T. Boyle - San Miguel

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 themselves 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?”

Will assured him that it was — and so did Mills. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Mills told him, and then repeated himself, “Once-in-a-lifetime. And as I think I’ve explained to you, the only reason I’m willing to sell is that I’m just too old anymore to be fussing around with boats and tracking sheep up in the hills.”

She’d managed to catch herself, her eyes watering from the effort, a thin wheeze of regurgitated air rattling in her throat. Mills kept talking. He was a salesman, that was what he was. But his logic was faulty: he was no older than Will. And what did that have to say about this little transaction, not to mention their lives here? She wanted to step in, change the subject — couldn’t they see they were pressing too hard, scaring him off? — but it was all she could do just to breathe at the moment. She held the wineglass to her lips, sipping, breathing, sipping, breathing, the first withering cough lurking just below the surface.

“No,” Mills sighed, taking up his glass and setting it down again, “this is a young man’s game, I’m afraid, though either partner could certainly run the place. Lord knows I did it, all on my own — till Will came in, that is — and for seventeen of the best years of my life. This place,” he said, revolving one hand as if it contained a miniature crystal globe of the island and everything on it, “is a kind of paradise. Paradise right here on earth.”