T. Boyle - San Miguel

Reg, the taller of the two, the one with the caramel-colored eyes and the pink slashes of scalp showing through his crew cut, ate with the kind of four-square rigidity you’d expect of a military man — or boy — but his compatriot, Freddie, slouched over his plate and bowl as if he’d never had any discipline in his life, not even from his mother. After a good five minutes of silence, during which the only sounds were the metallic clank of the woodstove and the click of their spoons against the rims of their bowls, Reg spoke up. “I’m sorry to bother you, missus, but you wouldn’t have a little butter for the toast? Please, I mean?”

And now she was embarrassed in her own kitchen. Butter? She hadn’t seen butter in weeks. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with jam for now because, well, since Pearl Harbor we haven’t been able to get any regular supplies—”

“Really? We’ve got crates of the stuff back at the base, right, Freddie?”

“Yeah, we could’ve… if we’d known, that is—”

“It’s all right,” she said. She was standing at the counter, tidying things before going out to ring the school bell. “We’ve learned to make do. Not that it isn’t hard sometimes. This past month especially.”

There was a silence, then Freddie spoke up. “But what do you do out here normally — I mean, before all this started? For entertainment, I mean?”

She shrugged. “Oh, there’s plenty to keep us busy. You get used to the solitude after a while. There’re the girls, of course. And we play cards, read, listen to radio programs, I suppose, just like anybody else.”

She saw them exchange a look. “That sounds swell,” Reg said finally.

And then, because it was five of eight and she made a strict rule of starting school on time, she folded the dish towel across her arm, replaced it on its wooden rack and stepped to the door. “I’m sorry, but it’s time for school,” she announced. “You’ll hear me ringing the bell”—she checked her watch—“in exactly three minutes. You won’t mind cleaning up your dishes, will you? You’ll find the soap under the counter here.”

For the most part, the Navy boys kept out of the way. They appeared regularly for meals — they never missed a meal, give them credit there — and the girls came to worship them as if they were celestial idols set down on the earth and given the power of speech and animation, but as the weeks went by she saw less and less of them. If they weren’t in their room leafing through comics and back issues of Herbie’s sportsmen’s magazines, they were wandering the island — aimlessly, she suspected — propped up by the single gun they shared between them. They never said a word about Herbie’s collection, which had grown to some thirty-odd firearms now, except to let out a few exclamations of surprise and approbation the first time Herbie led them into the living room to show it off — and if they resented the fact that a private citizen had an entire arsenal at his disposal while they went half-armed, they never let it show.

That they were bored was a given. There was nothing on the island for them but duty as defined in their orders — they wanted life, nightlife, gin mills and dance halls and girls their own age, movies, automobiles, swing bands, Harry James and Benny Goodman — and she couldn’t blame them. What she could blame them for was neglecting the chores she and Herbie set out for them — more than once she had to remind them that appearances to the contrary she wasn’t their mother, and if they wanted to eat they had better make sure they set and cleared the table, washed the dishes and kept the woodbox full to overbrimming. And if Reg wanted to help Marianne with her arithmetic or Freddie read aloud to Betsy, so much the better, but they did that on their own time.

They were good with the girls, she had to admit it, but the diversions of children’s games, hide-and-seek, red light — green light, checkers, Old Maid and Go Fish, only went so far. She registered the tedium in their faces, every day the same, nowhere to go, nothing to do. The one thing they did manage to show interest in — besides eating, that is — was the horses. At lunch one afternoon, the girls giggling and generally being silly vying for their attention and the dog looking up fixedly as the platter went round the table, Reg cleared his throat and turned to Herbie. “So the horses out there in the barn — Buck and Nellie? Do you ever ride them or are they strictly for hauling things up from the harbor?”

Herbie was in an ebullient mood, chasing after the subject of the sheep and how well they were doing because of what was beginning to look like a well-watered and prosperous winter no matter what the Interior Department, the Navy or the Japanese might have to say about it, and he’d just pointed out to her that more of the ewes seemed to be throwing twins this time around, when he paused for a moment to lift the soupspoon to his mouth and Reg slipped in his question. Herbie took a moment, setting down the spoon and delicately patting his lips with the napkin, always fastidious — he had beautiful manners, whether he was knocking on a door on the Upper East Side with his mustaches waxed or sitting here in the dining cum living room of a patchwork house framed by the sea. “Oh, we ride them,” he said, “of course we do — the exercise is good for them, Nellie especially. Buck, I’m afraid, is pretty much on his last legs—”

She looked up sharply. This was a sore subject between them. Betsy was eight and Marianne had just turned eleven, and while they were old enough to understand that all things had to die, especially on a working ranch — the sheep Herbie shot for meat, the turkey the foxes had made off with, one of the cats that had crept under the porch to give up the ghost in peace and was discovered only when it began to emit an odor — the horses were in a different category altogether. They were pets as much as anything else. The girls had grown up with both of them, and Buck, a big patient bay roan, had been the one they learned to ride on. He was old and stiff, they knew that — according to Jimmie, Buck had been on the ranch since Bob Brooks took over — but she didn’t like Herbie to mention it in front of them. Once, after he’d gone on about Buck staggering on the road up from the harbor (“He damned near pitched over the side into the ravine and me with him”), Betsy had asked, “Is Buck going to die?” and she’d tried to be forthright with her. “Yes,” she’d said, “everything dies, even Buck. But not for a long while yet, so don’t you worry about it.” “Why?” Betsy asked, and whether she was asking why she shouldn’t worry or why everything dies, Elise didn’t know. And in any case she really didn’t have an answer.

“He’s got to be twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. But he’s been a good old horse.” Herbie looked to where the girls sat side by side, staring up at him over their plates. “Right, girls?”

They both nodded solemnly.

“So would you mind then if we took the horses out?” Reg persisted. “It would make it a whole lot easier for us to patrol — get out to the other end of the island, I mean, out to Point Bennett and such.”

Herbie was feeling grand and expansive, riding one of his currents. If they’d asked her, she would have said no. The boys were well meaning, she supposed — or well meaning enough — but once they got out of sight of the house there was no telling what they might do. She was afraid for the horses — and for them too. That was all they needed: a boy sailor with a broken neck. But Herbie just waved a hand grandly and said, “We’ll see.”

* * *

On the night of February twenty-third, a Japanese I-17 submarine — a huge thing, longer than a football field — slipped into the Santa Barbara Channel undetected by anyone, not the Coast Guard or the Air Corps or the two boy sailors sent out to San Miguel Island to protect her and her family from attack. It was theorized that the submarine was piloted by a man who knew these waters intimately, either a former fisherman or perhaps captain of one of the Japanese tankers that regularly took on crude oil here before the outbreak of war. In any case, just after seven that night, the submarine surfaced and began shelling the Ellwood Oil Field just west of Santa Barbara, intent on destroying the oil storage tanks and setting off a firestorm. It was the first attack on the continental United States by a foreign power since the War of 1812 and while none of the shells hit its target, the sirens went off, a blackout was imposed and people up and down the coast were thrown into a panic, thinking an invasion was under way. On San Miguel Island that night — and she remembered it clearly — they were all sitting around the fire playing cards while the girls did their homework and the wind assaulted the house with its grab bag of shrieks, whistles and growls. Nobody heard a thing.