T. Boyle: San Miguel

She couldn’t answer because the power of words had left her. She whirled round and waved her hands to silence him and then another thought came to her, a deeper thought wrested from a deeper place, and worse, far worse than the one that had brought her here. Then she was down on her knees, working the dial on the safe that had come from the wreck of the SS Cuba, welded steel, adamantine and impregnable even to the pounding of the surf, and if the conversation had died and Bob Brooks was watching from across the room, it didn’t matter, because there was the envelope on the top shelf with her name written across the front of it in her husband’s hand and the note neatly folded inside:

Dearest Elise:

You’ll find me at Harris Point, on the knoll there. I am sorry for this, sorry for it all, but I will not be a burden to you, I will not. There is nothing I can say except that everything is so damned heavy. The air. The air is crushing me. It’s like lead, air turned to lead.

Mon âme est sortie de moi. Le roi est mort.

Herbie

They found him in the morning, as soon as it was light. She’d wanted to go to him in the dark and she’d fought with them, the whole room of them, Bob Brooks crushing her so tightly to him all the air went out of her and she couldn’t breathe and then she could and screamed at them till they were nothing more than hollow faces hung round her like pictures in a gallery, but they wouldn’t yield. It was impossible to go out there in the dark of a moonless night with the fog closing in, she should know that if anybody should — the terrain was too rough, the cliffs too jagged, the ravines too deep. They’d never find him. It was too risky. Better to wait. Better? she threw back at them. What if he’s hurt? What if he’s only hurt? No one had an answer. But Bob Brooks wouldn’t let go of her. They rocked in place, just as she had with Herbie that night in the kitchen, but this was no dance and it went on till her legs gave way beneath her.

That the girls had to see it — or see the first cascading moments when she had the note there in her hand and Bob Brooks wouldn’t let go of her and the noise that came out of her was like the high choking gargle of a dying animal — made it even worse. Somebody, some one of them with their hollow faces and dumbstaring eyes, swept up the girls and took them out the door and down the porch to their room. Reg, it was Reg, and Freddie right behind him. The sailor boys. Doing their duty. Vigilant boys, vigilant after all. But her legs wouldn’t work and she was sitting in the chair, Herbie’s chair, by a dying fire, and she had to get hold of herself, had to see to the girls and then prepare herself for the vigil that would take her to first light and Harris Point and what she would find there, because what if he’d missed his aim? What if he’d changed his mind? What if the whole thing was a ruse? A plea for sympathy? A cruel joke?

The girls were both awake, Jimmie stationed outside their door, Reg and Freddie perched on the edges of their beds, talking to them in low voices. As soon as they saw her there in the doorway, they got up and slipped silently from the room.

Marianne’s voice came at her in a soft tremolo, no pause, no respite: “What happened? Reg wouldn’t tell us or Freddie either. Is it Dad?”

“Yes.” The room was lit only by a candle, a sepia glow straining for the ceiling and falling back futilely, over and over.

Betsy now, the faintest breath: “Is he all right?”

“We hope so.”

“Why isn’t he back? Where is he?”

“He’s”—and here she had to pause to get control of her voice because control was what was needed now, control above all else—“at Harris Point.”

“Is he going to stay there all night?”

“Yes.”

“Is he camping out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he lost?”

“Yes,” she said, “he’s lost.”

* * *

He’d been steady to the last, his aim unflinching, the blue-black revolver still clutched in his hand. He was lying on his side, napping for all anybody knew, but when she was still fifty feet from him, she could see the truth of it. No one had to tell her. She didn’t need a doctor or a coroner or a priest or anybody else.

She was mounted on Nellie and Bob Brooks was beside her on Hans, the fog trembling with the first flush of morning light, the surf roaring below and the seals roaring back at it. There was a feathery mist leaching out of the air and a smell like a fire that’s just been doused. When she reined in the horse and got down to kneel beside him she saw the crusted spot at his temple and the black dusting around it, such a small thing, this hole no bigger around than her wedding ring. His eyes were closed, shut tight, and his face was locked against the violence the next instant was to bring. She didn’t turn him over, though she wanted to — she wanted to lift him from the dirt and press him to her one last time, just hold him, but he wasn’t there anymore and never would be again.

They brought him back to the house on the sled and Jimmie took the couch from the living room out into the yard and reconverted it to its original use, fashioning a lid for it out of a sheet of plywood he found in the barn. Manny and Jesus, their mouths set and their eyes drawn down to slits, carried the pick and shovel up to Harris Point and dug the grave there high over the ocean while Bob Brooks searched through the Bible in the living room and Reg and Freddie got the stove going in the kitchen and heated up the leftovers so people could eat. It was up to her to prepare the body and she did the best she could, steeling herself — or maybe she was just numb, maybe that was it. She washed his face with a hot cloth and laid a compress over the left side, where the bullet had gone through, but she left him dressed as he was when she’d found him, in his short pants and boots and the white shirt with the epaulettes shining on his shoulders. The girls knew the truth by then and they were inconsolable. She arranged for Betsy to stay behind with Jimmie, but Marianne insisted on coming out to Harris Point to watch the coffin lowered into the grave — she wouldn’t be turned or dissuaded. The wind was up and they all had to keep averting their heads to keep the sand out of their eyes. Bob Brooks said a few words and read a passage from the Bible. She threw the first shovel of dirt in the hole and then they all stepped forward and it was done.

* * *

There was a day of high sun and scudding clouds sometime toward the end of the following week, one day out of a succession of them, each as bleak and unfocused as the last. She was in the living room, packing things away for the move back to the mainland, trying not to linger over one object or another — this was a winnowing, a selection, and yet each thing she touched took her out of herself till she lost track of where she was or what she was doing or even why she was here. She didn’t feel betrayed or bitter or abandoned, only sad, just that. Sad for Herbie, for her daughters, for herself. She could have stayed in Manhattan, setting herself up in the apartment with the view of the East River she’d had her eye on and gone through life as if she were gliding on a string from home to work and back again, shuffling through the card catalogue, unwrapping a sandwich for lunch at her desk beneath the tall windows, taking dinner at the corner restaurant with the burned-down candles on the tables and the daily specials chalked up on a board over the bar. She could have gone to Paris or back to Montreux or home to her mother in Rye, where every day was a replica of the one that had come before and the only change was the change of seasons. But then Herbert Steever Lester had come knocking at her door and she’d taken the leap and put herself here on this island that was nothing to her now, a widow with two daughters to provide for and educate and see through to their own chance at life.