In the next moment she was easing down beside her under the tarp and offering the egg sandwich, which Anise, setting aside the book, ignored in favor of the hot chocolate. There was a wet thrashing of paws and tail and then the dog was crowding in beside them, sniffing at the warm ripples of the foil. “You better eat that before it gets cold,” she said.
“What is it? Not lamb?”
“Fried egg. With a ton of ketchup.”
She watched her daughter unscrew the cap of the thermos and pour out a cup of chocolate, drop by drop, as if it were wine of rare vintage. And now she pushed the sandwich on her again and Anise took it and laid it in her lap, where it balanced precariously between the dog’s probing wet nose and the damp sleeping bag she was perched on. Anise was tall, like Toby — already five-eight — and as she shifted position, she folded her legs under her, long legs, legs she could grow into, and rescued the sandwich at the last minute, as if it were an afterthought. Sipping, her eyes dropping to the glossy cover of the book (Studies in the American Story, From Hawthorne to Hemingway, $25.95, an amount they’d had to scrape to come up with), she murmured, “I really like this one story in my book? It’s called ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener.’ You ever read it?”
It sounded familiar, but if she had read it, it would have been back in high school. “Maybe,” she said. “But a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It doesn’t have sheep in it, does it?”
“Please.” Anise froze up, irritated suddenly, and gave her a hard look. She could see her daughter was in a mood, ready to open up on her about how bored she was and how much she hated sheep and sheep ranches and islands, and if you came right down to it, life, life itself. She watched that skein of complication run through her eyes in a cold accusatory flash, but then Anise just shrugged and let it go. “I mean, I don’t know if you could care, but it’s about an office and a scrivener — he copies things by hand, I guess, because they didn’t have Xerox machines or anything like that back then. And whenever the boss asks him to do something he says, ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”
“Uh-oh, am I in trouble here?”
Anise gave her a bitter smile, and yet her eyes lit with something like pleasure over the exchange. She needed to talk, to respond to someone in the flesh about what she was feeling, thinking, reading, and not the faceless instructor who graded her papers in a tight rigid hand and in lettering so minuscule he might have been copying out the warning label on a bottle of prescription pills.
Keep it light, she told herself. Go easy.
“Because if I ask you if you want to sit out here in the rain by yourself for a few more minutes while I go back in to take the bread out of the oven, you’re going to say — what was it?”
“ ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”
She wanted to help ease the burden — and she tried as best she could, tried to anticipate, cajole, keep things moving forward — but she was stretched to the limit through every minute of every day and right now the lambs needed her more than her daughter did. And there was bread in the oven and stew on the stove and Bax up in bed with his foul mouth and a temper like a nest of hornets somebody’s just whacked with a stick. She didn’t want to argue. She didn’t want to nag. But she couldn’t help herself. “How about eating that egg sandwich before it goes cold?”
“I would prefer. . oh, shit. To go to the mall, to see somebody, anybody, except you and Bax and a bunch of stupid sheep. Like all my life. Like every day. I might as well be in prison.”
And here came the guilt. The weight of it that was like a physical thing because she was guilty, guilty of everything Anise could throw at her and more. She shut her eyes to drive it away, but it did no good. She saw Anise as a little girl, the look on her face when she told her she was pulling her out of class three weeks before the close of the school year and taking her out to an island nobody had ever heard of. Fifth grade. Three weeks from the end. What about all my friends? What about summer vacation? We’ll have our vacation on the island, she’d told her. You’ll love it. Beaches — there’s a beach right there, your own private beach right in front of Scorpion Ranch. I’m not going. And then she’d repeated herself—You’ll love it—chanting it so many times it became a litany, and Anise, stubborn, unconvinced, adamant, throwing it back at her: I will not love it, I’ll hate it. And I don’t want to go to any scorpion place, I hate scorpions. Don’t you? She’d wondered about that herself, but as it turned out there were no scorpions, or only the smallest little dull brown things you sometimes saw clinging to the underside of one of the logs in the woodpile, and she’d promised her — promised her and believed it herself — that it would only be for the summer. Yes, sure, and now Anise wouldn’t know the inside of her old school — of any school — if it opened up right here in the pasture in front of her.
“You see any problems out there this morning?” she said, keeping her voice flat. She was staring off across the meadow now, and there were lambs everywhere, bright as cotton wool, and the ewes licking, licking.
“Uh-uh.” And then, reluctantly, because they were both on the same page again: “Twins right over there, see — like right by that red rock. There? See?”
“Did she—?”
“Yes, she licked them both.”
“And did you—?” With twins, it was a good idea to bind them together so the stronger, dominant one, would pull the other along to the teat.
“I’m reading, okay? I have an assignment due. Not that you would care.”
“Okay, babe, okay,” she said. “There’s plenty of time. We just don’t want them to get separated, is all.”
As if on cue, a raven began to croak from the screen of trees behind them, and then another joined in. A dark scribble of them marred the clouds overhead and there was a black patch on the ground a hundred yards away where two of them were trying to lure a ewe away from her lamb, but the ewe was having no part of it. “Keep your eye on that, hon,” she said, pushing herself up. “And keep Bumper with you — we don’t want him out there herding anybody, not this morning. I’ll be back”—she twisted her wrist for a look at her watch—“in like twenty minutes. And then I’m going to walk the perimeter here all day, right till dark, and you can go back to your room and your books, anything you want. Okay?”
Her daughter’s eyes, illuminated by the sheen of the rain, were as changeable as well water, the palest finest transparent gray shading to blue, not Toby’s eyes and not hers either. She was trying to picture her own mother, her mother’s eyes, but as hard as she tried to superimpose that vision on Anise, she couldn’t quite manage it. Folding her arms round her knees and leaning forward, she watched as her daughter unwrapped a corner of the sandwich and lifted it to her mouth for an exploratory sniff. “Okay?” she repeated.
“Yes, already, yes!! I mean, what do you want me to say? What do you think, I’m like three years old? I’m here, okay? And if any of those frickin’ birds even thinks about it I’m going to be on him like glue.”
Frickin’. On him like glue. She heard Bax in the mix and maybe Arturo, the youngest of the hands, thirty-one and retired from rodeoing with a right leg that looked as if it had come out of a laundry wringer. She heard it and felt the guilt all over again, as if someone had switched on a circuit inside her — Anise needed to be with kids her own age, her peer group, kids she could go to the movies with and window-shopping in the mall and all the rest of it. Girlfriends. Maybe even a boyfriend. Or somebody to moon over anyway. She pushed herself up and ducked back out into the rain, which seemed to be slackening a bit. Or was it her imagination?