Free Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon

sculptor, an artist, not a house-painting contractor. He had this hope then, standing over the enormous downed tree that had miraculously missed the house by mere feet, that if he could somehow go back in some small way to the Henry he used to be, Tess might ask him to move back in. And maybe if he returned to the house, he could go back to his role as protector, and somehow his very presence would ward off falling trees and whatever other natural disasters were looming.
    Daddy’s magic. He makes all the bad things go away.
    Maybe, as Emma had suggested, it really was a sign.
    So, grudgingly, he had some of the guys who worked for him at the painting company come and help him haul a fifteen-foot section of the thick trunk into the unfinished side of the barn he used as a workshop, where each night, the massive tree waited.
    Henry began by debarking the tree. He tucked the blade of his ax under a free edge of bark and drew it toward himself—the bark came off in slick strips, satisfying as peeling the dead skin off a sunburn. Then he found his long abandoned woodworking tools and got started. Or at least tried to.
    What he did, those first few days, was spend his evenings after dinner walking in circles around the great tree, hoping for inspiration. He tried looking at it from various angles. Considered how naked and pale it looked without its dark, rough bark. He lay down next to it, sat on top of it, ran his hands over its surface, once finding a deeply buried nail he himself had put into the tree decades earlier, when he’d built the tree house.
    Emma came into the barn to see the great sculptor at work.
    “It still looks like just a tree trunk, Dad,” she said, squinting at it, as if she was missing something.
    “These things take time,” he told her. “You can’t rush into it. The wood guides the sculpture. The wood alone knows what it wants to become.”
    “So, what—you’re waiting for the tree to start talking to you?” she asked.
    He nodded. “Exactly.”
    Emma shook her head. “Good luck with that,” she said, leaving the barn.
    Henry would come stumbling out of his workshop at daybreak and make his way into the kitchen at the main house for coffee and breakfast with Tess and Emma; a semblance of normalcy that Henry clung to but at the same time found rather pathetic. He could pretend all he wanted, but in the end, he’d still have to go slinking off to the barn to shave, shower, and dress. And inevitably, each morning, Tess would gaze at him over her steaming mug of French roast and ask how the sculpture was going.
    “Great,” he would tell her.
    “So the tree started talking?” Emma asked one morning.
    “Blabbing away,” he told her. “Can’t get a word in edgewise.”
    “Can I come see?” she asked.
    “Let’s wait awhile, huh? Until I get it roughed out. Then you and your mom can come take a look.”
    “It must feel good to be working again,” Tess said, and he gave her a little mousy smile.
    He was a fraud and he knew it. A poseur. He’d never been a real artist. Real artists didn’t quit.
    He took to opening a bottle of wine each night in his barn. He’d tune the radio to a classic-rock station and drink merlot from a coffee mug while he pondered the tree. Great beached whale of a thing. He remembered the sculptures he’d done in college: rough forms carved from tree trunks—humans, wolves, bears, and fish—never finished enough so that you’d forget where they’d come from. He wanted the spirit of the tree to shine through.
    The wood guides the sculpture.
    The wood alone knows what it wants to become.
    These were the things he believed in back in college, this naive notion of ethereal messages that it was up to him to pick up on, to spell out with his mallet and chisels.
    “Sometimes I think we’re just conduits,” Tess told him once, years ago, when she sat in his studio space in the corner of the sculpture building at Sexton. “Like the art we make can’t possibly