T. Boyle - San Miguel

And so they drank a second round and Herbie recounted the tale of the ship going down and the miracle of the cask revealed in the sand. “I had Bob Brooks — he’s the man I work for here, do you know of him, millionaire from Beverly Hills? — bring me a bunch of five-gallon tins when he came out with the shearers. It took the two of us the better part of three nights to siphon off the whole business and haul it up to the house, and believe me I was careful to keep the thing covered up with kelp and a couple shovelfuls of sand — and to erase our tracks too. All I could think was that somebody else’d get to it before we could drain it. Not only the shearers — they’ll drink anything — but the hired man here, because if you don’t dole out the booze with him he’ll drink till he drops down blind. But you know how hired hands are, I’m sure.”

This last was addressed to Hammond, who just gave him a smile and nodded his head. The fact was, as they were later to discover, George Hammond didn’t know the first thing about hands, hired or otherwise. Servants, yes. A Japanese gardener. A chauffeur. But he was no rancher — he was independently wealthy, living with his wife and mother at his mother’s estate on the ocean just east of Santa Barbara, where he’d constructed his own airstrip. He had one passion only, and that was for aviation.

“So tell me about your aircraft,” Herbie said. “It’s a real beaut.”

“Well, thank you. I like it, I do, but I’m looking for something with a bit more oomph, if you know what I mean. Took us what, John — just over forty minutes to get here? We can do better than that.”

“It’s a Travel Air, isn’t it?” Herbie had pulled up a stool and was sitting kitty-corner to the couch. She sat across from him in the chair, supporting the baby on one shoulder, and if she could foresee the fog coming down and their guests having to spend the night — or even two nights, three — so much the better. Marianne was crabwalking round the floor, clacking her blocks together, as excited by the company as her parents were, and she kept clacking them till Herbie leaned down and told her to hush.

“That’s right,” Hammond was saying, “two hundred twenty horsepower, and that’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve got my eye on something bigger — a Cabin Waco or maybe even one of the new Beechcrafts. Do you know the Beechcraft?”

Herbie didn’t. But he was all ears and she could see what he was thinking: Forty minutes to shore and that was too slow? With an airplane, their whole world could open up, no more waiting for the cattle boat or the Coast Guard or a passing fisherman or Bob Brooks to send supplies once a month if they were lucky. They could have some of the things the outside world had to offer, things they’d done without, things to make life easier. A phonograph. A radio. A generator for electricity. Travel Air Biplane. Cabin Waco. Beechcraft . She repeated the exotic names silently to herself, almost as if they were an incantation, though she couldn’t have known what she was wishing for.

The fog did come down that afternoon, the sun gone before they knew it, the hills swallowed up and the harbor erased so completely you wouldn’t have known they were on an island at all — they could have been anyplace, a field in Nebraska, a mountaintop in Tibet, Fifth Avenue with all the plugs pulled and the traffic swept off to the moon. Everything was soft and gray, the fog so dense you couldn’t see the plane from the front door. And with the fog came the quiet, ambient sounds muffled and nothing moving beyond the windows, all the world reduced to the room they were sitting in. Hammond — George — opened up once he saw that they wouldn’t be leaving till morning, if then. He sampled Herbie’s whiskey, regaled them with stories of what was going on in Santa Barbara society and in Los Angeles and beyond and John Jeffries had his own stories to tell while Herbie leaned forward to interject and magnify and urge them on, flying from one subject to another, never happier. She served lamb stew at the table in the kitchen. Marianne fell asleep in her arms. And afterward, because the chill had come back now and no denying it, Herbie built a fire and they sat around talking, the four of them, till the gray deepened by degrees and finally gave way to a starless night.

Christmas that year was a wonder. For the first time ever they had a tree — the girls’ first Christmas tree, festooned with strings of popcorn and figurines of colored paper, with a tinfoil angel perched on top — and there were store-bought toys and catalogue things too. The tree might have been scraggly and lopsided and no more than three feet high, not at all the kind of thing she remembered from her girlhood, when the whole family would go out into the stripped and silent woods with the horses and drag back a perfectly proportioned spruce eight or ten feet tall, but it was a tree, the only tree on an island that had none. She wouldn’t have thought it would make such a difference, the sight of it there on a piece of white felt draped over a stool in the living room — and the smell of it, of pine sap and the stiff fragrant needles — but it did. Just that. Just the tree. It brought back a cascade of memories — and created them too, the future memories. For her and Herbie and the girls.

They had George Hammond to thank for it. He’d become a fast friend, flying out weekly, sometimes twice a week. He brought them eggs, milk, fresh greens. Delicacies from his mother’s garden parties, squab, cold cuts, bakery bread, the cheeses she couldn’t get enough of. Once news got around of what they were doing on the island — pioneering, that is, living like the first settlers in a way that must have seemed romantic to people inured to the grid of city streets and trapped in the cycle of getting and wanting and getting all over again — people began to deliver things to Bonnymede expressly so that George could take them out to San Miguel in his new Cabin Waco and lighten the burden for the Lesters. It was amazing in its way — they were gaining notoriety just for drawing breath in a place that fired the imagination, already undergoing the transmutation into myth the press would later work on them, she the devoted and intrepid wife whipping up gourmet fare on a woodstove, Herbie the wounded war veteran withdrawn from society and seeking peace in nature, the girls growing into their depthless blond beauty in primordial innocence while the rest of the world churned with its hates and factions and the hard knocks of experience.

As Christmas grew nearer, Herbie took to calling Hammond Santa George, the bringer of gifts and good tidings. He’d split the boon of his whiskey with Bob Brooks, fifty-fifty, because Bob was the lessee, after all, and he wanted to be fair, but there were gallons of it hidden away in the storeroom — enough to last years, and no more parceling out pennies to have Brooks add a bottle or two of the cheapest rotgut to the grocery list. Oh, no. Herbie was possessor of the finest stock in all the islands and up and down the coast too. So when George flew in two days before Christmas with the tree and an armload of presents — and a Christmas goose to replace the turkey that had fallen victim to the foxes before it had its chance to appear on a platter — Herbie concocted a holiday punch so potent it ensured that George would have to spend the night if he downed so much as a cupful. And he did, of course. And she did too. They sang carols before a snapping fire, took turns reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and Dickens’ Christmas stories aloud to the girls, and then went out to hand-feed the goose in its cage in the yard while Herbie clucked over its fate.