Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  Thank God she still had Sammy.

  Fanny was in the garden when the boy returned from a visit to the stable. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Yes.”

  “Louis Stevenson is going to pay us a visit sometime soon,” she told him. She watched as the news registered: His pale, long face lit up. He leaped in the air and shouted, “Luly is coming!”

  “Shhh. Now, don’t tell. You are the only one who knows.”

  CHAPTER 32

  In the early-September sunlight, Fanny stood on the wooden sidewalk in front of the house on Alvarado Street and watched for Louis. She knew his route. He would take a train from Oakland to Salinas City, then transfer to the narrow-gauge train that dumped its passengers rather unceremoniously a few miles outside of Monterey. There he would get a wagon to bring him into town. Exactly when this would happen was anybody’s guess.

  Alvarado was the main thoroughfare in a town with only three real streets, and these were paved with a top coating of beach sand. At street corners in either direction, Fanny could see the old Mexican cannon barrels that had been plugged upright, like cigars in spittoons, to serve as hitching posts. The air smelled of horse droppings and fried beans wafting from Adulfo Sanchez’s saloon. The seaweedy odor of the ocean was there, too, and when the horse traffic quieted, the sound of the crashing breakers could be heard. Alvarado Street was alive with traffic at this hour, with vendors, shoppers, children walking home from school, and the occasional vaquero seated on a fancy-tooled saddle, riding by too fast.

  Fanny didn’t know everyone in town, small as it was, but she was beginning to recognize faces—the local restaurateur, the newspaper editor, the neighborhood women who nodded when they passed, the handful of stupified men who stumbled out of Sanchez’s bar in the late afternoon. She knew personally some of the bright lights in town, including Adulfo Sanchez himself, who was officially engaged to her sister Nellie. Adulfo was a sweet man from an old Mexican family with deep roots in Monterey. Nellie had met him at one of the town’s weekly public balls.

  Another local character was Jules Tavernier, a rather well-known landscape painter. Early on in Fanny’s stay in Monterey, Sam introduced her to Tavernier, whom he knew from the Bohemian Club, and took her to his studio on Alvarado Street, where she found some local “artists” lazing on Persian rugs, drinking whiskey, and talking about French Impressionism. One of these reclining idlers was Joe Strong, the young man who was already sniffing around Belle. Joe had jumped up and spoken respectfully to Fanny, but in that moment she felt the essential wrongness of him. Even then she could see he was the kind of young man who would burn himself up early and become an albatross for some girl when his bohemian ways lost their charm. Fanny reflected now that she should have shipped Belle straight back to Indiana at the first signs of their affair.

  “Fish! Fish!” A Chinese youth with a bamboo pole over his shoulder passed in front of Fanny, and she hailed him. She had purchased from the boy before and was fairly certain that “fish” was the only English word in his vocabulary. Examining the catch inside his net, she pointed to a shad, and he held up six fingers. Fanny reached into the small purse at her waist and paid him six cents.

  She went inside the house, where the thick walls kept the room cool. For two days now she had bathed, dressed, and perfumed herself as if expecting company. Each day they waited for Louis to arrive. Sammy behaved like someone with Saint Vitus’s dance, so jumpy was he with the secret. As the dinner hour approached, Fanny cut onions into a frying pan, then went outside to watch one more time. The fog from the sea was already rolling in. Carpenters carrying tools walked along Alvarado, and some of the drinkers from Sanchez’s bar exited noisily through the doorway. One of the men coming toward her had a familiar gait. He was a wraith of a fellow, with dark hair and … Fanny squinted. It was Louis.

  She let out a cry, and then he was standing there before her: Louis Stevenson, looking as if he had lost one half of himself. His features, always so lively, were strangely still, as if his eyes and mouth were too weary to dance. He was wearing the blue serge suit he had bought in London to call upon publishers. The jacket was a wrinkled mess that hung off his bony shoulders as if from a wooden hanger; a belt cinched at his waist kept the gathered pants aloft. Her face went slack as fear raced through her chest.

  Louis did not touch her. “It’s good to see you, Fanny,” he murmured. The sweetness of his Scottish accent was the only thing about him that seemed intact.

  “Where is your baggage?” she asked.

  “I’m happy you’re up, Fanny. I expected you’d be in bed.”

  “I’m better, Louis.” She looked up into his face again, prepared now not to gasp.

  “I was afraid you’d be …”

  He put out his hand to hold hers, and when she grasped it, she saw his wrists were covered with red welts. She pulled her hand away. “What is it?”

  “Ah, the emigrant’s curse,” he said. “The itch. I need to get some medicine.”

  “Is it all over you?”

  He sighed. “Unfortunately.”

  “We can go to the pharmacist right now, Louis.”

  “I need to sit down for a wee bit, is that all right?”

  “Yes, yes, come in.”

  When they went inside, they found young Sam standing near the table. His head tilted slightly to one side when he looked at the man with his mother.

  “Sammy,” Louis said.

  The moment the boy heard Louis’s voice, he stepped partly behind Fanny. Stunned, mother and son ogled the apparition that had collapsed on a chair.

  “I have all the makings for a fish dinner—just what you like,” Fanny said, forcing cheer into her tremulous voice. She bustled about finishing supper, while Louis’s dazed eyes followed her. No clever quip came from his mouth, only a rattling cough.

  “What are you going to do?” Nellie whispered when Fanny went into the hallway.

  “Send him over to the boardinghouse. Will you go to Adulfo’s and ask him to bring Louis’s bag? He left it there, he said. I suspect he’s too weak to carry it.”

  “Weak?” Nellie said, grasping her sister’s hand. “Honey, that man’s half dead. Who knows what that rash is. What are you going to do?”

  Fanny knew what Nellie was asking. This is the man you want to make a life with, the man who is going to support you? Are you insane? Through all the turmoil of the last months, during the battles with Sam, during all the letters from home condemning her for even considering divorce, Fanny had clung to Louis’s memory. She had prayed for this moment, but now that it was here, everything felt wrong. Looking into the front room from the hallway, she saw an emaciated creature she didn’t recognize, a tall man weighing perhaps 115 pounds, a thoroughly sick man.

  “I don’t know,” she said soberly. “I thought I knew, but now … “

  By noon the next day, Louis had recovered some strength. He came by the house to collect Fanny. “Do your parents know you are in America?” she asked when they went out onto the street.

  “They do now. I had a brutal letter from my father in New York. He told me to stop this ‘sinful enterprise.’ He’s cut me off, and do you know? I’m relieved.”

  “Do you have any money left?”

  “Not to speak of. Colvin owes me. He wrote that he would send some as soon as he is able.”

  Just then Jules Tavernier emerged from his studio onto the sidewalk. “Mrs. Osbourne,” he called out.

  “Mr. Tavernier,” she said, composing herself, “this is Robert Louis Stevenson, a friend of mine, and a great Scottish writer, I might add. He is in this country on a lecture tour.”

  “Well,” the man said, appraising Louis none too subtly, “will you be speaking here?”

  “Oh, no,” Fanny interjected. “He’s just down from San Francisco for a little respite.”

  When they had walked another half block, Louis asked, “Where can we go to talk freely?”

 
“To the beach,” she said. “It’s a small place, this town. People do not speak kindly of each other behind backs.”

  “I don’t give a tinker’s damn.”

  “I still have to care,” Fanny said.

  They walked down Alvarado Street to the soft sandhills that ran between the town and the ocean. She tried to cheer him as they walked, but he would have no part of small talk. The sound of the booming waves echoed like cannon reports in her ears.

  “It was not an easy trip,” Louis said when they reached the beach.

  “I can see that.”

  “I was afraid you were in grave danger when I got the telegram. People die of brain fever.”

  “Nellie sent it. She shouldn’t have frightened you. We don’t know what it was, but it passed.”

  Louis stopped walking and turned to her. “Where are you in the divorce proceedings?”

  Fanny caught her breath. “I haven’t begun.”

  Louis looked at her incredulously. “Don’t tell me that, Fanny. You asked me to come.”

  She looked at her feet, half buried in the sand. “It’s not that I haven’t talked to Sam about it.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s resisting it, despite everything. The truth is, I have been under siege from my family, too. Everyone is opposed to it. They’re like your father, Louis. They think it’s a sin.”

  “What do you want, Fanny? Not what do they want, for Christ’s sake—what do you want?”

  Fanny set her chin, looked into his eyes. “I want peace in my mind.”

  He kicked the sand. Whether from anger or the rash, Louis’s neck was flaming red. “Are you going to marry me or not?”

  Fanny put a hand over her mouth and stared out at the ocean. Her mind raced as minutes elapsed. When she did not answer, Louis walked away, up the beach, and she turned back toward town.

  CHAPTER 33

  Two figures were hovering over Louis when he woke.

  “Here he comes,” said one, an old man who leaned in close.

  “Can you see me, mister?” said the other, whose face was as pocked as a beach stone.

  “You been out for days,” said the first. “We ‘bout took you for dead.”

  Louis looked around. It appeared he was in the upper chamber of a rustic cabin. “How did I get here?” he asked.

  “English,” the old one declared.

  “Scottish,” Louis corrected. He tried feebly to sit up from the makeshift bed where he lay, but merely fell back.

  “Oh, you’re goin’ nowhere for a while, mister,” said the old one. “You gotta eat somethin’. Jesus Lord. Look at you.”

  Louis looked down at his naked, ribby chest. “What foul paste have you gilded me with, gentlemen?”

  “Man talks like a book,” said the pocked one.

  The elder fellow aimed a flinty blue eye toward Louis, daring him to complain further. “You itch, buddy?”

  Louis thought about it. “No.”

  “Damn stuff works, even when a fella’s been flayed as bad as you.” The man laughed, exposing a naked upper gum on one side. “It’s bear grease and some other surprises. Tom’s own recipe,” he said, nodding toward a fellow in the background who appeared to be an Indian.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Four days, and mostly not here,” the old one said. “What the devil is a man like you doin’ knocked out under a tree on this ranch?”

  “First, sir, what is your name?”

  “Cap’n Anson Smith. This here’s my partner, Jonathan Wright.”

  “I am Louis Stevenson. And I thank you both for saving my life.”

  “Oh, that ain’t decided yet.”

  Tom came forward with a steaming cup. “Tea,” he said. “Drink it.”

  “You was cold when we found you,” Smith said. “Now you got yourself a fine fever.” Louis saw a look pass between Smith and Wright. “Did you mean to just go off and die?” The captain’s voice was soft and respectful, as if he would understand such an impulse.

  “I like to go camping out, take in the air.” Louis smiled at the old man’s look of disbelief. “And … I had little funds for an inn.”

  “Or grub, looks like.”

  “Captain of what, sir?” Louis asked.

  “Army. Mexican war. Only thing I shoot now is bears.” He laughed at his own wit.

  “Me and him raise goats here,” Wright said. “Angoras. What’s your line?”

  “Writer chap.”

  Wright ran a knobby hand across his mustache. “Is there a woman somewheres in this?”

  Louis began to explain about the train trip, but a coughing fit took him for a good five minutes. The two men eyed him warily. “No more talking till tomorrow,” Smith said.

  Louis lay on the cot in the upper chamber, coughing between sips of the tea. Inside his head, the Pacific Ocean thundered unceasingly. He remembered, foggily, the state he was in when he hired a horse and wagon in Monterey. His heart felt cracked in half, and his mind was gone to shards from the itching skin. He set out into the countryside bent on relief. At one point in his hill wandering, he reached into his pants to see what he had left. “Pocket-cured nuts,” he said out loud, and shared with the horse what was in his palm. His money was all but gone. When he collapsed under the tree, he wasn’t entirely sure. He recalled lying in a stupor, only getting up to water the horse during the time—how long, two days?—that he lay there. Aside from the peanuts, he had consumed only coffee. He lost consciousness at some point and was awakened briefly by a tinkling sound, which turned out to be little bells attached to collars on some goats that had gathered around him to have a look. He could picture himself now as he had been when he was found—the fool on the heath with a horse, a herd of puzzled goats, and Cap’n Smith all staring at him.

  Exhausted by the coughing, Louis felt too weak to lift his own head. Tom was watching and approached to prop him up and spoon soup into his mouth. Louis was touched by the kindness of these weathered frontiersmen. As he began to doze, he sent off a mental thank-you into the ether that the terrible itch was truly, truly gone.

  The days that followed were marked by other people coming and going around him. Captain Smith and Tom brought infused teas and soups and progressively more solid food, while a pair of little girls visited from time to time to have a look at him. When he was less muddled, he learned that he’d been brought to Wright’s house, one of two rustic cabins in a clearing surrounded by a circle of big shade trees and, beyond that, hills dotted with pines and hundreds of goats. Louis could not see the open main room on the first floor from where he lay, but he woke to the snap of kindling in the dawn fire, smelled coffee and frying eggs, and felt the pulse of frontier farm life through the remaining day, until darkness quieted the family and the tinkling of bells outside.

  Obviously missing was the woman of the house. Mrs. Wright was away due to illness, and in her absence, her curious little daughters appeared to have nothing more to do than gape at Louis, like every other creature in this place. When he discovered neither could read, he set out to teach them how to decipher words. Mornings thereafter, with flies buzzing all around, he gave them a lesson, followed by a story.

  One day he recited a little poem he’d written not long ago.

  “More,” the smaller girl said.

  “All right,” Louis replied. “This one is longer, if I can remember it.”

  When I was sick and lay a-bed,

  I had two pillows at my head,

  And all my toys beside me lay,

  To keep me happy all the day.

  The children tittered at the rhyme. “Another,” the older one chimed.

  “Oh, this one keeps going,” Louis said.

  And sometimes for an hour or so

  I watched my leaden soldiers go,

  With different uniforms and drills,

  Among the bed-clothes, through the hills …

  Louis paused. “I’ve forgotten the rest.” he sighed, and looked around. Every
face was at attention.

  “Ah,” he said. “Let’s see.”

  And sometimes sent my ships in fleets

  All up and down among the sheets;

  Or brought my trees and houses out,

  And planted cities all about.

  I was the giant great and still

  That sits upon the pillow-hill,

  And sees before him, dale and plain,

  The pleasant land of counterpane.”

  When he finished, to the giggles and claps of the girls, he felt as if he had just sent a tiger through a fiery hoop.

  “You done good there,” said Smith, who had been watching. “I can tell you, they ain’t the easiest audience.”

  Louis glowed.

  “You always been sick?” Smith asked after he chased the children outside to feed some goats.

  “Not always.” Louis waved a hand weakly. “Aye, a lot. Bad in the lungs.”

  The captain scratched his cheek. “We’re goin’ to get you into town soon as you’re able. You’ve run through my kit out here. Maybe next week. There’s a doc in Monterey could help you. We’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 34

  “Louis is back in town.” Nellie’s face was flushed from running.

  Fanny grabbed her sister’s arm. “Where is he?”

  “Adulfo told me he’s over at Doc Heintz’s place.”

  “Where has he been all this time?”

  “Out in the country somewhere. Adulfo wasn’t clear on it.”

  Fanny’s eyes frantically scanned the kitchen. “What do I have that I can take to him?”

  “Fanny!” Her sister shook her shoulders. “The man doesn’t want food from you.” She paused. “Adulfo says he’s been very sick.”

  Fanny tore off her apron and ran down the sandy middle of Alvarado Street. At the doctor’s house, a maid answered the door.

  “Is the doctor here? I need to speak to him right away,” Fanny said. When the woman went to fetch him, Fanny smoothed her skirts and hair, wiped the sweat from her upper lip.