Osprey Island

[A]t present the place is a grubby fishing port of dirt lanes strewn withsun-baked fish heads, eatery floors tramped with mud and blood andsalt. A moss bunker refinery destroys the western shoreline—great smelting kettles and massive iron drums, the smell that emanates therefrom is enough to raise the dead. But where others less visionary will come away with only a visceral memory of the unrelenting stink, I see here a great hotel, stately, luxurious suites overlooking the majestic sunset shore. There will be tennis courts, a bathing pavilion, a restaurant and theater, and on a Sunday afternoon the ladies from Fishersburg and Menhadenport will stroll the whitewashed docks,parasols cocked overhead as they watch the schooners set sail into the bay.

—SYLVESTER DANIEL, investor, from an 1869 letter to his wife, Amelia

DEMOLITION FIRST. Then, construction. Bud, needing all the manpower he had, even cycled his waiters into the crew. Besides, it was pretty much free labor: the arrangement for June had always been beachfront lodging and meals in exchange for help in readying the Lodge for the season. And fine, true, that “readying” usually involved work of a highly undemanding, nontaxing variety. That it had turned into full-time hard manual labor was not something to which Bud was planning to draw anyone’s attention.

The police lines were down, and some progress had been made in the demolition. Off-island boys had worked the day of the funeral, guys who knew Lorna only as the someone who’d died in the fire. The grunt-work guys were there early, drinking coffee from Thermoses or Styrofoam cups, getting ready for another day. Roddy and the unlucky waiters joined the crew, pulled on heavy work gloves, and got down to it. A matter of throwing shit into the dumpster. Why they weren’t doing it with a bulldozer, no one had stopped to inquire. Probably because it was cheaper to pay a bunch of stupid thugs than it would have been to rent the necessary machinery. And Bud Chizek was nothing if not thrifty.

They’d busted down the remaining walls and posts with sledgehammers—the fun work, no doubt, for a few guys with more muscle and spare energy than they had any constructive use for—so there was wet, charred timber splintered over everything. They started gathering and tossing, collecting and discarding. It was rhythmic, methodical, awful work. Roddy hefted awkward shovelfuls of soaked and blackened linens into a wheelbarrow, and a guy with the remains of a black eye and tattoo lines snaking out from the sleeves of his T-shirt wheeled the loads away, got help from another guy—who’d already removed his shirt in preparation for the morning emergence of the Irish girls from their dorm—in hefting the load to the dumpster’s mouth. How Bud planned to lift the monolithic old sheet presses was anyone’s guess. The sun shone down with macabre earnestness. A lone yellow butterfly flirted at the periphery of the wreckage, as though it knew not to come any closer.

Suzy brought Mia over to Eden’s for the day to keep Squee company there, away from the Lodge. Then she got half the Irish girls out inspecting rooms—noting anything torn, broken, grotesquely or obscenely stained—and took the others with her to the maid’s room. Upon entrance, they looked crestfallen.