The first thing he carved was a spoon, which he thought of as a mistake. Not because it failed as a spoon — its bowl cupped precisely the right amount of soup, or salt — but because it introduced him to the habit of carving, of finessing the surface of things, a habit that took root and put out suckers before he knew how to stop it.
He had made the spoon from figured rimu, burnished it with a stone, and sealed it with wax, and along the handle he had worked around a streak of burl that flashed like a river seen from a height. It was far too beautiful to stir anything with.
The most important thing about carving, he always said, was to sharpen your blade until it could not be trusted, until your stop cuts could not be stopped, until the knife knew where to go.
*
I suppose I was inspired. Soon after I met him, I bought a book on tree-lore from a shop on Dowling Street. It was a mostly useless thing, full of pagan prayers and systematisations. But somewhere in there, I found a passage I could not forget, from a colonial gentleman writing to a gardener at the other end of the world. Willow is endlessly patient, he wrote, and it is one tree in many. Break a branch, and drop it in a creek. Come back in a year and you’ll find yourself apologising to the land. Touch a spring here, drop a branch there, and a vast machine will leap into action.
An orchardist’s tree, by contrast, is two trees in one. There is the stock underneath, chosen for being viable, vigorous, hard to kill. Then there is the scion on top, carefully cut from a tree somebody liked, drawing from foreign roots.
*
In the autumn, when the sap started to slow, he walked up around the peninsula hills. There had been a settlement there. Now there was mud, gorse, perhaps the odd mud-brick chimney. Whoever had lived up there had once planted a field of apples. Without people to prune and gather, the grafted wood on the trees died back, and the rootstock grew wild.
When he came back down from the hills, he carried an inch-thick slab of wood swaddled in a woollen blanket. Above the graft union, the grain was even and dull. Below, the grain ran coarse and hurried, wandering wherever it liked. Where the two woods met, there was a soft, dark inclusion the width of a hair.
*
By early June his workshop window was fogged from linseed oil and from his breathing. He had lost weight. From the apple slab he had roughed out a disc, and on that disc he had carved a familiar map: hills and creeks and streets and houses and steps and steps-with-cats, all compressed into a relief whose edges seemed to sharpen as you looked.
“It’s not me,” he said. “It’s the wood. It knows where the paths are.”
I asked about it; of course I did. He told me very little, only that he had tried the same carving in willow, but it was too wet, too eager, wouldn’t hold a fine line. Those scraps went out with his workshop sweepings.
On his map the graft line bisected our City. Below the seam the streets came out crooked, following gullies and the old shoreline and water’s blind rush downhill. Above it the streets formed a grid planned with no concern to topography. Some were impossibly steep.
Here I must say something that will make me sound like a fool. I think — no, I am sure — that he had begun to carve a door in the disc, a door between trees. I watched him work; he would trace a street with his impossibly sharp knife and find the point had turned, by its own logic, to run along the graft line. “Of course it isn’t a door,” he said. “What would it be a door to?” He laughed and he laughed and then he did not.
*
They found him in the middle of winter, not far from the harbour. It doesn’t matter how he died; the path along the water’s edge was always softer than it should have been. And water always finds a way.
When something is growing it cannot be trusted, or understood, or fixed in place, he would have said, more or less. You have to wait for the growth to stop before you can see it for what it was. I don’t think that was ever true, but he was sure of it, and I could tell because he hadn’t really changed for years. He had only looked inward and become more like himself.
The man who handled his estate let me take two items. I picked up a knife so sharp I could not trust it, and under his workbench, in a drift of shavings, I found the disc. When I looked closely at its centre I could see the smallest possible rectangle, sitting just above the seam where the two woods met. You could put the tip of a knife alongside this door and never feel it catch. I felt like a fool but I did it anyway. The seam held, and I went to bed, defeated.
But I dreamed of a map. Not his map, not his fussy and deliberate lines on grain that could no longer move. I dreamed of a map that was carved from the soil around the City. By roots, yes, but also by sap, by shrub, by the endless green of shoot after shoot, by rhizome, corm, and tuber, by seed and weed and desire and opportunity. The green map went on and on; it found no edges, it had no inclusions, it had no scale. It did not stop. It could not.
*
When a woodcarver fails, they blame the grain, though the truth is usually that they carved uphill, or without enough support. When they succeed, they will praise the grain as though they held the knife still and the wood moved around it. Either way, the grain is innocent. But the answers were never in the grain. By the time you see the inside of a piece of wood its story is already over. Walking the harbour path in August, I saw that the willows had already taken the corner by the culvert, diverting the stream over the road. There were none there the last time I walked that path, but willow doesn’t need a seed or a thrown fruit; all it needs is a break, a fragment, a chip of something carried off and caught, something that catches and stays.
A man sweeps a floor. A man casts his scraps and sweepings beside the unsealed road that runs, as every street here runs, downhill to the same water. He had wanted to open a door in a piece of wood, or I had wanted him to, and I suppose we both failed. Though he did touch a spring somewhere along the way.
And as I walked that path I broke a small switch off one of the willows on the way past — it came away easily in my hand, that’s the trouble with them — and carried it to the bench at the end of the road. I sat there a while, and then I got up and walked away, and I am not going to tell you what I did with it.