T. Boyle - San Miguel

They only learned of the attack the following morning, when the shortwave radio — given over now strictly to naval pursuits — began to buzz with the news. A pall fell over the house. They all gathered in the living room, even the girls, who couldn’t be kept away, the voice of the naval operator hissing and crackling over the bare details, Enemy submarine, nineteen hundred hours, casualties as yet unknown . The sailors sat there perched on the edges of their chairs, white-faced and stricken, as Herbie communicated with shore, their feet tapping nervously and their eyes darting to the windows as if they expected to see the Imperial Army out there secreted amongst the sheep. Herbie was outraged. He kept accusing them, as if the whole thing were their fault, as if they could have been expected to identify an enemy submarine forty-two miles away in the dark of night. “Where were you when we needed you?” he demanded. “If you’d been out there on patrol you might have spotted them and radioed their location to shore — we could have called out the planes and bombed them, could have wiped them out, the dirty sneaking Nip bastards.”

She watched Herbie fuming over the radio in the impotence of his rage, his arms flapping at his sides and his hair on end, and all she felt was a hopeless sinking fear. Their sanctuary was gone, the invaders at their doorstep — they could be anywhere, already landed at Simonton Cove or right down there in Cuyler Harbor for all she knew. She thought of the Japanese fishermen who’d come to the house all those years ago, saw their faces arrayed before her, such polite men, so mild — and so delighted with the baby. How could men like that threaten them? They were decent at heart, she knew they were — the captain spoke French even. But then — and the thought chilled her — there were the Japs she read of in the newspapers, demonic twisted little men spitting babies on their bayonets, raping women wholesale, murdering, thieving, leaving Nanking in ruins and Shanghai in chains. That was the reality. And this, this cockeyed dream of wide-open spaces, of freedom and self-reliance and goodness, simple goodness, was the delusion.

“Over and out,” Herbie pronounced, his voice too loud by half as he switched off the radio and spun round on the sailors. “What are you waiting for? You want to ride the horses? We’ll ride the horses. Here”—and he crossed the room to the wall decorated with guns, chose one and handed it to Reg Bauer. “And you, Freddie, make sure you have extra clips of ammunition for that Springfield of yours — they did give you ammunition, didn’t they?”

Freddie had half-risen from the chair, looking stunned. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I think so,” and he straightened up to his full height — which couldn’t have been much more than five-foot-four — and tried his best to look martial. And what was she thinking? That this was what stood between her and the Imperial Army? This boy? This and the other one, who looked as if he’d never even raised his voice in all his life?

“All right,” Herbie was saying, and he’d taken down a gun for himself, one of the big ones — was it the elephant gun, was that it? — “we’re going out that door in two minutes flat and we’re going to patrol every square foot of this island. You have your binoculars?”

The boys just gaped at him.

“Well, get them! And be quick about it! Who knows but that”—and here he caught himself in mid-sentence. She knew what he meant to say— they’re already here —but he didn’t want to alarm her, she could see that. Or the girls. Or these two boys either. This was the moment of crisis and she felt herself go out to him: he was equal to it. If she’d ever doubted that, here was proof of it.

“And when we get done with the first circuit of the island,” he was saying, “you know what we’re going to do?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’re going to go around again, that’s what.”

* * *

The following week the Hermes came to anchor in the harbor and when she saw the boat shining there in the distance it was as if the great American eagle itself had come swooping in to the rescue. She’d been living in dread all week, neither the shortwave nor the Zenith bringing them anything concrete by way of news except to say that the shelling had been an isolated event and that the Japanese, far from initiating an invasion, were stuck all the way on the other side of the Pacific and if the U.S. Navy had anything to say about it, that was where they would stay. Later, much later, when the war was over and the great cities of Japan were crushed under the weight of their own shame and the American bombs that had paid them back a thousand times over for Pearl Harbor and Bataan and all the rest, she learned that the Ellwood incident was an aberration, the only attack on the American mainland in the entire course of the war, and that the submarine’s captain — who had in fact piloted an oil tanker in these waters before the war — had been on a personal vendetta to avenge an insult he’d suffered at the hands of the refinery’s American workers. The submarine’s gunners had been inept, missing everything they fired on. And the submarine itself, having delivered its salvo, had turned tail and run halfway across the ocean.

But she didn’t know that then. All she knew was that the Japanese had struck and could strike again at any time. She couldn’t go out in the yard after dark without feeling as if the night had turned hostile, every sound transmogrified till she heard the roar of cannon in the crash of the surf or the keening of an aircraft engine in the sudden sharp cry of a gull. She was afraid for the girls. For Herbie. For herself. She went on as if nothing had changed, cooking, cleaning, sewing, keeping school, mending Herbie’s clothes and feeding the pets, but all the while she felt the tension deep inside her as if it were a physical abnormality, as if her stomach was a knot of twisted wire, barbed wire, the kind they used to repel invasions.

The Hermes brought relief from all that. The sight of it alone was enough — here were their true protectors, undaunted, patrolling the waters as they always had and always would, My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, and she never thought, not for a minute, that they’d come to evacuate them. Not these men, not now, not when every American had to stand united. They’d come with supplies, with relief — they’d come because they cared.

The whole household erupted. She couldn’t find a hat, Marianne was barefoot, Herbie pulling on the first thing that came to hand. There was no thought of the stove or the livestock or keeping a watch over the house — they were out the door, all of them, hurrying down to meet the boat, the sailor boys, the dog, she and Herbie and the girls, who were positively giddy at being let out of school early. And before they’d even got the supplies unloaded, they had the news and the news was what she wanted to hear: the danger was minimal, nothing really, and in any case it had passed. Did she believe it? Not really. Or not entirely. And Herbie was barely mollified, though he quizzed the captain and crew for hours and when they’d left read through the mail and the newspapers they’d brought along like an exegete bent over the Book of Revelation, weighing each phrase for nuance as if he could see through to a truth the world was hiding from them.

There were six letters from her mother, each more gut-wrenching and strident than the last, as if they’d already been taken prisoner and sent to some resettlement camp in the jungles of Malaya. Wasn’t this enough? her mother demanded. Wasn’t it proof in the pudding? If there was ever a sign from God, wasn’t this it? Her mother wrote in an elegant backslant that tended to crimp and run off the page at the end of each line and she could picture her sitting there at the secretary in the parlor at home all the way across the country, her mouth compressed and the pen clamped firmly in her gliding fingers. Each letter ended with the same imperative, underlined twice: Come home!