The Yesterlings: Secrets Among the Wild Horses of Sable Island

By Peter Kelton

The Yesterlings

Secrets Among the Wild Horses of Sable Island

Seeking adventure, Argentine dandy Balboa Brontine charms his way onto an expedition to film a remote Canadian island famed for wild horses and shipwrecks. He persuades Paul the filmmaker to let New Orleans femme fatale G

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Kelton DBA as Edit Ink
• Release date: Mar 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780692189689

Peter Kelton

Peter Kelton writes fiction when he's between news jobs and has written for some of the world's largest news organizations. Most of his work has been in New York. He has critiqued more than 450 novels in a national column and has written six novels of his own in a unique erudite literary fiction style of adventure, mystery, suspense and satire. He grew up in Texas, served overseas in the US Army and returned to Europe as a foreign correspondent. He currently divides his time between his homes in East St. Louis, IL and Querétaro, Mexico. He has ghost written for more than 100 clients and is a top-rated writer for the Upwork free-lance agency.

Book preview

Chapter One

Balboa Brontine first came to me about a week after the Canadians announced my grant. We met casually at my New Orleans lemonade stand on the Mississippi levy, not far from the Cafe du Monde. He said he’d just been released from Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick where he’d gotten some psychiatric treatment. He is a large, muscled man with deceptively polite manners, inclined to a gambler’s form of dress, paisley vest, and a string tie. There’s something oriental about his smooth-skin, wide-cheek face, although records show he is of Argentine parentage. But his ancestry as he describes it raises more doubts than it confirms. And he speaks of it with maniacal glee, as though telling a joke with no punch line.

Why were you in Dorchester? I asked, that sweltering afternoon under my beach umbrella, after I had poured a large tumbler of lemonade. Why were you in prison?

For stealing birds, he said, squinting from that dark face with his thin blue eyes. I got caught. Then he added my name, for emphasis I suppose. Paul, I got caught.

And you say your mother was part Japanese?

Balboa rolled back on the levy grass. That’s a good one, he laughed, doubling like giant dark dough, and then rising to toast me with his glass, his Aussie hat askance. "Yeah, that’s right. I just don’t know which part was Japanese!"

He had already sung for me the myth of his lyrical second birth, a sing-song high-pitched voice of Latin ecclesiastical chant echoing there across the muddy Mississippi.

I would eventually ask, And your nanny with the leather saddle?

She’d come around, yes. But I hid.

Well, that’s it, I said. Thank you for coming. It’s always good to see old Army buddies. We’d served together in Germany, years ago.

I thought, he brazenly wants in on my film.

As big Balboa Brontine lumbered away, I felt his story about the bird might have some merit, but something about his massive frame, the dark tan skin, slits of thinness in his face out of which peered sea-blue eyes, the quiver of his voice — no, I wasn’t going to film his story. I sensed trouble in his swashbuckling manner, his untoward humor. He walked away tall under that khaki Aussie slouch hat with an aura of recovering mental outpatient arrogance.

I’m working with a grant from the Canadian Film Commission to document facts about Sable Island. Some legislators have felt that the mysterious sand bar with a name that’s become legendary 100 miles southeast of Nova Scotia damages Canada’s reputation for harboring tranquil qualities of humanity. Not that you can blame some lonesome fog-bound sand spit for killing people, thousands of sailors. It’s just a piece of earth, the ocean is just water. But the myths that sprang from the deaths over hundreds of years, they were something else.

Libraries and museums burst at their paper seams with agonizingly poetic descriptions of Sable Island, from shipwreck chronicles scribbled more than 400 years ago to the mordant, modern words of an actor stricken with the continuous and wondrous illusion of peaceful tranquility that lay before the treacherous storms — waves so tall they broke across the entire island, carrying shiploads to their deaths in whirlpool currents and eddies that circled the island, pale-faced bodies afloat face up and face down, round and round until another tempest sunk them in the sand with perhaps 500 wrecked vessels and lighthouse keepers who heard ghosts in chains begging to be removed for sanity’s sake — God, please, please take me away. And wild packs of horses roaming with a freedom so astounding that they were coveted by horse traders the world over.

The politicians have thrown money at the film commission and, even though I live in New Orleans, my bid to do the documentary won hands down. I think some of the footage I submitted from Hurricane Katrina helped. That was five years ago, but everyone remembers it. So now I’ve set about dispelling myths about Sable Island, although I’ve already found many of them are disquietingly true. While they may indeed be true, the goal of all concerned is to turn the island into a sanctuary safe from human interference and let nature take its course. It’s an awesome challenge and the chances of failure are great, which is why I continue to run my lemonade stand to pay the rent; something to fall back on, now that newspapers have gone out of style.

The schooner La Placer Terrenal set sail with a three-man crew out of Ushuaia, Argentina. Balboa’s mother, Maria del Placido, playfully chased the little boy about the deck, then handed him to Haruka, his nanny, truly a tiny woman. His bearded father, Alejandro Brontine del Botánico, gazed through binoculars at the retreating city of Ushuaia, capital of Tierra del Fuego and the southern-most city on earth. He watched the snow-peaked Martial Mountains rise behind Ushuaia and then grow smaller as they sailed away.

Their classic William Garden topsail schooner moved easily through Beagle Channel like a toy boat, white sails and reddish sails that mocked the redwood deck, holding steady, its course set to skirt Cape Horn and then to Montevideo and points much farther north. Alejandro, the city slick entrepreneur with rugged Gaucho dreams, had bought a horse ranch. He would later tell the lighthouse keeper on Sable that he had set out to see the mythical horses on the island, hoping to breed them in Argentina.

As I learned more details of their shipwreck, I began to wonder about Balboa’s ancestry. He claims to be a descendant of landowner Luis Francisco Nougués but hasn’t any proof. True, the Japanese-Argentine community is located mostly in a place named Pablo Nougués. But the Luis Francisco Nougués dynasty built its communities along lines of the French region of Haute-Garonne, a heck of a long way from Japan. I do suppose he could be partly French, too. He claims his father had owned the Jardín Japonés (Japanese Garden and Teahouse), a traditional landmark in Buenos Aires, and that part I believe.

His father’s delirium was evident in what he said to the lighthouse keeper. They were huddled in one of several slap-dab lean-to shelters that dotted the island.

I was thinking of breeding, he said. My wife’s people, the Selk’nam Indians, they look Japanese, but they came to Tierra del Fuego about 10,000 years ago. Your tough horses would make a good breed with our Argentine horses. I believe firmly in cross breeding. It is mankind’s strength. You will see. We have Balboa to prove cross-breeding leads to superiority.

Balboa’s father was gravely injured in the shipwreck. He gurgled, blood trickling from his mouth, lungs punctured by large splinters from La Placer Terrenal’s shattered Oregon pine masts. He choked, gurgled, spat blood. Excuse me, it hurts. You know, the southern group of the Selk’nam, the Yámana, lived in what is now Ushuaia. My Maria del Placido is just like them. They fought all the time. But then the British, the French, the Spaniards came, wiped ‘em out. Measles, it was. She’s Selk’nam, but likes to pass for a Jap.

Alejandro hadn’t been told that his wife, Balboa’s mother, had died an hour earlier, at the 11th hour in the morning, just as the early fog began to lift, sunlight spitting into the ocean, whitecaps glistening. The waves broke like crystal along the crescent island, 30 miles of sand, crashing with enormous distain over the battered wreckage of La Placer Terrena, her hull split open on the sand bar and her shattered masts raised in dark surrendering silhouettes to the sky.

The lighthouse keeper, a grandson of a famous earlier keeper, Andrew Hayden, took notes. He and his family and the crew of the life-saving station, a permanent fixture set up in 1801 after hundreds of shipwrecks, routinely pulled wreck victims from the stormy seas that raked Sable Island. Hayden was a taciturn man with a wiry beard, accustomed to jotting down tales of horror from survivors. He would often hum Calvinist hymns when aiding the victims. While scribbling Balboa’s father’s last words, he nonchalantly rocked the sleeping boy with his foot in a rosewood bed, a large cradle-like affair fashioned from an earlier wreck.

We had a small woman with us, gurgled the dying father. She had knowledge of equestrian things and was also an Ornithologist from my Japanese Garden in Buenos Aires. She was our nanny to Balboa. Did she survive? Her name is Haruka.

Yes, she is resting in the survivor’s dwelling nearby.

Alejandro closed his eyes. His breathing grew shallow. After a few moments, Hayden leaned to listen. He heard nothing. Hayden put aside his pencil and notebook. He lifted the boy from the gently rocking bed, noting his largeness for what he assumed must be a three or four year child, and carried Balboa outside toward the survivor’s shelter.

The boy struggled awake in Hayden’s arms. He squinted in the bright sunlight as Hayden slogged through the ever-drifting sands to the survivor’s dwelling, a patched shack of weathered wood, eroded and corroded by salt, sea and wind. Hayden didn’t put much store by the thinkers who came now and then to study the island’s naturalness. They seem to think that by studying the island one could begin to grasp the mechanisms of planetary survival, to get some feel for entropy and entropy’s children, randomness and chaos. He laughed at their frail metallic instruments — measures of disorder in a system. The visitors babbled away about the change in entropy that takes place in a specific thermodynamic process while Hayden sheltered them among the blowing dunes and raging surf.

I know from visiting with Hayden that, after 20 years on the island, he’s not about to buy the romantic view of Sable Island as a metaphor for the way the planet governs itself.

Shit, he told me, you got the cold Labrador Current swirling down from the north, and the warm Gulf Stream coming from the south. This pile of sand sits right here on the edge of the Continental Shelf where the currents sideswipe. Well, happy hallelujah! We got fog most of the time, hurricanes dumping all them foreign birds, god-awful currents, and its only coincidental that a few hundred ships have wrecked here.

And the horses? I asked.

He stroked his grizzled chin. They are the work of the Lord.

When Hayden shoved open the door, Haruka sat up in her cot, extended her wiry arms, and took Balboa to her boney chest.

They have both died, said Hayden in the dim light.

I will care for the boy, Haruka said, smoothing his hair. It’s my duty.

Hayden told me it was only a matter of weeks before Balboa had run off with the horses, hiding among the dunes, living on mare’s milk and raw fish, keeping distance from Haruka, although she did trek the island trying to catch him.

In his delirium Alejandro couldn’t get breeding off his mind. Babbling and rambling, he told Hayden that Argentine women are more interested in sex than are women in any other country. He claimed to have studied women of many countries. Brazilian, Dutch and French women favor chocolate over sex, he claimed, while Italians, Germans and Mexicans would prefer to go shopping.

That’s why I came here, he said. The world has bred horses to death, bred them for speed and looks. They have become weak. Their bones shatter. People for centuries tended to do the same. Look at the British; such inbreeding. But in Argentina we have crossed ourselves with every race. We are stronger for it. And that’s why I want to breed the magnificent horses of Sable Island with our Argentine horses. It will show the world the right way, the path of the righteous. My wife’s Selk’nam blood mixed with mine. We produced Balboa. Believe me, he’s one tough kid.

That tough kid grew up to chant in Latin that weird song, the one he sang for me that day by the Mississippi River:

Balboa Brontine swept ahead of the galloping horses on that thin sandy island, a bronze shadow of a racing boy — then only five years old and dancing with the wind, a friend of ponies and braver in his mind than all the Argentine swallows, graceful as a Sumo wrestler’s dream. At night he slept in the shattered cabin of his parents’ schooner there on Sable Island 100 miles off the gray clinging cliffs of Nova Scotia.

Yes, Balboa came again to see me, in the quiet of my walk-up flat with wrought iron railings along the balcony that overlooked St. Charles Street. I nervously served him a mint julep with fresh mint from a window box garden. We sat in cane rocking chairs on the balcony. Under his bulk, the cane squeaked a bit more than my rocker as he pleaded his case.

Pablo, he said to me, I know I’m an arrogant son-of-a-bitch, but that’s why I want to join your film. You can’t separate myth from fact unless you’ve actually lived it. And I have. I am pursued by my father’s dream, my mother’s lust, and my own inadequacies. What better subject could you have? Make your film around me and you will have the true picture of Sable Island.

"You think I should start with the construction of La Placer Terrenal?"

Absolutely.

I had gathered notes on the schooner primarily because there was no excuse for such a vessel to be dashed on the sands of Sable Island. Balboa and I went over the boat’s history there in the magical dusk of a New Orleans evening, as incongruous as that may seem.

Christened and launched new in 1986, she was built to handle some of the world’s toughest conditions. Thanks to her heavy ballast, wide beam and full keel, she was exceptionally seaworthy and had sailed for 17 years from one end of Chile to the other, Arica to Cape Horn, sometimes braving hurricane-force winds. She had been used on and off to carry up to 60 tourist passengers on day sails and up to 12 on overnight trips. Only a captain and a crew of two are required to handle her. And, of course, Alejandro Brontine del Botánico skillfully handled the women passengers, especially the women from Argentina. He would walk them through the Japanese gardens in Buenos Aires while discussing his dreams of breeding horses, leading them along the path that inevitably led to a night or two or many aboard La Placer Terrenal.

In those sailing days, my mother, said Balboa, usually stayed at home, I think. Haruka would whisper to me, sometimes chant and sing in Japanese. But I now think it was to cover the sounds of my mother experiencing orgasmic convulsions with my uncles. We are, as my father used to joke, ‘a breed apart.’

You know, I said, Tennessee Williams had an apartment here in the French Quarter. Did you know that?

"Yes, I read that somewhere. I believe if Arthur Miller had had an apartment in the quarter, he would have produced a few more plays. What did you think of After the Fall?"

I thought it was more about life’s contingencies than Marilyn Monroe.

Interesting, said Balboa. He sipped the julep.

Why did you hide from Haruka?

Christ, I was only five years old. I was stupid and living with a family of wild horses. Mare’s milk was mother’s milk to me. The horses brought me up. I ran with them. I was free. Haruka was always carrying a saddle. I thought she was trying to ride me. Of course, I know now she was trying to saddle a wild horse.

Did she ever succeed?

Bet your butt! For a year or so she rode with the beach patrols. A party of four or five mounted horsemen, and horsewomen, would patrol the 30-mile island, looking for shipwrecks; now that’s all over. The lighthouses run on electronics. There’s hardly a decent shipwreck anymore. But for a while, at least, Haruka had found happiness. Believe me, there is nothing as thrilling as racing with those horses.

"What happened to her, do you know?

Eventually when the government decided it didn’t need people alive on the island, that’s when Hayden retired. He has a nice white house with a blue metal roof in Halifax. Haruka lives with him. They say as a housekeeper, but I personally believe that stern and rock-bound old fart is banging that little bag of bones. Frankly, she was better at horses than she was at me.

The sounds of music down the street floated up to my balcony as night set in. We listened and discussed the variations of jazz as played in Montreal, Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis and New Orleans. I poured another mint julep for each of us and ultimately, having exhausted jazz, which is quite a feat, I admit, at that time in the awkward silence I forced my imagination to deal with Balboa Brontine directly.

You’re rather persistent, aren’t you? I ventured.

He clasped large hands behind his leathery neck, rocked back, smiling at whatever he may have been thinking, eyes in a dreamy stare.

Mind if I smoke? he asked, taking a pack of Camels from the red paisley vest he wore.

No, not at all. My wife smokes.

Where is she?

We’re divorced.

What’s that like?

What was it like? I thought. Well, it’s none of your business. God, he irritates me. But I said, You want me to do my film based on you? Then let’s stick to the subject.

The flame flickered from his cigarette lighter and he inhaled deeply, the cigarette glowing orange in the dark. "What the film is about should not be me. It must be about the imbalance in nature that makes Sable Island a metaphor for life’s randomness itself. Nothing more, nothing less. You tell my story. No, show my story, you will have succeeded where many artists and writers have failed. Or fallen short, let’s say. My story isn’t what you think it is, I can guarantee that."

Well, your story, as I understand it, is terribly vague, no real graspable story line. I read your outline. I’ve listened to your pitch. Now you’ve got me cornered in my lair, so to speak. And you irritate the hell out me because I don’t understand you. What were you treated for in Dorchester? You see, my instincts tell me you are nothing but trouble, even danger, and life’s too short to put up with that. The Canadians gave me money to make a simple, straight forward documentary. You know, wild running horses, tufts of grass bowing in the biting sand-wind, old Canadian salts telling their story up close into the lens . . .

I was imprisoned for stealing a bird, a little bird. They thought that made me crazy . . .

You were in Dorchester for bird stealing?

Yeah, and for killing the man who owned the bird.

Chapter Two

That first night when Balboa had run away from Haruka, a raging squall swept Sable Island with wild horses scattering for any semblance of shelter, their thick tufted, hairy backs to the slashing wind, and one of them, a slow plodding mare, shoved and shouldered her way into one of the small battered shacks where hay was stored. As the foal slithered from her birth canal, wet with slimy placenta, the cross-legged little animal plopped