“Good stuff, huh?”
“It’s horrible. I don’t understand how anyone could drink it.”
He shrugged, his eyes gone vague. “It’s a taste,” he said, acknowledging the point. “You get used to it.”
“Used to it?” She could feel the effects already, at least she thought she could, a lightening of her limbs, the flutter of some organ deep inside her she never knew she had, a sense that the air had grown dense around her so she could get up and walk on it if she wanted. “I thought you were supposed to like it.”
“Here,” he said, and he was pushing himself up from the table in a scramble of limbs and holding out a hand to her, “let’s try flavoring it for you.” She followed his lead as he pulled her across the room to where she kept the basket of oranges, grapefruit and lemons Charlie Curner periodically brought out from shore and stood beside him, watching, while he shoved the carcass of the lamb aside with the palm of one hand and sliced two oranges and a lemon in half. The carcass didn’t seem to trouble him, nor the blood on the board either. He gathered up the fruit in one hand and spun round as if he were on a holy mission — and this was funny too, everything comical suddenly — before darting back to the table for her glass and making a show of squeezing the juice into it. “Now,” he said, tipping the bottle over the glass to fill it to the brim, “try it this way. And maybe, if it’s still too strong, mix a spoon of sugar in.”
If the light changed when the sun pulled back from the house and the barn threw its shadow across the yard, she hardly noticed. There was nothing in the world but Robert Ord and the glass before her, though she knew in a vague way that she would have to get up and see to the stove and dinner and set an extra place at some point. All in good time. In the meanwhile, there was Robert Ord and Robert Ord was a gentleman, or the best succedaneum the island could provide, and he let her sit there at her own table as if she were the guest — he insisted on it — while he got up to squeeze the bright orange and yellow rinds over her glass and tint the mixture with the dark burnt sugarcane rum, lovely rum, beautiful rum, rum that no longer smelled of chemicals but of tropical isles and the faraway. The rum was a breeze. It fanned her. Lifted her. She felt as if she were floating.
Then, somehow, her stepfather was there, Adolph peering over his shoulder and Jimmie there too, goggling at her from the open doorway. “Bob!” her stepfather bawled, striding across the room to slap him on the back even as Robert struggled unsteadily to his feet. In the next moment they were crowding into the room, handshakes all the way around, and if Robert was slow with his speech, no one noticed, at least not at first. They were all too enraptured by the novelty of seeing him there where they’d expected no one, firing one question after another at him: What news? How long had he been out? Had he seen Nichols last time he was ashore? He hadn’t brought any newspapers with him by any chance? A bottle? Did he have a bottle?
It was this last inquiry that caused him to reach down to the table, take up the bottle of rum by its neck and hold it to the light. Dark stuff, dark as molasses, and only an inch of it left to swish round the heel of the bottle. “I’ve got,” he began slowly, so very slowly, “this one… and then”—he swayed over his feet and spread a palm on the wall to steady himself—“there’s a couple more on the boat.”
That was when they all four looked down at her where she sat entrenched in the chair that was pushed up so tightly to the table she could scarcely move, not that she wanted to move. Her elbows were propped on the tabletop and her hands formed a brace for her chin, which suddenly seemed impossibly heavy. The silence pounded in her ears. Her stepfather looked to Robert, then to the bottle, and then, finally, to her. “What’s in that glass?” he said.
“Juice.”
“Juice, my eye.”
She clarified: “Orange juice. And lemon.”
He was drawing himself up. His hands were dirty, his forearms, dirt up under his nails and worked into his hair, his trousers stained with dried-up mud and his shirt feathered with trail dust. They’d been out riding to the far end of the island, checking the stock there, seeing to things in the season when there wasn’t much to see to. His eyes narrowed. A look of fury came over his face. And when he lunged forward to snatch the glass from her hand and lift it to his nostrils, sniffing, it was no more than she’d expected. “You’re drunk,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“Don’t you lie to me. You, you — you’re disgusting.”
“She—” Robert began, and it was as if his mouth were full of cornbread and he couldn’t risk forming his words properly, “I mean to say she was, or I did, I offered her a little drink—”
Her stepfather swung round on him. “You stay out of this.” And then he leaned over the table so that his face was so close to hers she could smell the rankness of his breath that was no different from the smell of the meat on the chopping block where the flies had begun to dance and settle. “You’re drunk,” he said again.
Something flashed in her then, a single whipcord of rebellion. “So what if I am. You’re drunk half the nights of the week. You were drunk when my mother—”
“You shut your mouth. Shut it.” He bit off the words. “Right now. And you get yourself up from that table and go straight up to your room, or I’m warning you—” He didn’t finish the thought. His finger. He was wagging his finger in her face. “You’re a disgrace,” he spat, and she was already pushing back from the table, already gathering her feet to flee — how she hated him, the hypocrite, the tyrant, and who was he to boss her like a slave? — when the finger curled back into his fist and the fist slammed down on the table. “Now get! Do you hear me? Out of my sight!”
* * *
She was sick in her stomach all night, once the liquor wore off, that is, because it was the liquor — she understood this now — that killed the pain. That was its use. That was why the men drank it and women too, even her mother, who used to take a glass of her stepfather’s whiskey from time to time and sit sipping it in the corner, her eyes bright and her face gone slack, cradling the glass in her entwined hands as if to extract the last emollient heat of it. Twice in the night she had to get up and vomit in the chamber pot while everything seemed to swirl round her in the dark as if the earth had slipped off its track since she’d laid her head on the pillow. What they ate that night, she didn’t know. Or care. At some point the odor of frying onions and seared meat had seeped up through the floorboards, which only made her feel sicker, and she’d heard them carousing below till it was full dark and well beyond.
She was sick. She was weak. Her head ached. But Robert Ord was leaving first thing in the morning because he had three living barking seals tied up in his nets on the deck and he didn’t want to risk losing them to death or sickness or starvation before he got them back to Santa Barbara and the man from the circus who’d put in the order for them, and she meant to intercept him when he left the bunkhouse at first light. He’d told her he wouldn’t be staying to breakfast — there were the seals, in addition to the fact that his hold was full of the guano he’d shoveled all the morning and afternoon before and there were the friable white streaks on his trousers to prove it, not paint, not paint at all — and at first she’d begged him to stay on. “I’m starved for the company,” she said, moving in closer to him at the table under the spell of the rum and the way the light sat in the windows and the whole world that had been so dreary and dull seemed suddenly magical, but then, though her brain was fuddled and the connections came slowly, she began to see the situation in a whole new light. She wrapped her hand around the muscle of his upper arm and leaned in close to him so that their faces were inches apart. “No need to stay on my account,” she said.