She paused a moment to lift her face to the sky. The clouds were dark and tight-knit, the rain dancing off her skin: there wouldn’t be any day-trippers coming out from the coast, not with this weather. She upended the bowl of scraps on the mulch pile, then took a minute to turn it with the pitchfork because it needed to be turned and she meant to deny the ravens these scraps too. It was then, the rain sizzling down and the working heat at the center of the pile giving up a plume of condensation and a curdled dank reek of decay, that she detected movement out of the corner of her eye and looked round to see the fox there in the lee of the Jeep, one paw suspended in mid-step.
Now here was an animal she could get behind — too small to annoy the sheep and always on the prowl for the mice that plagued the main house, their droppings ubiquitous, scattered over everything in dark little gift packets of filth and disease. She made a kissing noise and watched the fox’s ears come erect. Then, very slowly, she bent to the pile to unearth the fresh scraps till she found a wet red fragment of bone and gristle and tossed it to him. It landed with a soft thump in the wet earth at his feet and he took it gingerly, as a dog would, but without fear or concern — people were no threat to him. He’d been here longer than they had and he went on eating his mice, insects, the occasional bird, and if people left food around (or variously, Francisco’s briar pipe that went missing from the porch one evening, a half-burned candle, sweated socks hung out on the rail to dry and concentrate the salts of the body), he would oblige them by expanding the range of his diet. She watched him worrying the bone a moment, pinning it with his paws and working it with his teeth, his fur slicked with the rain and his eyes casting her adrift as if she had no significance at all, and then she went back in the house to see to the stew and slide the loaves into the oven.
Francisco had set the dishes aside to dry and was plying the mop on the concrete floor now, shifting the mud from one corner to the other in long yellowish streaks. The floor was always dirty, forever dirty, but that was a matter of degree — until she’d nagged Bax to have the supply barge off-load a hundred sixty-pound bags of concrete and until that concrete was loaded ten bags at a time in the back of the pickup and brought up here to be mixed in the wheelbarrow, poured, tamped and smoothed in place, the floor had been actual dirt, literal dirt, trodden and compacted by how many generations of sheepherders’ boots she couldn’t begin to imagine. The other substantial building on the property — the eight-room bunkhouse — was of wood-frame construction and as far as she knew had always had a pine floor, which was, if anything, even dirtier than the old dirt floor of the main house, but nothing to worry over. The hands took turns sweeping it and every once in a long concatenation of weeks even took a mop to it. They had their own communal room, a few rough chairs, a card table and a potbellied stove, but the main house was where they gathered for their meals and where they felt — at least in her presence — as if they’d come home, the talk at supper of mothers long dead, of haciendas that no longer existed in the mind-clouded valleys of Arizona, New Mexico and Old Mexico too.
She was enveloped in the sweet hot fragrance of the stew as soon as she stepped in the door, the windows steamed over, the big open space that served as kitchen, dining room and gathering place suddenly dense with it, the released molecules of the lamb she’d chunked and the spices she’d crumbled between her palms combining and rising and drifting till even Bax, frowning over his reading glasses in the whitewashed bedroom upstairs, must have been aware of them. Shifting the big pot to the right of the stove, she took out the frying pan, greased it and cracked half a dozen eggs in a bowl. She added a spot of condensed milk and a handful of grated cheese, beat the mixture to a froth and poured out the makings of two thin omelets, spiced only with salt and pepper. Then she laid out four slices of bread, slathered two of them with her own fiery homemade pico de gallo, eased the first omelet between them and poured out a fresh mug of coffee. “Francisco, when you have a minute,” she called, and no irony intended here either, because things were easy on the ranch, “would you take this up to Bax?”
He nodded and gave her a grin. “Yes,” he said, “sure, no hay problema.” They were both aware of the subtext here: she was making use of Francisco as intermediary for the very good reason that if she’d taken the plate up herself she would have had to listen to Bax’s dammed-up torrent of advice, complaints and animadversions, not to mention the mental list of chores, niggling worries and very pressing matters he was composing even now and had been composing ever since he took to bed.
She used ketchup on the second sandwich (Anise had been crazy for ketchup since she was a little girl, smearing it on anything, saltines, pretzels, bananas, fresh-sliced cucumbers and even, at least once she knew of, on a Hershey bar), wrapped it in tinfoil and filled the thermos with hot chocolate. Then she pulled on her rain slicker and the sombrero Francisco’s cousin Manuel had brought her back from Tijuana the previous year after a week-long post-shearing debauch, and went back out into the rain. She skirted the wash, which had begun to flow now with the reanimated Scorpion River, and headed up through the grove of eucalyptus to the meadow beyond, where the sheep stood sodden and gray, like so many heaps of dirty rags scattered across the new grass as far as she could see. It was a scene out of some immemorial past and she couldn’t help thinking of the first naked primitives who ran down the first wild ram and killed and cooked and ate it and sat round with swollen bellies thinking how nice it would be to have something like that tethered to the nearest tree so you could have meat and offal and a good warm fleece anytime you wanted it. Here was the ur-industry, as old as the tribes themselves. And Cain slew Abel because Abel followed the herds and Cain put seeds in the ground and what kind of sacrifice to the greedy God above was a mound of peas and squash compared to the haunch of a freshly slaughtered lamb?
Anise’s tarp — fireman’s red, or red-orange, a color you didn’t find in nature, at least not on the West Coast — shone wetly on the far edge of the field. Rita could see her sprawled legs, her hunched shoulders, the black-and-white dog with his head in her lap, the book propped up against the dog’s back and her daughter doing what she did all on her own without hassle or reminder, studying, learning, making herself a better person. Anise had already advanced beyond anything she or Bax could help her with, aside from guitar lessons, and the correspondence course, with its weekly standards and monthly planner, couldn’t begin to keep up with her. She wasn’t yet fifteen and she was already doing work equivalent to what they’d expect of a college freshman, and all on her own. Rita was amazed anew each time she saw her bent to her work — the discipline and determination she showed, which was nothing at all like what she’d experienced herself, not with academics anyway. She’d been too edgy, too eager to throw it all over and steal away to the Village and haunt the cafés and clubs, and what had that led to? To nothing. To a false life and false hopes. Anise was different. Anise had a future. And the longer she stayed away from the trouble of the world, the better.
“Hey, Buttercup!” she heard herself call, rain on her hat like a spastic drumbeat, the ewes all around her licking their newborns, and here was Bumper, streaking through the grass to her even as her daughter lifted her head and gave her a faraway look.