That face haunted him. More and more, day by day. Whose face was it? Where did it come from? How had it happened to be in this particular piece of wood? The questions hammered at him as the features became clearer and clearer in his mind and as he hewed them out of the oak with greater and greater specificity. They kept hammering at him after his work was done for the day. After he went home and got in bed at night, he lay awake with his eyes open and they hammered at him.
He recognized some of those features-or sometimes he thought he did anyway. He thought he saw some of Teresa's expressions in them, some of what her face looked like when he first saw her crying at the window and some of what it looked like now when she wrestled laughing on the ground with her son. He also saw the gentle, distracted, putty-cheeked angel from that black-and-white movie he'd watched in the white room. He also saw the old queen screaming on the lawn with his dead lover. And he saw Teresa's husband, Carter. He hadn't wanted to put Carter in the angel's face, but he sometimes recognized him there all the same. He sometimes recognized the grim heroes from the black-and-white war movies, too.
It was a beautiful face in its way, but strange. Neither man nor woman necessarily, though sometimes he saw more of one or the other in it. Neither kind and gentle as you might expect an angel would be, nor stern and pious as an angel might be on Judgment Day. The only words he could think of to describe its qualities were sorrow and joy. Which made no sense to him because how could you have both at once? But there it was. It was a face-as he saw it in his mind-as it came to reality under his hands-of simultaneous sorrow and joy, as if it were looking down from heaven and saw all the love and all the death on earth happening together at the same time.
It made no sense to him in one way, but in another way he understood. As he feverishly worked the chisel, then the gouges, then the smaller gouges into the wood, he understood that he was trying to carve out the shape of his feelings for Teresa. He was trying to expel them into an oaken semblance of themselves. He knew he loved her and he knew he couldn't have her and so he was trying to give his joy and his sorrow a face. He hoped then they would be outside him and he would be free of them.
But he wasn't-he wasn't free. The more he succeeded-the closer he came to sculpting the face he wanted-the more that face began to agitate and obsess him. It was as if it was watching him, as if his own emotions were now outside himself and looking back at him, staring at him. It was as if the wooden angel had come to feel about him what he felt about Teresa, the same agony and celebration, the same sorrowful and joyful love.
And it made him feel bad. That was strange, too, wasn't it? You would think that, since he loved Teresa-since he loved her more and more as time went on-you would think it would make him feel good to have an angel-even just a wooden angel-looking at him with all the tenderness and warmth he felt for her. But it didn't. It made him feel the way he had felt when Teresa told him how her husband died in the war. It made him feel small and rotten. More and more, day after day.
Finally, there came a night, one terrible, terrible night, when he couldn't sleep, when he kept thinking and thinking about the angel's face. He couldn't stop and, after hours of tossing and turning, he sat up naked on the edge of the bed and buried his own face in his hands hoping he could make the image of the angel's face go away. All he could think was Stop! Stop! Don't look at me! Because, really, what a piece of crap he was. What a crap life he had led. He was a crappy little thief, that's what. A crappy little tough-guy punk worth nothing to anyone anywhere because he'd never done anything for anyone ever, and if he'd never been born, the world would be the same or even better than it was.
New mang! he cried out in his mind. New mang! New life like princess in fairy tale, huh? Well, bullshit. Bull-shit. How did some plastic surgery and some phony papers make him any different than what he was before? Any thieving punk piece of garbage could get a cut job and a clean sheet. Happened all the time. What did that make him but a liar and a fraud, a fugitive and a fraud? Talking to old Applebee like his long-lost son. Playing with the kid like his father. Flirting with Teresa as if he were man enough to take her husband's place. And what about all those stories he told about himself, those stories stolen from those cornball black-and-white movies? All fake. Even his name was fake. Henry Conor. Every time Teresa called him that, it shot through his blood like grief. What a fraud.
It was an awful night. A terrible, terrible feeling. He sat there naked on the edge of the bed with his body bent over and his hands digging into his eyes and he felt he would do anything-anything-not to be the man he was.
Identity like stain. Identity like stain.
At last, the sculpture was nearly done.
He was putting the finishing touches on it. He had the new head sitting on the dowel, fixed to the body. He was standing over it, brushing at it with sandpaper before gluing it all together and working the angel's robes to hide the join.
"Oh! It's beautiful, Henry!" He hadn't heard Teresa come out of the house, but there she was, standing behind him. "It's better than the original. Even my father says so. It's incredible."
He glanced over his shoulder at her, then turned and faced her. She was wearing jeans and one of those scoop-necked T-shirts, a lavender one that looked good against her skin. She was standing with her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes were bright. He couldn't answer her because of the way she was looking at the angel and the way it made him feeclass="underline" too filled up to speak. He wanted to take hold of her and feel her soft shoulders in his hands. He thought if he couldn't take hold of her, he would go up in smoke.
Her bright eyes shifted to him. She began to say something and then stopped and then said, "You have a real gift, Henry."
He looked back at the angel. He touched its cheek with a knuckle. It looked at him. Henry, he thought, ashamed. She didn't even know who he was.
"It's just something I can do," he said. "I always could."
They were silent and awkward, facing each other in front of the altarpiece.
"Will we ever see you again when it's done?" she asked him suddenly.
"What? Sure. What do you mean?"
"I mean, you won't just go away, will you? When you're finished with the work. You won't just stop coming here."
He was standing there like a kid now, his heart fluttering inside him as if he were a kid. "I guess not. I don't know. I'll be around."
"It's just… it's Michael, you know-it meant so much to him having you here."
"Sure," said Shannon. "He likes to have a guy around. He misses his dad. I know."
"It's not just that. It's you. He thinks you're great. We all… my father, too. We all think you're great."
"Yeah, but I'm not," said Shannon with an uncomfortable laugh. He had to say this. With the angel looking at him, he felt compelled. "I'm not great. I'm not even really any good." He laughed again. He wished he could stop telling her these things, but he couldn't.
Teresa shrugged, smiling. "Well… who is, right? Any good."
"Yeah. Right. Well, not me, that's for sure. I mean, it makes me feel… bad, Teresa, you know? That you might think-that Michael might think-that I was something I wasn't. I mean, I haven't told you some of the bad things I've done. And there's a lot of them, too, believe me."
"Everybody's done bad things, Henry. You don't have to tell me."
My name's not even Henry, he wanted to say, but he didn't, he couldn't. "Yeah, but I mean his dad, Michael's dad, your husband, Carter… he was a… he was a big man, like you said. He was somebody you could look up to. Fighting in the war and all that. Saving those people and all that. I mean, I am not that guy, no way, Teresa. You ought to know that. Michael ought to know that, too. I am so way not that guy, it's not even funny."