NOTE: This post (copyright Bob Kalivac Carroll 2026) is a sharing of Chapters 1 and 2. When completed, the  book will consist of 37 chapters and an epilogue. Most of the work, except for the last 5 chapters,  is completed. The completed book of 37 chapters will be on my forthcoming website--The Transcendental Eye. Will open at the end of September 2026. In the meantime enjoy these two chapters, which together make up the first linked story.

 

GOD’S ELBOW

by

Bob Kalivac Carroll

 

 

 

All literature is—finally—autobiographical.

 

—Jorge Luis Borges

            —The Man in the Mirror of the Book

 

Preface: Journey

               God’s Elbow is a collection of linked stories, and stories within stories. 

Some have been published in literary journals; others are unpublished until now. 

All are rewritten here to engage a narrative flow. Although a published writer of fiction, 

I also am an art writer with a doctorate in the philosophy of art field. Some of that scholarly 

background inevitably leaks into my storytelling as well. If one looks for words to describe 

these stories linked in a singular flow,  journey is one word. As we all know, there are many 

journeys within life, and all the while life itself is journey. Another word is revelation, and a third 

would be love. While I will not be so foolish as to attempt to define love, but one definition I heard 

works well for me—love is when you care about someone more than you care about yourself. 

That is demonstrated a few times in this work. BC

 

 

PART I

JAYBIRD’S TREES

 

This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff.

                                                            

                                                                                                ―Carl Sagan

Chapter 1

Green Fuse

 

The Salisbury brothers, Owen, then later Finis, saved me from a boringly safe existence. Each brother introduced me to his version of Codo del Dios, God’s Elbow, and eventually I found my own understanding of that mystery. Some people seem to know about God’s Elbow, but many obviously do not understand this nasty old world, albeit when alive in it. Boxers, wrestlers, and barroom brawlers (excluding those who are completely moronic, and they are a minority) already understand the Codo del Dios phenomenon, or the elbow to the face, though as it turned out, God’s Elbow is about much more than an elbow to the face.

I wasn’t naïve. My stepsister Letty and I had been through some difficult, even horrific, times as teenagers. Call it our teenage God’s Elbow—one of our many journeys, together and separately.

While Owen and Finis both liked to talk about spirituality as if God was a giant alien insect with a genius-level IQ, neither man seemed to be a churchgoer or even a Christian. Both had opinions about everything under the sun, but that’s where the similarities ended. Owen worked as a woodcutter in Northern California, while Finis became a professor of cosmology at the University of California at Berkeley. Both brothers could offer some cosmic arcane (and occasionally idiotic) interpretations of the God Idea and God’s Elbow, the latter being harder to understand than the former. 

I was just 21, and just honorably discharged from the 101^st Airborne as a sergeant, when I was arrested for having some weed in my pocket (marijuana was still illegal then). The California judge said the next arrest would land me at the Q, San Quentin State Penitentiary. But since being arrested for weed was the first official offense on my records, and given my service as a veteran, I was given two years suspended sentence. I did have to be on probation during that time with a full-time job. Owen Salisbury, who cut and sold oak firewood hired me. Owen believed in second chances, or so he said. 

“We’ll see how long you last, Jaybird,” Owen said when we first shook hands.

“Cutting firewood shouldn’t be rocket science,” I said. “I used to cut firewood when I was younger.”

Owen looked me over silently for a moment, before saying, “That right?  I’ll put it this way, lad, bucking trees ain’t like cutting firewood at home. It ain’t easy and trees sometimes find a way to bite back. Okay?”

Bite back. That statement seemed odd to me, but as I got to know him, I found that Owen’s style was to wear his oddness like a special shirt, one used for a day of cutting wood. 

The Deiner property was about two hours north of San Francisco. During that summer Owen and I had cut more than a dozen cord of Black Oak. We were working our way up a rutted half-road that ran alongside a twisted creek full of rock and running water. As we got deeper back each day, the road deteriorated more, and the trees were older, larger. Owen would take his old Dodge Power Wagon back every dusk to where he lived, somewhere near Clear Lake, which was the largest natural lake fully inside the California borders. Because I had no home to speak of at the time, I drove my beat-up Ford pickup a couple of miles up the road past where the old Deiner cabin lay rotting, and set up a cook stove and a camp tent, though I ended up sleeping naked under the stars, which I much preferred to inside sleeping. 

That creek talked all day, and when I fell asleep at night it kept talking. Most of time it sounded like mumbling, like the stream was rolling some stones around in its watery mouth. Once a while a word would come out of the dark with such vividness that it would cause me to sit up straight on my camp bedding. Just a word, like “night” or "you". One night the creek spoke my name, and that was strange. The creek said “Jay” with such clarity that I got up and shined a flashlight into the water. Seeing water flowing over rocks in the dark was like seeing human organs inside a living human body.

One day we had just cut a tree, which for some reason started Owen, generally a compulsive talker, to acting kind of sulky. He broke out a dented thermos and sat down on the fresh stump and began silently filing the chain on his worn Husqavarna chainsaw, pausing occasionally to sip what I knew was Wild Turkey-laced coffee. 

"You're quiet today, Owen."

He put down the file and lit one of those cheap generic cigarettes before refilling his mug. He smoked and looked all around, then leaned forward. "You heard about the Deiner family and the trees?"

“Nope. What about them?"  

Owen's face—full of wrinkles from working outside for decades—showed more facial expressions in a couple of minutes than most people's faces showed all day, and at that moment his weathered forehead looked to me like tree bark growing sideways. Taking a deep breath, I let myself say silently to myself, Hell, Owen, you are a tree!

 “You don’t know. Okay.” Owen shrugged and worked some dentures with his tongue. “This here was Deiner property." 

“I knew that. And?"

"Al Deiner and his nine-year-old daughter disappeared out here back in the Fifties.” 

"What happened?"

"What happened ain’t generally known," he said. "Cept it was like Deiner and the little girl fell off the planet. Being acquainted with Al Deiner myself, I came out with the sheriff.  All we could find out was that Al and Sarah, his young daughter, went up into the woods one morning and never came back. The sheriff and I found the place where Al was cutting that day, but no people, not even any tracks leading away. Just some weathered sawdust remains and an old gas can left behind."

"Maybe they were murdered," I said.

“Weren't no evidence of it,” Owen said. “Sheriff brought dogs, too. Weren’t no sign of no predators. No sign of nothin, not until a couple of years later when some hunters found a skeleton, adult size, hanging from an oak limb way back in the woods." He gestured vaguely at the trees surrounding us. "Steel cable around the neck. Everybody figured suicide. But we couldn’t figure out why that would happen.”

“And there was no sign of the little girl?”

“Little girl?” Owen said, shaking his head and grimacing. Then he gave me a sad glance. “I’ve had dreams that might explain her disappearance, about Al losing his daughter and becoming distraught enough to hang himself,” he said. “But it’s not the kind of dreaming you’d be able to understand.”  

“I don’t really pay much attention to dreams.”

“Maybe you should.”

I shrugged. Later, Owen’s story and dreams perhaps pointed at something more, but I wasn’t sure what. It sounded too mysterious to my ears. Or maybe it was that I secretly wanted to be like Owen Salisbury myself—be an old man living down by a lake in a shack patched with apple crate wood and roofed with old Pennzoil oil signs, living with a pack of half-wild dogs and a few old books of poetry and philosophy for company. 

Besides, if it was a sign, it wasn't the first.

Owen worked with trees in a bizarre and obsessive way. Like the way he picked out the exact tree to be cut from a stand and left the others standing even if they were in the way of the main tree being cut, or the precise way—like a priest following a ritual—he cut and fell any tree. Or how sometimes right in the midst of work, he'd shut down his saw, as if there was something to hear besides squirrels and birds and wind. 

"The widow,” Owen continued, “she’s been in a mental hospital down in the St. Helena the past decade.” He continued massaging his arthritic fingers as he talked.  "When I worked out here first, back in Fifty-three, she, Mrs. Deiner, was already not what you'd call legally sane. She'd come out to the work site every day same time and asked the same questions. 'You seen Al and Sarah? You know when they’re getting back?' I’d just shake my head. The discovery of Al's skeleton pretty much finished her.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah. Seemed like a freak tragedy, just plain ole unexplainable. At least not explainable by us. Course there may be more to it. Who knows? Anyways the state took over managing the property and the state gave the permit for us to cut firewood.”

Owen sipped his whiskey coffee and looked me in the eye. "Course, a person has got to have lawful permission too."

"Pardon?" 

"To cut trees."

I already knew that Owen was one of the oldest woodcutters in Northern California, and one of the most eccentric. He’d been cutting wood longer than most woodcutters in Lake County, starting out with an axe several years after World War II, when he and his brother arrived here as older boys, coming from Wales. Owen still carried a faint Welch accent, especially when he was relaxed and friendly. But working with him, I also learned that he talked to trees while he worked, and he didn’t care who else was around at the time. He seemed always to be having a conversation with the trees around him. Me? I thought Owen had lost a few brain cells. I had no idea back then how to talk to trees.

 “I doubt if I need some kind of magical pass to cut trees,” I said.

"Okay. But tell me something, Mr. Jaybird Blanco, what do you know about trees?" 

"Trees? Whatever I’ve picked up from using wood heat, I guess. What burns best, drying time of different kinds. Pine is lighter than oak and burns faster. All that stuff."

Owen shook his head. "You know something about wood." 

"Yeah?"

"A butcher knows something about meat, but he might not know nothing about the animals that provide the meat, their own flesh. Ever been to a slaughterhouse?" 

I shook my head.

“If you had, you'd know animals don't like being killed.” 

I leaned into that thought for a second. "All I can say is that I appreciate them giving up their lives, but hell, Owen, trees are not animals. They’re not alive in the same way as human beings.”

Owen frowned. "You sure of that, lad? They give stuff, like the air we breathe. This tells it, son.

            The force that through the green fuse drives the flower 

            Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees 

            Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose 

            My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.”  

 

He nodded his head. "That’s it, lad.” 

"Okay. But that's just poetry. Does it really have to do with anything?”

Owen looked at me like I might have accidentally gotten some sawdust inside my skull. “Dylan Thomas was a passionate Welsh soul who could make instant beauty with a few words. His lyric poetry is a singing.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “My stepsister loves poetry too, and of course who would not admire the poetry of Dylan Thomas? But honestly, poetry doesn’t mean a lot to me in practical ways. I mean why not just speak the facts?”

“Facts,” Owen said, shaking his head and standing, indicating the discussion was over. 

 

  

Chapter 2

The Turiya Tree

 

Come the next morning, Owen didn't show up. I waited an hour, then figured his arthritis had flared up. We didn’t have cell phones back then. So I got in my pickup and drove farther up the road. After a while, I came onto a big oak standing just off the road at the edge of the woods. Larger than anything we had cut up until then, I saw cords and dollars and decided to fell it, so I moved my pickup out of the way, and got out the equipment.

I fired up my saw and started on the oak, first making the face cut, the notch a tree cutter takes out for the direction he wants the tree to fall. Working like that—the chainsaw revving, the intense concentration—that intimate sphere of the sound and physical strain becomes the woodcutter’s world. After knocking out the chunk, I stood there, the saw idling. I looked all around and took a few breaths, then swung around to the other side of the tree to make the felling cut that would drop it alongside the road. From there it would be relatively easy to cut and load firewood onto my pickup, though I knew that given the size of the tree, it would be a day’ work if not more to cut it up. 

The felling cut took a long time. About halfway through the trunk the chain got smoking hot and began to screech. I backed off for a minute, wondering if I’d hit a long-buried nail or maybe a rifle slug in the wood, then revved up and continued the cut with a slight angle shift, bearing in. My hard hat’s ear mufflers lessened the noise, but the scream of the saw still left me feeling raw.

The oak started into its fall—a slow-motion lean, cracking as it began to teeter, hinting at a twist. I shut down the saw and stepped back, pulling off my headgear. I’d done everything right to fell that tree. I stood there looking up at it, helmet in one hand, silent saw in the other. A few degrees into its fall the oak seemed to bind and hang there at an angle for a second. Then the butt of the trunk suddenly slid off the stump, thudding the ground so heavy that my toes vibrated. At the same time, it twisted wildly, like a drunk giant losing his balance, and swung way around in the wrong direction, back towards me. I dropped my saw and helmet and started stepping away smartly, and would have made it, when a main branch, a kind of tree in its own right, snapped off and fell dead onto me.

Next thing I knew it was night and I heard the creek talking. Then I passed out again. Finally, I woke up to early morning light and saw the old man jacking up the big limb with a railroad jack. Owen pulled me out from under the limb and leaned me up against the main trunk of the down tree, which now stretched across the road and into the creek.

He gave me a cup of cool water and squatted in front of me. "You shouldn't have cut this tree, lad," he finally said.

Why not?"

"You know why. The law. Once you know about the law, you doubly got no excuse."

I felt irritated. "To be honest, Owen, I appreciate how we're connected to plants and animals, but deep down I wonder what the hell law you're talking about."

Owen shook his head. "‘Deep down’ ain't where you're living, son.” Without saying anything further, he stood and pulled a folded, beat up photo from his back pocket. The photo showed a group of men sitting and standing on a huge stump of a giant redwood tree they had just cut down. “That’s what I’m talking about. The greed for lumber, and for money, caused that and much more.” He put the photo back in his back pocket and began walking up the road, motioning at me with his crooked hand to follow.

I can admit that the photo bothered me. Something about human self-importance and arrogance, I guess. So, although one arm and my ribs ached, I stood and followed Owen. I felt he wanted to show me something. As we walked, the road began to narrow where the ceanothus and manzanita had reclaimed the ground. Curving away from the stream, it finally narrowed into a footpath that we followed into thicker woods. Those trees stood old and virgin. The path, layered with leaves, became an outline. The sound of running water grew fainter, finally disappearing altogether, so that the only sounds were boots shuffling through leaves and jackets scraping branches. The patches of sunlight lessened, and the shade increased until there was only shade, then just a twilight among tree trunks.

It seemed to me that we walked for a long time. I was just barely able to keep up with Owen, and every once in a while, the old man would go beyond sight, then beyond hearing, and I would panic momentarily until I again heard Owen moving through the woods up ahead. At one point when grabbing a young tree to pull myself forward, I had one of those odd moments when my mind—I thought it was my mind—echoed like a separate voice. It was as if I passed someone on the street who looked up at me at the last second and simply said “Jay” as we met and passed each other.

About the time I really thought I had lost Owen I saw an area of light ahead. It was a clearing, but with a canopy of trees overhead showing only a few patches of blue sky peeking through the leaves and boughs. I entered the space and looked around, noticing right away a tree centered in the small clearing. A thick-trunked conifer of some sort, I thought at first. But when I looked up, I saw leaves. It seemed more like a Madrone. The tree had a trunk the size of a large man's chest; it stood rooted in a low but large mound of earth covered with soil, moss and vines. Walking up to edge of the mound, I reached out to touch the tree when I heard a stick break. I turned to find Owen standing behind me. "Where were you?" I asked the old man, somehow not actually caring much now.

"Here. Waiting for you."

Owen walked over and began inspecting the mound as if searching for something. I stood beside him just as he pulled at a section of vine which swung open, revealing a large opening, a natural doorway of sorts, in the tree trunk. Owen knelt and looked inside, and after a few seconds, he looked over his shoulder at me for a long moment before standing and stepping back for me to kneel and look. I would never see Owen again.

Leaning into the opening, I expected to see a dark cavity, and it was hollow. But the space shone with a faint green light. Roots everywhere. Roots through her. Long skewered, now full grown, her feet and ankles were rooted in the tree’s root system. She had joined the flow of juices and force. Her body was smooth, the skin translucent and glowing with the same green radiance as the roots. Her eyes were closed. Light filled the space, and me, with a kind of shining ecstasy. I looked at her face more closely, and after a few seconds her eyes opened. Then her head turned ever so slowly, while her gaze serenely shifted until her eyes met mine. She whispered a sound, a word. It was more of liquid flowing sound than a word to me. I had never heard that word, that sound. As had happened in my childhood, I instinctively looked upwards and saw the word I had heard floating above the tree—Turiya. I looked down at the tree woman again. While I had no idea what Turiya meant, in that face-to-face moment, her gaze and utter beauty took my breath away. Then she gave it back. 

And I fell backwards, as if into an abyss. 

When I regained consciousness, the ecstasy was gone and the tree was simply a large Madrone. No hollow space, no translucent woman. No Owen. No Turiya, the strange word I saw above the tree. And no abyss. I stood there for a while, then slowly and painfully retraced my way back to my pickup. Owen’s Power Wagon was not there. I stared for a while at the oak that had fallen on me. I then drove myself—albeit with one arm—to the hospital, where I was found to have, besides the fractured arm, several cracked ribs and some scratches and cuts (one requiring a few stitches) on one arm. 

In the hospital that night, I argued with myself that I had hallucinated the whole incident after the big oak limb fell on me. But to call it a hallucination was a stretch for several reasons. The inexplicable phenomena of hearing what was, in hindsight, apparently Deiner’s daughter’s voice speaking in the creek and woods as well as whispering the mysterious word or sound “Turiya.” And what the fuck was that word? I asked myself. Is that really what happened? Could anyone explain the body I saw in the tree or even the tree itself. None of it made sense. I tried very hard to convince myself that everything that had happened was mere hallucination. That kept me up for a couple of hours.

The next morning a logger and acquaintance of Owen’s came by my hospital room to share some news. He said that Owen didn’t come out to the worksite the day the tree limb fell on me because the evening before he had been killed in a traffic accident. The logger said—he was obviously shaken by the accident—that his logging truck was loaded and coming down a long blind curve on Highway 175 when he slammed into Owen’s Power Wagon. The old man was just sitting there, he said, almost as if Owen had just purposely pulled over and parked in the wrong lane. The logger said he barely had time to touch his brake pedal, but even so he saw Owen lean forward over the steering wheel and look up through the windshield—calm like, he said—as the truck jackknifed and came down onto Owen along with tons of logs spilling onto the highway and onto Owen.

I felt upset, saddened, although my friend’s death didn’t explain how he could have been in the woods the next day rescuing me. As I recalled, everything about that encounter seemed factual as well, at least at the time. Owen jacked up the limb to free me, talked to me briefly, and afterwards led the way into deeper woods. How could he have been there when he was already dead? More hallucinations? Was such an extended hallucination even possible? Or was it a so-called mystical incident? Most of all, what does Turiya mean? What is a Turiya? A person or what? I could find no answer.  

“Anyway, what the fuck is mysticism?” I said aloud after the logger left. For me, mysticism had been—mostly via my reading—a fantasy idea more than an actual reality. I didn’t feel like I was some kind of mystic, far from it, but I had to acknowledge that this was not my first encounter with the inexplicable. In childhood when I saw illuminated words floating in the air above some incidents, I still could not explain those occasions. Similarly, I could not explain at all what happened with Owen and the tree. I desperately wanted to explain it all rationally to myself, but I sensed that what I saw in the woods had more meaning than I could deal with, at least for the time being. Later, I would have more questions, some impossible to answer, which led to more wandering blindly through life, a chaotic wandering that eventually—no surprise to me—landed me in New Mexico with some real prison time, even though I did not feel like a criminal and never thought of myself as living a life of crime.