The Carving Circle Read online

  “I remember a time in Boston. We were dirt poor. Your mother said she’d had enough of living on love and potatoes. Said, ‘Tonight we’ll eat steaks’ then got up, walked out the door and stormed down the stairs. Just like that. With that crazy look in her eyes she’d get when she fixed her mind on something. I just let her go. I thought, what now? But the next thing I heard was her sweet voice rising up from the busy street below, rising up to the open window and resting right there on the windowsill like a goddamn spring robin. I kid you not. It wasn’t even two seconds and I heard the first coin drop. That night we had enough money for two steaks and some greens. Lord we feasted like we’d never done before. Decided right then and there to move out to the land of the plenty.”

  “But Daddy…”

  “Just stop right there Elora, there’s no sense romanticizing about the impossible. You just pull your head out of those clouds and be happy with the life the good Lord gave you. It ain’t a bad one. You hear me? It ain’t bad.”

  16.

  At home, Birdie lit the wick of a glass hurricane lamp. They would need it for the burial. She has always preferred them to modern flashlights because of their glow and primal flickering. It was like reaching back through time towards a memory she felt at ease with but couldn’t quite grasp.

  She put Franklin in her bedroom and warned him not to peck the curtains. She put a blanket over her aviary and listened to the birds adjust their wings for sleep.

  It was not going to be easy, earlier in the week she had spoken to Stan, an old friend, about hiding Elora if necessary. Of course he agreed, and although she didn’t expect a massive change from Elora right now, it was the first step, and Birdie wanted to be ready. She patted the wooden penis in her cardigan pocket, if this doesn’t scare her off, she thought, I might just have a chance.

  Through the open windows she could smell and hear the pageantry of the night, and then Elora’s hesitant footsteps on the path that lead to the house. Birdie went to the door and opened it. Elora’s face was wet and crazed. She didn’t say hello, she just walked straight in, sat on the sofa, and with great care, folded her hands in her lap. Her eye was as mean as a canker sore and her nose was starting to scab. Birdie moved the hurricane lamp to the coffee table beside her and she glistened with moisture.

  “Hello Elora,” Birdie said and Elora turned her face away, the lamp outlined her sharp profile. “You sure you want to be here?”

  Elora shrugged. “I do. It’s just. Difficult.”

  “I imagine it is. You’re very brave to have come in the first place.”

  “It feels dishonest. But, I have to do something.”

  She said nothing and put her hand on Elora’s shoulder, Elora flinched, then relaxed into her palm. “Let me get you a drink? A hot tea or a glass of wine?”

  “Wine please.”

  “You have every reason to be nervous. I don’t blame you one iota.”

  “No, but I blame myself, otherwise it would never have come to this.”

  “What do you blame yourself for?” Birdie handed her the wine, she took it and Birdie sat down across from her.

  “I don’t know. Being empty, I guess, emptiness.”

  “We all empty out sometimes, Elora. We’d become stagnant otherwise, and stagnant water can turn to poison. What you fill yourself with is important.”

  “But I’ve tried, I’ve tried to fill myself with goodness, happiness,” her face began to crumple. “You don’t know how I’ve tried.”

  “No, I don’t, but listen, let’s not make this so huge, it becomes scary,” Birdie could tell she was losing her, could feel her retreating. “You’re here now. It’s good to chat, as for anything else, we’ll go easy,” so you’ll come again, she thought. “I’ve just planned a little exercise that will plant a seed of power in you, and if you let it, it will grow to replace your emptiness,” Birdie poured herself a glass of wine and sat down next to Elora.

  “How do you mean, “grow”? Like a baby?”

  “Yes. Exactly like a baby. That’s a wonderful way to think about it. Your own beautiful healing baby.”

  “Then maybe I’ll be able to carry a child?”

  “No. I’m not promising that. I make no guarantees I can’t keep. You’ll have a seed of power. You can try to use it any way you like, as long as you don’t use it against yourself. That’s the condition. Do you agree?”

  “Yes. But I’m not sure I can leave him.”

  “I’m not asking you to leave him. That’s not my decision. I’m simply asking you not to use your new strength against yourself.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Now. I have to say this, Elora; I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t and although I’ll only say it once, the offer will always be there. Do you understand that? Forever. Should you decide that you needed to leave, I have a safe house for you with a friend of mine in Chicago.”

  “He wants to change. He hates himself for, you know, for it,” said Elora.

  “By ‘it’ you mean ‘you’ correct? He hates himself for hurting you?”

  “Yes, but,” she took a deep breath.

  “But?”

  “But if I could just have a baby things would be different. I know it.”

  “Yes. Things would certainly be different. There would potentially be two of you to hurt.”

  “I am not here to leave him, Birdie.”

  “I understand, but you need to tell me why you’re here. Why did you send Hope?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Like you said, to heal. So that maybe I can, I don’t know. I need a change, we, we need a change. I want to make a change happen.” She took a drink of wine.

  Birdie looked at her for a long time and made her decision.

  “Okay. Okay, let’s make it happen then. Here,” she took the carved penis out of her cardigan pocket and handed it to Elora.

  Elora let out a breath of surprise. “Is this?”

  “It’s what it looks like. It’s a penis, tackle, dick, Johnny boy, knob and a whole lot else, but get over all of that nonsense. Just rub that out of your head,” she wiped her hand across Elora’s eyes. “What you are holding is also one of humanity’s oldest symbols of masculinity, virility and fertility. And that, my dear, is how we are going to use it. As a symbol, pure and simple.”

  “Oh,” Elora took another big gulp of wine. “What exactly do you want me to do with it?”

  “Relax honey, you don’t need to brace yourself. I simply want you to hold it and breathe deeply through your nose. I’m going to count backwards from ten, and when I reach one, you will be in a state of relaxation, like a trance or a dream.” As she spoke the words her voice softened and lowered. She had done this many times before and recited with confidence: “You do not have to do anything against your will, but the words I use, and the ritual you perform, will remain inside your mind, where you can access them instantly for strength,” she began counting.

  Elora closed her eyes. Her face was almost wet with moisture as though she’d been swimming through the lamplight.

  “Hold it and think of it as the symbol it is. Now make it weak and empty, like a limp, hollow worm in your hands. Have you done that? Good. Now think of your past as a map and begin to unroll it until it extends all the way to your childhood. Look at it. It’s like a long inscribed road with fields and timber and valleys and the Mississippi. See the town square, the red barns, the church, and the park with the swings, the school. Everything is there. Can you see it? Wonderful. Now, light up the people and events that have caused you pain. Make their lights bright and visible. Take your time. And when you’re ready, raise them above the map, so that they’re floating. Let each one rise, tell them goodbye and let them fly towards and enter your symbol. Fill that symbol with all of your pain, your anger, your loss, your fear. Is it completely full? Is it shining with light? Good. Now, turn it off. Turn the light off. Snuff out every little glimmer, until it’s dark and dead, like a stiff corpse in your hands. Now we are going to walk out
side and bury it because it’s dead. Are you ready?”

  Birdie took her satchel from a hook and opened the door to a vivid night. Elora followed her. The lamp lit the cobwebs on the grass. They walked through damp to the riverside. Elora cradled the symbol like an infant. Birdie knelt and took a trowel from her satchel.

  “Look at the river,” Birdie said. “The river is constantly reshaping the banks that define it. People can do that too. We can reshape the way we hold ourselves to enhance the way we flow. Stop blocking yourself, Elora. Are you ready to let it go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then take the trowel, dig a hole and bury it.”

  Elora dug a deep hole, placed the penis inside and covered it completely. She wiped her hands on her thighs and sat staring at the river. Her eyes were lit.

  “The pain does not own you anymore. It does not control you anymore. It has no power over you. It’s weak and limp and dead. You killed it. You will replace your pain with your own strength. You will become strong. You are the one that shines now. You are the one full of light. Now, when I finish counting forward, you will reach full consciousness where you’ll feel stronger and more able to manage your life.”

  Birdied counted her back to consciousness and after a few moments of silence, she took the geode from her satchel and handed it to Elora.

  “Open it,” she said.

  Elora opened it and found the tiny carved woman inside a bed of crystals.

  “That’s you,” Birdie said and took her hand. “From now on, remember, no matter what happens, that’s you.”

  “Thank you,” Elora said and began to cry.

  *

  Days passed and Birdie’s words were a current inside her. During the day she did not sing. Daylight was like a licked finger and thumb that extinguished her and inside of its hours she became unidentifiable to herself, as if she’d been sucked dry, a raisin, a shrunken head, but with a mouth that formed words, with arms and legs that followed instructions.

  She stood in front of the mirror and touched the skin healing on her face. Sweat made it sting, but it remained unbroken. Her face had gone from broken to unbroken. Once again she looked like the sheriff’s wife and people could treat her with as much indifference as a tin of pineapple or Spam. She perpetuated their indifference by wearing a public face that was both agreeable and undemanding; a pretty mask that worked in a way similar to how birdsong disguises the cruelty of wilderness.

  People felt safe around her, so she was able to keep herself hidden, and those in hiding know how to listen and the more she listened, the more she understood that the skin was often a rug that character was swept under, like dirt. The skin, the body, was immaterial. When she dared to believe in anything, she believed in music, so it was no surprise that Jacques arrived in song.

  17.

  It was hot in the car, even with the windows down; it was like breathing though a steamy washcloth. Arlo made her wear stockings to church.

  “Ladies wear stockings,” he said.

  They had laid towels across the vinyl seats so the back of their legs wouldn’t burn. Her towel was wet with sweat. Arlo draped a towel over the steering wheel and started the car. Elora stuck her head out of the window and the breeze was like the harassing breath of some animal. Her face had all but healed. As soon as they reached Highway One the dust stopped.

  “Thank goodness for that,” Arlo said. “It’ll be good you getting out and seeing folks. They have been asking how you were,” he put his hand on her knee and patted it.

  Highway One was a paved road that shot straight through the heart of Callisto, splitting the two halves of the town like an apple on either side of its asphalt. A finger snap of white wooden houses, enclosed by river and prairie, snugly tucked inside the clapping blue waves and flowering virile grasses that kept Callisto hidden, mirage-like amidst a feverish green. Unparalleled freedoms existed inside such seclusion, but dwelled as all freedoms dwell, inside their own shape of entrapment, so Highway One was a necessary emblem for the mind as well as a convenience for the body. It was a way out just in case one wanted to use it.

  Arlo preferred the back roads; the intertwined dirt paths that he’d helped carve and level. The dusty and insensible tentacles that lead to ponds, to cabins, to shacks, to overgrown groves, fields, homesteads, to the river, to nowhere and dead ends. Taking Highway One was a Sunday exception, because Arlo washed the car on Sundays and wanted to keep it as clean as possible for church. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” he would say.

  Every Sunday there was a moment of breathlessness as soon as the wheels touched the highway’s spine. A moment where the uneven jerk and pop kick of gravel became a purr, smooth and easy. It made leaving seem easy. A simple course of action, like licking an ice cube back to water, a steady and smooth movement inside which time would alter the entire consistency, the entire nature of the thing, of her. It seemed so easy and she imagined herself jumping from the car, running all the way to the interstate and hitching a ride to Chicago. Her mind caught in the whirl of motion and dreaming.

  Then the sight of the white cloud-popping steeple and Arlo slowing the car to avoid the fling of gravel’s rock as he pulled into the parking lot and the white wooden church, square and stout with three stained glass windows that ran along either side. The shape of the windows mimicked the steeple, arrows pointing up; pointing in the direction death would take you if you’d enter. The front door was a simple unpainted oak and above it a round stained glass window, blue with a white dove holding an olive branch in its beak. They walked beneath it. They were always early.

  She stood there trying to smile. She was too hot inside her knee length skirt, her long sleeved shirt and stockings. She straightened her spine uncomfortably. It was hot as hell and everyone moved in slow motion, as if they had each been bitten by a poisonous spider, and the heat was turning their insides to liquid. She imagined them all melting, dolloping through the cracks in the floorboards like mercury.

  The sun streamed through the windows, a torch behind a slice of colored Swiss cheese, she felt dizzy. Rainbow prisms shifted across wooden pews and the white walls and she felt as though she were inside a kaleidoscope. It spun. She spun. The edges blurred and rounded, spinning, spinning then black. She fainted. She collapsed like a person without bones, no person at all, a doll, that fell and fell through a black gelatinous dream.

  It was the dream of a play already in motion.

  She was a single drop of water that began to vigorously multiply, three of her, then five hundred, sixty thousand of her split, divided and filled like a cloud, until it became a forceful gray throttle and released. She dropped, crisp through the sky, a glass arrow headed for the earth’s throat. A million of her followed, mirrored droplets, inside each one the watery reflection of her face, ten million faces, twenty million faces, plummeted and smacked and folded through the musky sucking mouths of soil. Rain, and with it, erosion. Fragments of her pushed as one, all of her faces carved, forged, split rock and push towards the churning deep and blue.

  Then. A slap, not hard but intending. Her eyes opened. Above her their damp faces relaxed and softened from worry.

  “It’s okay, folks,” Arlo said. “It’s just the heat. She’s just fainted from the heat.” He held a damp dishtowel against her forehead.

  She felt sick.

  “I feel sick,” she said and they backed away not wanting vomit on their Sunday shoes.

  She was woozy.

  “I need some air,” she said and they backed further away allowing her girth to rise.

  Arlo helped her. “Steady,” he said, “steeeeady now.”

  As though she were a horse he was leading into a stable.

  “Steady, girl, steady.”

  She pushed his hand away. “Just give me a moment.”

  She walked towards the door. The dove in the window glared at her; its yellow eye seared a hole in her forehead, while behind her the Reverend clapped his hands.

  “Show’s over
people, let’s return to our pews quickly, quickly now.”

  The organ began to play and she could hear her Arlo’s laugh. He was happy. It had gone well, she had performed and he had gotten away with it. He was already talking to someone about fishing. She opened the door and stepped out into a colorless womb of dust. A veneer of dust covered over everything like camouflage. A tree was not a tree, but dust in the shape of a tree. The bank was a brick square of dust. She wanted to hide as well, so walked across Highway One and into a deep ditch, where she laid down and waited for the dust to cover her.

  Then Jacques.

  Jacques stood above her, looking down with curiosity and not judgment. Neither one of them were startled.

  “There you are,” he said and with one hand he helped her up to standing. In his other hand he carried a bunch of purple clover.

  “It’s for salad later,” he said.

  Hair, black. Eyes, black. And skin. His body was large and strong against the sun, his body sharpened the sun. Jacques.

  “Your face has healed,” he said, bent down and touched her temple with his thumb. “Are you alright?”

  What could she say? He was open and frank. “Sometimes,” she said. “Not really,” she turned away. “No.”

  “Come on,” he took her hand, “I’ve something to show you.”

  They walked through the field together. Gray clouds umbrella above them and raindrops began to bounce off the dry earth like clear rubber pebbles, an instant shattering of bullets. Thunder cracked and opened a waterfall, at once, they were washed, baptized. Their beginning began with the drought’s end, began with a flood. It was like this: she wanted to sing, then she met Jacques and there was song, wretched song.

  18.

  The fresh rain mixed with sweat in the folds of her skin. It caught in the hair on her lip and slid into her mouth like hot tears. She could feel dripping everywhere and mud, slick and gritty between her toes, filled her shoes. She stopped to tie her hair into a knot on top of her head. She stared at his hands, wrinkling with rain; she could not meet his eyes, but sensed him looking, thinking. They sloshed down the weed-worn track and all the way to the house. The storm was loud and crackling. He motioned for her to follow him around the back. She could see the river was dimpled like wet gray silk. They stood under a canopy of maple leaves. The raindrops fell heavy and irregular against their heads, against the wind chimes. In the watery blur she could see flashes of red and yellow vegetable and berries. She could smell onions.