by Boyle, T. C.
Then it was coffee—and with the coffee, the pudding and the pineapple upside-down cake she’d baked for the girls and had meant to hold back till Herbie showed up—and afterward the girls’ presents. It was half past eight now. The light was nearly gone and the fog beginning to seep in. Dinner was over, the plates strewn with crumbs and the guests easing back in their chairs and lighting pipes and cigars. She couldn’t have kept the girls waiting any longer—it just wasn’t fair—and if she’d felt a sudden flare of anger for Herbie, so much the worse. What was wrong with him? He knew how much this meant to them. And certainly, no matter how blue he might have been feeling—if that was it—he wouldn’t want Bob Brooks to know about it or guess just how deep it went.
It was then—just as she was getting up to clear the dessert plates while Marianne turned over the pieces of her new chess set and Betsy made wide blue streaks on a sheet of construction paper with her new watercolors—that she thought of the note. The thought came hurtling at her, suddenly broken free of the cage in her mind where she’d kept it locked up all through the afternoon and through dinner and into the evening, even till now, when it hit her so hard she nearly dropped the plate in her hand. She saw the look of Herbie’s face when he’d leaned over to kiss her, his jowls gone heavy with gravity, the furrows digging at the corners of his eyes, the white bristle of his sideburns. She heard the deadness in his voice. Nothing to worry over, he’d said. It’s just a note. I’ll leave it in the house.
No one noticed as she set the plate back down and crossed the room to the desk, the conversation gone on into another mode now, the after-dinner-and-cigars mode, men’s talk, moistened with whiskey—sheep and war and boats and money. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. There was a new rhythm inside of her, a drumming premonitory throb she couldn’t fight down. She snatched at the scatter of papers, tossed the book aside, slammed through the drawers. Bob Brooks’ voice, distant, otherworldly: “Elise, is everything all right? What are you looking for? Elise?”
She couldn’t answer because the power of words had left her. She whirled round and waved her hands to silence him and then another thought came to her, a deeper thought wrested from a deeper place, and worse, far worse than the one that had brought her here. Then she was down on her knees, working the dial on the safe that had come from the wreck of the SS Cuba, welded steel, adamantine and impregnable even to the pounding of the surf, and if the conversation had died and Bob Brooks was watching from across the room, it didn’t matter, because there was the envelope on the top shelf with her name written across the front of it in her husband’s hand and the note neatly folded inside:
Dearest Elise:
You’ll find me at Harris Point, on the knoll there. I am sorry for this, sorry for it all, but I will not be a burden to you, I will not. There is nothing I can say except that everything is so damned heavy. The air. The air is crushing me. It’s like lead, air turned to lead.
Mon âme est sortie de moi. Le roi est mort.
Herbie
Departure
They found him in the morning, as soon as it was light. She’d wanted to go to him in the dark and she’d fought with them, the whole room of them, Bob Brooks crushing her so tightly to him all the air went out of her and she couldn’t breathe and then she could and screamed at them till they were nothing more than hollow faces hung round her like pictures in a gallery, but they wouldn’t yield. It was impossible to go out there in the dark of a moonless night with the fog closing in, she should know that if anybody should—the terrain was too rough, the cliffs too jagged, the ravines too deep. They’d never find him. It was too risky. Better to wait. Better? she threw back at them. What if he’s hurt? What if he’s only hurt? No one had an answer. But Bob Brooks wouldn’t let go of her. They rocked in place, just as she had with Herbie that night in the kitchen, but this was no dance and it went on till her legs gave way beneath her.
That the girls had to see it—or see the first cascading moments when she had the note there in her hand and Bob Brooks wouldn’t let go of her and the noise that came out of her was like the high choking gargle of a dying animal—made it even worse. Somebody, some one of them with their hollow faces and dumbstaring eyes, swept up the girls and took them out the door and down the porch to their room. Reg, it was Reg, and Freddie right behind him. The sailor boys. Doing their duty. Vigilant boys, vigilant after all. But her legs wouldn’t work and she was sitting in the chair, Herbie’s chair, by a dying fire, and she had to get hold of herself, had to see to the girls and then prepare herself for the vigil that would take her to first light and Harris Point and what she would find there, because what if he’d missed his aim? What if he’d changed his mind? What if the whole thing was a ruse? A plea for sympathy? A cruel joke?
The girls were both awake, Jimmie stationed outside their door, Reg and Freddie perched on the edges of their beds, talking to them in low voices. As soon as they saw her there in the doorway, they got up and slipped silently from the room.
Marianne’s voice came at her in a soft tremolo, no pause, no respite: “What happened? Reg wouldn’t tell us or Freddie either. Is it Dad?”
“Yes.” The room was lit only by a candle, a sepia glow straining for the ceiling and falling back futilely, over and over.
Betsy now, the faintest breath: “Is he all right?”
“We hope so.”
“Why isn’t he back? Where is he?”
“He’s”—and here she had to pause to get control of her voice because control was what was needed now, control above all else—“at Harris Point.”
“Is he going to stay there all night?”
“Yes.”
“Is he camping out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he lost?”
“Yes,” she said, “he’s lost.”
* * *
He’d been steady to the last, his aim unflinching, the blue-black revolver still clutched in his hand. He was lying on his side, napping for all anybody knew, but when she was still fifty feet from him, she could see the truth of it. No one had to tell her. She didn’t need a doctor or a coroner or a priest or anybody else.
She was mounted on Nellie and Bob Brooks was beside her on Hans, the fog trembling with the first flush of morning light, the surf roaring below and the seals roaring back at it. There was a feathery mist leaching out of the air and a smell like a fire that’s just been doused. When she reined in the horse and got down to kneel beside him she saw the crusted spot at his temple and the black dusting around it, such a small thing, this hole no bigger around than her wedding ring. His eyes were closed, shut tight, and his face was locked against the violence the next instant was to bring. She didn’t turn him over, though she wanted to—she wanted to lift him from the dirt and press him to her one last time, just hold him, but he wasn’t there anymore and never would be again.
They brought him back to the house on the sled and Jimmie took the couch from the living room out into the yard and reconverted it to its original use, fashioning a lid for it out of a sheet of plywood he found in the barn. Manny and Jesus, their mouths set and their eyes drawn down to slits, carried the pick and shovel up to Harris Point and dug the grave there high over the ocean while Bob Brooks searched through the Bible in the living room and Reg and Freddie got the stove going in the kitchen and heated up the leftovers so people could eat. It was up to her to prepare the body and she did the best she could, steeling herself—or maybe she was just numb, maybe that was it. She washed his face with a hot cloth and laid a compress over the left side, where the bullet had gone through, but she left him dressed as he was when she’d found him, in his short pants and boots and the white shirt with the epaulettes shining on his shoulders. The girls knew the truth by then and they were inconsolable. She arranged for Betsy to stay behind with Jimmie, but Marianne insisted on coming out to Harris Point to watch the coffin lowered in
to the grave—she wouldn’t be turned or dissuaded. The wind was up and they all had to keep averting their heads to keep the sand out of their eyes. Bob Brooks said a few words and read a passage from the Bible. She threw the first shovel of dirt in the hole and then they all stepped forward and it was done.
* * *
There was a day of high sun and scudding clouds sometime toward the end of the following week, one day out of a succession of them, each as bleak and unfocused as the last. She was in the living room, packing things away for the move back to the mainland, trying not to linger over one object or another—this was a winnowing, a selection, and yet each thing she touched took her out of herself till she lost track of where she was or what she was doing or even why she was here. She didn’t feel betrayed or bitter or abandoned, only sad, just that. Sad for Herbie, for her daughters, for herself. She could have stayed in Manhattan, setting herself up in the apartment with the view of the East River she’d had her eye on and gone through life as if she were gliding on a string from home to work and back again, shuffling through the card catalogue, unwrapping a sandwich for lunch at her desk beneath the tall windows, taking dinner at the corner restaurant with the burned-down candles on the tables and the daily specials chalked up on a board over the bar. She could have gone to Paris or back to Montreux or home to her mother in Rye, where every day was a replica of the one that had come before and the only change was the change of seasons. But then Herbert Steever Lester had come knocking at her door and she’d taken the leap and put herself here on this island that was nothing to her now, a widow with two daughters to provide for and educate and see through to their own chance at life.
She had a fire going in the fireplace she and Herbie had built for the comfort of it, hauling the bricks up from the ruins of the Waters’ house in a wheelbarrow till their backs ached, mixing the mortar, plying the plumb bob and laying each row as straight as eternity, because you couldn’t have a home without a hearth and home was what sustained you. The lamp on the desk was lit, though the sunlight filtering through the windows was bright enough, but she’d lit it anyway, without really thinking. On either side of the chimney, dark rectilinear shapes stained the wall where she’d taken down her pictures and packed them away. The guns were gone too, the entire collection packed up and sent to shore for sale at auction, but for the elephant rifle, which she’d laid in the coffin beside him, and the final one, the fatal one. That one, the snub-nose, the cold steel thing she’d pried from her husband’s dead hand though she could barely breathe from the shock of what was happening to her, was at the bottom of the ocean—flung high out over the cliff on a current of rage that burned through her like lightning on a dry plain.
It was too warm for a fire really, what with the sun on the roof, but it was necessary: she was burning things. This was part of the winnowing too, all these things and she couldn’t begin to take half of them with her. There wasn’t room on the sled or on the Coast Guard boat that was coming for her in two days’ time. Or in the apartment Bob Brooks had found for her in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara, from the front window of which you could just make out the ocean in the distance.
The girls were ashore, hustled away the day after the funeral to stay with friends there until she could come for them, and the others had gone too—Bob Brooks and the shearers back to their business on the coast and the sailor boys to bivouac in a tent down by the boat shed at Cuyler Harbor. Only Jimmie had stayed behind, to safeguard the place and keep her company. Which was fine, but she didn’t need company, she needed her husband and her daughters and for things to return to the way they were.
The fire snapped and brought her back to herself. She seemed to have something in her hand—a record, the Requiem—but she knew enough not to put it on the phonograph. No, there was only one place for it: in the fire. Angry suddenly, enraged, she flung it into the flames and watched the cover blacken and the vinyl inside quicken and die back. She wouldn’t part with any of her books—she’d brought them here all the way across the country and the channel too and she’d bring them back again—but there were letters and bills and papers, magazines, recipes, clippings, old art projects, drawings and photos everywhere she looked, and these she fed into the fire without a second glance. She dumped an armload of papers into the flames and felt the heat flare on her face, and then she turned to the chest of keepsakes. It was made of cedar, open-grained, smelling of high forests and perpetual shade. She lifted one end of it experimentally, but it was too heavy. Keepsakes. What were keepsakes, anyway?
She raised the lid and there were the magazines and newspapers with their names splashed all over them, Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post, Swiss Family Lester, the Pioneers, Wounded Vet, Lonely Isle. She didn’t know then that the Japanese would go down to defeat or that Bob Brooks would find an elderly Norwegian couple—the Eklunds—to take their place or that his lease would be summarily terminated by the Navy six years later and that every last ram, ewe and lamb would be herded aboard the Vaquero and taken to slaughter. She didn’t know that the Navy would use the island as a bombing range or that the house she was standing in would burn mysteriously twenty-seven years later so that only the chimney remained amidst the blowing ash. And she didn’t know that the Park Service would finally take charge of all of San Miguel and its waters and that anyone who wanted to come here or dream here or walk the hills and breathe the air would need to have a permit in hand.
What she knew was that the island had turned alien, as strange to her now as when she first walked up the hill as a bride and Herbie lit the lamps up and down the house so that when she went back out to the courtyard to carry in her new leather suitcases the windows glowed against the night that was absolute all the way to the threshold of the stars. She knew that luck gave out. And she knew that there was nothing to keep, nothing to hold on to, that it all came to nothing in the end. She reached into the trunk and lifted out all she could carry. The fire leapt up. The pages crumpled, the images vanished as if they’d never been there at all. If she’d gone outside she would have seen the smoke twist out of the chimney, reaching as high as it could go till the wind flattened it and drove it out to sea.
ALSO BY T. Coraghessan Boyle
Novels
When the Killing’s Done
The Women
Talk Talk
The Inner Circle
Drop City
A Friend of the Earth
Riven Rock
The Tortilla Curtain
The Road to Wellville
East Is East
World’s End
Budding Prospects
Water Music
Short Stories
Wild Child
Tooth and Claw
The Human Fly
After the Plague
T.C. Boyle Stories
Without a Hero
If the River Was Whiskey
Greasy Lake
Descent of Man