T. Boyle - San Miguel

As she came round the corner to the front of the compound, she pulled up short: Herbie was standing there at the gate with two strangers dressed in city clothes. Which was odd enough to begin with, but what was odder still was that Herbie was blocking the gate, rather than stepping aside to invite them in. The first thing she thought of, absurdly, was Fuller Brush men — or Jehovah’s Witnesses. And then it came clear to her — reporters, more reporters. As she got closer though she could see that Herbie was agitated, his shoulders squared and his face gone dark, and why would that be? He loved reporters, welcomed them all, the more the better.

“No, no you won’t,” he was saying, his voice caught high in his throat. “You don’t have the right.”

The men — they were nearly indistinguishable, but for the fact that the one nearest her was chewing gum, working his jaws furiously as Herbie gestured in his face. “It’s nothing to get agitated over,” the man said.

“Agitated? You think I’m agitated? If I was agitated I’d go in there and take one of those guns down off the wall. No,” he said. “No, it won’t happen. Bob Brooks, you talk to Bob Brooks—”

That was when they became aware of her. They all swung their heads to take her in as she passed along the outside of the fence and came up to where they were congregated at the gate. “Hello,” she said, looking first to the strangers, then Herbie.

Both the men fumbled with their hats. The gum chewer gave her a strained smile. “Mrs. Lester? Hi. I’m John Ayers, and this is my associate, Leonard Thompson — we’re with the Department of the Interior and we’ll be out here for the next week, conducting a survey of the vegetation and wildlife, and we just thought we’d stop in to say hello. And introduce ourselves.” He tipped his hat a second time, a quick reflexive gesture. The gum snapped. “Just to be neighborly.”

“We just got here — on the Coast Guard boat?” the other put in. “We’ll be setting up camp on the beach down there in the harbor. Beautiful place, by the way, if only we’d get a little more sunshine, huh?”

Herbie had nothing to say to this, though she could see how upset he was — any encroachment on the island set him off, and though he understood perfectly well that the land was under the aegis of the federal government, which granted the lease for grazing rights to Bob Brooks and could pull the plug on all that any time it wanted, he tended to forget that fact, or brush it aside. Or deny it altogether. The federal government was an abstraction, distant and insubstantial, but he was real and so was she and so were the buildings and the sheep and the land beneath their feet — the land he worked and possessed and took the value of. Federal government. FDR. He held them in contempt, the same sort of contempt he held for the poachers who came ashore to steal their sheep.

“So you’re here to do a survey,” she said, just to say something.

“That’s right,” the first one said — Ayers. “It’s nothing to concern yourself over, is it, Leonard?” The other man shook his head. “The survey is only to assess the grazing damage here, with an eye to—”

“Improvement,” the other man put in.

It was only then that she began to understand. The island’s jurisdiction had passed from the Bureau of Lighthouses to the Department of the Interior and there had been talk of the National Park Service stepping in to oversee management of the land, but that talk, like all rumor, had flitted round them briefly and then gone on over to Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa for the ranchers there to bat around for a while. And yet here it was in the flesh, right on their doorstep. She felt afraid suddenly. Or not afraid, exactly, but off-balance, as if they’d come up and shoved her from behind.

“I don’t know how long you’ve been here—” Ayers began.

“Ten years,” Herbie said, cutting him off. “And Bob Brooks has held the lease all the way back to nineteen-seventeen. Is that long enough for you?”

“—but as I’m sure you’re aware the range here has been severely overgrazed, leading to substantial degradation of the land — desert, the whole place’ll be desert if things continue as they are — and let’s call this a feasibility study toward the end of reforesting the island, after making a determination with regard to reducing the grazing population, that is, because that’s the first step in any recovery program—”

“I told you, you can’t do that. There’s a lease in effect.”

A laugh now, a wave of the hand. “Oh, we’re aware of that, of course we are, and we don’t mean to imply that anything’s going to go forward at present—”

And now the other one put in: “But we have to inform you, and I have the official notification here, that oversight of San Miguel Island has passed on to the Navy now, for strategic purposes, you understand, as long as there’s a threat in the Pacific. And that we’re looking to long-range improvement of the resources here.”

“Which means getting rid of the sheep, is that what you’re saying?” A muscle under Herbie’s right eye began to twitch. He balled his hands into fists. “Even though ranching’s gone on here for a hundred and sixty years — since the time of the Spaniards, for Christ’s sake?”

She said his name aloud — two syllables, emphasis on the first — to draw him back, to warn him: “Herbie.” And then, in French: “Ce n’est pas le moment.”

He ignored her. “You better bring your lawyers with you next time, a whole squad of them.” And then he caught himself. “Or are you the lawyers, is that what you are?”

Ayers said quietly, “No, we’re not lawyers. We’re land management men.”

Herbie threw it right back at him. “I don’t care who you are. You talk to Bob Brooks. He’s a millionaire, you know that? He’s got resources. He’ll fight you every inch of the way.”

Both men took a step back. Neither was smiling now. “Let me emphasize,” Ayers said, shifting the gum from one side to the other, “that this is all just in the talking stages. It’s up to the Navy now. And you know the Navy—”

“No, I don’t,” Herbie said, fighting to control his voice. “I was an Army man myself. And you go ahead and do your survey because I don’t have the authority to stop you. But you’ll hear from me — and Bob Brooks too, I promise you that.” He turned as if to shut the gate, then spun suddenly round again. “And you stay out of my way, you hear me?”

* * *

That night at dinner Herbie hardly said a word. It was as if all the fight had gone out of him the minute the two men had turned and started down the road to the harbor. He didn’t touch his food. Throughout the meal, no matter if she tried to keep a conversation going or if the girls addressed him or not, he just stared at the wall as if he could see through it to a place they could only imagine. When the girls were finished and had got up to slide their smeared plates into the dishpan, she took them into the living room to read them their bedtime stories. Neither of them asked about the men who had come to the gate or why their father was still sitting there in the kitchen over a full plate of food, staring at the wall. She read for longer than usual that night — Kipling’s Just So Stories and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” their favorite — as if the magic of talking animals and the strangeness of India could insulate them from what was happening in their own house. Finally, when she put them to bed, Betsy asked if their father wasn’t coming in to kiss them goodnight and she had to say he wasn’t feeling well.

“Is it the flu?” Marianne asked.

“No,” she said, “it’s not the flu. He’s just feeling a little blue, that’s all. You know that’s how your daddy gets sometimes — me too. We all do.”