T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

The proprietor’s will had divided the island into seven parcels, one for each of his children, and one — parcel 5, by far the largest, on which the main ranch and winery stood — for their mother, Maria Christina Sara Candida Molfino Caire, or Albina, as she was known, mercifully, for short. The division was contentious. Each of the siblings felt cheated. Arthur, the eldest son, for instance, was given title to Christy Ranch in the west, but there was no serviceable harbor there to make it useful, while Edmund Rossi, son of his deceased sister Amélie, was awarded the far more desirable parcel number 7, on the eastern end of the island, and Arthur’s sister Aglae wound up with parcel 6, which included Scorpion Ranch and its excellent and protected anchorage. Litigation ensued. The original heirs began to die off and their heirs in turn took up the fight. Conditions deteriorated, the Depression intervened, the sheep kept on grazing.

Finally, in 1937, the main ranch and the four western parcels adjoining it were sold in large to an oil man from Los Angeles, Edwin Stanton, who attempted to revive the sheeping operation, bringing in domestic stock to interbreed with the remnant of the original flock and lure in the outliers. He soon gave it up when the whole of the flock, domestic and feral alike, scattered to the far ends of the island, making it too great a nuisance to round them up annually for shearing, docking and branding, and so he shipped 30,000 sheep to slaughter and focused on cattle, with mixed success. On his death in 1963, his son Carey took over majority ownership and ran the cattle operation until he himself died in 1987 and ceded the entire property to the Nature Conservancy, which hired a professional hunting concern to exterminate the remaining sheep, finally putting an end to the ovine occupation of the major portion of Santa Cruz Island.

But on the eastern two parcels, which remained in the hands of Monsieur Caire’s descendants, the sheep went right on ruminating, stripping the bark from the endemic oak, cherry and ironwood trees, grinding the bishop pine seedlings between their reductive molars, running every stamen and leaf and scrap of pith through the chambers of their four contiguous stomachs till the hills felt the pressure of them like a cinched belt, cinched and looped and cinched again.

By the time Bax took over the operation in 1979, things had fallen to ruin and the sheep were little more than an afterthought. The current owners, Pier and Francis Gherini, great-grandsons of the propriétaire , had come up with a scheme for developing their portion of the island into a resort, replete with marina, golf course, lodges and restaurants, but when the County of Santa Barbara denied them permits at the urging of the National Park Service, their interest flagged and whatever Scorpion Ranch once was, it was no more. It was Bax who brought it back to life. They hired him in an attempt to squeeze some profit out of the place, and he threw himself into the task, taking on new hands, repairing fence, rounding up as many of the ferals as he could and bringing in seventy prize Rambouillet rams to breed up the stock. Rita threw herself into it too. And Francisco. And Anise. They all did. But how could anyone hope to hold anything together when the world was as liable to fracture as Bax’s ribs and the long white bone that was like the bone of a ghost on the sheeny black X-rays of his left leg? Bax was laid up, that was the fact, and trespassers were out there shooting their guns at will and scaring the ewes off their lambs.

Anise had been inconsolable. Once it was over — and it was over when the ravens decided it was, lifting themselves from the bloat and scatter like great winged slugs — Rita went to her. She found her crouched in the beaten grass with the lambs all gathered to her, the hair strung dripping across her face, her shoulders quaking and her clothes wet through with the rain and the blood. Some of the lambs were too weak to stand, their outsized ears fanned out in the grass, their bleating like some diachronic dirge. They needed their mothers — for protection, warmth, milk — and if they didn’t get them soon the loss would go far beyond the seventy-three corpses Rita had already counted.

“Come on, honey,” she said, struggling to control her voice. “Let’s go back to the house and get into some dry clothes. I’ll make you some tea. Or hot chocolate. How about some hot chocolate?”

Anise didn’t respond. She sat hunched over her knees, rocking back and forth, the line of her clenched jaw as bloodless and jumpy as a diviner’s rod. She didn’t even lift her eyes.

Rita stood there in the rain, trying for her daughter’s sake to be gentle, reasonable, calming, motherly, but she felt none of these things. The fact was that in that moment Anise looked exactly like Toby, Toby when he was down, when they played and nobody showed, when the A&R man at the record company told them he had reservations about some of the songs on their second album, that they were weak, worse than weak, that they were shit, pure and unadulterated, and Toby was the last thing she wanted to think about now. Toby with his tantrums, his cheating, his coke. Cocaína , he always called it. As in, Let’s do some cocaína . Cute. Real cute. When they couldn’t even pay the rent.

She made an effort. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said, the smell of the rain enlivening the odor of death that hung over the field till she felt as if she wanted to sink down in the mud — right here, right in front of her daughter — and cry herself dry. What was the use of it all? The worry, the deprivation, every penny put back into the flock and no satisfaction but in increase? “The damage is already done and all we can do now is let the mothers come back to their babies. Look,” she said, pointing across the field to where Francisco and Bumper were working to bring them in, “they’re already coming back. They’re as worried as we are.”

Anise’s voice was small and bitter. “What about the ones that don’t have anything to worry about? What are they going to do?”

“I know,” she said. “I know, it hurts.”

She was remembering the previous year when one of the ewes that had lost a lamb to a withered leg kept nosing at the remains of the carcass — the hooves, the head, the coat — long after the flesh had gone. That was a kind of heartbreak that jumped species, from Ovis aries to Homo sapiens , and here it was again, seventy-three ewes come back to bleat for the lambs that couldn’t answer, and the ravens laughing from the trees.

“We have to get the police,” Anise said in a steady low voice, and now she looked up, her eyes hard and fixed. “Make them pay, those jerks, those hunters . For every one.”

“We will, honey, believe me.” And here she felt the anger and hate and despair come up in her all over again. “I’m going to go straight in there to the radio and call the sheriff, because this is criminal trespass, and, I don’t know, vandalism—”

“And murder.”

There was a countervailing breeze coming up off the ocean — she could smell the sharpness of it, the iodine, the salty sting of scales and feathers and fins — and it loosened the grip of the rain till it began to fall off in random spatters. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s what it amounts to.” She held out her hand, impatient now. “Come on, get up, move . Let’s get to the radio while there’s still a chance of catching them.”

Anise rose from the grass and smoothed down her wet jeans. The lambs she’d gathered just lay there looking into the wind, but already the ewes were trotting up to them, each instantly identifiable to the other by smell and a distinctive note of voice. “What good’s the sheriff going to do? Even if he came, which he won’t, it might be days from now and those guys are going to be long gone.”