The Art of Carving
Ron Cooper
Everyone in town had at least one snapshot of the Dead End sign on the corner in front of Rondeau’s Funeral Home. They kept it in a wallet or purse to flash on the road when an unsuspecting waitress asked, “Y’all on vacation?” A picture of a grinning Tag Rondeau standing under the sign graced a page in the Chamber of Commerce’s brochure with the caption, “Tagmill Rondeau, Respected Businessman and Coroner.” The dead-end street was hardly more than a driveway, running past the funeral home for fifty yards and stopping at the old tobacco warehouse that had been converted into the First Holiness Youth Athletic Center. Inside were a half basketball court and a weight-training area with a Nautilus machine and workout benches, which the Holiness youths would sneak to at night to do what they called premarital sets.
Some of those youths had earlier been at the purple jesus party by the river where they imbibed many, probably too many, plastic cups of that savior-named grape juice-sugar-grain alcohol concoction. They would soon weave their way to the Center, but at midnight, Purvis and Martha found no cars parked along the road, except for Rondeau’s tow truck and two hearses in the garage. Purvis backed around to a set of double doors, taking care not to hit the dips in the road that might wake Martha’s cousin Larson in the truck bed. The last thing Purvis needed was a retard getting in the way.
“How’s our boy doing back there?” Purvis asked.
“Still out cold rolled up in that tarp. I reckon he’s cozy in it. I ought to fill him up with liquor more often. You think there might be an alarm system here?”
“Alarm? Whoever breaks into a funeral parlor? We’re making history.”
Setting the toolbox before the double doors, Purvis shined a flashlight onto the knobs. “I ain’t believing this,” he said. He took a coping saw from the toolbox and removed the thin blade. “It’s like they didn’t want anybody breaking the lock, so they made it easy.” He slid the blade between the doors, jiggled for several seconds, clamped his knuckles—not his fingertips—to a knob, and turned. “We’re in.”
Inside, Purvis searched the walls with the flashlight. “This is our night. Not a window in the room. We can turn on the lights and nobody’ll ever know we’re here.”
“Let’s be safe and just turn on one, just enough to find the old bastard,” said Martha. She found a switch and turned on a lamp hanging directly over a stainless steel table.
“Damn! Lucky again,” said Purvis. “You got the one right over the old man. That is him, ain’t it?”
“I think there’re only two in here. Let’s just get to it.”
Armey lay naked on the table. His glasses and clothes, green coveralls and everything, were wadded on the shelf below him. Purvis put a finger to Armey’s bad eye. “Looks like a marble, don’t it?” As Purvis looped the apron over his neck and tied it around his back, he scanned the rest of the old man’s body. “Now, that’s something I didn’t know, that your hair, down, you know, there, gets gray. That’s just pukeable ugly, especially it not circlecized. Want me to cover it up? You probably don’t want to see your uncle’s, you know, ding dong.”
“I’ve seen it before,” said Martha.
“I know that. You were married and all, so I know you’ve seen…wait, you don’t mean his, do you?”
“We’re wasting time, Purvis. You sure you know how to do this?”
Purvis searched the items on the shelf below Armey. “This’ll do.” He found a sock and laid it over Armey’s bluish penis. “I believe in respecting the dead,” said Purvis. He opened the tool box. “My old man’s got chisels and saws and every damn thing in here. He’s carved a whole lot of people. I mean wood people out of cypress knees, not carved up real people. He’s says carving is an art. He’d have me watch him cut at the cypress knees, said carving is a good activity for bringing people together.” He lifted Armey’s shoulder from the table and peeked at the bullet hole in the back of the neck. “These tools ought to be able to undo a thing as well as make one. Besides, I’ve helped clean and butcher many a deer. You pretty much cut around the joints, give them a snap, then slice through the leaders. Might need to saw through a bone or two. Good thing is we won’t need to clean and dress him. That means gut him, at least one of them does. Might be cleaning is gutting and dressing is skinning, or the other ways around, but we won’t need to skin him neither. I bet that’d be hard, what with a human not having a hide like deer do.”
“Just get to it.” Martha felt her stomach churn. Just nerves. She could get through this. This was no worse than putting a bullet into him.
“I figure we can put the legs in one garbage bag,” Purvis said, “and the arms in another, or a leg and an arm together. The head and body might can go in the same one together, but I got plenty bags either way. That white eye of his, the blind one, is something, ain’t it? Hell, now they’re both blind.” Purvis considered the woodworking tools in the bag, then turned to Martha. “Can I have my knife back now?”
Martha pulled the hawkbill from her pocket, thumbed it open, and handed it to Purvis. Without hesitation Purvis spread Armey’s legs and sliced into the groin. The knife drew along so smoothly that Martha nearly thought Purvis was tracing a line with a pen, as she imagined slaughterhouse workers might do on a hanging side of beef. Purvis rolled the body to its side and drew the knife along the edge of the buttock. “Get me a bag,” he said.
Shaking open a bag, Martha heard a pop. She turned back to see Purvis holding up Armey’s leg like a trophy fish. “Wa’n’t much keeping him together,” he said. “We might can get all his scrawny limbs into one bag. No use wasting them.”
Purvis slipped the leg into the bag and went back to work. Martha watched in silence, admiring the astounding economy with which he executed his task. He pressed in the blade and ringed the joints without ever removing his hand from the knife. A deft twist extracted the ball joint from its socket. The flesh on both sides of each split was flat and even, like a grocery store ham. Looking at the table, Martha was disappointed to see only a few purple drops of blood, not the pool she’d expected.
Purvis carved the final arm from the shoulder and dropped it into the bag.
“You do that pretty well,” Martha said. “Focused.”
“My old man told me there’s two kinds of tools,” Purvis said. “Sharp and blunt. ‘Decide which one you’re going to be, son,’ he said.” Purvis rubbed his thumb along the edge of the knife. “I reckon I’m mostly a blunt tool, but sometimes I can sharpen up. Ockham the Razor.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“This philosopher, Ockham the Razor, said cut out what you don’t need, and that’ll make things truer,” said Purvis. “My cousin that teaches at the college told me all about him. The old boy lived thousands of years ago, like that other one my cousin told me said a whole lot of smart stuff, Aristotle. I don’t know if they ever come across each other, but that would’ve been some wicked shit. Godamighty! I bet they could’ve got into it big time.”
“This Ockham…what did you say?”
“The Razor.”
“Yeah, Ockham the Razor. He said get rid of dead weight, eh?” Martha asked.
“Yeah, dead weight, except this old monk I took propane to at the monk place said something about parsi, parsi money, maybe, and don’t multiply something beyond…” Purvis looked up and squinted his eyes, as if trying to focus on an insect upon the ceiling. He tapped the hooked tip of the knife against his lip. “Hell, I can’t recall what it was beyond. I just know what my cousin—you remember him, Legare?—told me.”
“Focus, Purvis. What about the head?”
“Whose head?”
“Armey’s fucking head!” Martha yelled. She laced her fingers behind her neck, arched her back, and blew a long gust of air at the ceiling. “Let’s finish up and get out of here. Now, are you going to cut off his head?”
Purvis thought he saw a shudder ran through Martha’s breasts. He thought of how his Uncle Stafford’s gobbler would spread his tail and shake when you got close to the turkey pen. A ripple would run through the bird, and its raised feathers would whir like a lawnmower cranking. All night Martha’s movements, her facial expressions, her stance, seemed to Purvis to be signs she was throwing at him. The signs were getting deeper—arms around her head, limbs in a bag at her feet—and he needed more training in reading them. Armey had all those books at his house and probably knew about how to read symbols. But there he lay, deader than Aristotle and not whole.
“Purvis, focus again on what you’re doing,” said Martha.
“What you’re doing.”
“Goddamn it, just give me it,” Martha said. She stepped toward Purvis and took his knife. She put her hand to Armey’s chin and tilted his head. The throat offered itself up, the larynx as round as a hickory nut. “I should have done this fifteen years ago,” she said as she pushed the blade into the far side two inches below the point of the jaw. It passed through the larynx and out the near side to ping against the table. She retraced the slice, deeper, through tissue, clearing the neck bone. She stabbed the point into Armey’s chest as if standing it in a wheel of hoop cheese in a country store, and then, laying one hand upon his forehead and sliding the other to the base of the skull, jerked hard, separating the vertebrae. With one more pass of the knife, the head left the body. Blood leaked from both sides of the neck, collecting into an indigo circle the size of snuff can.
“That’s better,” Martha said.
Purvis marveled at the entire performance, his heart racing like an engine. His father was right, he realized, about how carving can bring people closer. Martha must know it, too, or why else would she have taken the knife and cut? It was more, though, than just something that needed doing together—it was a symboling dance. Her arms and legs and ass and tongue and pistol could talk a book, and she played Purvis’s knife like a mandolin. He wanted to speak back to her in symbols, but maybe it didn’t work that way. In a love like theirs, maybe one person gives the symbols and the other receives. The one who receives has to be ready every moment to catch them, like flickering lightning bugs.
“Open the bag.” Martha held Armey’s head, upside-down in one hand, by the bottom jaw, her fingers hooking behind the teeth. The image was spectacular, and Purvis thought he would cry. Martha looked like an armored warrior woman goddess from way back in Rome or Egypt who had just killed a sea monster and made the waters safe again. She started to place the head into the garbage bag, but Purvis reached down and grabbed a new one.
“I reckon it deserves its own bag,” he said. Martha dropped it in, and Purvis tied the drawstrings. He rubbed his hands around the bag, as if guessing its contents.
“Here,” Martha said, handing Purvis his knife. “You can have it back now.”
“I think it’s sharper than ever.” He wiped it on the apron and slid it into his pocket.
They put the torso into another bag and loaded the dismembered body into the back of the truck, next to Larson, still asleep. The sky, clear now, was full of stars, navigational signs for those who could read them.
“You know what the hell time it is?” DeWayne said, standing in his doorway in just his underwear. “I got to drag my ass up in a couple of hours.”
“You got to go with us to the hash plant,” Purvis said. “I got something in the back of your truck we got to dispose.”
“Fuck that. I’ll take it tomorrow.”
“It’s got to be now.”
“What the hell for?”
“Armey.”
“How you mean for Armey? You said he was…” Then DeWayne spotted one of the bags in the back of the truck. He dropped his head and rubbed his face with both hands. “I ain’t believing. Jesus on a pine plank. A human man body. This ain’t real.”
“What’s real is the FBI on it,” said Purvis. “Martha said they were asking all kind of questions about me—”
“That crazy bitch out there in my truck? She’s hauled you into some crucial shit and now you hauling me into it.”
“You don’t know how it is.” Purvis wiped his eyes and began to talk fast. “It’s all coming at me like needles of light and me trying to catch them, but they stick to me, pulling me into a drowning place—”
“What’s coming at you?”
“Her symbols, and then it tastes like metal, like lead or copper, just when my head goes under. But then she’s like the boat for me, and her arms fanning out like a feeler gauge and shining in her symboling dance, and I’m trying to read it, trying to read it all,” said Purvis. “I got to do it and then do this other thing for her, and we’ll fly off or like up a beanstalk, and then things’ll go away from me and from her and me just a redneck sapsucker, and you don’t know a shit I’m talking about but you got to help or I’ll—”
“I knew I shouldn’t’ve let you borrow my truck.”
“I gassed it up.”
“Not enough.” DeWayne exhaled a heavy blast and turned to the side. “A punch.”
“Bullshit.”
“Just one punch and I’ll get dressed and drive the Isuzu and you two follow me in the propane truck. He covered up?”
“Three bags.”
“Baby Jesus in a biscuit. You cut the son of a bitch up?”
“Carved.”
DeWayne held his fists in a boxing stance. “I don’t know who’s working graveyard shift tonight. I’ll pull in and take care of it while y’all wait out front. Got it?” He dipped his right shoulder and pantomimed an uppercut. “Now, one punch.”
“Just not on my lip where them wasps bit it. They got my ear, too, and—”
The fist connected to Purvis’s wasp-stung ear, spurting blood and puss out onto his neck and DeWayne’s knuckles. “Screw a guinea,” Purvis said, choking a little. “I been trying to pop that bad boy all day.”
“Does it hurt?” Martha asked. “Grown men punching each other.”
“Not much,” Purvis said. “It’s just a brother thing. We been doing that since we was kids. I wish he’d’ve busted my goddamn nose and taken the edge off this hash stink. Or maybe if I had another swallow of that purple jesus, that would dead it out.” He sat up high in the seat, peering toward the rendering plant’s front door. “He’s coming out finally.”
DeWayne crossed the parking lot into the shadows, where they sat in the propane truck. “He’s a new guy,” DeWayne said through Purvis’s window. “Dude named Winky. Worried about he’ll lose his job. Somehow we hadn’t crossed shifts so he don’t know me.”
“What’s for him to get in trouble for?” Purvis asked. “What’d you tell him it was?”
“I said you were this fellow I know that let a couple his daddy’s hogs die he was in charge of and want to make it look like the hogs broke through the fence. He gets the fidgets and starts to sweating and carrying on about ‘I got to keep account of every time the grinder runs’ and ‘I don’t need suspicion.’ And I say, ‘Goddog, I’ll just load them in and they gone, we do it all the time,’ and he says, ‘I don’t know who we is but this old boy ain’t one of we’ and I say—”
“How much does he want?” Martha asked.
“Fifty dollars,” said DeWayne.
“Shit on we,” Purvis said.
“Here,” Martha said. She took a roll of bills from her pocket and handed DeWayne a twenty. “Tell him take it or leave it.” DeWayne went back inside.
“What if he don’t take it?” Purvis asked.
“Let’s just see.”
In a few seconds, DeWayne and Winky emerged. Climbing into the Isuzu, Winky drove around the back of the building, while DeWayne came to the propane truck.
“He said he’s got do it hisself,” said DeWayne.
“Why you not back there with him?” Purvis asked.
“Ain’t nothing to it,” said DeWayne. “Just put the shit in the front-end loader, drop it into the grinder, and it eats it up bones and all. Ain’t like we’re cooking and separating like a normal job.”
“What the fuck?” cried Winky, running around the corner of the building. “There’s a man in there!”
“Godamighty!” said Purvis as he and Martha jumped from the truck. “He must’ve opened them damn bags!” The three ran to the building.
“What you trying to do to me?” Winky yelled. “Twenty dollars my ripe ass!”
Winky led them inside. And there, eight feet off the ground, in the pan of the front-end loader, Larson sat up, the tarp loosened around his chest, his arms in the air. “I’m flying! I’m flying!” he said.
“Wrong bag,” said Purvis. “I reckon you tell that ain’t no hog. That’s right there’s a retard.”
“Get him down!” Martha yelled.
DeWayne climbed into the loader and lowered the pan.
“I’m falling! Woo hee!” Larson yelled.
Unwrapping the rest of the tarp from Larson, Purvis and Martha sat him onto the tailgate. Purvis put the garbage bags into the loader, and DeWayne drove it into the building. Winky, gasping, leaned against the truck fender.
“Take a squirt of this,” said Purvis, offering his albuterol inhaler. “I got the asthma and get the wheezes all the time.”
Winky took a puff. “Hate this damn job. Out here all night. Smells like a mountain of assholes. And me with a bad heart.”
“We all got a bad heart,” Purvis said. He tapped his cigarette pack. Out popped a joint. “This might help some.”
“I believe it will,” Winky said, lighting up.
“Way high,” Larson said. “Fly me again way high, woo, and give me a suck on that little something the gas man won’t give me I asked him for.”
“Hush, sweetie,” Martha said.
DeWayne returned. “Hogs all took care of. Let’s head out. Sorry we gave you such a scare, Winky.”
“Hogs hell,” Winky said. “What y’all had in them bags?”
“Like you said,” Purvis said, “a man.” He slapped Winky’s back.
Winky coughed, and slowly released smoke through his nose. “Twenty dollars my ripe ass.”
Purvis looked out the propane truck window. “I know some constellation names,” he said. “Yonder’s the Big Dipper, which is pretty easy, but did you know its real name is something like Ursa maker and is Roman or Egyptian or some shit what means the Big Bear? The two stars at the front edge of the pot point at the Little Dipper, what’s really called the Little Bear, and the tip of its handle is the North Star.” He sighted along his arm like a rifle, his other hand on the wheel. “That’s what everybody uses to navigate. Even sailors back in like Bible days followed them same ones. Signs. We all need signs.” Purvis pressed his hand against the ear Dewayne had punched. “I don’t see them right now, but there’s a line of three that lots of dumbasses think’s a dipper, but it’s Orion the Hunter. He’s my favorite, but he must be down below the trees now. The three is his magic belt, and with a sword hanging offen it. There’s a half circle up above, that’s his bow he hunts with. Plenty animals up there for him to shoot at—a lion, a bull, a goose. Wait, not goose. What they call that other big stretch-neck duck kind of bird?
“Swan?”
“Yeah, swan. I don’t believe I ever seen one. I wonder if they’re good eating? Them big old things could feed a bunch of people. I know people what eats about anything. Possum, snake, cooter. I’ve heard, now I don’t know it to be a fact, but I’ve heard that Chinamen’ll eat dog. I’ve eat possum a couple of times, and I’d eat snake if I knowed the poison was washed out, but I ain’t about to eat no damn dog. They stink.”
“Stink!” Larson yelled. He jumped up from where he was curled in the back to lean over the truck console between Purvis and Martha. “Stink truck! Gas truck man got a stink truck!”
“Hush, Larson,” Martha said. “Purvis, you’re especially talkative tonight.”
“I am? I reckon I am a little nervous.” He lit two cigarettes and gave one to Martha. “I wish I hadn’t given that Winky guy my last doob.”
“It was the sharp thing to do,” said Martha. “Besides, you’re tired.”
“Sharp.” He smiled for a second, then ground his jaw and wrinkled his brow. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know what to do, think I do, but it’s just all here, all around, coming at me.”
“What is?”
“All of it, and me in the midst, just got to go, but nothing to go on or where.”
“I might have something to go on,” said Martha. “Stop here so we won’t wake Mother.”
Purvis stopped and cut off the truck in front of the cattle guard. “You do, I mean, you are. Something to go on,” he said. “Like I said, I’m a sharp tool some of the time, but mostly a blunt one, good for bamming, not for clear-seeing.”
“Where we at?” Larson asked. “Aunt Ruthie’s and you live here too house, and I’m staying. Spending on a pallet, not in a truck for sleeping no more.”
“Hush, Larson,” Martha said. “Purvis, I told you about Florida.”
“Jacaranda.” He looked into Martha’s face. The features began to shift across her face in a wave. Another sign. “Jacaranda.”
“Yes. We’ll see Jacarandas and dolphins and pelicans and lots and lots of orange trees. Oranges sweeter than honey. I’ll take care of us down there, Purvis. You and me and the Jacarandas.”
“Jacky Randy,” Larson said. “You Jacky Randy.”
Purvis jerked his head around and growled at Larson, “Don’t say that.”
Larson giggled and poked Purvis in the shoulder. “Jacky Randy! Your name, the gas truck man, Jacky Randy!”
Martha opened the door. “Pick me up at the flower shop tomorrow at five,” she said. “Let’s go, Larson.”
Grunting, Larson tried to climb over the console. He slipped and fell to his stomach, his heel snapping up to kick Purvis in the ear.
“Goddammit!” Purvis rubbed his ear. “Now I got two sore ears!”
Martha helped Larson crawl from the cab. He placed his foot onto the cattle guard and balked. “I can’t walk that no ground but holes to the ditch and fall in it.”
Martha nudged him. “You can do it.”
“I’m falling!” Larson hollered.
Then Purvis came out of the truck and, in one smooth motion, swept Larson up, carrying him across the metal pipes.
“I’m flying!” Larson said.
“Everybody needs toting sometimes,” Martha said.
“Some needs toting all the time,” said Purvis.
“The Art of Carving” is excerpted from Purple Jesus, Bancroft Press, 2010.