“When Rafe and Sally were first starting the place, I put up ten percent of their costs, and told them I’d take repayment in meals. I think I’m down to about one and a half tables now. Rafe’s my cousin.”
“Everybody on the islands seems to be related,” Rae commented. “Talking to Nikki, she has a brother or an aunt or someone she went to school with in every corner.”
“Well, Nikki probably does. She’s one of nine kids, and her parents between them have … oh, let’s see, twelve, no—thirteen brothers and sisters.”
“They must have to go off the islands to find a spouse they’re not related to.”
“Yeah, most of ’em have found someone at college. We bring ’em in during summer vacation, you understand, when the weather is good. That way, by the time winter closes in, they’re already hooked.”
“And you—were you hooked, or born here?”
“Born and bred on Lopez. You been there?”
“When I was here a few years ago. They wave,” she recalled suddenly. “All the drivers who go past you, they wiggle their fingers to say hello.” As an anthropological phenomenon, it had entertained her and Alan for hours, and Bella had adopted the custom, waving with enthusiasm at puzzled Californian passersby.
“The Lopez wave. It’ll probably die out in a few years, but yeah, it’s a rural community. You assume it’s your neighbor going by.”
“Even if the car has California plates.”
“Yeah, well, we’re willing to let county borders stretch a ways.”
Rae was startled to find herself laughing along with him. Laughter over a glass of good wine with a … well, a handsome and intelligent man was probably the last thing she would have expected of this tumultuous day.
“Are you married?” she asked, then realized how abrupt it sounded, and how intemperately she’d been drinking. She changed the question to “I mean, did you go away to college and hook someone home yourself?”
“I found a native,” he said. “But we moved off the islands, lived on the mainland for nearly ten years before she died and I came back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Long time ago.”
“Does that matter?”
“Sometimes,” he replied, gazing down into the depths of his wineglass. “Sometimes it matters. Mostly when I try to remember what she looked like.”
Rae felt the tears prick at her tired eyes. “There are times I can’t remember my daughter’s face,” she admitted, and was abruptly appalled. She pushed away the glass and grabbed for a less loaded subject. “Other than that ten years, you’ve lived here your whole life?”
“College, the army, and a few years of living far from the water was enough. I’ve got the sea in my blood. Spent my childhood in a boat, practically. In fact, I spent a lot of it right on your island.”
“Folly? What, living there?”
“Oh no, just picnics and the occasional campout. Exploring the woods, fishing and digging clams for dinner, picking berries. Mountain man stuff, great for a kid—although you can’t let kids have that kind of freedom these days.”
“Did you have your fire pit in the same place mine is?”
“The very same.”
“My granddaughter tidied it up a bit, but it looked like people had used it over the years.”
“Not for a while. Truth to tell, my family once owned Folly, long time ago. It was called Minke then.”
“Really? When was this?”
Jerry looked uncomfortable, as if regretting that he’d told her this, and reached for the bottle to refill their glasses. “My granddad sold it in the Twenties. Must’ve been to your great-uncle.”
“Good heavens. I had no idea.”
“Yep. I always had the fantasy of rebuilding it myself, when I was young. My dad tried to buy it back, but of course by that time it was a sanctuary and nobody could quite sort out who owned it. Not that he would’ve had the money, of course.”
He had not looked up from his glass and plate during this entire tale. Was he embarrassed at the regret, and the tinge of resentment, that edged into his voice? Or did he fear that his audience might be embarrassed at the revelation? Rae couldn’t decide.
“My grandfather would have owned it,” she told him. “From the late Twenties until he died.”
“Yeah, I know. Dad tried to get a court case up, but again, it was too much money.” At last he raised his head, a crooked smile on his mouth. “So as you can see, I have a proprietary interest in the place.”
“Well, any time you want to camp in the clearing and dig clams on the beach, feel free.”
“So,” he said. “Tell me about woodworking.”
“I used to be good,” she said, as if speaking of someone else. “I’m more of a rough carpenter now.”
“That workbench of yours testifies to the fact that you’re more than that.”
“Turned out okay, didn’t it?”
“That little shaving of cedar you put into the one leg. Did you do that because it’s the same color as the madrone bark overhead?”
“You have a good eye, Sheriff.” The detail had been fairly subtle; most people who noticed it would take it for an echo of the bench top.
“You going to do some stuff like that in the house itself?”
And so Rae began to describe her plans for the inside of Newborn’s Folly, the Japanese (or perhaps Shaker) shelf-wall next to the black fireplace, the floating steps winding up the two towers, the bedroom and work areas on the upper floor with the incomparable view, the balance between drama and comfort and the difficulty of restraint. At some point Rae suddenly realized that a magnificent entrée was lying half eaten on her plate and that she had been talking earnestly about the personality conflicts between teak and zebrawood to a man whose idea of wood was probably limited to logs for the fire or 2×4s for the wall. She flushed.
“Sorry to get so carried away.”
“I’d say—not sure, you understand, it’s just a guess—but I’d say maybe you could still call yourself a woodworker.”
She felt herself returning his slow smile. “I’d say maybe you’re right.”
Thirty-two
Letter from Rae to
Her Granddaughter
May 23
Dear Petra,
I wonder if you’ve done any research yet into the far-off, distant past of our island? Before the peoples came here, before the nomadic tribes crossed the frozen Bering Strait or paddled with the Pacific currents, when the land itself was being laid down?
A person sees everywhere the immense pressures and incomprehensible tensions that accumulated here, shoving and wrenching the landmasses around like a pizza crust. There’s a layer of light-colored sandstone that runs through Folly, folded back on itself in some places, twisted in with the darker bedrock. How much pressure must it take to fold rock? Can you begin to imagine something like that? I can’t.
The other huge force acting on this placid-looking group of islands was ice. The last glaciers began to retreat up the Georgia Strait to the north around 13,000 years ago, scouring the strait, grinding and eroding the crests of the folded rock, but when they passed, the layers of sandstone and bedrock underneath them rose, jutting up into the air sometimes nearly perpendicular to the current sea. When the weight of 3,000 feet of ice—three thousand!—lifted, the release of pressure caused some of the land beneath to, as they call it, rebound. Incredible to think of, the earth bouncing back after that, isn’t it? But the unevenness of the postglacial rebound, following the grinding of the glaciers, broke Folly and her neighbors away from the larger landmasses, crumpled them as they rose, and twisted them into the shapes of islands.
Huge tensions, incomprehensible pressures, ripping and heaving at the land; such sweet beauty at the end.
Love,
Gran
Thirty-three
As she sat in Jerry Carmichael’s cruiser outside Elaine Walls’s neat two-story inn, it occurred to Rae that Carmichael had never said why
he had hunted her down in the first place.
“Jerry I appreciate you taking me out to dinner and carving another few inches out of your two tables’ worth of investment, but did you have something you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Yeah, I did, but I could see how tired and hungry you were, so I figured I’d just soften you up and come back in the morning. I’ll need a written statement about finding those bones.”
“It’s not that complicated. I could do it now.”
“Morning’s fine. In fact, Elaine makes one of the best breakfasts on the islands. Your being here would give me an excuse to add myself to her table.”
“Dear God, after that dinner, how can you even think about food?”
“Come morning, her huckleberry waffles will have you drooling.”
He retrieved her knapsack from the trunk of the car, handed it to her on the steps leading to the rose-lined walkway, and accompanied her to the inn, where he joked familiarly with Elaine Walls and warned her that he would be back for breakfast. Then he wrapped Rae’s hand in his giant grip again, wished both women a good night, and left. The inn’s small foyer seemed suddenly large in his absence.
Elaine Walls was very obviously her niece’s relative, from the frizzy red hair (in her case paling toward gray) to the perky speech. She kept up a string of friendly inconsequentials all the way up the stairs, peppering her remarks with everything from instructions for using a key if Rae needed to go out at night to the doleful state of the television reception downstairs.
“I start serving breakfast at eight,” she said at the door to Rae’s room, “but if you want coffee earlier or a cup of tea during the night there’s makings in the common room, and since yours is the room above, you don’t even need to worry about making noise. Good night, and if you need anything, just go through the kitchen and knock on the door.”
Rae closed the door on the woman’s retreating footsteps, and stood for a long minute with her hand on the knob and her forehead resting against the door. Alone, at last. Christ, what a day.
Standing there, feeling the cool painted wood against her warm face, the vibration of Elaine’s feet through the floorboards, and the weight of the long day pressing down on her shoulders, Rae did not move until she felt a drop hit the back of her wrist. She jerked upright impatiently, dashing the tears from her eyes, then dumped her grubby backpack on the bed.
Tired as she was, she knew there was no way she would fall asleep. Too much repressed inner turmoil, too many glasses of wine, too little exercise for a body accustomed to vigorous labor. She took her flashlight and her fleece pullover from the knapsack and let herself out of the inn.
Elaine had mentioned that the beach at the foot of the inn road was a public one, so Rae headed for that. She walked down the paved surface until the light over Elaine’s front door was faint, and then she stood in the dark and waited for her vision to adjust.
Now was when the cost of ignoring the events of Folly began to come due. Can’t hide, can’t ignore. If it had been just one thing, she might have repressed it satisfactorily until it shrank to a manageable size. But everything piled together—finding the skeleton, reading the diary, the growing certainty of what Desmond’s end had been, topped off by all kinds of unsettling feelings stirred up by the dinner with Sheriff Jerry Carmichael—was too much; Rae’s skin crawled with distress and fatigue.
Since Rae was a child, her great-uncle Desmond had inhabited the recesses of her awareness. That William had disapproved of his ne’er-do-well brother was always as evident as William’s disapproval of Rae herself; that alone would have been enough to make Desmond a secret companion, even without the pathos of his solitary end in the desert. Coming here as a fifty-two-year-old woman escaping personal horrors, she had begun to feel herself following in his footsteps: After all, the man must have had some reason to cut himself off from the world so emphatically. Her sympathy and admiration for his work, her curiosity about his life—and now his death—had caught her up, made her feel almost as if Desmond Newborn was the pattern after which Rae had been modeled. The older twin, as it were. Through her hands, his life’s work was being reborn. Now, having read through his personal diary in growing dismay and understanding, she was coming to think that the madness in her, too, had its origin in him.
For he had been mad, on and off over the years of his journal, a madness that was oh, so very, terribly familiar to her.
When Desmond Newborn was most disturbed, he kept lists. Rae could only imagine what his actual war journal had been like, since this book began during his recovery in the early months of 1918, but the war constantly broke out in his consciousness, like a wound that continued to suppurate. Every time the infection began to heal over, he would swear that never again would he write about those terrible months, and every time, after days or weeks, the festering sore would erupt anew and plunge him back into the trenches. Again and again in the first section of the journal, the chronological progression, brief, tentative mentions of seasonal changes and the family’s activities, would break off abruptly, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, and another list would begin. Page after page of tiny, precise writing, beginning with a catalogue of French towns and districts that were rich with the horror of war. Even Rae, who was no historian, recognized that Thiepval meant a river of blood, that Passchendaele translated as a desolation of foot-rotting mud, stomach-wrenching odors, and gut-clenching terror. And then the names, dear God, the names of people. They covered three sheets of the diary, the various shades of ink and sizes of nib testifying to his constant return to the pages—men’s names, all marked as dead or injured, with the terse addition of how:
Tommy Smithers. Both legs gone. Dead.
Jethro Hammerley. Shrapnel in the stomach. Dead.
Willy McMasters. Left arm above the elbow. Wounded home.
Orville Tellerston. Face gone. Must be dead. Hope so.
Matthew Grinwold. Gassed. Wounded home.
James Kinkaid. Sniper bullet to the head. Dead.
Harry Butters. Shrapnel. Dead.
Lists of the dead, lists of remembered letters and packages from home (how one parcel containing socks had arrived when he had none left, the pleasure in a fruitcake, the strange and thrilling cleanness of a packet of paper), lists of birds glimpsed in rare days behind the lines, lists of books borrowed and read, page after page, some of the entries given pages of their own, others just squeezed together. A litany of the world’s madness, brought together under the orderly notation of desperation. Desmond’s writing in the list sections was painfully precise, his margins exact. On one page, Rae had found a brief series of dates and wounds, without names. After a moment, she had realized that they were Desmond’s own injuries: Gas. Shrapnel. Trench foot. And last, in letters so exact they could have come from a penmanship chart: Sniper bullet, left shoulder.
The list of wounds was half a dozen or so pages from the beginning of the small book. He seemed to have begun the journal in winter, although the early pages bore no dates, and as time went on she could almost see him growing toward wholeness: His hand and his mind began to unclench, the penmanship became less rigid, the things he wrote shifted from list to reflection. The signs of healing began as memories often do, with a smell.
Dogwood blossoms. They have the fragrance of a woman’s body. I remember lying in the medical tent, the English sister bending over me, and all I could smell was dogwood blossom.
Bacon frying downstairs. Bacons the only meat that doesn’t make my stomach heave. And chicken, so long as it’s been freshly killed.
Hay being mown. In Thiepval, in the middle of a push, the sweet odor of cut hay came on the wind, stronger than blood and loose bowels, more powerful even than putrid flesh. Half my company stopped what they were doing, lowered their rifles, and raised their faces to the air. The Huns, too, paused to breathe in the farmer’s work, until our officers woke to the interruption.
And reflection:
What does it mean, to lose
one’s mind? Where does it go? If a man is out of his mind, where is he? What is insane when the world is mad by contrast?
The descriptions of evocative scents interspersed with philosophical speculation went on for pages, followed by those of sights that meant something to Desmond—his father’s library, a huge old tree on the grounds of the Boston house that Rae was startled to recognize from her own childhood, a trio of brightly dressed young women strolling through the park. Summer wore on, ending in a reference to falling leaves, and then the bitter armistice of November 1918. The war’s end shook him; Christmas was a bad time. After the first of the year there was another list, a page with nothing but eight dates on it, each a week or two apart during January and February; there was no explanation of what they meant. Then the darkness seemed to reach out again for Desmond Newborn. His next entry was not for many months, not until October 24, 1919, and read in its lonely entirety:
Arrived in Omaha. Why am I here?
Sporadic entries over the next pages—dates, places, and brief pathetic phrases—chronicled the wanderer’s dismal cycle of ill health alternating with aimless travel.
Until the early summer of 1921, when he wrote the following:
An old Italian in a railway yard near Tacoma told me how beautiful the San Juan Islands were. He said that when he read about God walking through the garden in the cool of the evening, it was the San Juans he pictured. I thought the substances he drank had turned his brain to porridge, but I came here to see. And he was right. God does walk here.
He went on to describe the islands, the soothing odor of the sea air, the quality of the light, and most especially the sense of hush that lay over the watery land. It was the longest entry he had written since leaving Boston, and he went on over the weeks that followed, until in June he found Sanctuary.
July 7, 1921
Paradise, on a hundred fifty acres of rock. The silence is profound. For the first time, I have found a place without artillery fire at the edges of my hearing. All the island has is the sea, and birds, and the slow speech of trees. I wired W. for the money, he wired back that he would need to see the place with his own eyes before he approved it. The gall of the man, to imagine me a child, needing his signature on a form in the bank! No, I will not have his shiny boots on my refuge.
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