“Don’t think such thoughts,” she’d said automatically.
Now, rising from her chair, she said, “That’ll be your father. You’ll have to clear the curtains away so Ida can set the table.” And then she was pulling the door open on a pale laminate sunshine, Will just mounting the steps of the porch with his hat and face and shoulders covered in an ochre residue of rock dust, everything ordinary, tedious, the round of the days as fixed as the stars in their slots, when she looked past him to where the two dun pincers of land cupped the bay and saw the sail there like a white knife plunged into the breast of the sea. “A sail!” she cried, the sudden intensity of her own voice startling her. “There’s a sail in the harbor!”
Will stopped in mid-stride, one foot lifted to the step, dust sifting from his sleeves and hat and the folds of his trousers, his eyes snatching at hers as if he didn’t believe her before he jerked violently round to stare out on the bay and see for himself. In the next instant Edith appeared at the door, her face wild with excitement. “Where?” she cried. “I don’t see it.” Will pointed—“There! Right there! Are you blind?”—and she shot down the steps, hatless, her best shoes ruined before she was halfway across the yard, even as Ida erupted from the kitchen and Jimmie, who’d been skulking round the corner of the house to take his lunch at the back door, reversed himself and started after Edith at a dead run. It took Will a minute, the heavy lines of his face lifting to take account of these new phenomena — a sail, Mills, the shearers — and then he was squaring his shoulders like the captain he was and shouting Jimmie’s name with fierce insistence. “Where do you think you’re going? You come here now.”
The boy pulled up short, skidding in the mud as if his legs meant to go on without him. He threw a quick despairing glance at Edith, who was already approaching the first turning, and then came reluctantly across the yard, his shoulders slumped and feet dragging. Ida kept on. She’d crossed the yard and was at the mouth of the road now, not running exactly, but moving briskly, the apron flaring round her skirts, while Adolph, who’d apparently gone out to the bunkhouse to wash up, flung open the door there and stepped out onto the porch, a dirty towel in his hands.
“Ida!” Will cried, his voice breaking round a thin wire of tension and excitement. “You’re wanted in the kitchen. You get in there now, and, I don’t know, prepare something, anything. And coffee. Coffee in quantity. And, Adolph,” he called across the yard, “you’ll join me just as soon as I can get this rock dust washed off of me and change my shirt, and then we’ll go down and help them unload. I won’t be five minutes.”
Marantha looked out to the bay again, to the sails and the ship enlarging beneath them, as if afraid it would have vanished in the mist like an optical illusion. But it was there, all right. The shearers had come. She should have felt relief but all she could think of was what they were going to do about dinner, where she would seat everyone, how they’d manage with the cracked plates and the mess of the place and the curtains that were laid out flat on the table instead of hanging airily at the windows. What would Mills think? What would Nichols?
But here was Jimmie, ragged and dirty and with his hair trailing down his neck like some aborigine because he refused to let her cut it, planted in the mud below her and looking up disconsolately at Will. “Captain?” he asked. “You want I should fetch General Meade and the sled?”
“That’s right,” Will said, smiling now, at ease, everything going according to plan. “Good boy, smart boy. He knows his business.” And then he reached in his pocket, extracted a nickel and held it up to the light. “You see this? This is yours if you can hitch up the mule and get the sled down there to the beach in twenty minutes flat.”
The boy just stared blankly. “What is it?”
“What is it? It’s a nickel. It’s money. You know what money is, don’t you?”
Very slowly, as the schooner swayed in a web of diminishing waves and the distant hands furled the sails and the sun shone weakly in the gouges and puddles that hopscotched across the yard and on down the ravaged road, he shook his head. “Not much use for it, really,” he said, looking out to sea and then gazing back up at Will, his eyes squinted against the sun. “Not out here, anyways.”
* * *
The main thing the shearers did, aside from the shearing itself, that is, was eat. They weren’t discriminating and they didn’t want dainty foods or any of the dishes out of the recipe book she’d got from her mother who’d got it in turn from her own mother. Quantity was what they required: lamb, mutton, turkey and salt pork, with fried abalone if it was available, beans, bread, potatoes and the corn tortillas Ida quickly learned to press on the griddle and serve in great towering stacks, all of it drenched in a sauce concocted from rendered lamb fat, chopped onions, canned tomatoes, crushed chili peppers and a good fistful of every kind of spice in the pantry.
That first night, they were fourteen for dinner, including Mr. Mills and Mr. Nichols, the table extended by means of the desk from Edith’s room and every chair in the house pressed into service, which still left them short so that two of the shearers had to make do with overturned buckets. She attempted to seat Mills at the head of the table — he was the one who’d built the house, after all, and the minute he walked in the door she felt out of place, an interloper, a squatter — but he wouldn’t hear of it. “No, no, Mrs. Waters,” he said, spreading his arms wide to take in the expanse of the room, the dim hallway and dimmer kitchen beyond, “this is your place now.” He was shorter than she remembered, heavier, with a paunch and a pair of muttonchop whiskers that seemed to tug his face in two directions at once. His skin was mottled — patches of normal coloration alternating with parchment white, as if he’d been spattered with paint. Or guano. This is your place now. Cold comfort.
She sat at Will’s right and she put Nichols — stiff, formal, a thirty-six-year-old bachelor who was dressed as if he were about to board the cable car for Nob Hill and who just happened to have ten thousand dollars to invest, or so Will claimed and she fervently hoped, hoped as much as she’d ever hoped for anything in her life — beside him. Edith, aglow in her new dress and barely able to contain her excitement — new faces amongst them, Nichols a gentleman and from San Francisco no less — was next to her, and Ida, in the intervals between serving the dishes, sat beside Edith. Jimmie was next to Ida, with Adolph across the table and the six shearers, dark silent men with leaping eyes who must have been Indians or Mexicans or some combination of the two, were at the far end. Will was in his Sunday best and she was wearing her blue dress, the one he liked so much, and she’d done her hair up in a chignon. There was a bouquet of wildflowers. She lit the candles herself.
The cuisine — a pair of turkeys stuffed with cornbread, a pot of beans, mashed potatoes and a puree of the butternut squash Mills had brought along as a gift, as well as coffee, bread pudding for dessert and red wine in quantity — might not have been the sort of thing the shearers were used to, but between the six of them, and Jimmie, of course, they reduced what was left of the turkeys to small reliquaries of chewed-over bones and scraped the serving bowls so meticulously Ida would have had to look twice to find anything to wash in them. To a man, they never said a word through the entire meal. From their end of the table came only the soft moist smack of mastication and the click of utensils, and if she’d spent a frantic half hour fretting over her table settings, it came to nothing. The minute they sat down, each of them produced his own knife, outsized things, sharp enough for surgery, and they used them variously as cutting implements, forks and serving spoons.