“That’s very generous of you, but still it wouldn’t be an inconvenience to us, not at all, wouldn’t you say so, Minnie?”
She and Edith had stayed on, glad for the company. They each had a cup of coffee before them, but the coffee had grown cold. In the interim, Nichols had produced three Cuban cigars and Will had brought out a bottle of brandy he’d been saving for a special occasion — unlike the whiskey.
They were all watching her. What had Will said? No matter. She shook her head and flashed her eyes as if nothing could please her more than having her house invaded, then raised the handkerchief to her mouth and coughed, just once, choking back the residue. She was tired. Exhausted. She hadn’t realized until that moment just how much the evening had cost her. “We thought,” she said, struggling to clear her voice, “that Mr. Nichols might want to take the spare room on this floor, across from Ida’s — Ida can always share with Edith — and that would leave Ida’s room for you, Mr. Mills, Hiram…” She attempted to cover herself with a laugh, but that was risky the way she was feeling, because a laugh, the slightest tickle in her throat, could bring on a coughing fit. “That is”—she snatched a breath—“if you really don’t mind giving up all those bedbugs out there in the bunkhouse.”
The detail she didn’t mention was that her husband would in that case be sleeping in the master bedroom, if you could call it that, at least until the business had been transacted and the guests were safely out of sight.
“I wouldn’t want to put you out,” Mills said, softening. He knew what the bunkhouse was like, knew better than anyone, except maybe Jimmie.
“Or me either.” Nichols had set down his glass and was giving her that faint smile, the gold outline of his tooth glinting in the light of the candles, which were guttering now in pools of wax.
“Oh, no,” she said, her voice so husky she might have been growling, “it’s no trouble at all.”
But of course it was, as her husband was to discover when he came plodding up the stairs after the others had gone off to bed. She was lying there waiting for him, propped up on the pillows, and she wasn’t reading or knitting or doing anything at all except watching for him to come through the door. The handle clicked, rose, fell, and there he was, unsteady on his feet, tipsy with wine, with brandy, looking needy, looking hopeful. “I hope you won’t mind,” she said, her eyes leading him to the pallet she’d made up in the corner, on the floor beneath the window: sheet, blanket and pillow, the thinnest of horsehair mattresses salvaged from the bunkhouse.
He stood there a long moment, rocking ever so slightly over the twin fulcrums of his hips, and then he began to unbutton his shirt, his hands clumsy, his fingers thick as blocks of wood. She almost went to him, almost slipped from bed to help him out of his clothes as if he were a child, almost relented, but it was all too much, all her resentments rushing back at her on a howling icy internal wind that chilled her to the marrow, to her soul, to the bottom of everything.
“I’m sorry, Will. It’s just that I can’t bear the weight of you beside me. Not the way I am now. I’m sorry. I truly am.”
Nichols
Whether it was because of the excitement of having company in the house she couldn’t say, but during the week that Mills, Nichols and the shearers were there, she began to feel stronger, day by day. The coughing tapered off. The phlegm she brought up, especially in the mornings, seemed looser and there was no tinge of blood. She began helping Ida and Edith with the meals and even found time to work in the flower garden she’d planted up against the fence in the front yard. And once, out of curiosity, she’d gone out to the corral to watch the shearers at their work.
It must have been the second or third day of the shearing. The weather was clear for a change, the wind soft, almost balmy. When Will saw her making her way across the yard after breakfast with her parasol and knitting basket, he swung open the gate and came to her, his face lit with a smile of the purest pleasure. He’d wanted her to take an active interest, and here she was, out of the house, in the sunshine, interested. “Minnie,” he called, holding a hand out to her, “come and watch. You’ll like this, I think.”
He was in his work clothes, his trousers spattered with mud, chaff in his hair and all down his sleeves and the front of his shirt as if he’d been out haying. But he hadn’t been haying — that was months off yet. He’d been wrestling with the sheep, that was what it was, as she was soon to see, helping the shearers pin them down while they clipped the fleece from their bodies in continuous sheets so neatly proportioned it was as if the animals had been wearing jackets that only needed to be unbuttoned and slipped off. “I hope so,” she said. “The whole business seems so mysterious to me.” She let out a laugh. “I never imagined wool came from anyplace other than a shop.”
His smile died and then fluttered back into place. “Listen,” he said, “let me get you a chair and you can sit over there, just outside the corner of the corral, and see what we’re about. This is all new to me too, you know.”
And so he found her a chair and she sat there, out of range of the mud the animals kicked up when they were flipped over on their backs and their legs pinioned so that the shearers, one man to a sheep, could transform them from squat comfortable-looking things to puny bleating sacks of skin that careened off to huddle in the next pen as if they were embarrassed by their own nakedness. Will waded right in, and it lifted her to see his enthusiasm, the way he snatched up an animal the minute Jimmie or Adolph, whose job it was to go on horseback and round them all up, released one through the gate. And Mills, Mills too. Mills and her husband were working in concert, making sure the shearers were fed a new animal the moment they finished with the previous one, then taking the fleeces and stuffing them into the huge canvas sacks that bloated out like sausages as the morning went on.
The sun was pleasant — heat, for a change, real heat — and she stayed there perched on the chair long after she’d grown bored with the process unfolding before her, the sheep bleating out their terror and broadcasting their hard black pellets of excrement even as the men fought to hold them until they went lax and submitted, then the fleece lying there in the dirt and the naked animal scurrying away to hide itself amongst the naked others. Across the yard, in their pen, the pigs were silent, as if contemplating what lay in store for them. Even the chickens and turkeys, usually so active around the barnyard, were keeping out of sight. She was thinking about that, about how the animals seemed to know what was going on though they weren’t conscious in any rational way, or at least that’s what she’d always believed, when Nichols emerged from the house and came strolling across the yard to her.
He held himself stiffly, as if he were uncomfortable in his clothes, but his voice was pleasant enough as he called out a greeting to her. “Good morning, Mrs. Waters,” he intoned, coming up to stand beside her so that his shadow momentarily took away the sun. “Are you enjoying the shearing? The process, I mean?”
She studied him a moment, a tall man, nearly as tall as Will, and dressed impeccably, as if he were on his way to a gentlemen’s club instead of coming out to peer into a muddy pen full of terrified sheep on an island stuck fast in its own solitary sphere. “Yes,” she said, smiling up at him, and she was glad she’d powdered her face and put on a bit of rouge, though most mornings she didn’t bother, not anymore, not out here. “Or no, truthfully. For the first couple, it’s interesting, I suppose, to see how it’s done, but I feel sympathy for the poor animals. They seem so terrified.”