“palmleaf with a twist” by Cran Herlihy
“the maiden lay dreaming” by Cran Herlihy
Get Cran Herlihy’s art and poetry from Great Mystery Publishing, http://www.greatmysterypublishing.com/index.htm
Elvenwood Acres
by Margaret Hammitt-McDonald
The wood refused to speak to Lily.
She held the piece of sugar pine the nurse had brought her, trying to coax song from the silent grains. Her paralyzed left hand was folded in her lap, the knuckles echoing the stubborn knot in the wood. She could not carve movement from her dominant hand’s numb bark anymore, so she had to make do with her neglected right hand. The tools sat on the table by her elbow, motionless and reproachful.
Her attention moved away from wood and tools with the injured reflexes of fingers exploring a bruise, straying to the forest outside the window, beyond gardens as carefully trimmed as the images she had once cultivated in wood, stone, and metal.
Elvenwood dripped in mist, the green of leaves and the slick black of tree trunks as startling as shattered glass amid the white billows of vapor. Some of the staff were strolling through the woods, fondling leaves, pausing to let rain drip into their palms.
She snarled at them, “At least you can walk among trees—until you get old and your legs don’t work anymore.” She imagined Dr. Avery Inimir, whom she had met on arriving at Elvenwood Acres the day before, with his sword-colored hair rusted to mere gray. Remorse pushed the thought away, yet she could not assuage the feeling of being cast off, a piece of driftwood draped with seaweed and the sad harps of fish skeletons.
“How is the rabbit coming along, Mrs. Walden?” Lily startled, dropping the wood into her lap. The voice sounded like the quiet radiance of redwood in an old church’s walls. She turned to the doorway and discovered a man with long hair worn in multiple braids.
“What rabbit?” she asked, unease making her words prickle. Was the man reminding her of something she had said before and forgotten? She studied her useless hand where it rested in her skirt’s field of sterile flowers, afraid that the same side of her mind had frozen as well.
“The rabbit in the wood,” the man prompted as he leaned into the doorway.
“Please, come in,” she uttered the expected pleasantry, though she felt her tongue stiffen like the year-lines frozen in the wood. He approached with the reverent gait Lily associated with cathedrals, moving in still awe amid the light and dust of saints.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself,” he said. He tugged at one of his braids, the first awkward movement she had seen among the staff, who all seemed to have been dancers or panthers once. The simple gawkiness of it made her heart shed some of its frost. “I’m Dr. Edmund Falutay. I’ve done a little carving myself, and when your daughter told me you were a professional sculptor, I made sure she brought your tools.”
She gestured for him to take a seat in the extra chair prepared for visitors whom she was sure did not always come to this garden of the damaged elderly. “I hope I wasn’t interfering. I just couldn’t help but see a rabbit. Here are its ears pressed flat back against its head as it runs from an eagle.” He traced a line in the grain, and she inhaled awe. He had seen true where her tumbled emotions had not allowed her to: the flattened ears, the alert and terrified face, the powerful hind legs, and the deep eye. As she brought the piece of pine back to her face, she could see individual strands of the rabbit’s fur, and its fear made her skin tighten on her bones.
She ripped her gaze from the wood, surprised at how keenly it had spoken. When she looked up at Dr. Falutay, she glimpsed the rabbit fleeing through his crepuscular eyes: skin burning with fright, desperation pouring into the leaping exertion of its sinews. She did not know what was worse, to look at the wood and see a living rabbit, to look into the man’s eyes and see it running, or to look inside and see herself fleeing, from whose jaws she did not know.
“You know, Mrs. Walden, we don’t just have to listen to the stories objects tell.” Lily forced herself to look at Dr. Falutay again. No rabbit ran there now, only her own tiny, motionless reflection. “Do you want that rabbit to get away from the eagle?” She nodded, surprised by the vehemence of her response, but the imaginary rabbit’s terrified dash for its life had echoed in a trapped part of her heart. “Then you can make it so.”
“But doctor,” she protested, unable to clear the rust from her throat. “One of my hands is dead from my stroke and the other one’s half-dead with arthritis. The sculpture will be awful, if I manage to finish it.”
“We can do it together if you’d like,” he coaxed. “I’ll hold one of those chisels, and you direct my hand with the mallet.” She selected the tools from the table and rested her hand in his larger one, and he braced the wood with his elbow while holding the chisel with that hand. “We’ll give the rabbit life.”
Her hand knew what to do as it guided his. It sang the rhythm of the wood with the unthinking deftness of instinct. She felt the rabbit’s muscles incandescent with need. She felt the nearness of the eagle, its claws whetted like the crescent moon. With the help of the extra hands, she delved into the wood, and a depression in the soil welcomed the trembling creature. It dived inside, letting fear dissipate into the sheltering earth.
Lily’s consciousness flowed out of the wood, and the sculpture rested in their mingled hands: the rabbit thrusting itself into its hole, its head turned back to the reaching eagle. Its emotions rippled under her fingers as she stroked the fur they had picked from the compliant wood. “You helped,” she half-accused, half-thanked the doctor, who had released her hand and was replacing the tools on the table.
“Not much,” he dismissed responsibility with a shrug. “It was your story. I merely held your hand while you told it.”
“Thanks for helping me,” she replied, fondling the rabbit. He gathered himself to stand and inclined his head toward her with a politeness Lily associated with the older world of history books, with their russet tones of lost grandeur. Only when he had gone did Lily question herself as she sheltered the rabbit in her good hand: my story?
***
The sunrise was sliding through Lily’s new window, a fragile color between orange and gold, as tender and coquettish as a rose. She remembered dreaming of stroking the living fur of the rabbit sculpture. Only when she was sorting the fragments of her dream did Lily realize that her left hand had been stroking it. An irrational hope shouted in her skin and she tried to flex the hand, but disappointment crawled into the space that hope vacated. With the birth of day, the hand had died again.
She forgot about her hand’s brief resurrection until after breakfast, when she accepted Dr. Falutay’s invitation to visit the woods, and her nurse Aaron came to push her wheelchair. The attendants parked their patients in a sunny clearing surrounded by a ring of hickory trees. Lily noticed abstract metal sculptures sharing the forest light with the undergrowth. The odor of decay and renewal emanated from the trees like a lullaby, and the combination of scent, sound, and tentative summer shadows soothed her into repose. She allowed herself to drowse, feeling like a bell invited to sing.
And then she must have dozed, for she saw the impossible.
Aaron exhaled himself free of his body and melded with the largest hickory tree. Dr. Falutay sang himself out of his skin and into the music tumbling from a bird’s throat. Dr. Inimir slid into the discrete golden spheres of sunlight dangling between branches. With their transmogrification, Lily sensed the release of a joy profound beyond comprehension. Her heart responded where her mind could not, and she tried to send herself into flight, song, and radiance with them—but fell down into herself.
Lily felt around at the edges of her body as tentatively as her right hand had started learning the repertoire of her frozen left. She awakened with her head tilted back up to the sky, a chalice opening itself to water, and blinked at the dazzle of the sun between the branches. Her face was raw with damp pearls. Her good hand fluttered up to wipe the tears away, and she gaped at the biggest of the hickory trees, striving to find her nurse in the tranquil raggedness of its bark. She discovered Aaron talking with Dr. Inimir, disappointingly and reassuringly embodied. But when he turned and waved at her, the wisdom of wood shone from his face.
***
That evening after dinner, a string quartet of doctors and nurses performed on the lawn, amid fragile paper lanterns that candles swelled with vibrant, youthful light. A quiet man, slim as the bow Dr. Inimir aimed at the cello’s heart, sat alert, his face trembling in harmony with the yearning of the violin. “He used to be a violinist,” a stout man with a pumpkin’s pleasantly squat face whispered to Lily. “He performed with the great orchestras of his time. Dr. Shinuya told me.” He nodded toward the violinist, a graceful woman with a squall of curly blond hair.
“How long have you been here, Mr...?” Lily asked him. She remembered him from breakfast, but his name had slipped away.
“I’m Tom,” he answered, his squash-blossom face shifting into an easy grin.
“Lily Walden,” she responded, taking the proffered hand.
“You’re not married, are you?” Tom asked, narrowing his eyes. “It’s not for me that I’m asking—it’s for Peter,” he added, gesturing at his thin friend, who was too absorbed to notice the exchange. “Old fellow’s lonely, I think.”
“Widowed,” she replied, laughing as Tom’s mobile features sharpened at the announcement. “I’m not looking, though. But that’s the most charming evasion I’ve heard,” she added, hoping her right-sided smile conveyed good-natured teasing.
“Touché,” Tom declared, clutching at an imaginary dart in his chest. “I’ve been here maybe a year. My diabetes got too bad for me or the kids to handle. Funny thing, though, I’ve felt healthy here—other than not being able to walk,” he amended, gesturing at the amputated legs beneath his wheelchair blanket. “It’s a magical place,” he continued, lowering his voice to a whisper as Peter glared at him with a finger to his lips. “I can’t put my finger on it. Something about that lemony light in the mornings, coming from the woods—it just makes you feel like possibilities have opened to you again. Listen to me,” he scolded, his tone gruff with the sandpaper sound of resistance to tears. “Like it or not, this place turns us all into poets.”
Intrigued and emboldened by Tom’s confession, Lily leaned toward him. “I saw the strangest thing in the woods today,” she whispered. “I’d just had my pain medication, so I was drowsy, and once we got to that clearing, I probably just nodded off. No, it’s too silly,” she interrupted herself, waving the dream away. But Tom was bending toward her, his eyes honed in his amicably indolent face. “Oh, all right,” she sighed, then let the rest of her words fall before she could catch and censor them. “They—the doctors and the nurses—changed into things.”
“What sorts of things, Lily?” Tom asked. His tone was as neutral as sand.
“Not really things but feelings,” she stammered, fumbling for understanding. “Dr. Inimir became sunlight, and not just the physical thing. He became warmth, and brightness, and the sheer joy of bringing out the colors of the forest. Dr. Falutay turned into birdsong. Aaron turned into the bark on a tree. Of course, all those things were already there,” she amended, though she knew that the precision of her explanation would not make it seem any less absurd. “However, it was as if they weren’t complete until the doctors and nurses melded with them. They gave the birdsong, the bark, and the sunlight their souls. Does that make any sense?” she finished.
“If I’d heard that story a year ago, I would’ve called you a loony old bat,” Tom replied, and his chuckle earned him another glare from Peter. “But after being here a year, I believe you. These people are like fabulous beings from a story. But it’s not like they aren’t real—in fact, I think they’re the most real of us all, whatever they may be.”
***
Lily shared breakfast with Peter and Tom the next day. The skin under Peter’s eyes had gained new burdens since the concert the night before, and his glance seemed charred. Tom’s conversation, as light as the darting of a butterfly, kept trying to rouse him, but he stirred his hot cereal without speaking. “Peter, Tom tells me you were a concert violinist once,” Lily hazarded, not sure whether the statement would invite or repel him, but her useless left side burned in sympathy.
“Once,” Peter echoed, stuffing cereal into his mouth. “Can’t do it anymore. I wouldn’t be able to hold the violin.”
“Tom told me you had some renown,” Lily prodded.
“‘Had renown’ is right,” Peter insisted. “You have no idea how listening to a concert hurts me. I know those pieces so well, but I can never play them again.”
“I used to be a sculptor,” Lily ventured again, daunted by the way he attacked the bowl with his spoon and tossed his pills into his mouth. The confused awe Lily felt when she thought about the rabbit carving prompted her to speak, even though his compressed mouth simmered with irritation. “Then I had my stroke. It paralyzed my good hand, so I had to learn how to use my bad one. Over time, I could write and do other things, but not sculpting. It was as if all the art in me had been paralyzed too. After that I got depressed.” Peter’s teeth fretted at his lips, as if impatient to silence her, but his depleted eyes continued to stare.
“Yesterday Dr. Falutay sat with me and helped me carve—just a little thing,” she began to dismiss it, then stopped, feeling again the urgent emotions surging out of the wood. “It turned out well. Not only was I able to use the skill I thought I’d lost, but there was something extra. The rabbit I carved…it seemed so—alive, as if its story had reached out from the wood and grabbed me.”
She hesitated, not accustomed to dragging so much out of her heart to share with two people she had recently met. Peter’s stiff face began to soften, and she wondered if refusing to speak would banish that moment of possibility. She decided to risk exposing that part of herself she had awakened from the wood, thinking, It’s my story. I can change it. He can change his too. If doctors can turn into birdsong, then this sad old man can become music again.
“I think you’ve guessed that the rabbit was me,” she said. Mingled hesitancy and eagerness made her stutter, but she remembered Dr. Inimir becoming sunshine and continued, “I felt trapped without my art. Despair was going to eat me.”
Tom was beaming at her and Peter’s face was trying out a smile, even if without his permission, she surmised from the way his mouth kept striving for stiff horizontality. “When Dr. Falutay helped me, he wasn’t expecting great art, but he gave me the courage to try. Peter, it doesn’t matter if you can’t play perfectly anymore,” she told him, grasping his wasted left arm before he could withdraw. “It’s not how good your work is that makes you an artist—it’s the fact that you make art. The music is a part of you. Even if not all the notes come out right, it will always be perfect where it counts: right in here.” She tapped her breastbone.
Peter took her hand with a delicacy she had not expected in such a cinder of a man. His lips twitched into a sad, incomplete grimace, a violin bow without strings. “You’re a sweet woman, Lily,” he rasped at her. “Tom was right about you. Bless and blast him, he has us practically engaged already.” The corners of his mouth quirked higher, but Lily could tell that tension had drawn them up, not real mirth. “But you’re a fixer like him. Before you decide to make me into your project, you need to know that some things are beyond repair. Get it through your head before you break your heart trying to mend me.” He released the brake on his wheelchair and rolled away from the table with powerful thrusts of his thin arms.
After Tom and Lily picked at the remnants of their breakfasts, Tom ventured, “The staff tries to get him to play at the concerts, Lily. He always refuses. But they haven’t given up on him, so neither will I.” He took a last gulp of tea and folded his arms over his chest, nodding once, as briefly and decisively as a general. “He’ll come around, Lil. One night he’ll serenade you by moonlight on a kazoo or something.” He winked at her, encouraging the lingering disappointment to dissipate in favor of slender hope.
***
Alone with wood again, Lily arranged herself so her left hand could hold the chisel in place by sheer inert weight—after a number of tries that had sent it skittering across the table—and her mallet nestled in her right. Doubts made her remaining hand quiver. The day before, she had not been required to face her art alone. Dr. Falutay had been an extra hand, and his perceptiveness had helped bring her down into the awareness where she had always helped wood, stone, or metal find out who they were. Now her words to Peter made her itch as if they were rashes. “How could I have said something so stupid?” she scolded herself. “The poor man—as if he could stand to hear the flawed shadow of how he used to play. Who am I deluding? I can’t carve either!”
The rabbit sculpture remonstrated with her in the afternoon sunlight, which innervated each fiber of its wooden musculature. “So I carved that,” she amended, then added, “but I couldn’t have done it without Dr. Falutay.” Yet she could not conceal herself from the bare wood before her in the comfortable bitterness of denial. Even with all her objections, the wood and her tools would not leave her alone.
Lily looked back at the uncarved block. She remembered her daughter once accusing her of loving her limitations. Alone with unmade art, she knew that Shade had been right, even in what had been her harsh adolescent honesty, as much as the truth had scalded her inside all those years ago. “They don’t love their limitations,” she said, considering her dream of doctors and nurses transforming into beauties beyond humanity. She wondered if the dream suggested that she could be free of her body’s strictures too. “Half a body doesn’t mean half a spirit,” she said, gritting her teeth around the reassurance. With that reminder, she let herself fall the rest of the way into the paradoxically languorous and keen awareness that preceded the making of her art.
Her resolve did not make the process of carving one-handed any less difficult. She had to rearrange the dead side of her body repeatedly, sometimes using her lips to grip in lieu of her lost hand. Her right hand ached, and she dropped the tools or the sculpture more than once, though the table always caught them. Yet these interruptions did not prevent her from seeing into the wood’s heart and knowing what shape she had to bring to birth. The forest-deep wisdom of Dr. Inimir resided in the grain. With her fingers, her eyes, her tools, and her stubbornness, she strained against her limitations to let the image be born.
When she had finished, she sat with the wood as the light diminished by sorrowing increments. Eventually she placed the bust on the table next to the rabbit, watching the sunset transforming the likeness into transient copper. She flexed her hand against the agony she had pushed aside while carving. Then she felt her aloneness enlarging; someone was waiting in the hall. She turned her head to look and asked, “Dr. Falutay, how long have you been standing there? I’m sorry. Please come in.”
“Please, Mrs. Walden, don’t apologize,” he responded as he took the visitor’s seat. “I didn’t want to disturb you at your work. I just wanted to let you know that dinner will be served soon. Thank you for letting me watch you in the act of creation.” The respectful formality of his last words startled Lily, as if he was speaking of the primordial creation, not just the making of a sculpture with a clumsy orphaned hand.
“Not at all,” she demurred. “All this work has made me hungry. I don’t know how long I’ve been at it, especially since I kept dropping things.”
“It’s a beautiful likeness,” Dr. Falutay said, inclining his head for permission to touch the sculpture. “Dr. Inimir would be delighted. But why did you give him pointed ears, butterflies in his hair, and a crown?” Lily flushed. The image had felt so true to Dr. Inimir that she had not noticed having added these features. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Walden,” Dr. Falutay said. “I forget that you’re not supposed to ask an artist why.”
“Dr. Falutay, I’m worried about Peter,” Lily changed the subject as her fingers fretted with the fairy features she had given Dr. Inimir. Dr. Falutay settled back into his chair as she replaced the sculpture on the table, where the sunset lent its gold to the carved crown. “You’ve helped me gain back my art. It seems, from the other people I’ve spoken to, that being here has brought them some level of peace with their conditions.” Lily noticed a deepening color flowing across Dr. Falutay’s cheeks, warming the brown of his skin to polished mahogany at the implicit compliment. “But Peter seems locked into his despair. It hurts him that he can’t make perfect music. I tried to tell him that making music at all is what matters, but he didn’t want to hear that.”
“At Elvenwood, we believe it’s never too late to be born again,” Dr. Falutay began, then swiped at the words with his fine hands. “Oh, that came out badly—I made it sound like a revival meeting. I mean, we don’t believe growing old means that other parts of you can’t come alive again.” Lily smiled and, after an instant of hesitation, patted his hand. “Healing begins and ends not with the doctor or the treatment, but with the person. Each of us has to find inside ourselves whatever it is that makes us want to be born again and again.” He gestured at the two sculptures now sharing a place by the window. “Peter hasn’t yet found that. We keep hoping he will. All you can do is to keep finding it in yourself. Seeing you so full of life and art might eventually cause him to find his own light.”
***
That night, Lily’s dreaming self rose and walked right through the door and into the hall, as easily as if she had passed through a melody instead of plywood. Light emanated from the clothing of graceful people drifting over bare floorboards that rustled with dried rose petals. Their faces exuded and inhaled starshine as if it were breath.
After a moment she recognized the doctors and nurses, clad in loose, wing-like clothing made of iridescent fabrics whose combination of flow and formality made Lily fancy they were wearing sonnets. Dr. Inimir’s face shone like beaten gold, his brow encircled by a narrow band of silver where sentient stars lived. Even dreaming, she recognized the crown she had adorned him with in the wooden bust.
“Who are you?” Lily asked him as the hall disgorged them into the dining room. Roses bent their heads at them, and their lips exuded an odor to match the scent of welcome issuing from the mouths of the flowers. “You gave me back my art, even if you could not give me back my body. I saw you becoming songs and sunshine. When I made a likeness of you, Dr. Inimir, the ends of your hair were butterflies. I did not think about that, or the pointed ears I gave you: they felt right, and yet they are not human.”
Dr. Inimir smiled, the expression as pure and forlorn as the loving sacrifice of a bell’s note. “We are the Elves of Elvenwood,” he responded. “This wood has been our home for millennia.” His voice ground against his tale like broken glass. “We protect those that grow and die—plant and animal—but we ourselves cannot die.”
“You watch over people at the end of their lives,” she said as the candle of Dr. Inimir’s face seemed to gutter. She could not help but add, “Doesn’t it hurt to care for those who have what you don’t: the power to die?”
“Yes, of course it hurts,” he replied, his eyes raw wounds. “But we would be diminished if we refused to give because the giving pains us. And who says you die? Nothing dies. Death is not an ending, merely a change of state. The ancients, the philosophers, the stars and planets, all live on in your dust, rocks, trees, and flesh. It is only we who cannot change.”
“But I saw you change,” Lily insisted. “I saw you become other—states of matter and energy. We can’t do that. I’ve never been able to put myself into a bird’s skin, no matter how hard I wished, let alone its song.”
“We dance from shape to shape,” Dr. Inimir explained, his fingers melding with a rose and the butterfly ends of his hair fluttering away and returning. “Yet our hearts never change. Yours do. Yours has, Lily.” He reached into the rose, and Lily could not tell if the sculpture he offered her came from the petals or from the palm of his hand.
Though the portrait bust had birds for eyes and a rose for a mouth, eventually she recognized her cheekbones and the set of her brows. A flower and an immortal physician had sculpted her face.
***
The rabbit and the elven Dr. Inimir waited on the table as Lily began sketching out another sculpture: the portrait of herself from the dream. She refused to sift the dream to separate the real and the symbolic; whether or not the doctors and nurses could change their shapes had stopped mattering to her. What they had told her about herself…that was the important part.
“Here’s the clay, Mrs. Walden,” Dr. Falutay said as he came in carrying a tray laden with a lump of green-tinged gray clay, a putty knife, a wire with a handle that looked like a cheese cutter reincarnated, a cup of water, and towels. “I brought an old tablecloth too,” he added, gesturing at the linen hanging over his left arm, making her think of waiters in fairyland. She giggled, imagining elves had no need of waiters—the food probably brought itself to the diners. He raised an eyebrow, catching the laughter, and smiled, though he did not ask for the joke.
“Thanks, Dr. Falutay,” she managed, trying not to think about the birdsong she glimpsed under his skin. Maybe the dream was true,she thought as she rolled her wheelchair backward to allow him to cover the table with the linen and begin setting out the objects on the tray. “I’m sure it’ll be messier, but after the endless time I took making that one little carving of Dr. Inimir yesterday, I thought clay would be an easier medium.”
“So what are you going to be making—do you know?” he asked. “Can you see as much in a lump of clay as you can in a piece of wood?”
“Yousaw something in a paralyzed old lady,” she responded. “Now I can, too. I’m going to make a self-portrait of the most glamorous, butt-kicking old dame around. Tom had better watch out if he tries to make a pass at me.”
“Should I warn him?” Dr. Falutay asked after he finished setting up. She shook her head and he withdrew with a laugh that reminded her of the duet between morning light and the roses in the dining room.
She was halfway through the molding of the face, adorned with a crown worn at a jaunty angle, when Dr. Falutay returned. “Mrs. Walden, I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Your daughter has come to see you. Is this a good time for a visit?”
Lily stiffened, withdrawing her hand from the clay, then chastised herself: Shade will be thrilled to see me making art again. She rolled away from the table so Shade could take the visitors’ chair where Dr. Falutay had sat and watched Lily transforming from fleeing rabbit to queen.
“Mother, how are you?” Shade’s anxious question came into the room before her daughter did, her face narrowed with worry, her hands strangling one another.
“Shade, I’m all right,” Lily told her in the old, reassuring mother-voice. Shade, who had stooped as if expecting a reprimand, straightened and raised her brows. “Neither of us could take care of me anymore. These people can. Take a look—I’m sculpting again.” She introduced Shade to her sculptures, realizing her nervousness emanated from the fact that she was also reintroducing herself to her daughter through them. “There’s wisdom in wood and clay,” she said as Shade studied the crowned Dr. Inimir and the rabbit. “And dreams,” she added, glancing at Dr. Falutay. Out of the edges of her vision, she imagined that he had winked at her with birdsong in his eyes.