T. Boyle: San Miguel

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, though she dreaded the yawing and jolting that was to come. She gripped the arms of the rocker, braced her feet, made sure of her hat.

“All right,” he said, nosing his horse around, “you go nice and easy now, Jimmie. This isn’t a race.”

The boy didn’t respond. He merely flicked the switch at the stolid black rump of the mule — General Meade — and they were off, the dog darting on ahead with a high tremulous yelp while Ida swung anxiously round to shout over her shoulder to Adolph, who stood there in the yard like a post, his arms dangling and his face expressionless. “Don’t you let that turkey dry out,” she called. She was trying to add something else, some further admonition, something about basting, but the sled dropped into a hole and her voice got away from her.

* * *

They hadn’t gone two hundred yards before the sheep began to appear, wedge-faced aggregations of them staring stupidly from either side or lurching out of the way of the mule at the last second. Yellow eyes, the black slits of their pupils. Wool caked with filth. Sheep. If they’d looked vaguely romantic at a distance, like souls set adrift, up close they were anything but. The smell was stronger here, a working odor of massed bodies, of sweat, urine, excrement. All she could hear was the sound of their ragged mindless bleating like a perpetual complaint, and underneath it the pulsing indistinct chorus of the seals.

Will led on, heading toward a bluff beyond, where apparently there was another canyon that gave onto the beach, another beach. The plan was to picnic by the shore, walk the strand and collect seashells while Jimmie went off to pry abalone from the rocks for a New Year’s chowder to complement the turkey and potatoes. That was fine, but this business of the sled was something else altogether. She held tight as it swayed side to side, lurched over stones and hissed through the long troughs of sand, Ida shouting with glee and the boy rising up out of his seat to coax the mule on. At first she was nervous about Edith, afraid her mule would bolt or throw her or step in a hole and go down atop her, but as they went on she saw how confident Edith was — and alert too — and how the mule really was gentle, ambling along like one of the ponies Edith used to ride at the park when she was little. She was thinking about that, about the time when there were just the two of them, before Will had come into her life, and how dense and rich those days had seemed, James dead and buried and Edith there to take his place, to be stroked, loved, supported, when Will, riding high above them, swung his horse round to come up beside the sled and lean down to her.

“You see that, Minnie,” he crowed, waving his arm in a grand gesture to take in the whole scene, from the dwindling furrow the sled had cut behind them to the crown of Green Mountain and the far-flung clusters of sheep that seemed to be everywhere, palely glowing under the benediction of the sun. “That’s just a fraction of the flock, which Mills puts at four thousand, and that’s before the increase of this year’s lambs.”

He was grinning down at her, looking more alive than she’d seen him in years, his excitement running on ahead of him. “I can see them,” she called back, the sled jolting so that she had to hang on with both hands. “Just look at the lambs trying out their legs. The way they kick.”

Edith was on the opposite side of the sled, not twenty feet away, her shoulders swaying gracefully beneath the crown of her hat as the mule worked its haunches up and down, picking its slow deliberate way through the scrub that was alive with pale green shoots of new grass and wildflowers as far as you could see. She was about to call to her, to point out the lambs, when Edith pulled up short, tugging at the reins so that the mule jerked back its head and planted its feet, all motion gone out of it in an instant but for the slow metronomic swishing of its tail. Edith arched her back, raised a hand to shield her eyes. “Oh, look,” she said, pointing now, “look at that one all alone. Is that one alone? Over there?”

The dog had already spotted it, scrambling his paws to bolt through the grass and circle it twice, his bark fluent and pitched high. The lamb, its umbilical still trailing away beneath it, merely blinked at him, as helpless as a fallen leaf. The ewe was nowhere to be seen.

“You better shut that dog up or he’ll drive all the ewes off their lambs,” Will said, addressing Jimmie, who stopped the mule with a single guttural command, sprang down from the sled and began wading off through the vegetation, the dog dancing on ahead of him.

“Nipper!” the boy called. “Nipper, heel!”

It was too much for Edith. She slid from the saddle as naturally as if she’d been doing it all her life and hurried after him, and in the next moment they were all on foot, the whole party, she and Ida and Will too, pushing through the scrub to where the lamb stood apart from the flock that spun out in all directions, each ewe with one or two lambs and sometimes three, lambs in the hundreds sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. There was that odor, that intense odor, as of things fermenting. Suddenly it was cold. She put a hand to her throat, pinching the collar of her coat to keep out the breeze that seemed to have come up out of nowhere. When she got to where the lamb was, the dog was sitting on its heels and Jimmie and Will were standing there gazing down at it as if it were some rare specimen. Edith, looking flushed, bent to it with a sprig of fresh grass. “Here,” she was saying. “Here, little thing, take this.”

“It don’t want grass,” Jimmie said flatly. “Milk’s what it wants. Mother’s milk.”

“Poor thing,” Marantha heard herself say, and at that moment the animal let out a bleat so hopeless and weak you’d have thought it was dying right there before their eyes.

“They each of them has his own call and his own smell — that’s how the dam finds them,” Jimmie said. “But every once in a while, nobody knows why, the ewe’ll reject her own lamb.”

“Can we keep it?” Edith pleaded. “Nurse it, I mean. Because if its mother—”

Will was standing beside her, gazing down on the bony narrow skull, the ears slick with afterbirth, the slit yellow eyes, the lips opening and closing on nothing. He had his hands on his hips the way he did when he’d made up his mind about something and that irked her because she could see what was coming. “You can’t just blunder on an animal and assume it’s abandoned,” he said, and his voice was wrong, all wrong, too hard by half. “Because sometimes the ewe comes back — isn’t that right, Jimmie? — and that gives it a far better chance of survival than having to rely on somebody who, for all the height and heft of her, is still a child, feeding it six times a day from a warmed-over pan of milk.”

Edith never even glanced at him. She just straightened up and turned to her, to her mother, and repeated herself: “Can we?”

And what did she say? She said, “Of course, of course we can,” and she was looking at Will when she said it. “We can’t just leave the poor animal out here to starve, can we?”

Dinner that first evening was a homely affair, hardly festive, but it was better than it had a right to be considering where they were and the transformation that had taken place in the interval of just over twelve hours, from the time they pulled themselves out of bed on the mainland till now, with night freshly descended over the island. The table had been moved to the center of the room and covered with a cloth, there was a fire going in the potbellied stove to take the chill off the place and Will had lit a pair of lanterns that threw rollicking shadows across the walls every time somebody moved. She took a glass of wine when it was offered her and raised it to Will’s in a toast to her new life and her new family, all of them, even Adolph and Jimmie, who were seated at the foot of the table, looking abashed. For them, there was beer, and for Edith a bottle of sarsaparilla. Whatever had afflicted her earlier, whatever her fears, the day and the sun and the novelty of the moment had pushed it all away and she felt calm now, calm and steady and even grateful.