“But wood don’t last,” said Joe Wear. “In a monument, I mean.”
Leviticus was silent a long time. Then—mockingly? in order to be understood?—he said, “It don’t last forever, but it don’t do badly. Legs first. When you’re done we’ll look them over and then discuss arms, hands, feet, and the like.”
“Life-size?”
That startled Leviticus. For a moment he imagined a figure Bertha’s size and felt the wrongness. No such thing as life-size: you’d always be fractionally off, and the difference would be heartbreaking. He drew a shape in the air. “Yea high,” he said. “Yea wide.”
“So smaller.”
“Smaller,” said Leviticus. “Has to be.”
Across Joe Wear’s table, old battered bowling pins, made of rock maple. He decided to go in calf first. He’d turned down Old Levi’s new wood but accepted a selection of artist’s tools, hammers and chisels, little planes, little rasps, sandpaper in various levels of irritation. The rock maple pins were hard to carve but strong as Truitt herself. Beneath the white paint, pale wood. It did not take him long to realize that the attitude of the leg would make a difference. Old Levi wanted the legs jointed at knee and ankle. He himself would work on the torso. That made sense. How would Joe Wear know how to make the womanly parts of a woman? Who would ask another man to make his wife’s body?
Begin with the lower leg. That seemed safe. He used his own muscles as models. A calf shaped itself one way standing, another sitting, another with its foot slung up on the table. What was this monument of Dr. Sprague’s he was building the pedestal to? He carved the curve of a calf, with just a suggestion of the shinbone. Gave it one comely ankle, lump of bone, notches in the skin up the Achilles tendon. He planed and sanded. Sprague had offered him an anatomy book but he did not like to look. God built bodies from the inside out. Only He could do it. Joe Wear worked his way in. He found he couldn’t stop. Wood and work had always mesmerized him. In the dark of the night he finished the ankle and wondered about a foot. How would it fit in? His own legs were knock-kneed, left more than right; his feet pigeon-toed, right more than left. His wooden legs he vowed to make perfect.
Joe Wear hefted the calf. Was it like Truitt’s? He wasn’t sure. Truitt’s calf. In actual life they had scarcely touched. She was The Great Handshaker, and no person at Truitt’s could entirely avoid her pivoting bustline, which came brushing by no matter what. She was bold with her body, always had been—never a hugger but a backslapper, an elbow patter. She might even tug your hair, if she were particularly fond. But she paid attention. Joe Wear was a tightrope walker. He balked at the hands of others. She left him alone.
Here was her calf, or somebody’s. He tucked it under his pillow when he went to bed. The next day when he saw Dr. Sprague, he lied without knowing why: “I’ll start tomorrow.”
All day long he thought about the calf: when he gazed at the bowlers, when he was meant to keep score for the leagues. What next? Calf, then calf, then thigh by thigh? Or all one leg at once? How would he devise a knee that both worked and looked kneelike?
That night he made a left calf so the right calf would not be lonely. Later he would think, A right thigh might keep a right calf company, too, Lord, Joe Wear, you needn’t always go for the obvious companion. The second calf was harder, because it had to mimic not just life but its maple partner.
For a week he could think of nothing else. Would he carve a kneecap out of wood, to hide the hinge of calf and thigh? At what angle did upper leg meet lower? He wanted the legs able to support whatever weight they had to, though Dr. Sprague had given him nearly no specifications—legs for a monument; if those passed muster, arms for a monument; if those passed, feet and hands. He decided he would make the legs with feet straightaway. The Salford Half Nickels still bowled at Truitt’s. Joe thought if he got these legs right he might offer to carve a wooden leg for Martin Younkins, who got around with crutches and a pinned-up pant leg. Maybe then he could do an arm for Jack Silver.
He watched the Half Nickels as they bowled, to see how their legs worked, whole or abbreviated. He examined the women in their skirts and bloomers, their angles and inlets. LuEtta Mood was a terrible standin for Truitt except for the fact that neither of them cared what they looked like as they bowled. He felt he’d never been so aware of what other people looked like in his life. He took the information back to his room over the alley and worked.
Heel, toes, arch, instep. Bare, every tendon visible, though in his heart he knew that stout Truitt’s tendons would have been hard to see in her fubsy feet. He thought of making a portrait of Virgil, in negative: three wooden toes, two wooden fingers.
The thighs he did last, being the most personal territory. He had to get to know the rest of the leg before he dared.
You’ve done both legs.”
“I couldn’t understand one leg without the other, so. No paint or varnish yet. Wasn’t sure what you wanted.”
He set the legs on the table in front of Dr. Sprague. He wasn’t sure of anything other than the cleverness of the joints, of which he was proud; he felt a rush of regret that he hadn’t articulated the toes, or thought about how the top of the legs might fit into a torso.
“Extraordinary,” said Dr. Sprague. He took them into his lap. They looked smaller there, but all right, plausibly half the length of Truitt.
“What you wanted?”
Dr. Sprague shook his head. He palpated the knees one at a time. He bent the left leg so he could hold its foot. “Mr. Wear. Bowling pins?”
“Yessir.”
“Then there is glory in bowling pins.”
“They like her?”
“Not at all,” said Dr. Sprague. “Arms next.”
“How’s the head?”
“It’ll have to be better now.”
“What’re you making that out of?”
“I’m still in the experimental stage,” said Dr. Sprague. “I am not the artist you are.”
Joe Wear found the elbows dull at first. Who is sentimental about an elbow? Who would recognize a beloved’s elbow among a dozen unknown elbows? One can’t even really know one’s own elbow, not by direct sight, not investigate it with both hands. He spent so much time contemplating the meaning of elbows he came right round to them. He was an elbow himself: useful, unseen, in service to others. Still he might rub up against something meaningful.
Now he felt bolder around Dr. Sprague. The man had asked a favor and Joe had complied. Glory: that was the word he’d used. Joe might ask him things, too. He began to bring little brown sugared and cinnamoned doughnuts in the morning, set the paper bag on a table. Mostly Joe ate them, but every now and then Dr. Sprague would accept one.
“How is it?”
“Quite remarkable, actually,” Dr. Sprague would say, his mustache flocked with sugar. Sometimes Joe thought all the man ate was what Joe brought him.
“What’ll you do with this place?”
“Just this.”
“Why not sell it?”
“It was my wife’s,” Dr. Sprague said. “Not mine to sell.”
“It was Truitt’s. It’s yours now.”
Silence.
“Yours now,” said Joe. “Unless: she leave a will?”
Dr. Sprague shook his head.
“So then what.”
“Let it go to hell,” said Dr. Sprague.
“You could sell it,” said Joe. He didn’t have enough money to buy it, but maybe someday. “Why don’t you go home?”
“Too far away, in time and miles and all the ways. They’ll sell it after my death. I hope you’ll stay on till then, Mr. Wear. Or—”
“—or what—”
He hesitated. Then he said, “As long as they don’t find family.”
“What family?”
“Bertha’s family. Descendants.”
“Minna?”