That night, when she served at table, he sat up rigidly the minute she came into the room, as if her mere presence had turned some switch in him. The other shearers broke off their conversation and stared down at their plates out of respect, but he fixed on her every movement. Her stepfather was addressing Adolph and Jimmie as usual and he was saying the usual things about the flock and the weather and the turpentine they would dip the sheep’s noses in and the whale he’d seen off Prince Island just that afternoon, raising his voice to let the sense of it drift down the table to include the shearers in the conversation. He was feeling convivial, the prospect of another crop of wool before him, and while the shearers — and Jimmie — raised glasses of watered wine to their lips, his own tin cup was filled with whiskey. As was Adolph’s, judging from the dazed look on his face.
She set out the two big pewter platters of roast lamb, one at each end of the table, then went out to the kitchen for the pot of beans, the tortillas and the hot sauce Jimmie had helped her concoct from chopped tomatoes, rendered grease and the dried habanero peppers the shearers had brought with them. She was flipping tortillas on the stovetop when the door to the kitchen pushed open and the new man stepped into the room as if he’d lived there all his life. His name was Rafael, he was twenty-six years old and he was a Spaniard (not a Mexican, he’d insisted during the brief introduction she’d had to him out on the porch before dinner), with glass-green eyes and long black hair he slicked back with a scented pomade she could smell all the way across the room.
“I am thinking if I am able to assist,” he said, and he was the first man — with the exception of Jimmie and Jimmie didn’t count — ever to offer to help. On a ranch, men worked in the dirt and women in the kitchen, their paths never to cross. On a ranch, there were no gentlemen or ladies — there was just life lived at the level of dressed-up apes tumbled down from the trees. If you wanted to talk of poetry or drama or music or have a man open a door for you or get up when you entered a room, then you’d better die and come back in a new life.
She was stunned. She didn’t know what to say, but he’d found a pair of dish towels to cushion the handles of the cast-iron pot of beans and was already lifting it from the stove, and then he was gone, backing out the door and down the hall to a chorus of jeers from the others. Mujer, someone shouted. Pícaro! cried another. A moment later she flipped the last of the tortillas onto a platter, took up the tureen of hot sauce and followed him down the hall, but instead of putting the platter in front of her stepfather or even in the center of the table, she set it down beside Rafael, as a sign of favor. “Oh-ho,” Luis crowed, “you see?” and everyone laughed, but for Jimmie, who set his mouth and lashed his eyes at her.
Did she care? No, not in the least. Jimmie had had his chance.
For months now she’d pleaded with him to help her engineer an escape from the island and he’d made vague promises about contacting this fisherman or the other when they anchored in the harbor, but nothing had come of it. The first time she’d mentioned it to him — while they were alone, in their secret spot, after she’d let him kiss her lips and suck endlessly at one bared nipple like the oversized infant he was — he gave her a long look she couldn’t quite dissect, at least not at first. “Please?” she’d whispered, and she’d moved her hand to his groin, to stroke him there through the fly of his trousers. “Pretty please?”
“The Captain wouldn’t like it,” he said after a moment.
“No,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t. But do it for my sake. Please?”
He looked away, though he’d begun to move his hips to the rhythm of her hand. “I could maybe… but then, what about me? I’d be here all alone without you. I’d miss you something terrible, because, well, I’ve only said it a thousand times, I love you. You know that.”
There was nothing to say to this. She wasn’t about to exchange vows with him, not if she had to stay there on the island for the next three centuries. She stopped her friction until he laid his hand atop hers and began to guide her. “Will you talk to the fishermen?” she said after a moment.
“What fishermen?”
“Any fishermen.”
“The Captain won’t like it.”
“No,” she said, staring into his eyes and working her hand deeper, “no, he won’t.”
Since then she’d seen any number of sails in the harbor or farther out at sea, ships riding north, fishing boats, sealers, the private yachts of people from San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara who sailed from island to island for the pleasure of it because they had the means and the occasion to go wherever they wanted whenever the whim took them. But not her. No. And every time she mentioned it to Jimmie he gave her that look she had no trouble reading now, a look of greed and fear and self-serving obstinacy — he didn’t want her to go any more than her stepfather did. What did she do? She cut him. Cut him dead. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t touch him — wouldn’t let him touch her — and if he spoke to her she ignored him, and yet still he never gave in. Oh, he pleaded with her and made up all sorts of stories about how he’d hailed a boat but it was full of Chinamen or maybe they were Japanese and she wouldn’t want to go with them, would she? or how he’d just about talked Bob Ord into it, but then Bob’s boat had run aground on a shoal off Anacapa and he’d had to have it towed into Oxnard for repairs and never did come back, but it was just more of the same and all worth nothing. He’d had his chance and he’d failed the test. Now she looked where she could and when Rafael had strolled through the kitchen door nice as you please, she saw the way.
She washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen while the shearers filed out to the bunkhouse, Jimmie tagging along behind, then waited till her stepfather and Adolph had settled in at the card table before taking a chair out into the yard to sit there with a book in the declining light of the evening. The book was Wuthering Heights, which she’d read so many times the pages had worked loose from the binding. She’d come to hate it, actually, all that rural misery and star-crossed romance she’d once found so exotic and appealing but was now just a burden to her because it was one thing to picture the scene from a sofa in a San Francisco apartment and another to see it out the window, but that didn’t matter. The book was a prop. As was the chair. She’d combed out her hair and tied it back with a new red sateen ribbon she’d bought on the visit to Santa Barbara and though her dress was out of fashion it was the best one she had and it was clean and ironed and she’d dabbed perfume under the arms and in the pleats of her collar.
The breeze was light for once, blowing across the yard and carrying the stench of the pigs away with it. Overhead, long ghosting trails of vapor went from gray to pink with the setting sun. She turned the pages of the book, staring down at the words but making no sense of them, working at the trick of shifting her eyes to the porch of the bunkhouse and the clot of dark figures gathered there without giving herself away. For the longest while, nothing happened. She held herself rigid, the light softened, fell away. It was almost dark now and she wouldn’t be able to keep up the imposture much longer. She was about to give it up and go back into the house when there was movement on the porch, a figure separating itself from the others, and suddenly it was as if she’d been transported to another world altogether because she was hearing music, music out here in the barrens — a guitar, the elided figures, the strummed chords — and she couldn’t help but turn her head.