The idea lifted her for just an instant — why shouldn’t she go out on deck and take in the sights? She wasn’t dead yet, was she? — but when she got to her feet, the ship lurched and she sat heavily again.
Ida’s face went dark. She seemed to notice the bucket then and the way Marantha was holding herself. “Are you all right, ma’am? Can I get you a blanket?”
“No,” she heard herself say, “I’m fine.”
“What about the bucket — could I empty the bucket for you? So it — so you don’t have to—?”
“Yes, that would be nice.” She felt her insides clench at the thought of it, of what was in the bucket and what Ida would have to do with it out there in the wind with the waves careening away from the hull and the bow pitching and pitching again. “But how’s Edith managing?”
“If you can believe it, she’s at the wheel right this minute, with your husband — Captain Waters, I mean — and the man who runs the ship, Captain Curner. He’s letting us take turns, anybody who wants. Me too. That was me at the helm not five minutes ago.” She let out a little laugh. “Could you tell the difference?”
And now suddenly Marantha felt her mood lift — Ida could always do that for her, every minute of her twenty-two years on this earth a rare adventure — and she found herself smiling. “I could. I knew it was a woman’s touch — it was so much smoother.” They both looked at the bucket then. “And that,” she said, pointing, “that came up when the men were at the wheel, no question about it.”
“But you know, it’s not half as rough as it can be out here, or as it normally is this time of year, or so Captain Waters says.”
“So it could be worse.”
“It could.”
“You’re not affected?”
“No,” Ida said, spinning herself round in a mock pirouette, “not at all. Captain Waters says I’ve got my sea legs. And Edith, Edith too — she has them. Sea legs. That means you—”
“Yes, I know.” She paused, looking round her at the scatter of bags and provisions, the few sticks of furniture Will had allowed her because it just wasn’t practical to ship all that furniture across until they had a chance to gauge how she was acclimating. “But can you believe it’s the new year already?”
“I can.”
The boat fell into a trough, then climbed back again. She folded her arms across her chest, trying to put pressure there, to hold everything in, because she could feel the next cough coming, and the next cough would bring on another spasm, she was sure of it. “It all seems to go by so quickly,” she said, and she wasn’t really talking to Ida anymore.
* * *
She was out on deck when the island hove into view (hove: that was the term, wasn’t it? From heave, because everything on a ship was constantly heaving, including your stomach), and she saw it as a tan lump marbled with bands of the purest white, as if it were a well-aged cut of beef laid out on the broad blue plate of the ocean for her and nobody else. But it wasn’t beef they would be eating in the days and weeks and months to come, it was mutton — and turkey from the flock the previous tenant had introduced. And fish, she supposed, because wasn’t the ocean here abounding in all species and varieties of fish? But then she’d never developed much of a taste for fish — aside from lobster, that is, which wasn’t really a fish, was it? — and she couldn’t think of a single way to serve it but baked in a dish till it was dry and tasteless.
There was a wind in her face, a cold wind freighted with pellets of cold salt spray, canvas flapping, ropes singing, wind, but it felt good, felt pure, and the tightness in her chest began to give way. By the time the boat came to anchor in the bay below the sole house on the island, the house that was theirs now, along with everything else within her purview — the rocks and gulls, the sand dunes careening down the slopes, the sheep that were like scraps of cloud scattered randomly across the distant green hillsides — she was so excited she was like a child herself, like Edith, who hadn’t spent more than twenty minutes belowdecks the whole way out. Will had warned her that the house was nothing special, a wood-frame sheepman’s place, built seventeen years earlier by their new partner in the Pacific Wool Growing Company, Mr. Mills, but that didn’t stop her from picturing it in her mind’s eye through every day of the past two months. What would it be like? The rooms — how were the rooms arranged? And the views? Would Edith have a room of her own — or would she have to share with Ida? And what of the hired man, Adolph Bierson, whose face she hadn’t liked from the minute she laid eyes on him at first light that morning? And Jimmie, the boy who’d been out here looking after things these past months — where did he sleep?
The boat swung round on its anchor so that the island was behind her and she was gazing back the way they’d come, beyond the mouth of the harbor and across the iron-clad waves to the mainland that was visible now only as a distant smudge on the horizon. Then they were lowering the skiff, Will scampering round the deck like a man half-fifty who hadn’t taken a minié ball in the soft flesh just above his left hip at Chancellorsville, and yes, she, Edith and Ida were to go first, along with a jumble of sacks and boxes, with Adolph at the oars and Jimmie to meet them on the beach with one of the mules and the sled to bring them up the long hill to the house. And she shouldn’t worry, Will insisted, his big sinewy hands steadying hers as he helped her down the rope ladder to the boat with his eyes on fire and the smell of his breath sharp with the aftertaste of his own excitement, because today was a holiday and they were going to have the remainder of the afternoon to themselves. “I’m not worried, Will,” she said in the instant before she started down the ladder, “not when I’m in your hands,” but with the way the wind was blowing she couldn’t be sure he’d heard her.
The House
Getting the boat to shore without overturning it in the surf was no small thing, but Adolph, grim as a soldier under fire and with the long muscles of his arms straining beneath the fabric of his jacket, managed it. For a long while they’d simply sat there, just outside the line of breakers, and she’d begun to grow impatient — and the girls had too — because here was the beach laid out before them and there the path up to the house, and what was he doing, this clod, this Adolph, when they were all so eager to set foot on terra firma and see what the house had to offer? Finally, though, she realized what it was — he was timing the surf, looking for an opening, the interval between a set of waves that would allow them to shoot in atop the previous one before the next came to smash them against the shore. She counted wave after wave, the seabirds screeching and the boat lurching beneath her, and then suddenly Adolph was at it, rowing furiously, the oarlocks protesting and the spray flying in their faces, and in the next moment they were ashore and leaping from the boat to tug at the painter and pull it high up the beach, and never mind their shoes or skirts or the way the wind beat the brims of their hats round their faces.
To the girls, it was a lark, both of them wet to the knees and laughing in great wild hoots even as she herself managed to save her boots, skipping on ahead of the sheet of white foam that shot up behind her and fanned out over the beach as far as she could see, though the hem of her dress was dark with wet and sprinkled with the pale flecks of sand already clinging there. She was breathing hard from the exertion, but deeply, and without restraint. If she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t hemorrhaged just last month, she might have thought there was nothing wrong at all.