Читать книгу Kendra - Jane Keehn - Страница 4

The work room smelled of linseed oil and wood shavings.

Emily sat hunched over a block of solid wood as big as her dog, Leo.

She wore plastic goggles and green overalls as she worked with a chisel and mallet, cutting into the block where she’d drawn the outline of a fish-tailed woman in thick pencil.

This was her space.

The Mandalay Maritime Centre had a work room where Emily could do her computer drawings then replicate them onto the block. Transforming the wood into a figurehead took more skill but her Grandfather had left her his old tools and had shown her once how to slice the block at just the right angle with the sharpened chisel.

With a quick tap from the hammer, curls of wood shavings dropped to the floor, revealing a humanoid figure. Emily ran her hand over the hips of the figure. She could almost see Meg’s small hands holding on for life.

As the figurehead’s shape became clearer, from the cutting away of the extra wood, Emily embraced the dusty, saw-dust flecked body with her ink-stained hands.

Her stained finger nails contrasted with the light Marri timber as she rubbed the roughness away with light sand paper. Her touch was as light and as precise as if caressing one of her lovers.

Her hands delicately felt along the shoulder of the female cut-out and smoothed over the shape to feel if the roundness was perfect.

Emily needed Meg’s mermaid for the Mandalay replica in the Museum.

She wanted the original for the sake of history and truth, but in her absence, Emily would create her own mermaid figurehead from old photos and ship’s plans. Her replica would complete the Mandalay exhibition she was working on and help her to honour her grandmother’s memory and place in local history.

The wooden square at the head of the figure stayed flat and blank as Emily finessed the body of the mermaid. Known only from an old photo of the coal ship before she left Norway for the Australian coast, this beauty may have been one of the wreck’s casualties, but before she had vanished forever, she had saved Meg.

Emily wanted to do her justice, so she was saving the more intricate carving of her face until last.

She would use her Grandfather’s delicate and fine wood-working tools to create beauty from raw wood.

Something from nothing.

A woman from a dead Marri log.