She waved her arms and shouted. The gander worked the ground with his feet, and raising his bill, trumpeted again.
She couldn’t quiet him and she couldn’t outrun him. She stood, in despair, expecting that at any moment Luisa or Jessie or someone from the house would come running to investigate the noise. By the time it was explained it would be too late, Mark would already have passed the place on the road where she intended to meet him. It seemed that the whole of nature was in league against her: the morning fog that should never have lifted, the bright day that hid nothing, the tattling birds; everything — time, and the weather, and Mark himself, and the gander’s trumpet summoning more of her enemies from the house.
She reached down and picked up a stone.
“Go back,” she said, as if the gander was not an animal but a bewitched human who could understand her words. “I warn you, go back.”
He honked again, beating his wings powerfully. But he didn’t look fierce; instead, he seemed curious, as if he had never before witnessed such strange behavior and was trying his best to do his part in the pantomime. He had known this silly woman for years; she had fed and watered him and stroked his feathers and chased him away from the chickens; if she wanted now to play a new game, he was willing. He leaped into the air in his excitement and listened to the full satisfying sounds that came from his own throat.
The stone hit him just over his opal eye.
He fell gracefully on his side. His opal eye remained unchanged, but almost immediately a glaze came over the other eye. His legs stuck out from his body, stiff as boards.
He lay among the leaves, looking smaller than he had when he was alive. She came over and spoke his name, “James?” She felt among his feathers for the beat of his heart. There was no blood, no evidence at all to show that the stone had hit him except his instantaneous excretion at the moment of death.
She would have liked to run away and leave him lying where he was; someone would find him and assume he had died naturally, of old age. But she was afraid that the finder might be Jessie. Jessie didn’t understand that death could come to her friends.
She decided to carry him further away from the path and cover him with fallen leaves and branches. There was no way to take hold of him except by his legs. The yellow skin felt like the skin of an old man, dry and cracked. She picked him up very carefully, so the oozing excrement wouldn’t soil her dress. He was surprisingly light. His fierce wings and huge body had almost made her forget that he was only a bird, after all; the body was merely fat and feathers, and the bones were like twigs.
Fifty feet from the path there was a small hollow under a eucalyptus tree, which shed its leaves and bark continually. No matter how often the wind swept them away, the ground was constantly littered with chips and chunks of bark. The trunk of the tree, where the bark had already been shed, was as grey and smooth as old bones.
She placed the gander in the hollow and covered him with dried leaves and pieces of bark. His drab feathers were easily camouflaged. When she returned to the path and looked back, she couldn’t even see the place where she’d buried him. No one would ever find him. He would lie there until he became part of the earth itself as Billy had become part of the sea. Not death, she thought, only change. Change, quick and violent and startling, like a hand grabbing you from behind in the dark. It took time to adjust and to realize that, though its pressure was relentless, the hand itself was friendly. Only change, nothing is wasted.
She wasn’t immediately sorry that she’d killed the gander. Like Billy, like the starfish, it had had no future but death, and that death should have come at her hand (the friendly hand in the dark), wasn’t important. She was merely an instrument in the cycle of change. The gander had escaped disease, and the roasting pan, and the wheels of cars, only to die by a stone over his opal eye.
She crossed the barranca, picking her way among the boulders, pursued only by her own squat black shadow that hid behind the trees and jumped out at her again in the clearing where the swimming pool was, and the old well, gone to salt. A hundred yards beyond, she reached the fence where once a year Mr. Roma posted new No Trespassing signs to replace the ones that had been bleached by the sun or shredded by the wind or turned into a soggy pulp by the sea fogs. She lifted the bottom wire of the barbed-wire fence and crawled underneath. One of the barbs caught the hem of her dress but she jerked free, leaving behind strands of green silk for some enterprising nuthatch to use to decorate his nest.
She sat down by the side of the road, breathing hard and feeling quite faint from the heat.
It was fifteen minutes before she heard the jeep coming along the road. All her worry and haste, the gander’s death, the crude burial, had been for nothing. She looked down at the friendly hands that had moved too fast.
It can’t have happened, she thought. When I get back James will be standing under the magnolia tree.
The jeep came around the curve trailing a cloud of dust.
She stood up, conscious suddenly of the way she would look to him — a woman no longer young, her face flushed and moist, her dress snagged, and her white shoes dappled with dirt. Nervously she smoothed her hair back and wiped off her forehead with a handkerchief.
He pulled up alongside the road.
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you. I thought I’d — drive into town with you.”
“You think that’s a good idea, do you?”
He was wearing sun glasses, the kind that covered the eyes entirely even at the corners. She couldn’t tell what his expression was, though he sounded cool.
“I couldn’t think of any other way,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
“The more we talk, the further in we get.”
“There are some things I’ve got to tell you. If I don’t, Luisa or someone else will, and I’d rather tell you myself so you’ll hear it straight.”
“What if I don’t want to listen?”
“You’ve got to, Mark,” she said helplessly. “You’ve got to.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as if they hurt. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“I’ll be gone tomorrow. Then you can forget about me.”
“Christ,” he said, and got out of the jeep and came around to her side. “All right. Talk. Tell me.”
“Here, like this? Can’t we even go somewhere and sit down? Look — we could walk over there.” She pointed south, to a field of wild mustard, blazing with yellow blooms. “Isn’t it pretty, Mark?”
“I guess.”
“Oh, it is pretty. I wonder who decides which are weeds and which are flowers. Did you ever see the wild morning glories growing by the shed? They look so delicate, it’s rather a shock when you find out how deep and tough their roots are.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me about, weeds?”
“Give me time.”
They crossed the road, side by side, but a yard apart. The field of wild mustard wasn’t fenced. The blooms came up to their knees.
“It’s not a very good place to sit,” he said. “There are too many bees.”
“Don’t you like bees?”
“Not especially.”
“They don’t sting unless they’re frightened.”
“So I’ve heard.” He had the same feeling that he’d experienced yesterday on the boat, that everything she said was meant to have personal and philosophic implications. Her conversational asides (the dugong and its child, the storm a thousand miles away, the old man who’d planted the trees) — these were not merely observations. They were analogies, perhaps unconscious, perhaps deliberate. And now there were more of them, the bees that wouldn’t sting unless they were disturbed, and the delicate morning glories with the tough roots. After only three days, even the weather wore her monogram.