Folly (45 page)

Shortly after lunch, Rae happened to catch Nikki in the process of stripping off her long-sleeved shirt. Her hands waved over her head and her flaming hair emerged, jerking Rae vividly back to the dream she’d had of the dancing women in Folly bursting into flame. The men, too, had paused to await the appearance of Nikki’s tank top, and suddenly Rae knew, with a vision so clear and precise that it could have been the catalogue photograph, what her next wood sculpture would depict: Nikki as wood nymph, emerging from the trunk of a tree, a gnarled, heavy-rooted, sea-worn trunk that would give way to clean red cedar, the sprite’s arms stretched upward as if she were plunging into the air.

Rae blinked. If she ever did another sculpture. She picked up a 2×4, and the moment passed.

The afternoon drew to a close; one by one the hammers fell silent and the crew gathered down in Rae’s campsite. Sweaty and tired and beers now in hand, they perched on the cedar trunk and the stump rounds to look up with the craftsman’s quiet pride at what they had done.

Anchored by the two stone towers, the house stood, strong and complete even without a roof. Folly it might be, but the structure belonged in that place, facing its cove and the strait beyond, rooted in stone and grown in wood, the vision of a man, the determination of a woman, and the skill of a community gone into raising it again.

Rae had tears standing in her eyes as she thanked each of them, tears (as they thought) of joy and pleasure, but not (as she herself knew) untainted by a faint sour trace of failure.

“Jerry,” she said, “could you stay for a minute? I need to talk to you.”

She saw Bobby Gustafsen elbow the younger deputy, who predictably enough blushed, but she ignored the exchange. Ignored, too, the glances they gave Nikki as she gathered her tools and one of the coolers and got into cousin Bo’s boat, her back resolutely turned to shore. When the sounds of the engines had died off, Rae dug two beers out of the melted ice in her own cooler and handed one to Jerry. They strolled
out the promontory and settled down on a pair of sun-warmed rocks. Jerry faced the house; Rae sat looking out over the open strait.

“Was this your idea, or Nikki’s?” she asked him after a while.

He did not answer immediately, and Rae knew that it was not his memory he was searching, but his understanding of the implications of her asking.

“It was Nikki’s,” he said. “She came to me with the suggestion, I agreed, we each rounded up a couple of others. You’re angry.”

“Not angry. Overwhelmed, yes. And confused, I guess, and a little bit resentful. Just a little bit. None of which sit well with grateful and overjoyed, which I am as well.”

He said nothing, merely waited for her to go on.

“I think what it boils down to is, I’m not simply building a house here. I came to Folly as a kind of last stand, and building this house, with my own hands, is like building myself. If I don’t do it myself, it isn’t real. I don’t want you to think I’m pissed off at how today went—hell, you guys saved me weeks of work—but just the way it came. Nikki’s a little … too helpful.”

Carmichael listened carefully to her explanation, frowning as he rolled the bottle back and forth between the palms of his large hands. The sleeves of his work shirt were turned up on his forearms, and he smelled like a long day of hard work. When he was sure she had finished, he gave her his side.

“I’d probably feel the same way, if I were in your shoes. Sort of like when a parent comes along and finishes up a kid’s project for him, trying to be helpful. It’s because it was Nikki, and because she is pushy, that I got involved. She just doesn’t know when to stop—if it’d been up to her, you’d have your shingles, windows, and a front door up by now.

“I thought about discouraging her, or at least asking your permission. I mean, not everybody likes surprises. But in the end, I went along with her, and I’ll tell you why.

“You see, here on the islands, we tend to divide into ‘us’ and ‘them’— you’re either a full-time resident who was born here, or you’re a newcomer. Obviously you’re an outsider, but because it’s Folly we’re talking about, the situation’s a little different. With you it could go either way, because although you are clearly a stranger, at the same time you’re a part of the islands in a way someone who just bought a piece of land to build a two-million-dollar summer house on could never be. And the people
who live here would be happy to have you stay a hermit, happy if you never set foot off Folly, if they could still feel like you’re one of them. Us. That’s what today was about: saying, ‘You are one of us, so we’ll lend a hand with Folly.’”

“Or, on the other hand: ‘You’re one of us,
because
we lent you a hand with Folly.’”

“That too. Sometimes a family has to go that extra step, to remind one of its members that she belongs.”

Rae tipped her head back to watch the sky, rose shading to indigo.

“Okay,” she told him. “Just so it’s only the once.”

“Just the once,” he promised. “If you want some help with raising the roof, you’ll have to ask. And, provide dinner for the whole crew.”

Rae cast a last glance at the sunset and stood up. “Dinner for one I could manage. If you don’t have to rush back to the world.”

“They know where to reach me,” he replied. “Thanks, I’ll take you up on the offer.”

Rae’s Journal

June 3

What is faithfulness?

I was never unfaithful to Alan. In nine years of marriage, I was never tempted beyond thought—and although a certain President admitted to having committed adultery in his mind, if we held everyone to those standards, the entire nation would end up behind bars for imagined crimes from embezzlement to mass murder.

It was a great shock when it dawned on me a short time ago that there was no longer any barrier between me and another man. I am not a married woman anymore, even though I still wear the wedding band that Alan placed on my finger ten years ago. I am perfectly free to look with speculation at a mans broad shoulders, or to kiss his mouth if I want to, or even to go to bed with him if I choose. Hell, I don’t even have to worry about pregnancy now.

That was a revelation. A troubling one; scary, even.

I am feeling the same sense of adulterous betrayal to poor Folly, that I have been unfaithful to the house that Desmond set before me, letting others intrude on the solidarity of our relationship, his and mine. I made vows to this house, to have and to hold, from this time forward, till death us do part. Instead, I have allowed strangers to lay their hands on it, to shape it and somehow claim it for their own.

(God, I must be drunk. I’m certainly raving.)

My neighbors have intruded, yes; on the other hand, a house is married to its community, not just to its owner. And if the owner is her house, I suppose I could say that I have just consummated my relation-ship with my new neighbors.

Oh, God. I
am
raving. This is all quite insane and I am more than a little drunk. I think I must feel guilty that I’ve saved myself so much work. Where’s my hair shirt?

Interested in food or not, even at the best of times Rae was no gourmet chef, and her current cuisine, coming as it did out of crates, tended toward the dried, the canned, and the instant. Still, there was plenty of it, and Jerry was too polite (and too hungry) to complain.

After they had scraped the pot and their plates, she asked him to carry the two chairs down to the beach. She followed with the dusty wine bottle she had found in the cave, a corkscrew, and her two elegant glasses.

The moon was hugely lopsided over the still waters of the cove, four days past full but still throwing distinct shadows on the beach. Rae sat with the butt of the bottle trapped between her boots and went cautiously to work with the corkscrew, going more by feel than by sight. The cork gave way slowly, crumbling slightly but emerging more or less intact. Rae undid the cork from the screw and held it under her nose, then dropped it in her shirt pocket and reached for a glass. Proper manners suggested she should offer the first glass to her guest, but she didn’t want to be held responsible for poisoning the sheriff of San Juan County.

She breathed in the vapors, took a tentative sip, and rolled it across her tongue. When she did not instantly gag and spit it out, Jerry asked, “Not vinegar, then?”

She swallowed. “No, but it wouldn’t make a bad marinade. Or a cleaning solution.”

She held it out for him to try. When he sipped and swallowed and
still kept the glass, she poured herself some in the other one, screwed the bottle down into the sand, and sat back to try it again. Yes, about the most that could be said for the substance in the bottle was that it was not vinegar. Flat, heavy, with all the nuance of a boiled shoe and possessing a distinct aftertaste of mildew; but it was not quite vinegar.

Perversely, they both drained their glasses, although the moon had heaved itself several degrees farther into the sky by the time they did so.

“It’s not bad,” Jerry pronounced lazily, “if you don’t think of it as wine.”

“If I donate it to the historical society like Nikki asked me to, they could sell it as Desmond’s furniture stripper.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Yes it is.” She got to her feet, noticing with some concern that her legs had gone numb from the knees down. Although that might have been from the six-pack the two of them had polished off before dinner. “You want some drinkable wine, or would you rather have Scotch?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

Scotch it was, twenty-year-old single-malt tipple, and it required several swallows to scrape the fur from their outraged tongues. The moon danced with the faint ripples in the cove, breaking up and re-forming, as the small brown bats flitted back and forth over their heads.

“Not a bad place to grow up, was it, Jerry?”

“A fine place. I missed it while I was away. Used to wake up in the barracks smelling the sea.”

“Were you in Vietnam?” He would have been old enough to hit the final days of that war, Rae figured.

“Germany.”

“Lucky.”

“I guess. My brother went through ’Nam. Seeing what it did to him, I always felt like I’d cheated and somehow got away with a cushy couple of years. And then at the end of it they even paid for me to go to college. Survivor’s guilt, you know.”

Rae Newborn knew survivor’s guilt very well indeed.

“Did he die, then, your brother?”

“No. Wounded once, not badly enough to get sent home. But something bad happened over there that he never got over. I never knew the details, since it never came to trial, but it was some kind of My Lai thing, involving civilians. Children died. Like I said, he never got over it. When
he came home he started working with abused kids, as a way of making amends, I always thought. I don’t know what he’s doing now.”

“Does he live around here?”

“Nobody seems to know where he lives. We get phone calls from time to time, and he sounds good, but he and my dad don’t see eye to eye, so he doesn’t come home much. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years.”

A tiny fish leapt out of the water, breaking the moon’s reflection into a shower of sparkles. Rae lifted her glass, and noticed the same reflections there, dancing. Maybe it was her vision, she thought; everything seemed to be dancing more than a little. She pulled herself together. “You know, ever since I got here I seem to be running into—what’s the saying? War and rumors of war. I mean, where I live, or where I used to live in California, there’s military bases all over the place, weapon development companies, you name it, to say nothing of kids with guns in their hands, but other than the foreign news I’d never hear about war. And then I come here, to the most peaceful, gorgeous corner of God’s green earth, and I buy a guidebook and read about places in my neighborhood called Slaughter and Victim Island and Murder Point. Bobby Gustafsen lives on Massacre Bay. Then there’s the Pig War, and smugglers of everything from Chinese workers to rum and cocaine, and Al Capone–type crime lords, and now here we are talking about Vietnam. And I suppose next you’re gonna tell me Nikki Walls went out with Desert Storm.”