Where There's a Will

Tonight it would be rack of lamb crusted with macadamia nuts, with tiramisu for dessert. Ordinarily, that would be enough to occupy whatever stray thoughts she happened to have, but not this afternoon. Her mind, for reasons she didn’t know, was on the past, the distant past of the 1950s and 1960s. On how hard those early years on the ranch had been; on how the four of them had worked to make something of it. There had been few days on which her brothers had not come home at night stinking of sweat, cattle, and horses, so drawn and fatigued they could barely speak, and sometimes so tired they couldn’t eat but would fall into bed in their clothes. And Dagmar herself had not only worked right out on the range with them when they needed her, but had fed them, and kept the house spotless, to say nothing of keeping up their often-sagging spirits.

Later, when they’d turned the corner and the Hoaloha Ranch was on its way to becoming a profitable enterprise, she hadn’t had to work on the range anymore, but for almost five years she’d cooked three big meals a day for twenty-five hungry cowboys and ranch workers and had done it all by herself, including the shopping and clean-up. Once, she’d kept count of the number of dishes and implements she’d had to wash in a typical week. It had come to 1,050 cups and glasses, 1,323 dishes, 1,890 utensils, and 126 pots and pans. And that was before automatic dishwashers. It seemed unthinkable to her now.

In addition to all that, she’d managed the accounts and supervised the payroll, no easy tasks during the lean years, when staying one step ahead of their creditors had been honed to a fine art, and the cash flow was so negative that one week out of four, on average, there was no money to pay the men.

She and her brothers had juggled and planned and gone without in anticipation of the time when the grueling work would pay off and the ever-expanding ranch would be carrying its own weight and more or less running itself. The brothers would then be real managers—managers on horseback—not glorified laborers. They would all get out of the miserable shack in which they lived and build a big, rambling ranch house for themselves—already they knew they would call it the Big House, as in those Westerns— where Dagmar would supervise the kitchen and household help instead of being it.

That time had eventually come, although Andreas had not lived to see it, but with human nature being what it was, it had failed to bring perfect happiness. Though none of them would admit it, they had missed the exhilaration of building something from nothing. Maintaining a cattle empire was pale stuff compared to carving one out. Dagmar, plagued by arthritis in her worn-out joints by then, had begun to dream of the days when the ranch was behind her and she could move down the mountain to the warmer, sunnier coast as a woman of leisure. And to be perfectly honest, she couldn’t wait for a house of her own, away from the two meddling, quarrelsome old men she had lived with almost her entire adult life. For peace.

And now she had that, too; she’d had it for almost ten years. Yet here she sat in her gated enclave for the wealthy, in what was surely one of the most beautiful spots in the world, holding a forgotten sardine in her left hand and dreaming, with a faint, wry smile on her face, of the laughter, the irritations, the lively arguments, and the many little trials of life with her brothers. Be careful what you wish for, she thought.

Had it truly been ten years since the terrible night she’d lost them both? In one way, the killing, the fire, and her surviving brother’s escape (if he did escape) seemed as vivid as if they had been a week ago; in another, it all seemed as if it had happened to another person, in another lifetime.

She was in the midst of these pointless, dismal thoughts when the sound of footsteps on the gravel path behind her brought her back to the present. Someone was rounding the curve that led to the cove. She threw the sardine, wiped her fingers, and quickly picked up the jet-black wig on the bench beside her. It had been taken off, as it usually was here, so that she could enjoy the breeze flowing through her scant gray hair. She had barely gotten it back on her head when the waiter from the Mauna Kai who usually brought her dinner came smiling into sight.

Could it be five o’clock already? Had she dozed without knowing it? The thought that she might turn into one of those drooling oldsters who couldn’t stay awake in public was a source of terror to her. She would end it all before it came to that. But no, when she turned to greet her visitor, he held an envelope that he held politely out to her. “It’s an e-mail for you, ma’am.”

Inasmuch as she refused to have a computer in the house, Dagmar had an arrangement with the Mauna Kai (one of many expensive but life-easing arrangements with the Mauna Kai) in which they kept an e-mail account for her. They would bring her any messages received and would send off whatever she might dictate in response.

“Thank you, Steven,” she said with a final, subtle adjustment of her wig from behind.

“I’m Faustino, Mrs. Torkelsson,” he said.

“Yes, of course. Faustino,” she said. “Now let me read this.”

From: Inge

To: Felix;Axel; Hedwig;Aunt Dagmar

Sent: Monday, June 08, 2004 2:17 PM

Subject: Amazing Development

Hold on to your socks for this one!

I just got off the phone with an Officer Pacheco of the Waimea Police Department.

The Grumman has been found! After ten years! A couple of skin divers spotted it in a few feet of water in a lagoon on some uninhabited, Godforsaken island 400 miles from here, and Officer Pacheco wants to know what we want to do about it.

The thing is, they saw some human bones in the cockpit! Can you imagine?

I told Pacheco I’d get back to him in a couple of days. I don’t think this is going to turn into a big deal, but I’m sure everyone will agree we’d better talk about it when we get together on Thursday—not at dinner, though, because John is coming with his friend at six. Suppose we meet here at four and we can talk it through. The last of my customers will be gone by then.

I should know more by the time I see you.

“Oh, dear,” Dagmar murmured, with an illogical but deeply felt sense that she had made this happen, that this unwelcome message from her niece wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t been maundering on about Torkel and Magnus, and about that appalling night. What would this mean? God forbid that the whole affair was going to be ripped open and reexposed like an ill-healed scar. Did she have the strength to go through it again? She was an old woman now. It would kill her.

She reread the message, this time with growing irritation. How flippant they were, this new generation, how little respect, how little appreciation, they had for the old people, the ones who had thanklessly slaved their lives away to build something for them. Silently, she shook her head. Hold on to your socks—as if this were an amusing bit of trivia to be passed on. Oh, it wasn’t that she didn’t love them—they were all she had—but they were almost like strangers to her now, this gaggle of nephews and nieces; members of a different species. They talked too fast, laughed too much—

Faustino cleared his throat. “Would you like to send a reply, Mrs. Torkelsson?”