December 3, 1918
I arrived home one year ago today, and I still feel less than half a man, my arm baby-weak. And my mind.
The influenza is in the city. My brothers wife Lacy goes out to nurse the sick, pleading with me to stay inside and dry, lest all her nursing of a torn-up soldier be for naught.
I expect tomorrow’s newspaper will report a sighting of the Beast of Babylon, or at the very least a rain of frogs.
December 11, 1918
William, of all people, has come down with the influenza. How does it dare? Curiously, I find I do care, and would prefer that my brother not die. Would that a dose of mortality might humble him, at least in his treatment of his wife. Lacy is at his side at all hours. I fear she will be next, although in truth, she is nowhere near as delicate as the name she bears.
December 25, 1918
The anniversary of Our Savior’s birth, although what that carpenter’s son did to deserve the title I do not know. Surely, there is little evidence of salvation in the world today.
William has turned the corner and will recover. Lacy is wan and gray, but as yet not ill.
Two Christmases ago I crouched in a flooded trench, pinned down by a sniper who entertained himself pinging rounds through our peepholes and picking off all periscopes raised above our bags. Like a duck-shoot at a fair, except that it meant two of us didn’t make it home. Mrs. Banner received a good if belated Christmas present, though, her sergeant husband with his blighty. True, we sent him to her minus an eye, but even His Majesty’s Army has to admit that a one-eyed sergeant may be excused from further service. The rest of us might well have traded in an eye for the chance of missing the remainder of the fighting. We might well have done so for the opportunity of missing the remainder of that day, frozen rain drooling down our necks, icy mud to our knees, made all the more bitter for knowing that the Germans were snug and dry a bare two hundred yards away—we’d briefly held their magnificent, strong, deep trenches some weeks before. Just before the afternoon stand-to (as if the enemy was about to spend his holiday coming across that mud and wire plain at us!) I caught the odor of goose roasting. The captain swore I was imagining it, and he was no doubt right, but it was sore cruel, that whiff of sage and crisp fat skin teasing its way among the thick stench of unburied bodies and eternal mud and flooded privies. Two years ago today.
But I swore an oath that I would write no more about the war, when I put the journal of those months overboard in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Why do so today? Because of the rain, I think.
Merry Christmas, Sergeant Banner.
December 27, 1918
Had to leave the house—the smell of roast goose made my insides rage and gibber. Spent the night in a barn somewhere. Lungs don’t like it.
February 2, 1919
A long bout with congested lungs, I do not know why they don’t just pack it in. I ought to take care of it once and for all, don’t know why I don’t, except it seems ungrateful to have been brought this far only to throw it in. Perhaps that’s why I go out in all weather, tempting fate. People are dying all over the city, why does my body have to be so d——d healthy?
Life here, despite the joys, is proving increasingly uncomfortable. When spring comes I shall have to take to the road.
Building a well-constructed revenge, he reflected, is like building anything else: The groundwork supports it, and also shapes it. He had business that would take him to Seattle in two months, so that is when he would act. He, himself: It would be too dangerous to depend on subordinates for something as delicate as this.
Eleven
The only surviving picture of Desmond Newborn was also the only photograph of his house: a creased snapshot of a man in a dusty suit and cloth hat, standing in front of a sturdy-looking wooden building with two stone towers, a six-paned window, and four steps leading up to the door. There must once have been other pictures, from the requisite studio portrait of a child in lace and curls to a confident young man in a stiff new uniform, but all of them had vanished, into time or an impulsive clear-out or the flood that the paternal mansion had sustained in the Forties.
She had found the survivor in the bottom of the flat velvet-lined box that held his medals and enlistment paper, and had taken it to the photo lab to be blown up to the largest dimensions possible before the details began to blur, which turned out to be eight inches square. One copy she had framed, and hung it on the wall of her house in California; the other she had taken to be laminated. This she retrieved now from one of the plastic storage crates in the tent.
Rae studied it, as she had a score of times already. Mostly, in the past, she had pored over the details of the house, calculating its dimensions, sketching the roof angle and the style of window frame. With her eyes shut, she could have drawn its front wall, the arrangement of window and door on the lower floor, the smaller four-paned window in the triangle of the upper level. Another man, with winter coming on (but why did she think that?—oh yes, the fallen leaves from the vine maple, scattered across the steps near Desmond’s boots) and a door being needed, would have settled for butting together his lumber and bolting a Z of one-bys on either side. Desmond, working under fairly primitive conditions, had produced a door bonded together with little more than sheer skill. The two holes that she had discovered on the door’s inside surface had some kind of metal buried at their base—nails perhaps, melted in the fire and fused into mere lumps; she had left them in place, facing the ground now through a sea of driftwood legs.
Rae planned on tacking up the laminated photo to the madrone over her workbench, whether as decoration or inspiration or an evocation of the island’s guiding spirit she did not know. She now noticed, however, that what she always assumed to be the doorknob did not match the mechanism she had removed from the charred door a few days earlier. She looked more closely, and saw for the first time that although Desmond was in the full sun and threw a clear shadow behind him, the knob cast none: It was not a knob, but a hole. And further, while she had always been struck by Desmond’s body language—an easy stance with both hands resting loose at his sides, content without fidgeting—she saw now that the right hand, in the shadow of his leg, was actually holding something, some dark shape very like the latch that was now lying, drenched in oil, in a plastic bag on the workbench. What Rae had taken for a photograph showing a self-contained man of few demands was in truth that of a man interrupted in a task, allowing a brief delay before he knelt down on his threshold to make his house secure. It slowly dawned on Rae that this black-and-white image she held in her hand was not a photograph of Great-uncle Desmond and the house he lived in; it was a picture of Desmond Newborn and the house he was on the very brink of completing.
She lowered the picture to look past the top of it, comparing the monochromatic past with the present reality. Some of the trees were missing, she saw, such as the vine maple and a cedar that had stood too close to the house, even their burned stubs rotted to nothing now. The young hemlock that had been protected behind the left-hand tower was now a mighty grandfather, and the thick green shrubbery of the present hillside had, sixty-odd years ago, been cleared away to an airy display of rock and tree trunk.
Of Desmond himself the picture gave away little, for all that it was clear and precise in the way old photographs always seemed to be. Stance, clothing, and half-shaded face, he seemed to her largely a slate on which future generations might draw their own conclusions. The set of his wide shoulders and clean-shaven jaw, the noncommittal expression in his dark eye, the generous mouth that seemed to have tasted pain—or was that the viewer’s hindsight? Perhaps even a projection, based on her own history?—when taken together could indicate stubbornness, or the lack of affect in a damaged mind, or the rigid control of a man in chronic pain. It might even be a patient disinterest in the process of picture taking—or in the person taking the picture. Whoever that had been.
Come to think of it, who had it been? Every indication was that Desmond Newborn
was not a man to entertain casual visitors; however, his dress, despite the latch in his hand (and she was fairly certain that’s what it was), indicated the formality of welcoming visitors. Even in the Twenties, she didn’t imagine that men donned suits and stiff collars to do carpentry. Unless this photograph was taken to commemorate a symbolic occasion, the mounting of the front door latch—in which case, why not make a bigger deal of it, positioning the builder at his creation, or at least displaying the metal shape to the camera? Desmond simply looked as if he was waiting for a mildly unwelcome visitor to work the shutter and then leave, so he could peel off his collar and get back to work.
“Uncle Desmond,” Rae addressed the picture, “you are a puzzle.”
She dipped the fingers of her left hand into the nail pouch on the front of her belt, as she had done a thousand times before, forgetting that she had not yet opened a box of nails of any size or shape; still, her fingertips encountered a sharp point down in one corner, and she fished it out.
A roofing nail. One and a half inches long, galvanized, flat-headed like a giant thumbtack. Digging back into the pouch, she found, ironically enough, two more like it. She knew precisely what she’d scooped those nails into the pouch for, seventeen months earlier.
It had been on a Sunday morning in early November, a crisp, clear Northern California weekend between the rains. Rae had just returned from a hectic two weeks in Japan, leading a workshop that coincided with the opening of a group show in which she had three pieces. Unwilling to be parted so soon after her return, she, Alan, and Bella had driven up to see Petra and Tamara (and Don, if he had not found an excuse to be away), only to find that Tamara had either forgotten or not wanted to think about the visit, because when they arrived she was in the process of herding her family into the farm’s oversized pickup, attached to a loaded horse trailer. Petra, then just short of her twelfth birthday and not yet launched into grungy jackets and bouts of adolescent surliness, had a horse show an hour north of the ranch. Rae took one look at Tamara’s mood and said that, much as they’d love to see Petra compete, she rather thought she, Alan, and Bella would laze around and wait for the family to return. She’d even cook a pot of spaghetti or something, so that dinner would be waiting.
Tamara made no attempt to hide her relief, just gave her mother the house keys and got into the pickup. Don accelerated off in a cloud of dust that had Petra’s horse rocking furiously inside the trailer.
Alan and Bella changed into their swimsuits and went to use the small pool behind the house, but Rae, jet-lagged and on edge as usual after an encounter with her elder daughter, put on the comforting tool belt (which she always tossed into the car for these visits, because Tamara always had some urgent undone job at hand and was willing to overlook her mother’s unladylike behavior if it meant that the washing line stopped dipping to earth or the gate finally closed cleanly).
Just before Rae had left for Japan, during the forgotten phone call when the arrangements for this visit were made, Tamara had mentioned the bitter discovery of Don’s failure to fix the roof on the end of the stables where a lot of equipment was stored, which meant that half the power tools were now rusted into immobility. So the day before, Rae had dropped by the lumberyard and picked up some bundles of shingles and a box of roofing nails. Now she popped open the box with the claws of her hammer, scooped two handfuls into each pouch, and got to work. Halfway through the soothing job, Bella’s wet curls appeared over the edge of the roof, with Alan close behind her on the ladder, hammers in hand, to help her. Three sunburned necks and a couple of hours later, the family of amateur roofers climbed down to go for a well-earned swim.
The peaceful interval lasted until after dinner. Rae clearly recalled being up on that low roof, the sharp chemical smell of the shingles, the rough grit digging into their knees and the palms of their hands. Alan’s customary vast patience, bracing Bella’s hand as her small tack hammer finished driving in the nails Rae had started. Alan’s care, always sheltering Bella from the edge, but so casual about it that the child did not notice. The three of them sitting on the peak of the roof when the job was finished, their arms around each other, looking out over the bucolic view, the freshly greened pastures, the grazing horses, the discussion of “When can I get a pony like Petra’s, Mommy?”
Sweet, sweet memory.
They swam, they made dinner in Tamara’s ornate kitchen, they poured themselves glasses of red wine. Bella found a videotape and fell asleep on the floor with Tamara’s standard poodle on one side and Petra’s black Lab across her legs. Alan got out some papers he needed to mark, and Rae had a book. The kitchen was fragrant and it was fully dark outside when the lights of the pickup played across the windows.
Don came in first, nodded to his mother-in-law and her husband, and went straight to the freezer for the bottle of forty-dollar vodka. He was wearing dark slacks, an open-necked shirt, and a light wool jacket, somewhat formal attire for the dust of a children’s equestrian event.
“How did Petra do?” Rae asked him.
He glanced up from his pouring, eyes narrowing as if this was some sort of trick question. “Fine. Petra did fine.”
“Did you stay for the whole thing?”
“Not the whole thing, no. I had a meeting nearby, a group of investors.”
As Rae had thought. Don did not share his wife’s interest in horses. Neither did Rae, for that matter—Tamara had caught horses from David’s mother, who had more or less raised her granddaughter in Rae’s enforced absences. When Don did attend his daughter’s events, or those of his wife, it was usually because there were contacts to be made, hands to be shook.
Bella woke up at their voices, demanded to know where Petra was, and flew out the door to the stables, the dogs on her heels. Alan had folded away his work into its briefcase and was standing with his back to the fireplace, his posture one of ease but his eyes not leaving Don.
For Alan detested his wife’s son-in-law. It was a reaction Rae had witnessed the moment the two men had met, at the party after her wedding to Alan, although at the time she had not known her new husband long enough to be certain what his behavior meant. Only later did she learn that this was Alan’s way of demonstrating that inexplicable, hackle-raising dislike some people trigger in others: an exaggerated politeness, unfailing attentiveness, a smile that did not crinkle the eyes, and an inability to relax when Don was in the room. Now, for example, Alan was politely inquiring about the business Don had conducted, the drive he had taken, and some football game that Rae would have bet Alan had never heard of until he brought it up.
Rae had never said anything to Alan about his visceral reaction, since Don was too self-contained to notice and Tamara too busy eyeing her mother for signs of instability, and because Alan never gave the least indication of wishing to avoid his wife’s family. Over the years she had come to accept it as a chemical quirk, the precise opposite of the equally inexplicable urge that had bonded her to Alan in the first place. It was, at any event, not a matter that came up more than once or twice a year, since having both men at any gathering was a rarity.
The conversation sounded like a badly written play, formal and of no interest to any of the parties. Rae assembled the salad, Alan stood with his hands clasped behind his back like a soldier, Don dropped into a chair with his second drink, answering their remarks and queries in monosyllables. Alan was beginning to flag when finally the girls burst in, Petra’s horse groomed and settled, its human caregivers more than ready for their own feed.
Bella had recently had it explained to her that she was actually Petra’s aunt, despite being three years the junior. The discovery delighted her, and as the two girls came in the kitchen door, trailing dogs and wisps of hay and the smell of horses, Petra was good-naturedly calling Bella “Auntie.” Then she spotted Rae standing at the stove, and in three giant steps of her riding boots the child’s arms were wrapped around her grandmother’s ribs. Except for the gray in Rae’s hair, the two could have been mother
and daughter—the same coloring, same bones, and the child showing signs of adult height. Rae squeezed Petra back, exclaiming that the girl had grown another inch since summer. She had also, Rae saw when they stepped away from each other, the first intimations of maturity in her face, the loss of a layer of subcutaneous childhood as her bones had stretched up.
“You look beautiful,” she told Petra, whose face twisted in a scornful dismissal of her grandmother’s absurdity.
Bella giggled. “She stinks,” she declared loudly.
“She does a little,” Rae had to agree with her daughter. “But it’s a nice stink.”
“Go change your clothes before you come down for dinner, Pet,” Don told the young equestrian.
“Yes, Daddy,” Petra said, subdued for a moment by his unvoiced disapproval, and told Rae, “Mom says to go ahead and start. She’s just putting away the tack. Come on, Auntie Bella, let’s go wash our hands.”
Bella’s giggle trailed out of the kitchen.
Rae did not look at Don. She was afraid that if she did, she would grab him by his well-starched collar and shout in his face, “Everyone in this whole damned family has been raised by disapproving adults. For God’s sake don’t do it to your daughter, too!” She bit her upper lip to keep the words in, knowing by bitter experience what the repercussions would be, that evening and in the weeks ahead. She would not be the one to set off a violent quarrel this time—and anyway, Don, the actual target, would contrive to slide away, leaving the field of battle to his willing wife.
But Rae’s heart ached for Petra’s winces, remembered all too well the blindly cruel remarks of authority: Grandfather supposing a B was only to be expected when Rae had been placed in a class of top students; that the son of a department store owner was probably the best Rae could hope for, considering her history; that …
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