That took me aback. “I guess. We might want that track working for us someday. But we’ve got to worry about keeping them at a distance first. So I’m for it.”
“Good,” said John. “We should probably try to talk with them at the swap meet, if we get a chance. And warn the others about them, too.”
“Wait a bit, here,” Tom said. “You still have to get a meeting together, and get the vote. If we start deciding things like the boys here did, we’ll end up like the San Diegans.”
“True,” John said.
I felt myself blushing. John glanced at me and said, “I’m not blaming you.”
I scratched the sandstone with a pebble. “You should. I’m as much to blame as anyone.”
“No.” He straightened up, chewed his lower lip. “That was Steve’s plan; I can see his mark on it everywhere.” His voice tensed, pitched higher. “That boy wanted everything his way right from the start. Right out of his ma. How he cried if we didn’t jump to his wishes!” He shrugged it off, looked at me sullenly. “I suppose you think I’m to blame. That I drove him off.”
I shook my head, though part of me had been thinking that. And it was true, in a way. But not entirely. I couldn’t make it clear, even to myself.
John shifted his gaze to Tom, but Tom only shrugged. “I don’t know, John, I really don’t. People are what they are, eh? Who made Henry here want to read books so bad? None of us. And who made Kathryn want to grow corn and make bread from it? None of us. And who made Steve want to see the world out there? No one. They were born with it.”
“Mm,” John said, mouth tight. He wasn’t convinced, even if it absolved him, even if he had been saying the same thing a second ago. John was always going to believe his own actions had effects. And with his own son, who’d spent a lifetime in his care… I could read his face thinking of that as clear as you can read the face of a babe. A wave of pain crossed his features, and he shook himself, and with a somber click of tongue against teeth reminded himself that we were here. He closed up. “Well, it’s past,” he said. “I’m not much of a one for philosophy, you know that.”
So the matter was closed. I thought about how this conversation would have taken place at the ovens among the women: the chewing over every detail of event and motivation, the arguing it out, the yelling and crying and all; and I almost laughed. We men were a pretty tight-lipped crowd when it came to important things. John was walking in a circle like I had earlier, and quickly his nervous striding got to us, so that Tom and I stood to stretch out. Pretty soon the three of us were meandering in place like gulls, hands in pockets, observing the swells and pointing out to each other any particularly big ones.
Looking back at the valley, now filled with trees yellow among the evergreens, I stopped pacing and said, “What we need is a radio. Like the one we saw in San Diego. A working radio. Those things can hear other radios from hundreds of miles away, right?”
Tom said, “Some of them can, yes.” He and John stopped walking to listen to me.
“If we had one of them we could listen to the Japanese ships. Even if we didn’t understand them we’d know where they were. And we could listen to Catalina, maybe, and maybe other parts of the country, other towns.”
“The big radios will receive and transmit halfway around the world,” Tom commented.
“Or a long way, anyway,” I corrected him. He grinned. “It would give us ears, don’t you see, and after that we could begin to figure out what’s going on out there.”
“I would love to have something like that,” John admitted. “I don’t know how we’d get one, though,” he added dubiously.
“I talked to Rafael about it,” I said. “He told me that the scavengers have radios and radio parts at the swap meets all the time. He doesn’t know anything about radios right now, but he does think he can generate the power to run one.”
“He does?” Tom said.
“Yeah. He’s been working on batteries a lot. I told him we’d get him a radio manual and help him read it, and give him stuff to trade for radio parts at the swap meets this summer, and he was all excited by the idea.”
John and Tom looked at each other, sharing something I couldn’t read. John nodded. “We should do that. We can’t trade fish for this kind of stuff, of course, but we can find something—shellfish, maybe, or those baskets.”
Another huge set rolled in, washing all the way to the base of the cliff, and our attention was forced back to the waves. “Those must be thirty-five feet high at least,” Tom repeated.
“You think so?” said John. “I thought this cliff was only forty feet.”
“Forty feet above the beach, but those wave troughs are lower. And the crests are nearly as high as we are!” It was true.
John mentioned that he wanted to get the boats out on days like this.
“So you were thinking about that when you walked down here,” I said.
“Sure. See, follow the river current at high tide—”
“No way!” Tom cried.
“Look at the turbulance in the rivermouth,” I pointed out. “Even those broken waves must be ten or fifteen feet tall.”
“You’d be capsized and drowned by the first wave that hit you,” Tom said.
“Hmm,” said John reluctantly—with perhaps a gleam of humor in his eye. “You may be right.”
We meandered around our shelf again, talked about currents and the possibility of a mild winter. Out to sea shafts of light still speared the clouds to gild the lined ocean surface. Tom pointed out there. “What you should try doing is fishing the whales again. They’re due through soon.”
John and I groaned.
“No, really, you guys gave up on that one too fast. You either harpooned an extra tough one, or Rafael didn’t put the harpoon in a place that would do the beast much harm.”
John said, “Easy to say, but he’s never going to be able to place the harpoon right where he wants to.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying, it’s just that most of the time a harpoon will do them more damage, and they won’t be able to dive so deep.”
“If that’s true,” I said, “and if we added more rope to the end of the line—”
“There’s not room for it in our boats,” John told me.
But I was remembering the time Steve and I had discussed it. “We could tie the bottom end to line that runs over to a tub in another boat, and have twice as much.”
“That’s true,” John said, cocking his head.
“If we were to get into the whale business we could really make a killing at the swap meet,” said Tom. “We’d have oil to spare, and animal feed, and tons of meat.”
“If we could keep it from going bad,” John said. But he liked the idea; what was it but fishing, after all? “Could you really get the line set so that it went from boat to boat?”
“Easy!” Tom said. He knelt and picked up a pebble to draw in the dirt. He started to scratch a plan, and John crouched at his side. I looked out at the horizon, and this is what I saw: three sunbeams standing like thick white pillars, slanting each its own way, measuring the distance between the grey clouds and the gray sea.
Chapter the Last
As the year fell away to its death the storms came more frequently, until every week or so one barreled in over the whitecaps and thrashed us, leaving the valley tattered and the sea a foamy pale brown from all the dirt sluiced into it. When we did get the boats out the fishing was miserably cold, and we didn’t catch much. Most days I spent at the table under the window, where I read or wrote or watched black clouds bluster in. The clouds were the vanguard; after them a smack of the wind’s hand, and maybe a low rumble of thunder, announced the arrival of the storm’s main force. Raindrops slid down the windowpane in a thousand tributaries that met and divided again and again as they wandered down the glass. The roof ticked or tapped or drummed under the onslaught. Behind me Pa labored away on his new sewing machine, and its rn, rn, rn rn rnnnn! rebuked my idleness, sometimes so successfully that I buckled down and wrote a sentence or two. But it was hard going, and there were lots of hours when I was content to chew my pencils (writing epics on my teeth) and think about it, and watch it rain, lulled by wind, and roof patter, and the tea kettle’s whistle, and Pa’s rn rn, snip snip.