San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  Then there was the dinghy, drawn up on shore, and he secured her suitcase in the bow and helped her into it like a gentleman so that she didn’t even have to get her feet wet. The surf rocked them. The shore pulled back. Ahead of them lay the boat drifting at anchor on a sea so calm it was like the land itself and she could see the pale sun-bleached mesh of the net and the three dark shapes nestled beneath it. The seals. The captives. Wrapped up in their animality and the forlorn fishy stink of them. They were leaving the island, never to come back, and so was she. The oars squealed in the locks and Robert, facing her, gave a quick look over his shoulder, then turned back and smiled at her. It was a simple smile, pure, charged with the excitement of what they were doing together, what she was doing, a smile of appreciation, of admiration, of awe even.

  It was only appropriate. Because everything had changed. She wasn’t Edith Scott Waters anymore, wasn’t a girl on a sheep ranch on an island, wasn’t ordinary in any way. She was Inez Deane, belle of the stage, and she was going home.

  PART III

  Elise

  Arrival

  She was thirty-eight years on this earth and until three weeks ago she’d never been west of the Hudson River—she’d been to the Berkshires, Boston and Newport as a girl, and Montreux and Paris too, but west? Never. The West was a place she knew only from books, from Francis Parkman and Mark Twain and Willa Cather, a huge dun expanse of the map striated with mountains and flecked with plains and deserts, home to cactus, rattlesnakes, red Indians, cowboys, bucking broncos, buckaroos—and what else? Prospectors. Oilmen. Motion-picture stars. She thought of Chaplin eating his own shoe, of Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees on a street lined with palms. The West. Terra incognita. Terra insolita. And now here she was, all the way out on the west coast of the U.S.A. and waiting for the cattle boat that would take her beyond the coast altogether, to the last scrap of land the continent had to offer, an island tossed out in the ocean like an afterthought. Thirty-eight years. And wasn’t life the strangest thing?

  It was early morning, the end of March, 1930. She watched the sun rise out of the mountains down the shoreline to her left, and that was strange too, because all her life she’d known it to emerge from the waters of Long Island Sound, a quivering yellow disk like the separated yolk of an egg, the waves running away to the horizon and shifting from black to gray and finally to the clean undiluted blue of the sky above—if the sun was shining, that is. And half the time it wasn’t. Half the time it was overcast, drizzling, raining—or sleeting. There was no sleet here, though, and never would be, not until the next Ice Age came along, anyway. Just the sun, which in that moment swelled to a perfect blazing circle and slipped free of the clutch of the mountains to draw long tapering shadows out of every vertical thing, boats at anchor, the pilings of the pier, the trees along the bluff—some of which, and she just noticed this now, were palms, imagine that, palms.

  The boat—Herbie had told her to watch for it downshore to the east while he ran off in his excitable trot to see to a dozen last-minute things—was called the Vaquero, and it was used by the family on one of the other islands to ferry cattle across the channel to market. She looked off to sea, sniffed at the breeze. The sun rose higher. People moved around her on the shifting planks of the pier, going about their business, maritime business, and no one gave her a second glance. Herbie had left her there to keep an eye on their baggage—a glancing kiss, a bolt from his eyes, I’ll be right back—but she didn’t feel at all threatened or even anxious. If there were any thieves on the pier that morning, she didn’t see them.

  When finally the boat did appear, it was a distant black pinpoint emerging from the shadow of the mountains to glint sporadically as it rocked into the rising flood of sunlight. She put a hand up to shield her eyes and held it there the whole while as the boat grew bigger and the smell—urine, feces, the close festering odor of glands and secretions and hide, cowhide—came rushing to her on the breeze. Then the boat was there, tethered and gently knocking against the pilings, and a raw-faced man in blue jeans and a wide-brimmed hat came scrambling up the ladder and onto the pier. He was short, shorter than she was, anyway, and so slim and agile it took her a minute to realize he wasn’t as young as he’d first appeared, wasn’t young at all. There were creases round his eyes, hackles of stiff white hair tracing the underside of his jaw where he’d been indifferently shaved, and she wondered about that, shaving at sea, with the deck pitching under you and the razor—even a safety razor—a hazard all its own.

  He stood there a moment as if to get his bearings, then shot her a glance, his eyes dropping from her face to the tumble of suitcases, shoulder bags, trunks, boxes and sacks of provisions scattered round her, before lifting again to settle on hers. Then he was coming forward, drumming across the planks with a brisk chop of his legs—boots, he was wearing cowboy boots—and giving her a smile so wide she could make out the cracked gray remnants of his molars. “So you must be the new bride,” he said, tipping his hat, and then he gave his name, which she forgot in the instant: new bride.

  Yes, she was a new bride, twenty years after she’d made her debut at Delmonico’s with a full orchestra to provide entertainment and a young tenor by the name of Enrico Caruso serenading the glowing cluster of debutantes and their families, all the world laid out before her, and fifteen years—fifteen at least—since she’d given up all hope. New bride. She almost blushed.

  “Yes,” she said, bending forward to nod in assent. “I’m Herbie’s wife, Elizabeth. Or Elise. Call me Elise.”

  There was a moment of silence, the stink of the absent cattle—they’d been off-loaded the day before in Oxnard, she would learn—rising to them from the boat lurching in the swell below. There were gulls, of course. Pelicans. People up and down the pier bending to one task or another.

  He ducked his head, pulled at the brim of his hat, looked to her things and then to the ladder bolted to the side of the pier. “Well, lucky for you and Herbie the boat’s here today, because if it wasn’t for the storm that come in day before last they’d of been here and gone already. And then you’d of had to take the Coast Guard boat.”

  She must have given him a puzzled look, because he immediately qualified that: “Which is fine, and I don’t mean anything by it—it’s just that the Coast Guard boys tend sometimes to go off on other business, depending on what comes up on the radio, orders, you know, and sometimes you’ll be four or five days aboard before you can get to where you’re going.”

  She smiled. “And what about you?”

  He smiled back, made as if to tip his hat again and thought better of it. “Oh, me? Don’t worry about me—I’ll be going out to Santa Rosa with the boat. And we’ll be shoving off here just as soon as they can take on supplies and get you and your—Herbie, that is—aboard.”

  “Santa Rosa? Which one is that?”

  He did a quick shuffle of his feet, maneuvering round the baggage to point off down the length of the pier and across the channel to where the sun striped the flank of the big island lying out there on the horizon. “That one there, straight out? That’s Santa Cruz. Now look to the right of that, you see it tucked in there behind that point, almost looks like it’s joined to it, but it’s not, believe me—that’s Santa Rosa, that’s home for the Vail and Vickers boys. And me too, at least for the first week or so, till you get settled in—I mean, for your honeymoon and like that.”

  “But I thought—weren’t we supposed to go to San Miguel?”

  Laughing now: “Oh, yes, nobody’s going to strand you on your honeymoon—San Miguel’s the first stop.” He’d shifted again and was pointing far off to the right. “You see that? Way out? That little strip of brown there?”

  She narrowed her eyes, squinting at the hovering vaporous line of the horizon, due west, all the way out, so far out she couldn’t be sure she was actually seeing anything at all. “Is that it?” she asked, loo
king to him.

  “It is, ma’am,” he said. “And you can’t always see it from here, but you’re lucky, as I say. Doubly lucky.”

  They were silent a moment, both of them staring out over the waves to where the island suddenly came clear, stretched across the horizon like the smallest fragment of a very old rug. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, turning back to him, “but what did you say your name was?”

  “Jimmie, ma’am. I’m Jimmie. Didn’t Herbie—I mean, Mr. Lester—tell you about me?”

  She was about to say No, he didn’t, but then she saw the look in his eyes and caught herself. “Yes,” she said, “he did, as a matter of fact.”

  This seemed to satisfy him. His features settled. He pushed back the hat to scratch briefly at his scalp. “Well,” he sang out all of a sudden, “no sense in standing here gawking—which of these bags you want aboard first?”

  * * *

  The Vaquero was like no boat she’d ever been on, the open high-railed deck more accommodating to animals than people, but the wheelhouse was snug enough and the men gathered there—ranch hands on their way back to Santa Rosa, the ship’s captain, her new friend Jimmie—were in a festive mood, their eyes shining, grins playing across their faces like heat lightning. There was a woman aboard, and a new bride at that, and they crowded round her, each one vying to outdo the other, their voices blending and breaking as they offered up an unyielding torrent of stories, advice, jokes and admonitions. She’d never much liked being the center of attention, shy of it, actually, the ugly duckling of her family, thick-limbed and awkward all her life, but this was different—she’d been selected for this—and she found herself enjoying the attention. Or mostly. And when it got too much for her, when the bug-eyed man in the plaid shirt and patched blue jeans leaned across the bench to shout in her left ear even as the one named Isidro contradicted him with a Spanish-inflected tirade on the other side, she just called out to Herbie in French—Chéri, sauve-moi—and he was there, distracting them with the jeroboam of champagne he’d somehow managed to get hold of from sources unnamed and had begun pouring before the boat even left the dock.

  “À ta commande, madame,” he crooned, pouring first for her, then for the bug-eyed man and finally Isidro, who stopped what he was saying—about cattle, his defining subject—long enough to tip back the tin cup he’d produced from his jacket pocket when Herbie had first uncorked the bottle. And then Herbie—her husband, and how she loved the sound of those three syllables on her lips—was holding out a hand to her as if he were inviting her to dance, pulling her up off the bench and handing the big heavy dense-green bottle to Isidro all in a single fluid motion, and here she was following his lead, not to an imaginary dance floor but out the door to the deck where the sun poured down and the breeze fanned her hair and the spume broke away from the bow and flew up in sunstruck beads to vanish on the air. The sea was gentle, the air mild—or if not mild exactly, then not cold, at least not yet. To her right was the mainland with its white-fringed beaches and the greening mountains that rose up and away from them, to her left the big island clothed in a patchwork of color, and straight out over the bow, larger now, but still not much more than a blemish on the horizon, the mysterious place where she was going to make her home. Herbie pulled her to him, whispering, “Ah, enfin, je t’ai seule.”

  The French. It was part of what had attracted her to him in the first place—she’d learned to love the language as a girl and he’d picked it up during the war—and now it had become their secret language, the language they alone shared amongst all these cowboys and sailors and sheepmen. She closed her eyes and he kissed her, right out there in full public view, and she didn’t care because she was half-mad with the champagne and the sun and the sheer wonder of the adventure she was on, picturing him the day they’d met, Herbert Steever Lester, dressed in suit and bow tie and with his laughing blue eyes screwed right into hers as she answered the door and he took her hand in his and murmured “Enchanté,” even though all he was doing was inquiring about subletting her apartment on East Seventy-second Street. Herbie. Her husband. Her first and only love.

  And then, his arm round her waist, they were strolling the deck—promenading—and if she saw the stains worked into the planks or caught scent of the animals that had so recently been passengers here and were now on their way to meet their fate, she wouldn’t admit it. Why spoil the day? Why dwell on the imperfections when there was so much beauty to glory in? She threw back her head and let her gaze roam free, the shore receding, the islands drifting closer, the sun ladled over everything and everything glowing as if the world were slick with a new coat of paint.

  For his part, Herbie chattered away, in English now, going on about the island and its multitudinous charms, telling her about the house and their bedroom and how she wouldn’t even need to crack her trousseau, except maybe for one of those sheer peignoirs from Paris. Gowns? Ball them up and throw them away! And where did she think his tux was? Back at Bob Brooks’ place in Beverly Hills. Where it was going to stay. Forever. Because this was the real life they were going into, the natural life, the life of Thoreau and Daniel Boone, simple and vigorous and pure. He talked on, talked and talked, pacing up and down the deck, as full of enthusiasm as she’d ever seen him.

  When finally the breeze got to be too much for her they went back inside and there was another round of champagne and then another and then the shadows began to lean the other way and before she could think San Miguel rose up out of the sea ahead of them like an image on a photographic plate and they were in the harbor there, the anchor chain paying out and Herbie helping her down into the boat that would ferry her across to the place where her life was about to begin, and if through all these years she hadn’t believed in reinvention or second chances or just plain dumb luck, she had to believe now.

  The House

  There was a team of horses—Buck and Nellie—but they were in the barn at the top of the hill where Jimmie had left them when he boarded the Vaquero the previous morning, and so she and Herbie hauled all their things up past the tide line themselves, then shouldered their packs and started up the crude dirt road to the plateau above. By this time, the sun was low in the sky and the Vaquero had rounded the point behind them and tipped away on the streaming red waves. She watched it over one shoulder, alive in all her senses, everything steeped in the soft declining light. The whole world seemed to be holding its breath. Something darted across the road ahead of them and what was it? A lizard of some sort. Or a snake. But then snakes didn’t have legs, did they?

  The canyon that gave rise to the road smelled wet and raw, like the inside of a cave, and it funneled the wind so that it was blowing in their faces, blowing cold, and she had to stop to button her cardigan. And once they were up off the beach, everything was mud, so that her shoes were thick with it, each step heavier than the last. She hadn’t gone a hundred yards before they were like twin boats—or no, like those great flapping wooden things they wore in Holland, and what were they called? Sabots? No, that was French. Clogs. Wooden clogs.

  But here was Herbie, dancing on ahead of her in his short pants and Army boots, his shirt flapping and the hair beating round his head, impervious to the wind and the mud and everything else. His mood was soaring, lifting him so high it was as if his feet hardly touched ground. And it wasn’t the champagne, which had worn off by now and had only left her feeling sleepy, but his natural exuberance that had him so worked up he was actually trembling like one of those coffee addicts you saw barking at each other like trained seals every time you stepped into a diner. Every thirty seconds he had to catch himself, looping back to her to shove at the weight of her pack as if to push her on up the slope, blowing a kiss in her ear, dropping a hand to her buttocks to pat her there, stimulate her, urge her on. And talking, of course. Talking all the while.

  “You see the yellow flowers on the cliffs there? That’s deerweed, but the funny thing is
there’re no deer to eat it.”

  “Just sheep.”

  “Right, just sheep. Our sheep. And you’ll catch sight of them soon enough. But the other patches of yellow—see them?—with the flowers all bunched? That’s coreopsis. Giant coreopsis. Bob says it’s only found on the islands, the giant kind, anyway. But you’re lucky. This is the season when it’s all in bloom, because come summer, when the rains are over, everything goes dormant and it’s just this brown thatch—”

  She was fighting for breath. She’d tied her hair up in a kerchief and she could feel the sweat at her temples. Good sweat, productive sweat, and how amazing to be here, in a wild place, with her husband beside her, a canvas pack slung over her shoulder and her legs digging at a hill that seemed to go on rising forever—just the two of them and not another soul for miles. Everything in the past three weeks had been a mad whirl, the berth on the train, unfamiliar beds, the hurried marriage that was really more of an elopement because of the murder out on San Nicolas Island. Her sister Anna had exhausted herself planning a formal wedding for them down the coast in La Jolla, but they’d had to throw all that out the window—there just wasn’t time to arrange for the license and blood tests, not in California. But Arizona was another story. In Arizona, things got done. And so, because Bob Brooks was subpoenaed to go and testify at the trial of one of his hirelings who’d fired on a poachers’ boat and hit the man at the oars—killed him, that is—she had to climb back on another train and rattle across the desert to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Yuma and then rattle back again, because Herbie was needed here, needed urgently, wedding or no. She wasn’t complaining, even under her breath—it had been the most intensely romantic thing she could ever have dreamed of—but she was tired and the hill was steeper than a ski slope and her feet were like lead weights.