The room was close, windowless, lit only by a candle on a dish he’d set on an overturned crate by the side of the bed. “You’re a martyr, a regular Christian martyr.”
“Don’t, Will.”
He was busy with the other boot now, but he took time to glance up and hold her gaze. “Do you want to lose everything, is that it? Somebody’s got to do the work around here, somebody’s got to persevere. Yes, I want this place. Is that a crime? You can’t know what I went through in the war — or after either, working the printing presses for my brother and then those idiots at the Morning Call. Dirty, demeaning work. Always somebody crabbing at you. Up in the morning, to bed at night, and for what? I want something of my own and if I have to work myself to death I’m going to get it.”
She was standing in the doorway still, one hand on the frame as if she were a visitor in her own house. But then this wasn’t her house and never would be — it was foreign to her, harsh and unacceptable, and so was this windblown island that might as well have been in the middle of the Amazon for all the diversion it offered. “You promised me we wouldn’t stay past the first of June if I… if I don’t improve. And I’m not improving, Will. It’s too cold. Too damp.” She felt a sadness so intense it was as if some machine had hold of her, some infernal engine, crushing the spirit out of her. “Too hopeless, Will, hopeless, do you hear me? If I’m going to die I want my things around me, I want society, comfort — not this.” She lifted her hand to take in the room, the house in which it stood, the island and the sea and the distant cliffs of the coast beyond.
“You’re not going to die.”
It was a lie and they both knew it.
He was on his feet suddenly, brisk, towering, on his way past her and out into the night to work his precious road. “Goddamn it, Marantha,” he said, his face so close to hers she could smell the stewed lamb they’d had for dinner on his breath — or his mustache, which he never even bothered to wipe properly—“it’s not my fault. I didn’t give you the disease.”
“No,” she said very quietly, “no, you didn’t.”
He was edging past her, nervous on his feet, guilty, ashamed of himself — and he should have been. He should have gone down on his knees the way he had when he proposed marriage to her in the front parlor on Post Street, Sampan a kitten in her lap and Edith curled up asleep with her china doll. Should have taken her in his arms and comforted her. Tried to imagine, for just an instant, what it was like to see the whole world fading to nothing all around you and none but the mute dead to understand or sympathize.
“Goddamn it,” he said, cursing again, though he knew she hated it, “we have to go on, don’t you see that?” His eyes were huge, apoplectic, his face flushed. “Life goes on, and what does life mean? Life means work, Marantha, work. And work is what I intend to do.”
* * *
The rain stopped sometime overnight. She was awake, unable to sleep, racked with night sweats and thoughts of the beyond, when the thrumming on the roof abruptly ceased and in rushed the silence, shaping itself to fit the void — silence that was somehow worse than the rain, which was at least alive, or in motion at any rate. She stared into the darkness, too exhausted to light the lantern and take up her book, thinking of Will sleeping in his narrow bed in the room below her and sharing in the darkness that was general over the island and the sea and the continent beyond and would even now, on the eastern coast, where her mother would be getting breakfast in the kitchen of the house she’d been a girl in, be giving way to the light. Did she sleep? She supposed so. Eventually there was a period of blankness, but if rest was the purpose of sleep, then she didn’t get much.
In the morning she felt so weak she could barely lift her head from the pillow. Outside the window the sky seemed a second roof, flat and gray and uninterrupted. Why she was alive, why she was breathing, why she’d been born on this earth only to suffer the way she had, she couldn’t say. She lay there a long while before propping herself up with a pillow so that she could see out to the bay, to see if there was a sail there, but there wasn’t. The shearers hadn’t come. They were still on the next island over, plying their mobile trade, eating, drinking, taking their time. The shearers are coming, the shearers are coming. But not yet.
Ida brought a tray with breakfast: tea, toast, fried meat, but no eggs — eggs were suddenly precious, what with the exigencies of the cakes and the mortality amongst the flock. By the time she finished and washed, dressed and put up her hair, it was nearly noon by the clock on the shelf Will had erected for her on the wall beside the bed. That was an advantage of a house constructed willy-nilly of railway ties and whatever else washed ashore from the wrecks that ringed the island, she supposed — if you needed a shelf, you just nailed a board to the wall, aesthetic considerations notwithstanding. She took a moment to gather up her needlework, then went down to sit by the stove in the parlor. Ida was in the kitchen, baking bread and adding whatever came to hand — potatoes, flour, canned tomatoes, salt pork left over from breakfast — to invigorate last night’s lamb stew. Will and Adolph were at work on the road, so far down now you couldn’t see them unless you went to the second turning and peered over the edge there, tracing the line of the canyon to where the road switched back again and the raw earth gave up the fractured shells of its dynamited rocks. Jimmie was in the fenced-in field behind the house, sowing grain in the furrows he’d plowed the past three days. And Edith? Edith was out walking.
In the next hour, she got up twice to feed wood into the stove, and she was just easing back into her chair, thinking only of the pattern of the tea cloth she was working on — the figure of a scintillant red cardinal, seen in full flight, on a field of pale blue, just that, nothing more — when a movement across the yard caught her eye. What was it? Men, two men, first their faces, then their shoulders and torsos emerging from beneath the slope of the hill in gradual accretion, legs now, full figures, moving toward the house. One of them was Will, unmistakable in his patched clothes and seesawing gait even at a distance, and the other — this came as a shock — a stranger altogether. Had the shearers come? Was this a shearer, this lean, tall, fresh-faced man with a rifle in one hand and the clenched feet of what looked to be an enormous trailing bird locked in the grip of the other? She saw feathers, the reanimated flap of dead wings writhing in the dirt.
She set aside her embroidery, a single pulse of excitement shooting through her—Someone new! — and went to the door. The air was brisk, smelling more of the sea than of the flock. The pigs grunted from their pen. She could hear the chorus of the seals on the distant snapping cable of the wind.
“Minnie!” Will was calling, and here he was, coming round the corner of the house, the stranger at his side. “Come look at this.”
She was wearing her carpet slippers, and despite herself, despite her excitement over seeing a new face, she didn’t want to come down off the porch into the muddy yard, and so she held back.
The stranger — he was in his twenties, early twenties, she guessed, Ida’s age — stopped in his tracks to gaze up at her with a look of wonderment on his face. He was unshaven, his beard the same nearly translucent color as the hair that trailed away from the brim of his hat and coming in irregularly, as if he weren’t quite sure yet how to grow it.