“Sounds terrific, sir. Thank you.”
Mr. Fahey waved them toward the door. “Go on, then. Don’t look so happy. It’s an impossible job.”
“See you tomorrow, sir.”
“No, you won’t. I’ll be at work. I’m leaving you in the clutches of the women.” When Jamie had pulled open the door for Sarah, Mr. Fahey called, “Portraitist!”
Jamie turned.
The man was standing in front of his desk, hands in his pockets. “What do you think of my collection? It’s something, isn’t it?”
“It’s magnificent,” Jamie said truthfully.
“Magnificent.” Mr. Fahey nodded. “That’s right. Amazing what a little beef will buy.” He grinned and waved them out again.
* * *
—
Slaughterhouses, Sarah explained as they went back through the house. Half a dozen of them. Cattle and hogs. Processing plants and tanneries, too, or shares of them. Places that made fertilizer and glue and candles and oils and cosmetics. The Depression had hit the business but not as hard as it might have. Her father sold a lot of things people needed, even if they were finding ways to need less of everything.
At the front door, she smiled more freely than before and told him how glad she was he’d taken the job. Alice came running downstairs to see him off, too, full of reminders to bring his drawing materials when he came back. And he promised and smiled and waved and made his way back past the topiaries to the street and then back to his boardinghouse, downhill and up again, the neighborhoods contracting around him into ordinariness and then squalor.
He thought that when he and Sarah had walked around the lake he must have conveyed his feelings about animals, the burden of his anguish for them. Even if he hadn’t, he thought she ought to have intuited something. Or, really, he thought she ought to feel the same way he did.
Though he barely wanted to admit it, he’d already begun entertaining fantasies of finding a way to study at UW with Sarah, to become a real artist in Seattle, to be a young husband who came home to a pleasant, sunny house and kissed his wife and infant. The idea of a family of his own making had been more exotic and beguiling than anything he’d ever considered, and now…？ Tainted, ruined.
He wondered if some primal memory of the sinking of the Josephina had lodged in him and, over time, morphed into an outsize horror of fear and helplessness, of mass death. Though he didn’t think his horror could be outsize, really. How could it ever be big enough? And yet it must be somehow disproportionate because most people seemed untroubled by the origins of the meat they ate, by the scrawny dogs everywhere, abandoned in hard times, likely to starve or be picked up by the dogcatcher and killed. Why couldn’t he make peace? The world was not going to change. He would be happier if he could simply forget.
He skipped dinner and lay on his bed in the boardinghouse as evening purpled the window.
He loved Caleb, and Caleb killed animals. But hunting pained Jamie less than slaughter. Hunting was an intersection of two lives, not a corralling, an extermination.
But Sarah wasn’t the one cutting throats. To condemn her would be unfair. He hated that her father would be paying him in blood money, but maybe there was some good in relieving such a man of a tiny bit of his surplus fortune. （A very tiny bit.） He would also promise himself to do something good with some of the money. To buy food for stray dogs. Yes, that was what he would do. And otherwise he would try to put the slaughterhouses out of his mind.
* * *
—
That he found himself enjoying his time at Hereford House was both a relief and reason for self-recrimination. First and foremost, there was Sarah, who appeared unexpectedly and irregularly, climbing up to the attic （he had chosen to begin in the attic） to help sift through dusty files, matching scribbled receipts to miscellaneous drawings and paintings. The infatuation he’d felt after their first walks had been deflated a bit by the mounting evidence that she saw nothing wrong with her father’s business, but his attraction was undiminished. Not that she was flirtatious. She was sharp and attentive and meticulous. She seemed to relish setting things in order. He didn’t dare try to kiss her.
Alice had been waiting for him that first Monday morning, determined he would not do anything before he’d drawn her portrait. “We’ll go outside for the light,” she’d announced.
He drew her sitting under a cherry tree behind the house, her arms wrapped around one knee, seeming to suppress a smile. As he was working, another tall female figure came striding across the lawn in a skirt and cardigan, Jasper lumbering in her wake.