When finally the boat did appear, it was a distant black pinpoint emerging from the shadow of the mountains to glint sporadically as it rocked into the rising flood of sunlight. She put a hand up to shield her eyes and held it there the whole while as the boat grew bigger and the smell — urine, feces, the close festering odor of glands and secretions and hide, cowhide — came rushing to her on the breeze. Then the boat was there, tethered and gently knocking against the pilings, and a raw-faced man in blue jeans and a wide-brimmed hat came scrambling up the ladder and onto the pier. He was short, shorter than she was, anyway, and so slim and agile it took her a minute to realize he wasn’t as young as he’d first appeared, wasn’t young at all. There were creases round his eyes, hackles of stiff white hair tracing the underside of his jaw where he’d been indifferently shaved, and she wondered about that, shaving at sea, with the deck pitching under you and the razor — even a safety razor — a hazard all its own.
He stood there a moment as if to get his bearings, then shot her a glance, his eyes dropping from her face to the tumble of suitcases, shoulder bags, trunks, boxes and sacks of provisions scattered round her, before lifting again to settle on hers. Then he was coming forward, drumming across the planks with a brisk chop of his legs — boots, he was wearing cowboy boots — and giving her a smile so wide she could make out the cracked gray remnants of his molars. “So you must be the new bride,” he said, tipping his hat, and then he gave his name, which she forgot in the instant: new bride.
Yes, she was a new bride, twenty years after she’d made her debut at Delmonico’s with a full orchestra to provide entertainment and a young tenor by the name of Enrico Caruso serenading the glowing cluster of debutantes and their families, all the world laid out before her, and fifteen years — fifteen at least — since she’d given up all hope. New bride. She almost blushed.
“Yes,” she said, bending forward to nod in assent. “I’m Herbie’s wife, Elizabeth. Or Elise. Call me Elise.”
There was a moment of silence, the stink of the absent cattle — they’d been off-loaded the day before in Oxnard, she would learn — rising to them from the boat lurching in the swell below. There were gulls, of course. Pelicans. People up and down the pier bending to one task or another.
He ducked his head, pulled at the brim of his hat, looked to her things and then to the ladder bolted to the side of the pier. “Well, lucky for you and Herbie the boat’s here today, because if it wasn’t for the storm that come in day before last they’d of been here and gone already. And then you’d of had to take the Coast Guard boat.”
She must have given him a puzzled look, because he immediately qualified that: “Which is fine, and I don’t mean anything by it — it’s just that the Coast Guard boys tend sometimes to go off on other business, depending on what comes up on the radio, orders, you know, and sometimes you’ll be four or five days aboard before you can get to where you’re going.”
She smiled. “And what about you?”
He smiled back, made as if to tip his hat again and thought better of it. “Oh, me? Don’t worry about me — I’ll be going out to Santa Rosa with the boat. And we’ll be shoving off here just as soon as they can take on supplies and get you and your — Herbie, that is — aboard.”
“Santa Rosa? Which one is that?”
He did a quick shuffle of his feet, maneuvering round the baggage to point off down the length of the pier and across the channel to where the sun striped the flank of the big island lying out there on the horizon. “That one there, straight out? That’s Santa Cruz. Now look to the right of that, you see it tucked in there behind that point, almost looks like it’s joined to it, but it’s not, believe me — that’s Santa Rosa, that’s home for the Vail and Vickers boys. And me too, at least for the first week or so, till you get settled in — I mean, for your honeymoon and like that.”
“But I thought — weren’t we supposed to go to San Miguel?”
Laughing now: “Oh, yes, nobody’s going to strand you on your honeymoon — San Miguel’s the first stop.” He’d shifted again and was pointing far off to the right. “You see that? Way out? That little strip of brown there?”
She narrowed her eyes, squinting at the hovering vaporous line of the horizon, due west, all the way out, so far out she couldn’t be sure she was actually seeing anything at all. “Is that it?” she asked, looking to him.
“It is, ma’am,” he said. “And you can’t always see it from here, but you’re lucky, as I say. Doubly lucky.”
They were silent a moment, both of them staring out over the waves to where the island suddenly came clear, stretched across the horizon like the smallest fragment of a very old rug. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, turning back to him, “but what did you say your name was?”
“Jimmie, ma’am. I’m Jimmie. Didn’t Herbie — I mean, Mr. Lester — tell you about me?”
She was about to say No, he didn’t, but then she saw the look in his eyes and caught herself. “Yes,” she said, “he did, as a matter of fact.”
This seemed to satisfy him. His features settled. He pushed back the hat to scratch briefly at his scalp. “Well,” he sang out all of a sudden, “no sense in standing here gawking — which of these bags you want aboard first?”
* * *
The Vaquero was like no boat she’d ever been on, the open high-railed deck more accommodating to animals than people, but the wheelhouse was snug enough and the men gathered there — ranch hands on their way back to Santa Rosa, the ship’s captain, her new friend Jimmie — were in a festive mood, their eyes shining, grins playing across their faces like heat lightning. There was a woman aboard, and a new bride at that, and they crowded round her, each one vying to outdo the other, their voices blending and breaking as they offered up an unyielding torrent of stories, advice, jokes and admonitions. She’d never much liked being the center of attention, shy of it, actually, the ugly duckling of her family, thick-limbed and awkward all her life, but this was different — she’d been selected for this — and she found herself enjoying the attention. Or mostly. And when it got too much for her, when the bug-eyed man in the plaid shirt and patched blue jeans leaned across the bench to shout in her left ear even as the one named Isidro contradicted him with a Spanish-inflected tirade on the other side, she just called out to Herbie in French—Chéri, sauve-moi—and he was there, distracting them with the jeroboam of champagne he’d somehow managed to get hold of from sources unnamed and had begun pouring before the boat even left the dock.
“À ta commande, madame,” he crooned, pouring first for her, then for the bug-eyed man and finally Isidro, who stopped what he was saying — about cattle, his defining subject — long enough to tip back the tin cup he’d produced from his jacket pocket when Herbie had first uncorked the bottle. And then Herbie—her husband, and how she loved the sound of those three syllables on her lips — was holding out a hand to her as if he were inviting her to dance, pulling her up off the bench and handing the big heavy dense-green bottle to Isidro all in a single fluid motion, and here she was following his lead, not to an imaginary dance floor but out the door to the deck where the sun poured down and the breeze fanned her hair and the spume broke away from the bow and flew up in sunstruck beads to vanish on the air. The sea was gentle, the air mild — or if not mild exactly, then not cold, at least not yet. To her right was the mainland with its white-fringed beaches and the greening mountains that rose up and away from them, to her left the big island clothed in a patchwork of color, and straight out over the bow, larger now, but still not much more than a blemish on the horizon, the mysterious place where she was going to make her home. Herbie pulled her to him, whispering, “Ah, enfin, je t’ai seule.”