I knew what I wanted to do. It was going to be a man, sitting, with his legs crossed and his forearms resting down along his calves. His head was going to be tilted back, and his eyes closed, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.
In three days it was finished. The trunk and limbs had a shape that was not man and not wood, but something in between: something that hadn’t existed before I made it.
Beauty. That was the old word.
I had carved one of the figure’s hands hanging loosely, and the other one curled shut. There had to be a time to stop and say it was finished. I took the smallest knife, the one I had been using to scrape the wood smooth, and cut away the handle and ground down what was left of the shaft to a thin spike. Then I drilled a hole into the wood of the figurine’s hand, in the hollow between thumb and curled finger. I fitted the knife blade in there; in the small hand it was a sword.
I cemented it in place. Then I took the sharp blade and stabbed my thumb and smeared the blade.
I hunted most of that day and finally found the right place—a niche in an outcropping of striated brown rock, in a little triangular half-wild patch that had been left where two, roads forked. Nothing was permanent, of course, in a community like this one that might change its houses every five years or so, to follow the fashion, but this spot had been left to itself for a long time. It was the best I could do.
I had the paper ready; it was one of a batch I had printed up a year ago. The paper was treated, and I knew it would stay legible~a long time. I hid a little photo capsule in the back of the niche and ran the control wire to a staple in the base of the figurine.
I put the figurine down on top of the paper and anchored it lightly to the rock with two spots of all-cement. I had done it so often that it came naturally; I knew just how much cement would hold the figurine steady against a casual hand, but yield to one that really wanted to pull it down.
Then I stepped back to look, and the power and the pity of it made my breath come short, and tears start to my eyes.
Reflected light gleamed fitfully on the dark-stained blade that hung from his hand.
He was sitting alone in that niche that closed him in like a coffin. His eyes were shut and his head tilted back, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.
But only rock was over his head. There was no sun for him.
Hunched on the cool bare ground under a pepper tree, I was looking down across the road at the shadowed niche where my figurine sat.
I was all finished here. There was nothing more to keep me, and yet I couldn’t leave.
People walked past now and then—not often. The community seemed half deserted, as if most of the people had flocked off to a surf party somewhere, or a contribution meeting, or to watch a new house being dug to replace the one I had wrecked. . . . There was a little wind blowing toward me, cool and lonesome in the leaves.
Up the other side of the hollow there was a terrace, and on that terrace, half an hour ago, I had seen a brief flash of color—a boy’s head, with a red cap on it, moving past and out of sight.
That was why I had to stay. I was thinking how that boy might come down from his terrace and into my road, and passing the little wild triangle of land, see my figurine. I was thinking he might not pass by indifferently, but stop and go closer to look, and pick up the wooden man and read what was written on the paper underneath.
I believed that sometime it had to happen. I wanted it so hard that I ached.
My carvings were all over the world, wherever I had wandered. There was one in Congo City, carved of ebony, dusty-black; one on Cyprus, of bone; one in New Bombay, of shell; one in Changteh, of jade.
They were like signs printed in red and green in a colorblind world. Only the one I was looking for would ever pick one of them up and read the message I knew by heart.
TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said. I OFFER YOU A WORLD...
There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant against the green, with his red sharp-billed cap like a woodpecker’s head.
I held my breath.
He came toward me through the fluttering leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious thin face. His’ ears stuck. out, flickering pink with the sun behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look knobby.
He reached the fork in the road and chose the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer. Let him see it, let him not see me, I thought fiercely.
My fingers closed around a stone.
He was nearer, walking jerkily with his hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly..
When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.
It rustled through the leaves below the niche in the rock. The boy’s head turned.
He stopped, staring. I think he saw the figurine then: I’m sure he saw it.
He took one step.
“Risha!” came floating down from the terrace.
And he looked up. “Here,” he piped.
I saw the woman’s head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn’t hear; I was standing up, squeezed tight with anger.
Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.
“Oh, what a stench!”
.
He turned to shout, “Corning!” and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.
My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn’t been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting.. . . They were all against me, people, wind, and all.
And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.
There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there and not come back.
I knew I would be sorry. I did it, anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.
There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried’ house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown-and-white puppy.
He looked up, with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him—
everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly, anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the ‘figurine at his face.
“Look—” I said.
He went over backwards in his hurry; he couldn’t even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.
I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.
A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, “Wait,” and was in a spiral pas~ sage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went, headlong, and came out at the wrong door—