A Ship Made of Paper

“I like to think ofpeople when they were little kids.You must have been one ofthose heartbreaking little kids, with a serious face and se-cretive, really secretive.The kind ofkid that a mother sort ofhas to spy on to figure out what’s really going on.”Distress courses across her eyes, like speeded-up film ofclouds 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…butIstarted 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 ofsnow.While Daniel watches her Volvo backing up, he thinks:She knocked on my door.

[4]

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 won-dered 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 hus-band’s fastidiousness, his loathing of mess, his fear of germs.He had turned their

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 min-utes, 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 ofhis 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 ofprivileged men and there is nothing he can do to obscure that fact, though it seems he is engaged in a perpetual project ofself-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 aTexaco attendant named Oscar.In a family ofoversized 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 au-thoritative in his manner.His light blue eyes have that arrogant flicker that comes from a genetic memory ofluxury 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 ofa three-mile curve ofblacktop.There is dis-order 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.

Some people wonder ifFerguson realizes that his once proud ancestral mansion is a wreck, a pile ofweather- beaten stone and crumbling plaster.He is painfully aware ofhis 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 ofEight 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 ofhis ancestors, Ferguson felt that his dignity, his manhood, his re-spectability, and his place in history were all dependent upon keeping the property intact.Unfortunately, ifhe 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 ofthe estate, each with a wing ofthe house, where they come and go unannounced and even invite friends to stay—none ofthem choose to live there.In fact, they have es-tablished their lives in St.Croix, Santa Barbara, and Nairobi, and they re-turn 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 MarieThorne, who has been back at Eight Chimneys for the past year and with whom he is having the most exciting and pleasurable love affair ofhis forty-two years on earth.Marie wants to turn a portion ofEight 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, ofcourse, details to be worked out, pro-posals to be written in the strange language ofsuch things, public support to be marshalled, legislators to be brought on board—and that is what to-day’s meeting with Daniel is, a beginning, a first step in that direction.

But suddenly Ferguson finds himself staring at something he has never seen before in October.He shifts his weight, the front legs ofhis chair bang down onto the planks ofthe 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 de-struction it wrought.On this property alone, thousands oftrees were lost.Nature’s design is for the snows to come after the leaves are offthe trees.That way, the snow falls to the ground.But ifthe leaves are still on the branches, the snow catches in the canopies, until the branches can-not 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 ofopen 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 ofdelight in the imminence oftrouble, a morbid receptivity to dis-aster.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 ofjewelry.She’s a large-boned, voluptuous woman, full ofen-thusiasm and temper.With erupting, abundant black hair and fierce green eyes, she’s the sort ofwoman who frightens children.She and Fer-guson have been married for twelve years.They are second cousins on their mothers’sides, but whatever