San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  And then he had her up out of the chair and he was hugging her to him so fiercely the breath went out of her. “We’ve got to get a doctor, the best man there is, and we have to get you to the hospital because we can’t deliver a baby out here, I mean, I can’t—I’m no doctor—and if there’s an obstruction, a problem, any problem . . .”

  She held to him, rocked with him there on the protesting bleached-out boards of the long straight run of the porch while the wind blew the smell of the sea to her and the soft tremolo of the grazing lambs drifted across the yellowed fringe of the hills. “Hush,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’ll all work out fine. You’ll see.”

  * * *

  For the next two weeks, Herbie was busy in the toolshed across the courtyard from the house, disappearing after breakfast each morning and not emerging again till lunch, after which he locked the door of the shed and went off on his usual rounds. When she asked what he was doing out there every morning, he gave her a mysterious look and said it was a secret, but when she stepped out on the porch to hang the wash or shake out the tablecloth or sit in the chair with her knitting beneath a fog-shrouded sun or a sky blue all the way to the empyrean, her ears told her the secret had to do with the hammering of nails and the metronomic cleaving of wood with a handsaw. He was building something. And what could it be? A bassinet? A crib? It would be crude, whatever it was—he wasn’t a natural carpenter—but she would admire it and exclaim over it all the same. It was the thought that counted. And she couldn’t very well order a maple crib from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue—or could she? When one of the boats stopped by—the Vaquero or Bob Ord’s Poncador or the Hermes, the Coast Guard cutter—she could send off a letter and then one or the other of them could deliver it when it came in, but what address would she give back ashore? And how could they afford it in these times?

  At any rate, there came a day when the banging and sawing and the soft persistent rasp of sandpaper stopped altogether and he brought her out to the shed to show her what he’d wrought. The door stood open. She could smell the shellac before she’d got halfway across the yard. Inside, where the light from the open door fell across it in a savage slant, was a crib patched together from a dozen multihued scraps of wood and glowing under its coat of shellac. It was immense, big enough to hold five babies stretched out end-to-end, and in the depths of it, in lieu of a mattress, were the pillows stripped from the beds in the back end of the house, where Jimmie and the shearers slept. For a moment, she was speechless, and the silence hung between them until Herbie said softly, “I figured shellac instead of paint because I wouldn’t want the baby peeling off any flakes of paint and, I don’t know, poisoning himself. Because that’ll happen.”

  All she could do was laugh and then take him by the arm, right at the biceps, and pull him to her for a kiss. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Perfect.” She was going to go on, telling him she loved the way he’d matched up the different woods and how nice it would look in the corner of their bedroom, right next to the stove that was going to have its pipe refitted any day now, but she never had the chance because he beamed his smile at her and said, “How about let’s take the day off? A picnic. How does a picnic on the beach sound?”

  They went down to the harbor and spread a blanket in the sand. She’d made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on her own home-baked French bread, or the best simulacrum she could come up with, wrapped some oatmeal cookies in newspaper and poured the better part of a pitcher of iced tea (or cool tea, since they had no ice or means to make or store it) into a thermos, and they sat on the blanket and read their books and ate and gazed out to sea. The day was bright, the sun steady in the sky—early September on through October the best time for weather out here, or so Herbie assured her, and he’d had it from Jimmie—but it was brisk out in the open with no windbreak and she was glad she’d brought a sweater. She was just beginning to think about dinner, a long leisurely walk up the hillside, lamb chops simmering in butter and sage, more French bread, and then an evening spent out on the porch watching the sky change till night came on and they could go in and sit before the stove and talk in quiet voices about the baby and their plans for him—and names, names too—when Herbie suddenly let out a cry, jumping up from the blanket as if he’d been stung. “You see that?” he shouted, pointing out to sea.

  She was getting to her feet, struggling up, the extra weight she’d begun to put on making her awkward and uncertain in her movements. “What?” she said, shading her eyes to follow his gaze out across the sun-bleached water. “What is it?”

  “There! Don’t you see it?”

  Something was out there, a rolling undulant thing that shone blackly at the surface, glistening and sparking like an oiled shroud towed through the waves. “What is it, a porpoise?”

  “Killer whale. An orca. The one I told you about that’s been harassing the seals, eating them, that is—one bite and the water’s all blood and the seal’s there like a bone crossways in a dog’s mouth. But are you okay? I mean, to stay here while I run up to the house for the gun?”

  “Gun? What gun?”

  “The harpoon gun, what do you think?”

  This was a new gun, recently added to the collection thanks to the largesse of Hugh Rockwell, who’d sent it via the Hermes as a kind of consolation prize after continually delaying the loan to finance Herbie’s bid to buy the lease from Bob Brooks. It was a shining brass thing that might have been a musical instrument but for the barbed spear jammed into the barrel of it and it was Herbie’s newest treasure.

  “You’re not going to try to shoot that thing, are you?” She glanced down the shore to where their only craft—a rowboat—sat beside the crude dock and the shed Brooks had built for storing the wool sacks before they were shipped out.

  “Of course I am,” he said, already moving away from her.

  “But why?”

  His shoulders twitched, his feet danced—he was all nerves, all excitement. “We can’t have that thing out there killing off our seals.”

  “Why not? There are thousands of them—and we don’t have anything to do with them, anyway, do we? You’re not thinking of becoming a seal-skinner, are you?”

  Her attempt at humor fell flat: he wasn’t even listening.

  “It’s a killer, that’s all,” he said. “And I’ve never—” He broke off then, turned and bolted across the beach to the road, where he never stopped churning his legs, leaning into the grade and running as if he were crossing the tape in the hundred-yard dash—except that this was the mile-and-a-half dash. And all of it uphill. She called out his name, bleated it, but it was no use—he was already gone.

  Half an hour later—and she hadn’t known whether to stay put or follow him up the hill, finally opting to stay in the hope she could intercept him on his way down and talk him out of it—he was back, racing across the sand at a dead run, the gun slung over one shoulder and his yellow oilskin flapping behind him. She’d been sitting in the lee of a jagged boulder, her eyes fixed on the road, the blanket folded beneath her and the remains of the picnic packed away in the basket. As soon as she saw him she sprang up, waving her arms, but he ran right past her as if she didn’t exist. By the time she reached the place where the boat was he’d already dragged it across the beach by its painter and shoved it out into the foam of the surf, wet to the waist and hoisting himself up over the stern to snatch at the oars even as a breaker tossed the boat and the oars grabbed and he pitched forward into the next wave. The wind blew sand in her face and she had to turn her head and shield her eyes. When she looked up again he was a hundred yards out, the whitecaps beating round him and his hair flailing at his scalp.

  For the longest while she watched him, mounting higher up the beach and finally partway up the road to keep him in sight, the boat all but lost in the blinding shimmer of the sea. Soon he wasn’t much more than a speck on the horizon, out beyond Can Rock, Middle Rock and
the huge dun wedge of Prince Island. She was cold. She found a place out of the wind, wrapped herself in the blanket and cleared a spot where she could sit braced against the rocks, wondering whether she should go back up to the house for her coat—and the binoculars. The binoculars would certainly help, because he was so far out now she could barely see him, and the killer whale, if it was there at all and she fervently hoped it wasn’t, had faded away to invisibility.

  Of course a killer whale wasn’t a whale at all, but a dolphin, a toothed dolphin some thirty feet long and twelve thousand pounds in weight, a thing that preyed on the biggest whales in the sea—the blue whale, even, the largest creature in the history of the world. The encyclopedia, which she’d consulted the night Herbie had first told her he’d seen an orca in the harbor, said that they went for the lips and tongue, tore the tongue out—the tongue that alone was bigger than her husband and his rowboat combined. They were savage. Implacable. Killers.

  Suddenly she was angry. What was he thinking? Was he crazy? Even if he did manage to shoot the thing, then what—he could hardly expect to tow it back, could he? One man, in a rowboat, in a sea like this? He was impulsive, irresponsible. An hour before they’d been sitting on a blanket celebrating the biggest news of their lives, of her life, anyway, and now he was out there risking his neck without a thought for her or the baby either. The wind keened. She folded her arms across her breasts, pulled the blanket tight round her and stared out to sea at the speck that had become nothing now, that was gone. Outrage beat at her. The cold infuriated her. What would she do without him? What would her life be then, the life that hadn’t even begun till she answered the bell and opened the door of her apartment in the crowded churning city to see him standing there grinning up at her in his wing collar and bow tie and with the ends of his mustache freshly waxed? Bonjour, madame. Or is it mademoiselle? Enchanté. Hurt yourself out here and you were hurt forever.

  It was nothing she wanted to think about, a nightmare, a cauchemar. Furious, she turned her back on the sea, on him, and started up the long road to the house.

  Marianne

  If Marianne had been a boy she would have been named Herbert, after her father, but also after Elise’s father and her older brother too: Herbert, the most natural name, the only name, for a male baby. But this baby was female and before Elise had left for the mainland to stay first with Bob Brooks and his wife (who was also expecting) in their big house in Beverly Hills and then with a cousin in the San Fernando Valley, she and Herbie had agreed on Marianne, in the remote eventuality that she gave birth to a girl. Or at least Herbie kept insisting on its remoteness. When she reminded him that the chances were evenly divided, fifty-fifty, he waved her off. “Little Herbie’s going to help me dig that new septic field and shoe the horses and work right there beside me when we haul the provisions up from the beach and the wool on down. And he’s going to learn to shoot before he can walk.”

  A girl, a boy, in the long run it wouldn’t really matter to him—she knew that—and she was secretly pleased when the doctor, holding out the newest human being in the world to her as she came out of the fog of the ether, announced, It’s a girl. Herbie wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there for nearly two months now, so nervous he’d insisted on putting her on a boat to the mainland at the end of her seventh month. If he’d all but ignored her the day of the orca (which still breathed and swam and devoured seals as far as she knew), he’d grown increasingly solicitous as her breasts grew heavy, her abdomen swelled and her clothes shrank till she spent half her time sewing new seams in her dresses, skirts and blouses. He helped with the housework, made her sit in the evenings with her feet up on a stool, pressed his ear to the ball of her stomach—her womb—to hear the baby moving inside her, full of plans, infinite plans, but nervous too. Or not just nervous—terrified that the baby would come prematurely and it’d be left to him to deliver it. “If only Bob had thought to build a hospital out here,” he kept saying, his quick grin jumping to life, “we’d have nothing to worry about. Should I write him and complain?”

  She missed him terribly during those last two months. At the Brooks’ there were servants and she fell into a reverie of the household she’d grown up in, where her father kept a staff of seven, but servants were a thing of the past, of another life in another place, and she felt uncomfortable intruding in any case. With the Whites—her cousins in the Valley—she felt even more ill at ease. She insisted on helping with the cooking and clearing up, doing laundry, making up her own bed and such, but she was moving slowly now and felt tired all the time, and she didn’t want to be a burden, especially not to a cousin she hardly knew. And there was noise. Automobiles everywhere, people crowding the markets, the ceaseless chatter of the radio. When Herbie blew through the door of her room at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles four days after Marianne had come into the world, all she could say was, “Take me home.”

  But it wasn’t as easy as all that. Herbie had brought Jimmie back to the island and left him temporarily in charge because there was no other option and he needed urgently to get home and put things in order, but the doctor was adamant: the baby was not to leave the mainland until she reached a weight of ten pounds or he wouldn’t be held accountable. Ten pounds, that was the limit, the threshold, the inflexible line that kept them chained to shore. Herbie found them an apartment, and what choice did he have? It was a small place, two rooms, a furnished walkup on a busy street ten minutes from the hospital. He burned with energy, impatience, his face gone soft for the baby and hard for her, as if it was her fault they were imprisoned here. He was the one who’d married her, hadn’t he? He was the one who’d put his organ in her. He was the one.

  They quarreled and made up and quarreled again. Herbie was out all day, from first light to last, looking for work, anything to sustain them and pay off the maternity loan Bob Brooks had advanced them though he was short himself. There was no work, no work of any kind, however menial or ill paying or inconsequential. Hoboes were riding the rails. Men stood on the street corners three-deep selling pencils and apples to finesse the humiliation of begging outright. “What does she weigh?” Herbie kept asking. “Have you weighed her today? This morning? What about now?”

  When finally they were free to go and they drove up to Ventura in Bob Brooks’ car to catch the Hermes, her ten-pound four-ounce daughter asleep in her arms and her husband at the wheel beside her, she felt as if she weren’t in a car at all but an airplane, soaring high over everything. All she could think of was the sleigh bed with the cradle at the foot of it and the newly functional stove there that threw out heat till the room was as warm as any steam-heated maternity ward or furnished apartment. The sea smelled like paradise, the gulls were winged saints. And if the Hermes was on patrol for bootleggers and it took them all day before they finally rounded the point and motored into Cuyler Harbor, what did it matter? They were home.

  It was dark by the time the captain lowered the dinghy and had one of the sailors row them ashore. He was a new man, this sailor, someone they hadn’t met before, and she couldn’t see much of him in the dark beyond the soft pale glow of his cap and the red glare of the cigarette he held clenched between his teeth. He didn’t say a word till they reached the verge of the breakers and he eased up on the oars. “We’ll have to time this just right,” he said as they bobbed there in the darkness, the surf roaring and the long white hem of the wave-tips flaring out on either side of them. “Because we wouldn’t want any risk, you understand, to the baby, that is.”

  They were wearing life jackets, all three of them, Marianne so tiny hers was like a cradle she’d been tied into, cat’s cradle, a nest of string Herbie had fussed over for the past half hour. He paused now in the middle of a monologue about the wonders of the island to thank the man for his concern, then gave him detailed instructions about where it was best to get in and how to gauge the waves. The sailor said nothing. Herbie scrambled up to the bow to flash a light
ahead of them. As soon as he flicked it on, the grand sweeping semicircle of the beach sprang to life as if they were seeing it on a movie screen, faintly brown, faintly yellow, the surf foaming white and the road up to the house a jagged black slash in the distance.

  Then they were ashore, the sailor springing out to haul the boat up out of the surf and Herbie there, knee-deep in the water, to take Marianne from her and make sure of her. They were quick and efficient as they unloaded their things, baby clothes, provisions, the accumulation of two months and more ashore, the sailor pitching in without a word. When everything was out of the boat, he asked if they needed help getting it up the hill and Herbie just said, “Thank you again, but we can manage. We do live here, you know.”

  There was a moment of silence, Marianne asleep in her arms, the surf hissing over the sand and rattling its freight of shells and pebbles and whatever else it had picked up on the incoming tide. The sailor drew once more on the cigarette so that his face flared briefly, almost anonymously—he could have been anyone—then flicked the butt away on a streamer of red sparks. “Yeah,” he said finally, “to each his own, I guess. But good luck, huh?”

  “Luck to you too,” Herbie said.

  In the next moment the dinghy was afloat again, riding up the crest of an incoming wave, the oars fanning out like the legs of a water strider and the sailor’s white cap the only thing visible until the boat was swallowed up in the shadows. Herbie bent for his rucksack, then flashed the light ahead of them and they started up the road in the narrow tunnel carved out of the night. He was shaking his head, a flickering movement in the darkness, his face ghostly in the quavering beam of the flashlight. “God, it’s good to be done with all that, isn’t it? All that fuss and bother and everybody running around like it’s their last day on earth. I swear I’ll never leave this place again,” he said, “no matter what, I don’t care.” He stopped a moment and they both looked back to where the Hermes, lights glowing fore and aft, rode the black void of the sea. “Goodbye, world,” he sang out, “as far as I’m concerned you can all go to hell.”