T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Well, it’s fat enough, George,” he said. “Fat and prime.” He was holding the flashlight, the goose giving back the reflected light in the pans of its eyes as it cocked its head to pick up the sound of their voices. Overhead, the stars leapt out in a mad white display. She felt the punch massaging her veins. It was cold. She thought of the sheep out there in the darkness beyond, huddled, with their legs folded under them. Christmas. It was Christmas on the island.

“You don’t think I’d bring you a scrawny one, do you?”

“No, not Santa George. You’re the — the best friend I ever had.” Herbie’s voice had run off the tracks, thick with its freight of whiskey and something else too, something maudlin and overworked. “Except maybe Bob Brooks.” A pause, the night pouring down, the goose snatching at the light, trying to get a fix on them. “And Elise. Elise, of course. Finest woman alive. Aces. Aces all the way. Don’t you agree, George? Isn’t she aces?”

“Yes, sure she is.”

“And you — I mean it — you are the most generous, the most—”

“Herbie,” she said as gently as she could, “don’t you think we’d better go inside?” And she tried to make a joke of it: “For the goose’s sake? She’s got a big day ahead of her come Tuesday. She’ll need her sleep, won’t she?”

“Her beauty rest.”

“Her beauty rest, yes.” She laughed. And George, good sport, joined in.

“But that’s not a goose at all,” Herbie put in, his voice thick, congealed into a kind of sobbing bray. He’d had too much to drink, maybe they all had, because it was Christmas, almost Christmas, and they were celebrating. “No goose,” he said, louder now, an edge of sudden anger slicing through him.

“What do you mean?” George said. They were all three following the beam of the flashlight to the animal’s cocked head and the firm golden lockbox of its beak.

“It’s a gander,” Herbie burst out. “Can’t you see that? Look at the size of him. Look at that neck. A gander’s no goose. A gander’s a — a, a gander !”

* * *

George couldn’t stay for the holiday — he was due back at Bonnymede to celebrate the occasion with his family, which was only understandable. In the morning, though the winds were volatile and threatened to flip the Cabin Waco before it could get off the ground, George hopscotched down the runway, found the air under his wings and was gone. She and Herbie stood there, arm in arm, and watched the plane recede into the sky. They had their tree and their presents — he would surprise her with a phonograph and three records, including a recording of Beethoven’s piano pieces as interpreted by a thirty-one-year-old Chilean genius, across the cover of which he’d written Für Elise in his neat rounded hand — and the greater gift of their daughters, who would awaken on Christmas morning to see what Santa had brought them. And they had the goose too — the gander — which snaked out his neck and hissed and honked round the courtyard, master of all he surveyed and destined to lead a long and prosperous life as Herbie’s special pet, while she poked the coals in the oven and laid on wood to stoke the temperature to three hundred seventy-five degrees, just right for leg of lamb.

The years scrolled by, 1935, ’36, ’37, ’38, the outside world canting toward the conflagration to come, tension ashore, tension at sea, Tojo’s troops in Shanghai and Hitler eyeing the Sudetenland. In the Lester household, there was tranquility. The phonograph brought the strains of civilization to a place where no music had been heard in all eternity but for the erratic strumming of a sheepman’s guitar or the rasp of an Indian’s rattle over a crude campfire, and she and Herbie and the girls listened over and over to the Beethoven till it was so worn it began to sound as if it had been recorded in the midst of a bombing raid. The next year she added Borodin’s Second String Quartet and Mozart’s Requiem to her thin shelf of recordings, though Herbie claimed he could barely stand to listen to them, the music made him so sad. Still, it was pleasant to sit there during the evenings and hear something other than the wind while they played cards or read aloud before the fire — and besides, wasn’t sadness, the ability to feel and feel deeply, what made us human? And joy, joy of course. She had the “Jubilate” for that.

The radio came next. Or rather, the generator to produce the electricity to make the radio something more than just another piece of furniture. Her mother, still worried over them, always worried, had sent the radio, a big glistening Zenith Tombstone model George managed to fly over in his plane, but it was mute until the generator began to turn and the first tentative squeaks and squelches of the forgotten world cohered in the mellifluous tones of an announcer’s voice, which came clear so suddenly you would have thought he was there in the room. Marianne nearly jumped out of her skin, staring wide-eyed at the fabric-covered mouth of the speaker, not quite believing there wasn’t someone hidden inside, while Herbie maneuvered the aerial and fine-tuned the dial like an impresario. She made popcorn and they all sat round this new marvel, transfixed, while dinner went cold and the sun faded from the sky, unseen and unappreciated.

All in all, it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they were glad for the broadcast concerts and the programs they gathered round to listen to each night— Amos ’n’ Andy, Flash Gordon, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour —but on the other hand, the news of the world came at them relentlessly, infecting them like some new kind of plague. Like it or not, they were part of the world now, drawn in almost against their will. Herbie began to fret over things happening halfway around the globe, the news bad, exclusively bad, bad all the time. She tried to tune out the announcer’s voice, her fingers busy with her knitting, her mind wandering, but her ears wouldn’t let her. And then there was the racketing blat-blat-blat of the generator that annihilated the silence of the yard so that she could barely tolerate going outside when the electricity was in use. Which, fortunately, wasn’t very often — the generator devoured coal oil, and coal oil not only cost money they didn’t have, but it came in fifty-gallon drums that had to be hauled up from the beach behind the steaming haunches of Buck and Nellie.

Then the first reporter — Richard Blakely, of the Santa Barbara News-Press —introduced himself by way of a letter contained in the canvas mail pouch George Hammond had got in the habit of bringing out to them each week. He was a friend of the Hammonds and had heard of the “wonderful things” they were doing out there on the island, things the subscribers to the paper “would certainly be interested in,” and he wondered if he might not come to visit them for a few days with the notion of interviewing them for a feature article in the Sunday edition, which, as they no doubt knew, was the most widely read issue of the week. Herbie slit open the embossed envelope with his penknife, careful to preserve it intact, then unfolded the letter and read it aloud while she and George, seated comfortably at the kitchen table, looked on. She could tell from the welling of his voice and the way he tried to give life to the reporter’s stale phrases that he was excited by the prospect. “Great news!” he concluded, handing her the letter. “Just what I’ve been hoping for — a little publicity. What sort of man is he, George?”

“Oh, he’s on the up-and-up. Very amenable.”

“Nice guy?”

“Yeah, nice guy.”

“So what do you think, Elise? Ready to roll out your Sunday best and cook up an island feast for the fourth estate? I’ll butcher a lamb. And set out the lobster traps. And George can bring us some more eggs — right, George? — so you can make one of your extra special deluxe chocolate layer cakes for him, show him what island living’s all about—”