Will had been in the kitchen, out of earshot, and lucky for Adolph, but she hadn’t forgotten the incident — and neither had Edith. And since that morning, at her pointed request, the hands had been taking breakfast and luncheon in the kitchen or out in the bunkhouse, but Will — she’d never told him what the man had said, not in so many words, for fear of Will’s temper and what he might have done — still insisted on all of them taking dinner together.
And so here they were, cracking lobster and passing round the plate of potatoes like one big family, and when Ida came into the room with her own plate and took a seat beside Jimmie, it was Marantha who broke the silence. “Ida,” she said, and this had been prearranged between them, “aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Lord yes, ma’am,” Ida said, tapping her forehead in pantomime and jumping up as if the chair were a bed of hot coals. “How ever could I have forgotten?” They all watched her cross the room and head down the hall for the kitchen.
“What’s all this?” Will asked, looking up at her.
“Oh, nothing much,” Marantha said, trying to keep her expression even. “Just a treat, a little something extra — for Jimmie.” The boy’s eyes jumped to hers. “Because he was the one who did all the work and it’s only right—”
And here was Ida, hoisting the big platter over one shoulder like a waiter in the finest restaurant, only to set it down before Jimmie, still steaming and redolent of the sea.
“Go ahead,” Marantha said, and now it all came out, now she was laughing, now she was a girl again, as the boy, with a look of bewilderment, plucked one of the long pale wet strands of kelp up off the platter and held it out before him on the tines of his fork. “Go ahead — it’s the best part.”
* * *
When Charlie Curner did finally arrive from Santa Barbara — two days late — she was the first to spot the sail in the harbor. She’d been sitting at the window in the bedroom, working at her scrapbook, feeling faintly nauseated after the few bites of luncheon she’d forced herself to swallow (the last of Edith’s lamb, which Ida had stewed with carrots and potatoes till it had lost its consistency and melted away into the gravy, though Edith still wouldn’t touch it, subsisting exclusively these past days on eggs and porridge), and she’d glanced up from the nameless pink flower she was pressing flat between two sheets of paper, and there it was. She had to look twice to be sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her, and then she lifted Will’s binoculars down from the hook beside the window and focused in on the boat till it came clear and she could see that it was Charlie Curner standing at the helm and not some Chinese abalone fisherman or a poacher come to rob them of the odd sheep when their guard was down.
Her blood was racing. She stood abruptly from the chair, spilling the scrapbook to the floor, and then she was out the door and down the stairs crying out the news. They all dropped what they were doing — Ida emerging from the kitchen with her hands white with flour, Edith closing her novel on one finger and darting out the front door to call to the men, who were already laying down their tools — and it was as if they’d been marooned a year instead of just a week and a half. Edith ran on ahead, the afternoon glowing around her in the sun that climbed up out of the mist like a hot-air balloon, her arms pumping and the heels of her shoes shining with a thin skin of mud. Marantha was hurrying too, thinking of the letters everyone had promised — her mother back home in Boston, Carrie and the others in San Francisco — and of her plates and cutlery and whatever else Charlie Curner had managed to bring to brighten the dull round of their days. Not two weeks yet and it seemed as if there were nothing else, no other world, no place but this. Even then, even in her excitement, she knew she would never last here, no matter what she’d promised or how hard she tried.
She ran out of breath before she was halfway down, and so she stopped herself and found a rock to sit on while below her, in the bay that stretched away to the flat gray nullity of the ocean, Charlie Curner pulled at the oars of his skiff and Edith stood at the scalloped edge of the breakers, waving her handkerchief high over her head. She watched the rest of them emerge from the canyon in miniature, their heads bobbing and shoulders weaving, Will and Adolph bringing up the rear while Ida and Jimmie sprinted past them to splash into the surf with Edith and haul the bow of the skiff up out of the surge as if it weighed nothing at all. It was a moment of high excitement: What had he brought them? What news? Had he remembered the flour, the sugar, the pickles she’d asked for specifically on Edith’s account? The calico? The gingham?
She watched them unload the packages, wishing she’d thought to bring the binoculars with her — though she squinted her eyes, she really couldn’t make out much detail at this distance. Was that the crate she’d packed her dishes in? She couldn’t be sure. All she wanted — she’d give anything — was to be down there with them, to race Edith all the way, but her legs wouldn’t carry her and her breath wouldn’t come. She’d been a strong runner once, the fleetest girl in her school, but that was a long time ago. Before James, before Will. Before the first annunciatory cough.
Below her, she saw them gathered now around the gesticulating figure of Charlie Curner, the news of the world come to them in a pantomime she couldn’t decipher and words she couldn’t hear. She hoped he’d remembered to bring the newspapers. And magazines. She’d expressly told him… but then she caught herself. If he brought her china, that would be enough. And the letters. The letters above all else. She told herself not to expect too much, because Charlie Curner wasn’t their personal agent but only another hired hand, after all, and the process of getting and ordering — of itemizing, of caring—was far from perfect. After a while, long before Jimmie came dashing up the trail for the mule and sled and the others began carrying the crates and sacks and brown-paper parcels up from the beach, she turned and started back up the hill, head down, moving deliberately, counting each of her breaths as if they were the only form of news that mattered.
* * *
She was up all that night, feeling feverish but refusing to admit it, her cough shallow but steady, the pain beneath her breastbone a dull intermittent thing she drove down with the patent medicine that was forty percent alcohol and no fooling herself about that and cup after cup of hot tea leavened with milk. The parlor was hers alone, no sound but for the ticking of the cast-iron stove and the patter of the mice on their nightly foray into the cupboard — and how she wished she had Sampan with her now, not only to put the fear of retribution in them but to feel him warm in her lap and listen to the soft grateful catch and release of his purring as she stroked his ears and the downy chocolate fur of his face and tail and delicate curled-up paws. She’d read through all her letters twice — two from her mother, whose news of home seemed almost exclusively of weather reports and funerals (How I envy you, dear, out there in sunny California, because it’s been the bitterest winter here anybody can remember since your grandmother’s time), one from her cousin Martha in Brookline and one each from Carrie Abbott and Susannah Kent in San Francisco — and now she was busy answering them. Charlie Curner — and she didn’t at all like the kind of looks he’d kept giving Edith at dinner, a married man of forty, forty at least — was asleep in his berth on the schooner he’d named for his wife and would be setting sail after breakfast, and so she had no choice but to get the letters finished and addressed before he left. Either that or wait God knew how long.