by Boyle, T. C.
“All right,” she murmured, smiling up at him, “if you think I should.”
He threw back the covers then, exposing himself all the way down to his toes, a lean terrain of etiolated flesh punctuated by his two flat nipples and the graying nest of his pubic hair. “You see? See what they’ve done to me? Neat job, huh?”
She saw a long curving cross-stitched line running up his side like the tracks of the electric trains in the window displays at Christmas, the flesh still red and angry where the needle had gone in and the sepsis had done its work.
He let out a laugh, then took her hand and put it there so she could trace the line of it with her forefinger. “This Morrison could have been a seamstress, don’t you think?”
Shadows flickered and gathered in the eaves. She felt very calm, very happy. “Yes,” she said, running her finger over the eruptive scar, “he did a beautiful job. But are you sure you’re all right now?”
“What do you think?” he said, and pulled her to him.
* * *
What came first, the discovery of the whiskey barrel or the intuition—or no, knowledge, definitive knowledge—that she was pregnant again, she couldn’t say. It was all bound up in the drift of the days in that spring of 1933, memory as indistinct as the weeks that ran up against each other without the distraction of weekends or holidays or anything beyond dawn and dusk to break the routine. She had Herbie back. They walked the hills, hand in hand, picked mussels from the rocks at low tide, sat before the fire at night and warmed each other in bed. And she had Marianne, who toddled round the house all day, chattering to herself and taking her naps whenever and wherever the mood struck her and each night climbing determinedly into her father’s lap for her bedtime story when dinner was done, the dishes washed and the light failing out over the ocean.
All she remembered was that somewhere in there was the day when Herbie came charging through the door in a state of high excitement, calling out, “Bottles, give me bottles, every bottle you can spare!”
It was late morning, the house quiet but for the intermittent rap of Jimmie’s hammer from across the courtyard, where the taproom—soon to be christened “The Killer Whale Bar”—was taking shape. Marianne was on the floor in the living room, playing with the alphabet blocks Herbie had made her, and she herself was busy with her latest project, repairing the punctured seat of a wicker chair she’d discovered in a pile of refuse out behind the barn. And now here he was, blowing through the room to the kitchen, calling for bottles. “Come on, girl, get yourself up,” he shouted over his shoulder. “No time to spare. What about those vanilla bottles, from the extract? Where are they? Are the corks still intact?”
She found him in the storeroom, digging through things. There was twine here, spare cookware, bottles and containers she’d washed and saved, a shelf of old newspaper and magazines, her broom, mop and bucket. “What is it?” she said, caught up in the pulse of his excitement. “What did you find?”
“Where’s the basket? I need a basket. And a length of tubing and my drill, but Jimmie’s out there in the shed, isn’t he? All right, all right, I’ll just have to be sly about it, that’s all, otherwise he’ll know we’re up to something—but come on, come on, bottles, girl, bottles.”
“You still haven’t answered me,” she said.
He paused then, just for an instant, to give her his grin, smug and piratical. “The find of the century, is about all. But don’t breathe a word to Jimmie. Quick now, wrap up the baby, grab your jacket and meet me outside the front gate—if Jimmie sees us he’ll just think we’re going off for a picnic lunch.”
What he’d found, on the windward beach between Simonton Cove and Harris Point, was nothing less than buried treasure. A ship carrying a cargo of flour, sugar and Kentucky bourbon whiskey, amongst other things, had gone down on the rocks there at the turn of the century, and for weeks after sacks of flour kept washing up on the beach—flour that the Russells, who were caretakers at the time, managed to retrieve and make use of for years to come, though it must have been uncommonly salty—but the whiskey casks had all been lost, as far as anyone knew. Jimmie had told the story twenty times around the table, tantalizing Herbie with the notion that some of the casks must surely have washed ashore and been buried in the restless sands—and it was true that all sorts of things would appear after a storm or a particularly low tide, including the mast of an old sailing ship Herbie had dug out the week before and erected in the courtyard as a flagpole. He’d been off on one of his beachcombing expeditions that morning and detected just the smallest irregularity in the plane of the beach ahead of him and begun digging with increasing excitement until he’d uncovered enough to see that it was a barrel—more than a barrel, a cask of the sort used for wines and liquors, and too big to dig out. He scraped and poked and smoothed away the sand until he could read the legend branded into the hooped belly of the thing: Kentucky Bourbon, 86 Proof.
“Of course, I rapped it with my knuckles,” he was saying as they headed off across the plateau, the bottles, tubing and drill secreted in the basket that swung from his arm, “and I have my hopes up, but for all I know that’s seawater in there now.”
She was out of breath, struggling with the weight of Marianne in her arms and the frenzied pace he was keeping, as if the waves were going to mount up and drag the cask back out to sea after thirty years and more of waiting. “You never know,” she said, between breaths, “maybe we’ll get lucky.”
It was a hard climb down and Herbie kept darting ahead and coming back to help her until finally they got to the beach and she let Marianne down to walk at a child’s pace—at which point Herbie lost all patience and shot on ahead of them, jogging into the distance until he was just a hazy linear stroke against the flat pan of the beach and the rolling horizontality of the sea. The mist closed in. The air smelled of dead things. She tried to keep him in sight, tugging at Marianne’s hand whenever the child bent for a starfish or seashell, but he kept shifting in and out of focus, Herbie the impetuous, Herbie the mirage.
When eventually she did catch up to him through the simple stratagem of keeping the ocean to her right and the dunes on her left, she found him on his knees in the wet sand, cranking the hand-drill round and round over a scrap of wood fixed there before him. She watched the shavings coil away until a dark hole no bigger than her little finger appeared in the glistening rim of what she realized was the cask—and how he’d ever spotted it she’d never know. It wasn’t two inches above the sand, all set to disappear again with the next tide. Wet wood. A faint gleam. It looked no different from the other wrack scattered up and down the beach.
His hands were trembling as he threaded the rubber tubing through the hole and into the depths of the cask. Before he put his lips to it he gave her a look and said, “Well, here goes. We’re going to have something very special here—thirty years aged, VSOP, can you imagine it?—or just more of this.” He waved a hand at the waves clawing their way up the beach and all that water floating off to the horizon behind it. Then he closed his eyes, put the end of the tube to his mouth and sucked in his cheeks.
She watched him swallow, suck again, swallow, and still he didn’t take the tube from his mouth or open his eyes. “Well?” she said. “If it’s salt water you must have had enough by now.”
And then his eyes flashed open and he gave her the most beatific look. “You try it, girl, and you just tell me what you think.”
* * *
It might have been that night or the next or maybe a week later that she told him she was pregnant again. It was somewhere in that period, that was all she remembered, and if the memory came intermingled with the faint floral savor of the smoothest, ripest, most ethereal liquor she’d ever known, that was no bad thing either. It was all a gift—manna, manna from heaven. “No doubts this time,” she said. “No need for the medical encyclopedia or the doctor either.”
He didn’t s
ay anything for the longest moment, just focused his eyes on hers as if he could touch her all the way across the room. “We’re getting to be old hands at this, aren’t we?” he said finally, laughing aloud. “But I’m the luckiest man in the world. And the happiest.” Then he got up and came to her where she was sitting on the couch, easing in beside her and wrapping her in his arms. “Herbie Junior,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling, “where’ve you been all my life?
“But wait, wait,” he said suddenly, jumping to his feet and darting across the room to the bookcase, where he’d hidden one of the scored brown vanilla extract bottles of straight Kentucky bourbon behind a book there. She watched him slide out the volume—An American Tragedy—and feel around for the bottle.
“Why Dreiser?” she asked, relishing the moment.
He turned to her, smiling, the bottle in hand. “Because the man knows sorrow and whiskey’s the cure for it,” he said, ready with an answer as always. “Old Theodore, old Ted, he’d drink bourbon at a time like this, don’t you think?” He uncorked the bottle and sniffed. “Even if it smells just the faintest wee little bit like vanilla. But at least this time around”—and here he held the bottle aloft like the trophy it was—“we’ve got something to toast the baby with.”
A pair of glasses. Two fingers for her, three for him. He leaned over the couch to hand her hers and then they clinked glasses. “To Herbie Junior!” he sang out, and drained his glass in a gulp.
She sipped at her portion, savoring it, even as he refilled his own glass, and if she was thinking anything at all it was just this: There’s plenty more where that came from.
The Travel Air Biplane
Elizabeth Edith Lester was born in December, a compact pretty baby with her father’s eyes and her grandmother Sherman’s retroussé nose. This time Elise had convinced Herbie to let her stay on the island till she was well into her eighth month and when she did go ashore it wasn’t to the Whites’ and only briefly to the Brooks’. She’d been unfailingly gracious to the fishermen and pleasure boaters who stopped by the island—it was reflexive, really, part of her nature, the sort of innate generosity of spirit she displayed for anyone, even the Japanese—and now she found her graciousness rewarded in invitations, half a dozen or more of them. There was no need to rent an apartment or to worry over inflicting herself on distant cousins who had their own lives to lead. This time she went where she was wanted, taking Marianne with her and rotating amongst couples she knew, spending a week or two at a time with each of them—social visits that enlivened her and got her back into the swing of things ashore, the radio programs, the daily newspapers, gossip and idle chat and earnest discussions about Fascism in Italy and the threat of war in Spain, and though she missed Herbie and Christmas on the island and was more than ready to come back home once the baby had put on the requisite ten pounds, the hiatus this time hadn’t seemed nearly as stifling as the first time around.
Herbie took to the baby—they called her Betsy for short—just as he had to Marianne. If he was disappointed in being denied a son yet again, he didn’t let it show. By the time Betsy was able to take hold of the finger he offered and smile up at him, he was as smitten as he’d been with Marianne, a good father, sound and giving and patient. The days settled in. The sky arched high, crept low, the rain came and went, the wind blew from the north. She mixed infant formula on the stove, hung diapers out to dry. She cooked and cleaned and looked after her daughters and her husband. This was life, this was release and joy—not tedium, not tedium at all. Yes. Absolutely. And now they were four, a twofold increase in the population of San Miguel since the census taker had recorded his data in 1930.
One summer morning she was out in the yard with the girls, tending masochistically to her flower garden that was doomed by poor soil, incessant wind and the birds that seemed to have nothing else green to attack for miles around, when she was startled by a ratcheting mechanical whine that seemed to be coming from every direction at once. She looked up, bewildered, and there it was: an airplane circling the house, one man forward, another aft, and both of them wearing leathern helmets and goggles that glinted in the light of a pale milky sun that was just then poking through the mist. As if this wasn’t startling enough, the thing dipped its wings and shot down like a needle toward the sheepcote in back of the house, leveling off just above the ground before circling once more and coming in for a landing. She watched it jolt across the field, the propeller a blur, wheels bouncing over the ruts, the fuselage jerking back and forth as if it were being tugged in two directions at once, and then it lurched to a halt and the two men were climbing down to earth like visitors from another planet.
Herbie was nowhere to be seen—as it turned out, he’d been down on the beach collecting driftwood and was already running at full bore up the road to the house, as startled and amazed as she—and Jimmie was off the island altogether, working for Bob Brooks at his ranch in Carpinteria. She put down the trowel she’d been using to loosen the soil around the withered stems of her geraniums, wiped her hands on her dress, snatched up the baby and took Marianne by the hand, then started across the yard and out the gate to see this marvel up close.
The taller of the men—a good six feet and two hundred pounds, forty years old or thereabout—was smoothing back his hair with one hand and hoisting a satchel to his shoulder with the other. He was dressed in shirt and tie and there were reddened indentations round the orbits of his eyes where the goggles had pinched the flesh there. The other man was Herbie’s size and looked to be in his thirties. He was wearing a leather flight jacket and doing his best to look blasé, as if he’d been landing here every day of his life.
“Elise?” the first man said, coming forward and holding out a hand to her. She shifted the baby and took his hand, giving him a wondering look: how did he know her name?
“Yes,” she stammered. “I’m Elise, I’m she—”
“I’m George Hammond, from Montecito,” he said, pointing vaguely behind her and across the channel. “At Bonnymede? My mother’s a friend of Mrs. Felton.”
Now she was at an utter loss. Ten minutes ago she’d been secure in the knowledge that she was one of only four people on one of the most isolated and forbidding islands in America, part of a tribe, a family, society reduced to its essence, and now she was standing before an absolute stranger—two strangers—in an old rag of a sweater, with dirt on her hands and two oily patches of the same on the front of her dress where her knees had pressed into the earth while she dug in her garden with a hand tool and the children played beside her and her own private clouds drifted overhead. And the stranger was speaking with her as if they’d casually bumped into each other at a charity ball or cocktail party. She couldn’t help herself. “Who?” she said.
“She’s a friend of my mother.”
Still nothing.
“Who happens to be a cousin of your mother—Una, Una Felton?—and who, at the suggestion of your mother, felt that John and I (this is John Jeffries, by the way) might want to stop by and say hello. And to see, well, if everything’s going forward and if you might need anything, that is, if there’s anything that John and I might be able to help you with.”
And now suddenly it came clear. Cousin Una. Her mother. These men with the flattened hair and circular marks impressed round their eyes—they were two missives in the flesh sent here from Rye, New York, that was what they were. Her mother had always been suspicious of Herbie—that Lothario, she called him, that adventurer—seeing their marriage as the classic case of the spinster swept off her feet by a suave ne’er-do-well whose motives would always be suspect, no matter if they were married for fifty years. Her letters had been increasingly strident of late, calling into question her daughter’s judgment, not to mention sanity, in trying to raise babies, her own grandchildren, in a place out beyond the end of nowhere, a dangerous place, isolated and bereft, where anything could happen. And that anything, of
course, never incorporated notions of happiness, fulfillment or serenity but exclusively the calamities that befell people living on islands—and she sent on a stream of newspaper clippings in evidence, accounts of people starving in the Hebrides or drowning off Block Island or Martha’s Vineyard or dying of strokes, seizures and in one case an apricot pit lodged in the windpipe, before help could arrive. Her mother was looking out for her. And here were George Hammond and John Jeffries, dropped down from the sky. What could she do but thank them and invite them into the house?
They were seated on the sofa in the living room, the door open wide to the sun and the hearth gone cold because it was high summer now and the weather had warmed into the sixties despite the persistent blow, when Herbie came bursting through the doorway, and it wasn’t at all like the day the Japanese had come. The two men had been minding the children a moment while she went out to the kitchen for refreshments, Marianne playing with a scatter of homemade toys at their feet and the baby laid out on a blanket between them. She’d just set down a platter of sourdough biscuits and a saucer displaying the last of their butter, with a glass of water for Hammond and a cup of hot tea for his companion, and was bending to take up the baby again, already overflowing with gratitude for these amateur aviators who’d braved the wind and fog to bring her secondhand greetings from her mother and a satchel of letters to back them up (not to mention six dozen eggs, a twelve-pound ham and a live turkey hen in a wicker cage), and here was Herbie, a volcano of excitement rattling over the floorboards in his hobnail boots, eager to pump the hands of their visitors and know everything there was to know about them and their insuperable biplane.