T. Boyle - San Miguel

The wind rattled the gate as if someone were there, but no one was — Jimmie was still back on the mainland because Bob Brooks couldn’t afford to have him here and he wouldn’t be needed till shearing in any case. So it was just the two of them, just Herbie and her. She smelled the sea, clean and cold. Felt the warmth of the sun on her face, her legs, her blouse and skirt and the blooming breasts and spreading abdomen they clothed and hid from view. She set down her book — a novel she couldn’t seem to focus on — and in a voice so soft and tentative she could barely hear herself, she said, “Herbie, I think I’m going to have a baby.”

The look on his face. As if she’d said, They’re dropping gold coins from an airplane!

“You’re not!” he said, coming up out of the chair so fast it pitched back and collapsed behind him. “You wouldn’t kid me, would you?”

She felt her face flush. “I’m — as far as I can tell, that is. From… from things. And the medical encyclopedia.”

He was standing over her, rocking back on his heels, his arms folded and his stare fixed on her, and then he reached out and laid a trembling hand on each of her shoulders as if he were blessing her. She felt his fingers there, the gentlest touch, and then they were gliding down the length of her arms till he took her hands in his and squeezed them tight. “You haven’t been having your period?”

She shook her head no.

“And you’ve been sick in the mornings — aren’t you supposed to be sick in the mornings?”

“Yes,” she said. “A little.”

And then he had her up out of the chair and he was hugging her to him so fiercely the breath went out of her. “We’ve got to get a doctor, the best man there is, and we have to get you to the hospital because we can’t deliver a baby out here, I mean, I can’t — I’m no doctor — and if there’s an obstruction, a problem, any problem…”

She held to him, rocked with him there on the protesting bleached-out boards of the long straight run of the porch while the wind blew the smell of the sea to her and the soft tremolo of the grazing lambs drifted across the yellowed fringe of the hills. “Hush,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’ll all work out fine. You’ll see.”

* * *

For the next two weeks, Herbie was busy in the toolshed across the courtyard from the house, disappearing after breakfast each morning and not emerging again till lunch, after which he locked the door of the shed and went off on his usual rounds. When she asked what he was doing out there every morning, he gave her a mysterious look and said it was a secret, but when she stepped out on the porch to hang the wash or shake out the tablecloth or sit in the chair with her knitting beneath a fog-shrouded sun or a sky blue all the way to the empyrean, her ears told her the secret had to do with the hammering of nails and the metronomic cleaving of wood with a handsaw. He was building something. And what could it be? A bassinet? A crib? It would be crude, whatever it was — he wasn’t a natural carpenter — but she would admire it and exclaim over it all the same. It was the thought that counted. And she couldn’t very well order a maple crib from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue — or could she? When one of the boats stopped by — the Vaquero or Bob Ord’s Poncador or the Hermes, the Coast Guard cutter — she could send off a letter and then one or the other of them could deliver it when it came in, but what address would she give back ashore? And how could they afford it in these times?

At any rate, there came a day when the banging and sawing and the soft persistent rasp of sandpaper stopped altogether and he brought her out to the shed to show her what he’d wrought. The door stood open. She could smell the shellac before she’d got halfway across the yard. Inside, where the light from the open door fell across it in a savage slant, was a crib patched together from a dozen multihued scraps of wood and glowing under its coat of shellac. It was immense, big enough to hold five babies stretched out end-to-end, and in the depths of it, in lieu of a mattress, were the pillows stripped from the beds in the back end of the house, where Jimmie and the shearers slept. For a moment, she was speechless, and the silence hung between them until Herbie said softly, “I figured shellac instead of paint because I wouldn’t want the baby peeling off any flakes of paint and, I don’t know, poisoning himself. Because that’ll happen.”

All she could do was laugh and then take him by the arm, right at the biceps, and pull him to her for a kiss. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Perfect.” She was going to go on, telling him she loved the way he’d matched up the different woods and how nice it would look in the corner of their bedroom, right next to the stove that was going to have its pipe refitted any day now, but she never had the chance because he beamed his smile at her and said, “How about let’s take the day off? A picnic. How does a picnic on the beach sound?”

They went down to the harbor and spread a blanket in the sand. She’d made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on her own home-baked French bread, or the best simulacrum she could come up with, wrapped some oatmeal cookies in newspaper and poured the better part of a pitcher of iced tea (or cool tea, since they had no ice or means to make or store it) into a thermos, and they sat on the blanket and read their books and ate and gazed out to sea. The day was bright, the sun steady in the sky — early September on through October the best time for weather out here, or so Herbie assured her, and he’d had it from Jimmie — but it was brisk out in the open with no windbreak and she was glad she’d brought a sweater. She was just beginning to think about dinner, a long leisurely walk up the hillside, lamb chops simmering in butter and sage, more French bread, and then an evening spent out on the porch watching the sky change till night came on and they could go in and sit before the stove and talk in quiet voices about the baby and their plans for him — and names, names too — when Herbie suddenly let out a cry, jumping up from the blanket as if he’d been stung. “You see that?” he shouted, pointing out to sea.

She was getting to her feet, struggling up, the extra weight she’d begun to put on making her awkward and uncertain in her movements. “What?” she said, shading her eyes to follow his gaze out across the sun-bleached water. “What is it?”

“There! Don’t you see it?”

Something was out there, a rolling undulant thing that shone blackly at the surface, glistening and sparking like an oiled shroud towed through the waves. “What is it, a porpoise?”

“Killer whale. An orca. The one I told you about that’s been harassing the seals, eating them, that is — one bite and the water’s all blood and the seal’s there like a bone crossways in a dog’s mouth. But are you okay? I mean, to stay here while I run up to the house for the gun?”

“Gun? What gun?”

“The harpoon gun, what do you think?”

This was a new gun, recently added to the collection thanks to the largesse of Hugh Rockwell, who’d sent it via the Hermes as a kind of consolation prize after continually delaying the loan to finance Herbie’s bid to buy the lease from Bob Brooks. It was a shining brass thing that might have been a musical instrument but for the barbed spear jammed into the barrel of it and it was Herbie’s newest treasure.

“You’re not going to try to shoot that thing, are you?” She glanced down the shore to where their only craft — a rowboat — sat beside the crude dock and the shed Brooks had built for storing the wool sacks before they were shipped out.

“Of course I am,” he said, already moving away from her.