T. Boyle - San Miguel

She folded the letter carefully and returned it to the envelope, and it was all she could do to keep herself from running off into the fields shouting for Will, because he had to see this, had to read the letter and take a look at the man and sign him on without delay. Her hand trembled as she clutched the letter to her. The new man, Reed, was studying her face, his eyes taking everything in. She’d opened a letter addressed to her husband right in front of him, and if it was a serious breach of etiquette — what would her mother have said? — she dismissed it, because husband and wife were one before the law and she and Will were equal partners in this enterprise, no matter what anyone might think or expect.

“I’m sure you’ll be just what we’re looking for,” she said, “and I’m sure too that you’ll find this place everything you could want. It’s—” Here she faltered, struggling to present things in a positive light. “It’s very peaceful out here. Isn’t it, Edith? Quiet. Tranquil.”

“Oh, yes,” Edith said, shooting her a glance, “very quiet.”

“If that’s what you want, that is.”

He took a step forward, snatched the cap from his head — the same sort of cap Jimmie favored, though this one was clean, or appeared to be. “A farm’s a farm, missus, and if you’ve seen one—” He finished the phrase with his hand. “Peace and solitude, that’s what a man wants, doubtless. And please don’t think that this”—pointing to the empty sleeve—“will slow me in any way or keep me from my duties because I can do the work of two men all on my own and what I can’t manage I’ve got my boys, Cuthbert and Thomas, of sixteen and fourteen years, to pull along with me.”

She wanted to reassure him — he was a treasure, her savior, the one man to lift her out of this, and she didn’t care how scrawny and hungry and crippled he was just so long as he was standing on two feet and drawing air — but she didn’t have the chance because Curner spoke up then. “Ma’am,” he said, indicating the crate he’d set down on the porch, “where do you want I should put this?”

If she didn’t recognize it in the exhilaration of the moment, who could have blamed her? “What is it?” she asked, Curner nodding and shuffling, Reed sober-faced, Edith burning up with her own barely contained joy — they were free, free at long last, already on their way!

A shrug. A grimace. “The plates,” he said. “You know, that you been asking after?”

* * *

She wasn’t privy to the conference Will had with the man — she’d gone up to bed early, too overwrought to hide her feelings or preside over the dinner table — but every time she’d looked up for the remainder of the afternoon she’d seen them crossing the yard together or tramping the fields or examining the railway ties that supported the barn as if they were rare works of art. She had a plate sent up, though she was too excited to eat, and when Edith brought it to her they were close as thieves. “Three more weeks,” she said, and Edith, giggling, repeated it to her: Three more weeks . Then she’d settled in with the back copies of the Santa Barbara newspaper Curner had brought her, the cat — they’d named him Marbles, for his coloring — curled up in her lap, where she could stroke the silk of his ears in a steady, easy, unconscious way. It was past nine and dark beyond the windows when she heard Will’s tread on the stairs, his steps uncertain, as if he’d been drinking — and he had, she knew he had, with Curner and the new man, her one-armed savior. She didn’t begrudge them. Let them celebrate. She would have celebrated herself but she was afraid of hexing things.

Will was on the landing. He was at the door. And then, oddly, he was knocking, the soft rap of his knuckles whispering through the wooden panels so politely, so reticently, you would have thought they were strangers to each other. “Come in,” she said, the door pushed open, and there he was, her husband, looking sorrowful and shaking his head back and forth in negation, and at first she thought he’d lost at cards and then that he’d offered up the bed in the storeroom to the one-armed man instead of installing him in the bunkhouse where he belonged and that now he’d come to her, to be close with her, to sleep in the same bed with her despite all that had come between them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shuffling unsteadily across the room, the hateful room, her prison cell, and he had been drinking, of course he had. She watched him go to the corner by the window for the straight-backed chair there and laboriously lift it and bring it round to her side of the bed, where he set it down on the dried-out floorboards and sat heavily facing her.

“Sorry for what?”

He was still shaking his head. “The new man,” he said. “Reed. One-Arm. Whatever you want to call him.”

“What about him?” She pictured the man, so reduced he couldn’t have weighed much more than Edith, and what was the weight of a human arm? A fifth your body weight? A sixth?

“He’s not”—his voice heavy and slow—“going to work out.”

She’d been lying flat and now she sat up so precipitously she startled the cat, which came up out of its sleep with a sudden lurch before it could see that it was only her, its mistress, stirring to action. “What do you mean?”

“Just look at him. He’s weak, deformed. He looks half-starved.”

“He’s no worse off than the men you march down Market Street with come Decoration Day—”

“That’s different. They’re veterans. And we’re not hiring any of them to keep us from bankruptcy.”

“But I thought, I assumed—” But how stupid of her. It was the Revolutionary War the British fought, and on the wrong side, at that, not Will’s war. And if any of them did fight in the Civil War it would have been for the South.

“He lost it in a threshing machine, a farm accident, and who’s to say who was to blame. He drinks, though, that’s for sure—”

“So do you.”

“But that isn’t the point. Or maybe it is: I don’t trust him to do the work. I don’t think he’s capable.”

“He is, Will, I know he is.” She was pleading now and she hated herself for it. “He has two sons, nearly grown, and they—”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry? Are you actually going to sit there and tell me you don’t intend to hire that man?”

“We can’t take the risk. What if the ranch were to go bust, where would our investment be then?”

“Investment?” She threw it back at him. “Is this your idea of an investment?”

“We can’t simply—”

“We can. And we will.”

“I want to stay on, that’s the long and short of it. If even for a month or two more. It’s summer, Minnie, summer coming on — the air, think of the air.”

She let out a laugh then, incredulous, tainted, more a dog’s bark than any human sound, and then, though her throat was closing up on her, she dropped her voice to the pitch of absolute certainty, of threat and irrevocability: “If you do, it will be on your own. I’m finished here. Finished. Do you understand me? And you will hire that man and I don’t care if we have to beg in the streets and every last ram and ewe falls over dead and rots in its hide. Just get me out of here. Get me out !”

Will wanted to leave the cat behind, but she was adamant on that score too — in the short time she’d had it, the animal had become her chief source of comfort, along with Edith, that is — and now, as General Meade jerked at his harness and Jimmie fought the reins and the rocker pitched and yawed with each violent shudder of the sled, Marbles concentrated his weight in the basket in her lap till he was as heavy and inert as a stone. There was wind, of course, a gale of it blowing full in her face so that she had to squint her eyes to keep the grit out of them. Everything had dried up, just as Will had said it would, but that was small consolation to her now. In fact, it was nothing but an annoyance, her dress sheathed in a pale yellow patina of dust before they’d gone a hundred yards and the handkerchief she pressed to her face filthy all the way through. And her gloves — her gloves looked as if she’d been using them to dig up potatoes by hand. She focused on her breathing. Held on as best she could. And entertained herself with the notion that in a few hours— mere hours — she’d be at sea.