Ida paused a moment — she was dredging chicken parts in flour while the oil snapped in the pan before her — and gazed over her shoulder at the darkened window as if she could see all the way across the channel to the coast beyond. “Or the sweetshop,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be the thing?”
And then the meal was served, chicken fricassee, fried potatoes, beans in tomato sauce and cornbread. Will said grace and the platter of cornbread was making its way round the table when the background palaver of the wind fell away for an instant and a thin plaintive cry inserted itself into the silence. At first she didn’t know what to make of it — was it a bird brought down in the wind? The mice? A fox? Or was it the dog, whining at the door of the bunkhouse? Will didn’t seem to have heard. He was going on about the schedule for the coming weeks, how once they’d plowed the fields and got the seed in they would turn their efforts to converting the path into a legitimate road so as to facilitate bringing supplies up from the harbor, the same theme he’d been stuck on through the course of every meal thus far. She was about to ask if anyone had heard anything, when Jimmie spoke up.
“That’ll be your lamb,” he said, flicking his eyes round the table.
Will looked up in irritation. “That is,” he went on, and he was addressing Adolph now, Adolph alone, “if Curner ever gets back here with the things we need. And that’s another thing — he might be a good man at sea, Curner, but he can’t begin to make the grade when it comes to giving attention to what people order in plain English or even reading a simple itemized list, if you want to know the truth.”
The lamb. It was out there in the dark and if Edith had forgotten about it so had she. She pictured it huddled against the fence under the vault of bleak glittering stars, the wind probing, hunger settling in like a disease.
“The thing of it is”—Jimmie snatched a quick glance at Edith—“a newborn lamb has no more protection against the cold than a naked baby.”
Edith set down her fork and looked wildly round her. “We can’t leave him out there — he’ll die, he will.”
No one said a word. The windows were black, the stove hissed and creaked with the fire in its belly, Ida glided in from the kitchen with the coffee pot in one hand and a second platter of bread in the other. “Mother?” Edith was appealing to her, her eyes stricken and her inflection rising. Their first crisis, she was thinking, the first sour note to spoil Will’s idyll. And Edith would have her way. Edith always had her way.
But not yet. Let her learn to wait. Let her learn that her mother wouldn’t always give in, or at least not without a struggle. She took a sip of water — mineral-heavy and sulfurous — patted her lips with her napkin, took up her fork. Though the chicken was excellent, really first-rate, she found she didn’t have much appetite. She’d meant to force herself to eat — the sight of herself in the mirror had frightened her more than anything any doctor could have told her — but tonight she just didn’t feel equal to it.
“Mother?” Edith repeated.
She didn’t want to play peacemaker, didn’t want to quarrel, but she could see Will was spoiling for a fight and she had no choice. “Couldn’t we put it in the barn — to get it out of the wind?” she offered. “And — oh, I don’t know, find it some old blankets or straw or something? How difficult would that be?” She looked past Will to where Jimmie sat beside Adolph at the end of the table, forking up beans as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.
The boy just shook his head. He was the authority here — he knew the flock like no one else. “No, ma’am,” he said, his eyes on his plate, “there’s no amount of blankets that’ll keep that animal alive through a night like this.” He gave her a tentative smile, clearly pleased with the attention. “You hear that wind?” he said. And she did, they all did, the noise of it overwhelming the ticking of the stove, their collective breathing, the rattle of utensils against porcelain. “There’s a gale coming,” Jimmie said, dropping his eyes to the plate again and shoveling up a quick mouthful of beans. “And this,” he said, chewing, “is just the announcement of it.”
That was enough for Edith. Without asking permission to get up from the table, she rose from her chair, darted across the room, out the door and into the night. A moment later the door was flung back again, the salt tang of the ocean rushing in on the wind, and here was Edith, her mouth set, leading the lamb into the room. Will let out a low curse, a crude epithet he must have picked up in the Army, and this wasn’t the first time Marantha had heard it, but it humiliated her now, here in company, angered her, and she called out his name sharply, even as Edith knotted the animal’s tether round the legs of the stove and slid back into her seat at the table without a word. The hired men never lifted their heads. Will fumed, but held his tongue. And the lamb, as if wiser than she would have credited, didn’t make a peep. Or bleat, that is.
There was a long moment of silence, in which the wind once again became the dominant feature, and then she looked to Edith and said one thing only: “Do you mean to tell me, young lady, that you’re not even going to wash your hands?”
* * *
The wind kept up all night, just as the boy had said it would. It was furious, unrelenting. She’d never experienced anything like it, not even the hurricane that had come raging up the eastern seaboard to uproot the big weeping willow in the front yard of the house she’d grown up in. Every time she thought the wind was dying, it seemed to come back all the more furiously, rattling the windowpanes and rushing under the eaves in a sudden violent blast. Will had warned her about the weather here — San Miguel was the northernmost link in the chain that made up the Channel Islands, the first landfall for the storms sweeping down the coast — but the warning had been buried so deeply beneath layers of praise for the pastures and the views and the romance of the place (and the air, never forget the air) she’d barely heeded it.
Until now. Now, as she lay there in the dark, the thing in her chest quiet for once, she was afraid. The wind kept beating, keening, unholy, implacable, and it was as if it were aimed at her and her alone. As if it had come for her. Come to blow her away across the waters and force her down beneath the waves, down and down and down to the other place, darkness eternal. The roof heaved, the house rocked and groaned beneath the joists. Everything seemed to compress, as if waiting to blow like the cork from a bottle. She wanted to waken Will, wanted to cling to him and feed off the low consoling murmur of his voice, but she didn’t because she knew he needed his rest — now more than ever — and there was nothing he could have done in any case, nothing anyone could do except God, and God had deserted her. Will was right there beside her, but she’d never felt more alone. She couldn’t sleep. She’d never sleep again. And though she needed to get up and relieve herself she was afraid to move, as if even the slightest perturbation would upset the balance and bring the whole ramshackle structure crashing down around her.
Finally, the pressure on her bladder became too much to bear and she pushed back the blankets and got out of bed, the floorboards cold beneath her feet and the air a shock. The darkness was absolute and she had to feel her way, expecting at any moment to trip over the chair or the steamer trunk or pitch headlong into a yawning black pit. She wasn’t one to complain — all she wanted was what was best for Will and Edith — but wasn’t it supposed to be warm here, wasn’t that how it had been advertised? Or warmer, at any rate? That was what she was thinking, muttering to herself, and then her outstretched fingers came in contact with the wall and the wall led to the corner, but she couldn’t find the pot because it was the wrong corner, and by the time she got done fumbling blindly around and understood her mistake the pain in her abdomen was so insistent she was afraid she was going to wet herself, wet right through her nightgown like an incontinent child, and how would she explain the stains on the floor or the reek of the soiled garment? Frantic now, she moved to her right, and here was the door and its cold iron handle and beside it a new wall altogether. She worked her way along this wall, step by step, her feet frozen, the wind screaming and screaming again, and then her shin struck something solid and the pot clattered in protest.