T. Boyle - San Miguel

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 excitement. “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.