by Boyle, T. C.
“In the old days,” he said, trying to make a joke of it, “they used to have itinerant schoolmasters. Ichabod Crane. Maybe we can get him out here. Or no, I guess he’s just a fictional character, isn’t he? And he’d be dead by now, anyway.”
“It’s not funny, Herbie. There are laws, regulations. They could take the girls away from us as unfit parents. And don’t we want the best for them? Don’t we want them to be able to go out and take their place in the world? Someday, I mean?”
The solution—or at least the beginnings of it—came in the form of a gift from Ed Vail. He’d come up to the house one evening for dinner after helping Herbie unload supplies from the Vaquero, and somehow—maybe because she couldn’t get it out of her mind—the conversation shifted from the weather, conditions at sea and people they knew in common to the letter from the school district and how upset it had made them. “What you need is a schoolhouse,” Ed said, pausing over the lamb chops he was always happy to see when he came for dinner on their island, because, as he liked to say, I’m up to here with beef. He held the moment, then took up his knife and fork and began cutting. “I’ve got just the thing for you.”
The next time the Vaquero came round, there was a brightly painted structure dominating the foredeck. From a distance it looked to be a second wheelhouse, though that was impossible—this was a working boat, as she well knew, and the deck was needed for sheep and cattle. When she got closer, she saw what it was—a wood-frame playhouse, white with sky blue trim and a narrow door that must have been no more than five feet high. The whole thing wasn’t much bigger than the toolshed and it had to be partially dismantled to get it off the boat and up the hill, but she was thrilled with it. Ed had built it for his own children, now grown, and it was a regular little house, with windows cut in the exact center of each of the walls, and a sturdy peaked roof. Herbie set it in the middle of the courtyard, beside the flagpole, up which he ceremonially raised the Stars and Stripes once the schoolhouse was anchored in place, and then he went out to the barn and came back with Buck and the sled and the three-hundred-fifty-pound bronze ship’s bell he’d dug out of the beach the year before, frame and all.
The girls, who’d been slamming in and out of their new schoolhouse as if they were on holiday (which they were, at least for the time being: she’d have to see to desks, maps, a globe and a chalkboard to make the conversion complete), stopped in their tracks when Herbie led the horse through the gate. “What’s that for?” Marianne asked, pointing to the bell, and Herbie, sweating from the effort though the day was windy and overcast, made as if he didn’t know what she was talking about.
“What do you mean?”
“That,” she said, coming up to touch a tentative finger to the brass shell while her sister held back as if it might erupt with a life all its own.
“Oh, that?” Herbie said, as if he’d just discovered it there on the sled. “That’s your school bell. And you know what a school bell is for?”
“No.”
“So you never have an excuse to be late. Or your sister either.”
After that, they kept regular sessions, eight to twelve and one to four, with an hour off for lunch, following the curriculum—and the texts—the school district sent out to them, and Elise made sure to test her pupils and send in the results as required at the end of each term. Though she didn’t have a teacher’s credential, the school district waived the requirement, considering the special circumstances of the arrangement, and the San Miguel Island school, with its enrollment of two, was officially sanctioned for business.
The biggest problem? Neither of the girls knew anything of the outside world and so they were forever interrupting their reading with questions about things anyone else would have taken for granted. (“Mother, what’s a coin? Mother, what’s a car? Mother, what’s a pig? Is it a kind of sheep?”) There were illustrations in the encyclopedia, of course, and the pictures she cut from magazines and tacked up on the walls, but there was nothing like doing and seeing—they’d never laid eyes on a tree, either one of them, or maybe Marianne had, but she would have been too young to remember—and so, the following summer, at the end of their first school year, she got Herbie to ask Bob Brooks and Jimmie to stay on for a few days after the shearers left so they could take the girls to Santa Barbara. On vacation. Summer vacation. It was high time they expanded their horizons, that was the way she saw it, and if they came across three-story buildings, street crossings and stop signs or the railway with its locomotives and the passenger cars clanking behind, automobiles, bicycles, the market and drugstore and all the rest, so much the better.
Of course, the press got wind of it, and everywhere they went they were trailed by reporters and photographers, the Swiss Family Lester treating their progeny to shoes in an actual shoe store and dinner at a restaurant where you sat down and people came up to take your order and serve you, to a tour of the bank and the courthouse, and best of all, to the drugstore for the first ice-cream cones they’d ever raised to their lips. And so what if every drip and lick was recorded for posterity? The girls were their shy and sweet selves and Herbie beamed and strutted and crowed and kept up a patter with the reporters that could have filled the next dozen editions of the newspaper. She made the girls pay for the ice cream themselves—or hand over the coins, that is, a nickel each—because that was part of the lesson too. Yes, there was a world out there beyond the island. And yes, there was ice cream in that world, and yes, my darlings, my daughters, my loves, people paid for things there with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.
* * *
And then there was a day, it might have been in 1939 or even 1940, she couldn’t remember, a day of overarching light and gusts so strong they threatened to tatter the flag where it snapped at the pole, when a package wrapped in brown paper and trussed up firmly with half a ball of string appeared as if by magic on the front doorstep. She’d been in the schoolhouse with the girls, drilling Marianne on long division and Betsy on alternating columns of addition and subtraction, and Herbie had been out on one of his reconnaissance patrols to check on the far-flung sheep and sniff out signs of poachers, so no one had seen a thing. Nor had she or the girls heard the gate open and close, and that was because they were absorbed in their lessons. And because of the wind. Which tended to rock the schoolhouse on the pallets that kept it just off the ground while it shot under the eaves with a dull roar that more than once had fooled them into thinking George was coming in for a landing in his new Beechcraft Staggerwing airplane. At any rate—and this had happened before—she concluded that one of their yachting friends must have stopped by and delivered the package, and not finding Herbie and not wanting to disturb the lessons, had stolen away without a word. But why then hadn’t they at least left a note? It was a mystery. As was the package, which Marianne stumbled over when she and her sister raced each other across the courtyard and darted in the door for lunch.
It was addressed to Herbert Steever Lester, Esquire, San Miguel Island, California, U.S.A., and the return address was stamped Ethiopian Embassy, Washington, D.C. She brought it in and set it on the kitchen table, and though she was eaten up with curiosity and the girls kept pestering her to open it, she left it for Herbie—he was the one who’d written the emperor, after all—and made use of the opportunity to give the girls a geography lesson after lunch. Where was Ethiopia? “Right here,” she said, revolving the globe halfway round to show the dark continent and the mountainous wedge of the ancient land on its eastern horn, right across from the Arabian Peninsula. “And you know the Arabian Peninsula, right? Where the Arabs are? Remember The Arabian Nights?”
Herbie came in looking exhausted. He’d stumbled across the remains of a campfire on the beach at Chinese Point that was so fresh the embers were still glowing, and had searched the entire shoreline, fruitlessly, as it turned out, and he’d gone far out of his way and used up all the water in his canteen so that he had to find a seep
just to wet his mouth. He must have fallen too, judging from the fresh wet scab glistening on his left knee. The minute he walked in the door, the girls jumped in his arms, but instead of dancing them round the room as he usually did, he just hugged them to him and dropped them down again, then lifted his head to give her a tired grin. “How about a little splash of whiskey before dinner?” he said. “Will you join me?”
“Yes,” she said, “that sounds nice. Oh, and by the way, this came for you.”
As soon as he saw the package he came to life—or no, he took off like a rocket, every cell and fiber of him alive with excitement. He turned it over in his hands, reading out the return address in a voice of wonder. “What do you think of that, girls—all the way from Africa. You know where Ethiopia is?”
They both nodded impatiently. “Open it, Daddy,” Marianne pleaded, and in the next moment both girls were jumping up and down, chanting, “Open it, open it!”
She brought him a knife and he cut the string and tore the paper away from the box, which was the size and shape of the boxes shoes come in. “What do you know,” he said, mugging for the girls, “Haile Selassie sent me a new pair of shoes.”
Inside there was a letter from the deposed emperor—or one of his subordinates—thanking Herbie for his generous offer and his support for the regime in exile, which only awaited the day when the Fascisti were defeated and the Lion of Judah could return to his rightful throne. No mention was made of the years that had gone by since Herbie had made his offer or of the fact that it was moot now because the Italians were in Addis Ababa and looked to stay for a good long while, but in the depths of the box, wrapped in tissue paper, were two shining gold-braided epaulets, given, the letter said, to grant the addressee royal status in the emperor’s court.
Dinner could wait. Whiskey could wait. There was nothing for it but that Elise had to sit right down, right that minute (well, okay, he would pour the whiskey now, in celebration) and sew the epaulets to the shoulders of his best white shirt. When it was done, he modeled the shirt in the mirror, happy as a schoolboy, and then he drained his glass, filled it again, and took the elephant gun down from its mount, slung it over one shoulder and marched the girls round the courtyard—hep one, hep two—until dinner was on the table and they could sit down and give thanks not only for the food before them but for the wise and beneficent Lion of Judah and his steadfast ally, the King of San Miguel.
Bluer
Little money had come in, no matter how wide their fame had spread, but when the National Weather Bureau decided to establish a reporting station on the island—to set them up with a two-way radio and instruments for measuring temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure and pay them a wage for sending in reports twice a day on a regular schedule—Herbie jumped at the chance. Ten years back, when they’d first come out to the island, he might have dreamed of buying out Bob Brooks, but the Depression had put an end to that—and to his bid to have Hugh Rockwell step in as silent partner and rescue him. That had been a blow he never fully recovered from, and it had hurt him too that none of his schemes for lecturing or capturing seals or selling the bones of sea elephants ever came to fruition, but he never stopped scraping for sources of income. Now, though, with the twenty-five dollars a week the weather bureau was giving them, for the first time at least they had something coming in that wasn’t dependent on Bob Brooks or Hugh Rockwell or any other millionaire businessman, current or former. Things were beginning to look up. Or at least that was the way she saw it.
Still, they had to get up in the dark every morning, take the measurements and transmit them to a station ashore and then do it all over again at night, seven days a week, without fail, and she wasn’t really at her best that early or that late either—and neither was he. The schedule began to wear on them. One anonymous winter morning, the rain and wind relentless, the house freezing, they both struggled out of bed and right away he started carping at her and she snapped back at him and before she could think they were shouting at each other.
“It’s you,” he accused. “It’s all your fault. And why I ever let you talk me into this shitty weather job, I’ll never know.”
“Me talk you into it? You were the one who couldn’t stop going on about how it was like picking money off a tree—”
“I don’t care, I want to quit.”
“And what about the money?”
“To hell with the money. I say we write Billy Rose—or no, go ashore and wire him, wire him right this minute, today—and tell him we accept his offer.”
“We’ve been through that already.” Billy Rose was one of the impresarios of the San Francisco Exhibition and he’d wanted to fly them up there to be his guests onstage for a limited engagement, the Swiss Family Lester arrayed for everyone to see while Billy Rose teased out the jokes about sheep and islands and cooking on a woodstove, then turned to Marianne to mug and wink and lean in close and ask, “You like any of the kids in your school, honey?” while the crowd howled and the dollars poured in. They’d both rejected it, as they had the offer from Movietone News to make a newsreel feature, because they both—both—agreed that they wouldn’t want to subject the children to that kind of poking and prodding and cheap commercialism.
“I don’t care. I want to wire him.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“It’s a chance to make money, maybe big money—”
“No.”
“Who are you to tell me no? I’m the authority here, I’m the King of San Miguel, not you. You’re not the one they all want to come see, you’re not the one they interview—it’s me. Me. And I’ll do as I damn please, whether you like it or not.”
She had a cold, she was irritable, her nose was dripping and her head ached, and Marianne, running a low-grade fever, had kept her up half the night. She wasn’t herself and she should have left it there, she knew it, but she couldn’t. “Stop fooling yourself,” she shot back, “we’re the king and queen of nothing, it’s a joke,” and her voice wasn’t even her own—it was somebody else’s, somebody strident and heartless. “Are you kidding me? We’re as broke as we were when we got here—what do we own besides your guns and my books and the clothes on our backs? And we’re at the mercy of Bob Brooks, who could close this operation down tomorrow if he wanted to—and you know it.”
He was leaning over the bedside, lacing up his boots, his hair mussed, his shoulders slumped, his every motion jerky with anger. The stove had gone cold. The house smelled of ash, cats, something gone rotten in the walls. She was at the bureau, wondering what to wear (not that there was a lot of choice: she tended to wear the same thing every day, skirt, blouse, sweater, support hose and flat shoes), when all at once he jumped to his feet, snatched his white shirt off the arm of the chair and shook it in her face till the epaulets blazed in the light of the bedside lamp. “I’m king,” he shouted, “whether you want to admit it or not. And Bob Brooks would never in his life even think of doing anything to hurt us and if he ever did that’s just all the more reason to wire Billy Rose right this minute and get on that airplane.”
They never quarreled. Or hardly ever. It set a bad example for the children, for one thing. She could read his moods, play to him, wait him out. And more often than not she gave in to him. But not this time. Not where the children were involved. The rain grew suddenly louder, as if they were hearing it broadcast over the radio and someone had turned up the volume. “No,” she said.
“Elise,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
* * *
Gray skies, a month of gloom, no visitors, one day indistinguishable from the next. Three meals to put on the table. Seven hours in the classroom. Twelve midnight at the weather station and right back there again at six a.m. Floors to mop, pets to feed, dishes to wash, laundry to boil up in a pot on the woodstove that choked her lungs and made her eyes smar
t, her hands as rough as if they’d been carved of oak, her nails chipped and black with their half-moons of dirt no matter how faithfully she tried to keep them up. The girls were restless, the sun was a memory and Herbie was always out somewhere, shoeing the horses, mending fence, wandering far afield, as bored and weighed down as she was—blue and getting bluer. That month—it was March of 1940, Marianne nine and Betsy six and both of them growing out of their clothes—she found herself drifting around the house like an automaton, her legs in motion but her mind a thousand miles away. For the first time she almost wished she’d relented and let Herbie fly them all to San Francisco—at least it would have been a break in the routine.
One Saturday afternoon, when she felt she just had to get out of the house or go mad, she asked Herbie to look after the girls, shrugged into her jacket and went out for a walk. The girls had begged to come, but she was firm with them—“I just need a few minutes’ peace, that’s all, and I’ll be back for dinner, don’t you worry,” and then she told Herbie to keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove, and she was off.
The day was mild, the wind light and blowing up out of the south for a change. It was spring, the first breath of spring, and the revelation took her by surprise—she’d come out to the island a new bride in this very month ten years ago, not knowing what to expect, and here she was living an adventure she could never have dreamed of when she was a girl at school. It was as if she were the heroine of a novel, like the stalwart mother of the shipwreck story the press kept identifying them with (who also happened to be named Elizabeth, which, in light of things, had seemed to her an ominous coincidence).
But what was wrong with her? Everything was fine. The girls were growing, everyone was healthy, the ewes dropping lambs and the wool bringing in a regular if niggling profit, while Herbie was doing his best to mask his disappointments and throw himself into the work of the ranch. And here it was spring and she was out walking in this grand majestic place she had all to herself. The sky stretched flat overhead, sheep glanced up at her, startled, and trotted off on stiff legs, still chewing, the ocean smells drifted up the cliffs and the gulls shone white against the bruised gray backdrop that ran out over the water and faded away to infinity. She felt sustained. Felt whole and free. At first she walked aimlessly, letting her feet take her where they would, and then on a whim she decided to go out to Harris Point, Herbie’s favorite spot, a place where they’d picnicked and gathered arrowheads and where the views wrapped round you as if you were in the crow’s nest of a ship at sea.