*
It was nearly dawn, but still dark when she left. The river was a metal gray, the sky was cold and hazy. She noticed a round rock similar in shape and size to a geode and when she looked closer she saw that there were many, clustered like black mushrooms, wet and musty. They seemed real. She watched them as they slowly begin to pinken into a patch of bald heads under the light of the suns golden eyelid as it opened up the distance with its red lashes.
She chose the rock closest to her and carried it back to her car and placed it on the passenger seat. She had the strange sense that it was living. She had felt this way about eggs before, as if they were asking to hatch. She knew a person that could help her crack it. When this was over, she will contact Birdie and thank her.
She started her car and drove away. It was the only car on the road. The lights on her speedometer faded as the sun came up. We are the chances we take, she said, and it felt like a mantra. The window down; the hair on her arms standing up. She could feel her chest leap; she leapt. She felt.
She drove slowly down Jacques’s lane so as not to wake him, as it was nearly seven a.m. She parked, picked up the wooden sculpture of Callisto, closed the car door very carefully and walked towards the porch.
Elora didn’t rush, instead she concentrated on placing each heel precisely in front of the opposite toe, linking her footprints to trail a chain behind her. The house was quiet, and she knew when she reached it everything would change for this is what happens when pieces slide into place; they plow and unearth a rough terrain.
The garden was full of sculptures, she entered the fold, walked in and out and around their bodies. They were magnificent. Each of them had a feature that moved in the wind, arms that swung or rope hair, their eyes were painted stones. They were without grime and spotless. Most of them looked similar to her. It was like walking through her montage.
She stood in the middle of the women and watched the sun come up from behind the house to warm the sky, watched clouds roll behind the trees, break into kaleidoscopes and emerge whole again. The leaves had begun to turn colors, like orange ink spilling across the green, like leaky red veins through the pine’s thick bodies. She would have liked to watch the color spread, deciding she wanted nothing more than to see a cycle complete itself.
It’s amazing how one circumstance, one hour, can reconstruct a lifetime, and while the moment is performing, we sit on the cusp of our own definition, isolated by magnitude and inert in time.
It was bath day. He walked down the steps with soapy water and linseed oil. One of his statues caught his eye and started walking slowly towards him. Elora. He stepped down from the porch. He was wearing an oilcloth apron and had long yellow gloves on. He dropped the bucket and the water ran down the steps. He didn’t care or notice.
He whispered her name.
60.
She walked closer to him. Her flowered dress in the breeze, her laced up boots on the grass, she coughed, she was real, his head began to spin, he leaned against the banister and she reached out her hand, as though to catch him. He dropped to the ground. She knelt beside him.
There seemed nothing and everything to say, as if one word, one single word, would act like a crack in the levee and they would drown. The soapy water soaked into the soil. He began popping the bubbles, he touched her forehead with a wet finger to make sure she didn’t disappear.
“You’re alive,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I am,” she said and stood. “And you, too, are alive. I’ve brought you something,” she handed him the carving of Callisto. He took it and stared at her.
He brought it to his nose and smelled it. “Callisto?” His face was shocked. “Where did you get this?”
“On the kitchen table, where you left it,” she said.
“Where I left it?”
“Yes. It was there the morning after you died, or left, or whatever the hell you did. After you changed me.”
“I didn’t die. And I didn’t change you, I resurrected you, I saved you,” he said.
“I see that,” she interrupted.
“And I didn’t leave this. It isn’t mine,” he said searching the grain of the bear.
“What? Whose was it then?”
He began to pry off the head.
“Stop it! You’ll break it,” she said as the bear head popped off in his hand. Inside its torso was a small folded piece of paper. A white mushroom inside the knot of a tree. A white moth under a log.
“It’s my father’s,” he said unfolding the note. “It has to be; he left it for me,” he trembled as he lowered onto the wet soil and read the poem.
Down the Mountainside
For you,
I tie a limb
in a bow
around a heavy rock, that knotted,
that tight
ball of string,
for you, son,
I’ll let myself
go.
“Tell me what happened after I left,” he said.
*
The stories they exchanged were not so different from the ones they’d made up inside themselves. Their child, his father, victims of place and time. When people share a death they often share a rebirth. He took her to the sculpture of his maman.
“I knew she was returning and she did. I have the power of resurrection,” he waved a hand towards his garden of goddesses. “You came back to me.”
“I came here to see if you were alive and to tell you that I, too, create things. Photographs,” she said.
“Photographs? You’re a photographer?” He looked at her and down at the sculpture of Callisto.
“Yes.”
“Of course,” he smiled. “Of course. Show me.”
61.
He helped her bring them in from the car and hung them on the walls of his living room. He took some other photographs from the closet, pictures of bears, himself as a child, the mountains and his maman. He hung them beside hers. He circled around her photos, asking what each symbol meant. She found herself describing a person she admired, however despicable, and this surprised her.
“They are magnificent,” he said.
“They are just true,” she said.
“No. Not just. More than that. They hide the truth by revealing it. It’s what I do. It’s what my father did,” he stood in silence for a while. “I can’t believe he actually came for me. All this time I thought his body was on the mountain. I’ve even thought I’ve felt him as I harvest the wood. I assumed he had finally met his bear, and so, I didn’t try to resurrect him,” his eyes brimmed with tears.
“There is no way you could have known. His spirit was free because you didn’t resurrect him. And you probably have felt him in the woods, because his spirit went where it wanted to be,” she put her hand on his shoulder.
“And you,” he looked up at her. “Are you where you want to be?”
“When I was alive, I wanted to sing and be near you, so in that way, yes, I suppose, but I don’t know now. I’m not the same person. It’s hard to know what you want when you have to learn how to feel. I’m still adjusting.”
“I wish I could say I was sorry, but I’m not. You are standing here in front of me, without fear or secrecy, you can become whomever you want and Arlo will never hurt you again,” he went to hug her, but she pulled away.
“Do you really think it was your father that Arlo murdered?” She avoided his touch.
“It has to be. Somehow Arlo killed my father instead of me and I wasn’t there,” he looked out the window towards his father’s work shed.
He would carve his father as a bear. Rage and its slow eternal burn, charred his inside, he would finish his father’s sculpture.
“If you would have been there, then we both would be dead, and anyway, you can’t be sure that Arlo killed him.”
“I can and I am. He carved animals for me when he went away on expedition. I left him the encyclopedia as a clue and he left me Callisto. The bear’s name is
Callisto. That’s why I moved there in the first place. He figured it out and he came for me. You saw the photo’s of my father, we looked very similar.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll let fate decide.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I know where there are some eyes in the forest that can help us.”
“What kind of fairytale bullshit is that?”
“It’s not bullshit, it’s a plant. Actaea pachypoda. Also known as ‘Doll’s Eye’,” he said, rose from the chair and pulled the encyclopedia off the shelf, opened it to the correct page and handed her the book. The picture was of a stalk with long bristles and white berries with black pupils stuck onto their thin red stems. They were extraordinary and looked just like eyes.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” she said.
“I can take you to them.”
“With the right light, I could make it look like an eyeball stuck on red needle. I know that sounds a bit macabre, but in the right context, it would look astonishing.”
“In the right context, I can see it.”
“I could do a collage. You know, many eyes exposed to different lights, then reattached to the same stalk. Maybe I could even paint a few,” she said.
“I would even make you a wooden one. You could place it alongside a real eye. Arlo’s,” he said.
“What?”
“I mean the eye could be Arlo’s,” he looked straight at her. Outside fireflies dipped in and out of his sculptures. Elora was silent.
“It could be the one that holds the mystery,” he said.
“The mystery?”
“Every work of art holds the mystery of its creation close to the surface, but untraceable.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Five little eyes in a bitter wine will stop a heart that deserves stopping,” he said and took a drink. “Think of the image Elora. Think of giving birth to that. You’re an artist now. We both are and this man deserves to die for what he’s taken from us.”
She understood exactly what he meant. Understood it completely.
They were staring at each other and inside the slant of windowed sun between them, grew the image of a body, as if their veins were crocheting together and creating an entirely new person.
She felt something drop inside her, cold as a seed and black as a note of music.
“There is no need for that,” she said and took her camera from her bag. “I have a photo of Arlo in here. I have the ability to end him. That’s what you gave me. That was my rebirthing. You resurrect. I take away. All I need is a darkroom.”
When she spoke, the pieces of their future slotted into place like loose blocks of ice will freeze into a single sheet of glacier. The frost behind his eyes began again, only this time it was shared warmth. She could understand him now. They could unite. He put his hand over hers. As true partners.
“You have no idea what this means,” he said and stopped. How could he finish this sentence?
“I’m still learning to feel,” she said. “I don’t know if I can be with you and make it meaningful.”
When she imagined her own eyes, they were barren like soil where life had been uprooted. Holes.
“I will help you. Trust me, this is how we were meant to be,” he said. “I love you. I want to learn how to love you more.”
She thought about his love and it’s potential hope inside her own disturbed earth. Maybe. Maybe he could fill her.
“We’ll see,” she removed her lens cap. “Stay like that. Don’t move,” she said as she placed her camera against her eye and shot his photograph.
Epilogue
Arlo sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath and panting in the pre-bird morning with a feeling of panic he could not explain. I’m going to die, he thought, end. There had been no nightmare, no pain, just the sense of his world being gathered up and yanked away from him as though his surroundings had been painted on cloth. For a moment he felt the fragile ripping of premonition and stared past the window frame at a windbreak of leafless trees, black branches stitched across a gray dawn. He thought of her eyebrows against her bloated forehead and shuddered.
He swore he’d seen her the other day. Like a damn ghost, he saw her near his fishing cove, but when he turned the boat around, she had gone. Vanished. He should cut back on his drinking.
Arlo was not a good man, not even a decent one, and had learned to shake off any earthly forewarnings that might force him to consider his own karmic comeuppance. There were things he was willing to contemplate and things he wasn’t willing to contemplate. It was as simple as that. The past was in the past and when it showed signs of rearing its ugly head, he focused his mind on the thing he loved best, fishing.
It was early autumn and the fish would still be biting. His heart slowed as he imagined catfish waiting on the river’s bottom like quiet whiskered stones. Stones that were muddied straight through to the point of putrefaction and if he had a soul, then surely, it resembled this.
There she was again.
Her white arm reaching up for him and the river, full of hooks and snags, tumbling around it like a mysterious dream. Her fingers unkempt with seaweed, her mouth opened and out floated two huge water lilies, as pink as lungs, bobbing up and down the current. Elora. He hadn’t thought about her for months, and now, all of the sudden, she was everywhere.
At first, he couldn’t even look at the river without imagining some part of her body resurfacing and he felt the panic of then, the anger. Why was she back now? He punched down his thoughts with action, pulled on yesterday’s clothes, had a piss and went into the kitchen to pour himself a scotch. These things take more time than we realize, he thought, filled his flask and grabbed his fishing rod.
His boots broke across shards of frosty grass and his breath clouded the air. It seemed as though he were the only thing awake until his boat motor started like some faithful animal. He moved quickly across ripples.
The river’s wind was a good smack across the face and cleared his mind. He took a deep breath and welcomed the return of his old self just before he was pushed into the water.
It was shocking and cold. The boat was empty and sped off without him. He tried to swim, but his body was completely frozen and inert. He could only move his eyelids and his mouth. He shouted for help and floated on his back. The current was as tangled as Elora’s hair and it carried him like a log downstream. Stars raced above him, fading ornaments against the metal sky and an arrow of geese. Lines of trees shadowed the bank like a watching crowd.
He felt himself pulled under and when he screamed the water swelled into him like the sucking in of bellows. It felt purposeful as though the water were enjoying it, as though it were alive.
The Carving Circle Page 20