When Davan Eyke moved in, the ravens watched, but they watch everything. They are a humorous, highly intelligent bird, and knew immediately that Davan Eyke would be trouble. Therefore they dropped sticks upon the boy’s roof, shat on the lintel, stole small things he left in the yard, and hid them. Pencils, coins, and once his car keys. They also laughed. The laughter of a raven is a sound unendurably human. You may know it if you have heard it in your own throat as the noise of another of Krahe’s favorites, Schadenfreude, the joy that rises as one witnesses the pain of others. Perhaps the raven’s laughter, the low rasp, sounds cynical to our ears and reminds us of the depth of our own human darkness. Of course, there is nothing human in the least about it and its source is unknowable, as are the hearts of all things wild. Davan Eyke was bothered though, enough so that he complained to Krahe about the way the birds disturbed his sleep by dropping twigs and pinecones on his roof, which was of painted tin. End over end, the refuse clattered down.
“Get used to them” was all the artist said to Davan Eyke.
Krahe tells me this the day I bring the mail, a thing I do for him often, when he feels he is close to tossing himself into the throes of some ambitious piece. Then, he cannot or will not break the thread of his concentration by making a trip to the post office. There is too much at stake. This could be, I know although he will not admit it, the day his talent resurrects itself painfully from the grief where it has been plunged.
“I have in mind a perception of balance, although the whole thing must be brutally off the mark and highly dysphoric.”
He speaks like this, pompous, amused at his own pronouncements, brightening his eyes beneath harsh brows.
“Awkward,” I say, deflatingly. “Maybe even ugly.”
In his self-satisfaction there is more than a hint of the repressed Kansas farm boy he was when he first left home for New York. That boy is covered by many layers now—there is faked European ennui, an aggressive macho crackle, an edge of Lutheran judgmentalness about, among many things, other people’s religions. He says he has none. I can infuriate him easily by observing that, all the same, he is still Lutheran—a fire-breathing crank. Lapsed, maybe, but still tearing down hypocrisies. Still nailing his theses to the doors of cathedrals. He also descends at times to a strata of ongoing sadness over the not-so-recent loss of his second wife, who was killed on a road out west when her car ran over a large piece of stone. “Do you know,” Krahe said once, “that a stone can be wedged just so into the undercarriage so that, when you press the gas pedal, the accelerator sticks and shoots the car forward at an amazing speed?” That was the gist of the fluke accident that killed his wife. A high school prank near Flathead Lake. Stones on the highway. Her speed increased, says Krahe, as she pressed on the brakes. Not a beautiful woman from her pictures, but forceful looking. Resembled by their daughter, Kendra, a girl evidently committed to dressing in nothing but black and purple since she’s entered Sarah Lawrence.
“He’s not working out,” Krahe says now, of Eyke, who has moved just out of earshot. “I shouldn’t hire locals.”
I tell him that I resent his use of the word “local.” After all, I am one, although I qualify in his mind as both local and of the larger world since I spent several years in London, living in fearful solitude on the edge of Soho, failing my degree, and also because he senses that I’ve had a life he knows nothing about, which is true, but I never talk about who I really am with him. The work I do with mother takes us into an extremity of places and lives, too, and I suppose this also exempts me from the “local” tag.
“You wouldn’t have to hire anybody if you used smaller rocks,” I answer, my voice falsely dismissive.
“This guy’s a brainless punk,” Krahe continues.
“I thought you knew that when you hired him.”
“I suppose I could have told by looking at him, but I didn’t really look.”
“The only job he’s ever had was cutting grass, and half the time he broke the lawn mower. He broke so many on this road that people knew enough not to hire him. Still,” I tell Krahe, “he’s not a bad person, not even close to bad. He’s just…” I try to get at the thing about Eyke, but there just isn’t much to get. “…he could learn a lot from you.” My defense is lame and my lover does not buy it.
“I was desperate. I was working on Construction Number Twenty.”
That is the working title of a piece commissioned many years ago by a large Minneapolis cereal company to rise on the corporate grounds. It is still not finished. Krahe slowly flips the mail along his arm, frowning at each envelope as though it holds a secret outrage. In contrast to those sprightly hands and feet, his body is thick, he favors the heavy plaid woolens sold by mail, and his movements are ponderous and considered. His black hair is cut in a brushy crew cut, the same hairdo Uncle Sam once gave him. At fifty-six, he hasn’t lost his strength, and though he complains about his loss of energy, when I see him and my heart charges up, it is like being near a power source. When he speaks of Kendra coming home for a weekend, his voice is tender, almost dreamy. In those times there is a kind of yearning I’d do anything to hear directed toward me—I think I also love him because I want to know this side of him. Kendra doesn’t seem to have a complicated view of her father. And he sees Kendra, I tell myself, partly as the incarnation of his lost wife and not as his actual self-absorbed and petulant daughter. I don’t like her and she doesn’t like me.
I stay and watch the two men wrestle steel and stone. Davan Eyke is slight by contrast. He doesn’t look in fact as though he can lift as much weight as his boss. Together, though, they haul stones from the woods, drag and lever blocks of pale marble delivered from the Rutland quarries and farther away, too. His studio contains German Jurassic limestone, ammonite fossil-bearing rock, a granite shot with bits of hot blue. If Davan himself was artistic, this would be an ideal job, a chance to live close and learn from a master. As it is, Davan’s enthusiasm dwindles in proportion to the resentment he quickly transfers from his father to his boss.
Elsie sighs and makes a face when I tell her Kendra Krahe is visiting her father, and that he has invited us to dinner. I laugh at her eye-rolling. Krahe often invites us to dinners that do not materialize once Kendra becomes involved. She rails against me; more than once I suspect she has prevailed upon her father to break off our friendship when it turned more serious. She would not tolerate my sleeping there while she was in high school, and the habit of Kurt’s coming here has persisted. There is a low energy about Kendra, a fantastic drama, a way of doing ordinary things with immense conviction. Her father has never believed the dots splashed on the paper, the C+ science projects she displayed with such bravura, were only adequate. Seeing through the lens of her dead mother’s image, Krahe firmly believes that Kendra is extraordinary.