“Are you—?” she began, then turned to Will. “Is this one of the shearers?”
The man let out a laugh. “Hardly, ma’am,” he said, and came forward to tip his hat in a show of greeting. “My name’s Robert Ord, ma’am, and I’ve done come out to these islands after the seals.”
Will was grinning. “And guano. Don’t forget the guano.”
“Guano?” she echoed.
The stranger seemed to color, though she couldn’t be sure because of the beard and his sunburn. “The leavings of the seabirds,” he said, ducking his head and exchanging a glance with Will. “The white stuff. Very valuable to the farmers back on shore.”
“White gold, they call it. Isn’t that right, Robert?”
“Yes, sir, they do.”
But where were her manners? He was a sealer, a collector of — of excrement — but he was a guest for all that and a new soul, a new face and voice and figure to drive down the tedium and bring news of the outside world. “Mr. Ord,” she said, ignoring the fact that he still clutched the rifle in one hand and had just dropped the bird’s blood-wet feet to employ the other in tipping his hat, “would you like to come in and sit by the stove? We were just going to brew a fresh pot of coffee and Ida’ll have luncheon ready any minute now—”
“Yes,” Will said, his voice drawn-down and dismissive, as if her invitation counted for nothing at all, “we’ll be in directly. But look at what Robert’s brought us.” He gestured to the deflated bundle of feathers and claws at his feet, and she saw now what it was: an eagle. One of the fierce predatory birds that seemed to sail overhead as if they’d been propelled, their wings motionless as they caught the currents of the air and rose or plunged as they saw fit, fish eaters, opportunists, killers of lamb, turkey, chicken and shoat alike. She was stunned at the size of it — and the color, from the deep iridescent umber of its wings and torso to the perfect unalloyed white of its crown and tail feathers. Its talons were reptilian, the feet scaled like a chicken’s and big as a man’s hand. She hated it. It stole from Will, stole from her, but it was a complex kind of hate, hate that had awe mixed in with it, and a kind of love too.
“Nearly eight feet from wing tip to wing tip,” Ord said, looking down at the massive spill of the bird. He nudged it with the toe of his boot, its head splayed awkwardly against the compacted mud, the talons clenched on nothing. “One of the biggest I’ve ever went and shot. And I tell you, I’ve shot plenty.”
She studied the leathery slits of the eyes, locked shut now, and wondered what they’d seen from their vantage, so high up. What had the house looked like? The hogs? The turkeys? They themselves, with their explosives and guns and their figures that dwindled from the pyramidal crowns of their hats to the twin dots of their shoes.
Will’s voice intruded on her reverie: “This one won’t trouble us anymore.”
It took her a moment. They were both watching her, smiling, proud, another obstacle out of the way and the evidence of it spread across the barren dirt at their feet. “But whatever will we do with it?” she asked.
“Do with it?” Will let out a laugh, and the stranger — Ord — joined in. “Bury it. Or maybe string it up over the barn as a warning to the others.”
She felt cold. The smell of the sea seemed to concentrate itself suddenly, the fermenting odor of all the uncountable things washed up out of the waves coming to her as powerfully as if she were standing down there amongst them. And then a gust rose up out of the canyon, knifing through her, and in the instant she turned to retreat into the house she saw it fan the dead bird’s wings till they rasped and fluttered and strove to take flight one last time.
The Shearers
If the shearers were late, if they were unpredictable, appearing when it suited them as they worked their way successively from one island to the other, it was beyond anyone’s control, least of all hers. According to Will, Ord had heard from one of the fishermen that they were on the next island over, but nobody could be sure, since they could hardly send a cable, could they, and then Ord was gone with the seals he’d shot for their skins and a hold full of the guano he’d shoveled off the island in the mouth of the harbor, which looked to be no lighter for the lack of it. Twenty times a day she gazed out the window to the sea and there it was, its slopes so blindingly white with the leavings of the seabirds they might have been glaciated, Prince Island, and why they called it that she couldn’t say. San Miguel had been discovered by a Portuguese named Cabrillo, she knew that much, and that he’d been sailing for the king of Spain, hence the Spanish name, but then everything was Spanish here, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, California itself. Maybe the king had a son, but if so then why the English name? There must have been a word for “prince” in Spanish, though she didn’t have an inkling as to what it might be. Of course, all that was more than three hundred years ago and there must have been a whole succession of kings and princes in the interval. If it were up to her — if she were the queen — she’d name the place for its chief attribute: Guano Island. Or better yet, Heap. Guano Heap.
In any case, the shearers were late. Mornings came and went, afternoons wrapped themselves in a swirl of mist, the nights dropped like a curtain — breakfast, luncheon, dinner, the washing, the dishes, cards, seashells, walks to the beach and back — and still no sail appeared in the harbor. “Where are they?” Will kept wondering aloud, his voice strained and pleading, but he wasn’t addressing her or anybody else because no one had the answer except God above or maybe Ord’s mysterious fisherman, but his sail never showed itself either. “What’s keeping them? How can we ever hope to make a profit if there’s no one to clip the wool and take it to market?” Too anxious to sit in a chair for more than ten seconds at a time, he paced from one end of the room to the other, flinging out his hands in dumb show, and she would have offered him a whiskey just to calm him, but the whiskey was gone. He’d finished it. With Ida.
“They’ll come,” she said, trying to make the best of it, trying to assuage him, because his fears were hers and she could picture the sheep growing shaggier, dirtier, their wool so tangled and stringy it dropped off of its own accord, the shrubs decorated with it, the stripped stinking tracked-over mud bandaged in white, not a penny made and everything lost. Still, in a way, the delay was a blessing. Each day the shearers held off was a day Will could place his dynamite, blast his rocks, work the mule and the shovel and Jimmie and Adolph till the road began to take shape. He’d been driving himself furiously, the fences repaired, the barley and alfalfa in the ground and already sprouting, the shed erected and the roof of the house patched against the next deluge, and yet the road was little better than when they’d first started in on it — and the road was central to the whole operation. Will knew that. She knew it. And Mills — Mills especially knew it. And he would be here soon, on the boat that brought the shearers, with the new man, Nichols, in tow, and the onus was on Will to show them what he was made of.
Early one afternoon, just before lunch — it was the twentieth or twenty-first of the month, another day of exile, fog in the morning, sun breaking through at noon — she heard Will’s voice in the yard and set aside her sewing to go to the door and greet him. He’d been blasting all morning, the soft muted concussions rolling up the canyon to set the windows atremble and resonate in the floorboards till she could feel them as a dull tingle through the soles of her shoes. Edith, who’d been helping her cut and sew curtains for the front window in the hope of adding a little color to the place, had turned to her at one point to complain about it. “It’s so annoying, isn’t it? It’s like we’re at war. Really, it’s a wonder one of them doesn’t lose an arm or a leg.”