T. Boyle: San Miguel

She had a fire going in the fireplace she and Herbie had built for the comfort of it, hauling the bricks up from the ruins of the Waters’ house in a wheelbarrow till their backs ached, mixing the mortar, plying the plumb bob and laying each row as straight as eternity, because you couldn’t have a home without a hearth and home was what sustained you. The lamp on the desk was lit, though the sunlight filtering through the windows was bright enough, but she’d lit it anyway, without really thinking. On either side of the chimney, dark rectilinear shapes stained the wall where she’d taken down her pictures and packed them away. The guns were gone too, the entire collection packed up and sent to shore for sale at auction, but for the elephant rifle, which she’d laid in the coffin beside him, and the final one, the fatal one. That one, the snub-nose, the cold steel thing she’d pried from her husband’s dead hand though she could barely breathe from the shock of what was happening to her, was at the bottom of the ocean — flung high out over the cliff on a current of rage that burned through her like lightning on a dry plain.

It was too warm for a fire really, what with the sun on the roof, but it was necessary: she was burning things. This was part of the winnowing too, all these things and she couldn’t begin to take half of them with her. There wasn’t room on the sled or on the Coast Guard boat that was coming for her in two days’ time. Or in the apartment Bob Brooks had found for her in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara, from the front window of which you could just make out the ocean in the distance.

The girls were ashore, hustled away the day after the funeral to stay with friends there until she could come for them, and the others had gone too — Bob Brooks and the shearers back to their business on the coast and the sailor boys to bivouac in a tent down by the boat shed at Cuyler Harbor. Only Jimmie had stayed behind, to safeguard the place and keep her company. Which was fine, but she didn’t need company, she needed her husband and her daughters and for things to return to the way they were.

The fire snapped and brought her back to herself. She seemed to have something in her hand — a record, the Requiem —but she knew enough not to put it on the phonograph. No, there was only one place for it: in the fire. Angry suddenly, enraged, she flung it into the flames and watched the cover blacken and the vinyl inside quicken and die back. She wouldn’t part with any of her books — she’d brought them here all the way across the country and the channel too and she’d bring them back again — but there were letters and bills and papers, magazines, recipes, clippings, old art projects, drawings and photos everywhere she looked, and these she fed into the fire without a second glance. She dumped an armload of papers into the flames and felt the heat flare on her face, and then she turned to the chest of keepsakes. It was made of cedar, open-grained, smelling of high forests and perpetual shade. She lifted one end of it experimentally, but it was too heavy. Keepsakes. What were keepsakes, anyway?

She raised the lid and there were the magazines and newspapers with their names splashed all over them, Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post , Swiss Family Lester, the Pioneers, Wounded Vet, Lonely Isle. She didn’t know then that the Japanese would go down to defeat or that Bob Brooks would find an elderly Norwegian couple — the Eklunds — to take their place or that his lease would be summarily terminated by the Navy six years later and that every last ram, ewe and lamb would be herded aboard the Vaquero and taken to slaughter. She didn’t know that the Navy would use the island as a bombing range or that the house she was standing in would burn mysteriously twenty-seven years later so that only the chimney remained amidst the blowing ash. And she didn’t know that the Park Service would finally take charge of all of San Miguel and its waters and that anyone who wanted to come here or dream here or walk the hills and breathe the air would need to have a permit in hand.

What she knew was that the island had turned alien, as strange to her now as when she first walked up the hill as a bride and Herbie lit the lamps up and down the house so that when she went back out to the courtyard to carry in her new leather suitcases the windows glowed against the night that was absolute all the way to the threshold of the stars. She knew that luck gave out. And she knew that there was nothing to keep, nothing to hold on to, that it all came to nothing in the end. She reached into the trunk and lifted out all she could carry. The fire leapt up. The pages crumpled, the images vanished as if they’d never been there at all. If she’d gone outside she would have seen the smoke twist out of the chimney, reaching as high as it could go till the wind flattened it and drove it out to sea.