The French. It was part of what had attracted her to him in the first place — she’d learned to love the language as a girl and he’d picked it up during the war — and now it had become their secret language, the language they alone shared amongst all these cowboys and sailors and sheepmen. She closed her eyes and he kissed her, right out there in full public view, and she didn’t care because she was half-mad with the champagne and the sun and the sheer wonder of the adventure she was on, picturing him the day they’d met, Herbert Steever Lester, dressed in suit and bow tie and with his laughing blue eyes screwed right into hers as she answered the door and he took her hand in his and murmured “Enchanté,” even though all he was doing was inquiring about subletting her apartment on East Seventy-second Street. Herbie. Her husband. Her first and only love.
And then, his arm round her waist, they were strolling the deck — promenading — and if she saw the stains worked into the planks or caught scent of the animals that had so recently been passengers here and were now on their way to meet their fate, she wouldn’t admit it. Why spoil the day? Why dwell on the imperfections when there was so much beauty to glory in? She threw back her head and let her gaze roam free, the shore receding, the islands drifting closer, the sun ladled over everything and everything glowing as if the world were slick with a new coat of paint.
For his part, Herbie chattered away, in English now, going on about the island and its multitudinous charms, telling her about the house and their bedroom and how she wouldn’t even need to crack her trousseau, except maybe for one of those sheer peignoirs from Paris. Gowns? Ball them up and throw them away! And where did she think his tux was? Back at Bob Brooks’ place in Beverly Hills. Where it was going to stay. Forever. Because this was the real life they were going into, the natural life, the life of Thoreau and Daniel Boone, simple and vigorous and pure. He talked on, talked and talked, pacing up and down the deck, as full of enthusiasm as she’d ever seen him.
When finally the breeze got to be too much for her they went back inside and there was another round of champagne and then another and then the shadows began to lean the other way and before she could think San Miguel rose up out of the sea ahead of them like an image on a photographic plate and they were in the harbor there, the anchor chain paying out and Herbie helping her down into the boat that would ferry her across to the place where her life was about to begin, and if through all these years she hadn’t believed in reinvention or second chances or just plain dumb luck, she had to believe now.
The House
There was a team of horses — Buck and Nellie — but they were in the barn at the top of the hill where Jimmie had left them when he boarded the Vaquero the previous morning, and so she and Herbie hauled all their things up past the tide line themselves, then shouldered their packs and started up the crude dirt road to the plateau above. By this time, the sun was low in the sky and the Vaquero had rounded the point behind them and tipped away on the streaming red waves. She watched it over one shoulder, alive in all her senses, everything steeped in the soft declining light. The whole world seemed to be holding its breath. Something darted across the road ahead of them and what was it? A lizard of some sort. Or a snake. But then snakes didn’t have legs, did they?
The canyon that gave rise to the road smelled wet and raw, like the inside of a cave, and it funneled the wind so that it was blowing in their faces, blowing cold, and she had to stop to button her cardigan. And once they were up off the beach, everything was mud, so that her shoes were thick with it, each step heavier than the last. She hadn’t gone a hundred yards before they were like twin boats — or no, like those great flapping wooden things they wore in Holland, and what were they called? Sabots? No, that was French. Clogs. Wooden clogs.
But here was Herbie, dancing on ahead of her in his short pants and Army boots, his shirt flapping and the hair beating round his head, impervious to the wind and the mud and everything else. His mood was soaring, lifting him so high it was as if his feet hardly touched ground. And it wasn’t the champagne, which had worn off by now and had only left her feeling sleepy, but his natural exuberance that had him so worked up he was actually trembling like one of those coffee addicts you saw barking at each other like trained seals every time you stepped into a diner. Every thirty seconds he had to catch himself, looping back to her to shove at the weight of her pack as if to push her on up the slope, blowing a kiss in her ear, dropping a hand to her buttocks to pat her there, stimulate her, urge her on. And talking, of course. Talking all the while.
“You see the yellow flowers on the cliffs there? That’s deerweed, but the funny thing is there’re no deer to eat it.”
“Just sheep.”
“Right, just sheep. Our sheep. And you’ll catch sight of them soon enough. But the other patches of yellow — see them? — with the flowers all bunched? That’s coreopsis. Giant coreopsis. Bob says it’s only found on the islands, the giant kind, anyway. But you’re lucky. This is the season when it’s all in bloom, because come summer, when the rains are over, everything goes dormant and it’s just this brown thatch—”
She was fighting for breath. She’d tied her hair up in a kerchief and she could feel the sweat at her temples. Good sweat, productive sweat, and how amazing to be here, in a wild place, with her husband beside her, a canvas pack slung over her shoulder and her legs digging at a hill that seemed to go on rising forever — just the two of them and not another soul for miles. Everything in the past three weeks had been a mad whirl, the berth on the train, unfamiliar beds, the hurried marriage that was really more of an elopement because of the murder out on San Nicolas Island. Her sister Anna had exhausted herself planning a formal wedding for them down the coast in La Jolla, but they’d had to throw all that out the window — there just wasn’t time to arrange for the license and blood tests, not in California. But Arizona was another story. In Arizona, things got done. And so, because Bob Brooks was subpoenaed to go and testify at the trial of one of his hirelings who’d fired on a poachers’ boat and hit the man at the oars — killed him, that is — she had to climb back on another train and rattle across the desert to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Yuma and then rattle back again, because Herbie was needed here, needed urgently, wedding or no. She wasn’t complaining, even under her breath — it had been the most intensely romantic thing she could ever have dreamed of — but she was tired and the hill was steeper than a ski slope and her feet were like lead weights.