Chapter Three - The Forest of Forgiveness
Something moves through my head like music, and together Gariela and I walk down a path of sound and light that changes and melts before me. I find myself in a little wood where leaves twinkle in the sunlight. Under my feet crackle dry leaves and fragments of twigs. They're soft, and I step experimentally over the forest litter beneath my feet for awhile before stopping in amazement.
I'm standing and walking. I haven't stood on my own power since the day of Christine's death two years ago, but there I stand. I look up to a sky that isn't blue, but white like glowing china, and fresh air plays around me. I look at my hands and they're no longer ropy and twisted with age, but as they were in my prime fifty years ago.
Far away I hear the tapping of a hammer.
I turn around and Gariela's still there by my side, a little woman whose scarred and ancient face pulls me in with love. She gently lets go of my hand and points in the direction of the sound.
"Who's that?" I ask.
"Go and see."
So I walk off toward the sound. As the path curves around, a small boxy frame house appears. In front, a man builds something out of wood with the tap-tap of his hammer, a shelf or something simple. His shoulders are big and substantial, and his long brown hair covers his face. Slowly and deliberately he works, whistling a merry little tune. He hears the crunch on the path and looks up, setting down the hammer. His broad face breaks into a smile and he comes up to me, his arms open wide. All around him shines a rosy light, shimmering behind his head and wide shoulders.
I stop dead in astonishment. It is Joseph Buquet.
The last time I saw him his face was contorted in terror as I wrapped the noose around his neck, and pushed him off the scaffolding to hang and twitch below. I stalked him like a cat and killed him without a scrap of hesitation. Now he stands before me brown and pink, glowing with life. I can't look at him, I'm so ashamed.
He embraces me and it confuses me. What kind of body do I have? What kind is his? For I can feel him, the skin sliding over round muscles, his warm breath on my cheek, heat pouring off his skin.
"Well," he says. "You're finally here."
I gape at him, unbelieving. He's smiling at me with his arm still around my shoulder.
"I killed you, I say. It was a terrible thing to do."
He lets me go and beckons. "Come and sit. I can finish this later."
It's a birdhouse he's building, several simple pieces of wood nailed together, but the glorious shining planks have grain so pronounced I can see each one alive and almost moving.
"May I hold it?" I ask. He places the birdhouse in my hands and I stare at it open-mouthed. "What's it for?"
He looks at me and laughs deep and rich from the belly. "For the birds. I'm a keeper of the birds. And you're going to help me, mate. That's why you're here."
"How can you stand to look at me? I would think you would hate me."
He takes the beautiful wooden object gently from my hand. "I did for the longest time. Would have killed you myself if I could have. But you'll see how it all works. You're all confused and then your head clears. It's in the air. Wonderfully clears up the head."
"I'm sorry," I say. He smiles and nods, expecting me to go on, so I do. "I wanted to hurt Carlotta, destroy her career. I thought if I did it for Christine, she would love me. You were in the way like a dog in the street, in the path of a carriage. I would have run you over in a second."
He replies softly, "I did the same thing, mate. I thought I could make the girls love me when I sweet-talked the poor little things, and cornered them in the corridors and the dormitories. When I thought no one could see."
"It doesn't work, does it?" I say.
"Pointless as hell."
"You seem to know so much about me."
"Well, it's funny," he rumbles. "You learn things here and you're not sure how you do. They just come into your head. As I was working here I found out all sorts of stuff about you and it helped me to see you, how you could do what you did. I can't tell you how long it took, though. Time doesn't work the same way here."
"Where is here?"
"Where you need to be now, mate. We're all where we need to be, here. But we've got a job to be doing, so let's get to it."
His big body glides up without effort and I follow him to the tool shed behind the white wooden house. He spans with his hands and says, "When you find an oak of just this size, chop it down. It will be tough, let me tell you. You'll think your arms and your gut are fit to burst. Then cut off the limbs and bring the log to me. We'll see where we go from there."
He takes an axe from a hook on the wall, hands it to me, and leads me deep into the woods. It's dark and tangled, even though the sky still glows white. "You'll know the right tree when you see it," he says, and then looks me full in the face with love.
Then to my surprise he lays his hand lightly right on my chest, where two swells of muscle I haven't had in decades meet in a sharp crease. A great rush of wind slices through me and it's as if he moves into me, penetrating me with all of his big living presence. I feel the drink in him, clouding his mind and restraint. I see a girl, a child really, crying and terrorized, clutching her bloody ballet skirt around her legs. He glimpses me on the catwalk as Carlotta croaks her way through a bad evening of opera bouffe. His thoughts ring in my head as if they were my own, That's no ghost. It's a man in a mask, and he's caught me out. If I can catch him and kill him, he won't see me anymore. He won't make me stop with the girls. I can hide his body in the cellar.
Just like me. Hiding, not wanting to be caught. I back off choking. He grips my arm saying, "Sorry, too much too soon, mate. I forget that you have to work up to it, like. But I just wanted you to see. It's not a matter of me being all perfect and you the Judas goat. I've had a lot to be sorry for too. Now off you go to find that tree."
He smiles and waves as he walks off, leaving me alone in the forest with an axe and the gathering green forest dark.
There is no day or night, only the bright white sky, and I scrutinize one tree, then another, until before me as if it called my name stands a tall scrub oak. I hit it with my axe but the tree rings like iron and I barely scratch its bark. I hit it again and again, and after more swings than I can count there's a tiny nick in the surface.
On I go in that time without time, until my hands bleed and the axe starts to slip from them. I tear strips off my shirt and wrap them around my stinging, bleeding hands. Finally the tree falls and I lop off the limbs but they're tough, and each limb fights as I whack at it.
Joseph comes up from between the trees to where I work, and he carries a long saw. I take one end and he the other, and we saw the long log into smaller chunks. I'm so exhausted I can barely move my end, but his strength astounds me. He's almost pushing me and the saw itself, and under his hands the saw goes through the log like a knife through butter. He sees the bloodstained rags around my hands but says nothing.
He pushes, I pull, and then our motions reverse. Finally I stumble and can push no more, so he comes over to me and lifts me tenderly, sitting me down on one of the log sections. Humiliated, I put my head between my knees. "I can't do this," I whisper.
"You can, laddie. You've got to work up to it, is all."
I drag the log sections back to the little white house and pile them up one after another. Then I sit and watch him glue and nail, his face beautiful in soft light filtered green from the leaves. I have no idea how much time has passed and I suffer no hunger or thirst. But my hands bleed and my muscles complain with pain.
He sends me into the forest again to cut more trees, and I move into parts of the forest wilder and thicker than I've seen. He comes out with me to saw, but the job of dragging the logs back to the house is mine and my muscles still complain, although they have gotten harder and stronger from all the effort. My raw and bleeding palms get worse.
One day I come into the clearing near the house, pulling a log so large that all the skin rips off the palms of my hands, leaving the entire surface bloody and ragged. He looks on and slowly nods. I stare at the shreds of skin on my bleeding hands and then bury my face into them. Blood drips through my fingers.
Joseph comes up to me and pulls my torn hands away from my face, holding me gently by the wrists. "Come over to the well," he says. I've seen the old stone well behind the house but he's never used it. He lowers the bucket and draws up water.
"Hold out your hands." He pours the bucketful onto my hands and at once they're full of cool rain, of snow from the mountaintop, of ice from the stars themselves. "Now wash your face."
New, pink skin covers my hands as I dip them into the bucket to splash my face. I feel the same ruts and pitted skin, the same twisting of my eye, but the water soothes it all. I scoop some more water into my hair and then he takes the bucket from me and pours its contents over my head. Shocked, I stare at him. He laughs and I start to laugh, too.
"I think you have enough logs, he says. Now it's time to learn to plane and saw."
He shows me how to strip the bark from a log, how to clamp it and saw it into perfectly straight planks so that the silky grain goes exactly in the right direction. Back and forth I move over the wood. It's easier than chopping or hauling. All my muscles glow with power as they lengthen and thicken over the time that I cannot measure. I still think in terms of days because I still follow a pattern of work, rest, and work again.
In the endless repetition, I don't think or remember much. Instead, I notice that each leaf is distinct, that I can focus on a single leaf at the top of the tallest tree and bring it into focus. On and on this goes until I know every leaf, every blade of grass in the clearing, every knot on the softly rustling trees where we work, and every line in Joseph Buquet's radiant face.
"Now you learn to sand," he says one day, and so I sit next to him, rubbing the coarse paper in circles again and again over the small rectangular pieces of oak until the wood shines like glass. As I look at the grain I can see it almost move, like waves.
"There's a world in there," I say to him, and he just smiles and nods, nailing together another birdhouse.
One day the sky is especially bright and I feel something new. I thirst. "Joseph," I ask, "may I have some water?"
It's as if he's been waiting to hear this, for he leaps up, runs to the well, and dips the bucket in as he did so long ago when my hands bled. He picks up the dipper and I reach for it but he won't give it to me. "No, it's my pleasure," he smiles, and he holds the dipper for me and gives me water as if I were a child and he were my father.
"Tell me," I say after I drink. "Where are the birds who live in your houses?"
"Where tormented children are lost and then found, and given a home. Each one I make is a home for one of those children." He puts the dipper down, and suddenly a pink flame covers him.
"I'm sorry. So sorry."
"It's all right, mate," he answers. "Just keep plugging at it. Don't give up."
The house and surrounding forest glow with the blushing light from his face. A small black figure comes into view through the rosy haze. It's Gariela, holding out her hand once more. "Come with me. We leave this place now."
(To be continued.)