The Carving Circle

by Gretchen Heffernan

  Her orchestrations themselves were small still lives. The parts of recent activity that represented vanishing. Birdie’s reading glasses left on the table and shot throughout the day at different intervals, so the thin wire shadows suggested time. Discarded shoes. Open drawers. A hand towel with wet patches on it. A pile of cut fingernails. Like a study of the mundane and routine, but inside each photo, she placed the small, thumb-sized paper crane, as a way to honor the goose.

  Its grounding had given her flight.

  It made absolute sense of her being, for up until that point, before and after the river, she had been parading herself as real. She walked and breathed and made all the correct sounds, but always, her internal rhythm was a beat off, a pulse late, deeper, sonorous. She was the echo that bounced off her loss and along her days. But the camera was her own timepiece, no chance circumstance, no misgivings, the shutter snap was the second between her sound and the outside.

  She used the lens to capture her subject’s interior through her eyes as though she were a conductor, and similar to water conducting electricity, it gave her a surge. It was the only surge she'd felt since her resurrection. In fact, it was the only time she felt anything. She was not an ocean, a river or a stream. But more like a photographic lake, inert and unmoving, a reflection of what a human should be. Somewhere along the line, her stillness was replaced by a numbness that’s remained frozen for a long time. When she skates along her photographic history she always arrives at the goose. A strange thing to spark the light of consciousness. As strange as a fire inside an igloo and as life preserving.

  It was a way to live.

  38.

  Birdie had been at the shops. When she arrived home that afternoon she had found the front door slightly open. A heat was coming from inside where Elora sat meticulously cutting out the pages of a bible with an Exacto knife.

  A book on origami lay open by her side and she was folding an army of scripted animals that she hung, one by one, from the room’s ceiling with string and masking tape. Crease, turn, crease, turn, crease, paper punch hole, tie string, stand on chair and hang. It was a slow process, a methodical process that left her entranced and exuberant.

  “What in the world are you doing?” Birdie asked as she hung up her coat. She stuck a lump of fired chicken wrapped in foil in the refrigerator.

  “Can’t you tell?” Elora looked up in surprise. “I’m creating a fortress.” Her eyes were arrested with shine and Birdie knew she’d tipped off-balance again.

  Birdie slumped down in the chair beside the fire. She felt tired and weary and unable to cope with another one of Elora’s bizarre episodes. She had learned to keep her heart out of such behavior and play along.

  “What kind of a fortress?”

  “A stronghold. It’s for our own protection.”

  “Protection from what?”

  “You never know. But first I’m going to secure the ceiling in the living room, then the kitchen and my bedrooms. Is that the right order?”

  “I’m sure it is. Chicken’s in the fridge if you get hungry,” she got up and went upstairs to have a bath.

  It was difficult sharing her space with someone after all these years of living alone, especially someone that was crazy and possibly, even, undead. It was fine as long as she could keep Elora hidden. At the moment that didn’t seem to be much of a problem as only Jimmy visited her. There was a myth developing around Jacques old house and people kept their distance.

  By the time Birdie had finished her bath, Elora had folded and transformed religion into wilderness, into wings and fangs and freedom, so that an overhead jungle of biblical defense swayed from every room in the house.

  Elora was lying on her back beside the fire photographing her floating zoo. She put the camera down when she saw Birdie.

  “Soldiers can be so beautiful,” she said.

  She watched her creations hang in their suspended universe, each one, a still little death. She heard the scotch tape give way and saw a paper crane drop to the floor.

  Birdie opened the bird and read its stomach.

  “He shall tear it open by the wings, not severing it completely, and then the priest shall burn it on the wood that is on the fire on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD.” Leviticus 1:17.

  Birdie stood in the doorway. “That’s enough,” she said and began opening windows. With a frosty roar their bodies rustled and cracked at the wind’s touch, paper wings hit paper paws smacked paper necks, twisting and struggling, harnessed and caught.

  Birdie grabbed a broom and with sweeping arm movements, mowed through the lettered animals. Their delicate bodies tore and fell in pieces to the floor.

  Fell around Elora. She did not rush to save them, instead, laid expressionless as Birdie cleared each room, sweeping bundle after bundle into the fire without her protest. The flames rose with hot ferocity and when she had finished, Elora sat by the hearth and watched the fire eat. The hairs on her cheeks, her eyelids, reddened and singed, her skin was hot, yet she stayed, watching through the unforgiving night and into the morning long after the embers had turned black and gone cold.

  Birdie slept on the sofa that night and in the morning found Elora still on the floor. Her hair hung in sweaty coils down her back, a brown wool blanket wrapped around her boney shoulders. Defeated, deflated, a cavity, a stone cellar caving in. Heartache throttled the throat of her dejection. She was skin disguising a worm-infested fruit, heartache had eaten through her, and in her hands she held the smudged paper crane. She was rubbing it between her forefinger and thumb. She didn’t look at Birdie. She stared at the cold coals.

  “They were clouds on the ceiling. You burnt the clouds,” she said, took her camera and photographed the embers.

  39.

  The “crane incident,” as Birdie likes to refer to it, broke the back of Elora’s silent mourning. She went around stomping and smacking her limbs as though she hadn’t felt them before, as though she were beating the life back into herself. She spent hours arranging rocks, thimbles, hairs plucked from her head, screws, orange peels and anything else she could find to pattern into a still life. A small table in front of her window was the stage for her photoscapes. Once they were arranged, she would wait patiently for the perfect shadows to appear, then press the shutter down.

  Jimmy delivered a large box of film and chemicals. Birdie was happy to keep Elora supplied with photography materials, as strange as her themes were, they seemed to be healing her. At least she was talking now, Birdie thought as she opened the door for Jimmy. Elora was upstairs with the window open, hoping for the winter wind to ruffle the feathers she was attempting to photograph. Hearing his voice sends a wave of repulsion through her.

  “You some kind of photographer now or somethin’,” Jimmy said to Birdie.

  “More of a somethin’ but I try. Call it my retirement hobby. I could show you some pictures if you like?” She wouldn’t have asked if she thought he’d oblige. There was no way he’d step foot inside a witch’s house.

  “Nah, not my thing. Say, you hear about that nigger’s old place?”

  “You mean Jacques? Doesn’t it belong to his family?”

  “The man’s dead, Birdie. You think his French relatives wanna come out here? Their lawyer says he can fix up some deeds owing to the extenuating circumstances and all. These lawyers can do anything. Some poor s.o.b. from Kentucky bought it,” he said.

  “Why?” Birdie stuttered.

  “Exactly my thought, but I guess it was too cheap to resist, though who the hell knows. I just hope it’s not another troublemaker. This town’s had its fair share of trouble and it’s good to get things back to normal,” he said.

  “Whatever normal means,” Birdie snorted.

  “I’ve never been confused about normal. Nope, and I don’t know many folks that are. Maybe you’re the only one that’s confused about normal round here,” he said and got into his truck.

  “You’re
not wrong,” Birdie said. “So when are they moving in?”

  “Postal redirection starts next week, so soon, real soon,” he said and drove away.

  Elora had been listening. Someone was moving into Jacques’s house. That nigger’s old place, they couldn’t even bring themselves to say his name. Nigger is a terrible, grisly word that demands excuse. Initially it was the sting of hearing this word rather than its actual intention that surprised her. Its crash in the air like air followed by a bang, the sound but not the intent that caught her. That’s how they saw him. That’s all they saw. A story about a dead nigger, not a name, not a man, a lover, a creator.

  She sat on the floor holding the carved bear. She could almost feel him alive and something else. There had to be another explanation, she wanted a reason to justify the look of distance she often saw in his eyes, not a look of malice exactly, but the remote coldness of one who has been left behind, back-wood eyes, she thought, wasteland eyes. They shared this now. She realized it was a way of feeling. They both shared the unforgiving gaze of the exiled; a bloodline burned by circumstance that left a smell about the place like hair burning against hide. She caught this scent, like a hunter, she smelled their hearts, flayed victims, the pungent meat of terrible love and prejudice. The unknown truth was a rope that bound them together and at the same time pulled them apart; it was a noose.

  She placed the bear in the middle of the feathers, waited for the wind and took the photograph.

  40.

  “Meatloaf tonight,” Birdie shouted up the stairs with more enthusiasm than she felt. “Come on out,” she said. “You’re not going to make me climb the stairs for nothing are you? Come on now, honey, I know you’re still alive because you ate the sandwich I left you.”

  No answer. Dammit all to hell, Birdie thought as she climbed the stairs, she’s probably in there holding that bear.

  “She says she’s feeling him, feeling Jacques, that she’s feeling he’s alive, like a goddamn diving rod or something,” she’d told Stan during a recent phone conversation. “It is enough to break your heart. She spent months sitting in that chair, staring towards the field where her baby was buried. Remember the little thing, terrible, like a stone with a skin covering. Poor, desperate girl, she cried so hard the world cracked and dropped her into the pit of herself, but now, shit, she’s nuts. I’m all for creative madness, you know me, but she’s screwing screws into mud pies and photographing them with that bear and an origami crane. Now what on earth is that about?”

  Birdie knocked on Elora’s door.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yes,” Elora said. She was still wearing her unwashed dressing gown.

  “Christ, you look like a ghost,” Birdie put her arm around Elora’s shoulders. “And smell like a dog.”

  “I’ve been working,” Elora explained.

  Birdie looked at Elora’s table full of mud and objects. Feathers were poked into the mud so that they stood upright and the bear was positioned behind them as if he were peeking behind trees. Birdie sighed. Symbols, it all boiled down to symbols, sometimes she knew what they meant, other times they were obscure. Elora’s belonged to the obscure camp, but at least she was using them.

  “Take my hand,” Birdie said and led her to the bathroom. “Have a shower and then come down for some meatloaf. It will do you wonders.”

  Elora entered the kitchen soap fresh from her shower. Her shampoo mixed with the smell of onions and garlic.

  “I started sautéing without you. Here, sit down and dice this pepper,” she told Elora and began rummaging through the cupboards for flour and spices.

  “Good,” Birdie said. “Now put everything in this bowl and squeeze the mince between your fingers until it’s blended. Therapeutic isn’t it?”

  They molded the meat into a bread pan and placed it inside the oven. The methodology behind cooking had always eased Birdie, focusing on the sequence of one ingredient following another until reaching a stage of completion, plus it brought a bit of order into the house. They sat down at the kitchen table and began chopping up the remaining vegetables. After a while, Elora stopped and cleared her throat.

  “I can’t let anyone move into Jacques’s house,” she said. “It should be mine.”

  “That’s difficult because, technically, you’re dead.”

  “But I’m not!”

  “Yes, we’ve established that. We’ve also established that if you show yourself as living, you will certainly be killed, again,” Birdie said.

  Birdie clasped and unclasped her hands, making her veins pop out and flatten again. The poignancy of baking onions and garlic made her eyes water.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be crass, I know I’ve said it a thousand times, but it’s tragic how life can chop into a young tree. A person needs time to grow a history. Give yourself that time. There is nothing to do about the sale of that house. It’s just a thing.”

  “The piano is in there,” she said.

  “That piano was there when he arrived, but if it means that much to you, photograph it,” Birdie said.

  “I can’t live like this. I can’t.”

  “You can and you will. You already are,” she put her hand on Elora’s. “Listen to me. It’s awful that life struck you before you had the chance to thicken, but flesh grows around the axe, Elora, until the axe becomes inseparable from the tree. This will become you. It will never leave, but you will heal around it and to heal you need to turn it into something, something you can stand to look at, whatever that might be. Jacques was right, don’t you see? You need to create yourself again.”

  “I am creating myself again! I’m taking loads of photographs! I rarely go outside in case I’m seen, I’m stuck in here, like some crazy woman. I think I am some crazy woman,” Elora said.

  The idea for her gallery came to her then, as perfect picture and already developed. A gallery of emotions like a reference library, she saw frames with staged faces, she saw herself.

  “We need to leave. Before the house is sold,” Birdie said.

  “I’m not sure I can,” Elora said.

  “I know it’s hard,” said Birdie. “Hard to let go. You both resembled the world in your own special way, had that in common, saw things with an artist’s eye and there is no sick like lovesick, but you are wasting yourself here, wasting away. There is no need for it. You could start again.”

  “There is nowhere to go.”

  “You are young. There is everywhere to go, but start with Chicago, I could get you a job there, nothing fancy, but it would pay the bills and get you out of the house, out of here.”

  “I don’t even know where I’d begin.”

  “I’d help you. You know I would,” she got up and put her arms around Elora’s shoulders. “The trick is to only love the things that love you back, that’s it, that’s the trick for relationships, friendships, work, hobbies, everything. Think about leaving.”

  41.

  She can still remember how the wheaten sun had pressed the afternoon into his bedroom like steam. She had come in the morning and lay on his bare chest. He slept. She listened to the culvert of his body reverberating and his breath. So much was working beyond her control. She felt waterlogged and swung her wooden legs out of the wet sheet, then rolled off the bed like a tree off a cliff, boom, she crashed and moved towards the hallway’s cave, shadowed and fresh, cold hands on her shoulders, cold breath coiled around her neck like an eel of white air.

  There was the sensation of sinking as she made her way to the bathroom, splashed water on her face. The hand towel smelled of damp dust, outside the air was ready to cook; through the window she could see leaves hanging from branches, gray inside the house’s shadow. The sun, a giant leech, sucked the blood from everything.

  She poured two glasses of water and went back to bed. He was just waking up and she handed him a glass of water.

  “Thank you,” he said and plumped the pillows up behind himself.

  She placed her glass on th
e bedside cabinet.

  “I heard you were in town the other day,” she said.

  “I needed some things.”

  “You could have asked,” she said.

  “I didn’t think I needed permission to buy toilet paper.”

  “CC said you were bold, that was his word, bold,” she underlined an imaginary word in the air. “Arlo told me.”

  “CC was an ass.”

  “Bold, ass,” she underlined two words.

  “It’s not like I lied about going,” he said.

  “Lying and hiding the truth are the same things, Jacques.”

  “I hate it when people use my name to make a point. Fine. You are right, Elora. I kept it from you. I lied. We all lie.”

  “How am I lying? I just want to know if you are going into town, so I can prepare myself when Arlo mentions your name.”

  “You’re lying because you’re hiding your truth: me. I’m stuck out here like some stallion lover,” he said.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake. You are bold. Don’t you know anything? You’re out here to keep safe. You were crazy to move here in the first place and you’re even crazier to stay.”

  “Maybe I’ll leave then.”

  “Don’t let me stop you and certainly don’t let me take advantage of you,” she rolled her eyes.

  He put his hand on her stomach and stuck his finger inside her bellybutton. “You can take advantage of me,” he said.

  “Get off.”

  He turned over and pulled her to him. “I don’t want to argue. Something’s changing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s strange, but I feel like we’re waiting. I keep hearing this sound, this music, when I’m working. It’s synonymous with you.” He kissed her hair.

  “What do I sound like?”

  “Let me listen,” he put his ear against her forehead, adjusted her nose like a dial. “Ah there it is, seagulls.”