It had taken her a moment, fumbling with the match and lantern, to understand why. “I don’t want you here,” she’d told him when he came to her at bedtime. He was hateful to her then, clumsy, shabby, the root and cause of all her troubles made flesh, his face hanging like a swollen pale fruit in the doorway. “Go sleep in the storage room,” she’d said, “go sleep in the bunkhouse. I don’t care. I don’t want you here. I’m weak. I’m in pain. I—” But he was already gone, the door pulling shut softly behind him.
That was over now, gone, done, past. She didn’t want to think of it or what it meant that he’d made his bed in the monk’s cell across from Ida’s room ever since and that she didn’t care a whit whether he came back to her bed or not, not today. Today the sun was shining, the floorboards were drying out, the lambs growing into their limbs and all the birds in the world singing in unison while the cake, Edith’s cake, sat cooling on the table. That was what mattered, that was all that mattered: the cake. And Edith. Edith’s birthday. She got up and busied herself around the kitchen, thinking of all the things that needed doing — sending Jimmie for abalone, cutting wildflowers for the bouquet, finishing up the trim on the new dress she meant to surprise Edith with — and she was just sitting down at the little table against the window there, stirring a bit of milk into the porridge Ida had made for breakfast, forcing herself to eat, when she happened to glance up and see Edith making her way across the yard.
And who was that with her? Jimmie. Jimmie trailing along behind her like a moonstruck calf, the big straw laundry basket clutched in both arms as if it were filled with rocks, and why wasn’t he at work? Why wasn’t he clearing the road or plowing or sowing the grain — hadn’t Will said they needed to get it in as soon as they had a break in the weather? Edith’s face was perfectly composed, though her hair was disordered beneath her hat and her skirts were muddy, as if she’d been tramping the hills again, and she was saying something over her shoulder to the boy. In the next moment they both pulled up short, right in the middle of the yard, no more than fifty feet from the house, and Jimmie set down the basket, which did seem to be filled with stones — or no, seashells. They’d been at the shore, that was what it was, and she was just trying to sort that out — the two of them, alone and unsupervised, Edith’s walks, her moods, the way the boy watched her at dinner as if her every word and gesture held some secret meaning, and what if it did, what if she’d been blind to what anyone could have seen as plain as day? — when Edith held out her hand and he went down on one knee in the mud to take hold of it. And then, without prompting, without taking his eyes from Edith’s, he brought her hand to his lips.
All her pleasure in the day dissolved in that instant and she couldn’t stop herself from rushing to the door and out into the festering wallow of the yard, her shoes muddied in an instant, her skirts blackened, all the blood left in her wasted body rising to her face and a strange yammering chorus of voices howling in her ears. Shock, that was what it was, ungovernable, unconscionable. She’d never… She couldn’t…
Jimmie sprang to his feet. Edith lifted her eyes, distant eyes, defiant, as if she hadn’t been caught out, as if she weren’t ashamed in the slightest. There were so many things wrong with that tableau Marantha couldn’t begin to list them. She tried to speak, tried to demand an explanation, but the words died in her throat.
The boy’s trousers, filthy as they were, showed a spreading wet stain in the left knee, where he’d gone down in the mud. He put on a look of innocence. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said, but he wouldn’t meet her eye.
Edith said nothing.
She wasn’t going to cough. She wasn’t going to have a spasm. She was going to control her breathing, control herself. A cloud drifted across the sun so that a running sheet of darkness fell over the yard and raced up the far hill. The turkeys set up a gabble from their pen. She heard the sound of the dog barking at something somewhere. Finally — she wasn’t going to cough, she wasn’t — her voice came back to her. “Edith, you get out of that now,” she said, and knew it was wrong, knew it was inadequate to what she was feeling and the tone she should have taken. Don’t make a scene, she told herself. Not in front of the help.
“We’re only playing.”
“Playing? He — I saw him.”
“He’s my slave.” Edith turned to the boy, who wouldn’t raise his eyes. “Isn’t that right, Caliban? Isn’t it?”
Miserably, his voice hoarse with hopelessness, resignation, lust, he said, “Yes.”
“I’ve had him fetching seashells.”
Marantha tried to lift her feet from the mire, tried to edge closer, furious now, but it was as if she were frozen in place. “You’re not to go unsupervised, unchaperoned, that is—”
“It’s only a game, Mother.” Edith looked to the boy now, to where he stood beside her in the mud, shrunken, slope-shouldered, his features pinched in concentration. “He’ll do anything I say. Isn’t that right, Caliban?”
“Yes.”
“Speak up. I can scarcely hear you.”
Louder now: “Yes.”
“And what’s my name?”
“Edith.”
Edith snaked her hand out and slapped him so quickly he didn’t have time to flinch. “What’s my name?”
“Miranda.”
“That’s better. Now pick up that basket, take it around the house and arrange the shells on the porch there — and make sure you put the prettiest ones in front.”
The boy bent to the basket without a word, lifted it — it was heavy, she could see that — and braced it on one hip. Then, the mud sucking at his boots, he struggled round the corner of the house and out of sight.
“You see, Mother?” A faint imperious smile, a cruel smile, a smile of superiority and willfulness. “He’ll do anything I say.”
* * *
That night, for the birthday dinner, Ida served an abalone chowder that was even better than the one she’d made on New Year’s, followed by a pair of stuffed and roasted chickens (a special treat, since the flock had been decimated by the foxes and, Will claimed, an eagle that had made off with one of their best layers right before his eyes) with a side dish of rice and beans and a puree made from the last of the turnips Charlie Curner had carried over the previous month. She herself lit the candles and brought out the cake. Edith, in the new green dress that just exactly caught the color of her eyes, leaned over the table to make her wish and blow out the candles and everyone applauded.
“A toast!” Will proposed. He was at the head of the table, dressed in his best shirt and jacket, his hair newly washed and combed and his mustache neatly trimmed for once, and he reached down under his chair and came up with a magnum of the Santa Cruz Island wine he was always singing the virtues of, as if they too could establish a winery just by snapping their fingers, as if it were just one more money-making venture the island would give up to them in good time, though to her mind, the wind — and here it was again, picking up, rattling the panes and keening under the eaves like a chorus of the drowned dead — would blow the whole business, vines, trellises and grapes, right on out to sea. Everyone watched him draw the cork in silence as if it were a rare operation and he a magician in cape and top hat and she couldn’t help notice Jimmie’s eyes wandering to Edith, but then how could he resist — how could any boy, deprived or not, unless he was blind? Edith had never looked more beautiful. Maybe, she was thinking — and here the cork eased from the bottle with an audible sigh — maybe there was something healthful about the outdoor life after all.