Claire sat on her knees, winded, stabbing at the ground with her dull spade while Forster and Minna did the real work. In all the years she had grown vegetables, she had been too lazy to do the necessary labor of digging up the rocky, clayey soil, replacing it with rich topsoil. This omission cost her much each year in extra tilling and fertilizer and salt-burned plants. She waged a constant battle trying to supplement with compost — grass clippings, coffee grounds, banana peels, apple cores.
Now, a couple of inches down, the tip of her spade hit a rock, sending shock waves up her arm into her shoulder. The lymph nodes had been removed under that arm, and the doctor had warned her that bruises or cuts on the arm increased the risk of lymphedema, permanent swelling. Scared, she held it away from her trunk now, as if it were a dead thing.
“Are you okay?” Forster asked.
He tried not to look at her too closely. She felt even more sick, more ugly, around him. Why was a woman’s love different in kind than a man’s love? She loved Forster beyond husband, loved him in spite of his graying hair and the wrinkled corners of his eyes. She loved him in his weakness, in the clear knowledge that he would not be there through the worst. Her mortality, her illness, caused him to flee her now, in spite of loving her.
“Need some help?” asked Forster.
“I’m fine.”
Claire tried to concentrate on the job at hand. Minna, natural and easy in the garden, effortlessly planted six seedlings for Claire’s every one. What puzzled her was that one could not simply dig a hole the size of the root ball. She was used to pushing seeds into the muddy, late-winter soil with her thumb, not even bothering to use tools. Now, the recalcitrant earth broke up in stiff, clumped spadefuls, had to be dug twice as wide as it was deep, to reach far enough down without the sides collapsing, or a rock inhibiting the spreading roots. By the time Claire had a hole of sufficient depth, it resembled a small gravesite, large enough for a bird or a mouse. She thought of all the countless small pets that had been interred by the children over the years: mice, rats, hamsters, goldfish, snakes, birds, crickets. Hadn’t there been a ferret once? Never a serious pet such as a dog or a cat that deserved a proper memorial.
“In fact, Claire does need help. The farm is too much in her condition,” Minna said.
Forster flushed red but kept digging. “I suppose that’s a conversation between the two of us.”
Minna shrugged and turned her back on them. Exhausted, Claire stared into the steep sides of her hole, mesmerized by an earthworm trying to tunnel his way back into darkness, when Minna gave a yelp of surprise. In her hand was an Indian arrowhead made of shining black obsidian, the small crescents visible where the edges had been pounded sharp.
“We find a batch every spring,” Forster said, dismissive.
Minna dug another hole and found a tan shard of pottery. “Can I keep it?”
“You’ll be sick of them in no time.”
“This farm belonged to someone else before it was yours?”
“Well, I don’t know who Forster’s great-grandparents bought it from.” The accusatory tone of Minna’s voice irritated Claire. She considered the farm created out of whole cloth from the hard, barren alkali soil, created out of nothing, worthless really but for the hard work of Forster’s family and her own. “I don’t know how long ago Indians were actually here.”
“Maybe the Chumash?” Forster said.
“My great-uncle on my father’s side, the English side, had bought land on the far side of the island because it was cheaper. He was clearing the jungle for his coffee fields,” Minna said. “They began digging up bones. All sorts of bones. He pretended they were animal ones because otherwise it would be considered bad luck, make the land worthless. Until they dug up skulls, and the lie was up. It turned out to be a slave burial site. But this uncle kept plowing, hiding them by throwing the bones in a big pile in the jungle. After he was done, the pile was high as a man, wide as four men across with outstretched arms.”
“What’d he do with them?”
“Forgot about them.” Minna rubbed her calf with her hand. “A year later his crops failed. A year after that, the plantation house burned down. They moved to town, and his wife and daughter died in an outbreak of typhoid fever. He went back to England, broken. Became an alcoholic.”
“That’s terrible,” Claire said, gripped by the matter-of-factness in Minna’s recitation of events. People used to making a living off the land had a natural sympathy for each other, knowing the hardship involved, even at the best of times. Especially in her illness, Claire was full of the idea of unfairness in all its permutations.
“What’re you implying, Minna?” Forster chuckled. “Some kind of curse?”
“He was careless. He shouldn’t have ignored the bones,” Minna added, as if to ease the blow of her words.
Forster studied her for a moment, debating. “Who were you talking to on the phone that night, right after you first came here? When you were so upset?”
Minna’s eyes widened, then narrowed. Claire cursed herself that she had confided in him; he could never keep a secret. “My cousin. I borrowed money from him. He wants it back.”
Forster looked at Claire significantly. “How much are we talking about? Is he threatening you?”
Minna shook her head. “It’s not like that. I call him because he’s from home. A familiar voice.”
“If there’s a problem, you can tell us. We’ll help if we can.”
“None.”
Claire hadn’t told him about Minna’s recent requests for advances on her pay.
“He talks to my family. They are angry I’m not in school. I say there are other things in life.”
“Do you believe that?”
Minna smiled slyly. “It’s okay to enjoy yourself when you’re young.”
After Forster left, Minna clucked her tongue. “You betrayed me. Told him about the call.”
“It frightened me.” The truth was that during the last month, the intimacy that illness necessitated had created a bond between them so that Claire no longer questioned Minna. Such distrust was in the past.
* * *
Although it had not been discussed, Minna assumed a right to be gone every couple of nights. At bedtime, she slipped out the kitchen door, and Claire ran up to the second-story hallway and peered out the window just in time to see a faraway pair of glowing headlights like predatory eyes, waiting at the far-off foot of the driveway.
In the moonlight, the tree trunks shone smooth and heavy as bones, and even the paths between the rows resembled the ribs of an animal long succumbed. The faintly rotting smell of oranges on the air made it difficult to breathe.
Claire longed to forbid Minna these visits. All those years of living by herself, and now she could not admit the clinging panic she felt on those nights, alone, the waves of fear. Wasn’t she paying for Minna’s time? At two in the morning regularly, she woke with a pounding heart, watery bowels, a feeling that if she continued to lie there in the darkness another minute, she would simply cease. If Minna was home on those nights, she would appear magically with hot milk and sing her back to sleep, or would massage her back and legs till she drifted asleep. Claire stopped short of picking up the phone, calling either the girls or Forster to complain. Clearly she was protecting Minna even if it was against what she herself wanted. In the calm of daylight, she admitted to the irrational panic, admitted, too, that she didn’t own the girl’s soul. A companion, an assistant, but not a friend, not a lover, not a slave.