It was just light enough to distinguish the colors of things outside the window — a pair of khaki gumboots hanging from a hook under the eaves, a once-red wheelbarrow overturned atop the heaped-up mound of the kitchen compost pile, the scored white hood of Bax’s wrecked and wheel-sprung Jeep — when Francisco came in the back door to help her clean up the breakfast dishes and attack the mess on the pocked concrete floor. Francisco was a Basque with Mexican blood or a Mexican with Basque blood, depending on the company and his mood, and he’d been attached to the place through the last failed sheep operation and then as caretaker during the lonely years when the ranch house deteriorated from lack of care and money and the sheep forgot all about shearers, dogs and fences and scattered across the crags and ravines of El Montañon, the transverse ridge that separated this, the eastern ten percent of the island, from the western portion. Now he was with Bax. He was anywhere between fifty and eighty (no one could say and he wasn’t forthcoming on the subject, preferring to speak in terms of eras rather than years, el otoño de los vientos, the epoch of the bone collectors from the university, the earthquake time or the drought time when he was a boy working cattle in the San Joaquin Valley and the patrón had hired a chisera to bring rain and she charged him a calf for her efforts, and then, after it had rained like Noah’s deluge for two weeks running, demanded two calves to make it stop). He dressed in a faded blue workshirt, tattered bandanna, freshly oiled boots and jeans so saturated in blood, lanolin and dirt they could have been used to brace up the joists of the house in an emergency, and he wore the traditional sheepman’s knife in a sheaf strapped to his thigh. How he’d ever translated his knowledge to Bax remained a mystery since he was about as communicative as a stone (unless he was drunk, when you practically had to gag him to shut him up), but he was as complete and efficient as one of the robots the future kept promising. What he said now was, “I take the Mister su café, Missus?”
The Mister — Bax, that is, the man whose late-life challenge it was to oversee these 6,800 acres on an inequitable profit-sharing basis with the owners and in whose bed she’d been sleeping since two weeks after her installation as cook, hence her status as Missus — was laid up. He’d been clearing debris out of the cratered road that angled precipitously up out of the valley on the far side of the wash, trying to preserve access to their makeshift airstrip, when the Jeep, which wasn’t much more than animated debris to begin with, flipped on him. He was thrown clear. The Jeep rolled and kept on rolling, the windshield flattened, the steering wheel sheared off and the front wheels, fenders and hood permanently rearranged, till a boulder stopped it halfway down the side of the cliff. No one had any idea what had happened till the dark began to come down and Anise, looking up from her history homework, asked, “Where’s Bax?”
He’d been lucky, or so he told it. The concussion was mild enough so he was able to keep the ravens off him, waving an arm when they got too close; it was his bad leg — the left one — that was broken; and he’d only cracked three of the twelve ribs a human being is graced with. “Forget all that Adam’s rib nonsense,” he’d told Anise that first night at the hospital in Ventura when she sat over his bed with her long worrying face on, “because men and women have exactly the same number. And that’s a common misconception, that men have one less. You know what a common misconception is? Like a prejudice. An old wives’ tale.”
But he was laid up now, feeling his hurt, frustrated, angry, sixty years old a week ago and showing it. And he was a bear in the morning anyway. So she took the pot from the stove, poured a cup heavy with sugar and cream, and handed it to Francisco. “Yeah,” she said, “that’d be great. You take it up to him. And don’t tell him anything. Or no: you tell him I’m going to be out there with those ewes till every one of them has dropped. All day, all week, and next week too, if that’s what it takes.”
Francisco — his face was remarkably smooth for a man who’d spent his whole life under the sun, which was one reason why it was so hard to estimate his age, that and the fact that he carried himself like a far younger man, back straight, his stride long and his step vigorous — gave her a nod of accord. He said one word only—“Suerte”—and then he took the cup and ambled out the door and up the stairs to the room above where Bax lay flat out on his back reading through the pile of old Life magazines she’d picked up at a yard sale last time they were on the coast. There’d be a chamber pot to empty. And within the hour, after he’d had his first two cups of coffee, he’d want breakfast. Before that, though, there was a stew to prepare and set on the stove to slow-cook through the day, lunch and dinner both. That and the bread rising in the six pans arrayed on the counter behind her, which would go into the brick oven once the fire she’d banked there had burned down to coals.
She went to the drawer and took out her whetstone and put an edge on the butcher knife, all the while listening to the sounds of the house, the distant bleating of the ewes and the harsh avian cursing of the ravens that had gathered in their legions for the feast she meant to deny them. Where they came from, she couldn’t say — it was a mystery. There was always a resident population hanging round the slaughtering shed or the midden out back, but as soon as lambing season began they must have quintupled their numbers, flying in from the other islands or maybe even the coast. Francisco said they were the souls of the Indians, las almas de los indios, come back from the dead to plague the white men who’d displaced them, and maybe he was right. Certainly they were as smart as any Indian or anybody else for that matter. Step outside with a rifle and they’d vanish, only to reappear just out of range. Try it with a stick, even one you’d painted black for just that purpose, and they’d ignore you. She’d seen them work in pairs, one distracting the ewe while the other went for the lamb. And while scientists might make the claim that apes are the only tool-using animals aside from Homo sapiens, she’d seen ravens drop mussels on the rocks to crack them open or pick up a stone and hold it between their claws for ballast in a heavy wind. Souls of the Indians, devils, whatever they were: they weren’t going to get at her lambs, not this year.
It was lamb at the chopping block though, one of last year’s wethers fresh-slaughtered the night before, and if someone had tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she saw any irony in that, she would have said no, just practicality — they were in the business of shipping wool and lamb on the hoof to the coast and sustaining themselves on what they could, and that was lamb and more lamb, just as Bax had warned her that gray socked-in day they’d sat in the diner in Oxnard and become acquainted for the first time. Sheepmen ate lamb and mutton because it was there and because they couldn’t run out to Carl’s Jr. for a burger when they felt like it or cruise up the avenue for a beer and a hot dog. If the diet was a crime of sameness, she’d learned to supplement it with the occasional hog one of the hands shot or the lobster and abalone she and Anise would dive for with mask and snorkel and two pairs of cracked blue rubber flippers, just for the change. The lobsters were a treat, as many as twenty or more of them set to boil in water she’d laced with salt, peppercorns, apple cider vinegar and bay leaves, but the hands — Mexicans, mostly in their forties and fifties — were suspicious of anything new. They ignored the drawn butter and lemon wedges she’d husbanded since her last grocery run, preferring to fold up the supple white tails in their tortillas, with a scoop of beans and rice and hot sauce out of the bottle.