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lamplight his father’s round, tanned face shone deep orange, and his cheeks and chin where he hadn’t shaved fell almost to black and made him a little frightening. He was sketching with two of Richard’s pencil crayons, a brown and a grey. What looked to be a series of hunched dragons was, his father explained, a creature called a gargoyle.
    â€œI like that one with his eyes closed,” Richard said, pointing, not quite touching the paper. You weren’t to touch Dad’s drawing, though these didn’t look like his work-drawing.
    â€œHe’s supposed to be squinting.”
    â€œI like that fat one too. How his tongue curls like that.”
    â€œDo you think it’s too long for a tongue?”
    â€œMake it even longer,” Richard said, only happy to be asked. “But how come they’re all sitting like that?”
    â€œThey’re squatting. On the ledge of a building. In this case a cottage. I’m designing a summer cottage, next lake over, and the client wants,” his father snorted and shook his head, “four gargoyles. One for each corner eave. Actually you’d call this cottage a country estate. But I don’t think the project will happen.”
    His father explained that no two gargoyles were alike. They were creatures of the imagination. If you travelled Europe you could see them on the oldest buildings. Yes, they often had their tongues out, or their claws, and in some cultures, their penises. They were trying to look ugly on purpose, because they were actually protectors, protectors of your home. Their job was to scare away evil spirits.
    â€œWhat did the evil spirits look like?”
    â€œYou mean what
do
they look like?” And here his father put his round, orange face close to Richard’s and looked scary-on-purpose, like a devil.
    That summer Richard began making gargoyles himself. What began as a joke around the dinner table became a real project for him, and a dizzying leap for his artwork, which up till now had graced merely the refrigerator. His father was not only letting him carve gargoyles for the eaves of their cottage, but encouraging him to. His mother protested that gargoyles would ruin the look of a cottage. To her more subtle hints that a ten-year-old might not be capable of turning out art worthy of adorning “not just a playhouse, but a place someone lives,” his father said, “What do we care?” This gave even young Richard pause, for wasn’t caring about that exactly what an architect did?
    His father bought carving tools and showed how every single cut had to be away from your body. He chainsawed the roughest of shapes for him, based on Richard’s preliminarysketch. Cedar was one of the easiest woods to carve, he explained, and had natural preservative in its sap, which was why it lasted so long, years and years, even unpainted, and which was why it was used for totem poles, and why it would be perfect for his gargoyle. This was Richard’s proudest moment of the summer, hearing that his father wanted his gargoyle to last. His first, which did indeed end up on a corner eave of their cottage, had a single bent horn on his forehead. He was fat, and smiling. His impossible tongue was too big and fat to be a tongue at all and looked like a second head. Gouged eyebrows formed a V above his nose to show any evil spirits how mean he would be if they got close.
    Even now, decades later, Richard can see every homely, botched detail of his first gargoyle. Whenever he smells cedar, he sees that face emerging, smiling and mean, from the tortured wood. What was frustrating, but then not, was how different it was from what he’d drawn. At first he hated that he couldn’t carve very well. Then he learned to see that the gargoyle had always had its own idea of its face and it wasn’t going to behave. Because that’s what gargoyles were like. They might sit up on your house for you, but