Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  On the other side of the room someone moved in and out of shadow.

  The woman in the grey dress carrying the large splinter of dripping wood might have been his mother as she had been at a younger age. The old women said that a man sometimes saw a woman like that—not as she was but as she used to be. Certainly the woman in the grey dress was beautiful in the same way that his mother had been beautiful. This he was sure of.

  His father opened his mouth but would not speak. Alejandro wanted to ask him if he saw the same things as he, but could not bring himself to do this. His father had caused all this—the rotting feast, the woman carrying the great, bleeding splinter—just as he had caused the death of Alejandro’s beautiful mother. It was a hard thought. Once he had admitted this in his head he felt tension melting away from his face and chest, as if it were food rotting and falling into bits, even though he knew he could never say such a thing aloud. His father’s fantasies, his father’s grief, embarrassed Alejandro, and he could not make himself speak to him.

  A hand appeared out of the darkness and set a plain wooden cup of smooth, white milk on the table by Alejandro’s hand. He looked at his father’s face, the lips struggling for sound, the lips pale, dry, dead-looking.

  He needed to speak the truth, but he could not. He needed to talk to his father of his grief, but he could not. The milk sat in its cup unused, souring, until after the woman had left the room and the remains of the feast were gone.

  Still his father could not speak, and Alejandro could not bring himself to speak to his father. Alejandro would brood over this failure, he knew, the rest of his life. But he could not help himself. And he could not change things now.

  *

  When the old people in the village had a problem they went to find a bruja. His father was sick, he could not speak, and he was seeing things. A mestizo woman who lived in an old shack a half-day’s hike outside their village was said to know of such things. Some said she was a witch and some said she just had friends who were witches. All the old men in the village were suspicious of the old woman and some said they should go to her shack, drag her out to the arroyo and kill her there. The old women said the men were just jealous of a woman’s warmth, a woman’s strength. They laughed about the old men’s complaints and pointed out that the men never did anything about them. The old men blamed everything on this old woman: when the crops failed, when business was bad. Alejandro thought that soon they would blame these things on his father.

  First Alejandro gathered together what little money had been left in the house: old coins from the sooty can above the wood stove and newer pesos and centavos from the small mahogany box with the carving of a pig on its lid. Alejandro had never had any use for money before and knew very little about what was the proper amount for things, and besides that he felt strange about taking his father’s money, even though his father would never miss it and even though it was to help his father. Witches always wanted money for what they did—he had heard the old men and women say this many times.

  Then for something extra he caught the scrawny yellow cat with the red eyes who always stayed behind their house and howled. He had heard that those who deal with magic like to keep such odd-looking cats around, for companionship, or perhaps for ingredients. He tried to keep the cat in a bag but it kept clawing its way out and crawling up Alejandro’s back to perch on his shoulder, its claws dug in until they stabbed through the thin cloth of the boy’s jacket and into his brief coating of skin. This was very painful but the cat did not attempt to escape from here so Alejandro left him on his perch.

  Finally Alejandro went to his room and retrieved the staff he had carved under his father’s supervision. It wasn’t a very good staff and the carvings were amateurish but it was large and it was thick. He had shaped one end into the crude form of a snake’s head. A narrow, crooked tail turned slowly on the other end when Alejandro rolled the staff in his palms. Out on the plains near the forest he had heard that wolves and great cats lived. His staff would not be much help, but it was all that he had to protect himself. And it seemed right that he should have a decorated staff with him when he met the bruja.

  He started out early in the morning with a fog sour and milky still filling the dirt lanes. They had terrible fogs here, the old people said, because the village was by a brackish, shallow river that had turned bad because it passed through the dirty cities far away. He did not recognize his village at first. Since his mother had died, he had hidden from his neighbours, a boy without a mother.

  Then he wondered if the village looked so different because of the fog. It drifted high and low, aimless and wild as the drought-plagued villagers’ dream of fresh water. It collected in the sinkholes like milky pools waiting to be drunk from. The scrawny cat leapt from his back as if to oblige, but then scampered back when it crept close enough to the pools to smell.

  The pale brick and wooden houses floated out of the fog like great sea creatures coming up for air. He had never seen a sea creature, but he had learned enough from the old people’s stories that he knew this must be how they would be.

  No one was in the streets. The cat dug its claws into him until he cried out. The houses were in poor repair, the roofs torn and many windows shattered. Bushes and flowering plants were brown, or grey as ash. Winds had painted the walls with shadowy faces of dust. But there were no human faces in the windows or at the doors to serve as models for these portraits. There had been a time when the people of his village would be out and working by now. A giant hand of fog drifted by him and the faces disappeared from the walls nearest him.

  But then he recognized the Lucero house, and the Echevarría house, and he knew this surely was his village. He moved down the dusty lane holding his staff tightly, the scrawny cat stiff on his shoulder like one of his father’s carvings of cats that were so popular with the American tourists.

  Sometimes the walls of the houses seemed to melt down into the fog, thickening its pale colour. Sometimes the walls seemed not to be there at all, as if the house had rotted away a long time ago. The dark windows watched stupidly. The roofs sagged in despair. No chickens squawked at him. No cows bellowed. No dogs sniffed at his heels. The villagers had eaten all of their animals.

  Once he left the village the world became a noisier place. This made no sense to him because the village was full of people, and no one lived out here on the plains. But he had not realized how very silent the world of the village had become until he was on the road out on the plain, where gravel crunched beneath his soles and the wind crackled the few dry trees and insects and birds were waking to begin their daily labour of survival.

  Several hours outside the village he met his first wolf. It didn’t seem as big as he had imagined a wolf to be—more like a medium-sized dog that had been poorly loved—and by walking a good distance out of his way he was able to avoid the creature entirely.

  The next wolf to come into the road was another matter, however. It stood crouched and heaving, large enough to satisfy even Alejandro’s generous imagination. Alejandro approached it slowly, wiggling his snake stick back and forth near the wolf’s head. The wolf’s huge grey eyes followed the wiggling stick with interest. Then the great beast leapt and turned somersaults in the air like some circus animal before lying down to sleep in the middle of the road.

  Beyond the wolf, immediately past a bend in the road, Alejandro found the shack of the bruja.

  There was no answer to his knock. He was amazed at how grey and worn the door to this shack was—his father would have been dismayed, if he had senses back, to see such a thing. If this were the door to the old woman’s heart, she was an ill old woman indeed.

  There was no reaction when he rattled the windows in their loose frames. “Hola!” he cried, but there was no response. He went around to the back of the shack, where he found a huge cow standing in a pitiful patch of grass. The cow, fat rolling down its sides and with an udder as large as a soup kettle, gazed at him with blue, unblinking eyes. />
  You miss your mother, muchacho. The cow spoke inside Alejandro’s head. Alejandro stared at the cow. But you miss your father more.

  Alejandro had heard that in the old days the witches had more power. Back then a witch could turn herself into a cow. Verdad! the old people would say. “What do you know about me? What do you know about my father?” Alejandro asked with a trembling voice.

  The cow lowered her head and dropped open her mouth. She bit into the dirt around a clump of poor-looking grass and pulled it in with her tongue, roots and all. Alejandro saw the scrawny cat approaching her udder with great slowness. He had not realized it had even left his back. The cat went to one of the cow’s great teats and began to nurse. The cow sighed contentedly.

  I know you have lost your mother, the cow began. And your father has lost his wife. Which is like losing your mother, since even old men are like boys. Your father misses the same things you miss, muchacho. He misses holding her. He misses nursing at her breast.

  Alejandro blushed and looked down, dropping his staff. The staff shook and wiggled, becoming a long black snake that rippled like a narrow shadow across the ground to where the cow stood. Then it raised its head and grabbed a nipple beside the cat, and it too began to nurse. The cow closed its eyes and chewed. It moved its great hooves back and forth, finally stepping on the snake which snapped into two rigid pieces of staff.

  All living things require such healing. All living things must drink at the place of their beginnings, a drink that takes them back to the times before their beginnings.

  Without thinking, Alejandro had gone to the side of the cow, and now knelt there, where he touched the full roundness of the udder. The cat stopped nursing a moment and opened its mouth. Alejandro could see blood dripping from the nipple.

  And they must believe they will live forever, even though they know they will not.

  “What can you do for my father, you old witch?” The boy had begun to cry.

  I can do nothing for your father. He has become a ghost. Your mother has passed on, but into the realm of transformation. What changes, lives. It is your father who has died, for your father is frozen, and refuses to change.

  “But what do I do?”

  Take him some of my milk. Make him drink. Speak to him of your mother. Shake him from his dream.

  “But you’re a witch! You could bring my mother back! Let me lead you into the forest where she is buried, and bring our mother back to us!”

  Stay out of the forest, niño. It is a perilous place.

  Then the cow disappeared, leaving a bucket full of milk, the cat mewling around its rusty sides, and the staff broken in half on the ground.

  *

  Alejandro fully intended to do what the bruja said. He had the two pieces of staff wedged under his belt, the bucket of milk in his hand, the cat following closely behind to lap up any spills. But then he caught a glimpse of the tall trees at the edge of the distant forest, and their trunks gleaming despite the drought, and all that they promised. This was the source of all the wood in the village. This was the place where the legendary Black Walnut and Spanish Cedar grew, the raw materials of his father’s dreams. This was where the thorn that ended his mother’s life came from, and where his mother now lay buried.

  Alejandro walked away from the road and toward the distant line of trees, hoping that the witch cow would not see him. The milk bucket suddenly felt heavier in his hand. He wondered how much of it his mother’s corpse would have to drink before she would consent to come back to them.

  He had of course never seen where his mother was buried; the old woman who stayed behind while the others were at the funeral had told him simply that she was buried behind the chapel at the edge of the forest. Happily, the chapel proved easy to find.

  He approached the chapel slowly, as there was much weeping and wailing inside. It was a simple structure of mud bricks and boards, but with no roof: the wreckage of this lay to one side, as if torn off by the wind. Tall trees surrounded it, their lower branches knit together and hanging over the bare walls. A small goat cart with digging tools inside was parked by the open front door. A gravedigger’s cart. The goat stared at Alejandro with eyes like a woman’s. A beautiful wooden cross had been planted in the ground near the door. Buds had sprouted from one arm of the cross; two pale green leaves had opened. The sound of weeping from inside the chapel was tremendous, and frightening.

  But when Alejandro entered the chapel the weeping stopped. There was no one there. A woman lay on the altar, but evaporated into the shadows when Alejandro reached to pull aside her veil. Behind the altar Alejandro could see there was no wall: he could see the forest there, endless and cool and a green so dark it might have been a shade of black. He walked past the empty altar and into the dark green.

  The ground between the trees was littered with broken headstones and splintered wooden crosses. But one remained standing and whole, and unmistakable in the excellence of its sad, sad carvings. The empty eyes and the empty arms and the long and intricate flow of his mother’s hair. Two feet from this cross a giant tree reached toward the distant dim light of sky. Alejandro turned, and the goat cart was there beside him, the goat smiling, winking at him, pursing its lips. Alejandro reached into the back of the cart and pulled out the ancient pick and shovel.

  The work was hard, the roots of the tree growing through the grave tough and massive. Alejandro pulled the axe out of the cart and worked on the roots, which sighed and trembled with each new loss of sap. He chewed the ground without mercy, creating a wide hole around the tree and descending well below its roots. Soon he was covered with the thick, black dirt. He could hardly breathe, but he persisted in his descent.

  Alejandro dug and hacked his way through brush and soil, roots and finally the long wooden box of walnut, finely detailed with scenes of his father and mother embracing, the village so busy he barely recognized it, the shallow faces of the villagers so serene. But eventually the well-made box fell apart under his hands, and then there was his mother’s beautiful dark hair, her limbs thin, skin clinging stubbornly, and her steady look, as if chastising him for what he had done.

  The base of the tree pierced her chest. It was the thorn; in her endless sleep she had dreamed it into a tree.

  But Alejandro hacked and hacked until he had his mother free. He reached down under and between the roots and embraced her, pulling her out of the ground. Dirt filled his eyes and his mouth until he could no longer feel himself; he was a worm filled with dirt and wiggling up out of the darkness. A splinter of wood still grew from Felicia’s chest, but she was up into the light now, his mother once again.

  He laid her on the ground. He fed her some of the witch’s milk. He was amazed at how light she was when he lifted her into the cart. The goat smiled, seeming to laugh at Alejandro, but willingly followed the boy’s tug.

  For hours they travelled the dusty road back toward the village: Alejandro and the goat, his mother leaned up straight and stiff in the cart, and the thirsty cat following behind. Now and then he would stop and give his mother another drink, and sometimes he could almost see her smile.

  Just as he had the village in sight his mother fell over in the cart. Alejandro scrambled around to the rear and climbed inside with her, the bucket still in his hands, the milk slopping out and washing his clothes, turning the plank floors of the cart into healthy, green wood.

  She stared up at him with wormwood eyes. He gave her more and more of the witch’s milk. Her pale white tongue lapped greedily, but still her wooden eyes would not move, no matter how much he cried for her, how much he screamed he still needed her, or how much he confessed to her about the anger he felt at her leaving. Her body lay stiff and unmoving, with only her wet white worm of a tongue wiggling obscenely in the dark bore of her mouth. Finally he poured the remaining milk over her, but this brought no further changes.

  He knew he could bring her like this to his father, this creature so like a wooden carving, and his father would have b
een satisfied. His father would dress her and hold her and keep her forever, and no one would be able to dissuade him. Nothing would ever change. Alejandro had ignored the witch, and wasted her milk.

  He retrieved the two halves of the crude staff from his belt. He wrapped the pieces together with twine, binding them tightly. He hefted the mended staff and tested it for strength. Then Alejandro stood over his wooden mother and brought the staff down again and again, the snake biting her into more chips and splinters than he could count.

  *

  Through the back door Alejandro let himself into the house of the woodcarvers, and into the empty shop. He examined the hollowed out blocks of wood his father had arranged on a dusty shelf. As he took down each one he tried to remember the things his father had taught him about these samples:

  The cypress …it doesn’t wear well. The willow … your mother, she likes the willow tree—but it has a tendency to split.

  Now the Spanish cedar, it is easy to cut. But when his father pushed the sample up to Alejandro’s nose he had shaken his head. He did not like the smell at all. He remembered how hard his father had laughed then.

  Some like the finished look of poplar. But for the woodcarver … His father shook his head doubtfully. It bruises too easily, and it grabs the tool like a cat with the cheese, and will not let go of it. It refuses your cuts, so why should you fight with it? Life is too short, muchacho.

  So Alejandro chose the Black Walnut, his father’s favourite wood. See the fine, tough grain, Alejandro? This wood will accept more detail and undercuts than the rest … it will welcome the hand guided by a dream. It finishes beautifully, and has the darkness one expects in a dream …

  He worked carefully with his father’s tools, including the ones his father had not taught him yet, the ones whose names alone he knew from his father’s working sing-songs. The carbon knife …

  take the carbon knife, make the stroke but don’t bump against the tang. The tang. Use the mallet well, but use the mallet care … fully. Take the needle rasp, take the rasp riffler, and the fishtail, the fishtail,