Outside the sun was white and glared off the hubcaps of her car, causing her eyes to water as she fumbled for her keys. The smell of the sun warming the asphalt made her feel nauseous. She walked through the clear vapor shimmering above the parking lot towards her car carrying a polystyrene cup full of coffee and a map tucked under her arm, which she unfolded over the hood of her car. She took the address Birdie had given her out of her pocket and ran her finger up the highway parallel to the Mississippi and stopped when she reached Pine Creek, Ontario.
54.
Pine Creek, Ontario
Jacques was in his workroom when the doorbell rang. He stood up and registered the sound. A doorbell. He had forgotten he had a doorbell. He put his knife down, pulled a sheet over the figure that lay on his workbench and walked into the kitchen.
A young policeman squinted through the window. His solemn face made Jacques hesitate. He felt light-headed as if stepping off the tightrope of Before and into the free-fall of After. There was a second of midair before he reached the door; he held his breath and suspended.
“Hello, I’m looking for Jacques Beaumont?” He straightened his spine.
“I’m Jacques Beaumont.”
The officer had heard he was a sculptor and a recluse. He looked at his hands. They were split along the creases, calloused and blunt like ugly sausages. Jacques lifted one up and ruffled sawdust out of his hair.
“Sorry, occupational hazard,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Mr. Beaumont, I’m John Andersen, with the Police Department,” he took a badge from his breast pocket and showed it to him. “Mr. Beaumont is there anyone at home with you?”
“No, just me.”
“Do you mind if I come in?”
“After you.” He made a sweeping gesture with one hand and stepped aside. “I need a cup of tea, would you like one?” Jacques asked as he placed the kettle on the stove.
The kitchen walls and cupboards were painted white. The floors and countertops were wooden. A table made from an old door and two sawhorses was pushed against a bare window. The table was covered with palm-sized wooden circles stacked in rows like collapsed dominoes. A book was open to a page of writing he’d never seen before.
“No thank you. I’m fine,” he said.
He found that uniform pleasantries were the worst part of job. They both watched the kettle until it whistled. He wouldn’t have made a cup of tea if he’d known John would decline. He couldn’t stand the officer snooping over his work.
“That’s Sanskrit. It’s for a project I’m working on. Each word is a symbol of sorts, a meditation. I sculpt,” he said taking the spoon out of his mug and placing it in the sink.
“I know,” John said and Jacques arched his eyebrows in surprise. “I mean, I gathered as much from all the sculptures outside.”
“Ah, detective work,” Jacques said.
“If only all detective work were so obvious,” John laughed.
Jacques took the milk from the fridge and mixed into his tea.
“Let’s talk in the living room. I don’t want anything said in front of my medallions,” he said and pointed to the wooden circles on the table. “Wood absorbs.”
It took John a moment to realize that he was serious. He followed him through a hallway lined with overstuffed bookshelves. Jacques carried his steamy mug of tea like an extinguished candle and sat on the edge of a tan sofa, placing the mug on his knee. John sat across from him on a blue recliner. It was the only other piece of furniture in the room, no pictures, no television, no curtains, no nothing. Jacques knew what John was thinking.
“Renunciation,” Jacques blew into his mug and took a drink. “So I resist distractions. Now. What have you come to tell me?”
“Right. Well,” John cleared his throat and took a manila envelope out of his breast pocket. “It’s difficult, but I’m here to speak to you about Nora Beaumont.”
He nodded slowly. “My mother.” The kestrel, he thought.
“Yes,” he said allowing the word space enough to sink, then removed a few sheets of paper from the envelope.
“I understand how hard this must be Mr. Beaumont, but I do need to go over a few things with you. It says here in the file that she was suffering from dementia when she disappeared?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you reported her missing on April 14th 1952?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve had no contact with her since then?”
“No, none.” He could feel his mouth line with the saliva that precedes vomit.
“Well, there’s really no easy way to tell you this Mr. Beaumont but we’ve found her remains.”
Her remains. I remain, he thought. I am all that remains of her, of a time so long ago it feels like never. He’s spent years designing an alternative story for that time and now the truth, flung out before him like a writhing being, as though she were born again.
“I’m so sorry Mr. Beaumont. Here,” he handed him a tissue from his pocket.
Jacques took it. “I knew she was dead. It’s been years, so of course I knew it, but all the same. You have no idea.” He did not sob. He caught the tears that spilled down his cheeks with the tissue.
He had carried the guilt of his relief. He wasn’t proud of it, but it was true. When she finally left he had felt relieved, as though he had been wearing the wrong skin and could take it off and set it down. He thought he could come out of himself and simply walk away, but she had felt like a small animal in his hands. He never forgot. And now his mother was telling him that it was over. That he was forgiven.
“Mr. Beaumont,” John’s voice was a trained softness as he handed him another tissue.
“It was a freak storm.”
“Mr. Beaumont, it’s in the file, you don’t need to explain.”
“No. I do. The snow was heavy and her tracks were everywhere. Like a rabbit, you know? Zigzagged like that. She was frail by then, unreachable, one day there, the next day, gone. Just like that,” he snapped his fingers. “I did what I had to do.”
“Of course you did Mr. Beaumont. It would have been dangerous to go after her in those conditions. You did the right thing. You reported her absence and got on with your life.”
Jacques looked at John. He knew nothing, nothing. He was a dweller of a single dimension. The type that looked at a hand and saw only a hand, not a tool that could build, that could create life, or take it away.
“Where did they find her?”
“In a ravine not far from here,” John said and scratched his knee. His sympathy was waning. He coughed and his breath smelt of sweet digested coffee.
“Do you know who found her?”
“A group of hikers, geology students actually. Amazing what you can study these days. It’s heavily wooded up there, as you know, anyway one slipped and fell down the ravine. He broke his leg and, incidentally, discovered your mother.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“Yes. I’m sure it was. Listen, Mr. Beaumont, there is something else. It was raining and Matt, the student, saw a cave along the bottom of the rock face. He dragged himself there to wait for the paramedics. That’s where he found her.”
As a child Jacques had named that ravine the Bandit Trap because it was hidden by snowdrifts in the winter and covered with vine in the summer. You had to fall into it to know it was there. He hadn’t known about the cave. He looked out the window towards the forest. It pressed and threatened the house like a green and black glacier and he felt the split of erosion, of time. Maybe she crawled, he consoled himself, but it was a lie. In his heart he knew. He knew she’d been moved.
“It appears they were brought there by an animal and, well, I need to tell you that they’ve been tampered with.”
“Tampered with?”
“There are, ah, quite a few post-mortem claw marks, mostly on the larger bones, made by a bear or possibly a cougar, it’s hard to be absolutely certain. Mr. Beaumont, I’m so sorry, I really am.
It’s just dreadful after all this time. Do you have any questions?”
He thought of her piled up inside the cave like a game of pick-up sticks. He remembered her falling, how her white dressing gown had caught in the wind and for a moment she’d begun to rise, again glowing in the moonlight like a paper lantern. Her defiance included gravity. It made him breathless still.
“Can I have them? Her bones I mean, for a proper burial?”
“I’m sure that won’t be a problem. Although it might take some time, you know, with the paperwork and all. I’ll phone you in a week or so. Is there anything else I can do for you? Anyone I can call?”
“No. No, thank you,” he said and John stood to leave. Jacques walked him to the door. A pheasant shrieked outside. The sun had dropped.
“Looks like it’s going to be a nice evening,” John said instead of goodbye. He wanted to leave him with something positive, poor man, out here all on his own. John was grateful he had his wife Martha at home. Life wasn’t fair sometimes, he thought, but you can’t help everyone. He opened the car door.
“She would hate to be boxed up,” Jacques stepped out onto the porch and called after him.
“I beg your pardon?” John stood with the door open. The wind spun a pine-shaped air freshener from his rearview mirror.
“She would hate to be in some laboratory somewhere, boxed up and tagged, she’d want to be here. In this soil. Under this sky,” he pointed to the clouds.
“Okay Mr. Beaumont. I understand. I’ll do my best to get her home as soon as possible,” he stepped into the police car. He was already thinking about what Martha might be cooking up at home.
“Thank you,” Jacques said and raised one hand to say goodbye. John lifted a finger from his steering wheel.
Jacques watched the police car shrink until it was the size of a bug. Perception is everything, he thought, and walked back to his workroom and lifted the sheet from Elora.
It made sense that his mother would arrive first, he thought as he laid his hand on Elora’s wooden torso.
He had found this particular log for Elora the morning after a thunderstorm. It had been a night of terrific calamity, but the morning was cool and smooth as a rock scraped clean of its moss. The morning stayed pressed against his cheeks even after he’d entered the forest. It was difficult walking, as many trees had been struck or wind torn and their limbs lay scattered everywhere. He had adapted an old sledge attached to a chest harness to help him pull out logs. The wood for his larger sculptures often arrives this way. It’s hard work that he finds incredibly satisfying. He wants to build relationships that will last with his Elora’s and has moved beyond frivolous, easy commitments. He hopes he has given her a sustenance that’s meaningful.
Anyone who has spent time with trees knows that each one has a different personality, so when he’s searching for a piece to sculpt, he’s also searching for a tree that can cope with change. Some simply can’t, some roots are too deep and want to die and feed the soil to which they were born. He respects that. He leaves them for the beetles and searches for the logs that secretly wish they were birds.
She was in a clearing, lightning-struck and still smoldering on the ground like a fallen warrior. He touched her and sensed her bravery, her flight and her bird dreams. She sighed when he sawed off her damage, she fell asleep as if to convalesce, and he saw the woman within, her face creased inside the bark like a face pressed against glass. At once, he recognized it as Elora and although he has been carving her for two years now, he had never seen the face that she’d resuscitated. It meant that she was close, and although it was what he wanted, the idea of her arrival left him unable to move, unable to speak. He just stood there and let the past land on him, all at once, a flock of birds and it was deafening.
*
He was a sculptor that removed. That’s what he did. He cut, he shaved and sanded away all that was unnecessary (however luscious, however fleshy) from his object until it had the required space to open. Like years that eat away at a memory, like ants that eat a fruit, entirely, until they reach the stone, the truth, the seed. Each sculpture was a seed and with this one he’ll plant Elora. Again.
*
He gives new life to the fallen, an artistic decomposing because wood was always changing, always moving and, for years, remained alive. He liked the fact that it was only the solidity, not his marks, that could remain permanent. It filled him with a strange hope. Nobody wants the full truth, like a pause, it weighs too much.
He caught them at their heaviest. It was a service really, a bit like a chaperone or a bellhop. If you broke art, if you broke death down, it was ordinary. He painted X while eating toast. X died after making a bank deposit. The ordinary facts were the most haunting. One reason for this was because they hid the creator, the exterminator, the devil in the details. The other reason was because they brought the unimaginable close enough to recognize.
Always in the wood he recognized the tree, the thing it had been, which was already a measure of perfection that he didn’t dare to compete with, like life and its perfect design, his art was the other side to the story, the other face. There is never only one. The idea of one perception is impossible, so each tree was also designed for the body that he gave it, a secret longing perhaps, an underbelly, the thought churning inside it as changing as erosion.
It is a type of love in the way that it cannot be sequestered. It belongs to him, is vital to him and this idea pleases him as he imagines a companion might. He has many things in common with his father. The main thing being that they both shared a need to physically hold their feelings through a created object. Jacques detached to visualize, then recreated, the parts of himself that he needed to understand. He was a tactile man. He needed to hold his emotions, cut, mold, chisel and rearrange them so that he could control them. Sometimes he imagined that he sculpted himself out of form and into nothing, a zip of light that simply burned to black. The thought was both sustaining and horrible.
55.
Elora followed the Mississippi north along a stretch of highway. She opened the windows and concaved her brain. Her photographs hung from her mind like a row of drying hides, rawhide, she thought as the wind slapped against them as a thumb across cards. Few things allow the mind to detour like driving. She likes to sit in the middle of windows, likes to speed to the end of the city and will the countryside to move. It makes her feel linear when she is otherwise not. Sometimes you need to move towards the bull’s-eye, she thought. He won’t recognize her like this. He won’t recognize her with influence.
*
The sunlight snapped off behind the door and her hotel room immediately became a cave, dark, damp, orange and brown. So much for cheap and cheerful. A musty womb, she thought and stroked her stomach. Her body seemed alien, as though it were making decisions without her.
The heating was on and the air stung her eyes, so she flicked the heater off and tried to open the window, but found it was nailed shut. She opened the front door and switched on the bathroom fan, it clicked like a card in a bicycle wheel, which made the room seem nervous. She peeled the bedspread from the bed, threw it in the corner, and then sat down inside a swarm of dust motes floating in a stream of sun like gnats.
The fan kept clicking. She took off her shoe, threw it at the fan and to her surprise the clicking stopped. Her car’s engine was cooling, more clicking. It was parked right outside the door. There were bugs splattered on the grill and behind that a pink neon vacancy sign flashed against a cloudless blue sky. Everywhere glared. A fly buzzed through the door and, gratefully, back out again. She needed a moment to relax, so straightened her back and sat motionless.
Then caught and slowed her breathing until it moved in a continuous circle. Take in. Give out. A chill ran down her neck and softened her shoulders. She felt the hot air encase her and a breeze touch her sweaty face like a fingertip. She gently stopped her mind and brought it back to sensation, the feeling of her sweat, the movement of her breath, the so
und of birds, passing cars, electricity, footsteps and someone unlocking the next door.
She opened the curtains and turned on the air conditioning. She smelled her armpit. She needed a shower.
The bathroom light sputtered to a dull hum and made her face look yellow, prickled even, her cheeks like a plucked chicken’s breast. When she moved to the city she had her hair cut short. She ran her fingers through her hair and it felt like stroking a tabby cat. She turned on the shower and while she waited for the water to warm, she looked in the mirror and touched her face as if actualizing herself as real, pulling and pushing, with her fingers she broke her face into shapes.
Nose: as slender as a finger with a bottom heavy triangle. Cheeks: two sharp half cylinders. Eyes: two white rings, two gray rings and two black circles. Lips: slanted line, inverted triangle, slanted line, crescent. Forehead: three permanent creases between her eyes. Chin: dented vertical oval. To see a face is to feel it. True faces are felt, she thought, otherwise they’re lies. The mirror began to steam, inside the shower, she dissolved.
Elora stepped from the shower and smoothed her hair with her hands as she entered the bedroom. The cool air hits her damp body. She got into bed and hid under the covers. The eroticism of wet skin on the bed sheet strangely aroused her as she lay there straining her ears to hear the soothing growl of semi-trucks tunneling their steel frames down the highway of an isolated night.
It sounded like what she wanted, sounded like freedom, a way to break free, new words to use, not these words. These words hung on the walls of her mind, black letters on white canvases, parts in a jar, preserving her, illustrating her. She was a collection of erratic meanings. She tried to piece them together, to fill in the holes. She tries to remember Jacques’s face by painting it in her mind: oval with cheekbones jutted as sticks, a deep dimple in his chin, broad nose, but when she stands back to view him, it is herself she sees on the canvas and a single black word: loneliness. Loneliness. Broad as the break of day, any day. All her days were the same, shoulder touching shoulder until they stopped, until they burned, like paper dolls, ablaze.
The Carving Circle Page 18