by Boyle, T. C.
She stumbled, the baby clutched tight, and he put out an arm to steady her.
“You all right?”
“Yes,” she murmured and it was a frisson, the faintest delectable tingle of satisfaction, to realize it was true, maybe the truest thing she’d ever uttered.
The Japanese
In the old days it was the Chinese, or so Jimmie told her. They had come out here, to all the islands, really, but to San Miguel in particular, to harvest the abalone, though it didn’t belong to them because they were foreigners and they didn’t hold the lease on the place, anyway. And they’d poach sheep too and leave behind the charred remains of what they couldn’t eat—the fleece meant nothing to them, just a throwaway, putrid, with the skin still on it and all over maggots. Now it was the Japanese. Their trawlers and long-liners came all the way from Japan because the channel was rich in the fish they craved, the tuna and mackerel and halibut they’d overfished in their own waters. Jimmie didn’t like them. Herbie didn’t like them either. For her part, she was indifferent—she’d never met a Japanese in her life and it was no secret that everybody had good and bad in them no matter where they came from.
So it was a surprise late in that spring, her second spring on the island, Marianne growing and gurgling, with her at all times, even in the kitchen, even then, asleep in a wicker basket and the pot boiling on the stove, when a sleek white fishing boat motored into the harbor flying the flag of the Japanese nation. The flag, it seemed to her, was beautiful, simpler and more austere than the Stars and Stripes: a red circle to represent the rising sun against a bright snapping field of white. She needed the binoculars to see it clearly, and as she hoisted the baby and started down the hill to greet them as she would have greeted any of their rare visitors, whether it be the Coast Guard boys, amateur boaters out of Santa Barbara or whalers from as far away as Norway, she felt no apprehension. They would ask something of her (meat, water) and give her something in return (fish, most likely) and she’d invite them to the house for tea and a meal and if they didn’t have any English they’d communicate with facial expressions and gestures. She was glad of the company, always glad.
Herbie had gone out earlier that morning to the southwest side of the island where the elephant seals had their rookery, just to keep an eye on them, he said. He took a gun with him and a safari hat and a pack with a canteen of water and the sandwiches she’d made him. It was three or four miles from the ranch house to the beach where the big bloated males kept their harems, the females two-thirds their size and spread out around them like so many sacks of grain. She’d been out there with Herbie to look at them half a dozen times, and they were appealing enough, she supposed, these things that appeared out of the sea each year as if by magic and had been hunted nearly to extinction for their blubber the same as whales till lamps went to kerosene and coincidentally spared them, but she wasn’t as attuned to them as Herbie was, Herbie the hunter. He wasn’t going to donate the skeleton to the museum, he kept insisting, he was going to sell it, because in these times they needed all the income they could scrape up, what with Bob Brooks cutting his salary to the minimum and precious little money available anywhere, and wasn’t that the truth? It was, she supposed, and she knew they were lucky to have any employment at all and to live out here away from the soup kitchens and the hoboes and Okies and everybody else going hungry in a world shrunk down to nothing. They weren’t self-sufficient, far from it—the garden a failure, the necessities shipped in from the coast—but they could always eat lamb when others did without. And fish. And the occasional lobster or abalone, which she pounded flat, soaked in evaporated milk, rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried, with her own tartar sauce to perk it up.
They were lucky. Maybe the luckiest people on earth. And Herbie was out stalking his elephant seals and Jimmie ashore or maybe out on Bob Brooks’ other island because Bob felt responsible for him and tried to find him work as best he could, and there were strangers in the harbor and the sun shining bright and she was on her way down to greet them with her baby in her arms, just for the novelty of it, and the neighborliness, that too.
There were three of them hauling a rowboat ashore when she got down to the beach and strode across the strand to them, Marianne perched on one shoulder, the sand whispering beneath her shoes. They were dressed like any other fishermen, stained pants, peacoats, watch caps, except that they wore sandals instead of shoes. One of them—the captain, obviously—slipped out of his coat when he saw her coming and handed it to the man beside him. He was wearing a white jacket beneath it, with epaulettes on the shoulders. He said something to her, which she later realized must have been a thick-tongued variant on “Good afternoon,” and bowed deeply, as did his two shipmates.
She didn’t know what to do so she bowed back, then rose, smiling, and said, “Welcome, welcome to our island,” and she couldn’t help adding, thinking of Herbie, “the Kingdom of San Miguel.”
In the next moment they’d swarmed round her, their wide dark blunted faces opening up in amazement at the sight of Marianne, this prodigy in her arms, as if a child were the last thing they expected out here, and she wondered how long they’d been at sea and what wives and children they’d left behind. She thought of her own separation from Herbie, first at the Brooks’, then the Whites’, and how each day had slammed down on her like the door to a vault and how nothing had seemed right, not the sun in the morning or the food on the table or the air moving through the windowscreens, heavy with the scent of orange blossoms. But these men: they were ashore, feet on the ground, and they laughed aloud and held out their forefingers for Marianne to clutch in her tiny fist, made faces for her and talked baby talk in falsetto—their language, in that register, fluting like the wind in the tops of the trees. “Bebay,” the captain kept saying, looking from her to Marianne and back again, and she could see the words trying to shape themselves on his lips till he looked as if he were going to implode with the effort, but he got no further.
“Would you like,” she said, enunciating very slowly and distinctly, as if that would make a difference, “to come up to the house”—pointing now—“for some refreshment? I can make tea. Sandwiches.” She looked doubtfully from one to the other. “Do you like sandwiches?”
* * *
An hour later the three men were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the sofa that had once been a coffin, each with a teacup in one hand and a saucer in the other and their spines held perfectly rigid. She sat across from them, Marianne in her lap, and passed a platter of gingerbread cookies to the captain, who was positioned on the end of the sofa nearest her. “Good,” he pronounced, after taking a precise experimental bite of his cookie while the other two looked on for a signal as to how to proceed. She wished she could communicate with them, ask them where they were from, if they had families, what their religion was like, their food, what they thought of California, because here was an opportunity she would never have had in New York, where there were all types, but not any Japanese, or not that she could remember. Chinese, yes. But then, looking at them, how could you tell them apart? Maybe she had seen Japanese before without realizing it, but even if she had she’d certainly never sat across from them over a cup of tea and a platter of cookies.
Americans—and she was guilty of this too—tended to treat foreigners like children or idiots, like the deaf and dumb, simply because they had no English or fumbled with it, and yet here were people as articulate and full of passion and hope and experience as she was herself. They were polite. Beautifully mannered. They loved babies. And they had so much to tell her, she was sure of it, if only they could find the words. She set down her cup, shifted Marianne in her lap. And then—and she didn’t know why except that it was the language of diplomacy, of the world, and she was speaking before she could think—she tried French. “Parlez-vous Français?”
The captain shot her a look of interest, as if all this time he’d been waiting to hear just that ph
rase. He smiled. “Un peu. J’ai vécu à Marseilles une fois—il y a plusieurs années.”
And that was it, that was the key in the lock, and though his French was minimal and he spoke it with an accent she could only call bizarre, it enabled them to communicate, if fumblingly. She learned that he and his crew—there were eight more aboard—had sailed out of Yokohama six weeks before and that he knew the islands and the coast of California and its fisheries intimately, having captained beaucoup fishing vessels over the years. But it was slow going and frustrating, because suddenly she wanted to know all about him, about his life and his hopes and prejudices, a real live Japanese before her, a visitor from another kingdom. Or empire. It was the Japanese Empire, wasn’t it? To Es-ce que vous êtes marié? he replied, Non. To Vous aimez la vie de la mer? it was, Oui. And then, after a moment’s reflection, “Beaucoup.”
She was about to ask him if he’d been ashore in America, if he knew any Americans and if so what he thought of them and if the accounts of his country’s (how would she say it, belligerence, aggression?) had any basis in fact or if they were just typical newspaper hyperbole, when the door swung open and Herbie was there, the gun slung over his shoulder and the knapsack, crammed with something—driftwood, seashells?—dangling from one hand. Instantly, the three men leapt to their feet. They came up so fast they nearly knocked over the low table that held the teapot and platter, each man clutching his cup as if it were a shield.
She watched Herbie’s face work through its emotions, going from surprise to shock to distaste and finally a kind of feigned indifference all in an instant. How it had happened, she couldn’t say, but suddenly the room was thick with tension. “Herbie,” she called, trying to brighten her voice, “these are our guests, fishermen from Japan—that’s their boat in the harbor there. They”—and here she gestured toward them and they all, in unison, bowed, but it was a short bow, a nod of the head only, their eyes fixed on Herbie and his gun—“were just joining me in a cup of tea, paying a visit, that’s all. The captain”—another gesture, another bow—“speaks French. Un peu.” She smiled, first at Herbie, then at the man in the white jacket, but neither smiled back.
Herbie set down the bag beside him, nodded brusquely at the three men, then crossed the room as if he were measuring off each step, shrugged out from under the strap of the gun and with a kind of surgical deliberation placed it back on its mount on the wall. None of the men moved. They remained standing there, the teacups clutched in their hands, until Herbie swung round and leaned back into the wall, arms folded, so that he was framed by the slashing parallel lines of the guns, nine guns in all, from the tanegashima to the elephant rifle, and they leaned forward, one by one, to set their teacups back down.
Herbie didn’t say hello or welcome or anything of the sort, not in English, French or Japanese, or even in the language of common courtesy. No, he was rude, just plain rude, and it embarrassed her. Fixing his eyes on the captain, he said, “Ce que vous voulez ici, monsieur?”
The captain looked to his men, then to her, and finally, Herbie. His face showed nothing. “Rien,” he said finally, and he bowed again and moved toward the door, which stood open still on the courtyard and the main gate beyond. In the next moment—and Herbie never flinched, never shifted, just stood there leaning against the wall with his arms folded—the Japanese were bowing their way out the door with murmurs of “Merci” and something else, something in their own language that might have meant thank you or goodbye or maybe just Sorry.
* * *
She didn’t want to quarrel, but as soon as they’d left—as soon, that is, as Herbie had got back from following them down to the shore to make good and certain they got in their boat and rowed off to the ship anchored in the harbor—she came right up to him and let loose. “I can’t believe how you treated those men,” she said.
He was standing in the doorframe, the light a solid wedge behind him, as if it had turned hard, to ice or stone. “What’s for dinner?” he said, ignoring her. “I’m half-starved.”
“Why were you so rude? They were decent enough, just like anybody else, fishermen, that’s all—you should have seen the fuss they made over Marianne.”
“They stole from me. I told you that.”
“Who stole from you? Those men, were they the ones?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, softening his voice, “maybe. He looked familiar, the one in the white coat. I told you the story, didn’t I—about the strychnine that time? The time I was poisoned?”
He tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. “No,” she said. “No, you didn’t.”
“Listen, I’m sorry,” he said, and he went to sit on the couch, right where they’d been not an hour before, but she wouldn’t let it go, she was furious at him, and she stood over him, hands on her hips, and if the baby was fretting in her basket, so much the worse.
“It was when I first got out here, and Bob was gone and Jimmie too and I was all alone and didn’t really know what I was doing—thinking of you all the time, around the clock. Remember all those letters I wrote you? The miss-you ones? The pleading ones? Well, anyway, lambing was coming on and before he left Bob said we needed to do something about the ravens, to keep them off the newborn lambs because they’ll kill them, you know that, don’t you? I shot a couple, but then, because I was low on cartridges and didn’t want to waste ammunition, I put out poisoned baits for them, meat that had gone bad, and I laced it with the strychnine from the bottle out there in the shed. But my mistake—you know what my mistake was? I got done and rolled a cigarette and licked off the paper and smoked it without thinking to wash my hands.”
She eased down beside him on the couch. “You poisoned yourself,” she said, her voice soft now.
“Yeah.”
“You never told me, never said a word in your letters—”
“Why would I? I felt like an idiot. And I didn’t want to worry you. But it was bad, and it hit me right away, because I was smoking it, you see? I went into convulsions. Stiffened like a rake. I couldn’t breathe. I was out there in the courtyard, in the dirt, thinking I was going to die all alone and nobody’d find me for weeks, and suddenly there was this Jap, come up from a boat in the harbor just like the ones today, looking at me over the gate, and I called out to him for help. ‘I’m poisoned,’ I said, and then I don’t remember, but he must have got me in the house and put me here on the couch and found a blanket for me. I passed out. And when I woke up, the Jap was gone and one of my guns was gone too—and since I only had the three at the time because Hugh had the rest, thank God, I noticed right away. But can you imagine? The son of a bitch leaves me here, dying for all he knew, and all he does is steal my gun? Can you get any lower than that?”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. But these men—” she broke off. Suddenly, amazingly, he was grinning at her. “What?” she said. “Why are you grinning?”
“Did you count the silverware?”
And now she was grinning too—it was a joke. He was already joking about it. They had no silverware, no silver of any kind, not even a candlestick or an egg cup. “I’ll get up and see in a minute,” she said.
“What about the salver?”
“I’ll have to check on that too,” she said.
The Pain
After that, there was a long stretch of time in which nothing much happened, everything placid, the wind blowing, the sheep grazing, the waves rolling on up the shore and pulling back again. It was just her, Herbie and Marianne, the Vaquero coming once a month with supplies, the Hermes every week or two with the mail and news of the outside world. Which wasn’t especially good as the year wound down and Christmas came on without a tree or store-bought presents, though it was homey and quiet and she and Herbie exchanged little things they’d made—earrings he’d fashioned from mother–of–pearl, socks and a muffler she’d knitted in a shade of red so bright
you could have signaled out to sea with them, and for Marianne a stuffed corduroy teddy bear with button eyes and three miniature sheep Herbie had carved from a block of balsawood that turned up on the beach one day.
Another spring came and went. The shearers arrived and then they were gone. The days bled into each other, days eternal, each one like the next. Herbie threw himself into his projects—hooking up a water heater to the stove in the kitchen and running the pipes through the attic to the bathroom so they could have baths without having to lug a sloshing pail from one end of the house to the other; building the fireplace in the living room out of adobe bricks salvaged from the old Waters place; erecting a windmill to pump the water up from the spring and replace the hand pump—and she worked right beside him, hauling brick, mixing mortar, taking the shovel and pick and extending the septic field out and away from the house and water supply. They were too busy to be bored, though there were nights when she would have given anything for a radio or a phonograph even—just to hear music, anything, a polka, a concerto, Eddie Cantor or Al Jolson, it didn’t matter. Music. She missed music, but not much else.
The fact was that everything out there beyond the channel began to seem increasingly remote and disconnected. They picked up a newspaper or magazine her mother had sent them and they might as well have been reading about another planet, science fiction in the pages of Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post. The Depression was worsening and no end in sight, as if joblessness, bankruptcy, starving children and whole families cast out in the street were the normal way of doing things and all that had come before, all the generations of farmers, factory workers and shop owners, all the savings accounts, a quarter a week, build for the future, nothing more than an illusion. Mussolini and his Blackshirts were strutting in Italy and Hitler and his Brownshirts in Germany and when election day came around they discovered that the United States was to have a new president, a socialist by the name of Roosevelt whom both she and Herbie would have voted against if there were a polling place nearby. As if it mattered. And it didn’t. All that mattered was the three of them and the way the seasons turned and the ewes dropped their lambs.