Will made his way around the table, filling each of the glasses in succession, starting with her own, then Ida’s, Adolph’s and even Jimmie’s—Jimmie’s—and finally stopping at Edith’s place. She wanted to say something, wanted to interfere — it wasn’t right that a girl of Edith’s age should take intoxicating beverages — but Will was already pouring. Edith had been animated all night, in high spirits, but she went silent now. Will poured the glass full, then poured for himself and lifted his glass high. “To the prettiest girl on this or any other island in the world! Or no,” he said, correcting himself, “to the prettiest young lady!”
Marantha watched her daughter bring the glass to her lips, watched her sip and make a face before trying it again, emboldened, and taking a long greedy swallow. “You’re not to go off with that boy alone,” she’d lectured her the moment Jimmie had vanished round the corner of the house that morning. “It’s not proper.” Her heart had been beating wildly. The sun, so welcome a moment ago, hit her like a hammer. “Do you really imagine I have any interest in him?” Edith said, looking her straight in the eye. “He’s a boy, a child, a weakling. And he’s ignorant, as stupid as the stupidest sheep in the flock. Stupider.” And what had she felt? Relief, certainly. But she had to stop herself from making a lesson out of this too, from reminding her daughter that there was no need to be cruel, that every person, no matter his station, deserved to be treated with dignity and respect, that — but what was the use? Edith was growing away from her, growing up, and here she was drinking the wine, drinking it greedily, and already holding out her glass for more. Which Will poured. And still her mother said nothing.
Edith led off the singing with “Blue-Tail Fly” and then Will sang his favorite, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in his strong cascading baritone, and everyone joined in. Ida got up to sing “The Rose of Tralee” and when they all applauded — was she tipsy? — she sang it through again. Jimmie was next. He rose to sing “Men of Harlech” in a voice so reduced you had to strain to make out the lyrics (“Men of Harlech, stop your dreaming / Can’t you see their spear points gleaming?”), after which Edith excused herself and came back a moment later in a new costume altogether, in a loose flowing skirt without her corsets, and before Marantha could object, Edith announced that she was going to perform one of the dances she’d learned at school that went to the tune of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
“Since we don’t seem to have a piano”—Edith was pushing back the chairs now and arranging the lamps for dramatic effect on the shelf behind her—“or anyone to play accompaniment even if we did have, I’m going to hum the melody myself.” She paused to glance round the room. “Unless we can borrow a piano from one of the neighbors. And a pianist.”
They were all watching her intently — Adolph, unfathomable Adolph, with his heavy brow and hooded eyes; Jimmie, with a faint fading smile pressed to his lips; Will, grinning proudly; Ida, sloppy suddenly, slouching, her mouth hanging open. Edith made as if to look out the window, the hem of the skirt rising daintily round her ankles as she bent forward and put a hand up to shade her eyes. “Do you think there are any wandering pianists out there?” She held the moment, bathing in the attention, and then looked directly at her. “Could you find one for me, Mother?”
Will let out a laugh and said to no one in particular, “Charming girl, isn’t she?”
And then the dance began, shakily at first, Edith clearly having trouble coordinating her movements to the tune she had to produce herself, but she got stronger as she went on, so that even after Ida rose discreetly and vanished into the kitchen and the men passed round the bottle till there was nothing left, even after her voice faded away and the only sounds in the room were the rhythmic tapping of her feet and the wind in the eaves, she kept moving across the floor in a slow graceful arc, her limbs swaying to the music only she could hear.
The Eagle
All the talk was of the shearers — the shearers were coming, the shearers — until she began to think they were some messianic tribe bent on redeeming them all. She pictured men in silken beards and turbans, an oriental squint to their eyes and their shoes turned up at the toes, bearing gifts of spices and speaking in a strange tongue, but Will was having none of it. Will was in a state. He couldn’t sit still, couldn’t rest, working furiously at the road, scanning the horizon every morning for the telltale sail in the harbor, jumping up from the card table in the evening to pace back and forth until she thought the floorboards would wear through under his weight, and all the while lecturing Edith and Ida — and her too — about the state of the house. It had to be homelier, cleaner, more orderly — and why? Because it wasn’t only the shearers who were coming, but Mills too. And not simply Mills, who was getting out, but the new man who was to buy in as half-partner, and it was their duty to show the place at its best. What would Mills think if he saw the state of the house as it was right this minute? Or the new man. Think of him. The real shame of it — and Will wouldn’t leave it alone — was that they didn’t have the wherewithal to buy out Mills themselves and set up as sole owners and proprietors and let the rest of the world go to hell.
“Imagine it, Minnie,” he said. “Just imagine it. Our own island — our own country — and nobody to answer to. We could pull up the drawbridges and man the battlements. I could be king. And you — you, Minnie — you could be queen.”
What could she say? She tried to be accommodating, tried to soothe him, tried even to scrub the place into submission, but the idea was a living death to her — the world was in San Francisco, in Boston, in Santa Barbara, not here. Queen? Queen of what? The sheep?
He put an arm round her waist, drew her to him and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “It’s what I’ve always dreamed of,” he murmured.
Then one night, after dinner, as she was going down the hall to the kitchen with the notion of brewing a pot of tea, she found him in his room — the former storeroom — changing into his work clothes. “You’re not going back out there, are you?” she’d asked, incredulous.
The room was cramped and cheerless, but neat enough, she supposed, in a military sort of way. It was like an encampment on a battlefield, the bed no more than a cot with a single thin blanket drawn tight, his gear — a canteen, various tools and implements, his tripod and transit — arranged on various hooks projecting from the walls. He was sitting on the cot, pulling on a pair of stained and worn trousers she’d already mended more times than she could count. His socks were dirty, his shirt, even his braces. He didn’t say anything.
“It’s the dark of night. It’s raining.”
He shrugged. He was lacing up his boots now, though she’d asked him time and again to put them on and remove them on the porch so as to minimize the dirt in the house he was suddenly so very interested in keeping clean. “Seems like it’s always raining.”
She was silent a moment. “I’m sorry we haven’t got the money, Will,” she said. “I know how much this venture means to you, this place, I mean. You know if I had the money I’d give it to you”—she’d meant to keep any note of resentment out of her voice because he was her husband and she loved him and here he was sleeping separately from her because she was too weak to bear him—“but I’ve already given everything I have.”