That they were bored was a given. There was nothing on the island for them but duty as defined in their orders — they wanted life, nightlife, gin mills and dance halls and girls their own age, movies, automobiles, swing bands, Harry James and Benny Goodman — and she couldn’t blame them. What she could blame them for was neglecting the chores she and Herbie set out for them — more than once she had to remind them that appearances to the contrary she wasn’t their mother, and if they wanted to eat they had better make sure they set and cleared the table, washed the dishes and kept the woodbox full to overbrimming. And if Reg wanted to help Marianne with her arithmetic or Freddie read aloud to Betsy, so much the better, but they did that on their own time.
They were good with the girls, she had to admit it, but the diversions of children’s games, hide-and-seek, red light — green light, checkers, Old Maid and Go Fish, only went so far. She registered the tedium in their faces, every day the same, nowhere to go, nothing to do. The one thing they did manage to show interest in — besides eating, that is — was the horses. At lunch one afternoon, the girls giggling and generally being silly vying for their attention and the dog looking up fixedly as the platter went round the table, Reg cleared his throat and turned to Herbie. “So the horses out there in the barn — Buck and Nellie? Do you ever ride them or are they strictly for hauling things up from the harbor?”
Herbie was in an ebullient mood, chasing after the subject of the sheep and how well they were doing because of what was beginning to look like a well-watered and prosperous winter no matter what the Interior Department, the Navy or the Japanese might have to say about it, and he’d just pointed out to her that more of the ewes seemed to be throwing twins this time around, when he paused for a moment to lift the soupspoon to his mouth and Reg slipped in his question. Herbie took a moment, setting down the spoon and delicately patting his lips with the napkin, always fastidious — he had beautiful manners, whether he was knocking on a door on the Upper East Side with his mustaches waxed or sitting here in the dining cum living room of a patchwork house framed by the sea. “Oh, we ride them,” he said, “of course we do — the exercise is good for them, Nellie especially. Buck, I’m afraid, is pretty much on his last legs—”
She looked up sharply. This was a sore subject between them. Betsy was eight and Marianne had just turned eleven, and while they were old enough to understand that all things had to die, especially on a working ranch — the sheep Herbie shot for meat, the turkey the foxes had made off with, one of the cats that had crept under the porch to give up the ghost in peace and was discovered only when it began to emit an odor — the horses were in a different category altogether. They were pets as much as anything else. The girls had grown up with both of them, and Buck, a big patient bay roan, had been the one they learned to ride on. He was old and stiff, they knew that — according to Jimmie, Buck had been on the ranch since Bob Brooks took over — but she didn’t like Herbie to mention it in front of them. Once, after he’d gone on about Buck staggering on the road up from the harbor (“He damned near pitched over the side into the ravine and me with him”), Betsy had asked, “Is Buck going to die?” and she’d tried to be forthright with her. “Yes,” she’d said, “everything dies, even Buck. But not for a long while yet, so don’t you worry about it.” “Why?” Betsy asked, and whether she was asking why she shouldn’t worry or why everything dies, Elise didn’t know. And in any case she really didn’t have an answer.
“He’s got to be twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. But he’s been a good old horse.” Herbie looked to where the girls sat side by side, staring up at him over their plates. “Right, girls?”
They both nodded solemnly.
“So would you mind then if we took the horses out?” Reg persisted. “It would make it a whole lot easier for us to patrol — get out to the other end of the island, I mean, out to Point Bennett and such.”
Herbie was feeling grand and expansive, riding one of his currents. If they’d asked her, she would have said no. The boys were well meaning, she supposed — or well meaning enough — but once they got out of sight of the house there was no telling what they might do. She was afraid for the horses — and for them too. That was all they needed: a boy sailor with a broken neck. But Herbie just waved a hand grandly and said, “We’ll see.”
* * *
On the night of February twenty-third, a Japanese I-17 submarine — a huge thing, longer than a football field — slipped into the Santa Barbara Channel undetected by anyone, not the Coast Guard or the Air Corps or the two boy sailors sent out to San Miguel Island to protect her and her family from attack. It was theorized that the submarine was piloted by a man who knew these waters intimately, either a former fisherman or perhaps captain of one of the Japanese tankers that regularly took on crude oil here before the outbreak of war. In any case, just after seven that night, the submarine surfaced and began shelling the Ellwood Oil Field just west of Santa Barbara, intent on destroying the oil storage tanks and setting off a firestorm. It was the first attack on the continental United States by a foreign power since the War of 1812 and while none of the shells hit its target, the sirens went off, a blackout was imposed and people up and down the coast were thrown into a panic, thinking an invasion was under way. On San Miguel Island that night — and she remembered it clearly — they were all sitting around the fire playing cards while the girls did their homework and the wind assaulted the house with its grab bag of shrieks, whistles and growls. Nobody heard a thing.
They only learned of the attack the following morning, when the shortwave radio — given over now strictly to naval pursuits — began to buzz with the news. A pall fell over the house. They all gathered in the living room, even the girls, who couldn’t be kept away, the voice of the naval operator hissing and crackling over the bare details, Enemy submarine, nineteen hundred hours, casualties as yet unknown. The sailors sat there perched on the edges of their chairs, white-faced and stricken, as Herbie communicated with shore, their feet tapping nervously and their eyes darting to the windows as if they expected to see the Imperial Army out there secreted amongst the sheep. Herbie was outraged. He kept accusing them, as if the whole thing were their fault, as if they could have been expected to identify an enemy submarine forty-two miles away in the dark of night. “Where were you when we needed you?” he demanded. “If you’d been out there on patrol you might have spotted them and radioed their location to shore — we could have called out the planes and bombed them, could have wiped them out, the dirty sneaking Nip bastards.”
She watched Herbie fuming over the radio in the impotence of his rage, his arms flapping at his sides and his hair on end, and all she felt was a hopeless sinking fear. Their sanctuary was gone, the invaders at their doorstep — they could be anywhere, already landed at Simonton Cove or right down there in Cuyler Harbor for all she knew. She thought of the Japanese fishermen who’d come to the house all those years ago, saw their faces arrayed before her, such polite men, so mild — and so delighted with the baby. How could men like that threaten them? They were decent at heart, she knew they were — the captain spoke French even. But then — and the thought chilled her — there were the Japs she read of in the newspapers, demonic twisted little men spitting babies on their bayonets, raping women wholesale, murdering, thieving, leaving Nanking in ruins and Shanghai in chains. That was the reality. And this, this cockeyed dream of wide-open spaces, of freedom and self-reliance and goodness, simple goodness, was the delusion.