The Carving Circle

by Gretchen Heffernan

  “Nora?” his father said. “Norabird, what’s wrong?”

  He got up and started walking towards her, but she crouched away from him and held her hands in front of her face. She was mumbling something over and over again. There was a rancid burning smell.

  “Her hair!” Jacques pointed at Nora’s head.

  Her braid was alight with flames. Mathis lunged towards her, but she kicked him away, and started dashing back and forth across the kitchen floor. Her arms were flailing. The jars of blackberry juice crashed to the floor. His father slipped and slid while trying to chase her, finally he caught her.

  “The sink!” Jacques shouted.

  His father thrust Nora’s head into the sink. She was clawing and scratching his arms. When he brought her back up she gulped for air, then slapped him, hard, across the face. Her eyes were back. She was back with them. Her scream was wet.

  “Your hair was on fire,” he rubbed the red handprint on his cheek. “I had to.”

  “What?” She reached behind her and winced when she felt her burnt scalp.

  She looked around the room. There was broken glass and blackberry juice everywhere. Their feet were bleeding. She let out a small whimper.

  “Come on,” his father said, while gently taking her by the arm, “let’s have a look.”

  It was a sticky limp across the floor. He sat her in a chair and stood above her with his eyes closed, then took a deep breath, and looked at her scalp. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  “They’re only surface burns. You’ll be sore for a while, but it’s nothing to worry about. You’ll be just fine. Though we’ll have to trim the rest of your hair Nora. I’ll just do that now okay?”

  He asked Jacques to make a paste of baking soda and water while he went to get the scissors and bandages. She sat in the chair, completely bewildered, and stared at her hands.

  “There’s glass in them,” she said.

  “Yes, you had an accident,” his father told her, “I’ll take care of that in a moment, just as soon as I finish fitting this bandage. There. A few weeks and you’ll be as good as new. Now let me see those hands. Right, Jacques can you fetch me the tweezers?”

  He removed large, angry shards of glass from her hands and her feet. She didn’t flinch. He did the same to himself and cursed bitterly under his breath.

  “I don’t understand,” she muttered while Mathis led her to bed.

  Jacques cleaned up the mess and sat down at the table. He looked at the map of British Columbia his father had been marking and read Callisto, Callisto, Callisto all along the mountains like a love drawing or a mantra.

  *

  It was the risk that made Mathis feel alive, the risk of losing, not his life, but the intensity of the moment by coming one step too close. He began to crave the adrenalin that stretched like a tripwire between himself and Callisto. The camera was a way to trap that vertigo through explosion, flash, in a box that he could take apart with his hands. If he could, he would have taken himself apart. He would have reassembled himself. It was violent like that. It was violent in the way that making love is violent, for what is essential for our survival, can also drive us beyond our own control. He could not control himself or his desires any more than he could control Callisto. But. He could house the two of them inside a slide, so that he owned his weakness, and like a magician, he could revive them from darkness and into the focus of light.

  *

  Jacques and his father were collecting firewood.

  “I notice you haven’t been carving,” his father said.

  It was true. Resurrecting the mouse had scared Jacques and he’d been afraid to carve since. What if it happened again, or worse yet, what if it didn’t? It had felt so natural that Jacques now wondered if it had actually happened at all. His father moved a log and made a satisfied grunt.

  “Look here,” he said and pointed to the ground.

  It was a small thing. A seashell deep inside the capacious lungs of the forest like a perfect pink cyst. His father picked it up.

  “It happens sometimes that an echo of the past can make its way to the surface. The seabed that produced the shell a million years before the forest grew proves the soil’s legacy, but the forest cannot remember anything beyond its own existence and has no recollection of the watery beginnings it feeds from. We live inside our enclosures,” he said, “and occasionally, we wake up inside the wrong one. Your grandmother, my maman, was Creole and would be upset with me for saying that. There are no wrong enclosures, she’d say, the soul learns what it needs to know for its entire journey. She was a guide. A translator of enclosures. Some people thought she was crazy. Others thought she was wise. Crazy or wise, my photographs guide me, soothe me, and she taught me that there is no other way to live. I want to tell you this,” Mathis placed the shell inside of Jacques’s hand. “When you find your essence, be true to it. If you are a shell that wakes inside a forest, do not deny the ocean, guide it towards you. Guiding is a part of your legacy. There are fossils of your maman inside of you.”

  The shell in the forest, thought Jacques as he looked at his father, the bear in the skin. The creator within.

  The starling arrived the next day. It has been killed for sport by one of the cats and left beside the front door as a present. Jacques picked it up and inspected the two clean little holes inside its chest. What if it had fledglings? A power is not corrupting if it’s used for good, he thought, and carried the bird upstairs.

  *

  As his ability to resurrect small animals matured, it was as though the forest knew, so brought to him it’s recently perished. He built a long shelf above his bed and placed all of his resurrections on top of it. There were lots of mice and birds, a few rabbits and a single glorious vixen. He had found her by a stream. Her coat was wet and solid with frost. He didn’t have a piece of wood with him that was fox sized, so decided to try with the small bit of maple he had in his satchel. He sat down beside her and began to carve and pray. The water gently rocked her beautiful, russet form, from her white throat hung miniature icicles. He thought of how he would use a hot poker from the fire and gently singe her forelegs and the tips of her ears black. When she was awakened, he’d locate the black flecks in her eyes.

  She did not run away from him like the others had, but stretched her limbs and took a drink of water, before looking directly at him and walking into the wood. For a moment, Jacques wondered if she might speak to him, so abundant was her spirit, and he felt their organisms align. The vixen reminded him of how his maman would have been, a majestic survivalist, a mystery outside of the mind’s field.

  When you understand this, when you begin to live outside of your enclosure, it is not inconceivable that the essence of one thing might fall into another. That a vixen might resemble his maman, that lives should link, though this was never the physical case with Jacques. His arms were arms, not wings, his hands were hands, not claws, but through them he could raise the shells from the soil. In resurrecting he never produced the entire personality, rather the substance that was the strongest, so when his maman began to lose her mind, he carved and carved her hands, for they had always been the strongest.

  *

  A pair of loons called out inside the crickets’ hum. Jacques put down his book and went to the open window. His mother was sleeping. The sun was sinking and Jacques could see Mathis rolling a large log from the woodland. A trail of bulldozed grass stretched all the way to his darkroom. When Mathis reached the door he turned it upright and wrapped his arms around it with his face against the bark. It looked as though he were wrestling someone. Jacques heard the log thunk in the corner.

  Jacques left the house and followed the trail of bent grass to the edge of the woods. The forest floor was springy, covered with pine needles and mossy stumps like half-hidden trolls.

  Mosquitoes shrilled through the ferns and spiny thicket, a few owls piccoloed off the dense alders, where small funnels of evening lit up the occasional tree, but otherwise the
canopy was evergreen thick. One of these funnels spotlighted a split tree trunk that sat in the ground like a shard of glass.

  It reminded him of his maman’s hands.

  It was an old wound and leg-thick branches lay on the ground. It was beautiful wood, soft and easy to manipulate. Jacques picked up as much as he could carry and walked back to the house. It was almost dark and orange holes were glowing from his father’s darkroom. Jacques piled the wood on the porch and squat down to choose a piece to carve. It was smooth, unknotted and the size of a forearm.

  He let his knife decide the shape the wood would take. The forms he was carving at that time transcended classification, like a sigh or laughter transcends language. He drilled small holes in the bottom of each sculpture and stuck them on a stick fixed inside a block of wood.

  He thought of them as sensations. His maman called them shrunken heads. He placed them in his bedroom window, where their shadows cast strange boulder shapes across the floor. He liked the view between them. Sometimes he carved a certain shape purely to break the view, to crack the space around it, and rift the surge of atoms like a bubble in a life that’s sedimenting.

  He was learning to carve himself, to thumbprint and convert the wood into his own creation. He looked down at his carving and saw that it was becoming another small, cupped hand, and imagined removing his maman’s hands at the wrist and replacing them with ones of his own making. They would be beautifully carved with stars for knuckles and diamonds for fingernails.

  5.

  Mathis’s darkroom was a shed without windows that sat twenty paces from the house. Each wall had three fist-sized holes for ventilation and when Mathis was developing his photographs, he nailed a flat board over the holes. It had been days since Mathis had left his darkroom, yet the holes remained uncovered. Through them, Jacques could see small movements of light, shadow, and once, even an arch of piss. Mathis ate carrots, string beans, rolled-up bread, anything that would fit through the holes. He refused to open the door.

  When Jacques told Nora that he was worried about his father she said, “I’m not. I’m beyond it. I’m beyond giving a shit about what happens inside his love shed. You don’t see me in there, do you?”

  It was true. Nobody was allowed to look inside. If Mathis needed something he pushed his lips through the wall like a slug and shouted. Jacques passed him screwdrivers, long sticks, tacks and wildflowers. Jacques saw photographs glossing the walls and a thick silhouette in the corner. He wondered if it was the log he’d seen his father rolling and squinted towards the figure.

  “Take your eyes off her. You have no business looking at her,” his father said.

  His eye floated like a knot in the wood.

  *

  Mathis had been inside his darkroom for five days when Nora started throwing things at the wall. The objects she threw grew twice their size in the long autumn light and hit the wall like monsters.

  Jacques took the knives and scissors from the kitchen drawer, threw them in a bag and left. She didn’t notice. She was caught in a rhythm. He walked past his father’s darkroom, three holes flickered with gaslight, and all the way to the lake.

  He sat cross-legged on the dock. The reflection of a few stars lay trapped in the lake like fireflies in a black jar. Nude fish mouths wrinkled the water’s skin. He took his knife and a small, unfinished carving from his pocket. It was a pawn. The last piece to his set. He and his father played chess during the winter when the bears were hibernating. The sky was as dark as it would get on a full moon and behind him the house anchored like a bright ship.

  The lake held even the Milky Way.

  At its bottom the fish slept with stars on their backs.

  He thought about this. He thought about the burn of possibility.

  He walked back to the house. His father was still in his darkroom, softly singing. Cold air rushed him through the door. She wasn’t asleep, instead, sat in a pile of torn clothes and didn’t look up.

  “You’re too hard on things,” she said, mending one of his shirts.

  The needle stabbed her thumb. The stitching was large and irregular. On the table he could see little pinprick indentions scattered across the surface like beads. Mathis opened the door and Jacques hardly recognized him. His face was smeared and hairy. There were many things different about him, but the most noticeable was the smell.

  “Look at how useful I am,” Nora said holding up a crudely darned shirt. “Aren’t I useful?”

  *

  The first snow came and lasted for days. It drifted ground level with the windows ledge and cast a strange bleaching light into the house. Mathis began digging a path to the woodpile. The shovel scraped inside silence. Outside there was a crow. Inside, Nora slept in a puddle of sweat and moved in and out of consciousness. Jacques made a beef pie for dinner and listened to a mouse nesting in the roof.

  Mathis turned his face towards the mountain. It was always snowing on the mountaintop, and if Mathis had remained on the mountain for too long, he could begin to feel as though he were drowning in the white glare. His eyes would start to search for structure and color, an edge, a deepening in the path and that’s when he knows that it’s time to leave. He often drank the sight of the first flower he’d come across poking like a beautiful hand through the snow, his descent into the green valley could melt him with its suppleness. He knew there was no thirst like the thirst for the green and living world.

  He thought about this as he stacked a wall of wood behind the stove. He wanted to say something meaningful to Jacques who was reading at the table. The smell of cooking venison filled the room, and Jacques could feel the cold from his father’s body as he stood above him. There seemed to be no way to undo what had been done. He closed his book and looked up at his father in his overcoat and work gloves.

  “She’s stuck on the mountain,” Mathis said. “But you’re not.”

  It explained everything and nothing at the same time.

  “I’ll only be away for a little while.”

  “Don’t,” Jacques implored.

  “I promise I’ll come back.”

  6.

  In the morning Mathis was gone. Jacques woke to a cold house, dressed and went to stoke the fire. He placed the kettle on top of the stove, put on his boots and damp coat and went outside to replenish the wood basket. He didn’t want to touch the wall of wood his father had built.

  As soon as he opened the door his moisture instantly froze. His breath hung in front of his face in little exhales of fog. Above him, stars like lighthouses filled the morning sky. He walked to the logs stacked alongside the house. The black tarpaulin that covered them had frozen to the wood, and when he jerked it free, he ripped off the top layer of bark. The logs were icy and smooth in his bare hands as he threw them into the basket.

  Birdsong took the sharpness out of the air. He could hear his mother coughing upstairs. The kitchen was warm when he returned and the kettle was boiling. He put the full basket next to the stove and made two cups of tea.

  Months passed and blizzards came and went.

  His mother slept through it all in her sweat. Her breath rose and fell with effort. It snagged on every gurgle. Jacques melted snow on the stove and spoon-fed her. Their larder was nearly empty and everything fresh had long been devoured. In the evenings he read or whittled or did anything to avoid confronting the inevitable. The piano beside the sofa beckoned him with its promise of irregular noise. He didn’t want to wake her. Sometimes he put the lid down and played intense, inaudible songs.

  Time was both fast and slow.

  Then, one evening, he found himself standing at the door to his father’s darkroom. Hibernation was close to death, he thought, perhaps he could carve Callisto and bring his father to him. A key on a string dangled from his gloved hand.

  Jacques had nearly stopped believing his father would return. It seemed like their only chance. The sound of his boots crunching in the snow and the owls echoed in his lonely chest. His heart was beating f
ast. His mother had stopped eating all together. It wouldn’t be long. She was mumbling in her sleep when he left the house.

  He needed the strength, however forbidden, that his father seemed to find inside this room. He was desperate. He looked up at the moon, white stone cut by black branches. He opened the door and stepped inside.

  It was black and smelled feral. He switched on his flashlight. It shone a yellow spot on the floor while his eyes adjusted. He was afraid to look at the walls. He was afraid, but did it anyway and what he saw repulsed and fascinated him.

  They were covered with pictures of Callisto. The pictures were framed with some kind of mud. He smelt it. It was bear faeces. Inside the scat his father had placed little stones and twigs in interwoven patterns. Feathers and bits of flower were delicately pressed into his finger swirls. It was disturbingly beautiful.

  He saw her in the corner.

  He shined his flashlight on the carved image of Callisto, but she wasn’t exactly a bear. Her face was more human than bear. Her paws were human hands. She was serene, almost perfect and adorned with wreaths of withered wildflowers. Large clumps of fur were glued to her body. Her eyes seemed to plead for release. There was a cough behind him, he turned and found his mother standing just beyond the door, clutching her nightdress to her throat.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. Her voice was a whisper.

  She was barefoot in the snow. Her frail body quivered underneath her nightdress and her eyes were wide and wild. She looked like a ghost.

  “You scared me. What are you doing out here, it’s freezing, you’ll catch cold. Come on. Come back inside,” he said, but she just stared at him.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said again.

  “Done what?”

  “Gone inside,” she nodded towards the shed.

  “I was just locking it up,” he said.