“Never let a good-looking man walk when you can give him a ride,” she winked.
He laughed and approached her window. “Don’t you ever stop?”
“Lord no,” she said. “I have to remain deserving of my reputation. Moral disgust is my disguise. Now, get in.”
“A business woman through and through,” he said as he opened the door and arranged his bag of groceries. “Thanks. I’m not sure how I would have managed this,” he nodded towards the toilet paper.
“Shit always gets in the way,” she said and winked. “What in the world are you doing in town anyway?” She looked accusingly at his groceries.
“I could ask the same about you,” he said.
“Yep, you could, and I’ve been at the bank, but it’s different because I’m not sleeping with anybody’s wife.”
“Yet.”
“I’m serious here, Jacques.”
“Right. You caught me.”
He rested his forehead on the glass. Silos scattered across the green fields like pieces from a wreck. He pictured a machine world above the clouds aborting the broken parts of itself, heavy things falling from the sky.
“They can’t do anything to me,” he said, finally.
“You’re a damn fool. Their granddaddies could have had you arrested just for walking Main Street and you don’t think that’s bred in? They are just waiting for an angle and if you weren’t rich and connected, they’d have run you out by now. Listen. You’re lucky. You want to sculpt, so sculpt, and stay outta sight and mind if you want my two cents,” she stopped for a breath.
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not unless you like walking. If you want another two cents, stay the hell away from Elora, I mean it, I feel it, let her down gently, but let her down. It will only end badly. Arlo will kill you both.”
“What if I told you I loved her?”
“Love’s a fluid thing, Jacques, especially when lives are at stake. But if that’s the case, you need to disappear. And quick,” she said.
“Elora wants to us to run away to Chicago.”
“Does she now? Crafty little vixen. Well, if you’re gonna run, you better run further than Chicago, think Mexico, think someplace where they’ll never find you, because if you take his wife, and they find you, you’ll live together for eternity.”
He said nothing. The sound of the road pinched him like a tight belt. She pulled up to his house and he could barely breathe.
“Don’t tell me if you take off. Just go. The least amount of lying I have to do the more convincing I am.”
25.
Birdie sat on her porch and watched the day draw itself into evening. There was a weeping in the smoky sky, a spasm of red and orange, her heart, her stomach, told her that something was about to go wrong. Across the field, she could see the shadowy figures of Jacques’s wooden idols. A sculpture stood beside the river, then moved, and Birdie watched as Elora crept up to the back of the house and knocked on the window. Jacques opened the door and the girl blazed inside his grip. Birdie stood, walked inside and began preparing an invocation.
*
Jacques kissed her neck.
“I can’t believe you are here,” he said. “What happened?”
“Arlo got called to testify in a court case in St Louis. He’ll be gone for two nights. Can you believe it? God,” she said and looked up at the stars. “It’s such a beautiful evening.”
“Yes, it’s the perfect evening for a concert,” Jacques said and kissed her again. “Come on. Everything will listen.”
So they set about preparing.
Clues of the rain’s battering remained in frogs, fallen crops, fat creeks and mosquitoes, and the sulphurous smell of hot decay rose from the prairie’s humid bottom. The grasses were straight spines of lime green that twitched against one another. Elora stepped down from the porch and into the field towards a patch of thistles. She could just see their tall purple heads spiked against the night sky like bee-stings. She loved the pride of a thistle, how it could be both hard and soft at the same time, like the face of a porcupine or the gloss of polished metal.
“Elora,” he called, running to catch her, “you’ll need these.”
Panting, he placed a pair of garden gloves into her hands, then bent down, broke the flowered head off a bit of white clover, popped it into her mouth, and walked away. She chewed its sweet gum all the way to the thistles, then squat between the grasses and bent the base of a thick stem until it snapped, releasing its sticky milk. She brought its gentle speared flower up to her face, and felt a tremendous sense of relevance that she wanted to remain, rightness, the ant crawling up her arm, the heat releasing from the prairie’s marsh like a velvety lotion upon her bare legs, the moon in the sky, everything in its rightful, willful place, even his reluctance to give all that she wanted, and her resignation to take less than she needed, seemed the right imbalance. The child inside her was a small presence. She would have to wait to tell him, for she couldn’t bare it if she lost the baby and broke both their hearts.
She gathered the thistles together and walked back to the house. She placed them in a jug and put the jug on the piano. One by one, Jacques was hauling his carvings into the back garden. He placed them in rows.
“Looks good,” he said, appearing once more from behind the house. Under his arm was the wooden figure of a woman with fish scales for skin, her closed eyes and mouth were shaped like crescents.
“I’ll wheel the piano out in a minute,” he said, placing the figure in the yard next to a plump naked woman with a featureless face and a wreath around her neck. “After we eat.”
Earlier in the day he had pulled from his garden carrots and onions, and put them in a large terracotta pot with a chicken and some garlic. It had roasted all afternoon and filled the house with a delicious smell. He had picked a big handful of spinach, runner beans, some tomatoes and coriander, cut them up and stuck them in a bowl. His rhubarb was ripe and delicious, he chopped it up and baked a cake for dessert.
“Can you take the cake out of the oven?” he called from inside his workshed and emerged with a large rectangular block of wood. Elora saw the beginning chisel marks of legs and what looked like a cat’s tail.
“No need for her to miss out on tonight’s festivities just because she’s in the womb,” he smiled and caressed her, then stood her beside the figure of one whose arms were left as branches. His wooden audience was in place.
Jacques moved a small end table out to the porch. He placed a piece of cut chicken on each plate and a helping of spinach salad. He poured two glasses of wine. Elora stuck a fork in the cake cooling on the countertop. It was clean when she pulled it out.
“Come out here and sit down,” he said from the door.
When she stepped outside she stood still for a moment, paralyzed by the view ahead of her. He had placed each woman side by side facing the porch, so that there were three long lines in the yard looking like twenty wooden soldiers. An audience of warfare goddesses and behind them a wave of black and a fractured moon.
*
The sculptor removes. He takes one thing and makes it another by eliminating what he deems as unnecessary. He manipulates space, and it is true, there were things he chipped from her that she did not need, that she was better off without, such as the presumption that human beings are any more divine than other forms of life. Yes, we are the thinking creatures, the planning creatures, but what of the instincts we have lost and suffused?
This is what he gave her.
The removal of calculation and the introduction to instinct, which gives way to the soul, just as the chiseled piece of wood reveals the curvature of a neck, and an air that swirls like a lick inside it. Spending time with him was like blowing away sand and uncovering a body hidden beneath. The soul preserves, waits for you to find it, and waits for you to engage.
*
“Tonight we’ll give them a show they won’t forget,” he said taking a bite of chicken. “This is delicious.
If I do say so myself.”
“What songs will we sing?”
“Any that come.”
“Inventive singing. My favorite. I feel sorry for our audience though,” she said.
“They’ll love it,” he said. “They’ve served their purpose anyway. I’m done with them now,” he said and put down his fork.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’ve done all I can for them and you’re the only figure I want to carve,” he got up and wheeled the piano out onto the porch.
She laughed and sat down on the chair beside him, single chords struck the dark like random splashes. A prairie night is a riot to the unaccustomed ear; you have to adjust your breath to hear through its clamor, slow your breath to hear music. It gives nothing away and forces you to pay attention.
“Are you ready?” he said.
“Yes, but I don’t know what to sing.”
“Just stand up and open your mouth,” he said, “I’ll play the sounds to follow you.”
The porch felt like a stage. Above her the clear night loomed in waiting and the stars, a million animal eyes shining against a black as far-reaching and meditative as a deep sleep, and the carved women ahead of her, softened by their shadows, pearl like, waiting for her to begin, so she opened her mouth and nothing. Nothing. She opened it again, left it open, until a sound swirled up the back of her throat and fizzled its way out like a dying firecracker, a struggle.
Jacques struck a piano cord, a middle C, she followed it, hummmmmm, breathed it in and out until it became an incantation. Hummmmmm – then higher – open aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa – louder, louder still – a low and sonorous uuoooooooooo and the atmosphere began to give back. The atmosphere oscillated between her voice and the air’s own wide bellow, they played, catch and throw, catch and throw.
It was not as before, no bone fork in her throat, no thunderous musical revelation, but rather an eager partnership between the air and voice, like the steady tension that vibrates between would-be lovers, and each thing bounced on this taunt thread compelling her to sing its human name, so that she stepped out and sang every part unto her, and every part came alive and the night, a stirred dust, collected in her droplets of wet eyes, tongue, lungs. The tanginess of time, the taste of mold and rust, particles rose up and settled, coating both colossal and microscopic, each arched blade of wheat and each burst of pollen, the curve of every petal, and the angled pockets where leaf grows outwards from limb and the sky, a black drum pounding.
It activated everything. Everything.
Shifted. Electrified. Hummed.
She called their names, their own essence – mosquito, mothwing, cricketcry, ragweed, cornhusk, riverslurp, thistle.
She called herself, she called him, playing behind her his collection of notes that flowed and scattered like wildebeests, heading towards his carvings, his women, their audience, she sang them alive for him like a gift. Their anxious figures, tenderized by their shadows, chewable, no longer wood, but meat and flesh. One by one. She called them out of themselves – fishwoman, hoofedwoman, snakewoman, cat. They rose with bones of air, straight into his heart of lush, lush unearthing, of discovery, they walked, she walked, calm as a believer approaching a terrific storm, that power.
*
They ate every drop of stew, ate every crumb of cake, drank every drop of wine and then one other. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. She whispered. Then later –
“I love you,” she said.
“I know.”
“It’s true, you know it’s true.”
“What we know changes.”
“But I can feel it; you must feel it, don’t you?”
“What we feel changes.”
“Stop talking like that! You’re the one who believes in instinct, right? There must be no greater instinct than the instinct to love.”
“Survival forms instinct.”
“Then I need you to survive.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s run away together.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere.”
“Someplace where we can be together. What about Chicago?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You make it difficult. We could easily melt away in Chicago, live forever.”
“Look, nobody says forever and means it, okay?”
“I do. I’d stay forever.”
“You don’t know that, forever always grows into something else. I’m telling you, it changes.”
“Then we’ll grow together, move together, change together. I’ll follow you.”
“Yes. A part of you will.”
“Which part?”
“The part you let me take.”
“Take it all.”
“No. That’s not how I meant it.”
“It’s what I mean. Take all of me. I love you.”
*
In the middle of the night she woke. His arms around her, his mouth, his weight, the weight of a loan, then sleep, his shadowed face turned from her. His cheekbone lightened with blue light, on it were two pockmarks, like craters in the moon. He was like the moon, that close to the body. That far away.
26.
It is remarkable how the heart can become the sum of a life and the body just a way to feed it. Touching him was like placing her hand through a cool running stream to grab a piece of gold she’d seen sparkling there, elemental, elemental to a fault, not a love a human can sustain, not a love that can want, but must remain as is. This is the deception, and yes, when she met him, her truth split and revealed only the brightest half of itself, like iron before it cools into a gray shape, and this was the truth they lived in, formless and molten. She could not ask anything of him, no detail that would place him inside of a mold, no clues, nothing to hold, there was only now, he’d say. But what he meant was, that with no hint to a past there can be no indication of a future, for one needs the other to see. She thought this was artistic, adventurous even, and at first, could not recognize its cowardice, for a life will always find someone to take responsibility for its existence. That is what lives do.
For him to remain molten, she had to become the shape of his steel but first to melt, the embrace, the melting, the time spent in her liquid state, when any form seemed possible, any carving, any casting, any shape and so, she was content to just flow around him like water in a bottle, to run off his body of ideas like a fast-moving drip.
Even her fear of Arlo was diminishing. She now lived in a place beyond his control where her body could create a new life. Little soul, she whispered to it daily, stay with me. She wanted to tell Jacques, but couldn’t, as though voicing the words would make her lose the baby. Also, there was still a distance about him, as though he inhabited a space he had not shown her.
It was the way he spoke of the present that made it pliable and unlocked from the past or the future. His disguise was freedom, like a religion; so holy he guarded it to the point of devastation. But too often devastation is mistaken for revelation. She felt guilty for wanting anything solid, so guilty she spoke only of things no human could catch. Stars. Songs. Plants. Time. Impossible things. Impossible when you realize that nothing indefinitely needs you.
A child grows with or without you, love lives with or without you, and hate, nothing needs you, nothing but your own will to create a minuscule space for throwing life into, a hole in the ground, a net in a tree, hands leaking water, but sometimes, sometimes you get the sensation that there is more than survival, and a collection of disappearing firsts. Yes. Sometimes you feel a pattern flash inside of you with no memory behind it, no future ahead of it, just a perfect moment wanting nothing more than to live itself out, and you think, this is mine, mine alone. Singing inside the night’s intimacy was such a moment for her.
Only these flashes, these instants can be kept; no person, but there was once one she would have died for; no idea, but there were many that she dreamt; no song, but there was once
one that’d been sung; no thistle, but she had once held one in her hand.
Somewhere she knew this, somewhere she knew that ownership was not a concept nature recognized, and had she thought about it, she might have been able to retrieve this inborn knowledge. Perhaps then, she could have swelled with the peace that comes from allowing each moment to be just what it is: a moment among a series of moments among lifetimes, were it not for the terrible power of desire. Of human want. Terrible the way the most cherished things are terrible; terrible the way all that is worth living for is also terrible – because as soon as it enters us it becomes human and to be human is, inevitably, to end.
27.
It was sunrise when Elora got home. He had parked around the back. The trial was postponed because a member of the jury had had a heart attack. He was waiting in the dark house, beside the shutters and their ladders of light. When she opened the door, he grabbed her by the neck and the geode she’d been holding crashed against the floor. The small woman fell out of it.
“What the hell is this?” he kicked the carving with his foot.
She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t breathe. He recognized the carving as Jacques.
“A nigger whore? Is that what you are? A nigger whore?”
He tightened his hands around her neck. She kicked and scraped against the wall until she stopped. He let her body collapse onto the floor like a marionette. He wiped his hands on his uniform.
He stepped over it and picked up the carving from the floor. The rims of his eyes were red with hate. He put the carving in his shirt pocket and poured himself a whiskey. He sat down on a chair and looked at her. Shit, he thought and grabbed a kitchen towel and dropped it over her face. He couldn’t have her looking at him, not when he needed to think.
He walked to the garage, flicked off the security light and scanned the room. He’d take her to the river. He took the tarpaulin off his fishing boat. She’d fit under it nicely and the town knows how much he loves fishing, so nobody would think it strange.
The Carving Circle Page 10
