“Oh, I don’t mean nothing like that,” he said. “I wouldn’t — I like being here with you. Hell, I’d stay a week if I could, if I was welcome…”
She would have let him kiss her, guano or no, and it didn’t smell, or not hardly, but he didn’t seem to take the hint. Maybe he was shy, maybe that was it. She held her face there, as close to his as she dared, and when he flushed and looked away, she dropped her voice to a whisper and said, “You can’t know how long it’s been since I was off the island.”
He lifted the glass to his mouth and jerked his chin — tossing — and then turned back to her. His eyes seemed to swell and recede and swell again. The lines bunched in his face. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time. Very slowly, very tenderly, he brought his lips to hers and they did kiss, almost chastely, as if he were afraid to go too far, and it was the sort of kiss she’d practiced on Jimmie, who had the annoying habit of trying to worm his tongue into her mouth, a dry kiss. He pulled back and stared at her a moment and then she kissed him and she was the one who worked her tongue and when they broke apart this time she didn’t ask a question of him or beg a favor — she merely said, “I’m going with you.”
“I don’t know,” he said, and her heart sank — he was just like the others, gutless and weak, afraid of her stepfather, afraid of the law. But then he looked her in the eye, just holding her gaze, and she could feel him working through the tangle, objection by objection, before he let out a sigh and said, “She’s riding pretty low in the water, what with all that weight. And those animals aren’t exactly the pleasantest things to be around.”
“I don’t mind.” She gestured at the carcass of the lamb, the crude kitchen, the door that gave onto the barnyard.
“And the guano. That’s shit, you know, gull shit.”
“I know.”
“It can smell something awful when it’s all packed in like that.”
“I don’t doubt it,” she said.
“Makes your eyes water. And it’s bound to be rough, what with her riding low, and I don’t know if you can… or you’ll want to—”
“Hush,” she said, and then she leaned in and kissed him again.
* * *
This time, though she felt cored out and her head throbbed and she’d hardly slept, she was there to make sure of him when the door to the bunkhouse swung open beneath the pale fading screen of stars. If he was surprised to see her there, he hid it well. She’d been sitting atop her suitcase and when the door opened she rose and came to him and he took both her hands in his and accepted the kiss she brushed against his cheek. He had his bedroll thrown up over one shoulder and a leather satchel over the other. He looked blunted and pale, his eyes heavy in his head, and she wondered about the aftereffects of the rum on him — if she felt this bad how must he have felt? Was he capable of piloting his ship? Rowing out to it? Even walking down to the beach?
It was then that the door of the bunkhouse swung open again and her heart froze till she saw the shadow of the dog there. She watched it lift a leg to the steps of the porch, then shake itself and go off round the back of the barn, and still she stood there, waiting for what she couldn’t say.
“Well,” he said finally, “I guess that’s your suitcase, is it?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and they were both turning toward it now, walking in stride. And the thing was, he never hesitated, but just bent to it, took it up by the handle and continued on across the yard and down the road, moving so swiftly on his long legs she had to hurry to keep up. The day brightened around them, just perceptibly, and then, in the distance, the cock began to crow and she could picture it perched atop the shed where she’d seen it spring in a single claw-pedaling leap every morning for as long as she could remember and her only thought was that she would never have to hear it again in all her life.
Then there was the dinghy, drawn up on shore, and he secured her suitcase in the bow and helped her into it like a gentleman so that she didn’t even have to get her feet wet. The surf rocked them. The shore pulled back. Ahead of them lay the boat drifting at anchor on a sea so calm it was like the land itself and she could see the pale sun-bleached mesh of the net and the three dark shapes nestled beneath it. The seals. The captives. Wrapped up in their animality and the forlorn fishy stink of them. They were leaving the island, never to come back, and so was she. The oars squealed in the locks and Robert, facing her, gave a quick look over his shoulder, then turned back and smiled at her. It was a simple smile, pure, charged with the excitement of what they were doing together, what she was doing, a smile of appreciation, of admiration, of awe even.
It was only appropriate. Because everything had changed. She wasn’t Edith Scott Waters anymore, wasn’t a girl on a sheep ranch on an island, wasn’t ordinary in any way. She was Inez Deane, belle of the stage, and she was going home.
PART III. Elise
Arrival
She was thirty-eight years on this earth and until three weeks ago she’d never been west of the Hudson River — she’d been to the Berkshires, Boston and Newport as a girl, and Montreux and Paris too, but west? Never. The West was a place she knew only from books, from Francis Parkman and Mark Twain and Willa Cather, a huge dun expanse of the map striated with mountains and flecked with plains and deserts, home to cactus, rattlesnakes, red Indians, cowboys, bucking broncos, buckaroos — and what else? Prospectors. Oilmen. Motion-picture stars. She thought of Chaplin eating his own shoe, of Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees on a street lined with palms. The West. Terra incognita. Terra insolita. And now here she was, all the way out on the west coast of the U.S.A. and waiting for the cattle boat that would take her beyond the coast altogether, to the last scrap of land the continent had to offer, an island tossed out in the ocean like an afterthought. Thirty-eight years. And wasn’t life the strangest thing?
It was early morning, the end of March, 1930. She watched the sun rise out of the mountains down the shoreline to her left, and that was strange too, because all her life she’d known it to emerge from the waters of Long Island Sound, a quivering yellow disk like the separated yolk of an egg, the waves running away to the horizon and shifting from black to gray and finally to the clean undiluted blue of the sky above — if the sun was shining, that is. And half the time it wasn’t. Half the time it was overcast, drizzling, raining — or sleeting. There was no sleet here, though, and never would be, not until the next Ice Age came along, anyway. Just the sun, which in that moment swelled to a perfect blazing circle and slipped free of the clutch of the mountains to draw long tapering shadows out of every vertical thing, boats at anchor, the pilings of the pier, the trees along the bluff — some of which, and she just noticed this now, were palms, imagine that, palms.
The boat — Herbie had told her to watch for it downshore to the east while he ran off in his excitable trot to see to a dozen last-minute things — was called the Vaquero, and it was used by the family on one of the other islands to ferry cattle across the channel to market. She looked off to sea, sniffed at the breeze. The sun rose higher. People moved around her on the shifting planks of the pier, going about their business, maritime business, and no one gave her a second glance. Herbie had left her there to keep an eye on their baggage — a glancing kiss, a bolt from his eyes, I’ll be right back—but she didn’t feel at all threatened or even anxious. If there were any thieves on the pier that morning, she didn’t see them.