The sand gave beneath her feet. Tiny creatures, translucent hopping things, sprang all around her. The smell was wonderful — sea wrack, salt spray, the newborn air — and it brought her back to her own girlhood in Massachusetts and the sultry summer days when her father would take the whole family to the shore. But it wasn’t sultry here. Far from it. The temperature must have been in the low fifties and the wind made it seem colder even than that. “Edith!” she cried out. “You’ll catch your death in those wet clothes,” and she couldn’t help herself, though she should have let it go.
Edith wasn’t listening. Edith was fourteen years old, tall and handsome, as physically mature as a girl two or three years older, and she had a mind of her own. She deliberately went back into the surf under the pretext of unloading the bags from the rear of the boat when she could just as easily have started at the front, and she and Ida — who should have known better — were making a game of it, snatching up this parcel or that and darting up the beach to tumble everything in a random pile even as Adolph trudged through the sand, a bag under each arm and dragging two of the oak chairs behind him without a thought to the finish or the cushions she’d sewn for the seats. In the meantime, the steamer trunk she’d so carefully packed with her personal things — letters, stationery and envelopes, writing implements, her jewelry, the clothes she’d folded and tamped into place — was still in the boat, its leather surface shining with wet. She wanted to shout for him to fetch it before it was ruined, but she didn’t know how to command him, barely knew him, and the sour look he gave her didn’t help matters.
Flustered — and cold, shivering — she glanced round her in irritation, wondering where the boy was with the mule and the sled to take them up to the house. And that was another thing: she couldn’t for the life of her imagine what sort of sled they were talking about. The sleds she knew were for coasting down snowy hillsides or they were horse-drawn sleighs, with runners, for snowbound roads, but this, as Will had tried to explain, was a sort of travois — the path was too narrow and rough for a cart and so things had to be dragged up and down from the house. The house that was invisible from here, though she craned her neck till the muscles there began to throb. All she could see were pocked volcanic cliffs fringed with a poor sort of desert vegetation.
“I’ll race you!” Edith shouted, waving a pair of hatboxes high over her head, as Ida, her face lit with the purest pleasure, sprinted up the beach with her suitcase.
“Girls!” she cried. “Stop it now. Show some dignity.”
Ida, dutiful, slowed to a walk, but Edith kept on, her skirts dark with wet and her heels kicking up sand, and she didn’t stop till she mounted the ridge that marked the high-tide line. She might have gone on running all the tortuous way up the path to the plateau beyond and right on into the house, if the boy hadn’t appeared at that moment, mule and sled in tow. For an instant, Edith just stood there, staring, and then she dropped the hatboxes, turned on her heels and came running back, giggling, while the boy — Jimmie — stood there gaping as if he’d never seen a girl before in his life, and maybe he hadn’t. Marantha gave a wave of her hand and made her way up the crest of the dune to him while he bent to the boxes Edith had dropped.
As she got closer she could see that the sled was a crude affair, constructed of the salvaged railway ties that composed one of the chief sources of building material here on this treeless island, two lengths forming the struts across which sawed portions had been nailed into place to create a slanted bed. In the center of it, lashed firmly down, was a rocking chair, and that must have been for her, so that she could ride behind the mule, an innovation of Will’s, no doubt. And that was touching, it was, the way he cared for her, the way he thought matters through so as to make things easier on her. She caught her breath and then climbed up over the lip of the dune that traced the margin of the beach, the wind snatching at her hat so that she could feel the pins giving way and had to use her free hand to hold it in place, all the while clutching her overstuffed handbag in the other, the fingers of which had already begun to go numb under the pressure. To make matters worse, she caught her shoe on something, a loop of kelp or a scrap of driftwood, and stumbled so that she had to go down on one knee in the sand.
The boy just stood there as if he’d grown roots, staring from her to the retreating form of Edith and back again. He looked — this was her first impression and she wanted to be charitable — not stupid, really, but amazed or maybe hypnotized, a short, slight, dark-haired boy with sunburned skin, a retreating chin and eyes as black as the mud at the bottom of a pond. When he saw her stumble a second time, it startled him into action, and he came running to her, his arms flung out awkwardly for balance. Without a word, he reached a hand to help her as if she were an invalid already, and she wondered how much Will had told him.
“You must be Jimmie,” she said, trying to mold her face into a smile of greeting.
He ducked his head. Colored. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m Mrs. Waters.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I reckoned that.”
She turned her head to direct his gaze toward the beach. “And that’s my daughter, Edith, in the azure hat, and the serving girl, Ida. And the man—”
“That’s Adolph, ma’am. I know him. We — he — well, he come out already once to help me work the sheep and suchlike…”
“Yes,” she said, rubbing her hands together against the cold. “Well, I hope you’ll all get on nicely.” And then, looking to the sled and the mule with its skittish eyes and ears standing up as straight as two bookends and the path that wound its way through the chaparral and up the hill to where the mysterious house awaited her, she added, “The chair — I presume that’s for me?”
He nodded, stabbing at the sand with the toe of one boot. His hair was too long, she could see that, greasy strands of it hanging in his eyes beneath one of those caps the Irish workmen favored. His fingernails were filthy. And his teeth — she’d have to introduce him to a toothbrush or he’d be gumming his food by the time he turned twenty.
But here came the wind again, gusting now, and the sand driven before it like grapeshot. “Very well, then,” she said, and again he just stared. A long moment unfolded. “What I mean to say is, what, exactly, are we waiting for?”
* * *
There was no room for Edith on the sled once they’d loaded it with everything it could carry, and so she stayed behind on the beach to help Ida and the men unload the skiff on its successive trips to the schooner and back. Edith had pestered her — she wanted to go now, wanted to see the house and her room and the sheep, and why couldn’t she just walk up on her own? — but Marantha was firm with her. She was needed below, on the beach, and she’d see the house in good time. Jimmie stared at his feet throughout this colloquy, which, given Edith and her temperament, lasted longer than it should have, and when Edith finally turned and stalked off he gave the mule a swat and they started on up the path.
The boy led the mule by the reins, walking in a loose-jointed way, sauntering as if he were out for a stroll, but the grade was steep and the mule was laboring. Within minutes its flanks were steaming. A cascade of mud and stones flew out from beneath its hooves and she was twice spattered, three times, four. She could smell the animal’s breath, rank and ragged, careening down the length of it on the wind that grew stronger as they rose in elevation. Her neck ached. Her mouth was dry. Steeling herself, she gripped the arms of the rocker as it jerked from side to side and the heavy struts of the sled scraped along the path, gouging two deep furrows behind them.