deck was missing at least one important Major Arcana card, The Fool, which I’d glued to Alex’s mandolin case just before he left for Alaska.
The late October sun had almost reached its highest point, and the long pine needles glittered on the trees around me. I knew I would appreciate the colorful people and fresh air so much more if I just had someone to talk to. It was like a vitamin I was missing. I turned my attention to the stone-carver. “What are you making?” I asked, just loud enough to be heard from across the path.
He looked up at me, surprised at being spoken to. His face was very young and elfin, with a little tuft growing under his lower lip. Under the smooth brow, I thought I could see the same lost-little-boy look Alex had had the day I found him, hitchhiking in the rain. (He would hate that description of him—he thought of himself as exceptionally wise, practically omniscient. He had a pompous habit of referring to himself as an “old soul.”)
The elf-boy smiled and reached across the pathway to hand me his project. I had to reach as far as I could too, and our arms briefly made an arch over the well-worn trail, with the carving as the capstone. It was a greenish soapstone, about the size of a large egg, into which he had carved the figure of a woman lying down with her knees up and her tiny hands spread across the mound of her belly; the head of a baby was emerging from between her legs. It was so perfectly carved that I could see an expression on the woman’s face of pain and joy—how did he do that? and the baby’s face, though he hadn’t completed the features, still somehow conveyed serenity. The outer edges of the stone were carved into a sort of canopy, so that the thing was whole and contained, a tiny universe of birth. I turned it over and over in my hands. It
I always wanted to sing harmony with him but he didn’t like it when I did. He said those songs were made to sound lonely.
It occurred to me that I didn’t feel any worse now than I had sitting next to Alex and trying not to add my voice to his sad single train of melody.
Finally I let the braid go and it unraveled itself immediately.
I picked some fallen pine needles from between the tarot cards I had fanned out on a square of maroon velvet, directly across the path from Buddha-boy. I was waiting for customers who might trade me a half-dozen bagels or a bicycle pump or a book of their own poems for a look at the cards. You never knew what people might offer to trade. I was specifically hoping for a red dress. I thought if I had a red dress I might actually go out dancing, instead of staying at home looking at the fire and reading books about other people’s relationships. Women in bright Indian scarves and barefoot, bearded men shuffled past me, sending out occasional faint whiffs of patchouli and raising a fine cloud of volcanic dust that settled and floated on my lukewarm coffee in its paper cup. No one stopped.
The only thing I had traded for all morning was a pair of porcupine quill earrings from a pretty girl of seven or eight who told me how she’d pulled out the quills herself from a road kill. I’d spread out her cards and told her she was going to grow up to be a famous doctor. I always told little kids something like that; I figured it couldn’t hurt—if it stuck in their minds and helped them accomplish it, maybe they’d end up saving somebody’s life someday, and my time on this planet wouldn’t have been utterly wasted. I wasn't really a student of the tarot. In fact, I didn't tell anyone this, and my
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