T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Where’s the basket? I need a basket. And a length of tubing and my drill, but Jimmie’s out there in the shed, isn’t he? All right, all right, I’ll just have to be sly about it, that’s all, otherwise he’ll know we’re up to something — but come on, come on, bottles, girl, bottles.”

“You still haven’t answered me,” she said.

He paused then, just for an instant, to give her his grin, smug and piratical. “The find of the century, is about all. But don’t breathe a word to Jimmie. Quick now, wrap up the baby, grab your jacket and meet me outside the front gate — if Jimmie sees us he’ll just think we’re going off for a picnic lunch.”

What he’d found, on the windward beach between Simonton Cove and Harris Point, was nothing less than buried treasure. A ship carrying a cargo of flour, sugar and Kentucky bourbon whiskey, amongst other things, had gone down on the rocks there at the turn of the century, and for weeks after sacks of flour kept washing up on the beach — flour that the Russells, who were caretakers at the time, managed to retrieve and make use of for years to come, though it must have been uncommonly salty — but the whiskey casks had all been lost, as far as anyone knew. Jimmie had told the story twenty times around the table, tantalizing Herbie with the notion that some of the casks must surely have washed ashore and been buried in the restless sands — and it was true that all sorts of things would appear after a storm or a particularly low tide, including the mast of an old sailing ship Herbie had dug out the week before and erected in the courtyard as a flagpole. He’d been off on one of his beachcombing expeditions that morning and detected just the smallest irregularity in the plane of the beach ahead of him and begun digging with increasing excitement until he’d uncovered enough to see that it was a barrel — more than a barrel, a cask of the sort used for wines and liquors, and too big to dig out. He scraped and poked and smoothed away the sand until he could read the legend branded into the hooped belly of the thing: Kentucky Bourbon, 86 Proof.

“Of course, I rapped it with my knuckles,” he was saying as they headed off across the plateau, the bottles, tubing and drill secreted in the basket that swung from his arm, “and I have my hopes up, but for all I know that’s seawater in there now.”

She was out of breath, struggling with the weight of Marianne in her arms and the frenzied pace he was keeping, as if the waves were going to mount up and drag the cask back out to sea after thirty years and more of waiting. “You never know,” she said, between breaths, “maybe we’ll get lucky.”

It was a hard climb down and Herbie kept darting ahead and coming back to help her until finally they got to the beach and she let Marianne down to walk at a child’s pace — at which point Herbie lost all patience and shot on ahead of them, jogging into the distance until he was just a hazy linear stroke against the flat pan of the beach and the rolling horizontality of the sea. The mist closed in. The air smelled of dead things. She tried to keep him in sight, tugging at Marianne’s hand whenever the child bent for a starfish or seashell, but he kept shifting in and out of focus, Herbie the impetuous, Herbie the mirage.

When eventually she did catch up to him through the simple stratagem of keeping the ocean to her right and the dunes on her left, she found him on his knees in the wet sand, cranking the hand-drill round and round over a scrap of wood fixed there before him. She watched the shavings coil away until a dark hole no bigger than her little finger appeared in the glistening rim of what she realized was the cask — and how he’d ever spotted it she’d never know. It wasn’t two inches above the sand, all set to disappear again with the next tide. Wet wood. A faint gleam. It looked no different from the other wrack scattered up and down the beach.

His hands were trembling as he threaded the rubber tubing through the hole and into the depths of the cask. Before he put his lips to it he gave her a look and said, “Well, here goes. We’re going to have something very special here — thirty years aged, VSOP, can you imagine it? — or just more of this.” He waved a hand at the waves clawing their way up the beach and all that water floating off to the horizon behind it. Then he closed his eyes, put the end of the tube to his mouth and sucked in his cheeks.

She watched him swallow, suck again, swallow, and still he didn’t take the tube from his mouth or open his eyes. “Well?” she said. “If it’s salt water you must have had enough by now.”

And then his eyes flashed open and he gave her the most beatific look. “You try it, girl, and you just tell me what you think.”

* * *

It might have been that night or the next or maybe a week later that she told him she was pregnant again. It was somewhere in that period, that was all she remembered, and if the memory came intermingled with the faint floral savor of the smoothest, ripest, most ethereal liquor she’d ever known, that was no bad thing either. It was all a gift — manna, manna from heaven. “No doubts this time,” she said. “No need for the medical encyclopedia or the doctor either.”

He didn’t say anything for the longest moment, just focused his eyes on hers as if he could touch her all the way across the room. “We’re getting to be old hands at this, aren’t we?” he said finally, laughing aloud. “But I’m the luckiest man in the world. And the happiest.” Then he got up and came to her where she was sitting on the couch, easing in beside her and wrapping her in his arms. “Herbie Junior,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling, “where’ve you been all my life?

“But wait, wait,” he said suddenly, jumping to his feet and darting across the room to the bookcase, where he’d hidden one of the scored brown vanilla extract bottles of straight Kentucky bourbon behind a book there. She watched him slide out the volume— An American Tragedy —and feel around for the bottle.

“Why Dreiser?” she asked, relishing the moment.

He turned to her, smiling, the bottle in hand. “Because the man knows sorrow and whiskey’s the cure for it,” he said, ready with an answer as always. “Old Theodore, old Ted, he’d drink bourbon at a time like this, don’t you think?” He uncorked the bottle and sniffed. “Even if it smells just the faintest wee little bit like vanilla. But at least this time around”—and here he held the bottle aloft like the trophy it was—“we’ve got something to toast the baby with.”

A pair of glasses. Two fingers for her, three for him. He leaned over the couch to hand her hers and then they clinked glasses. “To Herbie Junior!” he sang out, and drained his glass in a gulp.

She sipped at her portion, savoring it, even as he refilled his own glass, and if she was thinking anything at all it was just this: There’s plenty more where that came from.

Elizabeth Edith Lester was born in December, a compact pretty baby with her father’s eyes and her grandmother Sherman’s retroussé nose. This time Elise had convinced Herbie to let her stay on the island till she was well into her eighth month and when she did go ashore it wasn’t to the Whites’ and only briefly to the Brooks’. She’d been unfailingly gracious to the fishermen and pleasure boaters who stopped by the island — it was reflexive, really, part of her nature, the sort of innate generosity of spirit she displayed for anyone, even the Japanese — and now she found her graciousness rewarded in invitations, half a dozen or more of them. There was no need to rent an apartment or to worry over inflicting herself on distant cousins who had their own lives to lead. This time she went where she was wanted, taking Marianne with her and rotating amongst couples she knew, spending a week or two at a time with each of them — social visits that enlivened her and got her back into the swing of things ashore, the radio programs, the daily newspapers, gossip and idle chat and earnest discussions about Fascism in Italy and the threat of war in Spain, and though she missed Herbie and Christmas on the island and was more than ready to come back home once the baby had put on the requisite ten pounds, the hiatus this time hadn’t seemed nearly as stifling as the first time around.