T. Boyle - San Miguel

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 shearers 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?”

“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.

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.