T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Are you ill?”

“And whiskey. Is there any whiskey left?”

“Whiskey? At this hour?” She crossed the room to him and laid her palm across his brow. “You don’t have a fever, do you? Or your back. Is it your back?”

“It’s my side. I don’t think I can get up.”

She nursed him through the morning, alarmed because he was always so stoic, never sick a day, never idle. His face was drained of color. He wouldn’t take anything to eat. She gave him some fruit juice out of a can and found half a bottle of whiskey, one he’d been hoarding, out in the toolshed. For the rest of the day, he alternated sips of whiskey and doses of aspirin, but every time he tried to get up, the pain was too much for him. The problem — and he explained it to her when she brought a plate of supper in to him, supper which wound up going cold — was that the shrapnel in him was migrating, pressing on something there, on his left side, just below the ribs, cutting into him all over again.

She’d pulled up a chair beside the bed and lifted Marianne into her lap. “You need a doctor,” she said. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor, right away.”

“No,” he said. “I can’t do that. I can’t leave you here on your own.”

“I can manage. It’ll only be a day. Or a day there and a day back. That’s all. Two days, maybe three. I’ll be fine. I will.”

“No,” he said, “no,” and he tried to shake his head for emphasis but the pain grabbed at him and he could only wince.

It went on like that for two days, the whiskey gone, no more than a handful of aspirin left and Herbie taking nothing but tea and broth and no way to contact anyone unless she got in the rowboat and rowed herself out of the harbor, south around Nichols Point and due east to Santa Rosa to try to find someone there to help, but the boat wasn’t built for the open ocean and she’d probably just wind up drowning herself — and even if she didn’t, even if she managed to make it, what would she do with Marianne in the interval and who’d look after Herbie? No, the only solution was to keep an eye out for a passing boat and pray for the best. But it was the dead of winter, January, and the weather was bad — if it cleared one day out of seven it was cause for celebration — and when the weather was bad the fishermen stayed ashore and the pleasure boaters never left the dock. So where was this miraculous boat going to come from? And how would they know there were people in trouble out here?

By the third day, he was marginally better, sitting up in bed, taking toast and coffee for breakfast and a bit of soup for lunch, but when he got up to use the bathroom he was hunched over and gasping and when he was done there were traces of blood in the toilet. If she’d been alarmed before, now she was frantic. “I can’t take it,” she told him. “I’m going down to the beach. To signal. There’s got to be a boat out there somewhere.”

“Signal?” His voice was choked. “With what?”

“I’ll wrap a sheet around the broom and wave it like a flag, a white sheet.”

He didn’t say anything, merely winced and closed his eyes.

The afternoon was cold, the wind stiff, the ocean pounded to a froth. Visibility was poor. She tried to make a game out of it for Marianne, drawing faces in the sand, bending to collect shells, but it was no fun — even with her mittens and scarf and her hood up, Marianne was chilled through, she could see that. Her cheeks were chapped. Her nose was running. She was a baby still, a month short of her second birthday, and taking her down here in weather like this was crazy. It was useless. The whole thing was useless.

She went about her chores that evening as if she were an automaton, making a dinner she alone would eat, feeding the baby and putting her to bed, clearing up, seeing that Herbie was as comfortable as possible. She tried to sit before the fireplace, tried to read, knit, occupy herself, but her mind kept churning. Finally, because she couldn’t just do nothing — he was in pain, he could be bleeding internally, dying —she went out in the yard with the sudden notion of starting a bonfire, setting the whole island ablaze if need be, anything to get somebody somewhere to see what was happening here.

The wind wouldn’t have it. It battered her as soon as she opened the gate, rocking her off her feet and stinging her face and hands with grit as she went about mechanically piling wood in the lee of the house — the precious firewood that had to be dug from the earth or hauled up from the seadrift below, wood there was never enough of. She knelt in front of the pile as if in a pew at church, mouthing silent prayers, but the matches flared out the instant they caught. Eventually, after going through half a box of matches and crumpling ball after ball of newspaper, she managed to work a thin thread of flame through the pile and for a moment she thought it would catch, but a gust snatched it away and the darkness rushed back in. In bed that night, lying sleepless beside her husband, she listened to the wind raking across the island, stretching itself, sucking in air till it was blowing a gale.

* * *

And then the miracle. In the morning it was clear, the wind was down and there was a boat in the harbor, a motor yacht that must have come in in the night to take refuge from the storm. She spotted it right away, as soon as she got out of bed to find Herbie bent to one side in the chair by the stove, the empty aspirin bottle clutched in his hand, the baby standing up in her crib and whimpering to be picked up and the binoculars on the hook by the door where she’d left them. “Keep an eye on Marianne,” she told him, pulling on her clothes, fighting her feet into her shoes and snatching up the broom with the sheet wrapped round it. “Don’t let her near the stove. I’ll be right back.”

The boat was the Bon Temps, out of Ventura, and it had drifted to the end of its anchor line with the incoming tide so that its stern faced straight on when she got down to the beach, breathless, her heart pounding and a shrill tocsin sounding in her head. All the way down she kept expecting to see the boat motor out of the harbor before she could get there and she’d pushed herself hard, risking a turned ankle or a fall or worse, rocks strewn everywhere and the sand drifted up to disguise them. For one frantic moment she’d thought of taking Buck, but she couldn’t spare the time to saddle him and so she’d just taken off running and hadn’t stopped till this moment, when she unfurled the sheet and began waving it wildly over her head. “Help!” she shouted, the urgent squall of her voice carrying out over the water to the mute rocking hull of the Bon Temps, which might as well have been a ghost ship for all she could see, but then they’d be asleep in their berths still, wouldn’t they?

It couldn’t have been much past seven. The water smelled oily and rank. It was calm, flat calm, the stalled sun throwing a hard metallic glint across the surface. “Help!” she shouted, up to her knees in the surf now, the sheet flapping in the breeze she was generating all on her own. “SOS! SOS!” Very gently, almost apologetically, the boat swung round on its tether, then swung back again.

She was thinking of the rowboat, of running for the boat and rowing out to them, when a figure appeared on the deck. It was a man, dark-haired, angular, his face smudged with sleep. She watched him cup his hands and shout, his voice stretched thin as wire: “What’s the trouble?”

“It’s my husband. He’s — he needs a doctor! Help, we need help!”

Now there was a second figure, a woman, her face pale and milky beneath the blond bob of her hair and the flat black slashes of her eyebrows. She watched the two of them put their heads together, conferring, and then the man was dropping the dinghy over the stern, climbing into it and steadying it for the woman. Then they pushed off, the oars dipped, and they were coming.