Cataclysm Baby

Walker, Wallace, Warren

Now to make a memorial, a memory meant to outlast those recently gone from my head, lost through the holes eaten by this new wind blowing across my farm, bleached blank by the cloudy water that climbs thick and sluggish from my well. In goggles and duster, I gather my tools, go out of the house and into the ashy remains of the yard, this family orchard once lush and full of apples.

And all around me: Only stilled wood, dead branches over dirty ground. Only this lonely world grown atop my buried children, my planted wife.

With awl and adze, with hammer and chisel, I carve my oldest out of the first tree. I remake him as best I remember, shaping the roundness of his cheeks, grooving out the spaces between his teeth and toes.

When I am done, I fill my ears with my fingers to hold in the sound of his voice, the last words he said to me before we lost him, still too close to the surface of my thoughts. I clench my eyes so his image might not get diffused by the weak sunlight poking through my goggles, a dimness forever threatening to steal him from behind my lids.

Across the orchard, it takes weeks to rough in his sister and his sister and his brother and his brother. Upon a lightning-split husk, I stencil the twins that followed, then whittle out the other babies impossible to call boys or girls, their flesh too bent and broken upon their bones to name.

Our last child, the one birthed runny as yolk, I do not carve it at all. I haven’t the talent to make its nothing form out of wood, haven’t the strength to try.

On the first day of fall, I cut my wife’s body free of the centermost trunk, using my tools to recreate the inverted ribs of her diseased chest, the long-ago smoothness of her oft-emptied belly. With every skill I’ve learned, I remember her upon the wood: Her eyes exactly the proper shape and size, exactly the right tilt to complement the laughing smile last heard too long ago. Her nose alone I work on for days, slicing curl after curl off the bridge until it is the same nose whose tip I kissed goodbye every night, even at the end, when there was so little of it left. I spend a week curving bark into hair, and then a month recreating her favorite blouse, the many folds of its matching skirt, both worn the sun-drenched day we were wed.

And then believing myself done, every cut and carved son as partially complete as he was in life, every doomed daughter dancing in wood around the figure of my long-missed wife.

And then waking to forgetting her name. And then forgetting all their names. And then wishing I had carved those syllables into the trees, so I might know which child is which.

And then telling myself it doesn’t matter, that their names are not important.

It was not their names I loved. It is not their names I miss.

Another weird wind blows, and then it is winter. And then there is me, no longer remembering any day when it was not winter. And still this project, seemingly unfinished: Always some new detail for me to add, some torso to reshape or dimple to correct. Some finger needing a nail, some foot needing the rest of its toes—because surely a child would have ten toes, ten fingers?

Surely every child would have hair and eyes and ears and a nose?

Surely no child could be as incomplete as these?

And then one day berating myself for the lack of skill that left them ugly and warped, rent and ruined.

And then who are these people.

And then who am I to them, these ten perfect children made of trees, this one woman grown out of the applewood to raise them.

And so sad she is. So alone. And how I wish I could join her. And how I wish I could be the father and she the mother and all these our children, so that none of us would be lonely again.

And how sure I am that whoever made them is not the good one who made me, because who would be so cruel as to keep us apart, with this unbearable distance between wood and flesh, this unchangeable differential of atoms.

All winter long I brush the snow from off their faces, so that I might study each one in turn, so that I might practice falling in love with them, as some father must have done, so long ago.

When the snow finally melts, see then this improbable thing I find, sprung forth from the palm of some unrecognizable child: Some new leaf, some green branchlet blooming.

See now how I hold it in my fingers. And how I let it lay its buds across my palm. And how every day I think again I might pluck its growth free of the trunk, so that its fresh promise might tease me no more.