Folly (15 page)

It was Alan’s kind of conversation, the academic’s search for meaning in any field. Rae replied, “I was thinking this evening about how like Tamara is to my grandfather William. Physically she resembles my grandmother, but in personality—talk about ruthlessness.”

“And yet Petra shows no sign of it.”

“She doesn’t, does she? Petra the Rock. Maybe it’s like a double
negative—when it comes from both sides the two doses cancel each other out.”

“And she does have the honest love of both parents, no matter their other problems. Who knows what your grandfather’s childhood was like, to shape him that way.”

Rae knew full well what Tamara’s childhood had been like, and it would support Alan’s thesis of nurture’s preeminence. “William’s mother was indeed a tyrant, by all accounts.”

Neither of them made mention of the true subject of their thoughts, serenely dozing in the back.

They drove on through the night toward their hilltop home, deep in the woods. The next morning, with Alan running late (as usual) for his first lecture, she would gather her tool belt up in a hasty armload of damp swimsuits and leftover roofing material and sling it on its hook just inside her shop door. There the belt would hang, gathering dust, three galvanized roofing nails overlooked in its pouch, for seventeen months while Rae’s world ended and slowly remade itself.

Three overlooked nails: last remnants of a family’s happiness.

Rae looked from the nails resting in the palm of her hand to the laminated photograph of a man with a door latch in his, then up at the tree trunk on which she intended to mount the picture. Instead, she laid the photo down on the workbench and knelt on the ground to drive the three nails in a straight line along the edge of the bench, in the center of what had originally been the upper edge of the door. Their dusty gray finish was oddly similar to that of the driftwood below, three metallic circles surrounded by rich dark wood. They looked like a Braille message, put there for those in the know to decipher, like the dots on an elevator’s control panel. She ran her thumb over them to confirm that they were uniformly flush against the wood, feeling the rough surface against the freshly planed wood. Then she went off to find another nail to use in mounting the picture of Uncle Desmond and his house.

Desmond Newborn’s
Journal

October 22, 1923

To my amusement, I have discovered that I am greatly more suited to the life of a hired man than I am to the role of overseer, my once-soft hands more fitted to the pickaxe than the pen. A university man am I, younger son of a tycoon, who should be growing a belly behind a desk and conversing with Cabots and Lodges, yet here I stand with a masons trowel in my hand, speaking only to God.

“Stand” is hardly accurate at this very moment, and if I have spoken to the Almighty today, it was in terms so unflattering, He would have to be All-forgiving indeed to have answered me with anything less than a bolt of lightning.

I broke my foot this morning. Not too badly, thank the much-maligned Divinity, but when the swelling goes down I fear one of the bones along the top will creak and groan, and I shall be reduced to a hobble for some time.

My first act, after I had removed the rock from my extremity, cursed God and all his lithic creations, and pried the boot from my wounded member, was to cut a sturdy branch with a convenient crook from the madrone tree and trim it to fit beneath my arm.

Despite this setback, when I took up this journal to write the first entry in months, I discovered that I am quite ridiculously pleased with life.

Some of my happy delirium, I admit, may have more to do with the liquid pain relief of which I have partaken than with my contentment with my current life. Some may even be the spectacular sunset which the Almighty has laid out at my wounded feet, where I sit out on my finger of rock in the sea, and the intoxication of those colors that no painter has captured. But beneath those passing joys lies the deeper one of a man who has discovered his true purpose on this sorry globe.

I am a builder.

Not a builder of grand houses and factories like my brother William, but the builder of a house, this house, as yet little more than wax pen outlines on naked rock. The shape of it was imprinted on me, as if from birth, so clearly has it grown up before my eyes: towers that reach for the sky, a deep foundation that settles firmly into the earth, and a dwelling between, strong yet light, like the trees from which it will be made, like the native peoples who trod softly but firmly on this land before me, leaving behind a few subtle artifacts and images.

And sitting beneath this sky tonight, with the strip of black island to the west to separate the deepening oranges and blues of the sky above from the sparkling oranges and blues mirrored on the water below, I begin to see that my towers will do more than reach for the sky.

Had I not been forced to flee Boston by my sins, had I not gone to soldier, I would never have found this skill in my hands. I would have become my brother, grumbling behind his desk, dying there.

So now I speak to God, not to rail and curse, but to thank.

This is a blessed place, broken foot and all.

With the vegetation decimated and the jungle inside the stones reduced to a trampled expanse of mud, Rae could now begin to dig out the foundation, hauling away seven decades’ worth of fallen rock, composted leaves, and the decayed remains of floor and furniture, siding and shingles. It made for a rich soil but brutal work, shoveling the wet debris into her heavy, high-sided builder’s barrow and wrestling it out of the foundation and off to the future vegetable patch. It took just a couple of trips for her to realize that she would only be able to manage three or four hours of it before her back started to scream at her and the bone and muscles of her left arm grew too painful. The afternoons she would have to dedicate to other labor.

This morning, once Desmond’s photograph was on the tree, she rattled her barrow over to what would be the crawl space beneath the floorboards, then ran it up the bouncing ramp she had fashioned the day before out of 2×10s. Once up and over the foundation stones, she pulled on her work gloves and reached for the shovel, sinking its head deep into an undisturbed heap of fallen rock and the softer stuff below.

One of the questions whose solution Rae had most anticipated was the discovery of just how much Desmond had left behind him in the house, whether he had abandoned a bare shell (the front door, after all, seemed to have no lock) or if she would uncover some remnants of his life there. She could not hope for photographs or papers, and it was doubtful that she would encounter even scraps of his furniture, but the odd coin or cracked Mason jar, or some of those peculiar rusted lumps
uncovered in garden beds and displayed in small museums—that sort of thing was surely not out of the question.

With that in mind, Rae had included in her endless lists (compulsive, Dr. Hunt had called them reprovingly—but then The Hunter had never built a house) a quantity of heavy-gauge wire mesh in order to sieve the soil before it went into the future garden—which would also save the future gardener’s fingers, since there was bound to be glass and nails aplenty. She positioned the sieve frame over the deep barrow and set to shoveling.

Her first shovelful gave her only rotted leaves, her second a couple of nails, but the third time her blade went into the soil it gave a hollow thump and yielded a six-inch-tall brass vase. The incongruity of the find made her laugh aloud. What on earth was a bachelor pioneer doing with a brass flower vase? It would never hold water again, but with a chemical polish and a bunch of dried grasses in it, she could use it in her house. She set it aside atop the foundation wall, and returned to her domestic archaeology.

Over the next three days she found her coins and her Mason jar, along with a plenitude of peculiar rusted lumps. She also discovered the location of Desmond’s kitchen (in the northeast corner between the fireplace and the rear tower, marked by the handle of a spotted enamel coffeepot, one saucepan, a clot of fused silverware, a mass of broken plates, and one cast-iron skillet, red with rust) and the pantry behind it (several canning jars, all of them broken, and the lacelike remains of some food tins). She found his library to have been along the northwest wall, although nothing remained but a few scorched leather covers. He’d had a comfortable chair in front of the fireplace, whose brass feet and iron springs she encountered; the ivory pipe stem buried nearby evoked a homey image of Desmond at rest, reading a book with pipe in hand and a glass of Prohibition whiskey nearby. In the same area she found a fountain pen, cap fused to one end and incongruously shiny gold nib at the other, along with a dented brass candleholder with a loop for the finger, a smashed glass and an intact (but uncapped) whiskey bottle, a handful of porcelain that closely resembled a cup and saucer handed down from her grandmother’s wedding set, and the leather scraps of a pair of boots. She began to keep notes of what she found and where, and writing them up one evening decided that the upper floor had held his bed (an entire metal bedframe, matted with the roots of the tree she’d dug out, that had held a pad of some stuff packed too tightly to burn, now thoroughly rotted) and his wardrobe (two more leather boot soles, one gold cufflink, and some
horn buttons). Finally, to her pleasure, she found his tool cache, fallen from the upstairs north wall. A badly pitted saw blade came up with one shovelful, and in the next a hammer—just the head, worn and old-fashioned in shape, but making her feel as if Desmond himself had greeted her. She decided to mount both saw and hammer (giving both of them new handles) over her mantelpiece, once the house was restored.

The work itself, aside from the physical demands, she found satisfyingly mindless, a matter of skilled muscles left to do their labor, with the occasional return to full attention when the sieve turned up something more interesting than the ton of thick, viciously sharp window glass or the thousands of rusty, hand-forged square nails she was collecting in buckets. Shovel, sieve; shovel, sieve; and when the wheelbarrow was as full as she cared to handle, down went the shovel while she pulled the barrow back from the sifting frame, ran with it at the ramp to the top of the foundation wall, and then, slowing, let its weight pull her down the other side of the ramp and around the hill on the track she was rapidly beating to the future garden. Every third or fourth load she stopped, eased her spine, and drank a glass of water or cold tea. She would survey her domain, its growing disorder in the piles of soil and the bags of garbage and the raw stones of the foundation that were emerging where nature had once reigned uncontested. When her glass was empty and her vertebrae more or less in line, she would return to her rectangular stone enclosure and to the sounds of shovel scraping against stone, soil raining down onto soil, breeze and waves and birds in the trees and the occasional plane overhead.

The labor was long, mindless, apparently never-ending, and, she was beginning to understand, absolutely vital to her continued presence here. Not only did the day’s exhaustion take the edge off the night noises (and why had she ever imagined that the island was empty, or even peaceful? Folly was a 145-acre organism, endlessly restless, its parts snuffling through the leaves and branches at all hours of the day and night), but the work gave her a point of focus, distracting her from the sense of Watchers and the fear of returning voices. Concentrating on the job at hand, in all its filthy tedium, let the edges of her mind grow used to their surroundings, identifying and accepting the night scrabbles of raccoon and mouse, the day noises of drumming woodpecker or screaming raven, becoming aware without being hypersensitive to threat. The low hum of bees working the first madrone flowers, the zip of the hummingbird, even the distant whine of neighboring chain saws were all
familiar noises, lulling her into something resembling complacency. The creatures, similarly, were becoming accustomed to her, the red squirrel around her tent no longer scolding every move, the harbor seals no longer bothering to take to the water when she approached.