T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Edith was no dummy, though,” Jimmie said, blowing the steam off his coffee and rooting around in his shirt pocket for another cigarette. “She got herself a lawyer and sued the old wife, the divorced one, for custody of her daughter — little Dorothy, who she wouldn’t of even recognized if she didn’t have a picture in front of her. But she was the mother, and I guess, from what the papers said, she put on the performance of her life in that courtroom, and in the end she got her daughter back, no strings attached — but plenty of money. A thousand a month. Which is more than I’ve seen in my entire life — and a whole lot more waiting for when Dorothy grew up and came into her inheritance.

“No, she was sharp, a real trader. When the Captain died in nineteen-seventeen, she went ahead and sued the estate for the money her mother had left for her and her part of the ranch too and she won that case against the Captain’s brother and his son from his first marriage.” He lit, drew in, exhaled. “Edith. She married three times, did you know that? And every one of them a divorce. I know all her names by heart, Edith Waters Walker Basford Burritt, and of course the one that made her, Inez Deane.”

“Is she still living?”

He had the coffee at his lips, the cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth. His eyes were drawn down to slits against the smoke. “Last I heard. She’s up in B.C. someplace, Victoria, I think it was, sitting on a pile of money. Her daughter’s dead, though. Dorothy. Never made it out of her teens.”

“She didn’t — there wasn’t any foul play involved, was there? Anything irregular, I mean?”

“No,” he said, looking up sharply. “Edith wasn’t like that. Once she had her daughter back she would’ve raised her up like anybody else, like you with your own daughter. It was the influenza took her.”

They sat there a moment in silence, contemplating the escape of one daughter and the death of another, contemplating life and the island and the narrowing path they were all on, everybody alive, then Jimmie pushed himself up with a sigh. “I guess I better be heading off to bed,” he said through a yawn, “because there’s always work to do — and you know when Herbie comes back he’s going to lay into me if anything’s amiss.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s a good idea. I’ll put out the lamp here.” And then she was on her feet and moving, and if for the past hour she’d been able to forget about Herbie and where he was and the vacuum in her life that was opening inside her till there was hardly anything left of her, it all came rushing back in the instant she switched off the lamp and the house fell into darkness.

When he did finally return, a little more than a month after he’d limped down to the boat supported by Dick Graffy on one side and her on the other, Herbie was his old self from the minute he walked in the door, no change detectable in him but for the paleness of his skin and the softness of his hands. She’d been busy with something, deep now into the marooned life and its daily demands, and hadn’t noticed the Hermes cruise into the harbor. He’d walked undetected up the road with one of the Coast Guard men, both of them carrying rucksacks crammed with supplies — and not just staples, but treats: liverwurst, Neufchâtel, soda crackers, pâté, fresh milk, eggs, a white paper sack of éclairs fresh from the bakery, as well as a doll for Marianne and a marcasite brooch for her — and she hadn’t known he was there until the door swung open and he called her name. It was a transformative moment, a moment out of a novel she’d long ago read and couldn’t place, she turning to the door, Marianne looking up from her coloring book at the table, Jimmie somewhere out in the yard and Herbie, with his mile-wide grin and his arms spread open, rushing across the floor to her.

They had a celebration that night, the Coast Guard man prevailed upon to stay though he was wanted back on the ship. But why not invite the whole crew up, Herbie kept insisting until it was done and they were a party of nine for a dinner that started with pâté and crackers and drinks all around from the bottle Herbie had brought back with him and ended with fresh-brewed coffee and éclairs. When Marianne had been put to sleep and the men had left and Jimmie gone down to his room, Herbie took her to the bedroom and made love to her with all the quick-breathing urgency of a man starved for it, his hands like a stranger’s hands, soft and uncalloused, but his body so familiar it was like an extension of her own. They were lying there under the comforter, thinking their own thoughts, her head propped on his shoulder and a candle guttering in the dish on the night table — awake and dreaming, both of them — when he broke the silence. “You haven’t even asked to see my scar,” he said.

“All right,” she murmured, smiling up at him, “if you think I should.”

He threw back the covers then, exposing himself all the way down to his toes, a lean terrain of etiolated flesh punctuated by his two flat nipples and the graying nest of his pubic hair. “You see? See what they’ve done to me? Neat job, huh?”

She saw a long curving cross-stitched line running up his side like the tracks of the electric trains in the window displays at Christmas, the flesh still red and angry where the needle had gone in and the sepsis had done its work.

He let out a laugh, then took her hand and put it there so she could trace the line of it with her forefinger. “This Morrison could have been a seamstress, don’t you think?”

Shadows flickered and gathered in the eaves. She felt very calm, very happy. “Yes,” she said, running her finger over the eruptive scar, “he did a beautiful job. But are you sure you’re all right now?”

“What do you think?” he said, and pulled her to him.

* * *

What came first, the discovery of the whiskey barrel or the intuition — or no, knowledge, definitive knowledge — that she was pregnant again, she couldn’t say. It was all bound up in the drift of the days in that spring of 1933, memory as indistinct as the weeks that ran up against each other without the distraction of weekends or holidays or anything beyond dawn and dusk to break the routine. She had Herbie back. They walked the hills, hand in hand, picked mussels from the rocks at low tide, sat before the fire at night and warmed each other in bed. And she had Marianne, who toddled round the house all day, chattering to herself and taking her naps whenever and wherever the mood struck her and each night climbing determinedly into her father’s lap for her bedtime story when dinner was done, the dishes washed and the light failing out over the ocean.

All she remembered was that somewhere in there was the day when Herbie came charging through the door in a state of high excitement, calling out, “Bottles, give me bottles, every bottle you can spare!”

It was late morning, the house quiet but for the intermittent rap of Jimmie’s hammer from across the courtyard, where the taproom — soon to be christened “The Killer Whale Bar”—was taking shape. Marianne was on the floor in the living room, playing with the alphabet blocks Herbie had made her, and she herself was busy with her latest project, repairing the punctured seat of a wicker chair she’d discovered in a pile of refuse out behind the barn. And now here he was, blowing through the room to the kitchen, calling for bottles. “Come on, girl, get yourself up,” he shouted over his shoulder. “No time to spare. What about those vanilla bottles, from the extract? Where are they? Are the corks still intact?”

She found him in the storeroom, digging through things. There was twine here, spare cookware, bottles and containers she’d washed and saved, a shelf of old newspaper and magazines, her broom, mop and bucket. “What is it?” she said, caught up in the pulse of his excitement. “What did you find?”