But he doesn’t have a chance to obsess, not just then. He turns around to see her walking across the parking lot. She is alone, not a hundred feet away. It’s always so startling to see her, like spotting a celebrity.
She seems to float toward him.
“I thought your lights were on,” he says, dropping her notebook and
[ 69 ]
swinging the door shut. It closes with a sturdy Swedish finality that he hopes will prevent her from asking any questions.
“You’re all dressed up,” she says.
Daniel touches the knot of his tie. “I was in court.”
“Did you win?”
“That’s the thing about court, you rarely win and you rarely lose.”
“I once thought I was going to be a lawyer,” Iris says. “My dad always said I should be one, but just because I argued over everything, you know that way slightly spoiled kids do. I thought I could talk him into anything.”
The thought of her as a child both stuns and provokes Daniel, imagining her that way, in that distant world.
She senses his mind is elsewhere and moves her face a little closer to his.
“Is that why you wanted to be a lawyer?” she asks.
“I never argued with my parents, I was too afraid of them. I thought they’d fire me.”
“I like to think of people when they were little kids. You must have been one of those heartbreaking little kids, with a serious face and secretive, really secretive. The kind of kid that a mother sort of has to spy on to figure out what’s really going on.” Distress courses across her eyes, like speeded-up film of clouds moving through the sky. Daniel guesses she is thinking about Nelson.
“That was fun Friday night,” she says. Her voice rises with what seems like forced gaiety.
“My office is here,” Daniel says, gesturing toward the building.
“I know,” says Iris. She opens her oversized purse and pokes around for her car keys, finds them. “I knocked on your door on my way out.”
“You did?”
“I guess you were down here.”
“Yes, I was.” A little more explanation seems called for. “I’m on my way to see a client . . . but I started looking at the snow. Early for snow, isn’t it?”
She gets into her car, turns on the engine.The windshield wipers cut protractors into the fuzzy coating of snow. While Daniel watches her Volvo backing up, he thinks:
She knocked on my door.
They reached the top of the small hill they’d been climbing, but the sight lines
were no better than below. The only sky they could see was directly above them,
gray, going black.
“What do you think?” said Daniel.
“I think we’re lost,” Hampton said, shaking his head.
“Next they’ll be sending a search party after us,” Daniel said. He noticed some
-
thing on the ground and peered more closely at it. A dead coyote like a flat gray
shadow. Sometimes at night, he and Kate could hear coyotes in the distance, a pack
whipping themselves up into a frenzy of howls and yips, but this desiccated pelt,
eyeless, tongueless, was the closest he had come to actually seeing one. He wondered what had killed it.
“What do you have there?” Hampton asked.
“The animal formerly known as coyote,” Daniel said.
Breaking off a low, bare branch from a dead hemlock, Daniel poked the coyote’s
remains.Curious,Hampton stood next to him, frowning.A puff of colorless dust rose
up.The world seemed inhospitable—but, of course, it wasn’t: they were just in the
part of it that wasn’t made for them. Here, it was for deer, foxes, raccoons, birds and
mice and hard-shelled insects, fish, toads, sloths, maggots. Hampton stepped back
and covered his mouth and nose with his hand, as if breathing in the little puff that
had arisen from the coyote would imperil him. Iris had often bemoaned her husband’s fastidiousness, his loathing of mess, his fear of germs. He had turned their
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water heater up and now the water came out scalding, hot enough to kill most
household bacteria.There were pump-and-squirt bottles of antibacterial soap next
to every sink in the house; if Iris had a cold, Hampton slept in the guest room, and
if Nelson had so much as a sniffle, Hampton would eschew kissing the little boy
good night, he would literally shake hands with him instead and then, within minutes, he’d be squirting that bright emerald-green soap into his palm, scrubbing up
a lather, and then rinsing in steaming water.
Ferguson Richmond watches the rain from the front of his immense, crumbling house, reclined on an old cane chair, with his work boots propped up on the porch railing. He comes from a long line of privileged men and there is nothing he can do to obscure that fact, though it seems he is engaged in a perpetual project of self-effacement. He is careless about his appearance. He barbers his own hair, ekes out twenty shaves from his disposable razor, and wears large black-framed glasses from the hardware store, which are held together with electrical tape.Today, he is dressed like a garage mechanic, in grease-stained khaki trousers and a shapeless green shirt that had once belonged to a Texaco attendant named Oscar. In a family of oversized men and strapping women—
large-headed people, with broad, bullying shoulders—Richmond is the runt. He is five feet eight inches, with skinny legs and delicate hands, and he is steadfastly uninterested in all sports and games. He neither boxes, nor climbs, nor kayaks, nor shoots; his passions are for strong coffee and old farm machinery. All the same, there is something confident and authoritative in his manner. His light blue eyes have that arrogant flicker that comes from a genetic memory of luxury and power; they are rooms that had been emptied and scrubbed after a legendary party.
Eight Chimneys is a huge derelict holding, encompassing over a thousand acres on both sides of a three-mile curve of blacktop. There is disorder everywhere, from disintegrating stone gates overgrown with vines and capped by headless lions, to its unmown fields in which are hidden rusted threshers, ancient, abandoned tractors, and dead deer.
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Some people wonder if Ferguson realizes that his once proud ances-tral mansion is a wreck, a pile of weather-beaten stone and crumbling plaster. He is painfully aware of his house’s derelict condition. Five- and ten-acre parcels could be put on the market and they’d surely be snapped up by builders, and investors, but the full reach and grandeur of Eight Chimneys had not been diminished by even a solitary acre since it had first been granted to the Richmonds by King George, and, like genera-tions of his ancestors, Ferguson felt that his dignity, his manhood, his respectability, and his place in history were all dependent upon keeping the property intact. Unfortunately, if he doesn’t do something soon to shore things up, the house might be lost forever. But how could he ever get enough money to put it right again?
He hardly cares about money, except how it might intrude on his right to reside at Eight Chimneys. Though his brothers, Bronson and Karl, and his sister, Mary, all own shares of the estate, each with a wing of the house, where they come and go unannounced and even invite friends to stay—none of them choose to live there. In fact, they have established their lives in St. Croix, Santa Barbara, and Nairobi, and they return only for the occasional holiday or funeral, at which time they heap scorn and mockery upon Ferguson for how he’s letting the place go.
But now he has an idea, suggested by a lovely, surprisingly clever blind girl named Marie Thorne, who has been back at Eight Chimneys for the past year and with whom he is having the most exciting and pleasurable love affair of his forty-two years on earth. Marie wants to turn a portion of Eight Chimneys into a museum. Result? Taxes slashed, plus extensive renovations at the public’s expense. The taxpayers will foot the bill, and what a sweet thought that is. Foot the bill, foot the bill, there are times when Ferguson literally cannot stop saying it to himself. It’s his new mantra, which is what he said to his spiritually promiscuous wife.
Foot the
bill om shanti shanti
. There are, of course, details to be worked out, pro-posals to be written in the strange language of such things, public support to be marshalled, legislators to be brought on board—and that is what today’s meeting with Daniel is, a beginning, a first step in that direction.
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But suddenly Ferguson finds himself staring at something he has never seen before in October. He shifts his weight, the front legs of his chair bang down onto the planks of the porch, and he stands straight up.
The rain is turning to snow! Thick, heavy snow. At least a month too early. His father once told him about an early October snow and the destruction it wrought. On this property alone, thousands of trees were lost. Nature’s design is for the snows to come after the leaves are off the trees.That way, the snow falls to the ground. But if the leaves are still on the branches, the snow catches in the canopies, until the branches cannot bear the extra weight, and then that’s it, the trees succumb, they bend so far in one direction or another that their roots come right out of the soil, or else they snap in two, like old cigars.
Ferguson stands transfixed as the snow drifts over everything. In less than an hour, there is no green, no red, no brown, no gold: every tree is white, and every inch of open land is white, too. The snow is wet, porous; it lies in the field like that foam they spray on runways after a crash. This is very, very bad, Ferguson thinks.Yet he’s smiling. He feels a kind of delight in the imminence of trouble, a morbid receptivity to disaster. Good, he thinks, good, let it all come down.
Moments later, Ferguson’s wife, Susan, appears on the porch. Ferguson dresses like a handyman, but Susan favors capes, and at least two pounds of jewelry. She’s a large-boned, voluptuous woman, full of enthusiasm and temper. With erupting, abundant black hair and fierce green eyes, she’s the sort of woman who frightens children. She and Ferguson have been married for twelve years. They are second cousins on their mothers’ sides, but whatever genetic risk that poses is a moot point. They have no offspring.
“The electricity just went off,” Susan announces. “And once again we are plunged into shit.”
Fuck yourself, I wish your head would explode, get out of my life,
thinks Ferguson.
Let me sleep with Marie unmolested, spare me your pedestrian, boring
guilt trips, get out get out . . .
“I don’t know why we don’t have a generator,” Susan adds.
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
“I’m working on it,” says Ferguson. “Sit down, Susan. Look at all this snow.You may never see anything like this again. We are really in for it.
This happened before, in 1934, and it was a complete disaster.”
“I was hoping to bathe,” Susan says. “And I was also hoping to make some progress in organizing the library.” Eight Chimneys’ state of disrepair has come to irritate Susan, and, lately, imposing some order on it has become a virtual obsession. She simply cannot take it any longer. What had once seemed like a charming, funky casualness, a kind of stylish nose-thumbing at all of those blue bloods who once occupied these rooms, now strikes her as a kind of hell, an inferno of shattered sconces, peeling wallpaper, cracked plaster, stained ceilings, threadbare carpets, broken windows, knobless doors, perilous staircases, inexplicable drafts, grotesque armoires, and heirloom furniture theoretically worth hundreds of thousands of dollars but in reality worth nothing because no one in his right mind would ever want it.
“I don’t want you to organize the library,” Ferguson says. “I need to go through everything first.”
“What is it exactly that you want to ‘go through’?”
“There’s a lot to go through.”
“And in the meanwhile, the disorder is intolerable.”
“You should work on your tolerance, then, Susan. It’s a brand-new world, nothing is ever going to be the way we want it.We have to adapt, we have to grow, learn, change. Haven’t any of your spiritual advisors told you this?”
Susan can no longer tell if Ferguson is speaking his mind or trying to make her lose hers. He likes to play devil’s advocate, which she thinks is the most corrupt, exhausting parody of real conversation.
“Who are you waiting for anyhow?” she asks him. “You’ve been out here for an hour.”
“Dan Emerson. He’s going to give us advice about making Eight Chimneys a historic site, and maybe even a museum.”
“Oh yes, Marie’s bright idea.” She looks out at the snow. “He’s probably not coming.”
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“He’ll be here. A man like Dan Emerson isn’t going to be pushed around by a few snowflakes. He’s high energy all the way. And I don’t think he’s averse to developing some river clientele.”
“Oh, no one gives a hoot about river people anymore.”
“But I don’t think he knows that. He was raised in our great collective shadow.”
Susan sticks her hand out over the porch railing, the snow melts in her dark, henna-streaked palm. “Maybe the roads are already closed. We can never be sure what’s happening out in the world. We’re stuck away like lunatics in this place.”
“I’m working on it, Susan. Anyhow, look who’s here.” He points toward the west, where a line of cedars stand like exclamation points. A car is coming toward the house, snow spraying from beneath the tires.
A few minutes later, Ferguson, Susan, and Daniel go into the library, where Marie Thorne awaits them. Serene and delicate, she stares sight-lessly out the window. She has luminous long hair, practically to her narrow little waist, the hair of a woman not fully in the world. She has been blind since birth.
Daniel has heard about what is going on between Ferguson and Marie—people in Windsor County gossip about the local gentry as if they are royalty, or movie stars. Marie is the daughter of Skip Thorne, a former caretaker at Eight Chimneys, and she was raised right there on the estate. Ferguson has a reputation of being especially drawn to young girls, and it’s also been said that he’d found Marie attractive even when she was eight years old.