The Carving Circle

by Gretchen Heffernan

  “So he knew I would be alive,” Elora said.

  “Maybe. I can’t make sense of it, but one thing is for certain, you have to let him go now. Arlo killed him, Elora, and if he finds out you’re alive, he will kill you too. You have to think of your baby.”

  “Yes,” she said and lay down on the pillow.

  “That’s it, sleep,” said Birdie and she stroked the girl’s hair.

  While Elora was sleeping, Birdie performed a binding ceremony for the tiny carved woman. She cleansed a cloth in the river and wrapped it around the figure like a bandage, preventing the carving from causing more harm. She buried it in the ground before the first freeze.

  35.

  Birdie tended her. Every day she brought a spoon to her lips. It was only a small thing inside of an enormous one, a campfire inside a forest, but she tended her all the same, kept her spirit alive and burning.

  But Elora was lost. For months, she believed in nothing but holes. Nothing was certain but the holes that woke her, that whistled her to sleep, until whole days became whole nights marking weeks, marking months where each one was indistinguishable from the next, which was the exact opposite of their beginning where every second glared against her like sunlight on metal.

  She sat growing their child and remembering it all, his knuckle calluses, the pen in his shirt pocket, wood shavings stuck to his bare feet, a piece of loose hair on a plaid shirtsleeve. Arlo. Jacques had let her live, but killed her in the process. She was unable to feel, and could only observe each dazzling trace of her past life, as they spilled into one another, grinding away, gnawing away at her heart like acid, a billion microscopic mouths working, working her back to nothing. Teeth.

  *

  The winter was mild and Birdie was thankful. She cooked for Elora, kept her warm and gave her clothes to fit her growing stomach. Snow fell and melted over Jacques’s wooden army. The whole scandal became folklore and Arlo, “poor Arlo” he was now called, had a freezer full of casseroles. Birdie said nothing. She seethed in her torment. The anger in her crashed like thunder in a jar. Elora also said nothing. She didn’t speak. She just ate when Birdie made her and lay in bed. At last, when her belly was a swollen enough to pop, she broke her silence.

  “Bury them,” she said to Birdie. “His women. I can’t have them out there. Speaking to me, calling for me, please, just get rid of them.”

  It was the end of May, the baby was due any day now and Birdie was nearly seventy years old. How could she bury an army of women?

  She rang Stan and asked him to come with his son, Stan Jr. and a shovel. She was making his favorite rhubarb pie when she heard their motorcycles chop up the path and park outside her house. She walked out on to the porch drying her hands on a dishtowel, while he took off his helmet and smiled at her.

  “Your undertakers have arrived, madam,” he shouted up to her.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said and he gave her a big bear hug.

  “It’s not often you ask for something,” he held her shoulders and studied her, judging his next remark and decided she needed a bit of normality. “We can talk later. Look at you. Jesus Christ, woman, you just keep gettin’ better lookin.’ Listen, you ready to make an honest man outta me yet?”

  “Hell no, you wouldn’t love me half as much.”

  “Shiiiit, I’d love you double,” he said and she snorted.

  “He won’t be able to get down on one knee much longer you know,” Stan Jr. said as he approached them. “Hey, Birdie.”

  “Hey darlin’. You’re all handsome and buff. Get over here and give me a cuddle,” she grabbed him by the neck, pulled him close and the three of them squashed into one another.

  “He’s right! I’m an old codger now, my sweet parakeet, just say yes and let me die happy,” Stan stroked her hair. She pushed his hand away.

  “Shut up, come in, sit down and have some pie.”

  “See? By God, it’s like we’re married already.”

  *

  “Why don’t we drift them down the Missis? Let her polish them back to something decent,” Stan Jr. said putting his clean pie plate in the sink. “It near breaks my heart to see trunks all cut up like that. Burying them would be difficult, plus it seems a bit cruel, you know, a trench of bodies in the ground.”

  “That sounds like a good and soothing idea,” said Birdie.

  They worked the following night, releasing each one into the black river like a silver fish. Birdie thought of Elora rolling down the river, saw her snag and catch on the debris, saw her hair billow underwater like some soft tentacled urchin attached to a pale rock. She sat down on the grass. Her whole body was outlined in sweat and her insides were full of mucus. Stan sat down beside her, she hadn’t told him what this was all about, but he understood that she only kept secrets for a good reason.

  “This feels crazy, Bird. You ready to talk about it yet?” he said.

  “Yes, but I can’t,” she let her head fall against his shoulder.

  “I see. You know, parakeet, you look tired. Why don’t you come back to the city with us for a while? Huh? No questions asked,” he put his arm around her shoulders.

  “I’d love to Stan, but, again, I can’t.”

  “Come on. It’d be good for you. Get the brawl in your blood. We’ll listen to music. We’ll dance and eat ribs.”

  “Honestly, I can’t. I’m looking after a girl. She needs me. That’s why we are getting rid of these sculptures. They bother her.”

  “No kiddin’? What’s she got that I don’t?” He nudged her side.

  “A baby in her belly.”

  “Damn, she has me there.”

  “Only in event and not in looks,” Birdie laughed and rubbed his enormous Buddha belly.

  “Oh yeah? Well I’m working on the perfect 7lb 5oz little shit in here for us, woman! It takes time and dedication to make a love baby,” he said and massaged the sides of his stomach.

  “Oh Christ. Jr. help me up lovely boy before I drown in your father’s bullshit,” she put her arms out into the air and Stan Jr. lifted her gently. “Thank you, my dear.”

  “Now that’s the fightin’ Bird I like to see,” Stan rose with stiff effort. “How many of these broads do we have left? Let’s get the job done,” he said, picked up a sculpture and carried her to the shore. “Off you go, my beauty.”

  They worked in silence, slipping them into the water, and when they were finished, they stood watching them bob up and down like a fleet of wrecked figureheads, rolling, rolling back to the sea.

  *

  Elora lay in bed and listened. She could hear them speaking, Birdie and the two men, but more than that, she could hear the sculptures release themselves like burning coals to the water, there was relief as their murmuring stopped. She imagined their bodies eroding back to nothing, their cuts smooth and worn away until they were unrecognizable.

  On the nightstand the carved image of a bear looked over at her peacefully. He’d left it on the table as a gift. He had told her that his father had tracked and photographed a single bear for twenty years. Callisto was his obsession. Perhaps that’s what the carving meant? Perhaps he was telling her that she had become his animal? I am, she thought, I am his obsession. He can’t be dead. He will find me again, she thought, and the first wave of pain hit, she screamed like she belonged to it, wanted it.

  She heard feet running up the stairs.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. Still. Her heart hung from her ribcage like a single talon holds a falcon to a cliff. The voice was a whistle that rolled through a canyon; a hiss. The voice distant and muffled. Elora, Elora. A scream underwater. Can you hear me? It’s Birdie. A scream inside a gloved hand.

  She touched her arm, skin on skin like red steel on a pale petal, Elora. Her voice breaks through. Elora, the baby is coming. A siren. So loud it blurred.

  36.

  The pain left her breathless. The sheets were wet and she imagined the water soaking though the bed. It calmed her, she took little breaths, s
aw the water spilling through the floorboards and the downstairs ceiling, leaking through the living room, the basement, past the cracks in the cement and into the deep tissue of soil. It soaked all the way to the center of the earth where it began to boil.

  She heard boiling. Sheets ripping. She breathed into the sounds and the pain traveled through her and broke like bubbles through the searing. Birdie was there. Her voice was a smooth chant, but there are no words for life pushing through you, no words for the beginning of life.

  There is air only, breath only, and the awe at what we are up against. It is stunning that humans have survived despite such traumatic and frail beginnings. Tiny beings of instinct, little sensory organs, sprinting out towards the light, she flew like a wet bird, a girl. We are a hungry species, from the second we are born, we spend our lives wanting and needing nourishment, changing only what feeds us. Our hunger is desperate.

  *

  She was stillborn. Her name was Lorelei Beaumont.

  Clouds layered the sun. It glowed like a white mouth through muslin.

  That was just it. She was still born.

  He used to use an imaginary chisel and cut into her body. He told her he was leaving his design. That’s what he’s done, Elora thought, he’s turned me. Into something lifeless of his own making.

  It was as though she had aborted a dream she’d once had, and it changed her, how could it not? She had carried death inside of her body and through the sheer force of will, had released its form, but not all of it. Part of it stayed with her, as though her cave had been a room their child had smudged its handprints across, death had left its imprint and for a while it looked as though Elora, or whoever she’d become, was never coming back.

  All dreams are placed somewhere, in love, in action, in drink, in seas of regret, she built hers like a stone tower around herself, and from the top, she watched. In waiting, she placed her dreams in waiting for the return of feeling. There was nothing and everything that she wanted.

  And so the absence of life became one.

  37.

  Elora sat in the chair and watched the prairie, the river. All day, every day. All week, every week. She could see the exact spot where they had buried the child. The small, perfect mound of earth and imagined herself trading places with her daughter. Imagined herself as a curled fetus in the tall grass, red, raw and infected. It seemed so desperate and extreme. Imagining herself this way had an intrusive violence to it, as though she were a stranger standing in the shadow of a lit house. The allure of the ugly and disapproved. In her mind she gently poked this image of herself with a stick like she would an injured animal.

  If Jacques were still alive and she found him, could he bring Lorelei back? A child without sensation is no child at all. Her grief was a feeling that took place outside of her current body and inside the memory of her former self. She knew to grieve, but felt no pang of emotion, and it was the sense of nothingness that kept her a nonbeing. To not exist, yet to remember the way one exists, requires a torturous adjustment. What would a child resurrected into oblivion eventually become?

  What had she become?

  With an examining reverence she considered the way the earth re-digests itself. The methods of disease and infestation the earth had created to re-digest us, to change the form of our bodies, our minds.

  And, perhaps, our souls.

  She considered the things that burrow and eat flesh and the ways to hollow a person, to decompose a psyche, decompose a body, so that it returns to the earth to feed what is new. She is new. Somewhere, her child is new. There is something so gorgeously economical, gorgeously practical, about the way each thing dies, even a mind, after it leaves, still eats from somewhere, feeds something. We consume ourselves and through our demise we make way for something better, greater, so that nothing is ultimately wasted.

  But time.

  It passed and she filled it with the pictures of herself, that she cut from scratch after scratch and rip until she was sure she couldn’t feel it anymore. Until she was sure that she’d begun building some sort of clockwork heart to claim. One that might grow and function.

  *

  “She stares,” Birdie said to Stan.

  He rang to see how Birdie and her lodger were coping.

  “Stares at what?”

  “Anything and everything, she just stares, and stares and doesn’t speak,” said Birdie.

  “Best get her a camera then,” said Stan, always practical.

  “A camera for what?”

  “People need to find a reason for odd behavior,” said Stan. “That girl needs to be around people. She needs to see there is life out there, ready for the plucking, and there is no place so full of life as Chicago. But we can’t have her walking around the city staring at everybody like a damn zombie, can we? Get her a camera, get her used to it and get her up here.”

  “Stan, you are a genius.”

  *

  Birdie went out and bought her a Kodak Retina “1” Type 118 camera that afternoon. She placed the camera on the armrest of Elora’s chair.

  “If you’re gonna stare, use this,” she said as she sat down beside her.

  Elora looked up. It was true. Apart of her adjustment meant that her ability to concentrate had changed, as though she could see things that others could not, which made her stare openly at the world. Well, the world outside her window.

  “I figured you needed tools. Like a mask,” Birdie said.

  It could have been anything. A violin. Knitting needles. Binoculars. But a camera seemed the perfect accompaniment to her stare.

  “I can’t sing,” Elora said. “I’ve tried and I can’t.”

  “Because it sounds bad or because you haven’t the heart to?”

  “Both,” said Elora.

  This mouth is not my mouth. This tongue is not my tongue. These vocal cords are not mine, yet I belong to them.

  “Well, I’m sorry about that. I know you loved singing, but there are many ways to release. Use this camera as a temporary release. Just until you get your voice back,” Birdie said.

  “I won’t get my voice back,” Elora said. “This is my voice now.”

  “Well,” said Birdie as she patted Elora’s shoulder. “You can do the singing yourself or you can make things sing,” she got up and went into the kitchen.

  Elora took the camera in her hands and held it up like a weapon, a gun.

  *

  Jacques had once showed her a photograph his father had taken of an osprey. The bird dipped into a slim rift beside the ocean and was slanted with its wings fully spread. The camera angle was perfect and portrayed the bird as a bridge with one wingtip appearing to touch the cliff edge, the other, a wave, fixed and breaking all at once.

  “Look here,” Jacques had said and pointed to what looked like a smudge.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s the reason I love this photograph. Look closely.”

  “A shadow?”

  “Yes, another bird’s shadow. See the spread of wings? It can’t be the same bird.”

  “I do, that’s amazing,” she traced her finger over the imprint.

  “You never know what you’ll capture when you cut a slice of time.”

  *

  The following morning Elora woke up and walked outside with her camera. The first snow of the season was wet and sluiced the morning. The river diminished inside the white and Jacques had been gone for months, for a lifetime, forever, an hour.

  In her hands she held a machine. It wasn’t so dissimilar to herself. It could lay up the images of time, but could not live it.

  She heard a gunshot, hid behind a tree and saw, ten feet in front of her, a goose fall heavy as a weight from the sky. Its wings were still spread in flight, its neck was twisted, its wet eyes were black and its beak was open in shock. Blood poured from its upper chest.

  Right away she saw the potential and used her foot to move the red into a circular pattern so that it resembled a sun with splattered rays se
tting into the feathered head.

  Seconds after she’d taken the photograph, a dog arrived, snatched up the bird with its spitty jaws, then disappeared, tail wagging, over the hill. She looked down at the stain the blood had left in the snow and saw more shapes in it, a mask, a rose.

  Death is when a thing changes shape, she thought. That is all.

  She stared at it for a long while without feeling anything and imagined herself as a bird locked in a block of ice. A small body locked in a dead cold, blue and foggy, with only a pair of black eyes looking out, unblinking and afraid of overheating, of melting and releasing a tiny bird’s frantic heart.

  *

  Birdie had built her a small darkroom in the closet of the spare room. She gave Elora an egg timer, a thermometer and a book that described how to mix the chemicals and unload the canister onto the reel. Elora practiced each step in the light a dozen times before she felt comfortable attempting to do the same in the dark. When she turned out the lights, her other senses took over, and she found that her hands, though unsteady at first, eventually understood how to work the equipment. Once the lid of the developing tank was secure and the chemicals were at the correct temperature, she started pouring the mixtures into the tank and timing her agitations on the film. She rinsed the chemicals from the film for ten minutes, then holding her breath, unscrewed the developing tank and unrolled a row of ghosts.

  The perfect imperfection. The film hadn’t completely developed and had a granular washed-out effect. Dark blood pockmarked the snow. The goose’s body appeared weightless against the white, as though it could be brushed away, only the blood showed gravity. It was exactly what she wanted to capture. A way to mark time as manufactured by her, staged by her. The camera was a box of emotions that didn’t require a claim.

  She started orchestrating her photographs. It gave her control, as though she were designing a montage of deliberate representation. It also acted as a reference library for feeling. The goose on the snow says that the brutality of survival could diminish light. She could rationalize this as truth, but could experience it as emotion, like a mirror she began to see herself through the lens.