San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  It wasn’t far, no more than three miles or so, though the terrain was rough, a checkerboard of the usual dips and gullies, loose sand, scree, dirt compacted like concrete. She traced her way along the narrow peninsula and hiked up to the point, where she cleared a spot for herself with a vigorous sweep of one shoe before spreading a blanket so she could sit in comfort and look out to sea. She didn’t know how long she stayed there, letting her thoughts wander till she wasn’t thinking anything at all, but eventually she pushed herself up and started back, the image of the stove and the steaming pot rising before her. The children would be hungry, Herbie impatient. And she would come in the door to their various murmurings and mutterings and the excited barking of the dog, boil the spaghetti, grate the cheese and serve the meal, as always, and be thankful for it too. As always.

  She retraced her way across the broad apron of the plain, moving quickly now, the sun burning suddenly through the clouds to hover over the water in promise of better things to come and the sheep scattered in dense white clots across the hills. The breeze was light still, still warm, and even before the ranch house came into view, nestled like a long low fortress behind the running line of the perimeter fence, she could smell the smoke of the stove and the faint sweet scent of the marinara sauce mixed up with it. Before long she was there, making her way along the outside of the fence, listening to the gander stirring up a fuss in the yard and feeling better, infinitely better—she’d just needed to get out, that was all.

  As she came round the corner to the front of the compound, she pulled up short: Herbie was standing there at the gate with two strangers dressed in city clothes. Which was odd enough to begin with, but what was odder still was that Herbie was blocking the gate, rather than stepping aside to invite them in. The first thing she thought of, absurdly, was Fuller Brush men—or Jehovah’s Witnesses. And then it came clear to her—reporters, more reporters. As she got closer though she could see that Herbie was agitated, his shoulders squared and his face gone dark, and why would that be? He loved reporters, welcomed them all, the more the better.

  “No, no you won’t,” he was saying, his voice caught high in his throat. “You don’t have the right.”

  The men—they were nearly indistinguishable, but for the fact that the one nearest her was chewing gum, working his jaws furiously as Herbie gestured in his face. “It’s nothing to get agitated over,” the man said.

  “Agitated? You think I’m agitated? If I was agitated I’d go in there and take one of those guns down off the wall. No,” he said. “No, it won’t happen. Bob Brooks, you talk to Bob Brooks—”

  That was when they became aware of her. They all swung their heads to take her in as she passed along the outside of the fence and came up to where they were congregated at the gate. “Hello,” she said, looking first to the strangers, then Herbie.

  Both the men fumbled with their hats. The gum chewer gave her a strained smile. “Mrs. Lester? Hi. I’m John Ayers, and this is my associate, Leonard Thompson—we’re with the Department of the Interior and we’ll be out here for the next week, conducting a survey of the vegetation and wildlife, and we just thought we’d stop in to say hello. And introduce ourselves.” He tipped his hat a second time, a quick reflexive gesture. The gum snapped. “Just to be neighborly.”

  “We just got here—on the Coast Guard boat?” the other put in. “We’ll be setting up camp on the beach down there in the harbor. Beautiful place, by the way, if only we’d get a little more sunshine, huh?”

  Herbie had nothing to say to this, though she could see how upset he was—any encroachment on the island set him off, and though he understood perfectly well that the land was under the aegis of the federal government, which granted the lease for grazing rights to Bob Brooks and could pull the plug on all that any time it wanted, he tended to forget that fact, or brush it aside. Or deny it altogether. The federal government was an abstraction, distant and insubstantial, but he was real and so was she and so were the buildings and the sheep and the land beneath their feet—the land he worked and possessed and took the value of. Federal government. FDR. He held them in contempt, the same sort of contempt he held for the poachers who came ashore to steal their sheep.

  “So you’re here to do a survey,” she said, just to say something.

  “That’s right,” the first one said—Ayers. “It’s nothing to concern yourself over, is it, Leonard?” The other man shook his head. “The survey is only to assess the grazing damage here, with an eye to—”

  “Improvement,” the other man put in.

  It was only then that she began to understand. The island’s jurisdiction had passed from the Bureau of Lighthouses to the Department of the Interior and there had been talk of the National Park Service stepping in to oversee management of the land, but that talk, like all rumor, had flitted round them briefly and then gone on over to Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa for the ranchers there to bat around for a while. And yet here it was in the flesh, right on their doorstep. She felt afraid suddenly. Or not afraid, exactly, but off-balance, as if they’d come up and shoved her from behind.

  “I don’t know how long you’ve been here—” Ayers began.

  “Ten years,” Herbie said, cutting him off. “And Bob Brooks has held the lease all the way back to nineteen-seventeen. Is that long enough for you?”

  “—but as I’m sure you’re aware the range here has been severely overgrazed, leading to substantial degradation of the land—desert, the whole place’ll be desert if things continue as they are—and let’s call this a feasibility study toward the end of reforesting the island, after making a determination with regard to reducing the grazing population, that is, because that’s the first step in any recovery program—”

  “I told you, you can’t do that. There’s a lease in effect.”

  A laugh now, a wave of the hand. “Oh, we’re aware of that, of course we are, and we don’t mean to imply that anything’s going to go forward at present—”

  And now the other one put in: “But we have to inform you, and I have the official notification here, that oversight of San Miguel Island has passed on to the Navy now, for strategic purposes, you understand, as long as there’s a threat in the Pacific. And that we’re looking to long-range improvement of the resources here.”

  “Which means getting rid of the sheep, is that what you’re saying?” A muscle under Herbie’s right eye began to twitch. He balled his hands into fists. “Even though ranching’s gone on here for a hundred and sixty years—since the time of the Spaniards, for Christ’s sake?”

  She said his name aloud—two syllables, emphasis on the first—to draw him back, to warn him: “Herbie.” And then, in French: “Ce n’est pas le moment.”

  He ignored her. “You better bring your lawyers with you next time, a whole squad of them.” And then he caught himself. “Or are you the lawyers, is that what you are?”

  Ayers said quietly, “No, we’re not lawyers. We’re land management men.”

  Herbie threw it right back at him. “I don’t care who you are. You talk to Bob Brooks. He’s a millionaire, you know that? He’s got resources. He’ll fight you every inch of the way.”

  Both men took a step back. Neither was smiling now. “Let me emphasize,” Ayers said, shifting the gum from one side to the other, “that this is all just in the talking stages. It’s up to the Navy now. And you know the Navy—”

  “No, I don’t,” Herbie said, fighting to control his voice. “I was an Army man myself. And you go ahead and do your survey because I don’t have the authority to stop you. But you’ll hear from me—and Bob Brooks too, I promise you that.” He turned as if to shut the gate, then spun suddenly round again. “And you stay out of my way, you hear me?”

  * * *

  That night at dinner Herbie hardly said a word. It was as if all the fight had gone out of him the minute the two men had turned and start
ed down the road to the harbor. He didn’t touch his food. Throughout the meal, no matter if she tried to keep a conversation going or if the girls addressed him or not, he just stared at the wall as if he could see through it to a place they could only imagine. When the girls were finished and had got up to slide their smeared plates into the dishpan, she took them into the living room to read them their bedtime stories. Neither of them asked about the men who had come to the gate or why their father was still sitting there in the kitchen over a full plate of food, staring at the wall. She read for longer than usual that night—Kipling’s Just So Stories and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” their favorite—as if the magic of talking animals and the strangeness of India could insulate them from what was happening in their own house. Finally, when she put them to bed, Betsy asked if their father wasn’t coming in to kiss them goodnight and she had to say he wasn’t feeling well.

  “Is it the flu?” Marianne asked.

  “No,” she said, “it’s not the flu. He’s just feeling a little blue, that’s all. You know that’s how your daddy gets sometimes—me too. We all do.”

  He came to bed late, stripping down to his underwear wordlessly while she lay there propped up on her pillow, reading. His every motion—pulling the sweater up over his head, bending to his shoes, unbuttoning his shirt—seemed to take forever, as if he were deep undersea and struggling against a heavy current. Earlier, in the kitchen, she’d tried to snap him out of it while she stood over the dishpan, washing up, but it was like talking to a stone. Did he want to listen to a radio program? Or just sit with her by the fire? Did he know that Betsy had added up five columns of three-digit numbers that afternoon—and perfectly too? Was he going to take Pomo for a walk or should she just let him out in the courtyard? He’d shuffled in his seat a bit—there was that much to show that he was alive—but if he answered her at all it was in twitches and grunts.

  Now, seeing him there slumped over his discarded clothes as if he couldn’t summon the will to pick them up and lay them over the chair, she closed the book and set it on the night table. She knew what was going through his mind, knew the way he let things get him down. Those two men were out there somewhere in the dark—on his island—and he couldn’t bear the thought of it. “Come to bed,” she said, patting the mattress beside her. “You’ll feel better in the morning—a good night’s sleep, that’s all you need.”

  He gave her an absent look, then eased himself down on the bed and pulled back the covers.

  “It’s nothing to worry over. Really. I mean it. You heard them—they said it was only a study. And you know how these government studies go. Everything’s a study. And nothing ever gets done.”

  “I know,” he said after a moment. “I know. You’re right.”

  “We’ll be old folks by the time anything happens. In our rockers, side by side out there on the porch and the girls all grown up and married.”

  “The Navy,” he said, his voice submerged. “What would the Navy want with us out here?”

  “They probably don’t even know themselves. Bureaucracy, that’s all it is. Somebody shuffling papers in Washington.” It was only then that she noticed he was trembling. “You’re shivering. Are you cold?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She swept back the covers and held them open for him. “Here, move in close and I’ll warm you.”

  “What if they evict us?” he said, sliding stiffly in beside her. “Then what? Where’ll we go?”

  “They won’t evict us.”

  “But what if they do?”

  “No matter what happens,” she said, holding tight to him, “you’ll always have me and the girls. Always. No matter what.”

  But he was bitter that night, bitter and blue to the core. “Small comfort,” he said, and he rolled away from her and pulled the covers up over his head.

  The Gift

  As usual with these things, nothing much came of it. The Interior men went around the island taking notes—she saw them only once, in the distance, two crouched figures grubbing in the dirt at the base of a stunted bush, no different from the sheep except that the sheep bore wool—and then they were gone. Herbie came out of his funk once they’d left and he wrote a series of impassioned letters to Bob Brooks, the Secretary of the Navy, the Department of the Interior and their local congressman too, whose name nobody seemed to know till one of the Coast Guard men supplied it, and then he went back to being Herbie, bounding from one thing to another like the bees dancing over the geraniums that had somehow managed to struggle through the soil in the courtyard.

  Things held. Time moved on. The Nazis took Paris and drove the British Expeditionary Force into the sea at Dunkirk, 1940 became 1941, the sheep went on grazing and she served lamb five nights a week, week in and week out, while Herbie’s moods soared and fell on his own mysterious schedule and the girls grew taller and smarter and saw their test results rank in the highest percentile for their age groups nationwide. The winter was rainy and the spring wet, which made for fat sheep and abundant wool just when demand was growing because of the war in Europe. Summer rose up to loom over them, vast and static, and the girls, let out of school, roamed the island like wild Indians and learned to invent games for themselves. There was the radio, there were letters from her mother, visits from friends and a precipitous falling away of the interest of the press in the Swiss Family Lester in light of the rush of events, which, to her mind at least, came as a blessing.

  In the fall of that year, they had a brief spell of sunny weather that rode in on the hot winds off the Santa Ynez Mountains across the channel, mountains they could suddenly see from the yard, revealed to them where no mountains had been for weeks on end. After school each day that week she packed a snack, gathered up towels and a blanket and took the girls down to the beach for a swim, Herbie leading the way and the girls racing the last hundred yards in a pure shriek of elation. Herbie was a great one for swimming and he’d taught both girls to do a creditable breaststroke and Marianne the crawl and butterfly, but mostly they swam in chilly water under a leaden sky, so this was a treat, a real treat, and as long as the weather cooperated they took advantage of it. She’d just come out of the water herself one afternoon, everything slow and lazy, the girls taking turns burying each other in the sand and Herbie propped up on his elbows with a book, when the Hermes suddenly emerged from behind the headland to the east to slide across the harbor on a long glimmering train of light. “Look at that—it’s the Hermes,” she said, almost as if she were thinking aloud, and in an instant Herbie was on his feet and the girls up out of the sand and waving their arms over their heads. “But that’s odd, isn’t it? I didn’t think they were due for what, three or four days yet?”

  They stood in the fringe of surf and watched as the ship came to anchor and a clutch of familiar faces appeared along the rail. The girls jumped in place, kicking up jets of spray and crying out, “The Hermes! The Hermes!” in a singsong chant. It was a moment of high excitement, and if she thought with a pang of dinner and what she could possibly serve—or eke out—it was a fleeting thought. She waved and grinned and so did Herbie. They kept on waving as the dinghy was lowered and the oars flashed and the sun leapt up off the sea and fractured and regrouped all over again. She recognized the seaman at the oars, but the man in the bow was a stranger—and it looked as if no one was coming ashore but him, since typically the captain and at least two or three others crowded into the boat to come visit with them.

  The mystery was resolved a few minutes later, when the stranger bounded out of the boat, neatly sidestepping the outgoing wave so that his boots didn’t even get spattered—boots exactly like Herbie’s, and he was wearing short pants like Herbie’s too. He had a backpack, a tent and two canvas duffels with him, and they helped him haul it up the beach. And who was he? He was Frank Furlong and he was a surveyor.

  Herbie bristled. “You’re not one of these land management
people, are you? Because I thought I made it clear—”

  “No, no, no—I’m a civil engineer. I specialize in remote sites—out of doors, that’s where I want to be, not hemmed in in some office someplace. The Navy sent me out here to survey two possible sites for a beacon, but it’s your guess as good as mine whether in these economic times they’re ever going to get it built.” Even as he spoke he was patting down his pockets in search of something—which proved to be individually wrapped pieces of saltwater taffy, which he solemnly handed to the girls, Betsy first, then Marianne, who just stood there gaping up at him as if they didn’t know enough to say thank you.

  “Girls?” she prompted.

  “Thank you,” they said in chorus.

  “You’re very welcome, little ladies. And if your mother allows it—and your father—maybe we’ll just find another little piece of taffy for later on.”

  Before she could think she said, “Won’t you join us for dinner? It’s nothing fancy, I warn you—”

  “Fancy? I wouldn’t know fancy if it came up and bit me.” He was squinting against the sun, his eyes a pale rinsed-out blue. She saw that he hadn’t shaved in a day or two, whitish stubble crowning his chin and climbing up into his sideburns. His hair hadn’t gone fully over to gray yet, but to see him there in his hobnailed boots, short pants and soft-collared shirt, he might have been Herbie’s twin, minus the epaulettes. “Most nights when I’m out on the job,” he said, bending to heft the pack, “it’s pork and beans out of the can.”