San Miguel

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In retelling the story of the Waters and Lester families during their time on San Miguel Island, I have tried to represent the historical record as accurately as possible, and yet this is a work of fiction, not history, and dialogue, characters and incidents have necessarily been invented. I would like to acknowledge my debt to three texts in particular—The Legendary King of San Miguel, by Elizabeth Sherman Lester; San Miguel Island: My Childhood Memoir, 1930–1942, by Betsy Lester Roberti; and Mrs. Waters’ Diary of Her Life on San Miguel Island, edited by Marla Daily — and to express my gratitude to both Marla Daily and Peggy Dahl for their kind assistance with the research for this book.

She was coughing, always coughing, and sometimes she coughed up blood. The blood came in a fine spray, plucked from the fibers of her lungs and pumped full of air as if it were perfume in an atomizer. Or it rose in her mouth like a hot metallic syrup, burning with the heat inside her till she spat it into the porcelain pot and saw the bright red clot of it there like something she’d given birth to, like afterbirth, but then what would she know about it since she’d never conceived, not with James, her first husband, and not with Will either. She was thirty-eight years old and she’d resigned herself to the fact that she would never bear a child, not in this lifetime. When she felt weak, when she hemorrhaged and the pain in her chest was like a medieval torture, like the peine forte et dure in which the torturer laid one stone atop the other till your ribs cracked and your heart stalled, she sometimes felt she wouldn’t even live to see the year out.

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