T. Boyle - San Miguel

The captain looked to his men, then to her, and finally, Herbie. His face showed nothing. “Rien,” he said finally, and he bowed again and moved toward the door, which stood open still on the courtyard and the main gate beyond. In the next moment — and Herbie never flinched, never shifted, just stood there leaning against the wall with his arms folded — the Japanese were bowing their way out the door with murmurs of “Merci” and something else, something in their own language that might have meant thank you or goodbye or maybe just Sorry .

* * *

She didn’t want to quarrel, but as soon as they’d left — as soon, that is, as Herbie had got back from following them down to the shore to make good and certain they got in their boat and rowed off to the ship anchored in the harbor — she came right up to him and let loose. “I can’t believe how you treated those men,” she said.

He was standing in the doorframe, the light a solid wedge behind him, as if it had turned hard, to ice or stone. “What’s for dinner?” he said, ignoring her. “I’m half-starved.”

“Why were you so rude? They were decent enough, just like anybody else, fishermen, that’s all — you should have seen the fuss they made over Marianne.”

“They stole from me. I told you that.”

“Who stole from you? Those men, were they the ones?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, softening his voice, “maybe. He looked familiar, the one in the white coat. I told you the story, didn’t I — about the strychnine that time? The time I was poisoned?”

He tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. “No,” she said. “No, you didn’t.”

“Listen, I’m sorry,” he said, and he went to sit on the couch, right where they’d been not an hour before, but she wouldn’t let it go, she was furious at him, and she stood over him, hands on her hips, and if the baby was fretting in her basket, so much the worse.

“It was when I first got out here, and Bob was gone and Jimmie too and I was all alone and didn’t really know what I was doing — thinking of you all the time, around the clock. Remember all those letters I wrote you? The miss-you ones? The pleading ones? Well, anyway, lambing was coming on and before he left Bob said we needed to do something about the ravens, to keep them off the newborn lambs because they’ll kill them, you know that, don’t you? I shot a couple, but then, because I was low on cartridges and didn’t want to waste ammunition, I put out poisoned baits for them, meat that had gone bad, and I laced it with the strychnine from the bottle out there in the shed. But my mistake — you know what my mistake was? I got done and rolled a cigarette and licked off the paper and smoked it without thinking to wash my hands.”

She eased down beside him on the couch. “You poisoned yourself,” she said, her voice soft now.

“Yeah.”

“You never told me, never said a word in your letters—”

“Why would I? I felt like an idiot. And I didn’t want to worry you. But it was bad, and it hit me right away, because I was smoking it, you see? I went into convulsions. Stiffened like a rake. I couldn’t breathe. I was out there in the courtyard, in the dirt, thinking I was going to die all alone and nobody’d find me for weeks, and suddenly there was this Jap, come up from a boat in the harbor just like the ones today, looking at me over the gate, and I called out to him for help. ‘I’m poisoned,’ I said, and then I don’t remember, but he must have got me in the house and put me here on the couch and found a blanket for me. I passed out. And when I woke up, the Jap was gone and one of my guns was gone too — and since I only had the three at the time because Hugh had the rest, thank God, I noticed right away. But can you imagine? The son of a bitch leaves me here, dying for all he knew, and all he does is steal my gun? Can you get any lower than that?”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. But these men—” she broke off. Suddenly, amazingly, he was grinning at her. “What?” she said. “Why are you grinning?”

“Did you count the silverware?”

And now she was grinning too — it was a joke. He was already joking about it. They had no silverware, no silver of any kind, not even a candlestick or an egg cup. “I’ll get up and see in a minute,” she said.

“What about the salver?”

“I’ll have to check on that too,” she said.

After that, there was a long stretch of time in which nothing much happened, everything placid, the wind blowing, the sheep grazing, the waves rolling on up the shore and pulling back again. It was just her, Herbie and Marianne, the Vaquero coming once a month with supplies, the Hermes every week or two with the mail and news of the outside world. Which wasn’t especially good as the year wound down and Christmas came on without a tree or store-bought presents, though it was homey and quiet and she and Herbie exchanged little things they’d made — earrings he’d fashioned from mother — of — pearl, socks and a muffler she’d knitted in a shade of red so bright you could have signaled out to sea with them, and for Marianne a stuffed corduroy teddy bear with button eyes and three miniature sheep Herbie had carved from a block of balsawood that turned up on the beach one day.

Another spring came and went. The shearers arrived and then they were gone. The days bled into each other, days eternal, each one like the next. Herbie threw himself into his projects — hooking up a water heater to the stove in the kitchen and running the pipes through the attic to the bathroom so they could have baths without having to lug a sloshing pail from one end of the house to the other; building the fireplace in the living room out of adobe bricks salvaged from the old Waters place; erecting a windmill to pump the water up from the spring and replace the hand pump — and she worked right beside him, hauling brick, mixing mortar, taking the shovel and pick and extending the septic field out and away from the house and water supply. They were too busy to be bored, though there were nights when she would have given anything for a radio or a phonograph even — just to hear music, anything, a polka, a concerto, Eddie Cantor or Al Jolson, it didn’t matter. Music. She missed music, but not much else.

The fact was that everything out there beyond the channel began to seem increasingly remote and disconnected. They picked up a newspaper or magazine her mother had sent them and they might as well have been reading about another planet, science fiction in the pages of Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post . The Depression was worsening and no end in sight, as if joblessness, bankruptcy, starving children and whole families cast out in the street were the normal way of doing things and all that had come before, all the generations of farmers, factory workers and shop owners, all the savings accounts, a quarter a week, build for the future, nothing more than an illusion. Mussolini and his Blackshirts were strutting in Italy and Hitler and his Brownshirts in Germany and when election day came around they discovered that the United States was to have a new president, a socialist by the name of Roosevelt whom both she and Herbie would have voted against if there were a polling place nearby. As if it mattered. And it didn’t. All that mattered was the three of them and the way the seasons turned and the ewes dropped their lambs.

Then there came a morning when Herbie couldn’t get out of bed. It was just after their second Christmas, a dark late-December morning, the wind chasing round the courtyard and the steady granular tap of the sand grains at the window the only sound in the world. She was up before him, at first light, feeding Marianne and putting on the coffee pot, and at first she didn’t think anything of it. Usually he was up first, burning with his uncontainable energy, running from one thing to another, but Marianne had woken her early and she took her out to the kitchen and let him sleep. When he didn’t come in, even after she’d fed Marianne her porridge, poured out a cup of coffee for herself, greased the griddle and mixed the pancake batter, she went back to the bedroom and found him lying there supine, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. “Bring me the aspirin,” he said, his voice clenched in his throat. “The whole bottle.”