T. Boyle - San Miguel

There was plenty enough to occupy her — occupy them — without having to worry about the fate of a medieval society she’d barely heard of, an empire nonetheless. World events swept on to other things, Herbie fired off letters to FDR, Will Rogers, Lewis B. Hershey and Father Coughlin in support or protest of whatever was on his mind at any given moment, and the life of the ranch went on. They had more visitors now, and the reporters never stopped coming — and, of course, reporters and visitors alike required feeding and a place to sleep and an expanding portion of the time she needed to devote to other things, like her daughters’ education, for instance. As Marianne and Betsy grew — and reports of them spread — questions arose in certain quarters over the quality of the education they were receiving, or if they were being educated at all. There were letters from various cranks and retired schoolteachers and professors too, espousing one scheme or another, and then finally an official letter arrived from the superintendent of the Santa Barbara schools, reminding them that the law required that all children on reaching the age of five years must attend school. To this point — Marianne was seven and Betsy not quite five — she’d done her best to instruct them herself, sitting them down at the kitchen table on weekdays and teaching them to copy simple sentences out of the children’s books her mother and various friends had sent on, as well as the rudiments of arithmetic, French and geography, but it was far from ideal, considering the distractions.

She showed Herbie the letter from the superintendent’s office when he came in from the yard that day. She watched his face as he scanned the letter and then read through it again, slowly this time. “What do you think?” she said finally, and why did she feel light-headed all of a sudden? Why was her heart pounding? Nothing had been decided — it was only a letter, that was all. An inquiry. “I was wondering if we should send them to the mainland — I’ve been thinking about this for ages, dreading it, really. To boarding school, I mean. I can’t imagine how we’ll afford it, but the fact is we’ve been selfish, we have — and don’t give me that look. We’ve been thinking of ourselves, not the girls — they need schooling like any other kids.”

“What’s wrong with you teaching them? And I can help. With reading, anyway. And math. And French, what about French?”

“It’s not the same thing. They need a curriculum.”

“I’d rather shoot myself than see those girls leave this island. It’d tear my heart out. Yours too. Admit it.”

“But I can’t teach them under these conditions and you know it, what with the pot going on the stove and the dog at the door and the cats… and every time they look up from their books, even Betsy with her coloring book, there’s something going on outside. I can’t keep their attention. Nobody could.”

“In the old days,” he said, trying to make a joke of it, “they used to have itinerant schoolmasters. Ichabod Crane. Maybe we can get him out here. Or no, I guess he’s just a fictional character, isn’t he? And he’d be dead by now, anyway.”

“It’s not funny, Herbie. There are laws, regulations. They could take the girls away from us as unfit parents. And don’t we want the best for them? Don’t we want them to be able to go out and take their place in the world? Someday, I mean?”

The solution — or at least the beginnings of it — came in the form of a gift from Ed Vail. He’d come up to the house one evening for dinner after helping Herbie unload supplies from the Vaquero, and somehow — maybe because she couldn’t get it out of her mind — the conversation shifted from the weather, conditions at sea and people they knew in common to the letter from the school district and how upset it had made them. “What you need is a schoolhouse,” Ed said, pausing over the lamb chops he was always happy to see when he came for dinner on their island, because, as he liked to say, I’m up to here with beef . He held the moment, then took up his knife and fork and began cutting. “I’ve got just the thing for you.”

The next time the Vaquero came round, there was a brightly painted structure dominating the foredeck. From a distance it looked to be a second wheelhouse, though that was impossible — this was a working boat, as she well knew, and the deck was needed for sheep and cattle. When she got closer, she saw what it was — a wood-frame playhouse, white with sky blue trim and a narrow door that must have been no more than five feet high. The whole thing wasn’t much bigger than the toolshed and it had to be partially dismantled to get it off the boat and up the hill, but she was thrilled with it. Ed had built it for his own children, now grown, and it was a regular little house, with windows cut in the exact center of each of the walls, and a sturdy peaked roof. Herbie set it in the middle of the courtyard, beside the flagpole, up which he ceremonially raised the Stars and Stripes once the schoolhouse was anchored in place, and then he went out to the barn and came back with Buck and the sled and the three-hundred-fifty-pound bronze ship’s bell he’d dug out of the beach the year before, frame and all.

The girls, who’d been slamming in and out of their new schoolhouse as if they were on holiday (which they were, at least for the time being: she’d have to see to desks, maps, a globe and a chalkboard to make the conversion complete), stopped in their tracks when Herbie led the horse through the gate. “What’s that for?” Marianne asked, pointing to the bell, and Herbie, sweating from the effort though the day was windy and overcast, made as if he didn’t know what she was talking about.

“What do you mean?”

“That,” she said, coming up to touch a tentative finger to the brass shell while her sister held back as if it might erupt with a life all its own.

“Oh, that?” Herbie said, as if he’d just discovered it there on the sled. “That’s your school bell. And you know what a school bell is for?”

“No.”

“So you never have an excuse to be late. Or your sister either.”

After that, they kept regular sessions, eight to twelve and one to four, with an hour off for lunch, following the curriculum — and the texts — the school district sent out to them, and Elise made sure to test her pupils and send in the results as required at the end of each term. Though she didn’t have a teacher’s credential, the school district waived the requirement, considering the special circumstances of the arrangement, and the San Miguel Island school, with its enrollment of two, was officially sanctioned for business.

The biggest problem? Neither of the girls knew anything of the outside world and so they were forever interrupting their reading with questions about things anyone else would have taken for granted. (“Mother, what’s a coin? Mother, what’s a car? Mother, what’s a pig? Is it a kind of sheep?”) There were illustrations in the encyclopedia, of course, and the pictures she cut from magazines and tacked up on the walls, but there was nothing like doing and seeing — they’d never laid eyes on a tree, either one of them, or maybe Marianne had, but she would have been too young to remember — and so, the following summer, at the end of their first school year, she got Herbie to ask Bob Brooks and Jimmie to stay on for a few days after the shearers left so they could take the girls to Santa Barbara. On vacation. Summer vacation. It was high time they expanded their horizons, that was the way she saw it, and if they came across three-story buildings, street crossings and stop signs or the railway with its locomotives and the passenger cars clanking behind, automobiles, bicycles, the market and drugstore and all the rest, so much the better.