was central to the whole operation. Will knew that. She knew it. And Mills—Mills especially knew it. And he would be here soon, on the boat that brought the shearers, with the new man, Nichols, in tow, and the onus was on Will to show them what he was made of.
Early one afternoon, just before lunch—it was the twentieth or twenty-first of the month, another day of exile, fog in the morning, sun breaking through at noon—she heard Will’s voice in the yard and set aside her sewing to go to the door and greet him. He’d been blasting all morning, the soft muted concussions rolling up the canyon to set the windows atremble and resonate in the floorboards till she could feel them as a dull tingle through the soles of her shoes. Edith, who’d been helping her cut and sew curtains for the front window in the hope of adding a little color to the place, had turned to her at one point to complain about it. “It’s so annoying, isn’t it? It’s like we’re at war. Really, it’s a wonder one of them doesn’t lose an arm or a leg.”
“Don’t think such thoughts,” she’d said automatically.
Now, rising from her chair, she said, “That’ll be your father. You’ll have to clear the curtains away so Ida can set the table.” And then she was pulling the door open on a pale laminate sunshine, Will just mounting the steps of the porch with his hat and face and shoulders covered in an ochre residue of rock dust, everything ordinary, tedious, the round of the days as fixed as the stars in their slots, when she looked past him to where the two dun pincers of land cupped the bay and saw the sail there like a white knife plunged into the breast of the sea. “A sail!” she cried, the sudden intensity of her own voice startling her. “There’s a sail in the harbor!”
Will stopped in mid-stride, one foot lifted to the step, dust sifting from his sleeves and hat and the folds of his trousers, his eyes snatching at hers as if he didn’t believe her before he jerked violently round to stare out on the bay and see for himself. In the next instant Edith appeared at the door, her face wild with exc
itement. “Where?” she cried. “I don’t see it.” Will pointed—“There! Right there! Are you blind?”—and she shot down the steps, hatless, her best shoes ruined before she was halfway across the yard, even as Ida erupted from the kitchen and Jimmie, who’d been skulking round the corner of the house to take his lunch at the back door, reversed himself and started after Edith at a dead run. It took Will a minute, the heavy lines of his face lifting to take account of these new phenomena—a sail, Mills, the shearers—and then he was squaring his shoulders like the captain he was and shouting Jimmie’s name with fierce insistence. “Where do you think you’re going? You come here now.”
The boy pulled up short, skidding in the mud as if his legs meant to go on without him. He threw a quick despairing glance at Edith, who was already approaching the first turning, and then came reluctantly across the yard, his shoulders slumped and feet dragging. Ida kept on. She’d crossed the yard and was at the mouth of the road now, not running exactly, but moving briskly, the apron flaring round her skirts, while Adolph, who’d apparently gone out to the bunkhouse to wash up, flung open the door there and stepped out onto the porch, a dirty towel in his hands.
“Ida!” Will cried, his voice breaking round a thin wire of tension and excitement. “You’re wanted in the kitchen. You get in there now, and, I don’t know, prepare something, anything. And coffee. Coffee in quantity. And, Adolph,” he called across the yard, “you’ll join me just as soon as I can get this rock dust washed off of me and change my shirt, and then we’ll go down and help them unload. I won’t be five minutes.”
Marantha looked out to the bay again, to the sails and the ship enlarging beneath them, as if afraid it would have vanished in the mist like an optical illusion. But it was there, all right. The shearers had come. She should have felt relief but all she could think of was what they were going to do about dinner, where she would seat everyone, how they’d manage with the cracked plates and the mess of the place and the curtains that were laid out flat on the table instead of hanging airily at the windows. What would Mills think? What would Nichols?
But here was Jimmie, ragged and dirty and with his hair trailing down his neck like some aborigine because he refused to let her cut it, planted in the mud below her and looking up disconsolately at Will. “Captain?” he asked. “You want I should fetch General Meade and the sled?”
“That’s right,” Will said, smiling now, at ease, everything going according to plan. “Good boy, smart boy. He knows his business.” And then he reached in his pocket, extracted a nickel and held it up to the light. “You see this? This is yours if you can hitch up the mule and get the sled down there to the beach in twenty minutes flat.”
The boy just stared blankly. “What is it?”
“What is it? It’s a nickel. It’s money. You know what money is, don’t you?”
Very slowly, as the schooner swayed in a web of diminishing waves and the distant hands furled the sails and the sun shone weakly in the gouges and puddles that hopscotched across the yard and on down the ravaged road, he shook his head. “Not much use for it, really,” he said, looking out to sea and then gazing back up at Will, his eyes squinted against the sun. “Not out here, anyways.”
* * *
The main thing the shearers did, aside from the shearing itself, that is, was eat. They weren’t discriminating and they didn’t want dainty foods or any of the dishes out of the recipe book she’d got from her mother who’d got it in turn from her own mother. Quantity was what they required: lamb, mutton, turkey and salt pork, with fried abalone if it was available, beans, bread, potatoes and the corn tortillas Ida quickly learned to press on the griddle and serve in great towering stacks, all of it drenched in a sauce concocted from rendered lamb fat, chopped onions, canned tomatoes, crushed chili peppers and a good fistful of every kind of spice in the pantry.
That first night, they were fourteen for dinner, including Mr. Mills and Mr. Nichols, the table extended by means of the desk from Edith’s room and every chair in the house pressed into service, which still left them short so that two of the shearers had to make do with overturned buckets. She attempted to seat Mills at the head of the table—he was the one who’d built the house, after all, and the minute he walked in the door she felt out of place, an interloper, a squatter—but he wouldn’t hear of it. “No, no, Mrs. Waters,” he said, spreading his arms wide to take in the expanse of the room, the dim hallway and dimmer kitchen beyond, “this is your place now.” He was shorter than she remembered, heavier, with a paunch and a pair of muttonchop whiskers that seemed to tug his face in two directions at once. His skin was mottled—patches of normal coloration alternating with parchment white, as if he’d been spattered with paint. Or guano. This is your place now. Cold comfort.
She sat at Will’s right and she put Nichols—stiff, formal, a thirty-six-year-old bachelor who was dressed as if he were about to board the cable car for Nob Hill and who just happened to have ten thousand dollars to invest, or so Will claimed and she fervently hoped, hoped as much as she’d ever hoped for anything in her life—beside him. Edith, aglow in her new dress and barely able to contain her excitement—new faces amongst them, Nichols a gentleman and from San Francisco no less—was next to her, and Ida, in the intervals between serving the dishes, sat beside Edith. Jimmie was next to Ida, with Adolph across the table and the six shearers, dark silent men with leaping eyes who must have been Indians or Mexicans or some combination of the two, were at the far end. Will was in his Sunday best and she was wearing her blue dress, the one he liked so much, and she’d done her hair up in a chignon. There was a bouquet of wildflowers. She lit the candles herself.
The cuisine—a pair of turkeys stuffed with cornbread, a pot of beans, mashed potatoes and a puree of the butternut squash Mills had brought along as a gift, as well as coffee, bread pudding for dessert and red wine in quantity—might not have been the sort of thing the shearers were used to, but between the six of them, and Jimmie, of course, they reduced what was left of the turkeys to small reliquaries of chewed-over bones and scraped the serving bowls so meticulously Ida would have had to look twice to find anything to wash in them. To a man, they never said a word through the entire meal. From their end of the table came only the soft moist smack of mastication and the click of utensils, and if she’d spent a frantic half hour fretting over her table settings, it came to nothing. The minute they sat down, each of them produced his own knife, outsized things, sharp enough for surgery, and they used them variously as cutting implements, forks and serving spoons.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. Four months ago she’d been entertaining the Kents and Abbotts in the apartment on Post Street, and now she was here in this drafty sheep-stinking ranch house, breaking bread with men who looked as if they’d never been introduced to a bar of soap. She sipped her wine and looked morosely round the table. Will was talking. Mills was talking. Jimmie murmured something to Adolph, who grunted, and Edith tried to draw Nichols out on the subject of the theater, but he said he’d been traveling and couldn’t remember when he’d last been to a show.
She asked about Mrs. Mills—Irene—picturing her back in Santa Barbara in her comfortable house, the wind and the waves and the travails of the sheep nothing to her now, wondering if she dared ask about the date circled on the calendar, but Mills—Call me Hiram—just said she was fine. “Does she miss the place, miss it here, I mean?” she asked, and she couldn’t help herself though she already knew the answer. “Oh, yes, of course she does,” he said, his eyes locked on hers in the throes of his sincerity, though he was lying, anyone could see that. “We both do. It was a true . . . privilege to live out here.”
The meal went on. There was small talk—news of the world, details relating to the running of the ranch—but it was Mills carrying the conversation and Mills was dull. The candles flickered and the stove hissed, emitting a faint scorched odor of the ironwood roots they’d dug up to burn, the trees th
emselves long gone, but the dense hot-burning roots remaining in the earth like buried treasure. Nichols didn’t say much, responding when he was spoken to, offering up the odd comment on the tenderness of the turkey or the decor of the house (“Very nicely done, really—much more comfortable than I’d expected. For a ranch house”). He held himself with a rigidity that seemed to betoken a military background, either that or some sort of spinal complaint, and he wore a mustache identical to Will’s, except that it was pure dead-of-night black, whereas Will’s had gone to gray—or white, in fact.
In the expansive moment when Ida brought out the dessert, the pudding thick with raisins and drowning in vanilla sauce, Will, as if he couldn’t bear it any longer, turned to Nichols and asked if by any chance he was a military man. “Or formerly, I mean. Like myself.”
Nichols looked startled—or perhaps bemused. “Me?” he said, and here the mustache lifted at both corners of his mouth and a stained tooth edged in gold revealed itself. “Hardly. I worked for my father out of school, then went east for an education, which, unfortunately, I never succeeded in completing. For a degree, that is.”
She was going to ask about that—Was it one of the Boston schools?—by way of finding common ground, putting him at his ease, but her voice stuck in her throat and she had to turn away and press a hand to her mouth, fighting the urge to cough with everything she had. They knew she was ill. They’d heard the rumors, she was sure of it, but she wasn’t going to let it show, not if it killed her.
“And then,” Nichols went on, tapping delicately at his lips with one of the mismatched napkins she’d managed to come up with, “my father passed on and left me a little something which Hiram here”—a glance for Mills—“has just about convinced me to put to work for my own benefit. For the benefit of us all, that is. You really do have an impressive operation,” he said, his eyes drifting from her to Will. “A very unique opportunity, isn’t it?”
