T. Boyle - San Miguel

A silence descended over the table. Nichols dropped his eyes, no doubt calculating just how far that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would take him. The pudding went round. Ida produced the coffee cups. The shearers looked sated, drowsy, ready to find their way out to the bunkhouse amidst the explosion of stars overhead and the yeasty warm wind-borne odor of the flock.

It was Edith who finally spoke up. “Yes,” she said, her eyes fixed on Nichols, “it’s all that, just as my father and Mr. Mills say, but I don’t know if you realize how dreadful the weather can be. You’ve had sunshine today, and very little wind—”

“A little harsh weather can’t put me off,” he said, that faint smile lifting the corners of his mustache.

“But you can’t begin to imagine,” Edith went on, using her hands to elaborate. “It seems like we’re living in the eye of a hurricane here — or not the eye, what do you call it? The edge, the outer edge.” She shot Will a glance and Marantha recognized her look, a combination of the coquettish and satiric, as if this were all a grand joke. Was she trying to undercut him, was that it? Defy him? Squash the deal? It was her father who’d taken her out of school, disrupted her life, and now she was getting her own back, pushing the limits, needling him when he was most vulnerable. It was spite, pure meanness. “Edith,” she heard herself say. “Edith, wouldn’t you like another helping of the pudding? It’s your favorite—”

Edith ignored her. “Mother’s come here for the air, you know, and I can’t think we’ve had three days of sunshine in all the time we’ve been here. It’s damp, Mr. Nichols, damp and cold and unhealthy.”

“Edith.”

“And the wind.” Edith had her dramatic face on, conscious that everyone was looking at her, even the shearers. “It’s so fierce, so loud and hateful”—a pause, another look for Will, for her father, only him—“it just makes you feel so lonely you want to die.”

* * *

And then there were the sleeping arrangements. Mills volunteered to take a place in the bunkhouse with Adolph, Jimmie and the shearers, but Will protested—“Good God, Hiram, you built the place yourself, worked it, raised your family in this house, and we can’t have you crawling off out there like a hired hand”—and Mills, as if to show how magnanimous he was, just shook his head side to side in denial. “If it’s good enough for Jimmie”—and here he shot a look down the length of the table to where the boy still lingered in the hope of a glance from Edith, though the pudding was long gone and Adolph and the shearers vanished into the night—“then it’s good enough for me, isn’t that right, Jimmie? And it’s your house now, Will, and I wouldn’t want to upset you or your family.”

“That’s very generous of you, but still it wouldn’t be an inconvenience to us, not at all, wouldn’t you say so, Minnie?”

She and Edith had stayed on, glad for the company. They each had a cup of coffee before them, but the coffee had grown cold. In the interim, Nichols had produced three Cuban cigars and Will had brought out a bottle of brandy he’d been saving for a special occasion — unlike the whiskey.

They were all watching her. What had Will said? No matter. She shook her head and flashed her eyes as if nothing could please her more than having her house invaded, then raised the handkerchief to her mouth and coughed, just once, choking back the residue. She was tired. Exhausted. She hadn’t realized until that moment just how much the evening had cost her. “We thought,” she said, struggling to clear her voice, “that Mr. Nichols might want to take the spare room on this floor, across from Ida’s — Ida can always share with Edith — and that would leave Ida’s room for you, Mr. Mills, Hiram…” She attempted to cover herself with a laugh, but that was risky the way she was feeling, because a laugh, the slightest tickle in her throat, could bring on a coughing fit. “That is”—she snatched a breath—“if you really don’t mind giving up all those bedbugs out there in the bunkhouse.”

The detail she didn’t mention was that her husband would in that case be sleeping in the master bedroom, if you could call it that, at least until the business had been transacted and the guests were safely out of sight.

“I wouldn’t want to put you out,” Mills said, softening. He knew what the bunkhouse was like, knew better than anyone, except maybe Jimmie.

“Or me either.” Nichols had set down his glass and was giving her that faint smile, the gold outline of his tooth glinting in the light of the candles, which were guttering now in pools of wax.

“Oh, no,” she said, her voice so husky she might have been growling, “it’s no trouble at all.”

But of course it was, as her husband was to discover when he came plodding up the stairs after the others had gone off to bed. She was lying there waiting for him, propped up on the pillows, and she wasn’t reading or knitting or doing anything at all except watching for him to come through the door. The handle clicked, rose, fell, and there he was, unsteady on his feet, tipsy with wine, with brandy, looking needy, looking hopeful. “I hope you won’t mind,” she said, her eyes leading him to the pallet she’d made up in the corner, on the floor beneath the window: sheet, blanket and pillow, the thinnest of horsehair mattresses salvaged from the bunkhouse.

He stood there a long moment, rocking ever so slightly over the twin fulcrums of his hips, and then he began to unbutton his shirt, his hands clumsy, his fingers thick as blocks of wood. She almost went to him, almost slipped from bed to help him out of his clothes as if he were a child, almost relented, but it was all too much, all her resentments rushing back at her on a howling icy internal wind that chilled her to the marrow, to her soul, to the bottom of everything.

“I’m sorry, Will. It’s just that I can’t bear the weight of you beside me. Not the way I am now. I’m sorry. I truly am.”

Whether it was because of the excitement of having company in the house she couldn’t say, but during the week that Mills, Nichols and the shearers were there, she began to feel stronger, day by day. The coughing tapered off. The phlegm she brought up, especially in the mornings, seemed looser and there was no tinge of blood. She began helping Ida and Edith with the meals and even found time to work in the flower garden she’d planted up against the fence in the front yard. And once, out of curiosity, she’d gone out to the corral to watch the shearers at their work.

It must have been the second or third day of the shearing. The weather was clear for a change, the wind soft, almost balmy. When Will saw her making her way across the yard after breakfast with her parasol and knitting basket, he swung open the gate and came to her, his face lit with a smile of the purest pleasure. He’d wanted her to take an active interest, and here she was, out of the house, in the sunshine, interested. “Minnie,” he called, holding a hand out to her, “come and watch. You’ll like this, I think.”

He was in his work clothes, his trousers spattered with mud, chaff in his hair and all down his sleeves and the front of his shirt as if he’d been out haying. But he hadn’t been haying — that was months off yet. He’d been wrestling with the sheep, that was what it was, as she was soon to see, helping the shearers pin them down while they clipped the fleece from their bodies in continuous sheets so neatly proportioned it was as if the animals had been wearing jackets that only needed to be unbuttoned and slipped off. “I hope so,” she said. “The whole business seems so mysterious to me.” She let out a laugh. “I never imagined wool came from anyplace other than a shop.”