The Carving Circle

by Gretchen Heffernan

  An hour and a clean face later, he trudged camera and tripod through the town, offering bread to those that would pose for him. He was told that the horse drawn cars were called Bennett Buggy’s. Many of them had been turned into homes with blankets and the few household items the travellers could carry stashed away under ripped seats and inside glove boxes. He peered inside a car window and took a photo of a soiled child nursing from a breast like a small pillow of air pushing from a ribcage.

  No one had the energy to complain. Their eyes reminded him of animals in the dead of winter. Many traded half the bread for drink, which was another form of hibernation and he learned to feed the children first.

  When he could no longer endure what he was seeing, he walked to the edge of town and into the woods. He set up his tripod and camera forty feet away from an old Ponderosa with the intent of capturing something more alive than the life he’d just witnessed. Which is exactly what happened, because when he looked through the lens, he saw Nora, sitting at the base of the tree and staring straight at him. The lens had turned her upside down. He could see that she was brown and beautiful even on her head.

  She walked towards him and pointed to the camera.

  “I’ve heard of those. They say one can steal your soul,” she said and stuck out her hand. “I’m Nora.”

  “Jacques,” he shook her hand, “nice to meet you. Would you like to try it? It is not true about the soul stealing. I promise.”

  “I have a good grip anyway,” she said and moved in front of the lens, looked through it and immediately lurched back. He caught her; it was like holding a deer in his arms. She pushed away from him and brushed herself off.

  “Sorry,” he laughed until he saw that she was not amused. “I should have told you the lens turns everything upside down,” he said. “Try it again.”

  He felt her go quiet, so quiet that the silence between them became an understanding. She was chewing her tongue. He watched her and although she didn’t move, she reflected a feeling of intrinsic life, like a tree trunk. She was small and steady. Industrious, he thought, a wren. Her whole body jolted and he heard the shutter snap. He looked in the direction of the photograph and saw nothing. She emerged from the focusing cloth with a smile.

  “Perfect,” she said and walked off into the trees. She lifted her muddy skirt and petticoat like a princess. He stared after her until she disappeared and then wondered if she’d been real. Strange things can happen to a lonely man, he thought, and then: Wait. Am I lonely?

  Back in his dark room, weeks later, he watched the image of a small cardinal emerge from a dish of chemicals. It was sitting on a branch. Its chest was all puffed out as though it were just about to sing. So, he thought, not a wren after all. A cardinal. He spent the rest of the afternoon coloring its feathers red. The next day he framed and hung the photograph on the wall. It reminded him of snow before it’s been stepped in.

  Day after day the cardinal sang to him. He couldn’t stop hearing it, so busied himself and made a stew. Venison, juniper berry, tarragon. He stirred the pot and noticed the hand that held the spoon did not resemble his own. It was as hard as dark grit stone. He stopped and took inventory of himself. His body was calloused and scarred, ugly even, but his mind, his inside felt remarkably supple, as though he’d become the perfect design of a clam.

  Perhaps, he thought.

  Perhaps that’s the way it is with work that you love?

  Perhaps a strong body, makes a strong mind that unfastens inside?

  It begins with something small. An idea. A hat. Two cells. A cardinal in a tree. Yes, he thought, yes. He wanted to share this revelation with someone; he looked at the photograph hanging on the wall, and then at the mountain beyond. He tasted the stew, it wasn’t ready yet, and there was time to weed and water his garden before dinner. He’d need a hot meal inside him for the two-day hike it’d take him to reach his bride. He never gave it a second thought.

  He arrived in town on a Sunday. There was a market and the street was bustling with beggars, whores, greengrocers, businessmen and ladies. He found her right away. She was wearing a hat that shadowed half her face. Her clothes were not new, but they were clean. She stood next to a stall knocking on a watermelon to test its ripeness. When he asked her to live with him, she thought about how only his eyes and his mouth would be visible in the night. The fever had taken her entire family. She had just enough money to survive the year, and all thoughts beyond that accompanied a panic so great that she often wished for death. She said yes.

  Their life was peaceful, until Mathis met Callisto and something inside him stepped from one room into another, entirely. He hadn’t realized he’d been made of rooms. He’d spent all autumn and winter inside Nora and the house they inhabited. He whittled her two cats for the mantelpiece and made a wardrobe for her dresses. He carved swirls of wind on the banister and leaves on the woodwork. He hung up his photos of birds, at her eyelevel, not his, because he knew she liked them, yet, all the same, when spring arrived, the walls seemed to tighten.

  There is no other way to keep me, he told her and left.

  He tracked the female bear for days through trees heavy with vine. The ferns were waist high and the ground was wet and buggy. Her urine smelled like a woman’s heat and he felt her around every corner, so strong was her presence, that birds startled him, so did the rain.

  How could he have been so careless? His equipment was getting soaked. He walked back to his campsite, crawled inside and laid his camera out to dry. Rain fell and slid down the tarpaulin, while he sat grumbling and picking at things, a hair from his hat, dirt from his fingernail, fluff, finally, he got up and walked outside.

  There she was.

  A silver freight train of steam. Callisto reared up and he tasted the hot spray of her breath, saw her yellow teeth, her nostrils spat. What could he do?

  He had a wild heart.

  He felt a part of himself incinerate, every bit of him burned with sweat, the rattle of her spit sawed the air, and a crack between them, like wood catching fire, catching instinct, struck. The animal in him rose up to greet her; she lowered, grunted and walked away. It was terrifyingly simple. He named her Callisto, and when he returned in the autumn, Nora noticed that a part of his soul was, indeed, missing. It was the part that looked at her, only. He told her he’d been struck by lightning, but she knew photography had stolen him.

  Over the years Mathis and Callisto came to resemble one another, as though his photographs were captured mirrors, so that by the time Jacques was a young boy, he couldn’t think of his father without thinking of Callisto. The two seemed fixed together like a handshake, like an ancient pact.

  *

  In the mountains and at home in his darkroom, Mathis hunted. He was a hunter of light. A hunter of illumination, where nothing remained untouched.

  When Nora told him that she was pregnant, he thought of her womb as a camera, the captured seed was a slide and cells multiplied an image into view. When the baby was born they named him Jacques, and were you to hold his skin up to the sun you would see a series of slides:

  An infant nursing on a rocking chair.

  A barefoot child catching frogs.

  A boy floating on his back in a pond and clouds racing their reflections over him.

  A teenager standing in the silence of a snowy wood.

  And so on and on. Each image, each slide, a single molecule building the picture of Jacques and Mathis was there and he wasn’t there, like light through the trees, the presence of Mathis was dappled.

  *

  When Jacques was younger his father carved him a large ark. It became a tradition to sit at the table with an encyclopedia and choose the animals for Mathis to whittle while he was away on expedition. One evening they came across a map of the American state of Illinois and there at the bottom, beside the Mississippi, was a town named Callisto.

  “There’s a town named after your bear,” said Jacques.

  “The Mississippi is a river I w
ould love to see,” said Mathis.

  They made a plan to visit one day. His father outlined the state with his pen and stared at the map for a long time, then got up to make a cup of tea, while Jacques flipped through the pages searching for an animal his ark didn’t already possess. A section about India had a photograph of a peacock with his tail spread. Jacques knew his father would be able to carve the patterns on the feathers perfectly.

  “Their feathers look like eyes,” said Jacques as he turned the book around for his father to see.

  “Peacocks it is then,” his father said and placed his hand on Jacques shoulder. “If I don’t make it to Callisto, you go. There is no such thing in this world as a coincidence,” he said, then sat by the fire and drank his tea.

  That night his father’s sleep had little growls inside it and Jacques knew he’d leave the following day. He always left during his black soil dreams and usually returned with the first snow.

  Nora would run to him and pounce on him like a puppy. He’d laugh and stand there, letting her empty his pockets of presents, glossy feathers and stones with pictures on them. The snowflakes were penny sized and landed on their sweaters in patterns and melted. They would enter the warm house. Their discarded boots left puddles full of firelight. Mathis would reach inside his pack and give Jacques his whittled animals, then sit in his chair and speak for the first time in weeks.

  The carvings were enhanced by his narrative. Jacques and his mother would draw up their knees under blankets, listen and drink tea. Magnificent, faraway sentences flew from his mouth like feathers dislodged from the hunt. It entranced them and the carvings were dry talismans they spun inside their hot hands. He told his stories beautifully. He did not speak of Callisto, yet she was there, within the shadows that flicked against the wall, like a black flag, as they sat inside the half said.

  *

  The light in Canada was completely different to the light in Provence. It was not supple and affectionate and wheaten. It was arresting and sharp or nothing, and how an artist used this light deserved, demanded even, a certain level of stateliness that bears naturally cultivated.

  The photographer is his light.

  The photograph achieves an immortality that is familiar because the picture is both real and unreal. As soon as time is fixed, it’s gone, but the photograph remembers and throws out a tentacle of recognition that’s entirely personal to the viewer. It’s this familiarity that haunts us, like a ghost in a dress we’ve secretly worn before.

  The key word is secret. It was always an act of love. That was never a question. Years passed, and Mathis’s photographs improved, because his secrets grew to the point where his obsession was almost revealed. Almost. The Almost kept it spiritual, kept it art. If Mathis’s pictures were able to whisper they would undoubtedly speak of transformation.

  For what becomes of a man who becomes his own beast?

  What becomes of a man that doesn’t?

  3.

  That summer Mathis came home early, but he was not himself, there were no rocks or feathers in his pockets, and he spent most of his time in his darkroom.

  It was the summer of bluebottles.

  Jacques remembers walking down the stairs in his pajamas. The room smelt of vinegar, lemon and unwashed hair. His maman was scrubbing tiny black spots from the woodwork with a wire brush and had already taken large circles of paint off the walls. Her actions were becoming increasingly manic, though this word did not factor into his vocabulary and he saw her as possessed. Her peach housecoat was hanging half open and covered in white paint flecks. Her feet and knees were filthy and stray strands of hair kinked like black spider legs from her messy braid. Her arms stopped moving when she heard him, and water dripped from her elbows into a puddle on the floor.

  “It’s as if we’ve been cursed,” she said.

  He let the comment hang in the room like an unheeded warning. What was there to say? He blinked at her. She was right. He went and made a cup of tea.

  The summer heat had produced a plague of black flies. Bluebottles created a hive of iridescence between the storm windows and the house felt as though it was floating inside a crawling sea.

  When the flies first arrived, Jacques helped his father remove the outer windows. The morning was yellow, hot and still. Their valley was scorched bland and the mountains rose like stone omens. The flies burst forward and landed a shiny glove on Jacques’s face. He gagged and swallowed one by accident. His father pointed up to the black ribbon twisting out of view, and his mother, on the porch, began a round of applause. Mathis and Jacques joined her, and a row of pines that pitch-forked the sky caught the sound of their clapping as it skipped across the field. The sun had made them dizzy. Inside the house, Jacques drank a glass of water to dislodge the wing he had caught in his throat.

  Of course, it had been useless, as the flies returned in droves, and like an organized army, they left black spots, smears and swirls on the woodwork and in corners. They bit and drew blood, and when they died, they left their flaky carcasses inside the thick orange carpeting. Their tiny black bodies crumbled under Jacques’s bare feet. All summer long he picked wings and antennae out from between his toes.

  *

  Jacques pulled a chair up to the window and drank his tea. A fly squeezed through a small hole of broken sealant at the bottom of the window frame and whined with freedom. He put his tea down and waited. It landed and protracted its arms like windshield blades. He placed his thumb on top of it until he felt a pop, then walked to the back door and flicked its body towards the dry ground. It scattered with the others like blue-black scabs on a head of sedge grass.

  Beyond the field, his father’s boat rolled to shore. He had been fishing, and Jacques had heard him leaving at dawn, heard his zipper, his heels in boots, the turning doorknob, and then the peaceful nothingness of a person who has left. The window was a patch of chilly lavender and shadow, and he fell back to sleep curled under his warm quilt.

  Jacques walked down to the pier. The fish hung from a tree like a line of silver darts. His father reached up, cut the line and threw them on the ground where they flapped droplets of musky water against Jacques’s legs. His maman, dressed and composed once more, stomped down the hill drying a knife on her apron. Her hair was secured with clips. She did not look at Jacques. Instead, she looked at the fish and whistled her approval. Mathis smiled.

  Jacques squatted next to his maman and helped her unhook the fish mouths. She chopped the heads off the smaller fish and gutted the rest. She gave him a newspaper full of entrails and fish heads.

  “Bury it,” she said and grabbed his arm.

  His father was walking back to his boat.

  “You hear me? Not a word. Bury it,” she squeezed his arm and didn’t blink.

  He knew she wasn’t talking about fish guts. He thought of her in her peach housecoat. He pushed her hand off his arm and she softened, recoiled.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, squirrel. I’m just tired, that’s all,” she said as she lifted her face towards the sun.

  “I know,” said Jacques.

  She looked at him. Her eyes glistened like two bluebottles and infected everything, then she walked away.

  A flock of geese flew overhead, noisy as a crowd of bicycle horns and he watched them land on the lake. It was incredibly still and the geese smeared across its reflected mountains like raindrops across a canvas. There was disruption all around him. He buried the fish guts in the garden and walked back to the house.

  His maman was in the kitchen chopping onions. There were tears streaming down her face, so she hadn’t noticed the onions turning pink.

  “You’re bleeding!” Jacques said.

  She stopped, dried her eyes on her sleeve and looked down with amazement at the cut between her thumb and forefinger. It was long and deep. She dipped her finger in the pool of blood, licked it and grabbed a tea towel. The blood mushroomed through the cloth like a red cloud.

  “It’s nothing. Here,” s
he gave him the knife and swatted flies as she ran down the hallway. He finished chopping the onions.

  He knew she hadn’t felt a thing.

  4.

  There were other clues. Once she dropped a spoonful of chili on the floor and when she couldn’t pick it up, began banging her hand against the wall. His father had been away on expedition and by the time he returned, the bruise was a pale yellow as if someone had rubbed a dandelion across her knuckles.

  After his eyes adjusted to it, he saw it everywhere.

  To him the word illness meant stomach bug or cough. It meant hot soup, not sudden outbursts of vowels like loud, frustrated claps. It meant blankets, not dead hands. Her hands were the first to lose their feeling. They were battered, bruised and cut. He knew when she could feel because she’d ask him to sit next to her, then she’d run her hands up and down his arms, his chest, stopping to feel his heart beat, through his hair and then softly, softly across his face and cheeks.

  By the end of the summer her arms were thin as a child’s. They were ropes she wrapped around herself as if trying to hold together the pieces of a shipwreck. In her eyes she carried the same mysteriousness of the sea and could not be helped or predicted or guided. Her illness was like a superstition his father refused to talk about. The problem was that his father was not a seafaring man. He was a woodsman. He knew wood and very little of water. He was not prepared to learn something new. Sometimes it is simply the refusal of change that initiates change so suddenly.

  *

  Nora was pouring boiled blackberries into pint jars for jam. It was late summer. The black braid hanging between her shoulder blades began to twitch as she took quick glimpses behind her. Jacques was seated at the table removing sticks and leaves from the final bowl of blackberries, and his father was across from him marking a map with a pencil. He was the first to notice her twitching. He put his pencil down and nodded at Jacques. She was shaking. Suddenly she turned around, still holding the hot pot and splashing boiling blackberry juice over her arms and bare feet. She dropped the pot, scurried a little on the juice and backed away from them as if she didn’t recognize who they were. She looked like a scared animal.