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He was chewing. He brought the coffee to his lips. “If you think this is bad, you should have seen it in the war.”

Adolph’s eyes were dead, Jimmie looked as if he were asleep on his feet. “This isn’t the war,” she said.

He gulped down the coffee, turned the cup over to drain the dregs and handed it to her. Then he rocked back on his heels, the rain driving at his face, and grinned. “I admit it,” he said, “conditions could be better.” And he looked to Adolph and Jimmie and then back to her again. “But at least nobody’s shooting at us.”

The Cake

Ida was first (her birthday was the eighth of February and Edith’s the twelfth) and everyone felt they should make the day special for her, so even though it was raining again—still, forever, it seemed — and she’d barely slept and felt as if she’d been run through with a sword, Marantha was up early and shuffling round the kitchen, seeing to the flour, sugar, butter and eggs for the cake. Ida had already served breakfast, the men eating at the table in the parlor though she’d forbidden it, or thought she had, and now Ida was taking a mop to the floor there, everything smeared with mud and the very walls reeking of mold and rot and the sort of deep penetrating dampness no stove could ever hope to dry out. She’d given Ida a good dressing-down for serving the men in the house — and for the carpet too, because the carpet was hopeless after they’d got done with it. Ruined. Fit for the trash and nothing else.

“Don’t be such a scold,” Will had said, hateful, lecturing her, taking Ida’s side, his eyes like pinpricks and his nose stabbing at her out of the tanned hide of his face. “You can’t expect the hands to take their plates all the way out across the yard in this kind of weather. That’s just unreasonable. Worse: it’s inhumane.” She’d felt mean and pinched and so she threw it right back at him: “Inhumane? What do you call serving up that poor child’s pet for dinner? What about forcing your own wife to live like some gypsy in a caravan? You tell me that.”

For herself, she’d breakfasted in her room on tea and toast with a bit of jam while writing in her diary, as if there were anything to report but rain and tedium and more of the same, and when the men had gone out to their digging, she’d come down to the kitchen. The stove was hot still, at least there was that. The kettle boiled right away and she had herself a second cup of tea, with two full teaspoons of sugar stirred in (why not — it wasn’t as if she had to worry over her weight) and that gave her a lift. Of course, whatever she needed, whether it was a proper mixing bowl, a measuring cup or a whisk to beat the eggs, was either back in Santa Barbara or buried amongst the mouse pellets in some dismal back corner, but still she managed to find a suitable pan, grease it with the butter Ida had churned the day before yesterday and get things under way, using a teacup for measuring and one of the clay crocks in lieu of a bowl.

She’d creamed a cup of butter and was using a soupspoon to fold in a cup and two-thirds of sugar, as best she could measure, when Ida, mop and bucket in hand, pushed her way through the door. “Good morning, ma’am,” the girl sang out, eyeing the pan as she crossed to the far corner to lean the mop against the wall there. The rain slackened momentarily and then started in again with a heavy thump, as if a tree had fallen against the roof, but that was impossible, the Spaniards having taken the last tree down for lumber a hundred years ago and the sheep making sure in the interval that anything taller than six inches was chewed right on down to the dirt. Or mud. In the next moment, Ida had the back door open on the roar of it and on the stomach-wrenching reek of the flooded W.C., which now stood just two hundred yards from the house, and here was the dog, soaked to the skin and trying to dodge past her even as she flung the bucket of dirty water out into the yard and slammed the door shut on it.

Marantha was at the counter — a whitewashed plank projecting from the wall and propped up on two sticks of wood indifferently nailed to the floor — and she barely turned her head. The eggs were next — eggs she’d collected herself at first light, bent over in Will’s shroud-like mackintosh while the rain drummed at her back and the hens peered miserably at her from beneath the shed and the steps of the bunkhouse. She cracked three of them and carefully worked each into the mixture before adding the first cup of flour, feeling good, feeling competent and well, feeling useful, and she was so caught up in the process she entirely forgot about Ida, or that this was supposed to be a surprise.

“What are you doing, making an omelet?” Ida’s voice seemed to come at her out of the ether, and when she jerked her head round in surprise, Ida was right there, not a foot away, peering over her shoulder. “Or is it bread?”

“No,” she breathed, trying to mask what she was doing, “no, it’s not bread. I — everything’s fine. Just fine.” She gave it a moment, and then, as casually as she could, she cracked the final two eggs and beat them into the mixture while adding the second cup of flour, a trickle at a time.

“I wouldn’t want to speak where I’m not wanted, but isn’t that too many eggs?”

She didn’t know what to say. The kitchen felt very close suddenly. She could hear the dog whining at the door, and that was vaguely irritating because the animal was not allowed in the house and should have known better — let him go sprawl in the bunkhouse with Adolph and Jimmie. A moment drifted past. Ida hadn’t moved.

“You know, ma’am, I’d be more than willing to help if you like,” Ida said, and she was right there still, right behind her. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the parlor where you can rest by the stove while I finish up here?”

She could feel the strength radiating down from her shoulder to her forearm and wrist, the batter folding and folding again till she’d worked it smooth. Pound cake, the simplest thing in the world. She was working from memory, from her mother’s recipe, and her mother’s cakes had always been flawless, better than the baker’s, better than anything her aunts or grandmother or anybody in the neighborhood could ever hope to compete with. She had a vivid image of a morning long ago, snow cresting on the woodshed, a tray of gingerbread cookies cooling on the counter while the sweet wafting aroma of the cake her mother had just taken from the oven filled the house and they sat at the window over cups of chocolate and watched the snowstorm transfigure the world. “What ever became of the vanilla extract?” she asked, as if it were an idle question, and she wasn’t going to turn round, wasn’t going to give up the pretense. “I hope we remembered it. With the kitchen things, I mean.”

“You’re baking a cake.” Ida’s voice had gone soft.

“That’s right, yes.” She let the affirmation hang in the air between them a moment, her shoulders busy, the spoon clacking in the depths of the bowl, and then she couldn’t help but turn. Her smile — it was automatic, composed in equal parts of sympathy and embarrassment — wavered when she saw the look on the girl’s face. “We were hoping to surprise you.”

“You don’t have to go out of your way for me, ma’am,” Ida murmured, dropping her arms and folding her hands in her apron as if she meant to hide them. Marantha took her in at a glance: the men’s gum boots, the neat mauve dress with its white lace collar, the hair so woolly it defied the brush. Her eyes were wet. Her teeth worked at her lower lip. “Because I don’t usually — that is, we don’t… not in my family—”

“Nonsense,” she said, thinking of the Irish back at home in Boston, the eternal laundry, the ragged filthy children, the drunks and beggars. She set down the spoon and reached out her hand to take hold of Ida’s. “Happy birthday,” she said, running a thumb gently over the girl’s palm. And the valedictory words were on her lips—May you have many more—when the cough surprised her and she had to turn away, had to hurry across the room, bent double, a handkerchief pressed to her face, to find the stool in the corner and sit there till she could breathe again.