San Miguel by T. C. Boyle

Author:T. C. Boyle [Boyle, T. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781408830710
Google: 7SZSM-d4lngC
Amazon: 0670026247
Barnesnoble: 0670026247
Goodreads: 13589156
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Shearers

The shearers came back in August and this time there was a new face amongst them. At first she didn’t notice—she glanced up one afternoon and there they were, outside the window, milling around in the yard with their bedrolls flung over their shoulders and that greedy craving look in their eyes, and all she could think of was the extra work they would cost her. Five of them—or no, six—and each one going through three pounds of meat, a stack of tortillas and half a gallon of wine every day, though the wine was to be watered and doled out a glass at a time till they sat down to dinner so as to prevent a general riot, and her stepfather was absolutely strict on that score. They wore straw hats—sombreros, they called them—that were as stiff as tin and finger-greased till they’d taken on a dull gray sheen, Mexican boots that cocked them up off their heels and stained bandannas knotted jauntily round their throats to lend them the only bit of color they seemed able to support. She recognized most of them at a glance, lean reticent stripped-back men in their thirties and forties who spoke a garble of Spanish, Italian, English and Portuguese and maybe Indian too, she couldn’t say—all she knew was that it wasn’t French and it wasn’t German and the thought made her ache all the more for the life that had been taken away from her.

Of course she recognized them—she ought to, since they’d worked her nearly to death when they’d come out at the end of February. There was Luis, in a pair of leather chaps, and next to him Rogelio, quietly spitting in the dirt, and who was that, the one with a concave face like the blade of a shovel? The Italian. They just called him El Italiano. And—but here she caught her breath—there was a new man amongst them, young, with a smooth unseamed face and a guitar strapped over his shoulder atop the bedroll. He was standing there with the others, taking everything in, the chickens, the barn, the bunkhouse and the pigpen and the hills dotted with sheep that must have been replicas of the sheep-dotted hills on all the other islands, nothing new under the sun, and what was he doing here with these old men? Was he somebody’s son? Rogelio’s maybe? Luis’? That was when he suddenly glanced up at the house, at the window behind which she was standing, and they locked eyes till she was the one to turn away.

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

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