A Builder's Tale - Chapter Forty
Chateau Daphne, The market, Cortland And A tree, a tree, a tree. And then a forest.
Chapter Forty
Chateau Daphne, The market, Cortland
And
A tree, a tree, a tree. And then a forest.
And so, the project continued. Wilson putting off Cortland’s organization with stutters and stops, misplaced forms, and demands for money. While Daphne, with fading memories of Tim, occasionally presumes to be in charge, and bossy. But more often thinks of the rising markets, and visions of a future self, a year distant, wearing a floppy straw. Seeing herself clad diaphanous with silk and lounging comfortably in a deck chair. Or standing, apron on, in her new kitchen, gazing at a view of white sails, a breeze through open windows as she inhales the perfumed scents of summer. In these moments, she decides that to be in charge is to delegate. So, she urges Cort to… “Work it out with Wilson. Have him hurry-up and finish.”
Why not? The money was flowing. She knew this as a fact, noting her new found talent daily, her genius, as GG World kept rising, and all the CNBC wise men praising and predicting… complimenting her choices. Companies no longer needed to make money… Forget the ratios of the past. Today, the value was in the anticipated tomorrow. And when the nation met the future… well, then… then there would be plenty of time to base value on earnings. For the moment, it was all about expectations. Hope would drive the markets higher. She was fortunate to be alive at the dawning of the ‘new economy’.
“What does it matter, a bit more money?” she told Cort. “I’m making more every day. Just get it finished. Philippe is satisfied. He tells me it’s well built. Give Wilson what he wants. Be in charge without being in charge. Philippe told me that! Even if it costs a bit more. I’ve picked the stone, the shingles… Pallet five and cedar four. Philippe and I are going shopping for patio furniture.”
And though this sat in Cort’s craw, fought with his pinched Calvinism, and gnawed upon his greed, he was the one who had suggested GG-World. So, he did as Daphne instructed… Sending Wilson money, while preserving his authority by demanding that Wilson adopt “the bible” for all job reports … Something Wilson ignored.
With renewed funding, Wilson calmed the worries of Ransom, Walshinksi, and his crew, informing them that Cort’s Bible was “a bible they should heave a top the trash pile… to be consumed in the next fire.” And that all of Cort’s demanding at the meeting had simply been “a show for Daphne.”
“They had funds,” and “All would be swell… As long as the job progressed with industry.” He desired speed, progress, but primarily he demanded quality. And with hope and sunshine, and the earth’s rebirth, all went well for a time.
The process of building a grand house is a wonderful and fulfilling enterprise, especially for the builder, when the money’s there and one’s team is competent and smiling, finding fulfillment too. And if the builder is also the architect, it can be art and craftsmanship combined. When there is money, the hassles are small and common… Those of worker conflict, personality clashes, and the hung over sloth of individuals, and occasionally an employee who would rather dream than work. Take away the money worries, these and an owner’s whimsy… A project may become a joy. And add to this location and season, spring then early summer overlooking Lake Arnaud and Beauville… Everyone, from carpenter, to laborer, to plumber, and electrician… From those shingling the roof to those installing final blocking… from the stone masons extending the chimney high above the roof to others altering the landscape, two of his employees, sometimes painters, now staking and labeling the site for the coming trees and meandering stone walks and ways at his instruction. Everyone exhibiting a different gait, a jaunty inclination of the head, a furrowed brow of purpose… Smiling, happy with resolve.
Daily, Wilson went to the site, working on his pet project, the future stairs, as he answered questions and provided details while listening to a constant productive jabber intermixed with the normal ever present construction chatter, complaints of woman and sports teams… tales of sexual conquest, best lay’s, perfect tits, or past adventure along with the added babble of redneck republican politics dominated by some imagined Horatio Alger past, and a general up by your boot straps loathing of Unions. A self-defeating perspective Wilson did not understand coming from a working man, a politics he found foolish, ill advised, and one that he had given up talking about. These northern Michigan men never grasping that without the thrust of unions, everyone’s wages would suffer.
If the fools wanted to give it all away, the gains of almost a century, so be it. Their children and grandchildren would reap the pain. He had learned years ago that no amount of reason was going to shake them, no matter that at the recent ‘big meeting’ Courtland would have happily fleeced them all, and taken their boots and bootstraps with him. It had something to do with their ruggedness, or that perception, he supposed, their desire to be individual, to see themselves as special, unique, tough against the climate, survivors of the forest, hunters, subsistence men who did not see themselves as joiners. Unions were for downstate, and they lived in the harsher land of “God’s country”, and God would never have been for unions, would he?
In the mornings and evening breaks watching the ducks and geese on the lake, the patrolling swans, the wavered mist, the clouds, a wandering pageant across the sky. Well… It was a special place, Beauville, in spring and summer with everyone assembled fulfilled by the daily change, the rapid growth from enterprise, and spring transforming into summer… Chateau Daphne, full of smiles, practical jokes, productivity, and mirth.
Of course, it does not take much to make a builder, his subs, or crew happy. Simple progress is enough, and well-done progress is even better. With the freedom to work, and freedom to do a job as it should be done, without the need to cut corners, trim costs, or eliminate hidden necessities. With the freedom to perform, to make it right and proper, and sometimes perfect, and the men assured that they would be paid for their efforts… The daily working world of Chateau Daphne shouted fulfillment.
And just down the way, Brown was also full of the future. Brown fulfilling Brown, or “self-actualizin” as he would say, a phrase of his rummaged from Maslow, a synap blood brain splat of textbook memory. Brown, who had been hauling and banging for two weeks now… arranging and then rearranging his shipping containers, moving them about like furniture. “Put it there, no the red one, no the yellow one. Change the angle, South, south, south.” His voice penetrating the morning, combined with the rumbling of his equipment, the stench of his machines… Filling the days, and drifting towards the lake, and then across the road and with a shifting breeze enveloping Daphne land with noise and odor.
No one minded. It was more activity, and activity was good. It made a man feel alive. When the world about is building, it’s great to be part of it.
Not so much for Janet, who on her walks would smile more than last year, but still complain. And when she looked to Brown in the distance, it was with horror until she remembered that she was to have a new drive and a new stable to house her horses. Then the fat oaf conman ‘Digger’ became instead, ‘Benevolent Brown’. Still, as she walked rapidly by the noise and activity, Janet held her head high, with her nose pointed in disdain… Workers and work, just not her thing.
And as for Conrad… He had not lost a hair, even as his nose had acquired a bit more texture, and when they walked together, Janet’s long legged yard consuming gate slowed. At the end of the day just before cocktail hour, a time when Conrad was still upright and mobile, Wilson sometimes saw the two of them, arms linked, strolling. Conrad gesturing at everything and nothing, supported by a black and silver cane, a walking stick to match his flowing gray thatch, a cloak about his shoulders, his head topped jaunty with a fedora flipped as Italian movie gangsters wear them, looking like the artist, the great poet of his pretensions… A magnificent affectation.
Grace told him that they still loathed the house, but had accepted it… better finished and done than a half-finished mess looking like blight had struck the neighborhood. Still, if lightning were to strike, and the house to vanish… If Longbottom were to expire and if the land would somehow once again be theirs, well, “it would be just alright,” a phrase Conrad had brought back from their time in the Islands. However, that could never happen and they knew it.
Yet, as Longbottom Lane transformed from early spring to late, alive with activity, including Brown’s Camp Hope at its borders, there was a shadow on the future. There were fourteen lots, and no one else was building. When Wilson first returned to build here, he had thought that one house might lead to another. Imagining great progress, and great appreciation and more opportunity. But, the only one who had approached him in the last six months was that Petoskey realtor, looking for a bargain.
The lack of building was troubling to Wilson on the occasions when he thought he might remain in Beauville, with Grace, and future projects. It was much more so for Longbottom, who had expected to have sold his lots by now, and moved on to attack the next piece of large lake frontage with another money-making bit of subdividing. His notes were coming due. He needed sales and the added activity that would generate them. A virtuous loop of selling, construction and more subdividing. And while Wilson’s renewed building was helpful, very… It was not enough. And the Camp Hope collection of boxes was not helping. Last week, he had thought he had sold the lot at the southern end to a customer with friends who might also purchase. But, bad timing… When the man arrived and saw Brown atop his loader, saw the swinging containers, the barge at the shore, the round red steel erection that would be the dining hall. When the client saw the sign Camp Hope for Little Children… The sale was canceled, the money returned, his friends vanished with him.
And Longbottom, furious, had removed one of Brown’s smaller signs, stomped into Smythe’s office, thrown it on the lawyer’s desk and demanded that something must be done about Brown. Smythe had smiled, reasoned, and laughed, saying, “You're stuck with it. You can’t have a fight with Benevolent Brown… Bad publicity… Plus you’d lose. Do you want to sign up, contribute? You might still have a chance for one of the endowment cottages high up along the ridge. Great tax write-off. Fifty thousand now and another fifty next year and you get rights to a site, a one-hundred-foot envelope. View’s astounding. It’s all part of the Good Works Brown Foundation. We already have a charity directors board. But we might let you in. We’d have to check your back ground. Make sure you’re not a sex criminal. Can’t be too careful… Pedophiles are everywhere these days.” Smythe laughing, rolling back into his chair, spinning as Longbottom leaves his office.
Just what Longbottom needs, a camp next door, supported by a foundation that offers cottages, and you can deduct it on your tax return. Charitable contribution. Then he remembers there was a barge out front, with a tug and a sailboat tied up next to it. They’re going to put boats there, too. Fuck, he should have never messed with Wilson, and he should have hired Brown when he was laying out the estates. Damn. Good idea though. How had he missed this?
And on it went… Visqueen no longer flapped. Wind tossed tar paper had been replaced, then covered with shingles. The roof was almost finished, and the heavy laminated cedar timbers were half installed so that more wall shingling could commence. White Trillium filled the adjacent forest as spring raced to summer. Chateau Daphne building, the exterior finishing, and Brown, too busy to work at Daphne’s, allowed Indian Dick to borrow equipment to do the tasks Brown would have done, raking the land and mounding the acreage.
Loads of first more sand and then topsoil hauled in by Brown, and Indian Dick having fun atop the bulldozer pushing each dumped load back and forth, up then down, to match the heights he and Wilson had staked and marked the day before. Altering the buildings’ appearance even as the mansion’s location remained the same. But with the land itself, its contours remade to match the meandering lines of Wilson’s drawings, rising near the building’s sides, carved out towards the lake, and hollowed sideways at the drive, then rising again toward the road, the grand entrance presentation where when finished there would be Pfisters, flowers and tiered steps of stone leading to a massive oak door with a heavy brass Marley knocker.
And then, the final week of May, when the conifers were budding yellow bright green at their branch tips, when the deciduous maple’s leaves were half unfolding, the day came to create permanence… to bring in spots of forest high and low, front and back about Chateau Daphne, trees that hopefully, within months, a year or two, would look as if they had always been there. To change the landscape, the building’s aspect, to transform a once flat swamp field into a rolling acreage where trees had grown for decades.
Wilson’s approach to landscaping was instant, taller, bigger, wilder and less expensive. The local landscapers hated him. He did not pay thousands for a tree. He paid hundreds, negotiating with Brown to haul in trees from across the road, conifers and maples, twenty, thirty, thirty-five feet tall. This done with the aid of a large machine, a massive truck with eight wheels and a giant yellow scooping piercing pointed bucket mechanism that would open wide and surround a tree, and then close its jaws and hydraulic down, digging deep beneath the tree, then rise up with a circular cone of soil and roots with the tree on top and then fold itself horizontal, the bucket behind and the tree stretched forward to overhang, with the largest trees, the entire cab. They made an ungainly parade, Wilson and Dick behind this massive truck of yellow and green, with its folded tree as the branches, buds, tree, and contained soil buffeted by transport, moved from field to forest. Small clods of soil falling off and dusting up the morning. An impossible bit of forest riding horizontal down the highway.
Back and forth to Brown’s high acreage for a maple and then to the old Christmas tree farm where the trees had grown too thick and tall for Christmas… pines and spruce, now twenty and twenty-five feet tall with trunks six and eight inches in diameter. A Tree, a tree, a tree, the jaws encircling, surrounding shut, dig deep, dig deep, this circular cone… And then lift cone and tree and soil and roots as one, fold the tree horizontal across the long body of the truck, then drive to the site and deposit soil and roots and tree into a ready and waiting previously pierced hole. This went on at least one tree per hour.
The cycle repeating… plant tree, then scoop the next hole, then haul the bulbous topsoil and clay cone back to the forest, fill the previous hole, then scoop and lift the next tree with soil and roots attached, then repeat, repeat, repeat… as long as the daylight lasted. In a day, a tree mover could change an acre lot from field to forest, as long as Wilson found a forest nearby from which to pluck the trees. And in this case, the spruce and pines came from a Christmas tree farm amok with time, unharvested and grown too tall, and Brown’s deciduous forest high, and across the road. He had marked the trees days before, maples, pines and spruce, a hopeful birch. Forty trees, maples about the building, with a few spruces here and there, then at the lots north and south perimeters, conifers almost solid, tall and high to obscure the sight of any future building. An instant forest, and along the edge, pines, blue spruce if they could find some… stretching skyward, blocking the lots next door. And instead of a thousand, five hundred, two thousand bucks per tree. Depending on the size, he paid Brown fifty or a hundred.
The ‘professional landscapers’ the ones with their little huts, their stores, with packaged soil, cute picture books and fountains, birdbaths, and chain link fenced, a gravel lane’d arrangement behind asphalt parking lots… They hated this, saying “it was the wrong way, the trees weren’t perfect, they might have disease.” But Wilson knew. He had done it before. Only ten percent would die, unless he went for birch, and then only half of those would make it. Hell, a landscaper’s maple was only ten feet, fifteen feet tops, and Wilson’s from Brown’s Forest were twenty and thirty, thirty-five. Budding trees that would in two weeks be full, yet out of place, only because all the other lots were empty fields until you reached Chateau Daphne.
The effect was different… Strange, because the trees could not have possibly been landscaped there. They must have been there growing, year after year and decade. But how could that have happened, with no others anywhere, for a thousand feet in each direction? Wilson never understood why other builders did not do this. He supposed they simply did not realize. Or they made a larger cut, and it was easier walking about nurseries, selecting trees and jotting prices, owners in tow. While Wilson’s nursery was the forest, his goal was his building’s appearance, not simply dollars from some landscape kickback. And if not Brown’s land, some other farmers treed acreage. He always found them, farmers willing to do nothing and get paid one hundred bucks per tree. Yes, the landscapers hated him, but even after he paid for trees and laid out drainage and watering lines, he would only charge Daphne the cost plus his 12% and that would be just ten to fifteen thousand. Any other bid would have been for trees half the size and likely cost two, three times as much, or more.
And talk about fulfillment: one morning you arose to look at a barren lot, then you went to the forest and said that one, this one, that one, and by the end of the day or two. An impossible landscape would suddenly appear before you, as if the trees had been photo shopped into the picture, and perhaps by the end of summer, or even within a month, they, the landscape and the trees would appear to have always been there. The effect of the substantial trees, forest trees, imperfect sure, but nature is never perfect. These trees, different from a landscaper’s, less full, less pampered, natural, with conifers lacking the contrived sublimity of a city Christmas… Rougher, taller, some of the pines two topped, the maples lean and narrow trunked, grown from their forest floor towards the light, tall and slender from struggle.
Yes, the landscapers hated these imperfect trees. Had these landscapers been masons, they would have built with factory stone. Wilson could have played their game and made more money, his share larger on forty thousand than ten. He imagined this was why no one else did it his way. This and the kickbacks… Probably. The building business was laden with kickbacks, sneaky fees beneath the surface. Wilson moved in daylight, and oddly, well perhaps not… For this, he was resented. If one builder did not take the sneak, then it might expose an inappropriate charlatan custom practiced by all the others, and a violation of the norms of ‘get what you can get’.
Wilson suspected Cortland was one of these… A man well versed in the hidden fee, and this too might have been one reason that Cortland did not trust Wilson. Every crooked character assumes the same of everyone he deals with. An honest builder, impossible… Probably, thought Wilson, for the moment, his mind straying.
Yet, that the day he was creating a forest about Chateau Daphne Longbottom was watching, talking to Charles Lane, a local landscaper, about planting trees to block Brown’s Camp Hope. Wilson noticed them in discussion, too busy to stop and chat as he passed them, waving, following the giant tree-mover hauling first a twenty-five-foot spruce and then a thirty-foot maple. And then a birch and then another pine. Lane shaking his head as he and the trees went by… Longbottom watching.
They hauled and watered and dug and moved… twelve hours… but his plan and project required more. So, “one more day,” he said to the tree mover. It was 700 a day for the machine, that and fuel, and Wilson to pay for any breakage of equipment, a deal he had negotiated ten years before with his first project. Sweetheart… perhaps. The result of years of acquaintance… perhaps. That he had always paid the bill immediately… Probably. His landscaping was a good deal, but he would pass the goodness of it on to Daphne. It was not for money anyway, this approach and planting. Because it was simply too much fun to create a forest. And when divided into trees, the tree-mover rental was less than fifty bucks a tree.
He was up the next morning by 6, Dick at the site at seven digging drainage lines for the next batch of trees… Dumping in gravel, connecting pipe, a straight line with tentacles extending to the stakes for the rest of the trees, tentacles to ferry water away from the roots so that a first transplant summer’s constant watering, to insure the trees took hold, did not turn its roots to rot. Tomorrow, he would be putting in the smaller permanent pipes to carry water to them. This was the key to the tree’s survival. Lots of water, but none allowed to puddle in the clay, beneath the trees. Because… Under the sand and topsoil was a layer of clay, left from the years of waves and water and erosion from a higher beach. When Longbottom land had been always wet, a thousand years before, two thousand, ten thousand, the last ice age, who knew, but clay beneath the sand because of time.
By eight he was in the forest marking maples, and in the old Christmas tree farm selecting Spruce too tall for any home’s Christmas interior, marking them so he would remember. The plan was to plant fifteen more trees. He hoped to be done by 3 pm. But they would dig and haul and grade till dark if necessary. And then would come the next morning’s beauty, the watering. New trees glittering in the dew, their new leaves expanding by the hour, new Chateau Daphne participants, in an advancing end to spring.
Within a week, it would be a forest full, a permanence astounding, as the shingles, siding, and stone progressed, browns and golds and grays against the dark tree trunks, the bright green leaves of summer… The permanence of Chateau Daphne displayed, established, now assured by this new landscape, the building rising from the jutting point, its foundation walls no longer ungainly high, but an appropriate few feet above the re-contoured soil.
Wilson wipes the sweat from his forehead, sitting on a new boulder. Satisfaction…The tree- mover gone, the crew departed, and Dick just leaving, headed for MacGuilties. He was alone, but not alone, because he now could see the finished house, even incomplete he saw it, next year and the one after that, rising, surrounded by two days of trees, that would in a few years fit, completely. The gray of the stone, the weathered shingles, the blue lake this evening, as it had been and always would be. The sun approaching sunset… He imagines a future evening with everything finished, a few years later as if Chateau Daphne had always been there.
It is immensely satisfying, and he enjoys the quiet. Then turning to a noise… It is Conrad, out for his evening stroll… walking, stumbling a bit, a waiver to the rhythm of his steps and cane. “I see you’ve made a forest.” He pauses and stares at Chateau Daphne. “It makes a statement. Your forest.” He harrumphs.
I see you’ve brought in towered species
Set in loam, fertilized with feces.
How many of them…
Will some die?
And wilt towards the high fair sky
Or will they live?
Will they thrive?
How much of your new forest
Will survive?
Conrad takes a flask from his pocket, imbibes a nip and then offers the flask to Wilson, who takes a sip. “Good scotch,” he says,
“Old Furney… The best,” says Conrad. “Ten percent,” Wilson replies. “Ten percent will die. Maybe only half the birch will make it.” They share the flask once more. Conrad tips his cap and taps his cane then continues walking, as Wilson soaks, in satisfaction, warmed by Conrad’s scotch.