Authors: Laurie R. King
“Desmond, is it? Who the hell’s been blabbing to you about that worthless ne’er-do-well? Who? Tell me, girl!”
She pressed back into her chair, as if to make as small a target as possible against his wrath, her body rigid with shock. He continued shouting. “My God, I have no respect in my own house. It was the servants, I suppose, chattering about something that’s no business of theirs.
“Not that it’s your business either, girl. Desmond Newborn was my brother, a shiftless good-for-nothing who went off and volunteered for somebody else’s war, got himself shot up for his pains, came back here and lived off my sweat until he could walk, and then to show his gratitude took to the road like some damned hobo. In and out of jail, never a job. The last I heard of him was a letter two months before the Crash, and that’s the last I ever
want to
hear of him. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
Rae seized this crescendo as a command to depart. She scuttled from the room with as much dignity as her nine-year-old self could muster, wrapping pride around her like armor until she had reached the safety of her bedroom, at which point she crawled into the bottom of her bed and let go, sobbing until she hiccoughed at the terror and fury, the outrage and injustice of Grandfather’s response.
I was just asking a question
, she whispered to herself over and over.
I just wanted to know.
By the time Cook came to look for her, Rae’s young mind had settled on righteous indignation. She did not speak to her grandfather for two days (which he actually seemed not to notice) and never again dared ask him about his brother, but the sheer unwarranted force of William’s reaction guaranteed that Desmond Newborn became a permanent resident in Rae’s young mind. Once she had recovered from the shock, she found Desmond lurking in the background, a curiosity and an enigma. He became a sort of imaginary friend, confidant to her secrets and problems, unseen protector and bulwark against God’s wrath. He helped Rae keep her chin raised whenever William blew up at her, helped her look her grandfather in the eye when she wanted to crawl away and tremble. By her tenth birthday, Rae desired nothing better than to be a
ne’er-do-well
herself. Whatever that was.
She never again approached William about the subject, never saw the leather box again until she inherited it, but over the years she pieced together a few facts about her secret companion. She chose her informants cautiously, relatives and family employees who would not instantly report her interest to William, and discovered that there had been an earlier war than the one in which Cook’s son had died and the young gardener had fought: Desmond’s war. When she was twelve she found a book in the public library about the terrible conditions of the soldiers in the First World War, but it only puzzled her the more. Given what she learned, she would have thought that the nobility of Desmond’s voluntary enlistment, followed by honorably received wounds, would have made him a shining legend throughout the generations. Instead, before Rae was even born, the family’s collective memory had shied away from Desmond, retreating into that vagueness that signals extreme discomfort. His Croix de Guerre was locked away in William’s drawer, his injuries referred to so obliquely that, as a child, Rae had believed it to mean that his face was horribly disfigured; as an adolescent, she concluded that he must have lost his genitalia. Only as an adult, after poring over the diary kept by William’s wife, Lacy—which was, unfortunately, little more than a laconic record of family events and household expenses—had Rae glimpsed the truth: that what Desmond left on the Western Front was a portion of his mind; that was the shame for which his family could not forgive him.
After Desmond had recovered from his body’s wounds, convalescing in the chilly family mansion near Boston where Rae had spent most of her own childhood, the ex-soldier, as Grandfather had said, took to the road. Desmond Newborn would appear on the doorstep of one or another of his widespread relations and roost with them for a few weeks, usually in the cold months when pneumonia or just bronchitis laid hold of his weakened lungs (a legacy of the trenches). Then he would pack up his rucksack and disappear again, quartering the country, heading gradually west. Buried among Lacy’s dutiful recording of weather and health, the baby’s milestones and monies spent on dresses and gifts, William’s wife would note an occasional sum wired to her brother-in-law in Louisville or Chicago or Boise. Once, without comment, her copperplate handwriting recorded that bail had been provided on a vagrancy charge near Houston. Later, in early 1921, more jail monies were provided, only this time not as bail. Rae had never found out why Desmond
had spent six months behind bars, but she knew that Lacy had sent money and a parcel of warm clothing, with no information in her diary other than the address of the Yakima jail.
Then, the following summer, the wanderer had washed up in the San Juan Islands in the state of Washington, about as far from Boston as a person could get without crossing a sea or a border; here Desmond Newborn found a home at last. Here he bought an island (a transaction not recorded in Lacy’s diary, so it must have come under William’s jurisdiction) and built his folly, an oddly elegant little wooden house nestled between two highly idiosyncratic stone towers, here on this string of cold, remote, and at the time sparsely inhabited islands on the crumbling edge of a continent. And here he lived, with the seabirds and the orca whales for company, until the wanderlust grew up again and took him off a few years later. At some point—no one seemed to know just when—the house caught fire and burned to the stonework, and both the island and Desmond Newborn’s shadowy legend were absorbed back into the family pool. Since that time the island had remained uninhabited, temporarily deeded to the state as a wildlife sanctuary, with the ownership and Desmond’s medals coming to Rae on the settling of her father’s estate five years before.
It was this strange, bereft remnant of a house, more than any other thing, that had anchored Rae’s climb from madness. Last May, five months after the accident and four after the attack, Rae’s mind had begun with great reluctance to unfurl from its tight retreat. In spite of herself, she started to take notice of her surroundings—the noise and disruption of the hospital, the tyranny of the drugs, the press of people and walls and cigarette smoke: a turmoil as great as that inside her mind. She began to seek out the quieter corners of the hospital grounds, craving solitude as a desert traveler thirsts for water. And like that traveler, Rae had eventually glimpsed solitude and, more faintly, purpose—a tool in the hand and the ability to concentrate on its use—flickering and wavering in the distance, as ethereal as a mirage and every bit as compelling. Except that the thought of returning home, the very idea of stepping into her fragrant and expectant workshop attached to a house that reverberated with emptiness, made her shiver with a mixture of desire and terror.
Into this tangle of inchoate yearnings and inexpressible fears had dropped a book, one of those strangely assorted and badly worn paperbacks
abandoned by patients or donated by the carton to places such as mental hospitals. It was missing its cover and the first dozen pages, but the remainder fell into Rae’s confused and heavily sedated mind like a seed into loam.
A man had built a house. An untrained and remarkably incompetent man (who would have reminded Rae of her first husband, David, except that this man was so cheerful about admitting his incompetence) had made for himself a shelter: a roof, four walls, a floor. In the incestuous manner of writers, his purpose seemed to be not so much the creation of shelter as the opportunities the building process gave for self-reflection—and, it went without saying, the publication of a book about both building and self-reflection—but in reading it, Rae saw only the dream given form, the creation of House out of Thought. She read and reread the book until it went to pieces. She could still recite long passages from memory.
Like a seed—or a lifeline.
Great-uncle Desmond’s skeletal home came to her as in a dream. In truth, during those months most things came to her as in a dream, but this one did not fade. Instead, it blossomed swiftly into full potential: She would pull herself together, she would go and rebuild Desmond’s house, she would lift his walls and dwell within them quietly all the rest of her days. Everything that House was lay there waiting for her to take it up: House as shelter, House as permanence, House as a continuation and a legacy, comfort and challenge, safety and beauty, symbol and reality joined as one. While Rae’s body wandered the hospital halls and grounds, her mind walked through the rooms she had known: the coldly formal dining room of her childhood home and the warmth of its nearby kitchen; the oddly shaped attic room of a bed-and-breakfast she had stayed in near Oxford and the gilded ceilings of the palace at Versailles; the tracery of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and the cramped door frames of Wright’s workshop in Scottsdale. She pictured herself in each one, saw herself in the process of hanging that dining room’s awful wallpaper, troweling on that attic’s plaster, building those rooms, and eventually, as a logical end point, the remembered and the imagined merged: Desmond, the mysterious lost relative who had intrigued her youth, stood beside her as she laid board upon board, making the house on Folly anew. Desmond, the family’s other black sheep and the shadowy companion of her childhood, returned now to muse with her: How
to get that roof up, all on her own? How to stand those walls, mount those windows, lay those shingles? Desmond, of whom William had disapproved almost as ferociously as he had Rae, walked with her through Folly, until she could envision each step of the rebuilding process, one following another, no flaws. Desmond, fantasy guardian and companion, would be with her.
It had seemed so simple at the time.
Now, standing at the edge of a Pacific Northwest jungle with the painful throb of a burned finger to distract her, just pushing her way through to Folly’s derelict front steps looked to be a challenge. Rae had no intention of beginning the ground clearing at this hour, with the first intimations of darkness gathering in, but she also did not want to go to bed without having at least glimpsed the foundation. Gingerly, painstakingly, she threaded her boots through the wet vegetation—most of which seemed to have thorns—wading her way up the low slope until her toe hit something more solid than stems. She plunged a gloved hand deep into the greenery and tugged blindly. The rich odor of broken plant and torn soil rose up, and she pulled again, and again, until there they lay, looking like a stairway leading through the jungle to a Mayan temple: Desmond Newborn’s front steps.
Rae gazed up at the four wide, immobile granite slabs. Stone was a medium foreign to her, a woman who had spent most of her adult life in a dialogue between the organic subtleties of wood and the ever-present danger of wickedly sharp steel, but there was no doubt that rock like this spoke of another world entirely, one of eternity, imperviousness, and utter solidity.
She put a foot gingerly on the lowest step, rocking her weight back and forth; the step did not budge. Scuffling some of the generations of leaf mold to one side revealed a mottled gray surface, finely textured. The next step was equally solid, and the third.
Shoving a pile of rich soil off the end of the third step, Rae’s boot encountered something hard among the brambles. She burrowed through blackberry canes as thick as her thumb and rose stems hairy with thorns, and found herself looking at a slab of milled wood nearly two inches thick, dark with age but otherwise well preserved. She ripped and yanked, hesitant to commit her leg to leaving the steps but curious to see what this immense plank might be. After a few minutes, she had cleared one corner of it, a handsbreadth in both directions. The rest disappeared
into the mass of vegetation. She grabbed the object and wiggled it from side to side; a lot of the growth moved in response. Without a concerted daylight effort there was no guessing the final measurement, but Rae looked from the steps to the wood and concluded that, despite its inordinate thickness, this was likely to be Desmond’s front door, fallen here when the house burned away from it. She knelt on the granite and stretched out to shove the growth from the lumber’s upper edge; a foot from the bottom her gloves found an enormous iron hinge.
Rae was smiling when she drew back her arm. Desmond’s door; who would have expected even a corner of it to have survived? She yanked off both gloves and pulled the knife from her tool belt, snapped open the blade, and stretched down to shave a thin layer from the door’s edge. Her hands seemed certain of the grain’s direction even if her eyes couldn’t see beneath the dirt, and indeed, as the blade traveled down the plank toward her thumb, the wood curled obediently over it. She caught the wide shaving and held it up to the fading light, noting its red interior, then put it to her nose. Beneath the earthy smell lay the faintest ghost of a tang: Western red cedar. She studied the revealed grain for a moment, caressing its fine dry texture, then slipped the curl into her shirt pocket before standing up and giving the protruding corner a last speculative glance.
Then she retreated. Back at the fire pit she threw some wood onto the coals to heat water for the dishes, retrieved her dinner plate from the arms of a bush, and washed up, taking care to lock away all traces of food. She was still hyperconscious of the unaccustomed noises around her, aware of the twitchiness of her muscles and every motion of the waves, but it was not as bad as it had been earlier. Perhaps uncovering the stones had helped: nothing like a ton or so of granite to lend a touch of reality to an enterprise. Maybe the unexpected glimpse of Desmond’s own woodwork steadied her. Or it might have been just the consumption of food that brought her down to earth. Whatever the reason, she now felt strong enough for the next step.
She picked up the green knapsack and took from it a mashed white paper bag with the name of a pharmacy printed on the front. The sky had cleared while she wasn’t looking, particularly out toward the western horizon; the undersides of the clouds now glowed rosy with the angle of the sun. Sticking the flashlight into an empty loop of the tool belt, she carried the paper bag down across the beach to the rock promontory— and nearly leapt into the cove at her left when a pair of heavy objects
splashed into the open water to her right. She peered, trembling, at the water, and a moment later burst into nervous laughter as two drowned-looking heads popped up from the water: harbor seals, disturbed from their perch by her passing. They looked up at her reproachfully with their liquid eyes.