The Carving Circle Read online

  First published 2017

  Scrutineer Publishing

  www.scrutineer.org

  ISBN: 978-0-9956843-7-9

  Copyright © Gretchen Heffernan 2017

  The moral rights of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission of the copyright holder.

  By the same author

  The Book of Dirt

  The Humours Quartet

  Book One: Black Bile, The Carving Circle

  Acknowledgements

  A heartfelt thank you to Arcadians everywhere, in particular, Rachael Adams for her support and shimmering brilliance.

  Dedication

  All the words are for Mike.

  The Carving Circle

  Gretchen Heffernan

  Prologue

  The first thing Jacques Beaumont brought back to life was a field mouse. He was just a boy and had found the mouse dead near the woodshed. It was in perfect condition, as though it had simply keeled over and stopped breathing. The creature seemed unconscious and when he picked it up, he half expected it to wake and bite him, but it just lay in his palm like a bit of stiff pelt. He couldn’t believe his luck. It was perfect for carving. He had a block of pine in his bedroom, already smooth and soft as toffee, just waiting for this mouse and his chisel, as if the two were fated, which, he’d eventually come to understand, they were.

  He ran up the stairs to his bedroom. The room was hot and breeze-less, even with the window open, and he began to sweat as he laid the mouse carefully inside a towel-lined box. Every corner of the room was cluttered with animal bones, rocks, snake skins, beetle casings, feathers, eye knots of wood and sketchbooks like a dragon’s hoard of found things he loved to carve.

  He studied the mouse’s body before he placed the box on his desk and took up his chisel. The mouse was the first mammal he had ever carved and he wanted it to be faultless. It took him hours to replicate the mouse’s delicate features accurately, and he lost all sense of time in the process, yet when he’d finished, the mouse and the figurine were, in essence, identical. He looked at his work in admiration. Focus had seemed to melt into his hands, as though his hands were acting extraneously from his body, yet somewhere close, though distant in feeling, like the future. He held the figurine lovingly to his chest and the mouse’s legs began to scratch against the cardboard. He peered hesitantly into the box, where he watched, with incredulousness, as the rest of the mouse’s body softened and twitched to life.

  Quickly, he tipped the box on its side and the mouse hurried out. The carving seemed to seethe to a fizz in his hand and he looked at it in wonder. Could it have had something to do with the mouse’s revival? Resurrection was not a term he understood then, and everything he felt was based on a bewildered sort of reflex. The roar of a coming wave flooded his ears, his mind and vision.

  Before he could think another thought, the mouse ran across his desk and quickly leapt out of the window, plummeting to a second death. He could see the dark splat of its small body like a squashed grape against the ground below, and as he gripped the carving in his hand, he found that he knew, instinctively, how to will the mouse alive. He squeezed and prayed and slowly, as though blowing up a tiny balloon, the mouse’s body began to take form. It stood, dazed and bloodied, but very much alive, and ran away.

  In that moment, time revealed its fluctuating existence to Jacques. How the power of the mind, when released from the body, from the myth of identity, can overlap time and that no thing, shape, or idea is ever truly static or linear. In fact, fervent living takes place where time overlaps and it was inside such a space that he met Elora.

  There are people in the world that direct this alteration and there are people in the world that simply adjust. Jacques was one of the directors, as was Elora, and when he resurrects her into her full reawakening, she will realize how much he loved her and loves her still.

  *

  Jacques walks into his garage and flicks on the light. The slender trunk of pine is resting like a patient on his workbench. He removes the sheet with the flair of a magician. I’ll begin with the head, he thinks. Its shape and hair; I’ll save her face for last. Elora’s features had always been exquisite. He would have to choose her expression carefully and he hoped that by carving her body first, her form might explain her desired countenance. It’s important that she has a choice, he doesn’t want her to feel forced or manipulated, so he listens to the wood and the life still inside it akin to a faint heartbeat.

  He begins to tear away each piece of her bark as though it were a fresh scab. He uses his hands and a small chisel. Anything electric, he fears, might jolt her and that is not what the wood wants. She’s alive, but he needs to build her emotions and for creating her persona he relies on listening to the wood.

  He delicately turns her over and peels the bark from her other side. She is the length of a head and torso. He runs his hands down the cylinder of her figure, a gesture so intimate that if she were awake, she’d shiver. The wood splinters where it’s knotted, like a folded knuckle, and he begins sanding her back to a smooth, honeyed bone.

  There is an initial sense of mutilation that remains until the sculpture has come to life, not alive in the way that blood knows it, but life as resurrection through smell, through touch, and that captured narrative we screw into ourselves to hold our memories together. Once they grasp that his purpose is to remake them as solid and strong, his marks move from scars to inscriptions and the relationship begins.

  He has loved them all. Truly. He looks across the valley dotted with his sculptures and watches the sun lower below the mountaintop like the yellow arc of a reptilian eye closing the mountain grey. Each one of them a different character of Elora, each one, designing her memory. More than love. Love when it’s explosive.

  He sands her down with long raspy sighs. The wood underneath is fresh and perfect and untouched. I’ll keep the first piece I chisel out of her, he thinks, curled as a child’s tendril, I’ll keep it close to me.

  He’s been saving this piece of wood for Elora for nearly a year. He’s felt her waiting, tiptoeing like a cat, along the periphery of his creative view. He labels each log with a date and place of discovery and files them in his woodshed. He has it all planned. This sculpture will focus on carving her head, chest and waist. She will have two metal posts for legs, as he perfected her legs on another sculpture months ago, and a floor-length nightdress composed of wooden medallions, each engraved with a symbol.

  He’ll drill a hole in the top and bottom of each medallion and fasten them together with wire, like chainmail. She’ll stand in the garden with her emblem nightdress circling around her. She’ll have a view of the mountains and the others to keep her company, until she completely turns.

  Until she comes back to him.

  In the beginning, during his activation, the time that he now thinks of as the period when he was learning how to resurrect, his sculpting was frenzied and raw. He’d race through forms that were often muddled with misshapen animals, digging, cutting through layers to get to the bottom of himself. Now, each new sculpture arrives as an instruction of crystalline precision that he can feel expanding beneath his eyelids like frost.

  He understands how wood is perfect for re-embodiment and invites touch because it, too, is cellular and composed of tissues, so cell attracts cell and regrows cell. It burns, its wounds leak, and it has a memory and turns to stone, like our bones, when they’re petrified, yet retains a warmth that is unduplicated. He understands this warmth, like the warmth of a human, comes from the sharpening o
r growing of a core, and must first endure tools, both brutal and smoothing, such as life. Such as age, how time quickly possesses cellular entities, so the perfect sculpture, like a human, begins to erode as soon as it’s created, for the earth lays claims to the reusing of molecules from the beginning. He understands how all molecules are intelligent, yet fluctuating, and therein lies their precious ability to mutate. His sculptures merely restructure this mutation.

  Jacques’s maman, his father and now Jacques himself were all born with the ability to harness life’s forces. We are taught the laws of physics and, without question, these influence our universe, but the forces that dominate our species are the laws of emotional acumen. Jacques’s lineage understood that physics and intelligence could be interchangeably influenced through ritualistic prayer. Sculpture is his form of prayer; his father’s was photography; his maman’s was Voodoo.

  It is an old wisdom and Jacques was born into it.

  *

  He picks up a wooden medallion from the kitchen table, places it inside of his palm and opens and closes his hand like a blinking eye. He used to dream that he had eyes in his hands. What would she say? What would she want said? He feels that what she wants, what is missing, is a story. I’ll give you my own, he thought, and unite it with yours.

  Some nights the frost behind his eyes suffocates him. It weaves one pattern furiously over the other, until it grows into a single block of ice that he has to crack himself out of. He walks through his mind then, breaking open his sculptures with a hammer and chisel. His past bursts from their wooden skulls like trapped black flies.

  He remembers now.

  That summer there had been a plague of bluebottles. He remembers everything. He sits down at the table and begins sketching a fly, a bear, an onion, a pint of jam, mountains. A young woman who loved to sing. Elora. A river. A bird. A murder. A story.

  1.

  Pine Creek, Ontario 1933 - 1953

  Mathis Beaumont was a photographer because he needed a layer between himself and his obsession with grizzly bears. It worked like glue inside a crack. It united and divided the fact that he was both man and bear. The lens allowed him to filter. It wasn’t until after Mathis had disappeared, that Jacques began to fully comprehend the use of his father’s filter and how you can grow one, like an invisible fingernail, in order to tolerate yourself.

  Their house had stood in a valley of mountains like a block of soap inside a green dish. It was a two-story rectangle of worn clapboard. The lake beside it was completely still and reflected another house, watery and surreal, like a parallel world he could jump into. This was the view, the dimension, his mother preferred, and in the spring, when it was clear that she was ill and wasn’t recovering, she moved her chair to the window and watched the mountains tremor in the water, as though working up the courage to stare at the real thing. Hibernating season was over and his father was away.

  “You’ve got to chew the fruit to see the pit,” she told Jacques, speaking of his father’s absence. “His expeditions are the closest he gets to chewing himself. Passion is like that. Like chewing yourself. That’s the way it is with people. I didn’t choose him. You think I’d choose a lunatic? Lord, no, he just happened upon me. And he didn’t choose that blasted bear. She was just always his. And it’s true your father’s half mad, but let me tell you something, he feels fear and he loves anyway, and that’s a darn sight better then fearing nothing and loving nothing and living half dead. You got that? Half mad is better living than half dead.”

  She looked out the window towards the row of pines that wrapped around the base of the mountain and protected their valley from the cold rock. She picked a piece of loose thread from her cardigan and rolled it between her thumb and forefinger. It was one of her lucid moments and he sat beside her on the sofa. She reached over and put her hand on his knee.

  “But not you, no. You’ve got the look of the hell bent.”

  She looked out the window again. The pines were dark frayed knees against a denim horizon. The sun was low and golden in the sky.

  “It’ll snow,” she said. “It’ll snow before the week’s out. It may be April, but I know the goddamn weather.”

  She took his hand and stroked it as though he were a small child.

  “Someday,” she said and he sat waiting for her to continue.

  Geese were calling fourth the spring and his heart sank at their freedom.

  “Someday you’ll have a bear and it will eat you,” she sighed.

  “Or you’ll chase it,” she sighed, “but probably both.”

  And so.

  The thought that he might be full of real and imaginary bears was an idea that Jacques carefully folded up and placed inside his heart like a note inside an envelope.

  *

  Mathis Beaumont’s unusual affection for bears could be traced back to his devotion to a particular ushanka, also known as a Russian trapper’s hat. It was a wild and magnificent possession for a child living in the south of France. One could argue that the hat saved the emotional life of young Mathis Beaumont, for even as a grown man, he could close his eyes and glaze the boy he once was until that child shined bright enough for Mathis to feel a soft fur against his eyelids. Indeed it was the fur that made the hat truly wonderful. It was stitched from the hide of a Russian Urrissi bear, a distant relative of the North American grizzly, and gave Mathis the warmth he would eventually use to draw the line his life would follow.

  But before that, others drew it for him.

  Mathis was the illegitimate child of General Jean Philippe Beaumont, a French nobleman with a preference for Haitian women. The year was 1905 and two things happened that irrevocably transformed Mathis’s future: his maman, a beautiful Creole housekeeper, died and Jean Philippe Beaumont was diagnosed with syphilis.

  In a desperate act to save his soul, as well as rejuvenate his marred member, Jean Phillippe moved his illegitimate son to his least favorite countryside residence, Château de la Colline Pourpre, an hour east of Aix-en-Provence and a million miles away from the streets of Paris. Mathis was given a hot bath, a hot meal and a cold English governess.

  However, despite his one act of kindness, Jean Philippe perished and Mathis, in accordance with French law, inherited his financial birthright. His stepmother was furious and immediately shipped him to a boarding school in Montreal, Canada, as far away from Parisian society as his passport allowed.

  It was a dream come true for Mathis. He placed the ushanka on his head, boarded the ship, stood at the prow and watched the Atlantic shove them to Canada. Land of the Grizzlies. Two years later the world went to war, and Mathis, for the second time in his life, had been saved by another’s vanity.

  *

  A peculiar fascination seldom exists without a sensible origin. General Jean Philippe had always refused Mathis cuddly toys because he claimed they were emasculating. His playthings were restricted to weapons, and while the governess wouldn’t be so bold as to give Mathis a secret teddy, she did offer him the ushanka his father was given during a Russian post.

  After dinner his governess would read from one of Jean Philippe’s prescribed war novels and Mathis would snuggle up to his hat. They sat by the fire in the winter and on the terrace during the summer. Mathis listened and rubbed the hat across his cheeks. The fur dampened with his breath and soon grew matted inside his small, tight grip, and it was through this affection that his uncanny interest in grizzly bears grew.

  This was an interest his father was happy to endorse, so that by the time Mathis left for Montreal, he was practically an expert on the subject. He saw his life as running parallel to the solitary and nomadic existence of the grizzly bear. After boarding school, he packed his camera equipment and made the long journey towards Ontario, where he bought a modest house in the middle of nowhere and began to pursue his passions in peace.

  His love of photography did not have such obvious origins. It couldn’t be pinpointed, but almost certainly dovetailed with his relationship to
light. Light and its ability to replace words. Unspeakable, unfathomable words that stitched his memory with radiance. Indeed, his memory was held together with light. Candles in a room and his mother singing, dancing, praying. Men with lanterns in dark streets. A fire in a barrel. The cold moon through a crack in his bedroom ceiling and the glare of wet rocks against a cloudless sky. His maman lighting the desk lamp and the mountains moving from pink to purple like heavenly ships. He was a prism of his memory and in every direction he turned, light catalogued and defined him, so when his father gave him a Brownie camera for his birthday, it felt like the final benediction of an internal instrument that had long since been playing.

  2.

  During his first few years in Pine Creek he watched the light religiously and hardly spoke a word. He planted a garden. He read, and reread, the books he’d brought with him. He spent months away tracking, mapping and photographing the grizzlies in his area. He had pictures of them fishing, mating, clawing the earth and sleeping in large, soft piles. He grew accustomed to the smell of his body and the voice of his mind. It was like meeting an entirely new person. He knew hunger, danger and thirst. He watched the bear and learnt the mimicry of survival. He tended his garden and thought of himself as supremely happy.

  But restlessness is the thorn of happiness, and one evening he found himself standing on the Nose, a boulder that jutted out from the rock face, and staring at the lit windows of a distant town.

  The next morning he came down from the mountain and enquired about a room for the night. It was 1930 and the wheat prices had fallen so drastically that tens of thousands of farmers had been forced to leave their land. The country had gone into economic ruin and the innkeeper turned him away as though he were another vagrant until he produced cash from his wallet. The money was too much for the innkeeper to resist and he gave Mathis a room. From the window Mathis watched horses pull cars their owners could no longer afford to fuel. He saw entire families that were shoeless and begging. The sound of his voice had shocked him, but not so much as the desperation of humanity.