She tried to be quick about it, lifting the lid and positioning herself as best she could in the darkness, but then, perversely, her flow wouldn’t come. She was thinking of the W.C. and how astonished she’d been to learn that it was a full three miles and more from the house (to keep the sewage downhill from the spring, Will had claimed, though he’d clearly been ashamed of himself for having overlooked the matter now that there were women in the house, and he’d promised to move it closer, much closer, as soon as he was able) and how utterly barbaric that was, when finally it came in a sudden hot rush and she cleaned herself quickly and climbed back into bed.
In the morning, it was still blowing. Outside — and she wouldn’t realize this till later — the sand was mounding its drifts against anything that stood erect in the yard, the walls of the house and outbuildings, the fences, even the flagpole, so that the men would have to spend the whole morning shoveling it away. Will was asleep still, breathing deeply. There was no other sound but for the wind. After a while she eased herself out of bed, put on her slippers and wrapper and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea to soothe her nerves. She wasn’t thinking of Ida sleeping behind the flimsy door of the windowless room at the bottom of the stairs or of the kitchen stove that had gone cold in the night or the wood to stoke it — and she wasn’t thinking of the other stove, the one in the main room behind her or of the lamb tethered to its legs. No, she was thinking of the wind and how it was a wonder it hadn’t shattered the panes of the windows and crushed the walls like paper, thinking how cold the house was, how alien, and wondering for the hundredth time in the past three days just what she’d gotten herself into.
It wasn’t till she’d lit the kitchen stove, filled the kettle with water and set it there on the stovetop to boil that she turned and came up the hall to the main room with the notion of stoking the fire there too. Only then did she think of the lamb. And she thought of it only because it was lying there stiff on the floor, the cord twisted round its throat where it had fought against it in the dark — twisted, and twisted again.
Jimmie
By the end of the first week she’d begun to feel stronger, so that she was able, at least for a few hours each day, to oversee the household and even take on some of the cooking herself — by way of a change and to free Ida for other tasks, not the least of which was to scour some of the sheepmen’s dirt out of the place. The floors were the most objectionable, pocked as they were with the impress of a generation of shearers’ boot heels and stained with grease and lanolin and worse. It went without saying that the kitchen was filthy, but she put Ida and Edith to work on it and before long it was almost tolerable, though it would never be what anyone, even a blind man, would call clean, not unless the walls and floor and fly-spotted rafters were torn out and set afire and the carpenters came in and started all over again. For the most part, she left dinner to Ida — she was to avoid all exertion if she had any hope of recovery, or so the doctors claimed, and by evening she was always at her lowest ebb — but when Jimmie and Adolph came up to the house one morning with a dozen lobsters from the pots they’d put out, she took it on herself, as a daughter of New England, to show them how they should be prepared.
Will had finished the shed and repaired some of the fences, and now he had the men working on the preliminaries of converting the path down to the harbor into a serviceable road. The day was overcast and cold, though the air, for once, was still. After examining each of the lobsters carefully to be sure they were sound, she went out the front door and across the yard to where the men were working. Will was in his shirtsleeves, slinging a pick. Adolph was filling the wheelbarrow with dirt and Jimmie was standing there with his hands in his pockets, waiting to dump it over the side and down into the canyon. “Jimmie,” she called, “would you come here a minute? I have something I’d like for you to do.”
She watched him exchange a look with her husband.
“I’ll just need him for a bit,” she said, though it wasn’t the truth.
Will set down the pick and took a minute to wipe his face with his handkerchief. She could see that he wasn’t happy about it, but he nodded to Jimmie and Jimmie crossed the yard to her.
“I want you to go down to the shore and bring me back some seaweed.”
He tugged at his cap, brushed the hair out of his eyes and shot a single look over his shoulder in Will’s direction, but Will had already turned back to his work. “Seaweed?” he echoed.
“You’ll need the mule.”
It took him the better part of an hour and when he returned he had enough kelp with him to bury the sled twice over. She was at the window with her sewing when he came up the road and she saw that Will and Adolph said something to him as he led the mule on past them, and then she was out in the yard and waving him around back of the house where she’d selected the spot for the pit in a stretch of sandy soil. “I want you to dig here,” she said.
“Dig, ma’am?”
“A firepit,” she said, and he gave her a blank look. “For the lobsters?”
He repeated her words, very slowly, and she could see that he thought she’d gone mad — or no, he was just confirming the conclusion he’d reached on that first day when he’d hauled her up the hill behind the mule.
She couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t you worry,” she said, “I know what I’m doing. Now, I’m going to want it roughly here”—she bent to project an imaginary line with the tip of her forefinger—“and it should be, oh, maybe three feet deep and at least that many long. Once it’s done, I’m going to want you to fill it with wood and build the biggest fire you can, understood?”
He simply nodded and slouched off to get the shovel, and if Will was going to complain — and she knew he would, taking the boy off the job like that — well, she had no doubt the result would be worth it.
She had Ida serve the lobsters with the last of the butter they’d brought over from the mainland and there were roasted potatoes to go with them. Edith lit a candle. Ida brought out a pot of beans and a plate of fried dough. Will said grace, a few murmured words, and then the two knives went round as everyone pried at the shells of the lobsters to get at the sweet white meat that had cost them nothing but effort, meat as free as the air and the salt seawater that surrounded them. “Good, isn’t it?” she said, trying a bite of it herself, though these weren’t the lobsters she knew because they lacked claws and the claws held some of the most succulent morsels, but then none of them would have known that but Will, and Will just said, “Yes, delicious.”
There was a silence, the only sounds the cracking of the shells and the play of their utensils. Edith was struggling to crack hers with a fork only, as Adolph had one of the knives and Will the other, and she wasn’t speaking to either of them because of the way they’d reacted to the death of her lamb. Will had been especially harsh. “You see what comes of your willfulness,” he said, as if Edith hadn’t been distraught already, blaming herself over and over. He’d looked down at it, at the staring eyes and the ragged red line at its throat where the cord had dug in, its legs splayed and tongue like some black wedge of meat it had tried to swallow. “Take that thing out in the yard where it belongs,” he said, or no, he was practically snarling, and then he turned his back on her and stamped down the hall to the kitchen. And Adolph, as if it were any of his business, had not only criticized her at breakfast that morning so that she left the table in tears, he’d insisted on dressing the carcass for its meat and then tacking the hide out on the wall of the shed to dry in the wind. “And why?” Marantha had demanded. “Why would you want to do that?” He’d looked up at her insolently, chewing around the heel of bread he’d just shoved into his mouth, a hired hand who should have been taking his meals out of doors — and would have, but for Will’s democratic feelings. “For gloves,” he said. “Kid gloves. The softest thing in this world.” He’d hesitated, looking her dead in the eye across the expanse of the table. “But for one other thing I can think of.”