The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford Page B

long time and he travels far until one day he comes to a cave in the desert where there’s a man with a long mustache, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by ghosts. By the light of a huge fire that burns wildly at the back of the cave, this weird guy does magic on my father. With his bare hand he reaches through my old man’s chest and removes a large turquoise feather from inside. ‘Now there’s room for your heart to grow back,’ he says. My old man smiles and…that’s all I remember.”
    At the end of the underground tunnel, they crawl back up into the mausoleum, and as they do, Emily notices that the marble lid to Cake’s tomb has cracked and fallen in two large pieces onto the floor. The friends lean over and peer inside. Emily says, “Like your dream,” and points into the remains at a feather, trapped by the rib cage where the heart is meant to be.
    Vincent, who has begun to come around, nods and says, “Lookhere,” and reaches into the tomb to grab a skeletal wrist. As he lifts it, the bony fingers open, and a handful of creatures and figures made of folded paper fall out—a bird, a woman, a mushroom, a boy with a bow and arrow, a ship, and finally one of a yin/yang wizard, who spoke this story into glass.

PRESENT FROM THE PAST
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    After my mother finally quit drinking, she entered a brief epoch of peace in her life. Gone were the paranoia, the accusations, the belittlements, the bitter rage of judgment, the look of fear. For years, nearly every day a lost weekend, she had been possessed by the dark amber ghast of gag-sweet Taylor Cream Sherry. Living with her back then had been like living with a vampire whose bite drained but never conferred immortality. What eventually brought about her unexpected exorcism, I can now only guess, but when she re-surfaced she was quiet and ready to laugh. She was watching and listening.
    One day in the spring of her new self, she asked my father to go out and buy lumber for her. She told him that she wanted to do some woodcarving. My father purchased the planks she requested along with chisels, rasps, and other necessary tools. She set about her task, working on the picnic table beneath the cherry tree in the backyard, laying the boards flat and gouging away at them. She told me over the phone that her subject was the stations ofthe cross—Christ’s fourteen-part journey to his own crucifixion. Each of the planks would bear a different tableau.
    â€œWhen I’m done with the boards, I’m going to have your father make them into a bus shelter with a little bench attached inside,” she said.
    â€œYeah, what are you going to do with it?” I asked.
    â€œSit in it and drink my coffee in the evening,” she said.
    A couple months later, Lynn and the boys and I drove to Long Island to visit my parents. From the kitchen window, I saw the bus shelter assembled beneath the giant oak at the back of their property. That evening, while Lynn took our two boys for a walk down to the school field, I sat with my mother inside her creation. We smoked and drank coffee, while my father sat facing us in a lawn chair.
    The small structure had a slanted roof and its walls were painted the same redwood stain as the picnic table. The hand-carved figures that lined the inside were more crudely rendered than I had imagined they would be. They had no faces, just ovals, dug out and painted white. However, the folds of Christ’s flowing garments were more detailed, as was the grain of the cross and the Roman soldiers’ armor and helmets. In painting them, she’d used very bright colors—sunflower yellow, neon lime, sky blue, hot pink—that appeared resilient against the redwood stain. I had to duck slightly to fit inside and the bench held room for only two.
    â€œYou should have been here the day we finished putting that thing together,” said my father. “A couple of weekends ago. It was a bright