Authors: Laurie R. King
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.
I shall name my island Sanctuary.
The money was sent. Months, happy years of entries followed, details of the water system that set Rae to smiling, valuable descriptions of the building process, the sources for his varicolored rock, his happiness with the quality of the cement he bought from Roche Harbor. There was even a mention of the front porch he proposed to add, come the following spring.
For six years, following two and a half years of trench warfare and four more years of battles in the mind, Desmond Newborn had peace. From June 1921 until the summer of 1927, he built his house, he shaped his world, he brushed up against his neighbors in friendly distance. For six years this solitary man lived his life, held conversations with his ghosts, and only occasionally dipped into the fringes of melancholia.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, he received a letter from his brother. In the middle of August 1927, Desmond wrote in his diary:
W. writes to extend a hand of friendship. After years of silence, my brother wishes to be reconciled, and posthaste, as he is on his way west on business. I am to respond to his hotel in Chicago, to say if I am willing or no, and to suggest how he may reach me.
The temptation is great, to act as if his missive never reached me. But truth to tell, I desire greatly to tell the family that I have made something for myself, will leave something behind, even if it only be a lowly abode of wood and stone. No, I will put temptation behind me, and write to say he is welcome. Then I shall have to break off the work on the tower windows to build another chair on which my guest may rest his city suit.
Desmond’s calm acceptance of the visit swiftly darkened, however, with irritation and querulous remarks about his brother that did little to
hide the growing tension he was feeling. Late in the journal, three pages from his last entry, came a final list—of things needed in Roche Harbor, true, but why inscribe a shopping list in a leather journal if not for the sense of order and control it bestows on the writer?
In the middle of September, Desmond Newborn wrote what was to be his final entry:
My brother comes tomorrow, to talk me out of my folly. Let him try. Although I freely admit, to myself if none other, that the thought of seeing his face fills me with a terrible dread.
Nothing more, just an illegible scrawl that looked as if the ink had smeared. The nearest Rae could come to deciphering it was:
I have a—
Terrible dread-
—yes, “dread” was the word. William had inspired it in his brother at the age of—what?—forty-five, just as he had inspired it in his granddaughter until the day of his death at the age of ninety-four, following on the heels of Rae’s second breakdown. He had dominated his son, crushing him into insignificance by his indifference; he had cowed his wife, Lacy, into the pale shadow Rae had known as a child; he had given Rae’s mother a life of unremitting criticism until she died young to get away from it; he had bullied Rae, scorned her gender and railed against her instability. The only way Rae could escape him was to marry the first man who asked her, and move from the Boston mansion into graduate housing in California.
Everyone else had had to die to get away from William’s devastating disapproval and impossible standards—Rae’s mother when Rae was five, Lacy the following year, his two sisters (one never married; one had a son and fled to England, there to die in the Blitz during the Second World War).