by Boyle, T. C.
Then there came a morning when Herbie couldn’t get out of bed. It was just after their second Christmas, a dark late-December morning, the wind chasing round the courtyard and the steady granular tap of the sand grains at the window the only sound in the world. She was up before him, at first light, feeding Marianne and putting on the coffee pot, and at first she didn’t think anything of it. Usually he was up first, burning with his uncontainable energy, running from one thing to another, but Marianne had woken her early and she took her out to the kitchen and let him sleep. When he didn’t come in, even after she’d fed Marianne her porridge, poured out a cup of coffee for herself, greased the griddle and mixed the pancake batter, she went back to the bedroom and found him lying there supine, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. “Bring me the aspirin,” he said, his voice clenched in his throat. “The whole bottle.”
“Are you ill?”
“And whiskey. Is there any whiskey left?”
“Whiskey? At this hour?” She crossed the room to him and laid her palm across his brow. “You don’t have a fever, do you? Or your back. Is it your back?”
“It’s my side. I don’t think I can get up.”
She nursed him through the morning, alarmed because he was always so stoic, never sick a day, never idle. His face was drained of color. He wouldn’t take anything to eat. She gave him some fruit juice out of a can and found half a bottle of whiskey, one he’d been hoarding, out in the toolshed. For the rest of the day, he alternated sips of whiskey and doses of aspirin, but every time he tried to get up, the pain was too much for him. The problem—and he explained it to her when she brought a plate of supper in to him, supper which wound up going cold—was that the shrapnel in him was migrating, pressing on something there, on his left side, just below the ribs, cutting into him all over again.
She’d pulled up a chair beside the bed and lifted Marianne into her lap. “You need a doctor,” she said. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor, right away.”
“No,” he said. “I can’t do that. I can’t leave you here on your own.”
“I can manage. It’ll only be a day. Or a day there and a day back. That’s all. Two days, maybe three. I’ll be fine. I will.”
“No,” he said, “no,” and he tried to shake his head for emphasis but the pain grabbed at him and he could only wince.
It went on like that for two days, the whiskey gone, no more than a handful of aspirin left and Herbie taking nothing but tea and broth and no way to contact anyone unless she got in the rowboat and rowed herself out of the harbor, south around Nichols Point and due east to Santa Rosa to try to find someone there to help, but the boat wasn’t built for the open ocean and she’d probably just wind up drowning herself—and even if she didn’t, even if she managed to make it, what would she do with Marianne in the interval and who’d look after Herbie? No, the only solution was to keep an eye out for a passing boat and pray for the best. But it was the dead of winter, January, and the weather was bad—if it cleared one day out of seven it was cause for celebration—and when the weather was bad the fishermen stayed ashore and the pleasure boaters never left the dock. So where was this miraculous boat going to come from? And how would they know there were people in trouble out here?
By the third day, he was marginally better, sitting up in bed, taking toast and coffee for breakfast and a bit of soup for lunch, but when he got up to use the bathroom he was hunched over and gasping and when he was done there were traces of blood in the toilet. If she’d been alarmed before, now she was frantic. “I can’t take it,” she told him. “I’m going down to the beach. To signal. There’s got to be a boat out there somewhere.”
“Signal?” His voice was choked. “With what?”
“I’ll wrap a sheet around the broom and wave it like a flag, a white sheet.”
He didn’t say anything, merely winced and closed his eyes.
The afternoon was cold, the wind stiff, the ocean pounded to a froth. Visibility was poor. She tried to make a game out of it for Marianne, drawing faces in the sand, bending to collect shells, but it was no fun—even with her mittens and scarf and her hood up, Marianne was chilled through, she could see that. Her cheeks were chapped. Her nose was running. She was a baby still, a month short of her second birthday, and taking her down here in weather like this was crazy. It was useless. The whole thing was useless.
She went about her chores that evening as if she were an automaton, making a dinner she alone would eat, feeding the baby and putting her to bed, clearing up, seeing that Herbie was as comfortable as possible. She tried to sit before the fireplace, tried to read, knit, occupy herself, but her mind kept churning. Finally, because she couldn’t just do nothing—he was in pain, he could be bleeding internally, dying—she went out in the yard with the sudden notion of starting a bonfire, setting the whole island ablaze if need be, anything to get somebody somewhere to see what was happening here.
The wind wouldn’t have it. It battered her as soon as she opened the gate, rocking her off her feet and stinging her face and hands with grit as she went about mechanically piling wood in the lee of the house—the precious firewood that had to be dug from the earth or hauled up from the seadrift below, wood there was never enough of. She knelt in front of the pile as if in a pew at church, mouthing silent prayers, but the matches flared out the instant they caught. Eventually, after going through half a box of matches and crumpling ball after ball of newspaper, she managed to work a thin thread of flame through the pile and for a moment she thought it would catch, but a gust snatched it away and the darkness rushed back in. In bed that night, lying sleepless beside her husband, she listened to the wind raking across the island, stretching itself, sucking in air till it was blowing a gale.
* * *
And then the miracle. In the morning it was clear, the wind was down and there was a boat in the harbor, a motor yacht that must have come in in the night to take refuge from the storm. She spotted it right away, as soon as she got out of bed to find Herbie bent to one side in the chair by the stove, the empty aspirin bottle clutched in his hand, the baby standing up in her crib and whimpering to be picked up and the binoculars on the hook by the door where she’d left them. “Keep an eye on Marianne,” she told him, pulling on her clothes, fighting her feet into her shoes and snatching up the broom with the sheet wrapped round it. “Don’t let her near the stove. I’ll be right back.”
The boat was the Bon Temps, out of Ventura, and it had drifted to the end of its anchor line with the incoming tide so that its stern faced straight on when she got down to the beach, breathless, her heart pounding and a shrill tocsin sounding in her head. All the way down she kept expecting to see the boat motor out of the harbor before she could get there and she’d pushed herself hard, risking a turned ankle or a fall or worse, rocks strewn everywhere and the sand drifted up to disguise them. For one frantic moment she’d thought of taking Buck, but she couldn’t spare the time to saddle him and so she’d just taken off running and hadn’t stopped till this moment, when she unfurled the sheet and began waving it wildly over her head. “Help!” she shouted, the urgent squall of her voice carrying out over the water to the mute rocking hull of the Bon Temps, which might as well have been a ghost ship for all she could see, but then they’d be asleep in their berths still, wouldn’t they?
It couldn’t have been much past seven. The water smelled oily and rank. It was calm, flat calm, the stalled sun throwing a hard metallic glint across the surface. “Help!” she shouted, up to her knees in the surf now, the sheet flapping in the breeze she was generating all on her own. “SOS! SOS!” Very gently, almost apologetically, the boat swung round on its tether, then swung back again.
She was thinking of the rowboat, of running for the boat and rowing out to them, when a figure appeared on the deck. It was a man, dark-haired, angular, his face smudged with sleep. She watched him cup his hands and shout, his voice s
tretched thin as wire: “What’s the trouble?”
“It’s my husband. He’s—he needs a doctor! Help, we need help!”
Now there was a second figure, a woman, her face pale and milky beneath the blond bob of her hair and the flat black slashes of her eyebrows. She watched the two of them put their heads together, conferring, and then the man was dropping the dinghy over the stern, climbing into it and steadying it for the woman. Then they pushed off, the oars dipped, and they were coming.
They made their introductions on their way up the hill—they were the Graffys, Dick and Margot, and they were coming down from visiting her parents in Avila Beach when the windstorm drove them into the harbor—and all Elise could do was apologize for hurrying them up the road till they were out of breath and the small talk fell away to the rasp of indrawn breath and the scrape of pebbles kicking out from beneath the soles of their shoes. The low sun elongated their shadows. The creek below chanted over its stones. She couldn’t help thinking what a glorious day it was, or would have been, if only there were no pain and no danger and things could go on as they’d gone on before.
When they got to the house, they found Herbie still propped up in the chair and Marianne—hungry, bored, impatient—perched in his lap with a picture book she’d lost interest in. “These people have come to help,” she said, the words all coming in a rush as she bent to lift her daughter and hug her to her. No one was dressed. The room was a mess. She felt ashamed suddenly.
The man—and what was his name again?—stepped forward and bent over Herbie while the wife hung behind in the doorway. “Is it bad?” he asked. He was thin, a man of sticks—she could see his shoulder blades projecting like a wooden hanger from beneath the weave of his turtleneck sweater—and he wore his hair parted just to the left of center and slicked down so it clung to his skull. His clothes were expensive—the sweater, dark woolen slacks, deck shoes with tassels—and he had a stern probing look that for an instant made her imagine he might be a doctor, and wouldn’t that be something, a doctor delivered to them out of the storm like an angel of mercy? But he wasn’t a doctor. He was a banker, as it turned out, president and chief officer of the Ventura Savings and Loan, one of the few banks that had survived the financial carnage. But he was here. And he had a boat.
Herbie—and this really put a scare into her—wasn’t able to respond. He just lifted his eyes, his gaze gone distant, and nodded his head.
“It’s his wound,” she heard herself say. “From the war. Shrapnel, he says. It’s pressing on something—inside. There was blood.” She looked away. “In the toilet.”
“Can you move?” the man was saying. “Can you get down to the boat?”
“I can’t”—the words pinched in his throat—“leave her here.”
“We’ll take her with us—there’s plenty of room. It won’t be a problem. And I can help you get down there—and Margot too, we’ll both help. Don’t worry.”
Herbie was shaking his head. “The animals,” he said—or no, he was croaking, his voice splintered and reduced. “Somebody has to stay.”
In the end, it was decided that Margot would stay there with her while Dick ran Herbie to shore, and there were assurances all round that everything would be fine, doctors what they are today, and Dick would take him to his personal physician, best man on the west coast, fix him up in no time, just you see.
* * *
There was the first night, Margot a godsend—just her presence, her presence alone—and she couldn’t thank her enough. Elise made up the bed in Jimmie’s room for her and they sat before the fire and talked about the little things, trivial things, the weather, boats, fashions, life in Ventura and Los Angeles, the motion pictures, never letting a silence fall between them for fear that everything would begin to unravel if they had even a moment to think about what they were doing, strangers thrust together in an emergency, as if their ship had gone down and they were clinging to the wreckage. Margot spent a long time in the bathroom the next morning and when she came out she was wearing makeup, her eyebrows two perfect plucked arches outlined with pencil, her lips a vampish red, her hair blondly gleaming. She sat in the kitchen, looking embarrassed, and she would accept nothing but coffee. They both watched for the boat all through the day but the boat never came. Elise tried to be cheerful, offering to show her guest down to the beach or up to Harris Point for the views, but Margot said she wasn’t feeling very well—she hadn’t slept, it was the strange bed, it was always like that with her and she just couldn’t explain it. “Even on the boat—” she began, and then caught herself.
As the day wore on Elise began to feel a constraint between them, an overpoliteness that became awkward, as if they really didn’t know what to say to each other. It was clear that Margot was bored and anxious and was beginning to regret her rashness or altruism or whatever it was that had made her offer to stay on. Which only made Elise feel guilty and inadequate—and foolish too. What were a couple of horses and a flock of sheep that they couldn’t be left behind for a day or two? And the house—what must she have made of the house, with its crude furnishings, the guns on the wall, a stove from the last century? And the larger question her guest was too delicate to ask: How could she live like this? How could anyone?
The second night, when darkness sheeted down in increments over the water and it became apparent to them both that the Bon Temps wouldn’t be returning, Margot looked grim and accusatory. There was no gaiety, no pretense. Elise tried to make conversation: “You know, it really is wonderful to live out here, away from everything. You’d be surprised.” Margot just gave a her look. “Though it takes some getting used to, of course. I don’t know if I told you, but I grew up in New York, in Rye, with a house full of servants. I never washed a dish in my life.” She gave a laugh. “Barely knew how to cook.” There was no response to this. Margot fished a silver lighter from her purse, lit a cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke with a long withering sigh.
At dinner, she consented to take a plate of lamb and potatoes with canned wax beans and a cup of tea, but she excused herself immediately after—and didn’t offer to help clean up as she had the night before. Or to mind Marianne while Elise was washing the dishes. She hardly even glanced at her. Just went to her room and closed the door.
It was infuriating. But why should she care? Why should she stand there at the counter and try to make small talk with this woman, explain herself—or worse, apologize? Or be made to feel inferior in her own house while all that mattered was that Herbie was somewhere out there across the waves, at the doctor’s, in the hospital, suffering, needing her, and she was stuck here with a stranger whose smile kept tightening and tightening till it was like a screw worked into a plank of smooth knotless wood.
The morning crashed down on them in a sudden burst of rain that hammered at the roof and pocked the courtyard with puddles. She had to force herself from bed: there would be no boat today, no Herbie, no word even. She kept telling herself everything would be fine, it was just a scare, that was all, but she pictured him strapped down on an operating table, his eyes sunk back in his head, the surgeon there with his tools like instruments of torture, and it all became confused with images of the sheep they slaughtered for the table, the heavy bluish sacks of their intestines, the blood that pooled in the bucket till it was like oil, dark and viscous and without sheen. When Marianne, pulling herself up by the slats of her crib, said, “Daddy, Daddy,” she almost broke down. And when Margot, hunched by the fire with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, said, “I don’t care what the weather is, Dick’ll be here, I know it, he wouldn’t desert me,” she couldn’t think of a word in response.
* * *
Just after noon, while she sat in her chair reading to Marianne from a book of nursery rhymes, the Bon Temps, rocked by a heavy swell, pulled into the harbor. The rain had slackened but the wind had picked up so that it was hard to see anything out there even with the binocular
s. It was Margot who spotted it. She’d been out on the porch for the better part of the morning, wrapped in an old coat of Herbie’s Elise had loaned her, her hair bound up in a kerchief and the binoculars pressed to her eyes, unfazed by the cold and the rain drooling from the eaves, willing the boat to appear. “They’re here,” she said, pushing through the door, her voice flat and annunciatory, as if to betray excitement would make it seem that there’d ever been a doubt in her mind.
Margot didn’t bother to wait while Elise dressed the baby in her jacket and dug out the umbrella, going on ahead with the scarf cinched tight under her chin and the cloth bag containing the few things she’d managed to bring off the boat with her clenched under one arm. Elise followed her tracks in the mud all the way down the road and across the beach to where the dinghy was cutting through the curtain of rain, already halfway to shore. There was a man at the oars—narrow shoulders, blue cap: Dick—and behind him, in the stern, a figure she couldn’t quite make out, though she was sure it was Herbie, Herbie come back to her with pills and emollients, stitched up maybe, but whole. It took her a moment, the oars dipping and rising, the tight slashing bow of the boat coming closer, to realize she was wrong. This wasn’t Herbie. This wasn’t Herbie at all.
The rain slanted down. The surf crashed. She felt all the will go out of her. She watched the boat as if it were a bullet suspended in slow motion and driving straight for the core of her, where the real pain lived. That was when she recognized the figure in the stern, the little loose-limbed man perched there like a monkey, his hair gone to gray and the slicker drawn up to magnify the fixed black stare of his eyes. It wasn’t Herbie. Not Herbie. No—and what this meant she could only guess, and even her best guess chilled her—it was Jimmie.
