Circle of Three

by Patricia Gaffney

  “I reckon. What’re you doing after you finish coloring that otter?”

  “Oh, I’m going to have some fun,” I told him. “Today is elephant day.”

  His eyes crinkled almost shut when he grinned. “Wish I could stay and see that. You’re having a pretty good time, huh?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Why’d you decide to help out? This sure ain’t nothing to do with you, Carrie.”

  People kept asking me that; I ought to have had a better answer by now. “It crept up on me,” was the best I could do. “I didn’t think it would get this far. I thought I’d pitch in once or twice, help get things started.”

  He laughed his shy, wheezing laugh. “That’s what happened to me! Hell, same with Jess, too. Pushovers is what we are. Are you sorry?”

  “No. But ask me if I’m tired.”

  “Hoo, don’t I know it! Say, the Finches told me they can come back one night next week, and then again next Saturday. If that’s any help to you.”

  I hummed, noncommittal. The Finches, two elderly Arkist sisters, both spinsters, sincerely wanted to help me, but they were hopeless—on so many levels, it would’ve been mean to list them. Color blindness was one, though; another was decrepitude. But the worst was that they had ideas; they made suggestions. I hadn’t known how proprietary I was getting until last week when Miss Sara Finch said the cow should be a Brown Swiss and Miss Edna Finch agreed with her. No, no, no. No. The cow was a black-and-white Holstein. Period. This was not a democracy.

  “Just wish I could pay you somehow,” Landy mumbled with his head down. “Here it is a Sunday, you could be home spending time with your fam—your daughter. Wish I could pay you back some way, that’s all.”

  It really bothered him, I knew because he said it so often. “Maybe you can, Landy. When things settle down, maybe you can help me with a couple of projects around my house. Things I can’t do by myself.”

  He beamed. “I’d be glad to do that, I’d be pleased. Anything I could do, it would be my pleasure. We’ll count on it.”

  “Good.”

  No one knew, not even Landy, how much money old Eldon had socked away. He had to have some, or he wouldn’t have made his playground equipment offer. (Would he? That was a thought. What if he were pulling one over on the whole town? I wondered if Jess had considered that. I’d ask him.) In any case, Landy wanted the ark effort to be as frugal as possible, because he said it was draining away his mother’s inheritance. His, too—but he honestly didn’t seem to consider that. He said he didn’t want the old man’s obsession to impoverish his mother once his father was gone. That was why I was using the cheapest good paint the hardware store sold, and slapping it on polystyrene instead of wood. It was why Landy and Jess, whose combined boatbuilding expertise wouldn’t have covered a matchbook, were designing a 119-foot ark in their spare time, with only Arkist help and no professional guidance. I couldn’t figure out whether Eldon was crazy like a fox or just crazy.

  I said good-bye to Landy and turned my mind to elephants.

  Everybody liked them, everybody was soft on them. To my generation they were what dinosaurs had been to Ruth’s. But kids outgrew dinosaurs—nobody outgrew elephants. Well, ivory merchants, presumably, but nobody with a soul. There was something about elephants, and I wanted to try to capture it. Their sweetness and shuffling intelligence, their persistence and indefatigability. Honesty.

  Like all the animals, I was doing this one life-size—a small elephant, granted, but life-size. The him-her, two-sided idea seemed to be working, although I hadn’t succeeded yet at crafting two different poses on either side of the cutout silhouettes; I’d only been able to vary the two genders of the same animal with color. But I’d keep trying. I worked with four-by-eight insulation sheets, and until now that had been more than adequate; in fact I often got two small animals, both sides, out of a single sheet. It wouldn’t be enough for an elephant, though, so I’d hot glued two sheets together, width-wise, edge-to-edge, then glued two more sheets, one on each side, across the seam to strengthen the joint, and finally glued four two-by-eight half sheets, top and bottom on each side, to fill in the gap. Now I had an eight-foot square of foam two and a half inches thick. Later I’d cut out ears, trunk, and tail, and glue them on separately for added dimension.

  It was Chris’s brilliant idea to use the polystyrene sheets. In a past life, she designed stage sets for amateur theatrical productions. Plywood, she pointed out, was heavier, more expensive, harder to work with, and buckled when wet. Polystyrene sheets glued together beautifully, cut with a craft knife instead of a band saw, and took latex paint like a dream. Chris only knew Landy from what I’d told her about him, but it tickled her to think how much money her suggestion had already saved him.

  I usually drew the basic outline of an animal with the foam sheet flat on the floor, but that wouldn’t work with an elephant; too big. Unless I crawled around on my hands and knees, but then I’d probably puncture the foam, which was strong but not indestructible. I stacked my eight-by-eight sheet against the wall, looking around for a box to stand on to reach the top. After dozens of practice drawings, I’d decided on a foreshortened three-quarter profile, so he’d be mostly head, trunk, and massive left flank, facing forward and fixing us with one small, kind, wrinkled eye. I wasn’t drawing freehand, I was transposing proportional sections from grid to grid, final drawing to foam sheet.

  Feet. Consider the function, I learned a million years ago in art school. The function of an elephant’s feet was to hold up several thousand pounds of elephant. Big, round, platform feet at the ends of massive shapeless leathery legs, skin sagging down in bags around what would be ankles on another animal. Great folds of skin at the backs of the shoulders, too, wattlelike, and I hoped that was realistic—would an elephant that small have skin that wrinkled? Well, he was a little old elephant. He was born small. His parents were small and he was a chip off the old block. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  The trunk was almost five feet long, curving in at the bottom, toward the dainty mouth. He was an Indian elephant, so his back was the highest point, higher than the shoulders, and arched slightly. The ears were big but not gigantic, not the flapping, sail-like ears on an African elephant—who, sadly, wouldn’t be boarding the ark. Exclusions like that really gave me pause. I felt sorry about my choice of the grizzly bear, for instance (again, on recognizability grounds), over the black, brown, silver-tip, Kodiak, sloth, sun, Atlas, and spectacled bears. I liked to think old man Pletcher was, too, when he’d picked the walrus but not the seal, and when he’d decided to let the shark represent the entire fish kingdom. Poor goldfish, poor salmon, I hoped he thought; poor speckled trout.

  Well, the rough draft silhouette wasn’t bad. Flipping it over, I could see it would transpose well for the female. I’d make her a lighter gray, although it would mean buying another quart of paint; maybe True Value’s “Smoky Moss”—the chip looked about right. Head wasn’t flat enough on top, I saw. But the muscle in the middle of his forehead, the one that picked up his heavy trunk, I’d gotten that just right. And I liked one ear in and one ear out, but did it look like I’d just made a mistake? I loved the side view of his hip, round and bulging, a mass of moving muscle; clearly he’d just thrown his weight onto his left back leg and was about to pick up his right front. I’d nailed it.

  It was when I was shading in the parallel horizontal lines on his trunk, making what amounted to a contour map, trying to show how the light struck the ridges and threw shadow into the hollows, that I had a brainstorm. I could do more than shade and highlight, I could etch. I figured it out by accident when I put too much pressure on my drawing pencil and cut into the foam. What if I inscribed the deepest wrinkly hollows on his trunk and face, those sad crevasses around his ancient eyes, and then painted dark paint into the etched parts and a second, lighter layer over the top? Texture! It would work, I was almost sure it would. However nicely I painted them, the problem of flatness, of ha
ving the animals resemble moving vertical platforms, stage sets on wheels, had plagued me since the beginning. This wasn’t the complete answer—already the shortcomings were starting to occur to me—but it was a start. A really good start. I felt lit up inside, full of fresh energy. I’d experiment on scrap foam first, of course. With a pen? Knife? I’d try a craft knife with a new blade. I wanted more than a shallow indentation, I wanted real crags, dramatic black fissures. But without shredding the foam. And how well would gray latex cover black?

  Stiff fingers and an ache in the small of my back woke me up from another trance. I’d forgotten my watch, but the edge of an early moon shone through the dusty, high-set barn windows. Late.

  I stuffed the mess Landy and I had made, all the foam and wood cuttings, into plastic garbage bags, cleaned up my paints, tidied up the work area. I couldn’t leave without looking at what I’d done this afternoon—the finishing touches on a jackrabbit, a nearly complete otter, and a rough drawing of an elephant. Not bad. Not half bad. But, my God, there were so many more. Landy needed more help, I could never do all these animals by myself in my spare time. Nobody seemed to be looking that fact squarely in the face.

  I’d been hoping Jess would come down by now and talk to me, see what I was up to. I guessed he was still busy with milking. I turned off the heater, turned out the lights, closed the big barn doors. Blinked around in the chilly twilight like a mole. Moles might or might not blink, though; their eyes were approximately the size of pinheads, and since they spent their whole lives underground, probably all they could distinguish was strong light from darkness. I had to do a mole soon; I’d been reading up.

  The hum of the milking machine drew me across the bumpy yard to the open, light-filled doors of the milking parlor. Inside, cows stood eight on a side, on two raised platforms over a shallow pit, where Jess and his helpers, Mr. Green and two neighborhood boys, went from cow to cow hooking up milking apparatus. I could never get over how docile cows were, how they plodded into their individual stalls on their own, stopped, and patiently stood until it was their turn to be milked. Why didn’t they ever stampede? Jess had laughed when I’d asked him that. “They’re peaceable by nature,” he’d said, “and anyway, milking’s what they like best. After food.”

  I stood just inside the doorway, enjoying the warmth, watching the mechanical but still earthy process of cow milking. Jess, in rubber boots and rubber gloves, washed the udder of an all-black Holstein with paper towels and disinfectant, then squirted a little milk out of each teat by hand. As he attached the rubber-lined suction cups, the milking machine made four soft, distinct sucking sounds. I glanced at the cow’s broad black face, expecting bliss, but it didn’t appear to change.

  They were almost finished, I could tell from the urine and manure sights and smells. When they first started, it was neat as a pin in the milking parlor; then slowly everything went to hell. When it was over, they hosed it down, every surface, and soon everything was clean and neat again. What a job.

  What a life! It wasn’t one I’d ever envisioned for my wild, romantic boy, even though it was the only one Jess ever really wanted. At least, that I knew of. He told me something once: he said he hoped he was a mixture of his mother and his father, some of each, but not all of either. It made me wonder if he was afraid of his mother’s illness. Maybe the hard physical work, the quiet cycles, the slow, unsurprising routine of Jess’s days were a totem for him, a hedge against—craziness. If so, I didn’t know what I thought about that. It was working, but was it sad? Was it funny? The problem was, I didn’t know if Jess was happy or not. I couldn’t tell—he’d turned into a mystery to me. Something else I never expected.

  Mr. Green pressed a button in the tile wall of the pit, a metal gate slid open, and a line of milked cows clopped out of the parlor and off to an outdoor pen, where troughs of hay silage waited for them. Another gate opened; a new line of cows plodded in. Jess looked up and saw me. His whole face changed. Gladdened.

  He couldn’t be a mystery, I knew too much about him. He had a crescent-shaped scar on his right shoulder blade; he got it leaning into a truck engine when the hood slipped and fell on his back. He was thirteen; it was his father’s ’62 Ford pickup. He taught himself to play the guitar when he was fourteen. His favorite musician had been James Taylor. When we were sixteen, he showed me how to press my forehead into a cow’s soft, bulging side and milk her with firm, gentle, rhythmic pulls, squirt, squirt, squirt, squirt. “Don’t let your hair tickle her skin, Carrie, she’s real sensitive, she can feel everything.” The lanky boy with the long, strong fingers gave me my first grown-up lesson in sensuality when he taught me to milk that cow. Yes, he did, and in respectful treatment of the opposite sex. I wanted him to touch me with the same sureness and solicitude as he touched those big bovine ladies, great heavy flaunters of their own femaleness. That milking cows had a sexual component shouldn’t have come as any great surprise, but in my adulthood I wrote it off as adolescent hormones in tumult. Now I saw I was wrong. It wasn’t a function of age, but of susceptibility.

  He stripped off his gloves, calling over something to Mr. Green, who glanced up and waved to me. He was a nice man, Mr. Green, but he was getting old. He wanted to retire and go live with his daughter in North Carolina, and Jess kept talking him out of it. Selfishly—he was the first to admit it. Mr. Green thought building an ark was the funniest thing he’d ever heard of in his life.

  “Hey,” Jess said. He had an endless stockpile of scruffy clothes. Cow tending was filthy work; why would he dress up? It was always a bit of a shock, though, the first time I saw him in his work clothes. Compared to his city councilman clothes, that is, or his man-about-town clothes. He led a double life. Tonight it was stained khakis torn at the knees, a frayed shirt, a dingy gray cardigan sweater, and a shapeless windbreaker with a broken zipper and both pockets ripped off. “Hey,” I said, and we went outside and leaned against the side of the building, gazing off at the livid, streaky sky. “Smells like spring,” Jess said, and I inhaled, but all I could smell was cow. “Come in the house,” he said, “have some coffee or something—have a drink.”

  “I can’t, have to go home. What time is it?”

  “About six.”

  “I told Ruth I’d be home by six.”

  “What’s she up to today?”

  “Studying for a French test at a friend’s.”

  “I thought she might come over with you. Since it’s Sunday.”

  “She didn’t want to,” I admitted. “She thinks this is so crazy, Jess, she thinks we’re all nuts.” This morning she’d informed me, with much scorn and derision, “God, Mom, you are getting so weird.” I said, “Oh, really? You’re going to be ten times weirder than I am.” “No way. How do you figure?” “No one’s stopping you,” I said, thinking of my mother. “No one’s holding you back.”

  Jess smiled in sympathy. “I know it, we embarrass the hell out of her. How can you blame her?” I loved it that he liked Ruth, and not just because of me. “So what did you do today?” he asked.

  “The elephant—the drawing for it. Oh, Jess, I think it’s really going to be good.”

  “Let’s see. Show me.”

  “No, I can’t, I have to go.” Neither of us moved, though. “What do you think Eldon would say if the tiger was flying through the air? Not standing or walking, but pouncing.” I had a picture of it I couldn’t get out of my head—all four big-pawed legs of the tiger straining forward, the muscular tail flying up and back, toothy mouth wide open, ears flat, and the whole thing at about a seventy-degree angle. A huge, open-air leap.

  “How would it stay up?”

  “Dowels coming up from the wooden base—from a distance you wouldn’t see them. I’m only talking about eight or ten feet off the ground. But do you think it sounds too…predatory?”

  “I think it sounds terrific. He might not, though.”

  “Well, he said he wanted realism. He doesn’t want cartoons or smiling faces, he doesn’t want
to anthropomorphize the animals at all—he said that.” That’s when I said I’d help—when I found out Eldon and I shared the same ark aesthetic.

  “True,” said Jess, “but he might not want people to think too hard about what the tiger’s going to eat on the ark for forty days.” He licked his lips. “Tasty chickens, handsome gazelles. Tender, juicy rabbits.”

  “I never thought of that. Rats—which I don’t have to do, luckily. Oh, Jess, you should see the elephant.”

  “Show me.”

  “I can’t. Anyway, you’re still working.”

  “No, we’re done.”

  “You’re not, you have all the washing up to do.” After the milking came the cleaning, another half hour of washing, rinsing, and scouring until the milking parlor gleamed and the cooling room shone. Then all the record keeping; Jess had to keep track of how many gallons of milk every cow gave at every milking. “I don’t see how you can build an ark with all the other work you’ve got to do,” I said. “Oh God.”

  “What?”

  “That sounded like my mother.”

  “Well, she’d have a point. I’ll have to hire another man to help with the milking until this ark’s finished.” He rubbed his eyes, and I saw how tired he was. “I know it’s only a platform, but it still has to float, and I’m not a boatbuilder.”

  “You’ll figure it out. It’s basically a raft, right?” He and Landy had explained the latest design they’d come up with. “With a sort of faux hull and two fake stories on top?”

  “In theory. It still has to float,” he repeated ominously. “And take a man’s weight so we can load it with animals.”

  “I was thinking,” I said. “Are you doing portholes?”

  “Portholes?”

  “You could do fake portholes, just painted circles—but I could paint faces looking out of them. It would be a way to get more animals on board.”