It was a framing hammer, its short, strong claws nearly flat compared with a standard claw hammer’s long curves, twenty-one ounces of drop-forged steel that was “too much hammer for a woman,” according to the store owner. Rae, however, was a big woman, tall and broad-shouldered. Besides which, she liked the way the hickory handle fit her hand, liked the way the exploratory swings woke up the muscles all along her right side, from fingertip to jaw and down to her hip. By now, the hammer, like its owner, had seen hard use. Ten thousand nails had worn down the face and left a fine network of scratches over the head, but it still gave her strength, this tool that had stayed with her longer than anything, or anyone, else in her life. Husbands left or husbands died, daughters married avaricious jerks or daughters died, one’s very mind wandered in and out of control, but two handles later the twenty-one-ounce hammer still fit her hand, still nestled reassuringly along the line of her pelvis. She smoothed her thumb along its icy steel head, pulled on her jacket, and let herself out of the tent.
She stretched and yawned and scrubbed at her face, waking up and taking in her surroundings. This would be the view that greeted her, every morning she lived in the tent: close at hand, her kitchen (fire pit, storage boxes, camp stove) and living room (canvas-sling chair and two tree sections that could function as dining tables, footstools, or chopping blocks), the fallen cedar on her right that kept the wilderness at bay and drew a line down to the promontory; the clearing to her left, a rough oblong too scruffy to be called a meadow, its borders defined by the cove before her, the old madrone tree some forty yards from her left shoulder, the burnt-out, overgrown foundations uphill from it, and, behind the back wall of the tent, a barren, sharply rising rock slope. Beyond those, water all around.
This morning the sky was a depthless expanse, high mist or low clouds. No birds sang, no wind moved; the strait beyond the promontory was the undulating gray of antique window glass. Rae’s breath was loud in her nose; when she moved, the scrape of the fabric jarred the air. As if in response, a quick scuffling noise came from behind the tent. Rae slapped her hand onto the holstered hammer, then stopped, forcing herself to listen attentively to the actual sound rather than her body’s reaction to it. A scuffle. Not footsteps. A bird? She edged around the front of the tent to peer at the shrubs, and an explosion of brown wings shot out from under the fallen cedar, followed instantly by a scrap of angry red fur scrambling up the nearby tree to the safety of height, where the squirrel sat scolding her furiously. Rae closed her eyes and took a calming breath. This so-called solitary life was going to take a lot of getting used to.
The angry squirrel continued its imprecations, and Rae was aware of its eyes on her as she picked up the kettle from the fire pit and filled it under the tap on her water jug before putting it on the burner of the propane cookstove. She then used the enticement of coffee to get through the brutal cold of a trip to the privy, and was relieved to find the treetop scold gone when she came out. By the time she had dressed all over again, buttoning, zipping, and fastening clothes and tool belt, a geyser of steam was shooting from the kettle’s spout into the frigid air. The stove was a luxury here; its tanks bulky and in need of frequent replacement compared with the old pump-style stoves of her childhood, but it was fast, and a great improvement over having to build a fire just for a cup of coffee.
Rae took out the glossy brown bag of coffee grounds and spooned some into the ridiculously fragile glass French-press coffeemaker— another luxury, one she would no doubt regret when it cracked and left her straining coffee grounds through her socks, but she had justified it in her mind by contemplating the wasteful alternative of all the paper filters she would have either to bury or to compost. The deciding factor, however, had been the vision of that sleek and gleaming symbol of modern sophisticates perched incongruously on a stump in front of a dusty canvas tent. Humor was a rare commodity in her current life, to be seized and hoarded whenever it ventured within her grasp.
She poured the water over the grounds, stuck the plunger in place, and carried the sculptural object over to the fallen cedar trunk, where she balanced it carefully before taking a few steps back, narrow-eyed as a critic at an art show: delicate glass suspended in a silver frame; soft, dull bark heavily worn by time and foraging woodpeckers; three small hemlocks, two cedars, a fir, and an assortment of bushes whose names she did not know as a backdrop; ugly folding aluminum cook table with plastic water jug to set it off; big, high-walled tent to one side evoking a family campout in the Fifties.
Yes, she decided approvingly, nodding at the arrangement; some things are worth the trouble.
This morning she even had milk, half frozen in the cooler box. Later in the year she would be lucky to have the fresh stuff once a week, following the visits of Ed the boatman, since the island lacked electricity and she had not yet decided if she wanted refrigeration and lights badly enough for the interminable bother of solar panels or generator. The idea of living in a primitive dependence on the sun was, temporarily at least, appealing. Either that, or the back of her mind had recognized the futility of making those decisions when it was far from certain that she would still be here to lay the power in.
Today, however, she would enjoy her coffee with milk.
She poured and sipped and stretched her spine and looked down at the mist that lay across the glassy water of the cove, a study in morning gray. She felt remarkably well, as was often the case after an attack like that of the night before. Her mind seemed to switch in and out of the panic mode cleanly, almost as if she had a short somewhere in the wiring of her brain: When connections were normal, everything worked at full strength; when the connection crackled and fizzed, under extra burden or just the vagaries of biology, she was gone.
In part it was the simple fact that nights were bad and things invariably looked better in the morning. Under that pearly dawn light, the texture of the island’s hush was benevolent, alive with promise instead of crawling with threat. She was eager to begin work, but put it off to walk out along the promontory to greet the day. She braced herself as she approached the place where the harbor seals had been lying, but there were no splashes; they were already up and away. Instead, she startled, and was startled by, a gray heron brooding over the shallow cove waters. The flaps of its wings cracked the air as it took off, the underside of its body mirrored perfectly in the smooth surface below.
Rae continued out to the end of the floating boat dock and sat down cautiously on the splintery boards, where she sipped from her steaming mug. When the ripples of her passing had calmed, she bent slowly forward to peer down at the water. A woman looked back at her, thin of face, brown of eye, with a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair (mostly salt, now) sticking out from under the garish knit cap and a dark smear down the left temple. She frowned and pulled off the hat to see the mark, then reached down to brush her fingertips in the water and wipe at the trickle of dried blood. When the ripples cleared, she was looking down at a face far more self-assured than it had any right to be. It looked strong and competent and not in the least fragile, its eyes calm, with no trace of wariness, not a nightmare in sight. I have Grandfather to thank for the construction of that façade, she thought bitterly: impervious-looking but frail as lace. God, how looks deceived.
A ghostly hand brushed across her hair and Rae whirled, but it was just the breeze, rising with the sun and ruffling the water along with her hair, stirring the branches in the corner of her eye. The touch woke the thought of Watchers, invisible in the woods, and she was searching for them, staring deep into the bushes, when her eye caught on a flicker of movement up high. She waited, and when it moved again she saw it, a speck of shining beauty even on this dull morning: a kingfisher. The tiny bird with the vivid plumage bobbed on the twig, watching not Rae, but the water. In an instant, it dropped, swooped, and sliced the water, rising with a flash of silver in its strong beak. It dashed down the length of the cove, dipped around the opposite bank, and was gone.
Rae had never seen
a kingfisher before. They were magical creatures, she had heard, and now understood why. She climbed to her feet, rubbing the dregs of tension from her neck, and concentrated on a series of long and deliberate breaths of the fragrant sea air.
Birds were waking, a thin invisible warble coming from the shore; farther along the bank perched a black bony hunter of a bird she thought might be a cormorant. Ask Ed to get you a bird book, she suggested to herself; that’ll give you something to do other than imagine ghosts. She turned and went on to the end of the promontory.
On the outer side of her rocky protector, small waves teased at the boulders. In the distance, the rising fog revealed a low dark shape in the water, a freighter heading up Haro Strait toward Vancouver or Juneau. An engine around to the northwest whined and cut off, sounding close, a reminder of how readily noises traveled on the water. From the offshore rocks west of where Rae stood, unseen harbor seals coughed and grumbled at each other, and the air seemed to gather itself in preparation for the day. The sun rose through the vapor on one side, the ghostly moon retreated on the other. The mist solidified for a moment, and Rae felt a faint, thin frond pushing to uncurl inside her: hope, perhaps, or even life.
Then the morning mists bowed to defeat and the first direct rays of the sun hit the water, transforming it into a shimmering expanse of light, a visual hymn of rejoicing, a paean to the intimate magnificence of the San Juans.
Rae Newborn’s first morning on Folly.
♥ Uploaded by Coral ♥
Six
Letter from Rae to
Her Granddaughter
April 5
My dearest Petra,
Well, as you can see, I made it through my first days on Folly without freezing to death or falling into the sea and getting eaten by an orca or being abducted by ransom-seeking kidnappers or coming down with ptomaine poisoning or any of your mother’s other ghastly scenarios. The only thing that happened to me was I walked into a tree on my first night, giving myself a nice purple bruise and a cut I didn’t notice until the next day. Thank goodness I don’t have visitors—they would have taken one look at my filthy hands, wild hair (from that super hat you gave me—warm, but it does leave your hair a bit mussed), and the great smear of dried blood down the side of my face, and had me locked up again before the sun set.
Daily life here is settling down into uncomfortable, but not impossible. I never seem to get really warm, since there’s no safe way to heat a tent and a campfire only warms one side of you at a time, but if I keep busy enough, I don’t notice being cold. Much. One nice thing is that I can eat huge meals and know I won’t gain an ounce—between work and keeping warm, I burn it all off.
As for the house, I’m still on the ground-clearing stage, which will take me another week before I uncover the foundation completely and begin to get a sense of the place. Very little of the walls survived, and those hunks are completely buried in nettles and blackberry vines. (I don’t think I showed you my blackberry gloves—they’re called gauntlets, because they come to the elbow, and they’re so thick I believe you could drive nails with them!) There are saplings growing in the foundations too, of course, some of them pretty close to being trees, like the eight-inch-thick maple growing smack in the middle of where my living room is going to be, and although I agree it would make an interesting centerpiece, it’d be hard to keep the rain out. Down it comes!
One thing I can tell you already, even with a lot of the blackberries still in place, and that is, Desmond Newborn had a real knack for stonework. The two towers haven’t so much as a loose stone, as far as I can see, even with all the plants growing around them, and his foundation is nearly as secure as it was seventy-five years ago when it had a house on it. This is a great relief to me, as you can imagine—I was definitely not looking forward to digging and pouring a new footing for my house. (It also means, of course, that I could actually have taken you on a proper tour when you were here, but at the time your mother was right, the stones could have been dangerous. And by the way, I hope your trip home went smoothly.)
Well, shall I tell you about the house-to-be? I don’t know if you’re the least bit interested in the details, so please let me know if you aren’t and I’ll write instead about the island and its wildlife.
Perhaps I ought to begin with the name itself. You may know this already, but “folly” is a name given to objects or acts marked by extravagance and irrationality. It is used in scorn, but also in awe, at the sheer, preposterous exuberance of a thing (“Seward’s Folly” was the name given to the purchase of that vast and “useless” tract of land we now call Alaska). Folly indicates the very opposite of sober restraint, and has come to mean in architectural terms a useless building stuck out in the landscape for no good reason but that someone thought it would look nice there. Foolish, but fun. I may discover why it applies to this island as my building progresses. However, the island is also known as Sanctuary, and I believe it was given that name before there was a bird refuge on the north end.
You saw where the house used to stand—and will again stand, God willing. It’s a boxy shape sort of tucked into a steep patch of hillside as if it had its back to the wall, with one stone tower at the right-hand corner of the rear wall (looking from the font) and another on the left-hand corner of the font. The two towers, with a dark chimney behind them at the back (which will be hidden by the roof, are tied together visually by the height of the stone foundation. It should look odd—I suppose it does look odd, or else why would the people here call it a folly?— but going by the picture I have of it, it won’t look as unbalanced as it sounds. The house itself, even without the towers (which aren’t much taller than the roof, actually, and sadly enough aren’t big enough for rooms at their tops, only windows), is high enough up on the hillside and angled so that it has a view which, while not exactly breathtaking, is definitely satisfying. The clearing where you helped me put up the tent and the rocky point that wraps around to form the cove just seem to open out when you’re above them, and draw the eye out, out into the strait and the islands (and—when the mist clears off, which it does occasionally—the northern coast of the Olympic peninsula). In other words, people passing by might not notice the house, but from the house you feel that you can see the world. I like this combination very much.
Speaking of breathtaking, I don’t know if I told you (and it was too foggy for you to see) but I have my very own mountain. Well, a tall hill, really, on the northeastern corner of the island, but it has an almost completely bald top, and from there a person can see the world. When I came here before, with your stepgranddad and auntie, we hiked to the top. You probably know that Washington State has a whole string of (we hope) dormant volcanoes, in addition to the not-so-dormant Mt. St. Helens? Well, you can see both Baker and Rainier from my hilltop, as well as the line of snowcapped peaks of the Olympic range. Plus Haro and Juan de Fuca Straits and Vancouver Island to the west and a lot of islands to the north. Somebody once put a little building on the bald hilltop, to see the view. It could even have been the government—I know that during the Second World War the army (navy? air force??) had hidden lookouts all up and down the Pacific coast, watching for the Japanese invasion that never came.
The next clear day I have, I’m going to climb up there with my camera and have a look. It won’t be a holiday, really, because I do need to trace the water supply before too long. Might as well do both, wouldn’t you agree?
Well, my sweet Petra, I need to end this, because my hands are tired and cold and I need to sleep. Boatman Ed will be here tomorrow, to bring me milk and bread and to pick up my laundry and a sample of water to be tested, so I’ll give him this to mail.
Give my greetings to your parents. Tell them I’m well.
Love, Gran
Seven
Rae looked at the sealed envelope, stamped and addressed to Petra Collins, and scratched vigorously at her hair with both hands, as if the gesture might relieve the unending twitchiness and tiredness that seemed
to crawl into her scalp at the end of the day. The letter was too cheerful to be believed. If she’d written those same words to, say, Dr. Hunt, all kinds of alarm bells would have gone off. But the truth of the matter was, a person simply couldn’t write the sort of brutally honest letter Rae felt like writing and send it to a beloved thirteen-year-old grandchild, no matter how mature, intelligent, and just plain wise the child might be. Rae wanted to complain about how sore her back was from all the bending, and how the pain shot up and down her left arm and shoulder, and how her fingers ached so that even moving a pen was a trial, how alarmingly little mental and physical strength she had and how frightening it was to contemplate the specter of age looming on the horizon. She craved the relief of confession—of the unending jumpiness that rode her every waking minute and many of her sleeping minutes as well, of how she spent half her working time glancing sharply over her shoulders at nonexistent Watchers, looking up from her labors among the stone towers, certain she would see a strange man striding up the promontory or stepping out from behind a tree. Of how the night before she had been jolted from a dream about being washed out to sea, saved only by a boulder on the promontory, and had woken to find her arms around her pillow and Petra’s face fading from the dream rock. And of how the island silence, long desired, was proving so oppressive that she had dug out Petra’s tape player and let it spin its tinny Oldies into her ears (and of how she had laughed herself to hysterical tears at the first song, which, through some peculiar twist of fate, was Martha and the Vandellas singing “Nowhere to Run”). Rae seemed to cry all the time, in fact, from nervous reaction or from loneliness and fear—fear of strangers, fear of voices, fear of weakness or illness or injury, fear of fear itself. This afternoon she had found herself sobbing with infantile rage when she could not move a fallen stone, kicking the mossy boulder like a three-year-old and screeching at the heavens until her knees gave out and she sat hunched over, weeping in self-pity until her head ached.
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