* * *
He can hammer with both his left and his right hand; he can hit the nail with his eyes closed, can drive it to the head with a single blow. The trees gave him a new body, one devoted to them, a servant to the hard flesh of the birch. Don’t think. About P. You can do it alone; he showed you how. Erik is gone another night; you take the body from the attic, you lay it in the ferns. You cry without knowing you are crying. How uncanny that skull is, P. but not P., it cannot speak to you, cannot see what you have done, and now you feel such disgust, exposing it, exposing yourself, for what? Because you are lonely? Sad? Insane? The body is just as at home in your arms as it is in the dirt, it has no way of knowing. What you are doing or why. What is coming. How stupid to think you could live the way it does, gently, at rest; you are still flesh and the demands of the flesh are immense, not content with vegetables in a basket or flowers on a vine but an entire cathedral of being, which is what P. was, purely, directed at you, for you, the way nature never is, selfish to want it still but how to stop? In the woods with P. you were a god. Now you are just a boy. You take the body back to the attic. Put its hands on your face. You cannot say it, because it’s not your word: beloved.
* * *
You are at the last line of trees. The deer no longer mind the noise; they watch it happen, the moment when the final nail sinks into the final trunk. All the woods at your back, a deep presence, alert, wondering if you are done doing your damage. You thumb the dark eyes in the bark, the headless tips of the nails. Look at you. Beauty. The leaves twitching on their stems, faint breeze. They are exhausted, too. From wondering. What it means. He rests his forehead against the trunk. Drops the hammer in the dirt.
* * *
They get a notice about the noise the saws will make while taking down the trees. Erik rubbing his thumbnail over his lower lip as he reads. What is it, Xie says. Silent push of the paper across the table. The woods are private property and should not be walked through or picnicked in or otherwise trespassed. No one can be liable for accidents involving logging equipment during such-and-such hours on such-and-such days. Any questions please call. Erik watching his face. Xie, he says. Caressing his wrist. Xie staring at the letter. Slow bloom of blood in his face. Erik leans forward, tightening his grip. Xie, he says again. Maybe there’s someone we can talk to, the city council, get some of your friends involved, maybe Jo knows— Xie looks up. Furious smile. He pushes the paper away, stands. Goes to the kitchen. Turns the oven on, whisper of flame rushing from the jet. He breaks a head of cauliflower into creamy white pieces. A hundred branches beneath his knife. Erik follows. Leaning in the doorway. We don’t know how bad it will be. The notice is only for one week of work. Xie nods. Dumping the cauliflower in the pot. Could be they only take a few hundred, at most. Xie still nodding, opening a can of chickpeas. Bangs it on the side of the pot to loosen the beans stuck to the bottom. It’s okay to be worried about it. I know how you feel about those woods. Erik goes on, offering to write a letter, to meet with the property owners, maybe they could even buy some of the land, take out a loan, he’d been thinking of it for a while, a handful of acres maybe, maybe, maybe. Xie slapping each vegetable on the board. Kale, a sweet potato, tomatoes. It was P. who sharpened the knife last, it cuts. Beautifully. We’re having curry tonight, Xie interrupts. That all right with you? Erik stops. Xie continuing in silence, lowering the flame on the rice. Wiping his hand on the towel. I’m not worried about it, Xie says, okay? Speaking into the sink. Gripping the lip of the stainless steel. So it’s fine. Erik’s face in the window, trying to catch Xie’s eye in the glass.
* * *
There are no more spikes left in the boxes. He breaks down the cardboard, buries the hammer in the garden. The gloves. His pack. Dirt warm in his hands. While you’re here strip the beds of old lettuce and put in new seeds. The cucumbers against the fence. There are tomatoes everywhere, and melons as heavy as heads. Worms churning in the compost. The strawberries ready for fresh jam. He’ll put it all in a box tomorrow, for Peter, bike it to the new church. But what to do now. Look across the stream. Moonlight running down every trunk, hash marks in the dark, white black white black white. What did I miss, what did I do wrong. But there is nothing wrong. Each tree in its place, fully crowned in green.
* * *
He goes into the little box, sits. He is supposed to say something. The latticed grille, through which he can see only a shadow, exudes a smell of rosewater. His breathing so loud. Yes? prompts the priest. Xie swallows. Tongue stuck. How long has it been since your last confession. He rubs his face. When has he ever told anyone anything? Really told them. Long silence. The priest waits. What do people say, here? Sins only the church can address. The priest can’t forgive someone for gassing a farm full of mink. Or eating a steak. Or cutting down a tree. He can’t forgive what isn’t a sin. He doesn’t even know what sin is. In Teresa’s mansions there are no animals, no plants, nothing living at all; those are left outside the castle, in the dirt, along with the most tortured souls, and the farther you get from them the better you are, cleaner; is that what they all believe, what this priest believes, what he teaches, that nature is garbage, is evil, and only when you free yourself of all that is living do you reach what is good. You piece of shit, Xie whispers. The priest is silent. Xie pushes out, the door squealing on its brass hinge. The church like the house, his attic, safe only if you are content to live like a fucking fool. His father can’t understand it, why he can’t be completely happy even in the garden, in the woods, when he is free to do as he pleases, to make the sort of life he wants, Erik allowing him every possible freedom, not understanding that the only available context for that freedom is poison. A comfortable existence borrowed against total collapse. Do what arouses you to love, Teresa wrote, again and again: never what arouses you to anger, to rage. It’s no spirit that loves the woods; only a body is capable of it, one that keeps its eyes on the ground, in the meat of the earth. And yet it is also the flesh that blinds you. Cripples you. Because what you came here to say is: What do I have to do to have him back. Can you bring him back to me. Looking for him everywhere. The red glass in the windows, liquid in the sun. The dandelions clustered against the stone, the tallest things growing on the denuded land, land cleared so that the church could sit in silence on the dirt, facing the woods, friend or foe? It is the only place left that could hold on to the body, that kept it for you. You can’t untangle one from another. Do you have to? Anything less than union is hell. Such a sharp line, between the field and the trees. You cross it for the last time.
* * *
He goes to the Moore farm. Same road, same time of night. Hasn’t been. Since. Familiar but in a strange way, like something in a movie coming to life, the sagging porches, the abandoned Waffle House, all the dense oak and ash and in between the shadow of the mountains. Stands at the edge of the driveway. Little red eye of the camera in the tree. It’s okay. You can see me. I can see you. No mask this time. He doesn’t go past the house, stays in the mouth of the drive. Can hear them from here. Rustle. Rattle. Fur against fur, fur against steel. New babies in the nesting boxes. What’s it like. Never to belong to yourself. Maybe we all know. That’s why we kill ourselves. Poison the world you can’t have, that doesn’t want you, that knows. What a virus you are. On the face of the earth. Moore’s white truck a ghost in the night, glowing. He can still feel the teeth through the glove, the claws, if you free them then they are free to kill. Free to die another kind of death. A light switching on over the porch. Moore’s face in the window. Calm. They look at each other. Wind stroking Xie’s face. Here you can still see the stars. Not like in the city. They don’t care about what happens. They go on burning whether or not you know their names, arrange them into shapes, make them into a story. If you look at the sky you see how much coldness there is in the way everything was created. But if you dig, the dirt is always warm. A burning at the heart of the earth. And everything stuck somewhere in between the deep freeze and the fire. Moore
holding down a slat in the blinds. Unpanicked. He was never your absolute enemy; he, too, is merely living, the way he knows how. But when the trees are safe and your father is no longer responsible for what you do you will come back, here, to do more than just look. Moore in the yellow frame of the window. Touching two fingers to his brow in a salute.
* * *
The letter did not give a time; the truck could come today, or today, or today. There is nothing to do but wait. The body in his arms, in bed, for the first time without pleasure. Look into the eyes, which can never again look back. It is not you. Not yet. Play cards with your dad. Watch the news. Make dinner. Jo calls, Peter calls; you don’t answer. Knee never stops trembling. Won’t he come? Now that you’ve done it, shouldn’t he see. The woods as you both have made them?
* * *
Off the road the first two hundred trees are marked with orange plastic tied around their trunks. Ends snapping in the breeze. He strokes the warm, slick ribbons. Tries to tear off a piece; the plastic stretches, whitens, but remains. He lets it go. How hot the day is. Dry. His lips burning. Blackbirds jumping from branch to branch. There are tracks in the dirt, from where the men dragged their boots, the door of their truck ajar on the road. Glint of silver inside, all the teeth of the saw. Don’t cry. Jo sobbing in the hall. Erik alone by the lake. Karen in the car. Leni shutting the broken screen. The tides turning red on one coast, black on the other. Alias’s mountains slashed to the quick. P. pinning him against the trunk of the tree. Hip-to-hip. What was the name of the lamb? It never had one.
* * *
You are asleep when the sound of the saw starts and then you are awake.
* * *
The first cut. The first tree. Whine of something wrong in a machine and then. No time to scream. No one would expect spikes here, the birch part of no great forest or preserve or endangered species, housing no extraordinary creatures, just common trees on private land. So no special mask or saw, no anticipation of anything. Wrong. Just a man doing a favor for a friend. Bending at the base of the birch. Say your prayers. The blade strikes the nail and the saw shatters, a piece of its chain sharper and faster than a sword in a hand spinning straight to the neck. Cutting one thing clean away from another. A body falling to the ground. A body falling in two parts.
* * *
Does a light come through the window, strike him on the forehead, call him to the half-cut tree. Or is it an absence of light that draws him. Life goes. Somewhere. When it goes. The man in the forest hanging just above or below his body for a moment, watching his own eyes wash red. Or is he evaporating along with his flesh. Forgetting he ever existed. You can imagine any number of things happening in this fragile pool of time. Silence where there should be sound. The birch cut half through at the base, brutal gape. Sap sorting itself around the wound. The soil drunk on blood. A body in a shape it was not meant to make. The sun pure and hard on the yellow plastic of the saw, the steel of its split chain. Xie steps backward, slow, until his heel hits the fender of the truck. Ragged sip of air. Hand against the hood, still warm. Every day before this one suddenly halcyon. It was so good. Not to see death coming.
* * *
There are woods beyond the birch, you know them, you will get to know them, you can. Disappear. No one will know for hours, yet, about the body by the truck, about you, what you are. You don’t think the word. The one that means: he who brings death. Mist of blood in the air. Over the dirt. Snap through the branches, the leaves, hands scraped raw, opening the old wounds. Air hard through the lungs, you can run and run and run. An animal from its cage, blind hurtle into the road. You keep the church to your left, you won’t go near it, you are headed for the highway, beyond which stand the ash and the gum trees, clustered at the base of the mountains. Don’t think of Erik. Of Karen. Of Leni. Of Jo. Peter’s sad eyes. Nova’s scars. The body you left behind. All your marks on the trunks. X after X after X. You run too fast to see them. The birch a white blur on either side, in front, behind, a sea, a sea of silver, then suddenly. Of gold. You stop. Are stopped. Hand out to touch the tree, which is no tree, but the body of the other. Enormous. Beloved. Only the sound of your breathing, of your blood. A crow twitching on its branch. Help me. P. pulling you down among the ferns. Shin on a stone. All you had to do was come here. To find him. If he was silent it was because you were silent; if he was far it was because you were far. But you were afraid. Still. Your face split by sobs, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. That the body in the woods would open up that way, irreversibly, you had not imagined what could happen to it, to you, how it might split you from life to take life. Fingers sunk into the dirt. Your head on his boot. Let me disappear. And his hand on your chin, pulling your head up to look at him, those eyes, black pools, Listen. There is no other world into which you might vanish. You must stay on the road. You must get on your knees. You must wait for the sword.
* * *
The perimeter of the woods is bound in yellow tape. Inside, it is busy with flesh; they want to know. If there is a mark on every tree. Hand after hand over trunk after trunk, scouting out the scars. And they are astonished, the trespassers; they cannot believe their eyes: Six thousand trees. Eighteen thousand nails.
* * *
Your house lit up in the distance, blue, red, white. The church with its quieter light somewhere opposite. Empty. The woods full of silence and iron. Your face slowly drying. P.’s boots digging up the dirt beside you. Full night now. The first stars. Touching their cold holes into the sky.
* * *
At the gate of the garden a hand stops you. You let it. The same officer who brought you from the Moores’ to the station, eyes gleaming when he sees you. Erik on the garden step, flanked by two men. He is not allowed to touch you. A breeze through the lettuce, the long tubes of rhubarb, the bent heads of the sunflowers. You step inside the house.
* * *
Did you hear the truck this morning. Yes. Did you hear the saw. Yes. Did you hear a scream, a sound, what came after. Silence. Did you know he was coming. Yes. Were you worried about him coming. Yes. Why. Because I knew what he wanted. What did he want. To kill them. To kill who. The trees. And that bothered you? Yes. You spend a lot of time in the woods. Yes. So what did you do. Silence. Xie. What did you do.
* * *
You don’t look at the man gripping your elbow. The door to the attic in pieces on the carpet. Brass lock twisted, sparkling, between two planks of white wood. Such noise overhead. Stranger after stranger walking the stairs up into your room. You count the steps to the bed. Hear the whisper of the sheet pulled from bone. Your lamb. A shout. Don’t think. About the body in someone else’s arms, someone who does not love it, who does not know it can be loved. You look at your father. He looks only at you. Boots on the ladder. All the silver from the closet carried down in pieces. The cape. The skirt. The crown. Even you do not understand it. The body in a bag on the floor, the zipper closing its teeth so tight together. Remember. When you brought him here. The gold filling the room to the ceiling. They put you on your knees as they carry the body out. You sob and sob. It will go back to the church, behind thicker glass, a more solid lock, more beautiful because you have adored it. P. lays his cheek against the back of your skull. Shh. In the garden, in the woods, on the Moores’ farm, in your bed, you made as much life as you could. You looked for it everywhere, even in the body, even in bone, because this is how you see the world: as desperately, infinitely living. All you wanted was to help it. Go on. For a little while longer. Someone holds your wrists behind your back, pushes your head down so that you must look at the floor, which is wood, beneath which is dirt, and beneath that, stone: and farther still, beneath every road, every path, there is fire. It is a mistake to think of the soul as something dark: there is light spread over all the earth, isn’t there? You, at least, have seen it. You see it now. Pulled to your feet. Walking from one imperfect place to another. The trees, alive, behind you.
The Seventh Mansion Page 14