He took his wallet from his back pocket, removed an old slip of paper from behind his driving license, read the telephone number and dialed.
“It’s me,” he said and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to wake you, but I need your assistance. Can you get a group together by tomorrow night?”
There was a silence while he listened to the person speaking on the other line.
“That’s right. Well, you know I can’t be involved. You’ll find him at the old Zimmerman place, Beaumont’s his name. And Harold?”
He poured himself some more whiskey.
“I’m asking you to get old-fashioned.”
*
Jacques needed stones for the eyes, perfect polished river stones.
Elora had left before sunrise. His craving for her that night had been ravenous. She was like a trunk he wanted to cut open, thrust open, and with his tongue like a chisel, he severed her and severed her, until she was small enough to swallow with one bite. All day, her scent coated his hands and arms as he carved. If he could have chewed the wood, he would have, it was his first real sculpture and it was of her. But there was something missing. Something retrieved and of the earth, he knew it, and so, the river stones.
He went to the river and he dug through the mud, and he felt the soil and thought of her moisture. The trees cracked in the wind, black branches on black water, he looked and saw her pretty mouth gasping beside him.
A fish, he thought, a mermaid, crawling up the riverbank towards him. Her name did not arrive and he stepped out of himself and into someone he recognized as dangerous.
He held the stones in his hands, one on each palm – eyes – he had always thought of his hands as eyes. He could see with them. Like a gift, they had led him to her. Her eyes were flat black. He winked his hands at her. He noticed red marks were already around her throat. She lifted her head towards him and he felt it was a sign. He carefully placed his hands and fingers along the marks, like letters, inside the script provided. It was perfect. Now she would be able to understand him, to know his gift.
“I’ll bring you back,” he whispered into her wet ear. “And I’ll love you. This way, we can both escape,” he said and squeezed until he felt it leave.
It was delicate. There was nothing thunderous. It was like easing a cork from a jug, she just went pop, and it was over, done, drinkable. The air was drinkable and he tipped his head back and guzzled it all, drank until he bloated with unearthly desire. I can bring her back, he thought, and with his fingers brushed her hair clean of sticks and pine needles, before he folded her into the river, and the river took her, soft as a tissue. He put the stones in his pocket and felt free. Free.
28.
Birdie threw a cardigan over her dressing gown and slipped her feet into her work boots. All day, her mind had felt as twisted and cramped as an octopus inside a small cave. The moonlight was pulling her out of herself with a beckoning. She grabbed her binoculars from the hook as she walked out the door. The sounds outside were like lamentations and she knew that her restlessness had meaning behind it.
She walked alongside the river towards Jacques’s. The lights were out and his goddesses were all standing together like a mythological army. She held her breath as she walked past them. She was heading towards a copse of pines just beyond Jacques’s house. The trees led all the way into town, black evergreen wings like a gathering of dark angels penetrated the sky.
She had seen a nighthawk there last year, nighthawks were two boomerangs tied together with a body and nearly soundless, but for their insect diving. The air whirled off of them as though they were small steel aircraft. It’s been a good year for mosquitoes and there was a pool of water near the copse. She stopped and listened for the plummet of wings. The grass was wet and buggy. She should have worn tall socks. She scanned the trees through her binoculars. Nothing. Nothing in the air. Everything was still, too still.
She scanned the river.
It looked as though a log had caught itself on a slab of rock that jutted from the reservoir. She walked closer. The river was somnolent and trapped sound against her banks. Birdie watched the water cover and uncover, cover and uncover the hand as though it were a water lily, splayed and out of grasp. The white root of arm descended towards a head of hair that danced, almost separately, from the body that tapped against the rock, until it unlocked and was carried away in a swirl.
At first, Birdie denied what she had seen. It seemed too graceful to be tragic. The way the body had moved appeared deliberate and alive. Elora. Birdie ran to the side of the rock. There was nothing. No torn cloth, no blood, just a spin of motion in the water hitting the bank. She closed her eyes and squeezed them until she saw red shapes. No, she thought, no, but there it was, resting on the needled floor amongst the pine cones. The tiny carved woman. She picked it up and wrapped her hand around its shape as thin as a finger. She let out one cry and ran.
*
She pounded on Jacques’s door. He opened his bedroom window and peered down.
“Are you alone?” He couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded cracked and raspy.
“Yes,” he said and she burst into tears. He ran down the stairs.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he said as he led her by the shoulders through the front door. The river woman was lying down on the sofa; the dark stones were set into her hollow eye sockets. She was the size of a torso. He picked her up and gently placed her on the floor. Birdie could hear him talking to her in soothing tones. He stroked her forehead. Her face looked like Elora.
“Her eyes are drying,” he said and motioned for Birdie to sit down. “Birdie breathe, whatever it is, trust me, it will be fine, just breathe,” and he took a deep breath to show her how. She followed suit, the two of them sat in silence taking and releasing breaths until she took his hand and kissed his palm.
“Listen to me because there isn’t much time. Arlo has killed Elora. I saw her body in the river. You will be next or get the blame. I found this,” she showed him the tiny woman. It was clutch indented into her palm. He took it and rolled it around in his hand as though it were an object of infinite mystery.
“This must be her gift to me,” he said and looked over at the carving with love.
“What?! No! You are not hearing me. I know it’s a sudden and terrible thing, but you need to listen! Elora is dead!”
“No, Birdie,” he said soothingly and took her hand. “She’s not.”
“She is!” Birdie snatched her hand back and slapped him across the face. “Wake up! She’s dead and you will be next! Arlo will kill you. I’m telling you this because I want you to live.”
“You’re right. I need to live,” he looked again at his carving. “It’s important that I live.”
“Yes,” she said and started, once more, to cry. “I am so sorry. I never should have asked you to get involved, to carve for me. I will die with this sorrow, this guilt, I will die with it. But you don’t need to. You can go. You can erase. The sun will be up soon. Pack a bag and I’ll drive you to St Louis. Take a train to anywhere and never come back.”
That’s what I’ll do, he thought, I’ll ride trains, I’ll carve, I’ll be free, but when he opened his mouth he said, “Elora.”
“You will find someone else. You’re young, believe me.”
“I carved this for her,” he knelt beside the carving on the floor. “I can’t believe it, but it’s true. She led me to her, to my carving,” he had the eyes of a fanatic, rollicking, black dots inside of whitecaps. “It’s the first one that’s ever been real. I can’t leave her.”
“Elora or the sculpture?”
“Both.”
Birdie looked at the figure lying on the ground. The river’s water had soaked a stain around her eyes. He had put the stones in wet, she thought, as though the woman were crying.
“If you stay here you will die,” she said, sat beside him and took his hands in hers. “You will never sculpt again. Bring her with you.”
His face was mo
re alive than anything she had ever seen. It was its own planet.
“You’re right. I’ll bring her to me,” he said and stroked the grain of her cheek. “I have that power now.”
“Okay,” said Birdie. “Okay, but we need to leave. I’ll bring the car around. You pack.”
She drove him to St Louis where he caught the Burlington Northern Railway up to Chicago and then on to Canada. They drove through the final colors of the night with the windows down to drown out the silence. The city seemed to calcify against the horizon. Jacques had rolled up his window and motioned for her to do the same, she did, and the molecules between them turned to gel. He pushed, slow and difficult, he pushed his hand through the space and stopped, fingers spread, in front of her face.
“See this hand,” his eyes, his voice both calm and wild. “It can do anything. I can bring her back, but she will need to recover.”
“Who?”
Jacques gave her a hard stare before he spoke. “You know who. When you see her, tell her to find me,” he handed her a piece of paper with his Pine Creek address on it. “Make sure she comes for me Birdie. The best way for her to recover is to create something phenomenal. I’ll do my best to fill her, but I might not be able to do it all on my own.”
She dropped him off at the train station. He looked exuberant. She remembers thinking that. He’s exuberant and lifted. Everywhere she looked the city was steaming, gray. He passed through the concrete swift as a bird’s shadow and disappeared. On the drive home his shape remained in the seat beside her like the presence of a dream. She realized she was trying not to think, that thinking made her shake. What did he mean? Worse yet, who was he?
29.
Jimmy brought her post. She held it in her hand. It felt remarkable that ordinary things remained. She stirred herself into character. Harlotry as camouflage.
“Where you been?” he asked her, the engine of her car was still hot.
“Visiting Stan.”
“Who is Stan?”
“My sexy boyfriend. Why, you missed me?” They knew she had a sweetheart whom she never, as a rule, spoke about. She did it to throw him off and it worked. He raised his eyebrows in feigned surprise.
“What? I might be old, but I ain’t dead, Jimmy. Nature has endowed him, if you know what I mean, and he has a motorcycle,” she swung her hips from side to side.
All suspicions of her implication were completely squelched inside of his embarrassment. Inside parts of her were breaking away and whirling, a pile of leaves left for the wind. Be done, she thought, I need sleep.
“Well you missed one hell of a show.”
“Yeah? You doing the whiskey dance at the tap again?” Sleep.
“This is serious Birdie, serious. Seems your neighbor was a full-blooded dark horse. He killed Elora Donnelly and then himself. Guess they were having an affair.”
“No,” she stared past him at the feather white clouds, the words spoken out loud crashed against the bits of her hanging in the blue. “That can’t be true.”
“It can and it is. Arlo found his body a mere few hours ago. Sent him back north. Some say he wasn’t completely dead when Arlo found him, but you didn’t hear that from me.”
“And Elora?”
“Still looking for her, but her clothes washed up a few miles downstream. He refuses a funeral for her though, can’t blame him, gonna have her cremated and tossed in the river. She’s got no folks to protest. Fish food, that’s what he calls her now, but hell, you can’t blame him.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “God help us,” she said to the sky.
“Seems to me he already did,” said Jimmy.
*
Jacques took the train. He placed her gently in the seat beside him, his gift from the river, he’d take her home to Canada. He was worried he couldn’t completely turn her. After her initial awakening, she had remained caught inside death, a butterfly beneath glass, and he feared that she might never return. He spent the train journey etching her an inverted leaf dress and long sinews of river hair. The veins in the leaf simulated the veins of the body, and the stem was a chain of tiny pearls that wrapped around her throat like a necklace. It was only when he carved a baby in her arms that she sprang to life as a butterfly, waiting, still as death, will unexpectedly beat against the window.
The window was his eye, he opened it, and that’s when the frost beneath his eyelids began to spread. And although her rebirth was fleeting, momentary, he knew her resurrection had occurred and any future sculptures he would create were ways of developing her and coloring her in. He knows she’s out there and he’s drawing her, carving her towards him.
The stars were silver filings in the night. Chips from something hard and cold, metal or bone. The motion bump, the flash along the track, a nerve along a spine and the houses dissolved, her soft face with its windows dissolved into the water, fading, shading the wind, her body drawn with charcoal on his and gone.
He felt her scattered.
She came to him as an after-image, as though he’d been staring at something illuminated, then closed his eyes and waited for the retinal image to appear.
He felt her in the silver filings.
The other bodies and his, a magnet, they flung themselves against, coating him, sharp foil digging in a shard of shine until he felt like someone new, someone heavenly, all at once, alive.
He wrapped his arms around the carving and propelled life through his skin, gentle and chilling as a draft, he brought Elora forward.
30.
Pine Creek, Canada 1953
Mathis had followed her trail, claw raked of twisted bush and littered with fresh scat. The air was thick with the smell of digested fish and hung like a canopy of moisture above him. His skin chewed with insect bites. Moss hung in green cloaks from the trees. He followed the trail her enormous stomach had rolled through the pine needles towards a keyhole of light.
She was staggering. She bashed against branches. He looked up and saw the mountain gnarl the sky. Splintered teeth on soft gray flesh. He was gaining elevation and the sodden air began to crystallize and break from heavy to fresh. Snow was on its way. He turned around and looked behind him. The way back was a dense darkness. He looked forward and the keyhole glowed. He was clumsy and weak as he stumbled through it.
Her cave was as small and black as a nostril.
He entered the smell of rotting death, and there she was, a breathless boulder. Dreams die when they are caught, he thought, die and become reality. He touched her scared face, her dry black nose. Her soft ears and the hump of her silver back.
He lay down beside her because he could. He curled up next to her body, stiff under its fur. He had sensed she was tired and old. Snow slanted in the moonlight. He watched it fill the mouth of the cave. He could die if he wanted to, but he didn’t, more than anything, he wanted to live.
He had his knife. He could make a fire. He had his camera. He brought the thick pad of her paw around his shoulder. She was as heavy as a nightmare. His head was against her throat, her chest and he imagined a heartbeat there, at last, he had her warmth. He picked some soil from her black claws and scratched it into his own fingernails.
He had food. She would feed him. His substance.
I’ll be full of you when I come down off this mountain, he thought, and slept.
*
He can’t remember the words his maman used, but words are mere exactitude, and it was apparent that during her sessions, the quiver around the letters was the frequency meant for the gods. So the sounds come to him, and because they are formless vibrations, they rattle him until his bones let loose and he shakes down to molecules, to dust.
It’s just a body, son, she used to say.
“Dis moi ce que tu veux,” she’d say. Tell me what you want.
“Maman parle aux dieux.” Momma speaks to the gods.
And the sounds would begin. The tremors of candlelight combining atmospheres and unhinging realms.
�
�Vous ne pouvez pas revenir sur cette.”
You can’t come back from this.
It was true. He couldn’t. There is a spell inside language that binds us to our ancestry, which has little to do with the words being said, rather the evocation of atmosphere sound provokes. Ordinary things, boiled cabbages and laundry days, when spoken in native tongue conjure landscapes and place and ghosts.
The dead live there.
And the people that we’ve been and killed to survive or willed to keep living. The dreams that manifested or died and the lies that truth revealed or buried. Laughter. Everyone’s. What we remember isn’t accurate because it’s selected, but the way it shapes us is as real as anything we could touch.
Mathis thinks of this often and it’s as though the different stages of himself were stacked and his mind, a borehole, tunnels through them all and his artwork, the echo through the tunnel.
Still.
He cannot speak of Callisto with a foreign tongue. She is native to him as though he was a terrain removed from the earth and singularly his own, without memory or place or utterance, inhuman yet human, like pre-birth. She runs up and down his tunnel.
Elle porte d’une dimension individuelle.
She bears a separate dimension.
*
The door had been left unlocked. He shoved it open, stepped into the house and inhaled an emptiness so thick it felt embraceable. He wrapped his mind around the knowledge that Nora was dead, that his son, Jacques, was gone, but alive. He walked to the window. Webs against his brutish hands and grime thick as snot on a tongue. He rubbed it against his sleeve, opened the view.
Jacques was out there. Dark green pines needled the clouds and bruised them like fruit. He knew Jacques wasn’t dead. Knew it like a sleeping person knows when another was pressed against their back. That warm connection, he let it sink peace into his bones. My tired, dreaming bones, like old planks, he thought, turned and saw the encyclopedia open on the table.
The Carving Circle Page 11
