Rae would build with full-measure wood. It had cost her a small fortune to arrange for custom milling, but the sight of those authoritative studs was deeply reassuring. Her house would withstand gales.
In part, the decision was wished upon her once she chose to use the existing foundation—narrower wood would have required an endless round of jiggling and trimming to fit. But in the end, it was the sensual satisfaction of the heavy wood that decided her.
With the foundation stones clear and strong, Rae buckled on her tool belt and wrestled back the hateful blue tarpaulin on the first stack of building material, and began to haul out the wood for the sills.
Had Rae been building a modern, engineered, permit-laden structure, she would have begun by drilling holes through the rocks for anchor bolts, to tie top to bottom. Actually, she probably would have begun by bulldozing the entire foundation into the sea or just moving to another location, because the drilling would have been a brutal job, impossible without heavy-duty power tools. This, however, was to be the restoration of a historic building, and as such she had permission to be scrupulous about following Desmond’s lead. He had set his sill plate actually into the stones of his foundation, creating a raised stone lip that was not continuous, but which would cradle the sills and hold them in place. As a woman who had spent most of her adult life in earthquake country, Rae was not entirely comfortable with this, but other old buildings were still on their pinnings, so in this, as elsewhere, she would trust Desmond.
She trimmed the sills—cedar, these, like Desmond’s, cedar being the Pacific Northwest’s native rot-resistant wood—and tapped them into place. They took remarkably little adjustment—the length, of course, and shaving off the odd tight place where it met the stone lip—but Rae was enormously pleased when the last board went in as easily as the first. The foundation was now neatly capped by cedar, all the way around but for where the towers and fireplace interrupted, everything fitting neatly—except for the front. Unlike the other three sides, where the stone lips holding the wood were narrow enough to be covered by the future exterior siding, in the front the stones jutted out a good two inches from the cedar sill. She didn’t know if this would prove to be a problem or not, although as it stood, it looked as if it would direct rainwater under the sill plate, and even cedar was not intended to stand in water for long. She would have to take a closer study of the photograph, to see what Desmond had in mind. His attention to detail would not have failed him in such a crucial spot. She hoped.
Other than that slight doubt, the sill plates lay clean and true in the spring sunshine, and Rae was humming as she went back down the hill for the floor joists.
Modern wood-frame building was dubbed balloon construction not just for the openness of its internal space, but because of the speed with which the structure rose up. Drive past a housing development one week and see little more than scattered concrete foundations; the next week the houses are up—or at least their skeletons. One good strong breath, and an architect’s dream inflates.
A solitary middle-aged woman may not raise a stick-frame house with the rapidity of a team of union-wage framers, but then Rae’s project was considerably smaller as well. She had been on the island for three and a half weeks and had yet to drive a nail into lumber. That was about to change dramatically.
Once she got the damn boards up to the site.
Other than that Desmond had worked with the standard (for his time) full-measure wood, which had been noted in the original engineer’s report that she had commissioned shortly after her visit here with Alan and Bella, Rae hadn’t known until reaching the back wall during demolition exactly what dimension lumber her predecessor had used— the photograph she had showed nothing beyond the exterior siding. Rae had drawn her own plans with an eye to modern building codes, knowing that her building and his would agree only in places.
Enough had survived of the back wall of the house, to the left of the fireplace as one came in the front door, for Rae to know that Desmond had used the same 2×8 joists at sixteen-inch centers that her plans called for (although his were of cedar, hers the stronger Douglas fir). There did seem to be something odd about the structure near the fireplace, marks of extra boards against the scrap of doubled joist under the wall that Rae hadn’t been able to figure out yet, but since it could be anything from a patch around some inadequate lumber to the need for greater support under a proposed upright piano, she decided not to worry about it.
A few boards at a time, Rae hauled her lumber up to the footing: floor joists, rim joists, 2×8s for the cripple wall to lay the floor above an uneven foundation—but at these she paused. That sill had looked nearly level, perhaps close enough to receive the joists directly … A careful check with the spirit level confirmed it: After all these years, Desmond’s foundation stones stood true. She could get away with minor shimming and trimming; there was no need to frame a separate wall to join floor to foundation—which would also give her more height inside the finished house. Whistling, she measured, marked, and laid the first joist over the sawhorse, leaned on the board with her left hand, drew the teeth of the saw gently up along the pencil mark, then drove the saw down firmly into the wood.
The forgotten odor of fresh sawdust juddered into Rae, as shocking as an open-handed slap, as blindly unexpected and powerfully evocative as the fragrance of Bella’s hair or Alan’s shirt. This fragrance did not just evoke building, however, or creativity or action or a step toward the future; what jarred Rae’s mind was sex. The cedar she’d cut earlier for the sill plates had no such effect, but the more familiar construction softwoods, redwood and especially Douglas fir, Rae had always found more than a little erotic, reaching in to send a thrill up her spine even before the memorable if somewhat besplintered afternoon when Alan had discovered his new wife’s little quirk. They had come out of her workshop looking like a pair of millworkers, or snowmen, pale sawdust glued to their sweaty skin and plastered into their hair, and …
And if she didn’t pay closer attention to the work at hand, her joists would never fit. She corrected the angle of the saw and focused on the clean line of the cut, pushing away the memories it had evoked.
But the memories, once aroused and reinforced all that day by the heady perfume of the sawn joists, did not go away. She had forgotten how frankly sensual the act of building was, particularly at the very beginning. Alan had come to anticipate the days when one of her projects finally moved from drawing and visualization to the actual laying on of hands upon wood. The exhilarating, dangerous moment of conception invariably transformed her, made her restless and distracted and randy.
Rae didn’t have Alan. Even Ed wasn’t due for four days, by which time—fortunately—the first flush would have passed. She’d just have to sublimate the urge, turn it back into the building. Cold showers were said to be good; God knew she could have any number of those.
She set the joist up to span the cedar sill, nudged it into place, scooped a trio of nails from the pouch at her waist, and for the first time in seven decades the joyful noise of hammering on Folly Island rang out across the water.
With a break for lunch, Rae had the joists laid down, shimmed level, and nailed fast by the middle of the afternoon, and most of the bridges to tie them were in place before the sun dropped behind the trees and forced her to stop work. Muscles trembling, back screaming, but immensely pleased with herself, Rae hobbled away to her tent to buckle off her tool belt and slide the saw into its place in the toolbox, and then collapsed onto her cot. After a while she forced herself upright, sluiced off hands and face, put some rice and beans on to cook, then poured herself a celebratory measure of wine in one of The Hunter’s elegant glasses. While dinner was bubbling, Rae went back to admire her handiwork, in the same way that she used to visit in-process pieces of furniture in her workshop.
Tomorrow was the first of May, she realized, and with a full moon to boot. International Workers would march beneath their red flag, children would pick weedy bouquet
s and hang them from neighbors’ doorknobs (did anyone actually do that anymore?), and New Age Celts would burn the spring fires of Beltane. She had been on Folly for one cycle of the moon, from April Fools’ to May Day, and she had a clean, bright, fragrant grid of close-locked boards to show for it. The scorched stones of the fireplace and towers seemed more out of place than ever, uneven and dark against the pale wood, like a couple of wizened old men who had stumbled by accident into a kindergarten room. On a more technological building site, Rae would have hired a power washer to scour the stones; here she had to wait until she had the subfloor down, so she could get at the stones without having to teeter on an ill-placed ladder.
“Don’t worry,” she told the rising stones. “I’ll clean you up in a few days.”
The moon rose, gravid with light, pulling itself with ponderous dignity out of the sea, and with the moon rose the noise she had heard on her first night on the island and not since then: drums. This time she was more sure of herself and her surroundings, and did not immediately assume it to be a hallucination, although she was still open to the possibility. She carried her bowl of dinner out to the end of her promontory to listen, eating without tasting until she was satisfied that, somewhere nearby, her neighbors were drumming up the full moon.
It was cool near the water. When the bowl was empty Rae went back to the warmth of her fire pit. She poured herself a second glass of wine and shut down the kerosene lamp, which was attracting moths. Rae sat and drank, her muscles tired but her blood restless, her eyes darting across the unearthly landscape, while the blue light of the moon grew stronger. The directionless drumming filled the air one minute, ebbed into the night the next. Everything around her was stark, black or white, the shiny tops of the madrone leaves contrasting with the dark shadows underneath. Bats flew; an owl called. The waves came and receded rhythmically against the stones, each one curling briefly into the light as it rose to meet the shore.
Rae wondered what it would feel like to lift her face to the moon and howl aloud. She wondered if the drummers on the neighboring island would hear, and if so, what they would think. She tried to imagine what The Hunter would say, and failed. She put down her glass and got to her feet to pace slowly up and down from tent to house and back again, feeling a nameless urge trying to rise up, an urge that felt like fur and smelled of sawdust. She ached with it, her bones and her flesh craving something, craving contact, physical, warm contact. She wanted Nikki here to take her on a moonlight boat trip, Sheriff Carmichael or Ed De la Torre to fill the air with the sound of their male voices. She wanted Bella to hug her, Alan to grab her hair and wrestle her to the floor. It was not a desire for sex—or, not only a desire for sex—but something even more powerful, the desire to wrap herself up in a pair of strong arms, to crawl into an embrace and put her head down and stay there, nestled into a shoulder, warmly clothed in the affection and protection and camaraderie of another human body and soul.
She wanted Alan, and Alan was gone.
It was odd, she reflected, but in the mental hospital it had been Bella she lusted for the most. The maternal drive to wrap her arms around her missing child and comfort her had then been overwhelming, but that urge seemed to have shriveled into insignificance by being so long denied. Since coming here, Bella had faded, and Alan had come to the fore.
Well, she couldn’t have either of them. Considering her age and her state, it was all too possible that she would never again know either of those kinds of embraces, sexual or maternal, that the brief, dutiful brush of a daughter’s cheek or the furtive hug of a granddaughter would be all she would have, ever after.
Now Rae really did feel like howling at the moon. For a moment she thought about taking the still-empty gun out of the locked storage box and feeling the smooth and comforting authority of its grip against her rough palm, caressing her cheek with its cold metal, holding it between her breasts. Instead, she walked down to her rocky little cove and methodically stripped off her clothing, shirt to shoes, and stood there, clothed only in the cool light of the moon.
She threw back her head, held her bare arms out from her sides, and closed her eyes, feeling the reflected energy that washed over the sea and the land, the beach and the figure that stood there. The night air stirred around her, bathing her face and body, caressing her exposed skin. The night smelled richly of seaweed and sweat, the rocks beneath Rae’s feet were hard and round, the branches above her head still and watchful. The warm moist hair under her arms and between her legs shrank at the unaccustomed touch of air, and she shivered, and then for the second time she walked slowly forward into the gently undulating water of the island’s cove.
When the freezing water of the cove was lapping at her upper thighs, Rae halted. Eyes still tightly shut, she lifted her hands to her face, and the hard, sensitive skin of her fingertips began to probe and explore. Like a blind woman getting to know a new person, Rae felt herself: the shaggy, wiry tendrils on her head (I need a haircut) and the broad stretch of forehead, the bristle of the eyebrows in an arch over the soft hollows of her eyes, lids twitching as if she were dreaming. The warm breath from her nostrils, the dry elastic of lips, strong jaw and vulnerable throat, a full, round breast in her right hand and the poor damaged object bisected by scar tissue in the left, and down.
Oh, Alan, she breathed soundlessly. Oh, oh, Alan.
Twenty-two
Rae’s Journal
May 2
I don’t remember my dreams being so strange, before. No dreaming at all for a whole drugged year may have something to do with it—like mental chemotherapy, chemical psychotherapy makes a persons dreams fall out. My unconscious has to grow again and catch up, pushing fantasies to the surface, some funny, some frightening, others just odd.
A while ago I had a vivid dream, just before waking, that I was pregnant, huge of belly and full of breast, being told by a doctor (who looked remarkably like Nikki Walls in drag, come to think of it) that it was a healthy baby dolphin. On waking, my first thought was how I was going to adapt the cradle I made for Bella so it would hold water.
Then I dreamed of men marching to war, grim, gray, muddy men with gaiters and greatcoats and rifles slung over their shoulders, marching in unison through a blighted landscape, past smoking tree stumps on which vultures perched, tramping blindly down the road in mechanical precision and straight off the edge of a high cliff, one row at a time, tumbling without a sound. At the bottom their bodies lay piled, like the news photos of mass graves, human beings turned to cordwood. Brrr. I did not sleep much after that one.
But the most convoluted dream yet was last night’s, going on and on with a cast of thousands, or dozens anyway—everyone I’ve ever known or even met seemed to flit through at some point. I forgot most of the dreams details long before I woke up, but one scene lingered.
I was in a cedar longhouse, a dim and smoky space, but cold even with the fire going. Everyone inside the place except me was a man, all the men in my life aside from Grandfather. I’ve never dreamed about Grandfather directly, although he often seems to lurk in the edges of my vision. But my father was there, and my uncle Gavin (looking even more like my mother than he actually did) and my first husband David and a couple of cousins. Vivian was there in the background, with Alan standing next to him.
They were all dressed in Native American costume, robes and a few bark rain cloaks, and they all wore wooden masks. Most of the masks looked like the person—Alan looked like himself, down to wood-rimmed glasses—except for two figures in the middle of the enormous room.
Their backs were to me. I went forward to see what they were looking at, and found them bent over the cherry cot I made for Bella. There was a baby in the cot, a girl baby awake and looking up at the two men. I couldn’t tell who she was—it could have been Bella, or Petra, or even Tamara for that matter, although they looked nothing alike even when they were tiny. The baby was a girl, that was all I could tell.
I went around to the other side of the cot and l
ooked at the two men, but these masks were different. You couldn’t tell who they were, because the wood had been carved as traditional Northwest masks, a raven and a bear. When they looked across the cot at me, I was frightened by the glitter of their eyes, and I wanted to grab up the baby and protect her, but then I thought that might only make things worse, that what I needed to do was draw their attention away from her.
So I put on a sort of mask of my own, and started acting abrasive and confrontational, asking them what the hell they wanted and who the hell were they, anyway?
They stood looking at me, and then one of them held out his right hand with Bella’s antique silver rattle in it, and the other held out his left hand holding Desmond’s rusty hammerhead that I found under the house. I knew in an instant that I had to get that hammer away from the baby.
“Who are you?” I shouted again. So they reached up with their free hands and lifted off their masks, and they now wore wooden faces with the features of my son-in-law Don and my stepson Rory. And then they reached up again to take those off, and Rory turned into Don and Don to Rory. Then they did it again, and again.
I grew frantic, not being able to tell which of the figures was Don. If he was the one holding the rattle, I didn’t think I had too much to worry about, but Don with a hammer in his hand was another thing entirely.
They kept shedding faces and I kept trying to locate Don beneath the masks, and then all of a sudden the baby started to cry, and I looked down to see that the heap of discarded masks had filled the cherry cot to the top, and the child was completely buried.
I woke up then, as frightened as if I’d dreamed a monster.
Dreams tell us truths, but it’s often a slim fragment of truth under a load of rubbish. Don is the key to this one, but what fragment of Don? Threat or thief? And if he is a threat, who is he threatening? His daughter? His wife? Bella is beyond his reach—or is it my poor infantile feminine side lying there in that cot, the last of the family at his mercy?
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