*
“Do you think she saw me?” Elora asked.
Birdie had been to visit.
“Yes, but she’ll keep it secret,” he said and put his arm around her. He smelled of soil.
“What did she want anyway?”
“Nothing much. I think she was out bird watching and just stopped by to say hello. Are you hungry? Because I’m starving.”
“I could eat. Are you sure she won’t say anything?” She put her arms underneath his chest and hugged him with her cheek against his back.
She knew she ought to visit Birdie and explain her relationship with Jacques, but admitting it to another person made the danger of what she was doing seem real. She wasn’t ready to deal with that yet.
“One hundred percent sure. Do you have time for a sandwich? I made some bread.”
“I think so, a quick one.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go.”
“I know, so do I.”
“Just a minute,” he ran outside quickly and came back with a fistful of basil. “Cheese, tomato and basil perfection.” He put the basil to his nose and breathed deeply.
“Here eat this. It’s been lovingly prepared.” Elora sat down at the table and bit into the sandwich. Jacques took a pitcher from the refrigerator and poured two glasses of iced tea. He raised his glass.
“To us,” he said.
“To us,” she took a drink. “Tell me something.”
“Something.”
“About yourself, your past,” she took a bite of her sandwich.
“Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know, anything, like why do you have polished spoons, yet only two shirts?”
“You want to know about my cutlery?”
“Nobody uses the word ‘cutlery’ here,” she said.
“I’m not from here,” he said.
“I know. I love that. But it doesn’t answer my question. I feel like there are so many things I don’t know about you,” she wasn’t ready to tell him that she was pregnant, not yet, not until she was sure, but she felt the need to unearth his past.
“The story of my cutlery is a marvelous tale actually. It’s deserving of an ode. Ode to the Beaumont Cutlery,” he said and raised his sandwich like a sword.
“See? This is what I mean. You avoid my questions about your past.”
“I’m not sure what you’re truly asking, and besides, you might not like what you hear.”
“Of course I will. I just want a bit of history. A bit of, I don’t know, understanding.”
“Okay. See this spoon? I once found it poking out of the garden like a sliver carrot.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Why do I love you?”
“Because I am mysterious and leave you full of wonder?
Come here,” he pulled her arm, she got up and sat on his lap. “Be patient with me.”
“I have to go,” she said. “Arlo will be back soon,” she stood to leave and he grabbed her arm.
“I’m sorry,” he explained. “The spoon was my maman’s. She buried the cutlery in the garden when she was losing her mind. It’s hard for me to talk about my parents. They were, distant. Preoccupied.”
“So the sculptures,” she said. “So that explains the things you can give life to.”
“You have no idea,” he said.
“Maybe. But I’d like to.”
“Stay the night,” he said.
“What about Arlo?”
“He’s not invited.”
“I’m serious, Jacques.”
“So am I. Drug him, hell, kill him. Do what you need to do.”
22.
After she left, he sat at the kitchen table and picked up the spoon. It was true. He had actually found it poking out of his garden like a silver carrot. His mother had emptied the contents of the utensils drawer onto the floor. He remembers that everything had crashed but the cutlery. It was missing.
Jacques and his father had been sitting in the living room. Jacques was reading and his father was looking at his maps. She had taken a handful of flour down from the cupboard and started sifting it onto the floor like hen seed.
“What are you doing?” Jacques said.
“Catching footprints. Someone’s stolen our silver,” she said and looked up as though she’d actually seen someone.
She leapt towards the corner and her flour-covered fingers ripped apart the air. Mathis stood up and took a deep breath. He grabbed her by the shoulders and wrapped his arms around her as she lurched towards the invisible thief. Jacques had tried not to look at her, but she was glowing irresistibly. She always shined during a fit, as if she’d been scrubbed clean.
“I need your help,” Mathis said. “Grab her legs and let’s lift her to bed.”
Jacques bent down to take her legs and she kicked him square in the eye.
“Jesus Christ!”
“That’s right! Shout! It feels good to shout!”
Jacques and his father began screaming and Nora joined them. The three of them screamed until their heads ached, then they flopped down on the kitchen floor like panting dogs. He remembers how the flour had stuck to their nose hairs.
“He stole my silverware from France,” Nora whispered to Mathis. “Kill him.”
“Okay Nora, I will,” Mathis said.
He stroked her short hair. It had grown quite a bit and her scars were nearly covered. She fell asleep with her head in his lap.
“What will we do?”
“Find it,” said his father.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know. Help me get her up.”
They carried her to bed. His father’s grip was emblazoned on her flour-dusted arms. She was as thin as a wishbone under the sheets. Jacques remembers her peaceful face and how they had stood watching her.
“I don’t think it will be long,” Mathis put his hand on Jacques’s back. “Come on. Let’s find that cutlery,” he said.
They searched everywhere for the spoons. In the larder, in pots and pans, linens, under loose floorboards, in the woodshed, the commode, everywhere when Jacques finally remembered that he’d seen her, days earlier, scoop away a bald patch of snow from the vegetable patch. She had poured a kettle full of boiled water over the uncovered ground.
They boiled the kettle, grabbed a shovel and stepped out into the cold night. He’d seen her standing underneath the charms she’d made to keep the birds away. The charms hung as still as wooden icicles. Sure enough, as the hot water melted the soil they could see little shiny handles like silver carrots poking through the ground. They collected the cutlery without saying a word and walked inside. Jacques’s hands were so cold that they burned when the warm air hit them, he stood thawing for a moment by the fire, while the sensation of pins and needles spread across his body. His father wiped the cutlery clean of mud, polished each one slowly, thoughtfully.
“When I showed your mother these she just stared at them. They were like shiny jewels to her. It physically pained her that I ate with them. Once I came home to find the house decorated with cutlery. I have to admit it was beautiful the way they sparkled, I laughed and laughed, sure my father was turning over in his grave at the thought of cutlery on the mantelpiece or hanging from the door frame. You see, your mother and I are similar creatures; we share the same curious eyesight. We both can find magic and luster in what others find ordinary. I love her for that, for many reasons, but most of all for that. I’m telling you this because it’s how I want you to think of her, treat her. Even when I’m gone. Do you understand?”
The following morning his father blew into his hot cup of coffee and closed his eyes to its steam. The logs cracked and burned steadily and the room was silent, but for their little sips. They did not look at one another when they heard her feet slap across the floor, the water pour into the bowl, her hands gather it and splash it across her face.
He had tried to think of something else, tried to think of a hap
py time and remembered, as a child her strapping him across her back like a snug, little cub and the three of them snowshoeing through winter mornings. He remembered his parents holding hands and the snow falling, like powdered sugar, dusting over them all. When she entered the room her hairline and eyelashes were still damp.
“Morning, well, this is certainly a day for porridge,” she said cheerfully and filled a pot with water. She opened a drawer, “Ah, my silver, I’ve been wondering where it got to.”
23.
He thought of Elora and his maman and love. He made a pouch with his shirt by lifting the end hem and scooped up the cutlery from the drawer. He walked around decorating the house, forks on the mantel, spoons on the windowsills beside the geodes and knives on the bookcase. He put them wherever the sun shone, so that the light would have something to strike as it moved around the house. He thought of light like this, as a solid thing, as a block that he could press a shape inside.
He had learned to manipulate light from his father. To his father, light was something to hold, direct and capture, but to him it was a life force to break and redirect. He had taken life, had broken light and placed his shadow, as the image of himself, in front of her stream, however frail, however weak, like a blockade, he had made the final decision and it filled him. He could bring the shadows back.
He looked around the room. Everything had a reflective quality, the geodes, the cutlery, even the piano bounced and outside, the river, brown and muscular, reflective, yet moving as though something were thrashing underneath and he understood its violence. It was as thoughtless and shaping as the light. It was not the violence of war, but the relentlessness that poisons the marrow enough to fight. This he was trying to mold. This he was trying to cut into. One snap of peaceful transcendence, one snap of an independent world.
The source of radiance is often hidden. Was Elora this source for him? They certainly kept one another hidden. Their relationship revolved around the fear of truth, rather than its embrace. There was something that he couldn’t reach. A meaning that seemed to constrict every time he is close to touching it, the worm of his childhood, small as a blood vessel, that used to vanish inside the coral whenever his hand drew near. It kept him from telling her about his ability to resurrect.
She approached singing in the same way he approached sculpture. At first, he believed that this would allow her to understand his gift, but the truth was that her singing produced nothing physical. He could create life from death and that fact would always separate them, but he wanted to tell her about his mother.
Did that mean that he loved her?
It wasn’t love in the way that he had anticipated love. Yes, the lust was there, yes, the heat and excitement, but perhaps he just wanted somebody, anybody beside him. Somebody he didn’t have to explain things to, who hadn’t the courage to ask and delve. No, courage is not the right word. She had courage. He couldn’t deny her that. She was risking everything for him and yet, there was something else. It was as if she had a vested interest in keeping him only the man of her perception. He had to be the right type of savior, the bad prince, but a prince nonetheless. She would never leave Arlo for a murderer. Is that what he was? No. With one hand he had taken away, but with the other, he had recreated. He had done his mother a service. Would Elora, or anyone for that matter, see his actions as benevolent?
It was better not to ask, not to risk breaking the illusion that served them both. He had told her the truth about the spoon, she could have pushed open the answer, but had decided not to, he felt, so that he remained safe inside her need to keep him perfect. There is nothing luminous about a man with faults that he can control.
In truth, he was a dry rock, and her devotion, her body, was like the water that made him glisten. He was ideal for her. The only flaws she saw in him were the ones he could not change. And as for him, he needed someone to hide inside, so love like a blanket to a prisoner. They were each other’s perfect escape. At first he welcomed her desire, of course he did, he was starving and she longed to be devoured. He wanted someone to touch without cutting and we are drawn to people with ideas as big as our own. It was hand-in-glove chemistry, but now? Now she was trying to make him real, and reality suffocated him. Inside reality he found no air. He had come to believe that air was something he needed to create.
He was ashamed to admit it, but the sense of relief he felt after his maman had died was enormous. Her life had become a jaw that snapped around him, and then it was over, and he was floating, momentarily in his own air lifting off the ground like a dragonfly unclenched and let loose. Or maybe something bigger, like a balloon or a cloud, anyway, he was beginning to feel free. It was shameful. It was so unlike him. Actually, that’s a lie. It was just like him. He despised neediness, weakness. It made him feel as though he was shrinking.
He doesn’t want to lie himself into another life that’s wrong.
He’s always felt as though he’d been stuck inside the wrong body, the wrong mind, with his own flickering nature too buried to excavate. Thinking of her feels like choking on the dirt of himself. It’s far better just to carve new figures, new bodies, chiseled out of his own rock self. Sometimes he wonders if he might just find one that resembles the actual him. He doesn’t mean this in a sentimental bullshit way. A piece of wood with his face trapped inside it eager to revitalize into something else. He’s talking about the flow and stacking of atoms here. He’s talking about sculpture as exploitation of space, where he would assume the space that was meant for him. The shape that fits. When he disposed of his maman’s body he felt atoms buzzing around the emptiness like flies ready to reconfigure.
How could he tell Elora about his gift? Would she understand? If he loved her then surely it would be something he would want to share with her, right? He was afraid that it would always divide them and she would grow to resent what she couldn’t possibly relate to.
His time now, in simple terms, is the occupancy of collage, what to keep, what to take away, what to hold, what to push, what he allows to harden. That’s one of the reasons he finds sculpture so seductive, for no matter how flawless the image, the wood will always succumb to forces beyond his control. She will never be what he expects. Like love. Love is also the beginning of erosion, in terms of the perfect self, but think of the beautiful shapes erosion has created. It’s why he likes to keep himself fluid, lava like, it lets him carve the space around himself in the hopes that one day he will crystallize into a shape he has created, then erode.
*
If his sculptures could speak they would say:
We took to the wind like wooden birds, we wanted to lie down and anchor beside him. He had found us tangled and overgrown, limbs shrieking in the night. We were already falling when he caught us, a hook in the belly of a rolling log; it was just in time, just in time. We thanked God. When he began carving his vision, we let him, grateful for touch. During the stages of becoming we grew confident and whispered our desires like spells, please, please make me a woman, a crane, an angel, a mermaid, a horse, ibis, ibis. And he listened. Chiseled us out like blown eggs. In the beginning we were as full as we’d ever been. He seemed a life giver. The gift of rebirth. Then the air began to circle us like it’d move around a cave, chilling and hollow.
24.
Jacques went to CC’s first thing in the morning. From the moment he stepped foot in Callisto, he felt noticed and watched, as though a crow were following him. She was right. If they stayed together, they couldn’t stay here. Perhaps they could run away to Chicago or some other wilderness? Maybe she could give him whatever it was that he needed? He was stuck between picturing his life with and without her.
Birdie constantly came over with extras, meat mostly, and with his garden, it had been enough to keep him from town. He hadn’t prepared for this type of exposure, but couldn’t turn around for home now, as he felt that would raise suspicion. For what? He wondered.
The door chimed when Jacques opened it and right away he saw CC
chewing on a toothpick with his arms folded over his chest.
“Well now, looky here, it’s our own bonafide Frenchman come out of hiding.”
“Hiding?”
“That’s what we thought. We thought you was hiding yourself or something from us.”
“No. Just working, that’s all.”
“That’s what I hear. I hear you’re an artist. Some kinda wood maverick, but hell, even a working man’s gotta eat.”
“I have a garden.”
“Must be one helluva garden. I hear that old bag Birdie’s been helping you out as well. She’s madder than a hornet near lemonade.”
“She’s been really kind actually.”
“She’s a witch you know. Got to watch out for witches.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Doubt you’d say if you did.”
“Maybe we should start over. My names Jacques Beaumont,” he went to stick out his hand, but CC waved him away.
“I know your name, son.”
There was the usual stuff on the shelves and Jacques put tins, toilet paper, meat, milk and eggs into his basket. He was desperate to get out of there. A young girl with Lucy written on her name tag stood behind the counter and rang up his purchases. She went to bag his groceries when CC cleared his throat to get her attention. She looked up at him, he shook his head no and she handed the paper bag to Jacques with eyes full of apology. He bagged his groceries and walked towards the door.
“Nice to meet you,” he said to CC.
“Yep,” CC kept his arms folded across his chest as Jacques balanced the bag on his hip and opened the door.
Pig, Jacques thought as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. The bag wasn’t heavy, but it was cumbersome and he wished he hadn’t bought the biggest pack of toilet paper. The day was warming up and he had a long walk home.
He walked down Main Street. A few of the shop fronts had been recently painted. Rosa’s Café had a green and white awing. On the window was a painted wreath of red roses and Arlo’s face looked through it straight at Jacques. He was sitting in his usual place buttering his toast, watching the small world. He saw Birdie’s Buick Skylark roll to a stop and hoot the horn at Jacques.
The Carving Circle Page 9
