San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  The Hermes brought relief from all that. The sight of it alone was enough—here were their true protectors, undaunted, patrolling the waters as they always had and always would, My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, and she never thought, not for a minute, that they’d come to evacuate them. Not these men, not now, not when every American had to stand united. They’d come with supplies, with relief—they’d come because they cared.

  The whole household erupted. She couldn’t find a hat, Marianne was barefoot, Herbie pulling on the first thing that came to hand. There was no thought of the stove or the livestock or keeping a watch over the house—they were out the door, all of them, hurrying down to meet the boat, the sailor boys, the dog, she and Herbie and the girls, who were positively giddy at being let out of school early. And before they’d even got the supplies unloaded, they had the news and the news was what she wanted to hear: the danger was minimal, nothing really, and in any case it had passed. Did she believe it? Not really. Or not entirely. And Herbie was barely mollified, though he quizzed the captain and crew for hours and when they’d left read through the mail and the newspapers they’d brought along like an exegete bent over the Book of Revelation, weighing each phrase for nuance as if he could see through to a truth the world was hiding from them.

  There were six letters from her mother, each more gut-wrenching and strident than the last, as if they’d already been taken prisoner and sent to some resettlement camp in the jungles of Malaya. Wasn’t this enough? her mother demanded. Wasn’t it proof in the pudding? If there was ever a sign from God, wasn’t this it? Her mother wrote in an elegant backslant that tended to crimp and run off the page at the end of each line and she could picture her sitting there at the secretary in the parlor at home all the way across the country, her mouth compressed and the pen clamped firmly in her gliding fingers. Each letter ended with the same imperative, underlined twice: Come home!

  Though she had no idea of when she’d be able to post it, she wrote a long letter in reply, assuring her mother that everything was fine (though it wasn’t and never would be again till the Japanese crawled back into their holes and the Interior men filed their surveys in the wastebasket), and that she couldn’t imagine any life but this. Then she went on for pages about Marianne and Betsy and their accomplishments and how the peace and beauty of the island would not only see them through this war as it had seen them through the Depression, but that they’d be stronger, purer and more self-reliant as a result. She sealed the envelope, licked the stamp and almost believed it herself.

  The weeks dropped by. Herbie, clacking along on the rails of an idea, indefatigable, unswerving, kept up a watch over the island whether it distracted him from her and the children and took him away from his chores or not—he was out at dawn, the binoculars dangling from his neck, a rifle slung over one shoulder and two cartridge belts marking an X across his chest, and he made the rounds again at dusk. Reg and Freddie, though, soon lost interest once it became apparent that the threat had dissolved and the days were as long as they’d ever been and the shore just as far away. They began to slack off on their chores, disappearing immediately after meals—reconnoitering, as they called it—so that Herbie had to lay down the law every other day it seemed. She saw the collision coming, both boys bridling under the whip, until finally Reg had had enough and spoke up in the middle of one of Herbie’s lectures on personal responsibility. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, stroking the lump of his Adam’s apple with two tense fingers and shooting Herbie a look, “but you’re not our commanding officer—”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “And we do feel”—a glance for Freddie—“that we’re doing everything the U.S. Navy expects from us.”

  “Yeah,” Freddie put in. “And more.”

  They were at the table. Another evening. Another meal. The pans piled up in the kitchen and the grease hardening on the plates. The smell of woodsmoke, of ash, of the dog wet under the table. Herbie pushed back his chair and gave them a withering look. “If the girls weren’t sitting here at this table, I’d tell you in no uncertain terms exactly what kind of job you’re doing around here. And I swear I don’t know what the U.S. Navy might or might not expect, but I’m in charge of this household and you’ll work to my standards and like it. That woodpile is a disgrace. And I haven’t seen anybody touch a shovel out in the yard for a week—a week at least. No, listen, I’ll make it simple for you: you get up off your rear ends and get out there in the kitchen right this minute or tomorrow morning you don’t eat.”

  * * *

  Neither of them showed up for breakfast the next morning, the first meal they’d missed in the three months and more they’d been billeted on the island. They’d cleared up in the kitchen the night before but they were sullen about it and afterward they went out wandering and didn’t come back till late—she was awakened by the scrape of their footsteps on the porch, followed by the faint metallic sigh of the door to their room easing back on its hinges, and checked the clock at her bedside: 1:35 a.m. There was no firewood in the box by the stove when she woke and she had to go out to the woodpile herself to fetch enough to make breakfast. She saw right away that it had been neglected—most of what was left were the big pieces that needed cutting and splitting—and she made a mental note to take the boys aside at lunch and remind them before Herbie found out, but then they didn’t come in for lunch.

  Herbie had spent the morning patrolling on foot, hiking up Green Mountain to glass the waters to the north and west, and he exploded when he saw they weren’t there. “The little crap artists,” he spat, and she had to warn him to watch his language even as the girls looked up from their plates and an indecisive April sun sketched a panel of light on the wall and then took it away again. “If they think they can defy me . . . Let them eat dirt, then, I don’t care. We’ll see how long they hold out.”

  What she didn’t tell him, in the interest of peace, was that a loaf of yesterday’s bread had turned up missing, along with several chunks of lamb crudely hacked from the joint in the cool room, as well as the last of the basket of apples the Hermes had brought out to them. What she did say was, “Maybe you were too hard on them last night. They have their pride too, you know. Remember yourself at their age, what you must have been like?”

  “Hard on them? Jesus! It’s amazing they have the energy to wipe their own asses—”

  “Herbie,” she warned.

  “Herbie, what? We’ve been through all this before. I’m fed up, that’s all.”

  “But they’re here and they’re not going away, not as long as there’s a war on—and the war hasn’t been going very well for us, has it?”

  “You can say that again.” He was mopping his plate with a crust of bread and he paused to glare at her as if she’d personally started the war and armed the Japanese till they were all but invincible.

  “We just have to face facts—the Navy’s in charge now and they’re going to do whatever they want, not only here but up and down the coast. Just be thankful they didn’t send us fifty sailors.” She got up from the table and began clearing away the unused place settings, then paused to hover over the girls. “Girls, you’d better finish up and take your plates out to the kitchen—I’ll be ringing that bell for afternoon session in twenty minutes on the dot.” Both girls shoveled up their food—it was baked beans today, with two strips of bacon each and a can of creamed corn—picked up their plates and retreated through the door.

  She watched Herbie a moment, his jaws working so that a hard line of muscle flexed on either side of his mouth. She let out a sigh. “I don’t like it any better than you do, but I say we all just try to get on as best we can, all right?”

  “No, it’s not all right.” He glared up at her, his jaws still working. “I’m going to report them, that’s what I’m going to do—get somebody else out here, men, somebody who knows what work is. Hell, even Jimmie’s worth the two of
those idiots combined.”

  It was then that Freddie’s face appeared at the window—the uneven crop of his hair (engineered privately, in his room), the too-big forehead and dwindling eyes—and right away she could see that something was wrong. Her first thought, and it clenched her heart, was that the Japanese had come, but that wasn’t it at all. He gestured wildly, then pushed open the door, his breath coming hard. “It’s the horse,” he said. “He—”

  Herbie jerked to his feet. “What horse? What are you talking about?”

  “Buck. We were—Reg was riding him—and he turned up lame.”

  “Riding him? I told you, I warned you—you don’t ride that horse unless I say so.”

  “He’s having trouble—he’s just standing there on three legs, and we can’t get him to walk.”

  The next question was where—up on the bluff at Nichols Point—and then Herbie was muttering curses and angrily thrusting his feet into his boots while she hurried out in the yard to ring the school bell. The girls had been in their room playing, and now they came slouching across the courtyard, looking put upon. “You said twenty minutes,” Marianne complained.

  “Something’s come up. I’ve got to go with your father for a minute.”

  She could see the fear seep into their eyes—they knew why Santa hadn’t come at Christmas, knew why the sailors were there and that the shells had fallen on Ellwood—and more than ever in that moment she hated the war and the constant tension and what it was doing to them all. “It’s nothing to worry over,” she said, and heard the falseness in her own voice. “Just one of the sheep. It’s nothing. And I expect you both to do your reading assignment just as if I were here—and I warn you, you’ll be writing reports the minute I get back. So no dawdling.”

  Nellie was just outside the gate, where Freddie had left her. She was lathered and her sides were heaving. Herbie took one look at her and swung round on Freddie. “You take this animal up to the barn and rub her down. And then you feed and water her, you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Goddamn you, you better.”

  In the next moment Freddie had turned to lead the horse to the barn and she was following her husband along a sheep path through the dunes and chewed-over scrub. Nichols Point was less than two miles off and mostly downhill and they moved quickly. “You think it’s bad?” she asked, but he never turned round and never bothered to answer. He was worked up, she could see that, and she almost felt sorry for Reg—almost, though whatever he had coming to him he’d brought it on himself.

  When they got close she could see the horse framed in the distance against an ocean the color of soapstone and a sky that went just a shade lighter. It was misting and the wind had cut off altogether. Reg was standing off to one side, his hands in his pockets. The horse—Buck—had his head lowered, but he wasn’t cropping grass, and he was favoring the left front leg.

  “I don’t know what happened to him,” Reg sang out when they were still a hundred feet away. “I was just riding him along the bluff here, looking for the enemy, you know? And he pulled up lame.”

  Herbie ignored him. He went up to the horse and patted his shoulder to calm him. With an effort, Buck raised his head, but the motion staggered him so that he had to put weight on the bad leg, just for an instant, and that staggered him again. Herbie knelt beside him to run a hand over the injured foreleg, taking his time, feeling for a break. Then he rose to his feet and still he said nothing.

  Reg was cupping his hands to light a cigarette. “Well?” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Get out of my sight,” Herbie spat.

  “But I didn’t do nothing. You yourself said he was old—”

  “Just go. Go on, get!”

  They both watched the sailor adjust his shoulders and start back across the wet field, trailing smoke and sauntering as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “It’s broken, isn’t it?” she said. He didn’t answer. “Mon amour,” she said. “Parlez moi.”

  He just shook his head. Buck set his hoof down, then jerked it back again so that it hung limp in the air. “We’re going to need to move him twenty feet or so—to the edge of the bluff there,” Herbie said finally. “Can you grab hold of his halter while I take the saddle off him?”

  It came clear to her then. “You’re not going to bury him?”

  His voice was hard, as if he weren’t talking to her at all but to Reg or Freddie or the Japanese in the white coat who’d had the effrontery to sit there in their living room like an authentic human being: “You want to dig the hole? Christ, it’d take a week.”

  And then the saddle lay in the dirt and Buck moved under her hand in a series of three-legged jerks, a foot at a time, until he stood poised there on the verge of the cliff that gave onto the bay below. He was a horse, only a horse, and he’d outlived his time, she understood that, told herself that, but when Herbie pulled the black snub-nosed pistol—the gift—from his pocket and pressed it to the animal’s head, she felt as if she were dying herself.

  All that was left was the report of the pistol—two reports, in quick succession—and Herbie jumping aside as the failing legs kicked out and the big roan body hit the ground and the ground shifted and it was gone.

  The Accident

  So he was angry, so he was furious, and the whole way back to the house he kept muttering and cursing and he never thought to offer her his hand or put an arm round her shoulders, as if her feelings counted for nothing, as if she hadn’t been as attached to the horse as he. Buck had been a good gentle animal and if he’d ever been hard to break or as skittish as his name implied, it was before their time. They didn’t even know who’d named him or what he’d been like as a colt—he was just a presence on the ranch, already middle-aged when she came up the hill from the harbor that first time—and though she knew he’d have to be replaced eventually it was a thing she didn’t like to think about. Or hadn’t liked to think about. And now she’d had to take the shock of seeing him hurtle off the cliff to the rocks below, useless and abandoned, fit only for the ravens and the gulls and the big red crabs that swarmed in on the tide. She followed her husband’s rigid back up the long gradual rise to where the barn and house came into view, and she wouldn’t cry over a horse, she wouldn’t let herself. Just as she hadn’t let herself look over that cliff either—for all she knew Buck had sprouted wings like Pegasus and glided off on the breeze or landed in a deep surging pool and swum away to wherever horses go when they die.

  Pomo wasn’t there to greet them when they came in the gate—he would have been out in the schoolhouse with the girls. She’d already determined not to say a word about what had happened till the girls were done with their lessons, and then, later, perhaps after dinner, she’d tell them Buck had died. Though not how and not where. The last thing she wanted was for them to go looking for the remains and if they asked she’d say they’d buried him on the spot. She could already hear Marianne asking, Where? Where? Out there, she’d say, and point in the opposite direction altogether. In a week there’d be nothing left on the rocks at Nichols Point, not with a good high tide—and the moon was full, wasn’t it? With any luck the bones themselves would be lifted off the rocks and swept out to sea. And she’d talk up the fact that they’d have to get a new horse now—Bob Brooks would just have to cough up the money or bring one out from his place in Carpinteria—and how nice it would be to have a new animal here, one they could maybe even name themselves and ride as much as they wanted without having to worry.

  That was what she was thinking as she slipped up on the schoolhouse so furtively even the dog didn’t know she was coming. She eased herself onto the doorstep, held her breath, counted three and whipped open the door like a magician, expecting to catch the girls out. But they weren’t chattering or doodling or wasting their time at all: they both had their heads down, absorbed in their lessons. The
y looked up in unison and Pomo slapped his tail twice and sprang up to greet her. “Good, girls,” she said. “Good for you. You just finish up your reading now and I think we’ll go ahead and postpone the essays till tomorrow, okay?”

  The room was warm still, but she went straight to the stove Herbie had installed in one corner, pulled open the cast-iron door and laid a knot of ironwood on the diminished coals. She had a story all ready for them and when Marianne asked where she’d gone she told her that two of the lambs had fallen into a hole and couldn’t get out so their father had asked her to come help him rescue them. Which she’d done. And the lambs were fine, just a little thirsty that was all—and their mothers were right there waiting for them.

  “Why couldn’t Reg help him? Or Freddie?”

  “Oh, you know how it is,” she said. “They’re busy patrolling. And they’re not used to ranching and such—and I am, so your father asked me. It was nothing, really. If I wasn’t here, you could have helped him.”

  “Where would you be if you weren’t here?” Betsy asked.

  “I was just saying—theoretically. You know what ‘theoretically’ means?”

  “Reg and Freddie took the horses,” Marianne said. “Reg was on Buck.”

  So the whole elaborate lie would unravel, she could see that. But not now. There were still two hours of school to go, which meant history, geography and then, if they were good, a chapter of Black Beauty she’d read aloud to them. All she said was, “Yes, I know.”

  It must have been half an hour later—no more than half an hour, she was sure of it, because they were still on history—when Herbie had his accident. He’d gone directly to the barn on getting back, ready to chew out the sailors, but they weren’t there. He’d found Nellie in her stall, but Reg and Freddie were nowhere to be seen. Then he’d gone into the house to see if they were there—and they weren’t, which only made him angrier—and the house was cold and the wood basket empty, so he went out to the woodpile, cursing them, kicking at anything in his path, working himself up. And when he saw the state of it, the larger pieces unsawed and the snarl of roots and driftwood casually dumped in the dirt where any rain could soak it, he flew into a rage. In the next instant he’d snatched up the maul and begun lashing at one piece after another, sweating and cursing, and then he began on the hard twisted roots he’d dug out of the ground, bringing the hatchet to bear now. He might have gotten into the rhythm of it, left hand to balance the wood on the chopping block, right to swing the hatchet and drive it through, the ends falling away and the next root there to replace it, automatic, like clockwork—or he might not have. He might have let the rage carry him into another place altogether, a place where he was blinded, careless, accident-prone. All she knew was that the root slipped. And that he reached out to steady it, brought down the hatchet and missed his mark.