The Carving Circle Read online

  “Wait here,” he told her. His feet smacked against puddles until he disappeared. The rain let up a little and the sky lightened.

  She noticed she wasn’t alone. Wooden sculptures of women were everywhere, watching, enclosing, a small army of goddesses in every size and shape. Some were tucked away, others were standing or lying on the ground, some were hidden in bushes, amongst the branches and the rhubarb, one was on top of the house, in every corner, carved women. Some were useful, were benches, chairs, one beside the back door had outstretched arms and hooks for fingers. Some were pregnant, were one-eyed or half-fish, half-bird, half-wolf or were half-buried. None looked finished. They were all crude and hovering with the sense of the unmade. She shut her eyes. The noise they made combined like a murmur, no voice singled out, no one thing heard or identified, no song.

  “Ready,” he said. He was holding a carving the size of a breastplate.

  It was a large single wing with her face chiseled in the center. In it, her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. In it, she was singing. She felt speechless.

  “Do you like it?” He smiled a white crescent.

  “Yes, of course I do, but, how did you know about the singing and,” she hesitated, then brought her hand up to her face.

  “I heard you. The other night by the river. No, wait, don’t get embarrassed. I understand it, where it comes from, that feeling of being out of control of your body. I know it.”

  “I knew someone was there. I was afraid.”

  “I know. I was too.”

  “Of what?”

  “Can I?”

  He didn’t wait for her to answer, he untied the knot and her wet hair fell and smacked against her shoulder. It was a sound that stopped everything. Like a gunshot, a child’s cry, a turning doorknob, water. He brought his mouth to hers. She felt them watching, trees trapped inside bodies designed by his hands alone, and turned away. They desired him, she could feel it, they craved him and she felt as though they were closing in, from the beginning, felt doomed by his sculptures. She knew they wanted to be human.

  “I’m sorry,” she pulled away. “I can’t.”

  19.

  She ran back through the field and rain poured from the sky. The exhausted earth lifted and opened in a hazel gratitude. What had been dry was filling, feeding again. Lightning and thunder in the sky and inside her chest. He was the artist Arlo had told her about. Jacques.

  Dust settled and the world seemed green with possibility. Outside the church, children were dancing in puddles and a hot vapor rose from the reawakened ground. Elora stood beside the car in the parking lot and let the rain pelt down upon her. She wished it was acid. She wished it could melt her skin and make her someone new, someone that could walk away from her life and into another, without fear.

  The church bell rang. In minutes the parishioners would run from the door to their cars. How could she reenter her life? She touched her lips. He had already washed away. We are still thrown, she thought, even the dead, even me, live inside an impulse we had imagined was impossible. The galaxy still explodes above us, redefining, reconfiguring the course of things. I want to be new, she lifted her face to the rain, make me new, she prayed to the sky.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Mean eyes unlocked the car and opened the door. “Get in the goddamn car and use the towel. People are staring. Jesus, woman,” he said.

  Inside the car it was silent and warm fluid drained from her ears as if they’d burst. Arlo drove. She could tell he was searching for words. His hands wrung the steering wheel.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. Half the time I come home to find you staring at the river, or a tree or space like you’re in a coma or something. Now this, standing in the rain, catching your death, in front of everybody. Don’t you have no pride? I know things aren’t always good between us, but that’s just folks, that’s just marriage, rough and smooth, but goddammit, Elora, you have me at my wit’s end acting like a crazy woman,” he paused.

  Elora watched raindrops slide down the window. He parked the car in their drive, turned the ignition off, and looked at her.

  “I know I shouldn’t drink so much, but I gotta lot to deal with, keeping the law and, well, coping with you. You ain’t an easy wife, Elora. This ain’t an easy life. A man has things he wants, a good and sane wife, a family, sons. Half the time you don’t even give me a proper dinner. I’m not complaining, I know you got things on your mind, but I want you to know that behind every action there is a reason. I love you though. You know that,” he turned her head to face him. “You’re still the prettiest girl around, so I’ll keep ya, crazy or not,” he said and laughed.

  *

  The rain did not stop, it didn’t even slow down, so that what was moist and alert began to droop, saturated and oppressed against the bloated ground. It collected in the wires of the screen windows like cells of a dragonfly wing when magnified. Like loneliness, Elora thought of things that fly and die within one season, of Jacques, sweeping in, and then, suddenly visible. To see her face in a wing. To feel captured, and let go, at once. Soon the soil will swallow no more and the fields will swell until they spill over. Like me, she thought. Tonight, as soon as Arlo left for his card game, she’d walk to the river.

  *

  Jacques stood at his bedroom window with the lights out. He could just see Elora beside the water’s edge. Thinking about her was like driving through a storm. It took concentration. Few things arrested him in such a way. He made the decision to see what would happen if he drove through to the other side, walked down the stairs and waited for her with the front door open. He could see that she was holding the small woman he’d carved for Birdie.

  “That’s the second carving I’ve made of you,” he called out and she stopped on the path. “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know,” she said and walked towards him. “I’m sorry I left the other day. I just...”

  “Don’t be. It’s okay. Everything will be okay.”

  She sighed heavily.

  “‘That world inside your sigh, knows no home’,” he quoted.

  “Who said that?”

  “I can’t remember, somebody. Why don’t you come over tomorrow and I’ll introduce you to my sculptures. Who knows? Maybe you’ll make some new friends.”

  “Wooden friends,” she laughed a sad laugh.

  “The best kind. They know how to keep your secrets.”

  20.

  Arlo left for work and Elora ran all the way to Jacques’s house, past the sculptures and up the porch steps with muddy calves. She knocked on the door.

  “You came,” he said as he opened the door. “Come on in, I’m making breakfast.”

  She was breathless and her hair stuck to her face in lashes. The large windows in the living room cast rain-speckled shadows on the floor. She stepped from square to square and followed him into the kitchen. Her socks left wet marks that absorbed unnoticed. Jacques was making eggs and coffee. He put a large dollop of honey into his coffee and stirred it.

  “I eat everything with honey now. The flowers are different here and the honey tastes like sun,” he took a sip and flipped his egg. “Aren’t you going to talk?”

  “This place,” she touched the walls softly. “It’s like I’ve been here before. I can’t explain it,” she circled inside the sundrenched emptiness. “How did you know to buy it? In town they say that you bought it unseen.”

  What difference does it make to the condition of the mind if a place is real or imagined? Remembering is a form of imagining that fastens the mind to a place, and real or unreal, it’s the place that matters. The place is where the identification is made. When Elora walked into Jacques’s house she identified with it immediately. It was in part the image of her personal landscape. The image of her escape, of her as free.

  “That is true. But I knew it was empty, big and isolated.” Like you, he thought, “I knew it had a view of the river and I understand that scale of lonely.”

 
The words lonely and understand in the same sentence were like a cleave to her inhibition.

  “They also say you are an artist.” A statement, not a question, she had seen his sculptures of course, but wanted to legitimize him.

  “That is also true, as you know.”

  When the emotions came they arrived like a herd.

  The heart’s fabric is the filament of dreams. He pulled at the very seams of her, pinpricked and unraveled her until she stepped out of her skin and into midair. She could see where she wanted to land. She could see who she could become.

  “Would you like to see them?”

  He lead Elora to the back door.

  He tucked his sculptures like artifacts into the foil of his person, where they stayed with him persistently, like faith or guilt. So that, for him, the act of creating was a form of tracking, tracking his secrets, claimed and unclaimed, following footprints and branches as broken as dreams, until he met a pair of eyes. Until he saw himself. Meeting her was standing unafraid in the middle of his wood, where all of his animals lived, some peacemaking, some deadly, but all of them ravenous. The idea of loving her was like entering the incalculable fold of time and eating through layer after layer of sediment, becoming, inhuman with the power to save.

  Outside, his sculptures bloated with water. He had positioned one by the window, and Elora stood beside the glass and looked at her. The grain had begun to split like a hoof up the center of her body, she had no arms, just a neck and head like a clothespin.

  “It’s like she’s peeking in.” Elora drew a circle in her breath mark on the window.

  “I know,” he said. “I like that, but I can move her if it bothers you.”

  “No. It’s fine. It’s just, different, that’s all.”

  “Different good or different bad?” He put a plate of fried eggs on the table.

  “I probably shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “But you are. So maybe you should just have a seat and enjoy yourself,” he handed her a fork and pulled the chair out for her to sit down.

  For a while, they ate together in silence, then she asked, “Jacques, what do you know about me?”

  “I know you’re less, far less, than you should be,” he said.

  “And you know about my husband, Arlo?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But that doesn’t bother me.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you want the truth?” She nodded, yes.

  “Because I imagine that the part of you that married Arlo is the part of yourself that you don’t love, but want to heal,” he reached across the table, took her hand. “That’s not the part of you that I’m interested in. I want to know the woman that I heard singing, the woman that Arlo doesn’t recognize and, perhaps, even fears,” he said. She burst into tears.

  He slid off the chair and kneeled beside her and took both of her hands. “That’s why I carved you, twice. My specialty is to resurrect life and, believe me, there are as many ways to live as there are to die.”

  *

  He was a sculptor. He brought things to life. He could carve a woman’s body from a dead tree. He could carve a rosebud from a dead tree, a cathedral, a rabbit, a soldier, a wand, but he chose her.

  “How long will you stay?” She lay against his chest, his heart in her ear.

  “I don’t know. As long as it takes, I guess.”

  “As long as it takes for what?”

  “To finish them, release them and feel the need to leave.”

  “Your sculptures? What will you do with them?”

  “Leave them. They belong here.”

  “But they’re yours,” she said.

  “They’re nobodies, casings. They’re practice.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but he put his finger over her lips and slowly unbuttoned her shirt. She was stunned. It was as though she were someone else, had entered another’s body. She let him undress her until she sat naked in the late morning light.

  He lifted her arm above her head and traced the slope beginning at her wrist and curving all the way to her hipbone. He lifted her hair and placed his finger on the bone behind her ear, moved it across her hairline, then down to the end of her spine and around to the front of her waist to her navel. He circled her navel three times, then moved his finger up, and traced each rib. From there to her breasts, he circled the girth of each breast before he traced her collar bone, her neck and jaw line, then shoulder, he drew a circle on her shoulder before he moved his finger down the outside of her arm, past her elbow to her hands, he spread and moved between each finger. Then he did the same between each of her toes and circled her anklebone, traced up to her knee, circled, circled then lifted her leg and pushed her gently back. His finger drew circles on the thin skin behind her knee before it traced down to the soft underside of her thigh and down, down.

  “I sometimes imagine myself as water,” he whispered as his finger entered and traced the inside of her.

  “I look at the log I’m about to carve and imagine myself as water and the log thriving once more from my nourishment,” he circled her.

  “This is what I need. To give life again by taking the decayed away, weakness away, to be the hands that offer reincarnation. That resurrect another form, another you,” his finger moved in deep circles.

  She could not speak.

  “Yes,” he laid his body on top of hers, “what I want,” he kissed her open mouth, breathed each word down her throat and one by one they entered her.

  “What I want is (inhale) to (inhale) wake (inhale) you.”

  *

  It was foolish to fall in love with a man who could envision himself as water. For such a thing could never be held completely, instead longed to hollow caverns, forge with rivers and respond to the tender dry slurping of roots. The thing we most need to contain, to live and churn under the moon, enters, shapes and slips away. Sometimes she could see him clearly. She could see his watery body shoot like a transparent bullet, through trees, through her, sculpting rings, small historical sentences of antiquity, he was the ringmaster. That is what he was. The Ringmaster.

  21.

  Months had passed, and although Jacques carved his mother, she never resurfaced. He tried carving her in every possible way. Perhaps she wanted to die. Perhaps she’d given him Elora instead. Elora had become the focus of his carving, his living resurrection. She was visiting him regularly now and he could think of nothing he wanted to sculpt more than her form.

  Sometimes his gift felt like a dream and he had to test that it was real. He rigged a few traps behind his shed. On the second night he caught a fox. It was dead by the time he found it, which was fortunate, as he’d always harbored a soft spot for the creatures. It was cruel to catch it, but he needed to be sure of his gift. He released its floppy neck, took it inside and laid it out near the fire. The evenings were cold now and his hands would cramp in the air. He wanted this carving to be accurate. He placed a small dish of milk next to its head so it could drink when it awoke. It took one attempt. He placed the sculpture on the hearth, opened the front door and watched the fox skitter out into the mud-colored evening.

  A large thump hit the window behind him and he walked into the living room where the collision of the kestrel was powdered across the glass in a delicate sketch. As though the bird had hit the window at such a speed that its ghost had been knocked from its body and captured on the glass. He opened the window and looked out. The bird with the broken neck lay at the base of the house. He picked it up and held it. His mother was near, her presence perfumed around him, and it struck him that without his thoughts, this bird would carry no meaning, his mother would remain dead. Only ideas give significance to forms and light. He stared at the bird until its name vanished, then he laid the bird out on the table and began to chisel a piece of chestnut. All the while, he felt certain his mother was blowing into the kestrel as though it were a feathered bellows. Inside each of us lurks the thing we did not choose, he thought, but what is chosen for us.
One day a catalyst for it appears. One day, death. One day, love. Art. And then, you begin.

  *

  Jacques. Every second. Jacques. She spends afternoons in the garden. His skin still inside her fingernails, she longs for soil, to dig and plant. It is too late for flowers, so she plants bulbs and the idea of things growing beneath the surface, the idea of flakes of him feeding the spring, these thoughts have no data, these thoughts develop as instruments develop the first time they’re played. Which is to say that they ripen into the music they were born to create.

  She enters the house and washes her muddy hands in the sink. Arlo, comes up behind her and sticks his finger inside a black bubble. He smells of beer and stomach acid. He pushes his cold hand up her shirt and presses his pelvis into her thigh. She can feel his holster against her leg.

  “I thought you were going to go fishing,” she said.

  “I like watching you in the garden,” he whispers in her ear and pulls her head backwards so that he can kiss her on the mouth. Compared to Jacques everything about him, his skin, his tongue, his movements, is sloppy and rough.

  She forces herself to turn and face him, but he stops her, reaching around her waist and lifts her skirt. She lets him. She is not his. What he takes is mere fluid, tears, blood. Salt. His violence is not the violence of evolution, but of the underdeveloped and crude. Outside of herself, of his invasion, she is developing and the world all around her is embryonic. It is the place where birds defy the ground. Where she is sky.

  For Elora it was a time when things were made, not destroyed. After Arlo left, she sat on the porch and watched the leaves red as blood fall, singularly, like pinpricked drops filling the garden one by one. There was life developing inside her. She unwrapped the ideas she’d bandaged, her memories, so that light could get through and grow. She could feel the growing, growing.