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.”
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.”