T. Boyle - San Miguel

It was only appropriate. Because everything had changed. She wasn’t Edith Scott Waters anymore, wasn’t a girl on a sheep ranch on an island, wasn’t ordinary in any way. She was Inez Deane, belle of the stage, and she was going home.

She was thirty-eight years on this earth and until three weeks ago she’d never been west of the Hudson River — she’d been to the Berkshires, Boston and Newport as a girl, and Montreux and Paris too, but west? Never. The West was a place she knew only from books, from Francis Parkman and Mark Twain and Willa Cather, a huge dun expanse of the map striated with mountains and flecked with plains and deserts, home to cactus, rattlesnakes, red Indians, cowboys, bucking broncos, buckaroos — and what else? Prospectors. Oilmen. Motion-picture stars. She thought of Chaplin eating his own shoe, of Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees on a street lined with palms. The West. Terra incognita. Terra insolita. And now here she was, all the way out on the west coast of the U.S.A. and waiting for the cattle boat that would take her beyond the coast altogether, to the last scrap of land the continent had to offer, an island tossed out in the ocean like an afterthought. Thirty-eight years. And wasn’t life the strangest thing?

It was early morning, the end of March, 1930. She watched the sun rise out of the mountains down the shoreline to her left, and that was strange too, because all her life she’d known it to emerge from the waters of Long Island Sound, a quivering yellow disk like the separated yolk of an egg, the waves running away to the horizon and shifting from black to gray and finally to the clean undiluted blue of the sky above — if the sun was shining, that is. And half the time it wasn’t. Half the time it was overcast, drizzling, raining — or sleeting. There was no sleet here, though, and never would be, not until the next Ice Age came along, anyway. Just the sun, which in that moment swelled to a perfect blazing circle and slipped free of the clutch of the mountains to draw long tapering shadows out of every vertical thing, boats at anchor, the pilings of the pier, the trees along the bluff — some of which, and she just noticed this now, were palms, imagine that, palms .

The boat — Herbie had told her to watch for it downshore to the east while he ran off in his excitable trot to see to a dozen last-minute things — was called the Vaquero, and it was used by the family on one of the other islands to ferry cattle across the channel to market. She looked off to sea, sniffed at the breeze. The sun rose higher. People moved around her on the shifting planks of the pier, going about their business, maritime business, and no one gave her a second glance. Herbie had left her there to keep an eye on their baggage — a glancing kiss, a bolt from his eyes, I’ll be right back —but she didn’t feel at all threatened or even anxious. If there were any thieves on the pier that morning, she didn’t see them.

When finally the boat did appear, it was a distant black pinpoint emerging from the shadow of the mountains to glint sporadically as it rocked into the rising flood of sunlight. She put a hand up to shield her eyes and held it there the whole while as the boat grew bigger and the smell — urine, feces, the close festering odor of glands and secretions and hide, cowhide — came rushing to her on the breeze. Then the boat was there, tethered and gently knocking against the pilings, and a raw-faced man in blue jeans and a wide-brimmed hat came scrambling up the ladder and onto the pier. He was short, shorter than she was, anyway, and so slim and agile it took her a minute to realize he wasn’t as young as he’d first appeared, wasn’t young at all. There were creases round his eyes, hackles of stiff white hair tracing the underside of his jaw where he’d been indifferently shaved, and she wondered about that, shaving at sea, with the deck pitching under you and the razor — even a safety razor — a hazard all its own.

He stood there a moment as if to get his bearings, then shot her a glance, his eyes dropping from her face to the tumble of suitcases, shoulder bags, trunks, boxes and sacks of provisions scattered round her, before lifting again to settle on hers. Then he was coming forward, drumming across the planks with a brisk chop of his legs — boots, he was wearing cowboy boots — and giving her a smile so wide she could make out the cracked gray remnants of his molars. “So you must be the new bride,” he said, tipping his hat, and then he gave his name, which she forgot in the instant: new bride .

Yes, she was a new bride, twenty years after she’d made her debut at Delmonico’s with a full orchestra to provide entertainment and a young tenor by the name of Enrico Caruso serenading the glowing cluster of debutantes and their families, all the world laid out before her, and fifteen years — fifteen at least — since she’d given up all hope. New bride. She almost blushed.

“Yes,” she said, bending forward to nod in assent. “I’m Herbie’s wife, Elizabeth. Or Elise. Call me Elise.”

There was a moment of silence, the stink of the absent cattle — they’d been off-loaded the day before in Oxnard, she would learn — rising to them from the boat lurching in the swell below. There were gulls, of course. Pelicans. People up and down the pier bending to one task or another.

He ducked his head, pulled at the brim of his hat, looked to her things and then to the ladder bolted to the side of the pier. “Well, lucky for you and Herbie the boat’s here today, because if it wasn’t for the storm that come in day before last they’d of been here and gone already. And then you’d of had to take the Coast Guard boat.”

She must have given him a puzzled look, because he immediately qualified that: “Which is fine, and I don’t mean anything by it — it’s just that the Coast Guard boys tend sometimes to go off on other business, depending on what comes up on the radio, orders, you know, and sometimes you’ll be four or five days aboard before you can get to where you’re going.”

She smiled. “And what about you?”

He smiled back, made as if to tip his hat again and thought better of it. “Oh, me? Don’t worry about me — I’ll be going out to Santa Rosa with the boat. And we’ll be shoving off here just as soon as they can take on supplies and get you and your — Herbie, that is — aboard.”

“Santa Rosa? Which one is that?”

He did a quick shuffle of his feet, maneuvering round the baggage to point off down the length of the pier and across the channel to where the sun striped the flank of the big island lying out there on the horizon. “That one there, straight out? That’s Santa Cruz. Now look to the right of that, you see it tucked in there behind that point, almost looks like it’s joined to it, but it’s not, believe me — that’s Santa Rosa, that’s home for the Vail and Vickers boys. And me too, at least for the first week or so, till you get settled in — I mean, for your honeymoon and like that.”

“But I thought — weren’t we supposed to go to San Miguel?”

Laughing now: “Oh, yes, nobody’s going to strand you on your honeymoon — San Miguel’s the first stop.” He’d shifted again and was pointing far off to the right. “You see that? Way out? That little strip of brown there?”

She narrowed her eyes, squinting at the hovering vaporous line of the horizon, due west, all the way out, so far out she couldn’t be sure she was actually seeing anything at all. “Is that it?” she asked, looking to him.

“It is, ma’am,” he said. “And you can’t always see it from here, but you’re lucky, as I say. Doubly lucky.”