“So you’re here to do a survey,” she said, just to say something.
“That’s right,” the first one said — Ayers. “It’s nothing to concern yourself over, is it, Leonard?” The other man shook his head. “The survey is only to assess the grazing damage here, with an eye to—”
“Improvement,” the other man put in.
It was only then that she began to understand. The island’s jurisdiction had passed from the Bureau of Lighthouses to the Department of the Interior and there had been talk of the National Park Service stepping in to oversee management of the land, but that talk, like all rumor, had flitted round them briefly and then gone on over to Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa for the ranchers there to bat around for a while. And yet here it was in the flesh, right on their doorstep. She felt afraid suddenly. Or not afraid, exactly, but off-balance, as if they’d come up and shoved her from behind.
“I don’t know how long you’ve been here—” Ayers began.
“Ten years,” Herbie said, cutting him off. “And Bob Brooks has held the lease all the way back to nineteen-seventeen. Is that long enough for you?”
“—but as I’m sure you’re aware the range here has been severely overgrazed, leading to substantial degradation of the land — desert, the whole place’ll be desert if things continue as they are — and let’s call this a feasibility study toward the end of reforesting the island, after making a determination with regard to reducing the grazing population, that is, because that’s the first step in any recovery program—”
“I told you, you can’t do that. There’s a lease in effect.”
A laugh now, a wave of the hand. “Oh, we’re aware of that, of course we are, and we don’t mean to imply that anything’s going to go forward at present—”
And now the other one put in: “But we have to inform you, and I have the official notification here, that oversight of San Miguel Island has passed on to the Navy now, for strategic purposes, you understand, as long as there’s a threat in the Pacific. And that we’re looking to long-range improvement of the resources here.”
“Which means getting rid of the sheep, is that what you’re saying?” A muscle under Herbie’s right eye began to twitch. He balled his hands into fists. “Even though ranching’s gone on here for a hundred and sixty years — since the time of the Spaniards, for Christ’s sake?”
She said his name aloud — two syllables, emphasis on the first — to draw him back, to warn him: “Herbie.” And then, in French: “Ce n’est pas le moment.”
He ignored her. “You better bring your lawyers with you next time, a whole squad of them.” And then he caught himself. “Or are you the lawyers, is that what you are?”
Ayers said quietly, “No, we’re not lawyers. We’re land management men.”
Herbie threw it right back at him. “I don’t care who you are. You talk to Bob Brooks. He’s a millionaire, you know that? He’s got resources. He’ll fight you every inch of the way.”
Both men took a step back. Neither was smiling now. “Let me emphasize,” Ayers said, shifting the gum from one side to the other, “that this is all just in the talking stages. It’s up to the Navy now. And you know the Navy—”
“No, I don’t,” Herbie said, fighting to control his voice. “I was an Army man myself. And you go ahead and do your survey because I don’t have the authority to stop you. But you’ll hear from me — and Bob Brooks too, I promise you that.” He turned as if to shut the gate, then spun suddenly round again. “And you stay out of my way, you hear me?”
* * *
That night at dinner Herbie hardly said a word. It was as if all the fight had gone out of him the minute the two men had turned and started down the road to the harbor. He didn’t touch his food. Throughout the meal, no matter if she tried to keep a conversation going or if the girls addressed him or not, he just stared at the wall as if he could see through it to a place they could only imagine. When the girls were finished and had got up to slide their smeared plates into the dishpan, she took them into the living room to read them their bedtime stories. Neither of them asked about the men who had come to the gate or why their father was still sitting there in the kitchen over a full plate of food, staring at the wall. She read for longer than usual that night — Kipling’s Just So Stories and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” their favorite — as if the magic of talking animals and the strangeness of India could insulate them from what was happening in their own house. Finally, when she put them to bed, Betsy asked if their father wasn’t coming in to kiss them goodnight and she had to say he wasn’t feeling well.
“Is it the flu?” Marianne asked.
“No,” she said, “it’s not the flu. He’s just feeling a little blue, that’s all. You know that’s how your daddy gets sometimes — me too. We all do.”
He came to bed late, stripping down to his underwear wordlessly while she lay there propped up on her pillow, reading. His every motion — pulling the sweater up over his head, bending to his shoes, unbuttoning his shirt — seemed to take forever, as if he were deep undersea and struggling against a heavy current. Earlier, in the kitchen, she’d tried to snap him out of it while she stood over the dishpan, washing up, but it was like talking to a stone. Did he want to listen to a radio program? Or just sit with her by the fire? Did he know that Betsy had added up five columns of three-digit numbers that afternoon — and perfectly too? Was he going to take Pomo for a walk or should she just let him out in the courtyard? He’d shuffled in his seat a bit — there was that much to show that he was alive — but if he answered her at all it was in twitches and grunts.
Now, seeing him there slumped over his discarded clothes as if he couldn’t summon the will to pick them up and lay them over the chair, she closed the book and set it on the night table. She knew what was going through his mind, knew the way he let things get him down. Those two men were out there somewhere in the dark — on his island — and he couldn’t bear the thought of it. “Come to bed,” she said, patting the mattress beside her. “You’ll feel better in the morning — a good night’s sleep, that’s all you need.”
He gave her an absent look, then eased himself down on the bed and pulled back the covers.
“It’s nothing to worry over. Really. I mean it. You heard them — they said it was only a study. And you know how these government studies go. Everything’s a study. And nothing ever gets done.”
“I know,” he said after a moment. “I know. You’re right.”
“We’ll be old folks by the time anything happens. In our rockers, side by side out there on the porch and the girls all grown up and married.”
“The Navy,” he said, his voice submerged. “What would the Navy want with us out here?”
“They probably don’t even know themselves. Bureaucracy, that’s all it is. Somebody shuffling papers in Washington.” It was only then that she noticed he was trembling. “You’re shivering. Are you cold?”
He didn’t answer.
She swept back the covers and held them open for him. “Here, move in close and I’ll warm you.”
“What if they evict us?” he said, sliding stiffly in beside her. “Then what? Where’ll we go?”
“They won’t evict us.”
“But what if they do?”
“No matter what happens,” she said, holding tight to him, “you’ll always have me and the girls. Always. No matter what.”
But he was bitter that night, bitter and blue to the core. “Small comfort,” he said, and he rolled away from her and pulled the covers up over his head.