and, more often than not (almost smiling), it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better.
It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree.
So he stood for perhaps ten minutes, watching the flow of gold over the upper branches, and then went to a carved wooden chest, opened it, shook out a length of disreputable cotton duck. He opened the hinged glass at one side of the atrium and spread the canvas over the roots ‘and all ‘the earth to one side of the trunk, leaving the rest open to wind and water. Perhaps in a while—a month or two—a certain shoot in the topmost branch would take the hint and the uneven flow of moisture up through the cambium layer would nudge it away from that upward reach and persuade it to continue the horizontal passage. And perhaps not—and it would need the harsher language of binding and wire. But then it might have something to say, too, about the rightness of an upward trend and would perhaps say it persuasively enough to convince the man—altogether, a patient, meaningful, and rewarding dialogue.
“Good morning.”
“Oh, god—dam!” he barked. “You made me bite my tongue. I thought you’d gone.”
“I had.” She kneeled in the shadows, her back against the inner wall, facing the atrium. “But then I stopped to be with the tree for a while.”
“Then what?”
“I thought a lot.”
“What about?”
“You.”
“Did you now?”
“Look,” she said firmly. “I’m not going to any doctor to get this thing checked out. I didn’t want to leave until I had told you that and until I was sure you believed me.”
“Come on in and we’ll get something to eat.”
Foolishly, she giggled.
“I can’t. My feet are asleep.”
Without hesitation he scooped her up in his arms and carried her around the atrium.
She asked, her arm around his shoulders and their faces close, “Do you believe me?”
He continued around until they reached the wooden chest, then stopped and looked into her eyes.
“I believe you. I don’t know why you decided as you did but I’m willing to believe you.”
He sat her down on the chest and stood back.
“It’s that act of faith you mentioned,” she said gravely.
“I thought you ought to have it at least once in your life so you can never say again what you said.” She tapped her heels gingerly against the slate floor. “Ow!” She made a pained smile. “Pins and needles.”
“You must have been thinking for a long time.”
“Yes. Want more?”
“Sure.”
“You are an angry, frightened man.”
He seemed delighted.
“Tell me about all that!”
“No,” she said quietly. “You tell me. I’m very serious about this. Why are you angry?”
“I’m not.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I tell you I’m not. Although,” he added good-na-turedly, “you’re pushing me in that direction.”
“Well then, why?”
He gazed at her for what to her seemed a very long time indeed.
“You really want to know, don’t you?”
She nodded.
He waved a sudden hand, up and out.
“Where do you suppose all this came from—the house, the land, the equipment?”
She waited.
“An exhaust system,” he said, with a thickening of his voice she was coming to know. “A way of guiding exhaust gases out of internal combustion engines in such a way that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded in the walls of the muffler in a glass wool liner that slips out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is fired by its own spark plug and what will bum, burns.
The heat is used to preheat the fuel. The rest is spun again through a five-thousand-mile cartridge. What finally gets out is, by today’s standards at least, pretty clean. And because of the preheating it actually gets better
