Hazel lifted the covers, zipped down the stairs, pushed the screen door open, and finally found relief when she sprawled her arms and legs out on the open grass and breathed in the evening air. The stars were bright and sparkling in the otherwise black, velvety sky. Silas’s cabin appeared a big sturdy shadow in the night with the single exception of one window aglow. With the lights on, the one room became a great illuminated stage. She could clearly make out Silas seated in a chair rocking back and forth. She watched him for a few moments swaying back and forth rhythmically, just blankly staring out into the rest of the room.
It occurred to Hazel, though, that Silas’s room faced the other side of the house. She counted the widows from the edge of the cabin. This was surely the window of the locked room. What was he doing in there, she wondered.
She thought about going inside and asking. She thought about pressing open that door she had been so curious about since she and Eve arrived. But Silas, rocking back and forth alone, looked like he didn’t want to be disturbed. There were walls in this home, too, now. Big ones.
Hazel made her way back inside and down the hallway toward her bedroom. There was a glow around the edge of the locked door. She knew Silas was in there. She wanted to knock and ask why but walls were walls and sometimes even doors were walls. So she slunk back into her bedroom, tucked herself under her covers again, placed one ear against her pillow and drifted to sleep.
31
The next morning, Hazel woke up and made her way downstairs to the kitchen. Silas was leaning his hip against the cabinets and staring into his coffee. Eve had a half-eaten piece of toast on her plate and her knees up on the table and was waving her phone around in the air, presumably looking for service.
“Morning,” Hazel said as she sat down. But no one answered.
Hazel took a piece of toast from the middle of the table and spread the huckleberry jam slowly over the surface. Her mother’s favorite, Hazel thought, and smiled. She brought the toast to her mouth and bit down. The sound of the crunch echoed in the quiet room as crumbs sprinkled down her chin. The faint sound of her chewing only amplified the prior silence.
She looked up at Eve again and began to study her face, looking for vibrations just under the surface of the skin that would give Hazel any hint about what she was thinking.
“What?” Eve said sharply as she looked up from her phone and straight into Hazel’s eyes.
Hazel sat quiet and still. Eve must have seen the blatant longing in Hazel’s face because she jutted her chin forward and raised her eyebrows, looking for a response from Hazel. But when Hazel didn’t give it, she shook her head and returned to her phone. There was nothing there. Just disinterest.
Hazel took another bite of her toast and turned her gaze toward Silas. His shoulders were slumped but still. His thigh was pressing into the drawers casually. He was still just standing calmly, looking at nothing. Doing nothing. Saying nothing.
Hazel began to trace the quiet on Eve’s face to Silas’s face and back. She felt everyone’s divergence. She could taste it. Everybody in this room was numb to their reality.
She wanted to yell and laugh and return to joy together, but now all of those moments seemed a distant illusion.
“I’m going to head down to the waterfront if anyone wants to come,” Hazel said into the room, hoping it would jolt everyone back to life. But it was still quiet.
She took another bite of her toast and waited. But still nothing.
She couldn’t not go now, so she slipped out the back door without another word. Hazel took a few steps across the grass and then turned back to watch the scene through the screen door. Neither Silas nor Eve had moved. She decided she would go down to the lake and at least put her feet in the water. She ended up spending time there, quietly thinking. On her way back up to the house, Silas’s workshop caught her attention.
Hazel made her way toward it and slowly turned her neck to look behind her before sliding the large barn door open. She had to push it with both arms with all her weight behind it to set the heavy weight of it into motion.
Hazel immediately felt an awareness of geometry and creativity and presence upon entering.
The space seemed to be governed by a specific but entropic rule. A purposeful disorder. The room felt smaller from the inside but Hazel was well aware that the perceived capacity was diminished by the precarious stacks of worn notebooks of varying stages of deterioration lining the walls and the color on the walls. The bound notebooks of varying thickness stretched entirely from one side of the space to the other, creating a rocklike strata along an entire wall. Above the wall of books, sketches of tables and chairs and benches were nailed into the wood. An assortment of dinged-up wooden surfaces of different heights and thicknesses and widths created a maze through the center of the space.
To the right was the workbench, where everything was kept in meticulous order. Each hammer and screwdriver and saw hung from its designated peg in an apparent order. The different nails and screws were stacked in transparent, scratched plastic drawers, arranged according to size.
Hazel imagined Silas standing in front of the workbench reaching up for a tool conveniently selected for the task in front of him. She imagined him hunched over one of the tables, sawing a thick piece of wood, and wearing a mask covering his mouth and nose as a storm of sawdust enveloped him.
Each thing in the workshop carried such specific purpose. Hazel could understand the call to a craft like this. The combination of human hand and instrument to create an object. An object that could be touched and used and interacted with. She imagined the power Silas would feel in changing the physical form of a thing. Cutting a raw slab of wood into a beautiful, usable form.
There was something divine in the ability to create like that. To make something more out of something less.
Hazel walked slowly and gingerly around the perimeter of the workshop, inhaling the scent of freshly cut wood and must. It all felt rugged and masculine. It was a place Silas belonged.
Hazel felt a surge of spirituality flow through her. The space felt simultaneously grand but heavy. Sacred but utilitarian. Illicit but inviting.
The competing forces made her feel a certain reverence for Silas’s craft.
And this was no doubt his church, if anything was.
Hazel reached out to let her fingertips brush against the sketched-on paper. She liked the slightly ribbed texture and the grooves of the pencil markings. She pulled her hand away from the wall and looked down at her finger, which was now covered in black charcoal that had sunk into her skin, revealing her fingerprint. She pushed her pointer finger back into a piece of paper on the wall, leaving a black oval print.
Right next to where Hazel had left the mark, she noticed a photo nailed into the wall. The image of a person seemed to violate the impression of the space as something solely and wholly belonging to Silas.
It was a picture of a very beautiful woman with an arresting shock of long, straight golden hair. Hazel was immediately drawn into her smoky eyes. The woman couldn’t have been much older than she was, but she seemed to carry more wisdom in her face. She was turned to the side with her head tilted toward the camera. Her lips formed almost a pout. Her crisp white and flowing tank top contrasted sharply with tanned and rich skin.