Folly (25 page)

Then she hesitated. Leave the spearhead, with all its ambiguity— amusing curiosity or double-edged threat—or remove it, to be replaced by the image of herself? She pulled it carefully from the back of the mortar. It was a beautiful thing, to be sure, dark gray with faint light threads lending it texture. And brilliantly shaped, by an artist as well as a craftsman, each side mirroring the other, the undulations of its edge calling for the testing thumb even as it clearly menaced. She held it up by the blunt end, half-tempted to prick a few drops of blood, some obscure instinct for sacrifice. She laid the flat of it against her wrist; it covered all three scars. She pushed down, feeling it cool into the warm flesh. Tilting it slightly would draw blood. Tilting and then drawing it back …

Rae snatched the blade away from her lifeblood before it could cut her. After a moment, she reached forward to lay it crosswise in the mortar’s depths. In front of it she wedged the two wooden figures; they now stood between her and the sharp blade. Heavy-handed symbolism, she scoffed, but sometimes that was better than the overly subtle.

She brushed off her hands and stood up. Her guardian spirits in place, at long last it was time to breach the vast, ugly blue tarpaulined stack of lumber.

One thing Rae had known from the very beginning was she would build her house with wood of the same solidity that Desmond Newborn had used. Modern lumber is milled far below its nominal size: A “2×4” actually measures one and a half by three and a half inches, a “1×10” is a mere five eighths of an inch thick. Adequate, particularly when sheathed with plywood, but noticeably less solid than the full measure.

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 bouquets 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.