It was Rafael. He was standing at the base of the bunkhouse steps, one leg lifted to the bottom riser and the guitar resting on his thigh, the fingers of one hand tensing and releasing over the neck of the instrument while he strummed slow emphatic chords with the other. The rest of the shearers were lined up like statues on the benches along the wall, Jimmie amongst them. Rafael was looking down at his hands, deep in concentration. The others — to a man — were looking at her.
The rhythm quickened, beating steadily toward some sort of release, and then Rafael lifted his head, looked across the yard to her and began to sing:
Si tu boquita morena
Fuera de azúcar, fuera de azúcar,
Yo me lo pasaría,
Cielito lindo, chupa que chupa.
She didn’t know the song or what the words meant, but when the chorus rang out in soaring full-throated abandon—Ay, ay, ay, ay—she knew he was singing not for his compatriots lined up along the wall or for her stepfather immured in the house or the sheep in their coats or the rolling broken dusty chaparral, but for her, for her only.
* * *
The shearers were to be there for two weeks and then the boat would collect them and they’d go back to wherever they’d come from till the sheep’s coats grew out and they made their rounds once more. It was her intention to be on that boat with them. She didn’t know how she was going to manage it, but she looked to Rafael, encouraging him in any way she could, making sure to brush by him in the doorway when he came in for meals, letting her eyes jump to his and then away again, lingering outside each evening to hear him raise his voice in song till her stepfather went out on the porch to spit and light a cigar and call her in. She had to tread carefully — her stepfather was more vigilant than ever with men on the property and Jimmie shadowed her like a spy. Jimmie. Jimmie was the enemy now and no doubting it.
Rafael didn’t offer to help after that first night, and yet it wasn’t that he didn’t want to — he was polite and well bred, she could see that — but because the others wouldn’t allow it. They’d heckled him at the table and what they must have said to him in private she could only imagine. Let them have their fun. They were crude men, ignorant, unlettered, and what they’d seen of the world was limited to bunkhouses and sheep pens. He was different. And she knew he liked her. There was a sympathy between them — or no, a current as powerful and jolting as anything a magneto and a copper wire could generate. He was handsome, what the Mexicans call guapo, with his unexpected eyes and the way he stood out from the others like a prince amongst peasants, taller, straighter, his forearms corded with muscle beneath the fringe of his rolled-up sleeves and his secretive smile that was reserved for her alone.
Near the end of the second week, on the final day of the shearing — and she was counting the days off, tense and impatient, sick to her stomach with the thought of the opportunity passing her by — he slipped her a note as he came in for dinner with the others. She’d rung the bell on the porch as usual and stayed there to greet the men as they came up the steps, and he’d been last, holding back purposely. His hand flitted toward hers as he shifted past her and there was the quick hot touch of him and then the note was in her hand, a twice-folded scrap of paper that fit her palm like a holy wafer. She went straight through the room, down the hall and into the kitchen with it. Come to me, it read. Midnight. Behind the privy.
It was nothing to slip out of the house. Her stepfather, exhausted from the exertions of the roundup and shearing — nearly two weeks into it now and he an old man no matter his protestations to the contrary — had forgone his cards and whiskey and retired early. By nine, when she damped the lights and went up to bed, she could hear him snoring thunderously from down the hall and he was still at it at quarter to twelve when she crept back down the stairs and out into the night. She eased the door shut behind her and stood there a moment on the back porch, listening. Nothing moved. All was silence.
It was chilly, and the minute she stepped off the porch she wanted to go back for a wrap, but didn’t dare risk it. She was wearing the dress she’d put on that morning, though she’d been prepared to change into her nightdress if her stepfather had been up and about — he was in the habit of easing open her door to wish her a good night, especially if he saw the light on, and she wouldn’t want him to suspect there was anything out of the ordinary. A fog had set in, but it was thin and diaphanous, the three-quarters moon shining through it to light the way. Not that it would have mattered: she knew the yard as intimately as a convict knows his cell and could have found her way even in the pitch dark.
There were stirrings in the brush. The fog sifted down and it was as if the darkness itself had come to life, pulsing and fluctuating in a tincture of moonlight. Before she’d gone a hundred feet she was out of breath, and it wasn’t because she was weak or tired — it was nerves, that was all. She tried to keep her composure, telling herself to proceed with caution, to go slowly with him, to let him see and value her for what she was before she let him kiss her, touch her, but all night she’d felt herself racing as if he were pulling her to him on that thin hammered thread of wire. The W.C. was a black monolith, a shadow amongst shadows. The smell of it stabbed at her. She circled round back of it, thinking how clever he was — if anyone should see her, she had her excuse, just going to the privy, that was all. The call of nature. She smiled to herself.
But where was he? All she could make out were the dark hummocks of rock giving back a faint glow under the moonlight and the scraps of ragged vegetation bunched up round her like discarded clothing. Had he forgotten about her? Led her on? Played a joke on her? And if he had — and here she pictured him lying in the darkened bunkhouse with a smirk on his face — she’d spit on his eggs in the morning, slap him right there at the table in front of everyone, tell her stepfather he’d… but then one of the dark hummocks before her unfolded suddenly and there he was.
“Cariña,” he whispered, taking her by the hand and swinging round to lead her through the brush without so much as a kiss or caress, moving swiftly. His grip was tight, too tight, as if he was afraid she’d break away from him, but she didn’t hold back, didn’t protest, just followed him, stumbling, her breath coming quick and hard. They moved swiftly, no time for thought or hesitation, and when they came to the fence he stopped to shift his hands to her waist and lift her over into the dried-up field where the hay had long since been cut and the sheep let in to browse the stubble to bare dirt. And then, like Jimmie, he shrugged out of his jacket — or no, it wasn’t a jacket but a kind of blanket, what they called a serape — and spread it out on the ground.
She watched the shadow of him bend to the blanket and then he was pulling her down beside him, twisting her round so that her feet went out from under her and she came down hard and all she could think of was a lamb flipped over for shearing. Without a word he began to dig at her, at her skirts, her legs, his hands rooting there, and he pressed his face to hers, not for a kiss but to strain against her. His cheek was a wire brush. His hands were stone. She wanted him to stop, wanted to talk, wanted a promise, and now that it was too late she saw how naive she’d been to think he’d be satisfied with kisses and the kind of manipulation she’d practiced on Jimmie. He dug at her, tore her undergarments, and still he didn’t kiss her. His cheek chafed against hers, he rocked and tensed and shoved himself into her and now she was the one made of stone, and not just her hands but the whole of her, as if the weight of him had petrified her.