San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  Herbie wasn’t happy about it, nor was she. There were strangers in the house and they weren’t invited guests or members of the Mexican-Indian crew who came out twice a year for the shearing and whom they’d come to know over time as friends and employees both. Where was their privacy? What did these boys expect of them and what were they to expect in return? From the very first night they felt constrained in their own home, but the country was at war and there was a quid pro quo at work here: billet the sailors and stay or refuse and be forcibly evicted. The government held all the power and now more than ever it would be a simple thing for some official to revoke Bob Brooks’ lease, making it an issue of national security, and no one understood that better than Herbie. If that wasn’t enough, there was the appeal to his patriotism. There was no one, not in Washington or aboard any ship still afloat in the Pacific, who could question his loyalty, that was how he saw it—and he let her know it, lecturing on late into the night, airing his grievances, pacing up and down the room flinging out his hands like a soapbox orator, as worked up as she’d ever seen him. “I’m a veteran, for Christ’s sake. I fought for my country and I’ll fight again, if that’s what they want from me. Patriotic duty. Don’t make me laugh. It’s an insult is what it is.”

  By the next morning, he’d come around. He was unusually quiet at first, hovering over a cup of coffee and sitting there at the table staring out into the gloom while she stirred oatmeal and sliced bread to toast in the oven. He’d mumbled a good morning when he came into the room, but hadn’t said another word till finally, out of nowhere, he announced, “The Navy’s not the problem. I see that now.” He shifted in his seat, set the cup down and began tracing an invisible figure on the tabletop with the bottom edge of it. “Of course I do. It’s the Japs, the Japs are the problem. And we’ve all got to unite against them.”

  It was seven a.m. and the sailors were asleep still—or that was her presumption, anyway. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe they were already out on patrol, trading the rifle between them.

  “Still, it burns me up to think they’d send us a couple of idiots like this—babies, that’s what they are, probably cry for their mother the first time a shell goes off. And if they think they’re just going to laze around here like it’s some kind of rest home, they’re nuts. I want you to lay out kitchen duties for them—they’ll wash dishes and scrub this place till it glows, by Christ—and I’ll let them know what’s needed in the yard, wood detail, for one thing. We’re two more mouths to feed now, two more adults, and that means double the firewood, double at least—”

  When the boys did come in—at quarter of eight—they looked even more subdued than they had the night before. Their uniforms—their blues—were wrinkled, as if they’d slept in them, but they seemed to have washed their faces and hands and their nails looked clean enough as they sat down at the table and she served out their bowls of oatmeal and set a platter of toast and a jar of jam before them. Herbie was already out in the shed, doing whatever he did on cold damp socked-in mornings like this, and that relieved some of the tension. The girls had already eaten and since the holiday was over, she had them in their room getting ready for school, which would commence as soon as she’d fed the sailors and gone out into the yard to ring the bell.

  Reg, the taller of the two, the one with the caramel-colored eyes and the pink slashes of scalp showing through his crew cut, ate with the kind of four-square rigidity you’d expect of a military man—or boy—but his compatriot, Freddie, slouched over his plate and bowl as if he’d never had any discipline in his life, not even from his mother. After a good five minutes of silence, during which the only sounds were the metallic clank of the woodstove and the click of their spoons against the rims of their bowls, Reg spoke up. “I’m sorry to bother you, missus, but you wouldn’t have a little butter for the toast? Please, I mean?”

  And now she was embarrassed in her own kitchen. Butter? She hadn’t seen butter in weeks. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with jam for now because, well, since Pearl Harbor we haven’t been able to get any regular supplies—”

  “Really? We’ve got crates of the stuff back at the base, right, Freddie?”

  “Yeah, we could’ve . . . if we’d known, that is—”

  “It’s all right,” she said. She was standing at the counter, tidying things before going out to ring the school bell. “We’ve learned to make do. Not that it isn’t hard sometimes. This past month especially.”

  There was a silence, then Freddie spoke up. “But what do you do out here normally—I mean, before all this started? For entertainment, I mean?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, there’s plenty to keep us busy. You get used to the solitude after a while. There’re the girls, of course. And we play cards, read, listen to radio programs, I suppose, just like anybody else.”

  She saw them exchange a look. “That sounds swell,” Reg said finally.

  And then, because it was five of eight and she made a strict rule of starting school on time, she folded the dish towel across her arm, replaced it on its wooden rack and stepped to the door. “I’m sorry, but it’s time for school,” she announced. “You’ll hear me ringing the bell”—she checked her watch—“in exactly three minutes. You won’t mind cleaning up your dishes, will you? You’ll find the soap under the counter here.”

  The Horses

  For the most part, the Navy boys kept out of the way. They appeared regularly for meals—they never missed a meal, give them credit there—and the girls came to worship them as if they were celestial idols set down on the earth and given the power of speech and animation, but as the weeks went by she saw less and less of them. If they weren’t in their room leafing through comics and back issues of Herbie’s sportsmen’s magazines, they were wandering the island—aimlessly, she suspected—propped up by the single gun they shared between them. They never said a word about Herbie’s collection, which had grown to some thirty-odd firearms now, except to let out a few exclamations of surprise and approbation the first time Herbie led them into the living room to show it off—and if they resented the fact that a private citizen had an entire arsenal at his disposal while they went half-armed, they never let it show.

  That they were bored was a given. There was nothing on the island for them but duty as defined in their orders—they wanted life, nightlife, gin mills and dance halls and girls their own age, movies, automobiles, swing bands, Harry James and Benny Goodman—and she couldn’t blame them. What she could blame them for was neglecting the chores she and Herbie set out for them—more than once she had to remind them that appearances to the contrary she wasn’t their mother, and if they wanted to eat they had better make sure they set and cleared the table, washed the dishes and kept the woodbox full to overbrimming. And if Reg wanted to help Marianne with her arithmetic or Freddie read aloud to Betsy, so much the better, but they did that on their own time.

  They were good with the girls, she had to admit it, but the diversions of children’s games, hide-and-seek, red light–green light, checkers, Old Maid and Go Fish, only went so far. She registered the tedium in their faces, every day the same, nowhere to go, nothing to do. The one thing they did manage to show interest in—besides eating, that is—was the horses. At lunch one afternoon, the girls giggling and generally being silly vying for their attention and the dog looking up fixedly as the platter went round the table, Reg cleared his throat and turned to Herbie. “So the horses out there in the barn—Buck and Nellie? Do you ever ride them or are they strictly for hauling things up from the harbor?”

  Herbie was in an ebullient mood, chasing after the subject of the sheep and how well they were doing because of what was beginning to look like a well-watered and prosperous winter no matter what the Interior Department, the Navy or the Japanese might have to say about it, and he’d just pointed out to her that more of the ewes seemed to be throwing twins this time around, when he paused for a moment to lift the
soupspoon to his mouth and Reg slipped in his question. Herbie took a moment, setting down the spoon and delicately patting his lips with the napkin, always fastidious—he had beautiful manners, whether he was knocking on a door on the Upper East Side with his mustaches waxed or sitting here in the dining cum living room of a patchwork house framed by the sea. “Oh, we ride them,” he said, “of course we do—the exercise is good for them, Nellie especially. Buck, I’m afraid, is pretty much on his last legs—”

  She looked up sharply. This was a sore subject between them. Betsy was eight and Marianne had just turned eleven, and while they were old enough to understand that all things had to die, especially on a working ranch—the sheep Herbie shot for meat, the turkey the foxes had made off with, one of the cats that had crept under the porch to give up the ghost in peace and was discovered only when it began to emit an odor—the horses were in a different category altogether. They were pets as much as anything else. The girls had grown up with both of them, and Buck, a big patient bay roan, had been the one they learned to ride on. He was old and stiff, they knew that—according to Jimmie, Buck had been on the ranch since Bob Brooks took over—but she didn’t like Herbie to mention it in front of them. Once, after he’d gone on about Buck staggering on the road up from the harbor (“He damned near pitched over the side into the ravine and me with him”), Betsy had asked, “Is Buck going to die?” and she’d tried to be forthright with her. “Yes,” she’d said, “everything dies, even Buck. But not for a long while yet, so don’t you worry about it.” “Why?” Betsy asked, and whether she was asking why she shouldn’t worry or why everything dies, Elise didn’t know. And in any case she really didn’t have an answer.

  “He’s got to be twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. But he’s been a good old horse.” Herbie looked to where the girls sat side by side, staring up at him over their plates. “Right, girls?”

  They both nodded solemnly.

  “So would you mind then if we took the horses out?” Reg persisted. “It would make it a whole lot easier for us to patrol—get out to the other end of the island, I mean, out to Point Bennett and such.”

  Herbie was feeling grand and expansive, riding one of his currents. If they’d asked her, she would have said no. The boys were well meaning, she supposed—or well meaning enough—but once they got out of sight of the house there was no telling what they might do. She was afraid for the horses—and for them too. That was all they needed: a boy sailor with a broken neck. But Herbie just waved a hand grandly and said, “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  On the night of February twenty-third, a Japanese I-17 submarine—a huge thing, longer than a football field—slipped into the Santa Barbara Channel undetected by anyone, not the Coast Guard or the Air Corps or the two boy sailors sent out to San Miguel Island to protect her and her family from attack. It was theorized that the submarine was piloted by a man who knew these waters intimately, either a former fisherman or perhaps captain of one of the Japanese tankers that regularly took on crude oil here before the outbreak of war. In any case, just after seven that night, the submarine surfaced and began shelling the Ellwood Oil Field just west of Santa Barbara, intent on destroying the oil storage tanks and setting off a firestorm. It was the first attack on the continental United States by a foreign power since the War of 1812 and while none of the shells hit its target, the sirens went off, a blackout was imposed and people up and down the coast were thrown into a panic, thinking an invasion was under way. On San Miguel Island that night—and she remembered it clearly—they were all sitting around the fire playing cards while the girls did their homework and the wind assaulted the house with its grab bag of shrieks, whistles and growls. Nobody heard a thing.

  They only learned of the attack the following morning, when the shortwave radio—given over now strictly to naval pursuits—began to buzz with the news. A pall fell over the house. They all gathered in the living room, even the girls, who couldn’t be kept away, the voice of the naval operator hissing and crackling over the bare details, Enemy submarine, nineteen hundred hours, casualties as yet unknown. The sailors sat there perched on the edges of their chairs, white-faced and stricken, as Herbie communicated with shore, their feet tapping nervously and their eyes darting to the windows as if they expected to see the Imperial Army out there secreted amongst the sheep. Herbie was outraged. He kept accusing them, as if the whole thing were their fault, as if they could have been expected to identify an enemy submarine forty-two miles away in the dark of night. “Where were you when we needed you?” he demanded. “If you’d been out there on patrol you might have spotted them and radioed their location to shore—we could have called out the planes and bombed them, could have wiped them out, the dirty sneaking Nip bastards.”

  She watched Herbie fuming over the radio in the impotence of his rage, his arms flapping at his sides and his hair on end, and all she felt was a hopeless sinking fear. Their sanctuary was gone, the invaders at their doorstep—they could be anywhere, already landed at Simonton Cove or right down there in Cuyler Harbor for all she knew. She thought of the Japanese fishermen who’d come to the house all those years ago, saw their faces arrayed before her, such polite men, so mild—and so delighted with the baby. How could men like that threaten them? They were decent at heart, she knew they were—the captain spoke French even. But then—and the thought chilled her—there were the Japs she read of in the newspapers, demonic twisted little men spitting babies on their bayonets, raping women wholesale, murdering, thieving, leaving Nanking in ruins and Shanghai in chains. That was the reality. And this, this cockeyed dream of wide-open spaces, of freedom and self-reliance and goodness, simple goodness, was the delusion.

  “Over and out,” Herbie pronounced, his voice too loud by half as he switched off the radio and spun round on the sailors. “What are you waiting for? You want to ride the horses? We’ll ride the horses. Here”—and he crossed the room to the wall decorated with guns, chose one and handed it to Reg Bauer. “And you, Freddie, make sure you have extra clips of ammunition for that Springfield of yours—they did give you ammunition, didn’t they?”

  Freddie had half-risen from the chair, looking stunned. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I think so,” and he straightened up to his full height—which couldn’t have been much more than five-foot-four—and tried his best to look martial. And what was she thinking? That this was what stood between her and the Imperial Army? This boy? This and the other one, who looked as if he’d never even raised his voice in all his life?

  “All right,” Herbie was saying, and he’d taken down a gun for himself, one of the big ones—was it the elephant gun, was that it?—“we’re going out that door in two minutes flat and we’re going to patrol every square foot of this island. You have your binoculars?”

  The boys just gaped at him.

  “Well, get them! And be quick about it! Who knows but that”—and here he caught himself in mid-sentence. She knew what he meant to say—they’re already here—but he didn’t want to alarm her, she could see that. Or the girls. Or these two boys either. This was the moment of crisis and she felt herself go out to him: he was equal to it. If she’d ever doubted that, here was proof of it.

  “And when we get done with the first circuit of the island,” he was saying, “you know what we’re going to do?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’re going to go around again, that’s what.”

  * * *

  The following week the Hermes came to anchor in the harbor and when she saw the boat shining there in the distance it was as if the great American eagle itself had come swooping in to the rescue. She’d been living in dread all week, neither the shortwave nor the Zenith bringing them anything concrete by way of news except to say that the shelling had been an isolated event and that the Japanese, far from initiating an invasion, were stuck all the way on the other side of the Pacific and if the U.S. Navy had anything to say about it, that was where they would stay.
Later, much later, when the war was over and the great cities of Japan were crushed under the weight of their own shame and the American bombs that had paid them back a thousand times over for Pearl Harbor and Bataan and all the rest, she learned that the Ellwood incident was an aberration, the only attack on the American mainland in the entire course of the war, and that the submarine’s captain—who had in fact piloted an oil tanker in these waters before the war—had been on a personal vendetta to avenge an insult he’d suffered at the hands of the refinery’s American workers. The submarine’s gunners had been inept, missing everything they fired on. And the submarine itself, having delivered its salvo, had turned tail and run halfway across the ocean.

  But she didn’t know that then. All she knew was that the Japanese had struck and could strike again at any time. She couldn’t go out in the yard after dark without feeling as if the night had turned hostile, every sound transmogrified till she heard the roar of cannon in the crash of the surf or the keening of an aircraft engine in the sudden sharp cry of a gull. She was afraid for the girls. For Herbie. For herself. She went on as if nothing had changed, cooking, cleaning, sewing, keeping school, mending Herbie’s clothes and feeding the pets, but all the while she felt the tension deep inside her as if it were a physical abnormality, as if her stomach was a knot of twisted wire, barbed wire, the kind they used to repel invasions.