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.
Yesterday, as proof of her growing imperviousness to intruders, she had taken three trips back and forth to the tent before she realized that there was a Watcher in the vicinity, that she’d been feeling eyes on the back of her neck for ten minutes. The sensation was one she’d felt a number of times over the previous days, albeit briefly, since neither squirrel nor blue jay was capable of looking on in silence for very long. The space between her shoulder blades began to crawl and her hand went to the hammer on her belt, but she did not panic. She searched the shrubs, the bank of dark leathery green near the ground and the delicate unfolding green of the maples above, and found nothing. It wasn’t until she had rotated three complete circles and was searching the high ground that she spotted her Watcher: a bald eagle, the world’s most glorious scavenger, perched in the upper branch of a cedar, studying her closely. Rae laughed in relief, and turned her back on him without a qualm.
With her fears distracted and under the autopilot of physical work, Rae’s mind was free to range at its will, and as she worked she would mull over things she’d been either too preoccupied or too drugged to wrestle with until recent weeks. It was stream-of-consciousness with no therapist to interrupt, no fifty-minute time limit, no external force to interfere with its flow.
Rae picked from her archaeologist’s sieve a once-silver spoon—or rather, a twist of blackened silver that had once been spoon-shaped—and wondered what story Petra would spin from it. From there her thoughts went to the letter from the child that Ed had brought her two days before.
She could tell that her granddaughter had worked long and hard on the thing, her clever thirteen-year-old mind shaping an argument as if she might thereby shape her world. Three quarters of the long letter (composed on her computer, as all business proposals should be) concerned a long-term history assignment Petra had for school, which she was thinking of doing on the history of Folly.
Rae had no doubt that Petra’s teacher would be overjoyed at the student’s initiative. However, at the tail of Petra’s somewhat rambling description of the assignment’s requirements and how she figured she could meet them, the girl threw in the stinger: She really needed to spend some time on the island herself, and although it was too late for Easter vacation, this project could, if the student wished, form the basis for an eighth-grade project. And so a stay over the summer would do just as well.
So could Rae please write to Petra’s mother and talk her into it?
Rae tossed the spoon-shaped object into the “save” bucket, scraped half a pound of thick window-glass fragments into the bucket marked “sharp,” and wondered if army records still existed for that long ago, and if so, who might be asked to lay hands on them. No family letters had survived either from or to Desmond, and as far as she knew, the scanty mentions in Lacy’s diary were the only references to Desmond in the handful of family diaries kept by his or his parents’ generation.
Had Desmond settled in Seattle, she meditated, there might have been a newspaper reference to him, coming as he did from a relatively well-known Eastern family, but she didn’t even know if there had been a local San Juan paper in the Twenties. Maybe Ed would know, or could find out for her.
A Zen koan: A hermit’s cabin burns down in the woods; does anyone hear but the trees?
Certainly, Rae reflected as she raised her arms to
scrape the shovel blade down along the stones of the northwest corner, Desmond had not stayed on here after the fire, not unless he’d lived back in the woods. There was no sign of any earlier attempt to clear away the fire-blackened remnants and start again.
Desmond had, apparently, taken to wandering again, only to die, friendless and alone, somewhere in the West. That was what Rae had been told long ago, when her continuing curiosity about the family’s black sheep drove her to bypass Grandfather William and press her father about Desmond’s fate. Although he claimed at first that he knew nothing about it, she kept at him until he admitted that he was not positive, since he’d been away at school at the time, but he thought a last letter had been received from Desmond not long before the Wall Street crash in 1929. After that, of course, everyone had been too busy coping with the disaster to bother with a wayward son, who no doubt now lay in a pauper’s grave in New Mexico.
Rae paused to lean on her shovel, hearing the phrase “pauper’s grave” clearly in her memory. It was one of the few conversations she remembered having with her father, and it had left her with the vivid image of a fresh, unmarked mound in a dry and dusty cemetery surrounded by crumbling adobe walls and overgrown with prickly cactus and tumble-weeds. It was a vision that had struck the adolescent she was as unutterably tragic, lonesome beyond words. She had, now that she thought about it, been just about Petra’s age—and here she was proposing to infect another generation with this tragedy. Maybe Petra should be encouraged to do something else for her school project, she thought. As if Petra could be turned away from anything she’d set her mind to.
No, Petra would research the builder of Newborn’s Folly, as Petra would try her damnedest to wangle her way here come June. Certain facts in the universe were unarguable. Rae could only hope that Petra’s stubbornness did not backfire, and drive her parents to forbid any visit whatsoever. Or even worse, any contact.
In the unlikely event that Petra managed to cajole, bribe, or manipulate her parents into letting her visit Folly, it would not only affect Rae’s plans during her granddaughter’s stay but also over the intervening months: Unless Petra’s startling new image, which involved near-black fingernail polish and raccoon-mask eye makeup, overcame the primal drive for cleanliness exhibited by every teenage girl Rae had ever met, in less than two months the owner of Folly was going to need a vastly more adequate water source than five-gallon plastic jugs. Roof be damned; what she’d need was a shower.
So between the future possibility of a visit from Petra and the current hard fact of a body that rebelled after three hours of hard digging, Rae decided to dedicate the afternoons to a different set of tools and a different group of muscles, working on the water line.
On Saturday she stopped digging well before noon, telling herself with satisfaction that one more morning ought to see a finish to it. She dumped the day’s last load of sieved soil from the barrow, cleaned off her shovel in a bucket of oiled sand, carried the buckets of “sharp” and “save” to their respective caches, and finally went to scrub her hands and make some lunch. After she had eaten, she stretched out flat on the camp bed for ten minutes, rereading Petra’s letter and thinking about her answer.
She would have to respond to her granddaughter before the Orca Queen came on Tuesday. She would also have to take considerable care with what she wrote.
Over the year of Rae’s hospitalization, the balance of Tamara’s marriage seemed to have shifted somewhat. Don’s real estate deals had been getting even shadier, the expenses of house and stables and the grandiose entertainment of prospective customers and would-be investors had grown so that even Tamara seemed to be concerned, and although they were still holding the line, Rae wouldn’t be at all surprised if the enterprise was resting on shaky foundations. Divorce had always been a disaster inflicted by irresponsible mothers onto their innocent families, and was thus for Tamara unthinkable, but frankly Rae didn’t see how her daughter was going to continue keeping her life together. One more tremor—Tamara’s falling ill, say, or an unfortunate inquiry into one of Don’s murkier real estate deals— might well tumble the enterprise to the ground, taking the marriage with it. All in all, however, Rae thought that the nexus for future problems might well be Petra. Going by their prickly attitudes on the trip here, and by asides in the child’s letters, Petra and her mother appeared to be headed toward a difficult patch, going through the inevitable phase of the child’s growing desire for independence, magnets in reversed polarity. In the brief time they had been together, from their meeting in Seattle to Ed’s taking the other two off on his boat, there had been much rolling of eyes, several pregnant silences, and two brief but vicious skirmishes. Petra’s troubles seemed to concentrate on Tamara, not Don— outright confrontation not being his style—but even he had been affected, and seemed unwilling to put up with much more. Tamara had admitted that Don was looking into special schools for Petra, the sorts of places that advertised in magazines as being for “troubled youth.” Rae didn’t think Petra qualified as troubled, aside from the normal troubles of her years and the state of her hormones. Indeed, considering her parents, and everything that had happened over the last year and a half, Rae thought Petra was doing remarkably well. Her curiosity and intelligence, her ability to rationally consider all options, make up her mind, and stand by her decision, and above all her ability to retain a degree of loyalty in the face of her parents’ increasingly harsh, conflicting, and incomprehensible demands, made her a cuckoo in that nest. Sure, she painted her fingernails with colors named after bodily functions and her style of dress was somewhere between that of a street urchin and a skinhead, but she never disappeared without leaving a contact phone number, rarely received a grade below B, and to Rae’s knowledge had never made more than the most token objections to the life of a young equestrian, uncool as it might be considered by her comrades-in-grunge. Tamara and Don seemed unable to look beyond the surface, but Rae had long thought her granddaughter one of the most sensible people she knew. During the day she had spent with Petra and Tamara coming here, Rae had caught herself thinking of Petra as the daughter she should have had.
Petra was, quite simply, central to Rae’s life. Petra was all Rae had left. The mere suggestion of having to do without her was unbearable. Rae had lost Alan and Bella, she had driven away most of her friends, she might never do any serious work again; to add Petra’s loss to that would be the final blow.
All in all, she reflected, little Petra was the meeting point of any number of awkward situations. Even before Rae’s last breakdown, Tamara had taken great care to keep her mother from having too much influence on her child. More than once, even with Alan present, Rae had felt as if she were some untrustworthy suitor having to outflank a suspicious and protective family. The whole business of having to buy Tamara (and Don) an expensive vacation in order to have Petra to herself for a few days was typical. Now, moreover, Petra seemed instinctively to grasp the undercurrents; on the ferry, around her mother, she had hid some of the affection she felt for her mad grandmother, as if she knew that an interest in that direction would be considered unhealthy. Rae guiltily discouraged Petra’s duplicity, and steadfastly refused to take sides openly against Tamara and Don: She would give the child no conflict to her love for and loyalty to her parents. Nonetheless, Petra’s affection—the solid fact that Rae could depend on that affection—created a warm glow within. Yes, in truth Petra was all Rae had left.
And so Rae would have to be very careful what she said in response to the letter.
Rae got up and laid Petra’s missive back on the desk, then changed her sweat-soaked T-shirt for longer sleeves that would protect her skin from snatching branches, picked up the other set of tools, and set off to climb the hill she had begun to call Mount Desmond.
The gentle, steady spring that Desmond Newborn had cleverly diverted as his water source was up on the side of Mount Desmond, a third of the way around the island. The cedar water troughs that he had hollowed out, fitted tog
ether, and covered had been marvelously tight and had probably carried water to the now-defunct storage tank above the house for thirty or forty years, but after nearly eighty, there was just enough left of the water line to indicate the skill of its builder.
Rae would have dearly loved to repeat his laborious, demanding woodworker’s technique—just as she would have loved to build her house by felling her own trees, milling her own lumber, splitting her own shakes. Her original dream, coming like a shaft of light into her deeply depressed mind, had in fact been just that: a log cabin in the wilderness, honest to the point of starkness, caulked snug with moss and mud, hewn with implements that carried weighty and ancient names such as adze and peevee and double-bitted axe. She had pictured a traditional Native American longhouse, low and windowless, built of thick cedar planks, with a carved totem pole standing in front. An ideal place for a potlatch, the ultimate community bond.
Later, weeks later, with shock therapy giving way to long sessions with The Hunter and the bleak and unrelieved terrain of black depression giving way to an interior landscape possessing at least a faint trace of green, Rae had come to decide that such extreme purity of purpose was unnecessary. Human beings are not, after all, dropped down upon a darkling plain with no tools, no companionship, no aid; indeed, working with materials and on foundations made by others was a more accurate description of human progress, individual or collective, than creatio ex nihilo. As a woodworker Rae used power saws and mechanical routers, commercial plywood and modern glues and finishes. It would not negate her purpose, using the present to rebuild the past, if she were to use Desmond’s site and foundations to support her own creation, or even to top Desmond’s mossy hand-laid stones with walls built of commercially milled lumber.
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